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Assesses the Muslim-Hindu conflict in India. Tenet of Hindutva, a Hindu far-right ideology; Analysis of the state-sponsored terror in Gujarat, India; Argument supporting the notion that a Hindu extremist takeover of India at the national level is highly unlikely; Support provided by U.S. right-wing Hindu groups to far-right groups in India.

Investigates how the Muslim community of the Androth Island in India transformed a disagreement regarding Sufi ritual practice into a moral divide that sanctioned a provocative fatwa, mosque expulsions and violence. Factors which contributed to the conflict in the community; Impact of the ethnic and sectarian violence in Delhi, India, Karachi, Pakistan and Colombo, Sri Lanka on the religious conflict among the islanders; Effect of the conflict in the island on the growth of the Indian state.

This article focuses on the rise of Hindu nationalism in India. There is increasing evidence to suggest that government officials openly aided the killings of the Muslim minority by members of militant Hindu organizations. The rise of communalism in Gujarat was unexpected. The ethnic conflicts had primarily been about reservations policy and the status of the backward castes.

Analyzes the ethnic movements of the Tamilnadu during the 1950s and 1960s, the Sikhs in Punjab during the 1980s, and the Muslims in Kashmir during the 1990s, with the focus at derivings some genaral conclusions. Periodic demands for more control and power by a variety of ethnic groups; Two Dimensions of the political context; Implications which concern normative and policy issues.

Discusses postmodern literature on Hindu-Muslim conflict in India. Issues concerning the origins and spread of Hindu-Muslim antagonisms; Distinction between communal conflict and communal identity-formation; Arguments regarding the establishment of truth about the cause and effect of communal violence between Muslims and Hindus.

