Communalism: Ethnic Violence in South Asia

Often read in opposition to nationalism, communalism is probably more usefully seen as setting the boundaries of the nation in a way that challenges the hegemonic view of the nation.

In the context of colonial India, it almost invariably refers to separate visions of nationhood as defined by Hindu and Muslim political actors, and the extent to which these are fuelled or furthered by violence between the two communities. Explorations into the psychology of the colonised, who are forced to come to terms with the humiliations of colonialism, are to some extent helpful in understanding the compulsions of internecine violence. Frantz Fanon writes compellingly that violence ‘frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect’.^{^[113]} He also argues that the apparent invincibility of the colonial power promotes a redirection of violence inwards within the colonised society, leading the colonised to turn on one another.^{^[114]} Fanon sees this as a direct substitution for confrontation against the colonial state; however, the separation between colonial oppressor and internal other/oppressor isn’t always clear in India. With anticolonial violence effectively delegitimised by both Gandhi and government, the competition for dominance and redress for the humiliations of colonialism was redirected towards internal others. However, in Gandhian and Congress mobilisational tactics, exploitation or oppression of Indians by Indians was consistently underplayed or glossed over, and class, caste or religious conflicts were not simply the result of some sort of false consciousness, but were as genuine as any grievances against colonial rule, and in many cases more immediate.

The rise in communal violence from the 1920s is therefore not simply the outcome of an over-reliance by the Congress on religious tropes in its mobilisation,^{^[115]} of the self-interested machinations of religious leaders^{^[116]} or of British divide and rule policies.^{^[117]} It was also a corollary of the braking of the nationalist movement by Gandhi's insistence on non-violence in the interwar years.

In more direct terms, as various groups positioned themselves in an anti-colonial struggle, it was also apparent that what was at stake was the ability to control a future state, to win a future conflict in a fundamentally conflicted society and to decide on who would primarily belong to that state. To that end, mobilisation in the interwar years, in common with much of the rest of the world, took the form of organising, training, and as far as possible arming, paramilitary groups ostensibly charged with ‘social service' work as ‘volunteers', but in effect creating sectarian private armies to create communal quasi-states or states-in-waiting, challenging the state's monopoly of violence.^{^[118]} Gandhi himself spoke of the ‘military discipline' demanded of Congress volunteers, and allowed those who ran the Congress's volunteer corps to train on military lines. Gandhi had made recruitment speeches for the British Indian Army during the First World War, and he maintained that non-violence could only be practised by those who were capable of violence, rather than those who abstained from violence simply because they were weak.^{^[119]}

While the dialectic of violence established between white ruler and brown subject seems relatively straightforward, the uncomfortable fact remains that, by the early twentieth century, a substantial measure of state violence inflicted upon the Indian body by coercive forces such as the police was inflicted by Indians serving in those forces. Revolutionary groups explicitly targeted Indians working for the state, appealing to them to leave the colonial services. On 23 April 1930, a Garhwali regiment ordered to fire on a protesting crowd in Peshawar refused to do so, and was court martialled, constituting a worrying new trend for the Government of India.^{^[120]} Gandhi, who might have been expected to endorse this decision, responded by denouncing the Garhwali regiment: imagine, he argued, if when India had a national government they similarly refused to do their duty to the state.^{^[121]}

In the face of the pressures of mass nationalist organisation and escalating ethnic tensions, the response of the state became less predictable, leading to ‘tacitly permitted transgressions' of conventions about the use of force, such as whipping, lathi (baton) charges and so on.^{^[122]} A political compromise of sorts seemed to have been reached in the Government of India Act of 1935, which devolved provincial authority to Indians (barring a clause that would reappropriate authority to a British-controlled centre in case of emergency), thereby also devolving a part of state violence to ‘nationalists' of various descriptions, as the policing of provincial disorder fell to these governments.

The majority of governments established in the provinces of British India following the elections in 1937 had Congress-led ministries: seven out of eleven, with another two in coalition, leaving only Bengal and the Punjab with nonCongress governments. The left flank of the Congress was often then the only opposition to the Congress governments in power which, dominated by Indian business interests, were invested in order and did the job of the colonial state by controlling ‘subversives' and ‘seditionists' (often their own Congress colleagues) by imprisoning them.^{^[123]} When the Congress governments resigned in protest at being drawn into the war without consultation in 1939, Gandhi wrote that it was a rescue of sorts for the Congress, bringing Congress factions together again and covering ‘the fact that we were falling to pieces'.^{^[124]}

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

Communalism: Ethnic Violence in South Asia

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