Ashutosh Varshney

Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society: India and Beyond

Scholars have worked either on civil society or on ethnic conflict, but no systematic attempt has yet been made to connect the two. In an attempt to explore the possible links, this article makes two interconnected arguments. First, interethnic and intraethnic networks of civic engagement play very different roles in ethnic conflict. Because they build bridges and manage tensions, interethnic networks are agents of peace. But if communities are organized only along intraethnic lines and the interconnections with other communities are very weak (or do not exist), ethnic violence is then quite likely. Second, civic networks, both intra- and interethnic, can also be broken down into two other types: associational forms of engagement and everyday forms of engagement. This distinction is based on whether civic interaction is formal or not. Both forms of engagement, if robust, promote peace: contrariwise, their absence or weakness opens up space for ethnic violence. Of the two, however, the associational forms turn out to be sturdier than everyday engagement, especially when confronted with attempts by politicians to polarize the people along ethnic lines. Both arguments have significance for theories of ethnic conflict and social capital.

Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict, and Rationality

Why do we have so many ethnic partisans in the world ready to die as suicide bombers? Does a rational calculus lie beneath the nationalist pride and passions? Can it be discovered if only we apply our understanding of rationality more creatively? This article seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the nationalism of resistance. It argues that a focus on dignity, self-respect, and recognition, rather than a straightforward notion of self-interest, is a better prism for understanding ethnic and nationalist behavior, although self-interest is not entirely absent as a motivation in ethnic conflict. In the process of developing this argument, a distinction once made by Max Weber—between instrumental rationality and value rationality—is recovered and refined further. No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers …. They are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them …. The cultural significance of such monuments becomes even clearer if one tries to imagine, say, a Tomb of the Unknown Marxist or a cenotaph for fallen Liberals. Is a sense of absurdity avoidable? The reason is that neither Marxism nor Liberalism is much concerned with death and immortality. If the nationalist imagining is so concerned, this suggests a strong affinity with religious imaginings ….—Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1983He received many helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. He would especially like to acknowledge the criticisms and suggestions of Gabriel Almond, Benedict Anderson, Robert Bates, Morris Fiorina, Ira Katznelson, Pratap Mehta, Vibha Pingle, Ronald Rogowski, James Scott, Kenneth Shepsle, Jack Snyder, Sidney Verba, the late Myron Weiner, Elisabeth Wood, Crawford Young, and three anonymous reviewers of this journal. Needless to add, not all of them agreed, so the standard disclaimers apply.

India in the Era of Economic Reforms

Written by economists and political scientists, essays in this volume not only analyze the impact of reforms on the economy as a whole, but also assess the state of Indias post-1991 public finances, agriculture, labour markets, exports, centre-state relations and the connection of economic reforms with Indias battle over caste and secularism. This book is intended for undergraduate, post-graduate students and researchers of economics and politics and also journalist, policy-makers and corporate executives as well as the general reader interested in the ongoing reforms process.

Is India Becoming More Democratic

A great deal of confusion exists on how to discuss, and theoretically characterize, political developments in India during the last decade and a half. There is, of course, a consensus that the Congress party, a towering political colossus between 1920 and 1989, has unambiguously declined. While there are legitimate doubts about whether the decline of the Congress party will continue to be irreversible, it is clear that much of the political space already vacated by the Congress has so far been filled by three different sets of political forces. The first force, Hindu nationalism, has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention (Basu 1997; Hansen and Jaffrelot 1998; Jaffrelot 1993; Varshney 1993). The second force, regionalism, has also spawned considerable research of late (Baruah 1999; Singh forthcoming; Subramanian 1999). A third force, not so extensively analyzed, covers an array of political parties and organizations that encompass groups normally classified under the umbrella category of “lower castes”: the so-called scheduled castes, the scheduled tribes, and the “other backward classes” (OBCs). How should we understand the politics of parties representing these groups? How far will they go? What are the implications of their forward march, if it does take place, for Indian democracy?

Mass politics or elite politics? india's economic reforms in comparative perspective

In discussions of the politics of economic reforms, a distinction needs to be made between mass politics and elite politics. In a democracy, the former may be much more pressing for politicians. As is true in so many multiethnic societies today, ethnic conflicts may enter mass politics more quickly than disputes over economic reforms. The relegation of reforms to a secondary political status, however, can work to the advantage of reformers, for a mass preoccupation with ethnic issues provides political room to push reforms. Given a multiplicity of salient political issues, even minority governments can press ahead with economic reforms.

