(Short biographical notices and background information are provided through hyperlinks for the most important personalities and organizations mentioned in the text that follows. The reader might refer to them for further understanding.)
All along the years when the fight for an independent India was at its peak, a number of Congress personalities, led by an already well-known leader - a brilliant man who hailed from the historically famous United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh, UP) - Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, carried a dream: once India was freed from the British rule, a modern state would be built, a state that would see that its caste and communal ancestral traditions were forgotten. A secular state that would bring people together. A new Socialist order would be built. New Temples - i.e. heavy industries–would appear which would bring the new India into modernity (Parry and Struempell 2008). Some of these dreams would take shape indeed.
Partition tragedies
However, the tragedies of the Partition and the violence which swept Northern India from 1946 to 1948 came as a shock and destroyed many illusions (for a historical background, see “India from 1900 to 1947” by Claude Markovits [2007] and for further details on the Partition violence, see “Thematic Chronology of Mass Violence in Pakistan, 1947–2007” by Lionel Baixas [2008])
The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948 was a watershed moment for India. It put an end to the murdering frenzy and to mass violence. Law and order could be restored. A strong leadership saw to that. Among those leaders was the “Iron Man of India” that was the Union Home Minister, Sardar Patel . He was the one who had gathered in time the 560 Indian princely states which had a special status (Menon 1961). In the larger country, he had made it very clear that no nonsense would be tolerated. What he had in mind were of course the various agitations of those days, mainly the Communist - led guerillas (Graff 1974), but also the linguistic or ethnic claims and, very clearly, the grievances of the religious minorities - whose behavior could threaten “Mother India”. These last categories, however, were more than willing to demonstrate their loyalty. They were in a state of shock.
After the dramatic exchanges of populations which had taken place during Partition, Hindu refugees had finally adjusted rather well. Muslims, however, had not. They were the guilty. They were those who had divided the Motherland (Robinson 1993). Those who had not left for Pakistan (which meant the majority of Muslims and most definitely the poorest among them) were left high and dry, even more so because their patrons, upon whom they depended, were no longer present (Azad 1959; Khaliquzzaman 1964). The only thing they could do was to concentrate on their day-to-day survival. Nearly four years proved necessary to reach a certain degree of peaceful coexistence between the communities concerned (Spear 1967; Philips and Wainwright 1970; M. Hasan 2004).
Who were these communities? And why this gulf between them? What is feeding the so-called “communalist cancer” in India, the word referring to the sense of insecurity, even hostility, which many communities feel at heart towards the “Other” (Pandey 1990), and which can lead them to take violent action in order to protect themselves, and further their own interests?
Hindu past
India is a giant country, a subcontinent which is extremely diverse, and where one finds people who, for millenniums, have cohabited in a narrow proximity but have never merged. They belong either to local indigenous tribes (adivasis) or descend from various waves of invaders who have settled, over the centuries, along the country’s rivers, in the large valleys of the Indus and of the Ganges, or in the hills, cultivating, plundering, settling or building but remaining organized along different strata and statuses. It is around 1500 B. C. that these various populations met and interacted. On the one hand, there were the Dravidians, people earlier associated with the Harappa civilization in the Indus valley, who had seemingly pushed aside the adivasis. On the other hand, there were the Aryans, who had come through successive waves from the Caucasia regions (from 1500 B. C. to approximately 1000 B. C.). These Aryans were very different from the populations they met when they came, with specific practices and religious traditions, articulated around the Vedic poems. They brought along the premises of an organization, centered on the notion of sacrifice, monopolized by a sacerdotal caste, the Brahmin varna.
These Vedic times are still remembered throughout India with utmost reverence. They are at the roots, together with the Upanishads and the great popular epics (Ramayana, Mahabharata), of what is being called Hinduism today, an accomplished civilization which is both open and tolerant as far as faith is concerned, but extremely rigid regarding the rules of society (see infra the four - varna model). It is altogether a system, a sophisticated philosophy, and a faith translated into a myriad of local popular creeds and devotion to thousands of deities.
With time of course, transformations and reforms have occurred: the major ones, Buddhism and Jainism, were born in the 5th century B. C., in present Bihar. They have tried to get rid of the caste system, and they have put the accent on meditation and non - violence. Sikhism on the other hand, was born much later in Punjab (in the 15th century), with a first sant, Guru Nanak, who tried to elaborate a kind of syncretism between Hinduism and Islam, centered on a unique God. Guru Nanak had several successors, and it is the fifth guru who built the much revered Golden Temple in Amristar in 1604. The next gurus faced serious problems with the Mughal Empire, and organized the community around martial and fiery traditions (the Khalsa order). The lineage stopped at the tenth guru, and Sikhs now rely on a holy book, the Guru Granth.
