Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State / Ward Berenschot / Hardcover / Oxford University Press 

ISBN: 9780199068173 / 978-0199068173

• ISBN-10: ‎ 0199068178

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ OUP (January 1, 2014)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 252 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0199068178
• ISBN ‏ : ‎ 978-0199068173

On February 27, 2002, a train coach caught fire just outside a railway station in Gujarat, killing fifty-eight people. The incident initiated one of the worst outbreaks of Hindu-Muslim violence since India's independence. As mobs of Hindus thronged the streets of Gujarat's cities and villages, local and state-level politicians made inflammatory speeches and distributed weapons for revenge, excusing the police from their responsibility to protect citizens from harm. In the end, the bloodshed claimed the lives of more than two thousand people.

Based on an extensive ethnographic study of Gujarat's local politics, this volume introduces a novel approach to comprehending the processes fostering communal violence. Ward Berenschot argues that the difficulties faced by Indians, especially the poor, in dealing with state institutions enable political actors to incite communal violence with ease. Guiding readers through Gujarat's shadowy local politics, Berenschot details the capacities of various rioters, from local criminals and Hindu-nationalist activists to neighborhood leaders, politicians, and the police, and their ability to organize and perpetrate violence. Specifically, he explains how different official positions allow some individuals to exploit patronage networks supplying access to state resources.

Ward Berenschot is a political scientist and postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden. His research focuses on identity politics and local democracy in India and Indonesia.

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 neighborhood 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 neighborhoods and streets in India’s economic powerhouse. — Thomas Blom Hansen, Professor of Anthropology, Stanford University, USA