Communal riots in India as a transitory form of political violence: three approaches

Political competition, relative deprivation, and perceived threat: a research note on anti-Christian violence in India

“…In addition, it may be useful to utilize state assembly rather than Lok Sabha electoral results. Moreover, since India's is a first-past-the-post democracy in which political parties commonly win with far less than 50 per cent of the vote, it may be useful to statistically explore whether 13 violence peaks at some percentage lower than 50 per cent rather than to conceive of 'parity' as proximity to 50 per cent (as we did). Our own preliminary investigation (not shown) suggests that that violence does indeed peak when the NDA receives around 35 per cent of the vote in Lok Sabha elections.…”

“…Few studies on religious minorities make this necessary distinction in their analytic plan. Among other issues, incidents of ethnic violence tend to be both more transitory and more geographically limited than other forms of political violence (Froystad 2009). Finally, whereas many larger studies examine only violent regions, looking for their commonalities, our analysis takes into consideration how peaceful states differ from violent states.…”

The Burden of Security

“…Although police often appear as actors in communal riots, critical scrutiny of the perceptions and experiences of police during these episodes is still to be undertak-en. This gap is perhaps linked to the fact that approaches focusing on the 'perpetrators' of violence-towards which some police actions converge-are largely absent from scholarship on communalism (Frøystad 2009). Government commissions, scholars and even a few former officers of the Indian Police Service have, however, extensively documented the often partisan behaviours of police during riots-behaviours ranging from selectively refraining from intervention to open collusion with the majority Hindu community and participation in killing and looting members of minority religious communities, and Muslims in particular.…”

8: A Fine Balance

“…The infamous cartoons were not published in Sweden (Eide 2011 24 Likewise, the Canadian philosopher Ashwani Kumar Peetush, warning against the social marginalization and radicalization that an unfettered freedom of expression may engender in plural societies, mentions India as an example of a state that recognizes the harm of hate speech and other kinds of hurtful expressions. 25 The question I address in the following pages is neither which of these positions are most accurate, nor whether they can represent different perspectives on reality like in the story of the blind men and the elephant (as I suggest in Frøystad, 2013), but rather what the regulation of the public sphere 'does', for better or for worse. This, in turn, raises the question of what kind of empirical material one should look for.…”

“…The kinds of discrimination targeted by these legislations typically concern behaviour that is far graver than making derogatory remarks. (Frøystad 2003), a book chapter on how people position each other according to class in public places (Frøystad 2006), an ethnographic account of the ways in which everyday enactment of caste and class articulated with the anti-Muslim tenets of the Hindu nationalist movement before, during and after the 1992 riots , as well as an article discussing the temporality of riot dynamics (Frøystad 2009 Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, which came into being to promote social inclusion of dalits further, also makes it punishable to force any member of a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe (SC/ST) to eat 'inedible or obnoxious substances', chase them from their property, compel them into forced labour, or report them to the police on false charges, to name a few of the atrocities specified in the text. Against this background, derogatory caste remarks may appear to be quite insignificant, but they nevertheless represent a form of discrimination that is now prohibited throughout the country.…”