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In every case, the geography of anger is not a simple map of action and reaction, minoritization and resistance, nested hierarchies of space and site, neat sequences of cause and effect. Rather, these geographies are the spatial outcome of complex interactions between faraway events and proximate fears, between old histories and new provocations, between rewritten borders and unwritten orders.
-Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers
Introduction
Violence among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs has been a relatively regular feature of postcolonial Indian society.1Until the end of the 1990s, however, Indian Christians were largely unaffected by it, despite being, in some circles, resented as a "foreign" element and suspected of divided loyalties. The late 1990s, however, brought a sharp surge in acts of violence against Christians, and the year 1998 appears to mark a turning point. The United Christian Forum for Human Rights estimates that there were only thirty-two registered cases of communal violence against Christians between 1964 and 1996. In 1997 the rate of violence grew dramatically, to fifteen, and then in 1998 the number jumped drastically to ninety (Aaron 2002, 47). The first large-scale, anti-Christian riot also occurred in 1998, in the Dangs, Gujarat, a region dominated by tribal, or adivasi, peoples, many of whom had become Christian. No Christians were killed in these riots, which began on Christmas day. But over the next few days, rioters vandalized or destroyed dozens of Christian houses and places of worship.
Between 1998 and 2007 the number of attacks on Christians continued to climb, reaching present levels of well over two hundred annually. And then, on the day before Christmas in 2007, Hindu-Christian riots broke out in Kandhamal, Orissa. These riots lasted for a few days, subsided, and then broke out again in August 2008. In the two rounds of Kandhamal riots2there were, all told, more than fifty deaths, dozens of cases of sexual assault and rape, the destruction of thousands of homes, and the temporary or permanent displacement of over five thousand refugees.
Most but not all of the victims were Christian. Christians occasionally retaliated, and one Christian attack alone destroyed 120 Hindu homes. Additionally, a significant factor in the first round of violence was a...