India's paradigmatic communal violence

Abstract

What is referred to as communalism--intolerance and tensions between religious communities--would seem to be part of a worldwide phenomenon of religious resurgence and the rise of religio-political movements and groups of all kinds, amidst an even broader emergence, over the last three decades, of various kinds of cultural exclusivisms. Capitalist modernity is characterised by the permanence of change, of constant flux. The devastation of older values, ways of life and forms of belonging (even if these were relatively recently acquired) is traumatic. These costs are compensated for and made more bearable by the promise of collective amelioration and better times--by the notion of steady and cumulative progress The advent of neoliberalism has seen still further transformations, greater social disorientation, loss of dignity and male self-respect, creating fertile ground for the rise of all kinds of aggressive self-assertions, religious or ethnic, that can serve as some form of consolation and whose affirmations (the more negative forms of identity politics) are a balm for social despair. It is the failed promise of modernity, both in its current neoliberal version and in its previous socialist version, that has led to the cultural intolerances of today whose forms vary geographically, preceded as they have been by different histories, rooted in different combinations of the old and the new. When the present is unsatisfactory and the future looks bleak it is the unchangeable past that appears to provide a source of security and certainty.