[Book Review] Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim violence and the Indian state

Ward Berenschot, Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim violence and the Indian state (London: Hurst and Company, 2011], ISBN 978-1-84904-136-2, xi + 236 pp., Price £ 25.00 Compared to almost 30 years spent in the largely riot-free capital, Delhi, I lived in the communal riot-prone Ahmedabad city for less than three years and this doesn’t put me in any pedestal of authority to review Ward Berenschot’s scholarly ethnographic work of relative significance in a hugely volatile present. I review Riot Politics in relation to works on communal and collective violence in South Asia by scholars such as Paul R Brass (The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India and Theft of an Idol) and Steven Wilkinson (Religious Politics and Communal Violence). While Brass has studied the regularity with which communal violence between Hindus and Muslims and anti-Muslim pogroms have occurred since Independence, Wilkinson takes recourse to in-depth field studies to ascertain that the transformation of a communal skirmish into a full-scale riot, in large measure, is aided and abetted by the inaction of the political class and the administrative machinery to reap electoral harvest. He asserts that the worst riots have taken place in India since representative government was established in the mid-1930s and they have largely occurred because elected state governments were openly partisan or because, for political reasons, they delayed taking action to prevent the violence and encouraged hesitation among the district officials. Instances such as the pre-Partition violence in Calcutta in 1946, the Bombay riots of 1992-93, the anti-Sikh riots in 1984, and the anti-Muslim Gujarat pogrom of 2002, among others, validate Wilkinson’s assertion. Using a restrictive definition of riot-proneness, yet another study by Ashutosh Varshney and Wilkinson pointed out that the incidence of communal riots is skewed towards urban India in general and towards 24 cities in particular. This, however, does not establish that the rest of India remains riot-free. The study provides statistical evidence to prove that since the worst-hit cities are scattered across India, communal riots are endemic to the country. Brass further complicates the discussion by raising a pertinent question—why is a violent situation, where the number of Muslims killed, particularly by police bullets, is disproportionately more than the number of Hindus, termed a riot and not a pogrom based on religion? He states that the master narrative of communal violence in India rests on two assumptions. First, riots are spontaneous acts by motivated and angry groups. Second, such situations arise out of the prejudices and hostilities between the two communities. In several of his works, Brass demonstrates conclusively that the above explanation is by no means satisfactory for large-scale Hindu-Muslim violence or anti-Muslim pogroms. Berenschot enters the arena of scholarship on communal violence in India with his interesting work Riot Politics. He claims to provide a novel approach to understanding the processes that lead to the violent outbursts of communal strife. The work is based on an elaborate fieldwork comprising interviews and conversations with a number of local Gujaratis in the Isanpur locality of Ahmedabad city, where some of the worst riots occurred in 2002. Significantly, the conversations suggest that the violence in 2002 was in fact a planned and organized event coordinated by a relatively small group of people. In stating this, the author rarely goes beyond what has already been made amply clear by scholars like Brass, Wilkinson, and Varshney –that communal violence in India is an event organized with electoral and political gains in sight, which also perhaps explains the larger number of Muslims killed in all such incidents. Berenschot’s book carries many fascinating snippets of his conversations with local social workers-turned-rioters and other witnesses who provide verbal evidence of the involvement of VHP and BJP workers in riots. The author’s argument relies heavily on his exploration of the nexus between politicians, state officials, and musclemen, called bahubalis or goondas. He contends that these local musclemen are employed by participant politicians, who foster them to foment and instigate riots and rioters –a fact that, I am afraid, has already been made by scholars, journalists, documentary and creative film-makers. Riot Politics, therefore, studies the Gujarat riots in great detail and builds on the existing arguments, but does not really break new ground. The book’s value lies in its meticulously collected rich ethnographic data.