The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India

Preface and Acknowledgments

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book follows upon my last two books on collective violence, Riots and Pogroms and Theft of an Idol, published in 1996 and 1997, respectively. Although temporally earlier than this book, many of the ideas contained in them were developed first in my work on riots in Aligarh. It was here, during my field work in 1983, that I first developed the notion of the "institutionalized riot system" as a central factor in the produ<..iion ofHindu-Muslim violence. I had originally intended to include my work on Hindu-Muslim riots in Aligarh in Theft ofan Idol, but concluded that the material was too extensive to go alongside the other case studies in that volume. My next thought was to produce a book focusing specificallyon Hindu-Muslim violence based on my research in several districts of Uttar Pradesh (U.P.), including especially Meerut and Kanpur, on which I have collected very considerable materials over the years, as in Aligarh. However, after looking over my interview data in Aligarh over thirty-eightyears and digging into boxes ofdocumentarymaterial and election data that I had collected in the same period, I decided finally on a book in which the city of Aligarh, standing in for so many other cities and towns in India, would form the center. That decision has allowed me to do something that I believe is unprecedented in studies ofcollective violence, namely, to carry out a diachronic study at a single site, keeping my analysis sharply focused-so I hope the reader will agree-on the same set of questions and problems throughout. Although studies have been done of riotprone cities (such as, for example, Detroit) that analyze each riot in succession, those I have looked at treat each riot as something new and different from its predecessor. Here, on the contrary, I have discovered continuity, extension , and development of what I intuitively felt in 1983 was an institutionalized system of riot production. I now feel that I have established my case in xv xvi / Preface and Acknowledgments this book and that the findings herein can be generalized to other parts of India and to other times and places in the world. I first visited Aligarh in the winter of 1961-62 to carry out field research for my Ph.D. dissertation on the Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh. That was a different time in many respects. Aligarh then was a relatively small town with a population around 185,000, now over halfa million. The Congress was the dominant party in the district. Many ofthe prominent politicians I interviewed then are now gone. Although party politics then was not lacking in volatility, bitter conflict, and some violence, it appears relatively genteel in retrospect compared to the atmosphere ofrecentyears. During the past twenty years, a newgeneration ofmilitant Hindu politicians has risen to prominence; I have met most of the leading persons among them. I have also maintained and extended my contact with politicians from an other political parties and organizations in Aligarh, Hindu and Muslim alike, and with members ofthe faculty of the Aligarh Muslim University. In most of my visits to Aligarh, I have always also interviewed key members ofthe civilian administration and police, and many subordinate civilian and police officials as well. Aligarh was verydifferent in 1961-62 in many other respects as well. Itwas a relatively much quieter and more peaceful place in general, not only with respect to incidents of violence. Persons of prominence from the preIndependence era were still present in those days, including not only most senior Congressmen, but men like the Nawab of Chhatari, former leader of the National Agriculturalist Party and later a member of the Muslim League, and A. M. Khwaja, a leading so-called nationalist Muslim, and others ofsimilar aristocratic or landlord backgrounds. Upper-caste and upper-class persons dominated in all spheres oflife, something that has changed considerably since then with the rise to self-assertion of the middle and lower castes in politics. Most of the senior politicians spoke good English then, fewer do so now. One could breathe the air everywhere in the absence ofthe internal combustion engine, which now pollutes the atmosphere even in this place far from any major industrial conurbation. The Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) in the Civil Lines area ofthe city, like the whole area around it, was then a kind ofoasis, a quiet, appealing, and peaceful place, though the AMU simmered internallywith conflicts between so-called conservative/communal and progressive/Communist faculty. The AMU now has the appearance more ofa fortification, surrounded with high walls in an effort to keep out rowdy, criminal, and other unfriendly elements from the campus. It is at the same time a place of internal turmoil, where confrontation and violencebetween groups ofstudents, students and faculty, Preface and Acknowledgments / xvii faculty against each other, and students and faculty against the vice-chancellor have occurred repeatedly over the years. I had selected Aligarh as one of five districts for my research in 1961-62 specifically for the purpose of analyzing how the Congress functioned in an environment of Hindu-Muslim tension. As if to demonstrate the validity of my selection of this district for that purpose, my visit, between December 25 and January 20, occurred between the riots of October 1961 and the General Elections of1962, held in February. I returned to Aligarh again in September 1962 to continue the research on that district in the aftermath ofthe elections that were influenced decisively in the city by the riots that had occurred the previous October. Idid notvisit Aligarh again for seventeen years. Since then, I have visited the city and the district numerous times, for short trips during elections when I toured U.P. in connection with several election studies projects, for an extended research period in