Rioting as Maintaining Relations: Hindu–Muslim Violence and Political Mediation in Gujarat, India

Abstract

This article discusses the role that local politicians played during the 2002 Hindu–Muslim violence in Gujarat, India. I argue that the capacity and interests of political actors to instigate and organise communal rioting is closely related to their capacity to provide access to state resources. The cooperation during the riots between politicians and various types of rioters – from local criminals, Hindu-nationalist activists, neighbourhood leaders to police officials – can be understood in the light of the daily functioning of the local patronage networks that help citizens deal with state institutions.

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments and useful insights, I want to thank in particular Mario Rutten, Bram de Swaan, Jan Breman, Ghanshyam Shah, David Ludden, Thomas Blom Hansen and the participants at the conference ‘Social Figurations of Violence and War beyond the State’.

Notes

 1. See the following reports by human rights organisations on the 2002 violence: Concerned Citizens Tribunal (CCT), Crime Against Humanity. Volume 1 and 2 (Mumbai: Citizens for Justice and Peace 2002); Human Rights Watch (HRW), ‘We have no orders to save you’: State Complicity and Participation in Communal Violence in Gujarat (New York: HRW 2002); International Initiative for Justice (IIJ), Threatened Existence: A Feminist Analysis of the Genocide in Gujarat (Mumbai: IIJ 2003), online at < http://www.onlinevolunteers.org/gujarat/reports/iijg/2003/>, accessed Aug. 2007; People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Violence in Vadodara: A Report (Vadodara: PUCL 2002), online at < http://www.onlinevolunteers.org/gujarat/reports/pucl/index.htm>, accessed Sept. 2007; People's Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR), ‘Maaro! Kaapo! Baalo!’: State, Society and Communalism in Gujarat (Delhi: PUDR 2002); Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand (eds), Genocide: Gujarat 2002 (Mumbai: Communalism Combat 2002); S. Varadarajan (ed.), Gujarat, the Making of a Tragedy (New Delhi: Penguin Books India 2002).

 2. Concerned Citizens Tribunal (note 1) p.23.

 3. ‘The truth. In the words of the men who did it’, Tehelka, 3 Nov. 2007.

 4. This section summarises a broad consensus in some of the main recent (diverse) literature on India's communal violence: Stanley Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1996); Christophe Jaffrelot, ‘Communal Riots in Gujarat: The State at Risk’, Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics 17 (2003); Ali Ashgar Engineer, Lifting the Veil: Communal Violence and Communal Harmony in Contemporary India (Hyderabad: Sangam Books 1995); Donald Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (New Delhi: Oxford University Press 2002); Steven Wilkinson, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004); Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2001); Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2002). The term ‘institutional riot system’ comes from Paul Brass, Theft of an Idol. Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1997); Paul Brass, The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press 2003). See also Kanchan Chandra, ‘The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in Contemporary India. By Paul R. Brass’, Journal of Asian Studies 65/1 (2006) pp.207–9.

 5. Gyan Pandey, ‘In Defense of the Fragment: Writing About Hindu–Muslim Riots in India Today’, Representations 37/Winter (1992) pp.27–55. See also Sudhir Kakar, The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1996).

 6. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkley, CA: University of California Press 1985) p.140.

 7. Today, one speaks of a family of Hindu-nationalist organisations (the Sangh Parivar), all committed to turning India into a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, a society and polity based on Hindu values. The RSS came to be seen as the ‘social’ wing of the family because it runs more than 5,000 schools, hospitals and does charity work, the VHP (World Hindu Council) as the religious wing as it aims to promote Hinduism in India as well as abroad, and the political party BJP as the political wing. The VHP again generated several organisations; most notable during the riots was its youth wing, the Bajrang Dal.

 8. For a more complete elaboration of this argument, see my PhD dissertation, Ward Berenschot, ‘Riot Politics: Communal Violence and State-Society Mediation in Gujarat, India’, University of Amsterdam (2009).

 9. Varshney (note 4) p.47.

10. On the role of the police during the 2002 violence, see Human Rights Watch (note 1) p.22; Setalvad and Anand (note 1), Concerned Citizens Tribunal (note 1, volume 2) pp. 81–96.

