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1/ Explaining Communal Violence Among the many paradoxes and contradictions that must confront observers of India is the competing imagery of violence and nonviolence , symbolized in two recurrent representations ofthat country . One is the image that has been flashed countless times during the past half-century in the media and the cinema of the bloody riots that occurred immediately before and after Independence as a consequence of the events associatedwith the simultaneous partition ofthe countryinto two new, mutually hostile sovereign states that immediately fought their first war and have since fought two more. The second image is that of the saintly Mahatma Gandhi traversing the country for decades proclaiming the message of nonviolence and devising strategies of nonviolent opposition to British rule that have since been adopted round the world by the weak to fight against exploitation and discrimination by the strong and privileged. The two images merge in Attenborough's film, Gandhi, when Gandhi appears in Noakhali in the province of Bengal during the pre-partition riots there to end the killing. He is shown lying on his bed, fasting to death against the violence, which is brought to an end as the repentant, weeping murderers deposit their weapons at his side. Forty-five years after Independence, the world was presented with another image of India, that of violent mobs of Hindus descending upon the old, mainly Hindu religious town ofAyodhya to climb upon a five-hundred-yearold mosque to destroyit. This image was then followed bythe pictures flashed round the world of Bombay in flames from the riots that followed after the destruction of the mosque a thousand miles away. Few people outside India, however, knew that similar riots also took place in cities and towns in large parts of the country, in which Muslims, having seen one of their mosques destroyed on BBe television or having otherwise learned ofit, were now being 5 6/ Explaining Communal Violence slaughtered, allegedlybecause they came out into the streets in shock and outrage and engaged in riotous behavior. Even fewer people-indeed, only specialists-know that Hindu-Muslim riots and anti-Muslim pogroms have been endemic in India since Independence .I They have occurred and recurred in many cities and towns throughout the country, but especially in the northern and western parts. Their frequency and intensityhave fluctuated from time to time and place to place, but hardly a month passes in India in which a Hindu-Muslim riot does not occur that is large enough to be noted in the press. But there are also many such events on a smaller scale that occur much more frequently. Indeed, it is likely that not a day passes without many instances of quarrels, fights, and fracases between Hindus and Muslims in different places in India, many of which carry the potential for conversion into large-scale riots in which arson, looting, and killing may take place. Neither in December 1992, nor on most of the occasions between Independence and 1992 in which so much destruction of people's lives, homes, and property have occurred, have many saintly figures appeared to quell the violence. In fact, both these images-offrenzied, murderous masses in India and saintly figures moving about spreading their message of nonviolence as a cure for their frenzy-are part of a grand discourse ofviolence that I hope to undermine in this book. Riots are not explained by the spontaneous furies of mad mobs nor are there anyweeping murderers among them nor can they normally be stopped by saints. On the contrary, itis a principal argument ofthis book that the whole political order in post-Independence north India and many, ifnot most ofits leading as well as local actors-more markedly so since the death ofNehru-have become implicated in the persistence ofHindu-Muslim riots. These riots have had concrete benefits for particular political organizations as well as larger political uses. Hindu-Muslim opposition, tensions, and violence have provided the principal justification and the primary source of strength for the political existence of some local political organizations in many cities and towns in north India linked to a family of militant Hindu nationalist organizationswhose core is an organization founded in 1925, known as the Rashtriya SwayamsevakSangh (RSS). Included in this family, generally called the Sangh Parivar, are an array oforganizations devoted to different tasks: mass mobilization , political organization, recruitment of students, women, and workers , and paramilitarytraining. The leading political organization in this family, originally called the Jan Sangh, is now the Bharatiya...

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