Ethnic Conflict and Civil Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (review)

The best way to prevent social conflict based on group identity from developing into death-dealing violence, says Varshney, is to cultivate local civic associations that cut across the boundaries of group identity. Such organizations can form peace committees, undercut false rumors, and bring pressure to bear on the police and other authorities to exercise their powers to maintain law and order. This strategy may seem fairly obvious: When conditions allow for such alliances, conflicts stand a reasonable chance of being managed and defused. The problem is to explain how such associations keep going. The key, Varshney argues, is to explore the history of civil society—in particular, Indian cities.

Conflict between Hindus and Muslims, a familiar theme in the literature on South Asia, has remained a matter of urgent concern well after the partition of India in 1947. It rose to terrible heights of violence since the early 1990s, never more horribly than in Gujarat, in February and March 2002. ¹ India, with a 15 percent Muslim population, is the third largest Muslim country in the world, surpassed only by Indonesia and Bangladesh. Varshney attempts to account for the period from 1950 to 1995, noting that most of India, "95 percent of the total population" (7), has had little or no experience of this sort of violence. For this reason, theories that explain the presence or absence of ethnic conflict on the basis of "essentialist" or "constructivist" characterizations of cultural groups or "institutionalist" analysis of political arrangements (such as consociationism) are too broad to account for the fact that violence tends to be sporadic and highly localized within a country.

Varshney dismisses as mere postmodernism Pandey's argument that the diverse history of particular events, widely dispersed in time and place, calls into question the very category "Hindu-Muslim riot" as a "colonial construction." ² Instead, Varshney's research assistants compiled an elaborate database of events, as reported in The Times of India, to determine when and where they took place and how many people were killed. (As a matter of fact, for much of this period, Indian newspapers made a point of not mentioning Hindus and Muslims as such, but tended to use euphemisms, such as "the majority community" and "the minority community"). Rightly rejecting official government reports as unreliable, Varshney places an unwarranted faith in the enterprise and comprehensiveness of his journalistic source. Nevertheless, he establishes to his satisfaction a short list of "riot-prone cities," based on the frequency of incidents and the number of deaths (104-105). He maintains not only that serious Hindu-Muslim violence is rare in rural India, but that its absence from most cities disproves explanations of such conflict based on urban modernity itself.

The empirical heart of the book is a section comparing three sets of two cities with respect to Hindu-Muslim violence and the presence or absence of "integrated" civic associations. Although Varshney's assistants induced a large number of informants to respond to an elaborate opinion survey and helped him to conduct more open-ended interviews, these testimonies provide only brief, anecdotal evidence in a work largely based on secondary sources. The comparison of cities—Aligarh versus Calicut, Hyderabad versus Lucknow, and Ahmedabad versus Surat—examines places that are roughly similar in size and proportion of Muslim population and seeks to show why one of the set has been violent and the other peaceful.

Lacking adequate accounts of particular events, Varshney's work nevertheless demonstrates Pandey's point about the multiple meanings of such identity categories as Hindu and Muslim in different contexts. Most striking is the tragic recent history of the two Gujarati cities, Ahmedabad and Surat, which have witnessed the displacement of a Gandhian heritage by the forces of a bigoted anti-Muslim Hindu nationalism. Although Varshney dismisses accounts of earlier riots as state-sponsored pogroms, his faith...