All of these religious traditions, born on the sacred Indian soil, are considered as a part of the Hindu world. They represent now 85 percent of the total Indian population. But who are the other 15 percent? On the margins of this Hindu world, at times in fact completely imbricated, there are important minorities, born out of foreign religions, which have survived, in glory or in submission (see table 2 and 3).
Parsis
The Parsis (Zoroastrians), who have their origin in Persia, have migrated when the Sassanid Empire fell under Arab conquests (8th to 10th century). They are a tiny elite group which is today on the way to a possible extinction (too many outside marriages). At the moment, they are the main industrialists in India and its most educated benefactors. Their community is mainly centered in Bombay.
Christians
Christians (2.4 percent of the whole population) have a long history, going back to the 1st century: Saint Thomas is said to have landed in South India, to eventually reach Madras, where he is supposedly buried. Historical evidence underlines the venue of merchants from the Middle-East and with them the first real efforts of evangelization, during the 4th century, thanks to the activities of the Oriental Churches and their missions. Contrary to later converts, these Syrian Christians benefited from a high status in society; today most of them are wealthy planters or businessmen, and they have a dominant role in Kerala politics. Quarrels are frequent as they are divided along many rival Oriental Churches.
A second wave of conversions to Christianity occurred in the 15th and 16th century with the arrival of Portuguese conquistadors (Vasco de Gama in 1498). The Roman Catholic clergy was well - organized, extremely active (notwithstanding the Inquisition attempts), and they were able to reach the lowest castes (Untouchables and tribal people). As for today, for instance, most Christian fishermen in South India are Latin Catholics.
The last wave of conversions started with Protestant missionaries from the 18th century onwards. Contrary to a general feeling in the West, the churches involved in missionary work were not British. Both the East India Company and the Church of England were very clear: nobody from their side should intervene in the Hindu private life and religious traditions.+++(5)+++ It explains why the job was done by non-British missions (Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Scotland), and why the various denominations look quite disconcerting to outsiders.
All in all, Christians today are not very numerous, and they are mainly concentrated in the South. Most of them are highly educated, running hospitals and educational establishments. It is to be noticed that Christian staff includes many literate and well-trained nuns, and that they accept jobs that high-caste Hindus would never fill.
Muslims
Muslims are by far the largest religious community (see table 2 and 3) and, although they are always considered as a monolithic entity, they are in fact extremely diverse: a diversity which is not surprising if one looks at the geographical factors, past history and local traditions. In the South, for instance, Islam was introduced peacefully by sailors who settled on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts while often intermarrying with local women (Dupuis 1996; Gaborieau 2011). Then, as it was the case with Christianity, Islam soon appeared, to the lowest Hindu castes, as a way to escape their miserable fate.+++(4 Bogus except in Kerala)+++ The process of conversions still goes on.
In the North, the atmosphere is different and often disquieting. Here Muslims are deeply resented as they are identified with those Turk and Mughal invaders who, along the centuries, descended from Central Asia and plundered India, before their chieftains built great empires, the Sultanate of Delhi, then the Mughal Empire, which fell only in 1857, under the enterprises of the British East India Company. As in the South, most Muslims are converts. They have a very low status, and it is only a small “crust” of Muslims (ashraf) who can proudly refer to their foreign origins.+++(4)+++ By and large, whatever the sects, schools and practices, most Muslims are Sunnis, except those whose princely rulers were Shias (Twelvers) or those in the West who are Ismaeli Shias, and involved in petty or large businesses. Last but not least, encompassing all these sects and schools, it should be remembered that there is an Islam “of the mosques” which is orthodox and somewhat militant, and an Islam “of the shrines” which is heterodox and extremely diversified (S. A. A. Rizvi 1978; Troll 1989): this Islam was brought by Sufi saints and preachers of various tariqa (mystical orders), whose tombs are still visited by lakhs of devotees (1 lakh = 100, 000). These tombs are definitely the place where Muslims and Hindus can meet and pray together.
In 1947, before Partition, Muslims represented one fourth of the total Indian population (94.5 million people or 24.3 per cent as per the 1941 Census of India). They fell to ten percent to now reach 13.4 percent. They are very unevenly distributed (see map 1). There are districts where they matter, especially when elections are in the offing, and other districts where they hardly exist. Table 1 lists their distribution and numbers by state (Census of India 2001). Tables 2 and 3 indicate distribution and growth figures for the main religions. It will be noticed that the Muslim population has grown more rapidly than the populations that adhere to other religions - a point which fuels one of the main arguments of the Sangh Parivar (Hindu nationalist family of organizations) to warn against Muslims.
