Communal riots and terrorism

There is good amount of literature on communal riots and terrorism now. This shows that the violence is not a religious issue. It is rather a political issue. An article on riots presents three different hypotheses (Sengupta, 2005):

• Communal riots in India are part of social conflicts and can be explained and understood in terms of same conceptual apparatus as those needed to analyze other forms of social conflicts.

• Communal riots in India are primarily due to lack of associational forms of engagements and everyday forms of engagements. If there is good participation of Muslims in all forms of formal organizations and everyday forms of engagements are improved the chances of communal riots can be reduced significantly.

• Communal riots are active creations of politicians. The level of violence is determined by extent of party competition and presence of Muslim swing votes. “… existence of three or more parties provides a security blanket to the minorities as the importance of swing votes increases provided the majoritarian party is not trying to attract the fringe Hindu votes. A bi-polar state party system creates a potentially dangerous situation for the minorities, especially when the majoritarian party, which owns the anti-minority issues, tries to foment violence.”