The importance that IR theorists have traditionally given to sovereign statehood has decreased their ability to explain new issues of global heterogeneity and diversity. The need to explain the end of the cold war, the disintegration of the former Soviet Union and the revival of old identities as well as the eruption of ethnic conflict in various parts of the world has, therefore, led to the return of culture and identity in IR theory. The concept of nation-state in international relations is based on the assumption that humanity is divided into nations and each nation is entitled to a state of its own. Although a state can exist without a nation it does not have the same legitimacy as a nation-state. Thus post colonial states like India, which are often considered to have artificial boundaries and are made up of many ethnic groups, feel obliged to embark on nation-building and prove that they are a nation-state even though homogeneous nation-states are a dwindling minority. The rise of the BJP in India emphasises the importance of religious and cultural identities but still does not prove that India is a nation. There has always been a tension between national and subnational identities in India. Not everyone who lives within the territorial borders of India considers him/herself to be an Indian nationalist-for example, Kashmiris seeking independence. The central government has always been aware of this and has always given priority to the preservation of the unity and integrity of the country. Indeed the constitution of India, while giving recognition to the fact that India is a multi-ethnic state, does not given anyone the right to secede from the Union. However, it is difficult to say how far India has progressed in the past 50 years beyond mere political integration and towards the creation of a nation-state through the transfer of loyalties from regional or ethnic groups to the nation, whose legal expression is the Indian Union. In the long run this is the only thing that will preserve the Indian state as it exists today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the continuing interethnic and anti-state violence in Assam, India after the creation of the semi-autonomous Bodoland Territorial Area District (BTAD) in 2003. We argue that this institutional arrangement, as an “innovative” model of ethnofederalism and political autonomy, has been unsuccessful in effectively preventing continued violence. We identify several dynamics resulting from the creation of the BTAD that contribute to its ineffectiveness, including the emergence of parochial and militarized Bodo ruling cliques, competitive radicalization between Bodo political elites competing in insular electoral constituencies, the inability to co-opt and integrate factionalized Bodo militants, reinvigorated non-Bodo activism and communalism, and the increased politicization of land. The extreme and multi-faceted “ethnic” diversity found in India’s Northeast, and its aggressive political expression at the local level, differentiates this region from other parts of India where ethnofederalism has been comparatively more successful for conflict mitigation. Thus, the prospects for successful ethnofederalism are area-specific. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Armed conflicts have been a permanent feature of the northeastern region since Indian independence. Surprisingly, relentless conflicts in this remote region of India have received little attention in the literature. Although some studies on conflicts in India have made important contributions to understanding and analyzing the causes of conflicts in general, none of them has paid specific attention to the ongoing conflicts in the northeastern region of India. Relative deprivation and persistent economic and political discrimination are often identified as the major causes for armed rebellion in this region. I provide a first quantitative test of this argument, exploring whether deprivation and continual economic and political discrimination explain the probability of armed conflict incidence across nine northeastern states of India during the period 1970–2007. The main findings from probit estimations show that poverty (relative to the rest of the country) and economic and political discrimination explain conflict outbreaks, after controlling for income, population pressures, state capacity, ethnic affiliations, forest area, peace years, neighboring conflict incidence, and distance to New Delhi. The study also reports considerable support for the baseline results when controlling for potential reverse feedback effects using the generalized method of moments. These results are robust to alternative estimation techniques and sample size. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most studies of Hindu–Muslim riots in India have tended to emphasize the effects of social, cultural, or political factors on the occurrence of ethnic violence. In this article, the authors focus on the relationship between economic conditions and riots. Specifically, this article examines the effect of economic growth on the outbreak of Hindu–Muslim riots in 15 Indian states between 1982 and 1995. Controlling for other factors, the authors find that just a 1% increase in the growth rate decreases the expected number of riots by over 5%. While short-term changes in growth influence the occurrence of riots, this study finds no evidence of a relationship between the levels of wealth in a state and the incidence of ethnic riots. Moreover, by including state fixed effects, the authors determine that the negative relationship found between economic growth and riots is driven primarily by the relationship between growth and riots within a state over time rather than across states. These results are robust to controlling for a number of other factors such as economic inequality, demographic variables, political competition, temporal lags, spillover effects from adjacent states, and year effects. Finally, to address potential concerns that economic growth could be a consequence rather than a cause of violence or that other unobserved factors could confound the relationship between economic growth and the occurrence of Hindu–Muslim riots, the authors also employ instrumental variables (IV) estimation, using percentage change in rainfall as an instrument for growth. The results with IV estimation are similar to the results with non-IV estimation in terms of sign and significance, indicating that the negative effect of economic growth on riots is not due to reverse causality or omitted variables bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been almost a consensus among the political opinion makers in India that the Constitution of India that came into force in 1950 has been a secular constitution. This paper critiques that consensus and demonstrates that the secularism of India's constitution is Hindu-tainted. It takes up some key articles of the Indian constitution and, by analysing the constitutional debates of the 1940s that went into the making of those articles, highlights the Hindu bias features of the Indian nationalist movement and the constitution. While acknowledging some admirable and progressive features of the constitution, the paper argues that its Hindu bias must be read as symptomatic of the depth of institutionalised Hindu communalism in India and the shallowness of the secular foundations of the Indian republic. The existence of institutionalised Hindu communalism means that the power of Hindu communal sectarianism is greater than that which is merely represented by Hindu nationalist organisations. The paper concludes by suggesting that the secular reconstruction of India demands critical combat with the institutionalised communalism embedded in a range of societal and state institutions. Examining Hindu bias in the constitution is an instance of an examination of institutionalised communalism in one key institution of the Indian state and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deals with the identity fetishism of people in Ladakh, India as manifested in their battle for autonomy. Factors that mitigate identity fetishism; History of Ladakh's struggle to gain autonomy; Implication of Ladakh's struggle for autonomy on the political and social nature of the state.

Reports on the events that happened during a riot in Kalugumalai, South India, in 1895. Narratives of the antagonists; Religious and ethnic disputes leading to the riot; Complicity and incompetence of the local police and judiciary.

Traces the formation of political group concepts of the Pathans, Sikhs and the Tamils of India. Character of ethnic concepts; Nature of the reorientation of community concepts to modernist economic development; Similarity in the patters of mobilization, conflict and concept in ethnic groups.

This article focuses on the question of affirmative action — doomed or self-perpetuating, with examples from India and the U.S. India experienced anti-reservation riots by university students, a strike by doctors and the self-immolation of one student, when in 1990 the government proposed to increase reservations for minorities in government jobs and university seats. On the other hand in Louisiana, former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke amassed thousands of votes because his campaign for the U.S. Senate elections was centered on the claim that whites are becoming minorities because of preferential treatment of blacks and other minorities. The violence of the opposition to reservations or affirmative action in the two countries could be ascribed simply to the persistence of ancient prejudices and the defense of historic privileges. It may be a backlash against the threat that oppressed, socially inferior groups might actually gain equality. In both nations, however, the opponents proclaim that they are protesting against a new form of inequality, not in favor of continuing discrimination.