Table 1 : Muslim Population by State
Table 2 : Population by Religious Community, 1961 to 2001 (in thousands)
Table 3. Decadal growth of religious communities, 1961 to 2001
Map 1. District - wide distribution of the Muslim population
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Map 2. Locations of Main Riots between Hindus and Muslims (1978–1993)
Source: GRAFF, Violette. 1993. «Le désarroi des musulmans indiens.» Hérodote. 71 (October–December): 129.
State difficulties
What makes things difficult for a state which calls itself “secular” (the word “secularism” was introduced in 1976 in the 1950 Constitution) and which wants to observe a balance between religions can be summarized as follows (Smith 1963; Madan 1993; Bhargava 1998):
1. Hinduism has “institutionalized” hierarchies and inequalities. There are thousands of castes and subcastes (jatis), together with their own status whose major criteria are blood purity, color, and traditional occupation. Endogamy is thus a strict rule. The origin of this organization is still subject to serious debate but, as we have seen earlier, it seems that the model is of Indo–Aryan origin and the tripartition system as formulated by the comparatist Dumézil (1958). Four main varnas can actually be distinguished, themselves encompassing thousands of endogamous jatis, which are a living demonstration of the system and of its pervasiveness: the priests (Brahmins) and the warriors (Kshatriyas) are at the top of society, followed by those that include society’s economic actors (Vaishyas). Situated beneath these high castes (labeled “twice - born”), we find the Shudras, the main part of the Indian population. Overlapping of these categories and disparities in economic possibilities explain that the administration (first British, then Indian) has classified them under different connotations (e.g. Backward Classes and Other Backward Classes. They are not, however, society’s “lowest of the low”: the “infamous” people who should not be approached because of their alleged “impurity” are the Untouchables, today called Dalits. Nevertheless, everybody needs their services, and as it is the case with the higher jatis, interaction is constant and expected. In administrative terms, they are classified as the Scheduled Castes (SC), while the adivasis (indigenous people) have been termed the Scheduled Tribes (ST) - both categories benefit from quotas recognized in the Constitution of India, the proud child of Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar , himself a Dalit.
2. Muslims desperately seek to maintain their own identity, way of life, and culture, which are specific and strictly ordained by a monotheist religion, Islam, through the Quran, the Sunna and the Muslim personal law, the Sharia. There is Allah and his Prophet, and then, for the Shias, their veneration for Ali (the cousin and son - in - law of the Prophet) and his sons, Hassan and Hussein, whose martyrdom is celebrated with much passion during the ten days of Muharram. Of course, as said earlier about shrines, there are bridges between Muslims and their Hindu neighbors. There are practices which can bring people together, share values and, at times, pray together.
Irreducible differences
Nevertheless, looking at major, at times irreducible differences (behavior, reasoning, personal codes, food, language), one can understand how, before Independence, a number of politicians, who could not cope with the ways of the Congress Party, would put the emphasis on these differences and subscribed, instead, to what is known as the “Two-Nation theory” that was formulated by Mohammed Ali Jinnah in Lahore in 1940 (Brown 1963; Hardy 1972; Jalal 1985; M. Hasan 1993; Bernard 1994).
Partition cost
Partition of the subcontinent was to prove a disaster in many ways, especially for the large Muslim population who could not or would not migrate eastwards or westwards to a nascent Pakistan. These millions of people are still “paying the cost” of the vivisection of Mother India. The memories of the past are still overwhelming and many people, sincerely or not, in their heart of hearts, would look at the Millat (Muslim global community) as one monolithic estranged block. From the very beginning, and in spite of communal violence and the many massacres that occurred between 1946 and 1948, a free and proud India was to assert itself in a most impressive way (see “India from 1900 to 1947” by Claude Markovits [2007]).
Smoothening
By the beginning of the 1950s, various developments in domestic politics and external affairs had softened the so - called communal relations. First, Indo–Pakistani relations eventually improved (the Nehru–Liaqat Ali Khan pact). Second, the death of Sardar Patel and the departure of other leading figures noticeably altered the balance of power within the Congress, and also weakened the so-called Hindu inclinations in the Party, along with the “communalist” overtones which some people saw in them. Prime Minister Nehru was able, henceforth, to impose his views without encountering any real opposition from either inside or outside the Congress system. This signified that there were no longer valid grounds for Muslims to refuse, on a political level, to back this composite organization, which, in general, had demonstrated benign neutrality; nor any reason for Muslims to align themselves with opposition parties whose promises could not be guaranteed. Generally, throughout this period, they were gradually reassured - if not entirely convinced - by Nehru’s personal stance, by the presence around him of a number of “nationalist” Muslim leaders, not really popular but respected (Maulana Azad and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai), and also by the very firm position these leaders were taking with regard to the secularization of the state and concerning the issue of communal relations (for instance, the guarantee offered by the Article 25 of the 1950 Constitution: “…all persons are equally entitled to freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practice and propagate religion…”) (Morris - Jones 1957; Smith 1963; Madan 1993; Chatterji 1995; Nandy 1998; M. Hasan 2004). From the first general elections (1951–1952), right up until the third general elections, which were held immediately before the Sino–Indian conflict broke out in 1962, all indications forecasted a Congress sweep of the Muslim-minority vote.
