Towards the end of his book, William Gould after taking you through a broad sweep of a South Asian political canvas hits on some crucial aspects of growing religious mobilisation. “Religious and ethnic organisation has therefore provided a means of protest and mobilisation in the face of the weak state, itself subjected to intense and violent political competition, and the pressures of widely differing international agencies. At certain moments too, such organisations have become a vehicle for violence. And the shortcomings of the state at all levels are well-known for all Pakistani and Bangladesh's citizens.”
Though this conclusion is in the context of Pakistan and Bangladesh where he says that religious and ethnic mobilisation has provided the means to make a protest, or it has been a means of responding to a rapidly changing and uncertain political and economic future, he begins to make a lot of sense, specially when you look at the role of right wing religious organisations in India, though there are differences. Finally, Gould says, for many it has been a means of upholding social stability, paternalism and local power in the face of globalisation, the impact of the wider world on every aspect of society and the increasing autonomy (and desire for independence) of the country's most underprivileged citizens.
Gould has attempted to show that violence and conflict were not the only or even the principal manifestations of “communal” mobilisation. He goes a step further by exploring various reasons for the conflict by looking closely at the state in South Asia in countries like India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan. He connects the changes in the nature of the state and analyses how each state has grown and the different compulsions en route — for instance in Sri Lanka, the emergence of a Sinhala only policy, or in Pakistan the furthering of ethnic divisions. In India in the late colonial period religious communities were rapidly established in the context of new (albeit limited) institutions of political representation. He says that in general it was the absence of adequate political representation for most Indians that made religious community organisations pertinent to political leaders and lobbying groups.
Nationhood
The book discusses the early political organisations and who constituted them, mostly powerful middle classes and how the Indian National Congress for instance, revolved around the professional interests of these leaders and publicists. There was no strong secular articulation and as Gould writes, “From a very early stage in the development of broad political institutions like the Presidency Associations, ‘secular' political activity which avoided direct discussion of religious matters became a norm, especially when it came to questions of governance and political representation.”
Quasi religious mobilisation was therefore, at one level, a form of social experiment in drawing together an idea of nationality that challenged Western conceptions of nationhood, he comments. Gould analyses the Great War and its aftermath and argues that political changes of the interwar period presaged a new or sharpened sense, for a range of parties, of the political importance of religious community. He uses instances from each country to discuss his main point about violence and religious violence having a host of factors other than purely religion. “The rise of the Hindu right in India has much more to do with the politics of community mobilisation than it does with the promotion of a particular religious agenda.” He also notes pertinently that it has suited the purposes of a range of parties on the Hindu right, for example to represent the central narratives of India's political history around the “Hindu-Muslim” problem.
And leading on to the issue of violence, he notes that the phenomenon of the communal riot itself entailed much more than just apparent violence between two communities. For him violence was to some extent “produced” by powerful political and state agents as a means of furthering other agendas. “In any violent event, there was evidently a whole range of detailed, complicated and contingent variables at play.” Gould's aim is certainly to defragment aspects of what is commonly referred to as “communal violence” or “communal riot” and giving it a broader socio political and economic context, with a deep historical understanding and analysis of the roles by various players. It also compels one to look differently at events that are so fixated in one's mind like Partition, the early cow protection movements in North India, later the Babri Masjid demolition, and the Godhra train fire and riots in Gujarat.
