Why the Muzaffarnagar riots were a departure from past trends.
In several respects,the recent communal violence in Muzaffarnagar had the classic features of a riot. The immediate cause appeared to be the stalking or harassment of a girl by young men of another community,a common trope in riots. There is a dispute about whether this harassment,or a motorbike collision between individuals of two different communities,led to the killings. Contesting narratives of this sort are also a recurrent feature of riots. Finally,it is said,local politicians made provocative speeches,and loud music blared in front of a mosque at the time of prayer. Music before mosques (or cow slaughter) and inflammatory speeches by political or religious leaders,too,are routinely associated with riots.
But,fundamentally,the Muzaffarnagar riots departed from our existing script of understanding. Over the last 15 to 20 years,ethnic conflict in different parts of the world,including India,has been studied extensively. We know a lot,but no theory could have confidently predicted the Muzaffarnagar riots. We should,of course,note that predictive accuracy is not a good way to judge social science theories. As in biology,social science theories tend to be probabilistic,indicating the odds,not proposing certainties. Just as not everybody who smokes cigarettes would get cancer,though a lot would,social science theories are better at explaining central tendencies,not departures from them. We just cant get the precision of physics.
Nonetheless,we need to understand why the Muzaffarnagar riots were unusual and examine their larger implications. Why were these riots surprising?
First,the Muzaffarnagar riots were mostly rural. While civil wars tend to be rural,riots are primarily urban. Why this is so is aptly summarised by a modern-day classic,The Logic of Violence in Civil War,by Stathis Kalyvas. In civil wars,the insurgents generally attack the sovereignty of the state. They need to hide from the might of the state to attack it well; villages,mountains and forests provide better hideouts for planning and protection than cities. In comparison,rioters attack communities,not the sovereignty of the state. Rioters are armed with lesser weapons,and houses in urban bylanes are a good enough cover.
Second,prejudice of various sorts might be widely prevalent in Indian villages,but the countryside tends to have caste violence,not Hindu-Muslim riots. And when they do take place,rural riots tend to be small. In the period,1950-1995,for which Steven Wilkinson and I constructed a dataset,rural deaths accounted for a mere 4-8 per cent of the total deaths in Hindu-Muslim riots (goo.gl/c1MkvZ). Killing anywhere between 40-50 people,if not more,the Muzaffarnagar riots were big. India has had big rural riots before in Bhagalpur (1989),Gujarat (2002) and a few in the Northeast. But these were exceptions to the larger reality of urban riots. The Muzaffarnagar riots belong to this exceptional category.
Third,riots also affected the city of Muzaffarnagar. Hindu-Muslim relations in Muzaffarnagar town have historically been calm. For communal violence,Aligarh and Meerut were the two worst cities in western Uttar Pradesh during 1950-95. But as I demonstrated in my book,Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India,neighbouring towns often continue to maintain their divergent characteristics. Next to continued…