History of Communal Riots in India???
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All along the years when the fight for an independent India was at its peak, a number of Congress personalities, led by an already well-known leader - a brilliant man who hailed from the historically famous United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh, UP) - Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, carried a dream: once India was freed from the British rule, a modern state would be built, a state that would see that its caste and communal ancestral traditions were forgotten. A secular state that would bring people together. A new Socialist order would be built. New Temples - i.e. heavy industries–would appear which would bring the new India into modernity (Parry and Struempell 2008). Some of these dreams would take shape indeed. However, the tragedies of the Partition and the violence which swept Northern India from 1946 to 1948 came as a shock and destroyed many illusions (for a historical background, see "India from 1900 to 1947" by Claude Markovits [2007] and for further details on the Partition violence, see "Thematic Chronology of Mass Violence in Pakistan, 1947–2007" by Lionel Baixas [2008])
The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948 was a watershed moment for India. It put an end to the murdering frenzy and to mass violence. Law and order could be restored. A strong leadership saw to that. Among those leaders was the "Iron Man of India" that was the Union Home Minister, Sardar Patel . He was the one who had gathered in time the 560 Indian princely states which had a special status (Menon 1961). In the larger country, he had made it very clear that no nonsense would be tolerated. What he had in mind were of course the various agitations of those days, mainly the Communist - led guerillas (Graff 1974), but also the linguistic or ethnic claims and, very clearly, the grievances of the religious minorities - whose behavior could threaten "Mother India". These last categories, however, were more than willing to demonstrate their loyalty. They were in a state of shock. After the dramatic exchanges of populations which had taken place during Partition, Hindu refugees had finally adjusted rather well. Muslims, however, had not. They were the guilty. They were those who had divided the Motherland (Robinson 1993). Those who had not left for Pakistan (which meant the majority of Muslims and most definitely the poorest among them) were left high and dry, even more so because their patrons, upon whom they depended, were no longer present (Azad 1959; Khaliquzzaman 1964). The only thing they could do was to concentrate on their day-to-day survival. Nearly four years proved necessary to reach a certain degree of peaceful coexistence between the communities concerned (Spear 1967; Philips and Wainwright 1970; M. Hasan 2004).
Who were these communities? And why this gulf between them? What is feeding the so-called "communalist cancer" in India, the word referring to the sense of insecurity, even hostility, which many communities feel at heart towards the "Other" (Pandey 1990), and which can lead them to take violent action in order to protect themselves, and further their own interests?
India is a giant country, a subcontinent which is extremely diverse, and where one finds people who, for millenniums, have cohabited in a narrow proximity but have never merged. They belong either to local indigenous tribes (adivasis) or descend from various waves of invaders who have settled, over the centuries, along the country’s rivers, in the large valleys of the Indus and of the Ganges, or in the hills, cultivating, plundering, settling or building but remaining organized along different strata and statuses. It is around 1500 B. C. that these various populations met and interacted. On the one hand, there were the Dravidians, people earlier associated with the Harappa civilization in the Indus valley, who had seemingly pushed aside the adivasis. On the other hand, there were the Aryans, who had come through successive waves from the Caucasia regions (from 1500 B. C. to approximately 1000 B. C.). These Aryans were very different from the populations they met when they came, with specific practices and religious traditions, articulated around the Vedic poems. They brought along the premises of an organization, centered on the notion of sacrifice, monopolized by a sacerdotal caste, the Brahmin varna.
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