World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 133

the local Mughal prince, a Shiite, favored members of his own sect and made deals with Hindus at the expense of Sunni Muslims. The Muslim community, therefore, never developed as a unified political block in opposition to Hindus. There are Muslims political parties in Lucknow, but Muslims do not support these parties as a unified community. Thus, in order to win elections, politicians must appeal across religious and sectarian boundaries to Hindus, Shiites and Sunnis. In Hyderabad, in contrast, the political divide separated Hindus from Muslims, not Sunnis from Shiites. The Muslims were a ruling minority in the city that refused to give up political power after the rise of mass political organizing in the 1930s. The last Mughal prince in the final decade of his rule (1937-1948) went to great lengths to block the development of local civic organizations that would unite Muslims and Hindus against his own authority. Varshney even claims that, instead of inter-communal civic and political organizations, there is an institutionalized riotsystem in this city in which politicians, criminal groups, and some of the local press take a role in fomenting violence.
As a result, Lucknow and Hyderabad are very different cities in terms of inter-communal civil society. Civil integration in Lucknow is largely economic, even though the integration is vertical (Muslim workers seeking jobs from Hindu businessmen who need labor). In the embroidered textile industry, labor/management relations are informal and based on trust. The industry works because of time-honored relations among Hindu and Muslim families. Hyderabad's economic structure is quite different. Muslims and Hindus tend to be segregated according to trade, such that cooperative relationships do not develop between them. Much the same can be said for political organizations. In Hyderabad, political organizations tend to be intracommunal. In Hyderabad, Muslims overwhelming support the Majlis-eIttehadul Muslimeen (MIM), even though the general pattern for Muslims after Partition was to support the Congress Party and its secular policies. This means that the traditional role of Congress in bringing Hindus and Muslims together has not been a factor in Hyderabad's politics. As with Calicut and Aligarh, Varshney's data show that the lack of inter-communal civil society in Hyderabad goes a long way in accounting for its rioting problem. The presence of civil society accounts for the impressive record of peace in Lucknow.
Varshney's study of Ahmedabad and Surat was structured somewhat differently than the previous two studies. In the Calicut/Aligahr and Hyderabad/Lucknow studies, the contrast was between the presence of inter-communal civil society and its absence as a predictor of violence. This third case study investigates the phenomenon of Hindu/Muslim violence diachronically by gathering data on the decline of civil society and how this correlates with an increase in violence. In other words, Varshney is tracking how violence arises as inter-communal civic networks breakdown.
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