Violence In India

1879 Words8 Pages
INTRODUCTION “Our behavior towards each other is the strangest, most unpredictable and most unaccountable of all the phenomenon with which we are obliged to live. In all of nature, there is nothing so threatening to humanity as humanity itself.” -Lewis Thomas India is a land of diversity with people belonging to different socio-cultural and religious background. Being a large country with a large population, India represents endless varieties of cultural and religious patterns. From the time immemorial, the heterogeneous communities in India have co-existed and evolved through odd and even historical trajectories. However, the idea of India or Indianness has always believed in the essential unity of religio-cultural formations amidst diversities.…show more content…
(Galtung, 1969) ‘Initially seen as driven by the basest of motives or lurking criminal instinct, the rioting crowd in history has been elevated in more recent works to the status of a social group with its own distinctive identity, interests and aspirations. The historians studying popular violence now looks beyond the blood-shed to ask why and how a riot happened, to see not just the catastrophe and chaos, but its underlying meaning and structure’ (Das; 1993:1). According to Ashutosh Varshney, Civic engagement in civil society reduces communal violence and this is the main reason of violence more in urban areas though most of the population is rural.(Varshney, 2002) But the Bhagalpur riots negated this point in which more than 1,000 people were killed and over 50,000 were displaced. Despite of having strong civic engagement, Bhagalpur witnessed the most haunting violence of all…show more content…
Some of these conflicts were of small magnitudes which did not take a horrifying shape but some conflicts turned into a carnage which put a big question on the administration about the safety and security of the minority community. Communal violence involving Hindus and Muslims, Hindus and Christians has kept on tormenting a large number of people and regions in the country in recent years. In modern times, the local acts of violence have also been commonly placed in political contexts depending on the identities of the people involved in them. Inter-caste, inter-religion and inter-ethnic relations have become such a widespread concern that any act of violence among two individuals belonging to two different ethnic/cast/ religious groups is seen through political lens and the strife between two individuals becomes the strife between two

More about Violence In India

Open Document