Riot politics : [Book] : Hindu-Muslim violence and the Indian state.

Formerly CIP. Uk

Based on an extensive ethnographic study of Gujarat’s local politics, Riot Politics offers a novel approach to understanding the processes that foster outbursts of communal violence in India. Berenschot argues that the difficulties that especially poorer citizens face when dealing with state institutions, underlie the capacity and interests of political actors to instigate and organise communal violence. As the reader is led into the often shadowy world of local politics in Gujarat, the author reveals how the capacity and willingness of various types of rioters—from politicians, local criminals, Hindu-nationalist activists to neighbourhood leaders and police officials—to organise and perpetrate violence is closely related to the different positions these actors hold in the patronage networks that provide access to state resources.An exciting new study of the relationship between political mediation and violence in Gujarat, this work is ethnographically rich, well-written, and theoretically ambitious. This is a work that is unusually sensitive to historical change in the traditional forms of brokerage and social mediation in Ahmedabad.—Dr Samira Sheikh, Assistant Professor, History and Asian Studies, Vanderbilt University, USABerenschot’s meticulously researched and robust work demonstrates that organizing, preparing, and imagining communal violence—real or potential—is endemic to the way democracy, identity, and political power functions at the level of neighbourhoods and streets in India’s economic powerhouse.—Thomas Blom Hansen, Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University, USA.

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