Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State - Hardcover

Berenschot, Ward

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9780199327331: Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199327335 ISBN 13: 9780199327331

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2011

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On 27 February 2002 fifty-eight people died when a train coach caught Western India. The incident marked the beginning of one of the worst outbursts of Hindu-Muslim violence since India's independence. As marauding mobs thronged the streets of Gujarat's cities and villages, local and state-level politicians aided and abetted the violence by making inflammatory speeches, distributing weapons and restraining the police--who largely sided with the state's majority Hindu inhabitants--from intervening to stem the bloodshed, which claimed the lives of over two thousand people. Based on an extensive ethnographic study of Gujarat's local politics, Riot Politics offers a novel approach to understanding the processes that foster outbursts of communal violence in India. Berenschot argues that the difficulties that especially poorer citizens face when dealing with state institutions underlie the capacity and interests of political actors to instigate and organise communal violence. As the reader is led into the often shadowy world of local politics in Gujarat, the author reveals how the capacity and willingness of various types of rioters--from politicians, local criminals, Hindu-nationalist activists to neighbourhood leaders and police officials--to organise and perpetrate violence is closely related to the different positions these actors hold in the patronage networks that provide access to state resources.

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About the Author:

Ward Berenschot is a political scientist and a researcher at Leiden University, specialising in identity politics and local democracy in India and Indonesia.

Review:

"An exciting new study of the relationship between political mediation and violence in Gujarat, this work is ethnographically rich, well written and theoretically ambitious." -- Professor Samira Sheikh, Vanderbilt University

"The 2002 genocidal violence in Gujarat has remained partly unexplained. Focusing on the city of Ahmedabad, Ward Berenschot's book throws new light on these events, drawing on unique fieldwork emphasising the role of grassroots leaders. This is a remarkable addition to the literature on communalism in India." -- Christophe Jaffrelot, Senior Research Fellow, CNRS, CERI Sciences Po and author of Religion, Caste and Politics in India

"This volume provides a rich ethnographic account of the modus operandi of grass roots political actors in communal (ethnic) violence. Berenschot provides an insight into everyday politics and the state in Gujarat, India. Highly useful for students of Indian politics and society." -- Ghanshyam Shah, National Fellow, Indian Institute of Advanced Study

"Berenschot focuses on the inability of the government to deliver normal services as the key element of the pathology he is describing. The'solution' he describes, however, creates a vicious circle: the last thing politicians want is for state institutions to be able to serve their customers without 'customised' political intervention. The human relationships he sketches are all too believable, and his account is a must-read for anyone trying to understand how democratic government in a poor country works in practice." -- Survival

"Scholarship such as Berenschot's ethnography of what we may characterize as 'riot culture' assumes a significance far beyond the academy. It helps to bring to the fore the mutually enabling relationship of modern hate and the modern state: two entities with which the citizens of democratic India, as much as any other nation in the world today, must familiarize themselves to a far greater extent than they might have hoped a few decades ago, at the time of the founding of their new republic." -- Ananya Vajpeyi, The New Republic

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