Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life

Hindus and Muslims in IndiaBy Ashutosh Varshney

Yale University Press

Copyright © 2002 Yale University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-10013-6

Contents

Preface to the Second Edition...................................................................ixPreface.........................................................................................xiiiPart I Arguments and Theories1 Introduction..................................................................................32 Why Civil Society? Ethnic Conflict and the Existing Traditions of Inquiry.....................23Part II The National Level3 Competing National Imaginations...............................................................554 Hindu-Muslim Riots, 1950-1995: The National Picture...........................................87Part III Local VariationsAligarh and Calicut: Internal and External Cleavages5 Aligarh and Calicut: Civic Life and Its Political Foundations.................................1196 Vicious and Virtuous Circles..................................................................149Hyderabad and Lucknow: Elite Integration Versus Mass Integration7 Princely Resistance to Civil Society..........................................................1718 Hindu Nationalists as Bridge Builders?........................................................201Ahmedabad and Surat: How Civic Institutions Decline9 Gandhi and Civil Society......................................................................21910 Decline of a Civic Order and Communal Violence...............................................23911 Endogeneity? Of Causes and Consequences......................................................262Part IV Conclusions12 Ethnic Conflict, the State, and Civil Society................................................281Appendix A Questionnaire for the Project on Hindu-Muslim Relations in India.....................301Appendix B Data Entry Protocol for the Riot Database............................................309Appendix C Regression Results: Hindu-Muslim Riots, 1950-1995....................................314Notes...........................................................................................319Index...........................................................................................373

Chapter One

Introduction

In this book I seek to establish an integral link between the structure of civil society on one hand and ethnic, or communal, violence on the other. To be more precise, the focus is on the intercommunal, not intracommunal, networks of civic life, which bring different communities together. These networks can, in turn, be broken down into two parts: associational and quotidian. I call the first associational forms of civic engagement and the second, everyday forms of civic engagement. Business associations, professional organizations, reading clubs, film clubs, sports clubs, festival organizations, trade unions, and cadre-based political parties are some of the examples of the former. Everyday forms of engagement consist of such simple, routine interactions of life as Hindu and Muslim families visiting each other, eating together often enough, jointly participating in festivals, and allowing their children to play together in the neighborhood. Both forms of engagement, if robust, promote peace; contrariwise, their absence or weakness opens up space for communal violence. Of the two, the associational forms turn out to be sturdier than everyday engagement, especially when people are confronted with the attempts by politicians to polarize ethnic communities. Vigorous associational life, if intercommunal, acts as a serious constraint on the polarizing strategies of political elites.

Although some of the key terms used above-"civil society," "civic life," "ethnic," "communal"-are discussed in great detail in the next chapter, let me briefly specify what I mean by them. Since scholars and activists do not use these terms in the same way, a clarification of how I have understood and deployed them will help pre-empt speaking across different conceptual registers.

By "civil society," or "civic life," I mean the part of our life that exists between the state on one hand and families on the other, that allows people to come together for a whole variety of public activities, and that is relatively independent of the state. Civil society is not a non-political but a non-state space of collective life. Moreover, in its non-state functions, it can cover both social and political activities. Soccer leagues, playing-card societies, and philately clubs may be social, not political; but trade unions and political parties are primarily the latter, not the former, though in the process of playing their political roles, they may also provide social platforms for people to come together. Both types of organizations are parts of civil society, so long as they are independent of the state.

A special note may be taken here of the double role of political parties. They constitute an important component of civil society in a multiparty democracy but not in a one-party system. In the latter, political parties become an appendage of the state, losing their civic functions. Since India is a multiparty democracy, its political parties are part of the nation's civil society, along with its unions, business associations, reading clubs, film clubs, NGOs, and so on.

What about the terms "ethnicity" and "communalism"? There are two distinct ways in which the term "ethnic" is used. In its narrower sense, "ethnic" means "racial" or "linguistic." This is the sense in which the term is widely understood in popular discourse, both in India and elsewhere. For example, for politics and conflict based on religious groupings, such as Hindus and Muslims, the principal subjects of this study, Indian scholars as well as bureaucrats and politicians since the British days have used the term "communal," not "ethnic," reserving the latter primarily for linguistically or racially distinct groups.

There is, however, a second sense in which ethnic groups are defined in the social sciences. This usage is broader in its implications. As Horowitz argues, all conflicts based on ascriptive group identities-race, language, religion, tribe, or caste-can be called ethnic. In this umbrella usage, ethnic conflicts range from (1) the Protestant-Catholic conflict in Northern Ireland and Hindu-Muslim conflict in India to (2) black-white conflict in the United States and South Africa, (3) Tamil-Sinhala conflict in Sri Lanka, and (4) Shia-Sunni troubles in Pakistan. In the narrower construction of term, (1) is religious, (2) racial, (3) linguistic, and (4) sectarian. The term "ethnic" often in the past would have been reserved for the second and, at best, third conflicts, but not extended to the first and the fourth.

Exponents of the broader usage disagree with such distinctions. They argue that the form ethnic conflict takes-religious, linguistic, racial, tribal-does not seem to alter its intensity, longevity, passion, or relative intractability. Their emphasis on the ascriptive and cultural core of the conflict, imagined or real, and they distinguish it primarily from the largely non-ascriptive and economic core of class conflict. Ethnic conflict may have an economic basis, but that is not its defining feature. Irrespective of internal class differentiation, race, language, sect, or religion can define the politics of an ethnic group. Contrariwise, class conflict tends on the whole to be economic, but if...