What kinds of civic ties between different ethnic communities can contain, or even prevent, ethnic violence?
This book draws on new research on Hindu-Muslim conflict in India to address this important question. Ashutosh
Varshney examines three pairs of Indian cities--one city in each pair with a history of communal violence, the
other with a history of relative communal harmony--to discern why violence between Hindus and Muslims occurs in
some situations but not others. His findings will be of strong interest to scholars, politicians, and policymakers
of South Asia, but the implications of his study have theoretical and practical relevance for a broad range of
multiethnic societies in other areas of the world as well. The book focuses on the networks of civic engagement
that bring Hindu and Muslim urban communities together. Strong associational forms of civic engagement, such as
integrated business organizations, trade unions, political parties, and professional associations, are able to
control outbreaks of ethnic violence, Varshney shows. Vigorous and communally integrated associational life can
serve as an agent of peace by restraining those, including powerful politicians, who would polarize Hindus and
Muslims along communal lines.
Table of Contents
Pt. I Arguments and Theories
1. Introduction
2. Why Civil Society? Ethnic Conflict and the Existing Traditions of Inquiry
Pt. II The National Level
3. Competing National Imaginations
4. Hindu-Muslim Riots, 1950-1995: The National Picture
Pt. III Local Variations
5. Aligarh and Calicut: Civic Life and Its Political Foundations
6. Vicious and Virtuous Circles
7. Princely Resistance to Civil Society
8. Hindu Nationalists as Bridge Builders?
9. Gandhi and Civil Society
10. Decline of a Civic Order and Communal Violence
11. Endogeneity? Of Causes and Consequences
Pt. IV Conclusions
12. Ethnic Conflict, the State, and Civil Society
App. A Questionnaire for the Project on Hindu-Muslim Relations in India
App. B Data Entry Protocol for the Riot Database
App. C Regression Results: Hindu-Muslim Riots, 1950-1995