11. See Amnesty International, Abuse of the Law in Gujarat: Muslims Detained Illegally in Ahmedabad (London: Amnesty International 2003), online at < http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGASA200292003>, accessed Aug. 2007; Human Rights Watch, Compounding Injustice: The Government's Failure to Redress Massacres in Gujarat (New York: HRW 2003).

12. Paul Brass (ed.), Riots and Pogroms (London: Macmillan Press 1996) p.9; Brass, ‘The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in Contemporary India’ (note 4).

13. Paul Brass (ed.), Riots and Pogroms (London: Macmillan Press 1996) p.9; Brass, ‘The Production of Hindu–Muslim Violence in Contemporary India’ (note 4) p.13.

14. See Charles Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003); Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing 2000); Norbert Elias, The Society of Individuals (New York: Continuum 2001); Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field' in George Steinmetz (ed.) State/Culture: State-formation after the Cultural Turn (New York: Cornell University Press 1999); Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, IL: Polity Press 1992).

15. See Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat (eds) States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2001); Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds), Anthropology in the Margins of the State (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press 2004); Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘Sovereigns Beyond the State: On Legality and Public Authority in India’ in Raminder Kaur (ed.) Religion, Violence and Political Mobilisation in South Asia (New Delhi: Sage Publications 2005).

16. See Chris Fuller and Veronique Bénéï (eds), The Everyday State and Society in Modern India (London: Hurst 2001); Akhil Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist 22/2 (1995) pp.375–402; David Nugent, ‘Building the State, Making the Nation: The Bases and Limits of State Centralization in “Modern” Peru’, American Anthropologist 96/2 (1994) pp.333–69; Barbara Harriss-White, India Working: Essays on Society and Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003).

17. On the functioning of India's ‘transfer system’, see Frank de Zwart, The Bureaucratic Merry-go-round (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 1994); Robert Wade, ‘The Market for Public Office: Why the Indian State is Not Better at Development’, World Development 13/4 (1985) pp.467–97.

18. Such an analysis can be found in Walter K. Anderson, The Brotherhood in Saffron: The Rashtriya Swyamsevak Sangh and Hindu Revivalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1987); Tapan Basu, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right (New Delhi: Orient Longman 1993); Thomas Blom Hansen, The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu-nationalism in Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1999).

19. Edward Simpson, ‘The State of Gujarat and the Men without Souls’, Critique of Anthropology 26/3 (2006) pp.331–48; Sikata Banerjee, Warriors in Politics: Hindu Nationalism, Violence, and the Shiv Sena in India (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 2000); Christophe Jaffrelot (ed.), The Sangh Parivar: A Reader (New Delhi: Oxford University Press 2005); Hansen (note 4).

20. Brass, ‘The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India’ (note 4) p.33.

21. Martha Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future (Cambridge: Belknap Press 2007); Oscar Verkaaik, ‘Fun and Violence. Ethnocide and the Effervescence of Collective Aggression’, Social Anthropology 11/1 (2003) pp.3–22.

22. ‘Their Eyes and Mouth were Shut’, Tehelka, 3 Nov. 2007.

23. Concerned Citizens Tribunal (note 1) p.37; Human Rights Watch (note 1) p.5.

24. For a list of police officers who were transferred because of their refusal to ‘cooperate’, see Setalvad and Anand (note 1) pp.194–200; Concerned Citizens Tribunal (note 1) pp.90–91.

25. See note 19.

26. Apart from Paul Brass' work, see the following studies that provide rich ethnographic material about the mobilisation for violence at the local level. I regard the observations in these studies to be in line with the main conclusions of this paper: Veena Das, ‘Privileging the Local: The 1984 Riots’ in S. Wilkinson (ed.) Religious Politics and Communal Violence (New Delhi: Oxford University Press 2005); Javed Alam, ‘The Changing Grounds of Communal Mobilization: The Majlis-E-Ittehad-Ul-Muslimeen and the Muslims of Hyderabad’ in G. Pandey (ed.) Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India Today (New Delhi: Viking 1993); Ghanshyam Shah, ‘Caste Hindutva and Hideousness’, Economic and Political Weekly, 13 Apr. 2002. See also the investigative reports mentioned in note 1.