Content area
Full Text
POLITICAL CONFLICTS AROUND RELIGIOUS, caste and regional identities have multiplied in India. Whether one views these "million mutinies" as symptomatic of a growing crisis of governability or of a democratic revolution, analytical questions abound. Why is there apparently more violent conflict around identity politics in India today than at any time since Independence? To what extent do the character and intensity of recent conflicts differ from those of the past? What lessons can we learn from cases where community demands have been successfully accommodated? And, relatedly, what measures might alleviate the widespread destruction of life and property and create the sense of predictability on which all social order rests? The following essays analyze both the growing incidence of violent ethnic conflict in India and some of the conditions for their resolution.
It is difficult to overstate the contemporary relevance of community conflicts in India. The decade of the 1990s began with violence breaking out in many north Indian cities and towns, mainly in response to the government's decision to implement the Mandal Commission recommendations. These recommendations provided quotas for employment and education to India's lower middle strata, the "Other Backward Classes." Anti-Mandal sentiment was an important element in the downfall of the central government later that year and in the subsequent growth of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In October 1990, the BJP organized a massive attempt to destroy a mosque at Ayodhya, a town in north India, that sparked off riots in which well over a thousand people died. But this was only a prelude to the more serious debacle in Ayodhya in December 1992, which resulted in well over two thousand casualties, including deaths in such cosmopolitan cities as Bombay. Violence in Kashmir has been very severe for much of the first half of this decade. The 1996 parliamentary elections provide decisive evidence of the growth of community identities. The two major victors were the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), on the one hand, and the coalition of lower caste and class groups that ultimately allied with Congress and formed the government, on the other. The community conflicts that had earlier been played out in the streets have by now found expression in the electoral arena.
The papers below analyze...