August 1983, and since then on several occasions when I have returned to India for research, conferences, and workshops. On more than a few occasions in those years, I arrived to find that another riot had recently occurred, or, as in 1990-91, I arrived just as the great riots of December 1991-January 1992 were coming to an end. My experiences in this latter respect were mirrored in others of the districts that I have visited repeatedlyduring the past thirty-eight years. So, during these later years, I increasinglybuilt in to myresearch visits to north India more focused and increasingly systematic questions, interviews, and data on the reasons for the recrudescence ofHindu-Muslim violence. I continued this practice during the writing of this manuscript in my most recent visits to Aligarh in November 1997 and March-April 1999. I have presented earlier versions of aspects of my research on HinduMuslim violence in Aligarh at manyuniversities, conferences, and workshops between 1987 and 2000, far too many to note here. It is more important that I note and acknowledge with appreciation colleagues and others who have assisted me in the final preparation of this rather complex manuscript. At the top of the list are two persons who read the entire manuscript in earlier versions. David Laitin read tlle first version when itwas several hundred pages longer and still in preliminary form. Kanchan Chandra read a complete, but still imperfect, second draft. The comments of both were indispensable to me in making the revisions that preceded my submission of the manuscript for review by the University of Washington Press. Elizabeth Mann read several chapters ofthe earliest version ofthe manuscript and her comments also led me to make several changes. Walter Andersen and Richard Flathman gave xviii I Preface and Acknowledgments me the benefit of their comments on particular chapters. The two anonymous reviewers for the press and Michael Duckworth, the acquisitions editor , will, I hope, also note that I have taken their criticisms and suggestions seriously. Of course, I am alone responsible for the arguments and points of view adopted as well as any errors that may be found herein. Naresh Saxena facilitated myvisits to Aligarh during the past twentyyears. Kanchan Chandra and Violette Graff provided me with valuable maps of Aligarh that I had not been able to obtain. Iqbal A. Ansari and Asghar Ali Engineer cleared up in correspondencewith me a fewdetails on which I needed information. Several persons have accompanied me to Aligarh over the years to assist me in moving about the city and interpreting when necessary; they include Pallav Kumar, Gyan and Jayati Chaturvedi, Sumit Mehta, and Aftab Ahmad. Arup Singh has been unfailingly helpful to me during all my recent visits to India. My past practice in citing interviews has been to provide simply the date and place of the interview. I have modified that practice somewhat in this manuscript. I have masked most of my sources for interviews. However, I no longer invariably promise my respondents confidentiality, and carry out the great majority ofmy interviews with a tape recorder plainly in view. Since so much ofmymaterial comprises direct quotes that lose part oftheir significance if the identity of the respondent is masked, I felt it important not to do so in such cases where no confidentiality was promised. I have been engaged more or less continuously in the research and writing ofthis manuscript for the past four years, that is, since myteaching responsibilities at the University of Washington ended in June 1997. In that period, others also have been extremelyhelpful to me. They include Irene Joshi, since retired as the South Asia librarian at the University of Washington, and her successor in that position, Alan Grosenheider. Michael Shapiro has helped me from time to time in translating some lines from Hindi newspapers and from my tape-recorded interviews. Jere Bacharach, Director of the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, made available a small grant from Rockefeller funds, which provided partial funding for the drawing ofthe maps included herein, prepared by Guirong Zhou. Fred Nick, director of the Center for Social Science Computation and Research at the University of Washington, and his staff, especially Dixielynn Gleason, have been a tremendous help to me on countless occasions with computer and software problems ofall kinds, including recovery from a total and irretrievable crash of my previous computer ten minutes before the Seattle earthquake of February 28, 2001, that hit just as I was trying to plug my portable computer Preface and Acknowledgments / xix with the backups for this book into the wall under my table. Thanks to the portable computer, a few other backup disks, and Fred's help in deciding on the purchase ofa new computer and getting me through the process ofreestablishing my work on new software, this book is now presented here. Susan Halon bore patiently my apparently unending absorption in the details and complexities involved in the construction of this book. She travelled with me to India and to Aligarh during my last two visits there and took all but three of the photographs included herein. While this bookwas beingwritten, my teacher, Myron Weiner, passed away on June 3, 1999. It was from him that I first learned the methods of field research that I have practiced during the past four decades. It was under his supervision that I carried out the first field research in Aligarh and the other districts of U.P. in 1961-62. He was himself then also in India, carrying out the research for his bookon the Indian National Congress. He advised, helped, and encouraged me then and remained a source of inspiration and a friend to me for the rest of his life, even when my work went off in directions and with methods and modes of analysis different from his own. I thinkhe would have liked this book and I dedicate it to him. P.R.B. Seattle, Washington December 16, 2001 THE PRODUCTION OF Hindu-Muslim Violence IN CONTEMPORARY INDIA ...