The Indian paradox : essays in Indian politics

PART ONE: NATION BUILDING AND POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS The Indian Paradox Violent Social Conflict and Democratic Politics Indias Minorities Who Are They? What do they Want? Institution Building in India PART TWO: CHANGING PUBLIC POLICIES AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES Capitalist Agriculture and Rural Well-Being The Political Economy of Industrial Growth Political Consequences of Preferential Policies India in Comparative Perspective PART THREE: ELECTORAL POLITICS Party Politics and Electoral Behavior From Independence to the 1980s The 1971 Elections Indias Changing Party System The 1980 Elections Continuities and Discontinuities in Indian Politics PART FOUR: STALEMATES, CRISES AND ATTEMPTED REFORMS India in the Mid-Seventies A Political System in Transition Rajiv Gandhi A Mid-Term Assessment Maintaining Indias Democratic Institutions

Creating datasets in information-poor environments : patterns of collective violence in Indonesia, 1990-2003

Indonesia has witnessed explosive group violence in recent years, but unlike its plentiful economic statistics, the data on conflict are remarkably sketchy. Because the New Order (1966‐1998) wanted to give the appearance of order and stability, it did not believe in publishing reports on group conflict, nor did it allow researchers and nongovernmental organizations to probe the patterns and causes of conflict. This article is based on the first multiyear dataset ever constructed on group violence in Indonesia. Following, and adapting for Indonesian conditions, methodologies developed and used elsewhere, we cover the years 1990‐2003, split the data into various categories, and identify the national, regional, and local patterns of collective violence. Much that we find is surprising, given the existing theories and common perceptions about violence in Indonesia. Of the several conclusions we draw, the most important one is that group violence in Indonesia is highly locally concentrated. Fifteen districts and cities (kabupaten and kota), in which a mere 6.5 percent of the country’s population lived in 2000, account for as much as 85.5 percent of all deaths in group violence. Large-scale group violence is not as widespread as is normally believed. If we can figure out why so many districts remained reasonably quiet, even as the violent systemic shifts— such as the decline of the New Order—deeply shook fifteen districts causing a large number of deaths, it will advance our understanding of the causes of collective violence in Indonesia.

India, Pakistan, and Kashmir: Antinomies of Nationalism

Ethnic, religious, and nationalist passions have returned to the agenda of world politics. The hope of intellectuals and statesmen at the turn of the 1950s was that a rising tide of rationality and modernization, in both liberal and Marxist variants, would sweep away these ascriptive identities that had led to such violence, bloodshed, and ruin. However, their expected erosion did not take place; rather, these passions have persisted and, it would be fair to say, have now gone beyond all expectations. Today, several societies-most dramatically, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia-seem to be on the verge of ethnic disintegration, depending on how their politics and institutions are restructured. Serious ethnic assertion also marks a good deal of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. Why are so many people in the world defining themselves in ethnic and religious terms? Although the problem is not fully understood, some minimal comparative observations can, nonetheless, be offered on the ethnic and nationalist revival of today, and it can be marked by at least four factors-two old, two relatively new. First, many ethnic groups cut across international boundaries that have been constructed to represent juridical statehood, or they are spread across regional boundaries within a nation-

Self‐limited empowerment: Democracy, economic development and rural India

This study deals with two questions: (i) what accounts for the rise of the countryside in Indias polity? and (ii) how has rural power in the polity affected economic policy and economic outcomes for the peasantry? The rural sector is typically weak in the early stages of development. A powerful countryside, therefore, is a counter‐historical occurrence. Universal franchise and a competitive democracy in a primarily agrarian India have led to the empowerment of the countryside. The power of the rural sector is, however, not unconstrained. The first principal constraint is, ironically, the size of the agricultural sector itself. Beyond a point, subsidising a large rural sector is fiscally difficult. The size of the rural population thus cuts both ways: it makes the countryside powerful in a democratic political system but checks this power economically. The second principal constraint on rural power stems from the cross‐cutting nature of rural identities and interests. Farmers are also members of caste, et...

Analyzing Collective Violence in Indonesia: An Overview

A seventy year old Indonesian woman or man today will have observed and/or directly experienced the following: as a primary school age child, the police-state authoritarianism of . . . Dutch colonial rule . . . ; as a young teenager, the wartime Japanese military regime, which regularly practiced torture in private and executions in public . . . ; on the eve of adulthood, four years (1945–49) of popular struggle for national liberation . . . at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives; as a young mother or father . . . the cataclysm of 1965–66, when at least 600,000 and perhaps as many as two million people . . . were slaughtered by the military; in the middle age, the New Order police-state, and its bloody attempt to annex East Timor, which cost over 200,000 East Timorese lives . . . ; in old age, the spread of armed resistance in . . . Aceh and West Papua, the savage riots of May 1998 . . . and . . . the outbreak of ruthless internecine confessional warfare in the long peaceful Moluccas. (Anderson 2001, 9–10)