According to Thomas Blom Hansen, Indian cities have become spaces of exclusion, fear, and sharpened enmity. He describes how Muslims are victims of an entanglement of communal violence, state complicity, and systemic discrimination.
Books and ideas: Over the decades since independence, how have the forms of communal violence between Hindus and Muslims in India evolved? And how would you describe the changing role of the state in responding to or participating in these episodes?
Thomas Blom Hansen: So right after Independence, the police forces would still observe the kind of manuals and ways in which colonial policing was done, which was largely as a form of referee between warring communities. So a riot would break out, the police would try to keep peace. They would try to divide people and so on and so forth. There would be injunctions for newspapers not to report anything that could incite violence and so on and so forth.
So it was very much that kind of old colonial idea of the state being there to keep order but be neutral, essentially. Over time that changes, and it correlates also with a thinning out of the representation of Muslims in the police force and in many parts of the state and governmental apparatus throughout India. So what you see from the 1960s, 1970s and accelerating and certainly being very pronounced in the 1990s, is that the state and the police force stop intervening, actually, and in many cases, actively participate on the side of the Hindu rioters.
So the state police forces, and there are many different police forces in India, but on the whole, they are no longer seen as a kind of non-partisan force that can come in and create order. And that has, of course, sharpened divisions in the sense that many Muslims feel that they are… And even the language in which we describe the riots, it used to be like between two warring communities, now it’s much more clearly a kind of pogrom, created by the majority community, perpetrated against the minority community and Muslims mostly, but also sometimes Dalits and supported by or even orchestrated sometimes by police forces.
And this has been made possible and accelerated with the coming into power of Hindu nationalist governments in many parts of the country where it’s very blatantly clear that the police’s job is not actually to protect the minority community, but to be part of the attack on them.
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