How is it that after this rather smooth period, religious tensions have surfaced in such a way that Hindu–Muslim riots have become a distinct feature of intercommunal relationships in India?
Rekindling
The year 1961 is held as a turning point, when “old demons raised their ugly heads” again. A serious riot in Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh) sounded the alarm. But there were other episodes which were not noticed as they should have. Aligarh and Meerut were later to be dubbed “riot-prone” cities (Brass 2006). And this turned out to be just the beginning…
An extensive literature on Indian Hindu–Muslim riots exists, complete with a recurrent and heated debate regarding their origin (Engineer 1984b; Ghosh 1987; Saksena 1990; Schermerhorn 1971). Are they due to the well-known irritants (Gaborieau 2011), feverishly decoded by the “other” community at a time when tensions are simmering: the desecration of religious sites, indiscrete loud music, disrespect shown toward the Prophet, the overlapping schedules of religious festivals and celebrations (Id, Muharram, Durga Puja, Holi, and Ganapati among others), the slaughter of cows, intruding pigs, disrespect shown toward women (“eve-teasing”), and property disputes? Are they linked to and aggravated by economic rivalries, the occupation of costly graveyards lands, abusive Hindu moneylenders and deep inequalities in education and commercial networks (Imtiaz Ahmad, 1984; Engineer 1992b)? Are they linked to the political developments of the day, to local antagonisms, or to pre-electoral and electoral battles (Varshney, 2002; Wilkinson, 2004) organized in a Machiavellian manner - as described in Brass’s observations about “institutionalized riot systems” (2003)? Are they linked to external pressures, ranging from Pakistani politics to cricket rivalries (Imtiaz Ahmad 1975; Wright 1978), or to international developments (Graff 1977)? It is difficult to analyze all of these possible explanations in this introduction. They will be referred to in the following chronology, which details each of these riots.
Difficulty in info-gathering
One thing should be clear: the data for the present paper has proved difficult to obtain. Nevertheless, it is obvious that in India, we don’t face “mass violence” as strictly defined by this project. As Michael Mann wrote: India “sees recurrent violence, but most of it takes the less serious form of a riot cycle” (Mann 2005: 474). Low-intensity cyclic riots, a structural feature of Indian society, are therefore not always extensively covered in official reports and the media.+++(4)+++ Some of these incidents, however, have escalated, provoking mass murder (as in Gujarat in 1969, and again in 2002). But it always remains difficult to obtain reliable information:
1. Because India, the world’s largest democracy, doesn’t readily publicize these issues. As noted by Steven Wilkinson in a book on elections and violence, “…as with most ethnic conflicts, systematic information on where and when Hindu–Muslim riots have taken place is hard to find.…State governments keep riot commission reports secret or delay their publication for years. The Central Government instructs the state news media to provide no ‘inflammatory’ information on riots, which in practice often means no information at all”(2004).
2. It is nearly impossible to obtain the exact death toll of each riot as statistics are dependent on police records, which are themselves dependent on “…the corruption of the local police; the perceived power of those who initiated the riot; whether policemen were injured or fired their weapons; and the level of financial compensation offered to riot victims by the state or central government” (Wilkinson 2004: 243–244). Almost always, the official death-count figures are much lower than the actual figures.
Kashmir
In this article, the reader will find only short references to Kashmir, a problem of a very different nature and rather unrelated to the issue of communal relations. The Kashmir question, debated since 1946, has been the source of three wars between India and Pakistan. As of today (in fact since 1987), it concerns also the will expressed by a number of Kashmiris to seek autonomy or even independence for their state (refer to the biography of Sheikh Abdullah ). Regarding the Hindu - Muslim relationships as such, they have always been rather harmonious. The tragedy today concerns the Kashmiri Brahmins (pandits), the only Hindu caste existing in Kashmir, who had to vacate their properties when the present war started (Noorani 1964; Madan 1981; Puri 1981; Akbar 1991b; Hurtig 1993; Racine 2002; Noorani 2011).
We have not dealt either with the issue of terrorism throughout India, (whether originating with Muslim radical groups or Hindu extremist organizations). An examination of the topic would entail our having to treat additional issues which involve other repertoires of violence and patterns of explanation - ones often not pertinent to the actual state of communal relations within India.