Forms of collective and state violence in South Asia

Abstract

Virtually all forms of collective and state violence have been endemic in India for a long time. They have ranged from riots, pogroms, police killings and massacres to retributive genocide; insurrectionary movements based on tribal, ethnic, religious and regional identities; agrarian-based class warfare (in which Maoist and other militant groups are termed “Naxalite” by the authorities and most commentators); and state violence, including state terrorism to counter several of the above forms. Most of these distinct forms of violence are regionally or locally confined: tribal movements, particularly in the northeast, insurrectionary movements in Punjab (in the recent past) and Kashmir, Naxalite violence in pockets in Bihar and Andhra, and violence labelled Hindu-Muslim in the northern and western parts of the country. The focus of my research on collective violence in India during the past 20 years has been primarily on the latter, though I have also done work on retributive genocide in Punjab at the time of partition in 1947 and insurrectionary movements in Punjab in the 1980s and early 1990s. My principal publications that set forth the arguments to be summarized and elaborated further below, as well as the some of the ethnographic and statistical data to support them, are Riots and Pogroms (1996), Theft of an Idol (1997), The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India (2003) and Forms of Collective Violence: Riots, Pogroms, and Genocide in Modern India (2006).