Book Review: Hate & The State, Riot Politics in India
Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State:
by Ward Berenschot
Reviewed by Ananya Vajpeyi
...Ward Berenschot’s new book, Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State renders signal service to the social science of violence, particularly communal violence in South Asia, in two respects. First, it clarifies the role of the state in engineering and executing such violence through an intricate coordination of political actors, bureaucrats, police and ordinary citizens—Berenschot fills out the somewhat abstract formulation of what it means, in concrete terms, for the state to have a policy of “divide-and-rule.” Second, it demonstrates beyond the shadow of a doubt that rioting is anything but spontaneous, unplanned, unpredictable, and subjective. It is, rather, a well-understood and well-recognized form of political engagement, with all of the institutional, administrative, and ideological paraphernalia necessary for organized and comprehensible political activity undertaken by individuals and groups who stand in a series of determinate relationships with one another.
Communal violence is not the magical effluvium of disembodied state power—it is the carefully constructed artifact of what Berenschot names “riot networks”; and the communal riot is the visible outcome of a particular form of politics that Berenschot names “riot politics,” which carries on in a regular, routine, continuous way, punctuated by the spectacular episodes of violence that it is designed to deliver now and again. As elections take place from time to time in a properly functioning democracy, so riots take place from time to time in a properly functioning communal state.
Through immersive observation and extensive interviews conducted in Ahmedabad localities in 2005 and 2006, Berenschot, who speaks some Gujarati, builds up a number of credible portraits of the people behind riots—the netas (politicians), goondas (strongmen), and chamchas (sycophants) for whom “rioting is maintaining relations.” From the outside, these people might appear as anti-political, sociopathic, almost inhuman; but in reality they are firmly embedded in their neighborhoods, communities, and the larger urban fabric, where who they are, what they do, and why they do it are all perfectly tractable to others within their circles. But Berenschot does not want to humanize and thus vindicate the authors of terrible violence. Instead he wishes to enter into the intricate ecology of relationships—the infrastructure of violence—the social psychology of a place that is diverse but also divided—the conditions of possibility that turn neighbors into informants and attackers, and peaceable, even cowardly citizens into inflamed mobs of rapists and butchers. Regular problems of access to state resources and electoral power; regular forms of political mediation and institutional corruption; regular actions and interactions involving bureaucrats, politicians, party workers, policemen, social workers, civil society activists, lawyers; are also the stuff of which, occasionally, so-called riots are made... Read more:
