Communalism Analysis

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Ornit Shani’s book ‘Communalism, Caste and Hindu Nationalism: The Violence in Gujarat’ is an in depth analysis of the issue of communalism in Gujarat in the 2002 and the 1985 riots. She presents her own thesis as an explanation for the origin of communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims.
Communalism has been an important theme in Indian politics since the 1880s. During the first three decades after independence, even after the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947, no political force gained substantial power in the name of Hinduism. From the mid- 1980s there has been a resurgence of a belligerent and new kind of Hindu nationalism in India’s public life and in its political institutions. In the main, the Hindu nationalist …show more content…

Since the mid-1980s Gujarat became the site of recurring communal violence. The state turned into a nerve center for the Hindu nationalist movement and has come to be seen as the Hindutva laboratory. The rising communalism in Gujarat culminated in a massacre of Muslims in many parts of the state in February 2002. The complicity of state officials in the killings raised doubts about the ability of the state to govern and to uphold the rule of law. It also demonstrated that such carnage in a country with one of the largest Muslim populations in the world had the potential for destabilizing India’s democracy and the secular consensus on which it was …show more content…

In recent years, a significant scholarship has questioned the sectarian nature of this conflict. This book is a contribution to this literature, and sets out to trace the nature of the revival of communalism since the 1980s from a different point of departure.
Its central hypothesis is that the growth of communalism in the last two decades of the twentieth century did not lie in Hindu–Muslim antagonism alone. The growing appeal of Hindutva, and its inherent antagonism towards Muslims, was in fact an expression of deepening tensions among Hindus, nurtured by instability in the relations between castes and by the ways in which changes in the caste regime were experienced by diverse groups of Hindus. These processes were conditioned by state policies and their political

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