Hindu-Muslim Violence in India: A Postscript from the Twenty-First Century

Mitra, Anirban; Ray, Debraj

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-98848-1_14

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 10 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“… See Chandra and Garcia-Ponce, 2019;Verghese and Teitelbaum, 2019 for class based or Maoist violence in India.3 On the impact of riots on election results, seeIyer and Shrivastava, 2018. 4 Two notable exceptions areMitra and Ray (2014) andMitra and Ray (2019). These studies differ from this article…”

mentioning

confidence: 78%

“…For example, focusing on India, Varshney (2002) argues that civic organizations prevent local incidents from turning into full-blown riots by using networks of trust that exist at the town level. Finally, scholars also explore the impact of economic and demographic factors, such as GDP growth, income levels of ethnic groups, and population growth on Hindu-Muslim riots in India (Bohlken and Sergenti, 2010;Mitra and Ray, 2014;Mitra and Ray, 2019;Urdal, 2008;Scacco, 2019). This otherwise vibrant literature largely ignores the potential effect of economic inequality within or between groups on communal riots.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Inequality, elections, and communal riots in India

Bulutgil

Prasad

2022

Journal of Peace Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

How does inequality within and between ethno-religious groups influence the likelihood and frequency of communal riots? Using evidence from India, this article finds that low within-group and high between-group inequality dampens the likelihood and frequency of communal riots. Theoretically, the article suggests that the instrumental logic, which posits that ethnonationalist politicians use violence to stoke ethnic cleavages and mobilize support, best accounts for this finding. We argue that to be politically competitive, ethnonationalist politicians need their supporters to identify foremost with their ethnic identity. When inequality within groups is high and/or inequality between groups is low, citizens are less likely to focus on ethnicity as their primary identity. In such contexts, politicians may use communal riots to improve their electoral prospects by reinforcing the salience of ethnicity. Empirically, the article relies on a time-series cross-district analysis of inequality and Hindu–Muslim riots in India to test the instrumental argument against theoretical alternatives. To illustrate the causal logic, the article also uses the analysis of a communal riot that occurred in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh. Analyzing three aspects of the riot – background conditions, timing, targets of propaganda – we evaluate the different predictions of the instrumental argument. The article concludes with the suggestion that communal riots are distinct from cases of mass violence – such as civil wars, genocide, and ethnic cleansing – and could be conceptualized, along with other types of small-scale political violence, as a separate class of events with their own internal logic.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 78%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Inequality, elections, and communal riots in India

Bulutgil

Prasad

2022

Journal of Peace Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In column 4 of this table, we include the key political variable of our analysis the districts share of the BJP in the Lok Sabha. Mitra and Ray (2019) find this variable to be salient in determining the extent of Hindu-Muslim violence in the recent years.…”

mentioning

confidence: 82%

“…Data on the Lok Sabha election outcomes are freely available on the website of the Election Commission of India. The main idea is that BJPs presence in the district may affect Hindu-Muslim conflict (in fact, Mitra and Ray (2019)) present evidence of this) and given that the central government is actually led by the BJP, the tackling of the pandemic in the district. Given that the Lok Sabha is a national body and given that the BJP is a national party with a distinct ideology it makes sense to see how the BJP MPs affect the climate for riots.…”

Section: Empirical Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Brothers in arms? Covid-19 and Hindu-Muslim conflict in India1

Mitra¹,

Mukherji²

2021

The COVID-19 Pandemic, India and the World

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recurrent episodes of Hindu-Muslim violence have plagued India for many years. The Covid-19 pandemic poses new challenges against this backdrop of religious conflict. We explore the performance of various Indian districts in terms of their Covid-19 cases alongside their historical proclivities towards Hindu-Muslim violence. The link between inter-faith cooperation in an area and its subsequent performance in terms of Covid-19 cases is theoretically ambiguous. It may be that areas characterised by low(er) religious antagonism are better able to harness trust within and across communities to jointly battle the spread of the pandemic. Equally, the continual presence of religious violence may induce cooperation within each community and thus check the spread of the virus in riot-prone areas. Combining several district-level datasets, we uncover a robust correlation between various Covid-related outcomes and past conflict measures. Specifically, we find that higher levels of prior Hindu-Muslim conflict is associated with a lower number of Covid-19 infections, deaths and active cases. This pattern is consistent and holds across a wide range of specifications. Our empirical analysis therefore finds strong support for the latter channel.

show abstract

“…CFST = 0.085 [0.079, 0.100]. The stronger effect of national culture was apparent even in cases where there is ongoing within-country religious conflict, such as between Hindus and Muslims within India72,73 . Muslims in India were more similar to Hindus in India,…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural similarity among coreligionists within and between countries

White

Muthukrishna

Norenzayan

2021

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Cultural evolutionary theories suggest that world religions have consolidated beliefs, values, and practices within a superethnic cultural identity. It follows that affiliation with religious traditions would be reliably associated with global variation in cultural traits. To test this hypothesis, we measured cultural distance between religious groups within and between countries, using the Cultural Fixation Index (CFST) applied to the World Values Survey (88 countries, n = 243,118). Individuals who shared a religious tradition and level of commitment to religion were more culturally similar, both within and across countries, than those with different affiliations and levels of religiosity, even after excluding overtly religious values. Moreover, distances between denominations within a world religion echoed shared historical descent. Nonreligious individuals across countries also shared cultural values, offering evidence for the cultural evolution of secularization. While nation-states were a stronger predictor of cultural traits than religious traditions, the cultural similarity of coreligionists remained robust, controlling for demographic characteristics, geographic and linguistic distances between groups, and government restriction on religion. Together, results reveal the pervasive cultural signature of religion and support the role of world religions in sustaining superordinate identities that transcend geographical boundaries.

show abstract

Hindu-Muslim Violence in India: A Postscript from the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record.

Cited by 7 publications

References 10 publications

Inequality, elections, and communal riots in India

Inequality, elections, and communal riots in India

Brothers in arms? Covid-19 and Hindu-Muslim conflict in India1

Cultural similarity among coreligionists within and between countries

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About