Which brings us back to technology. Did India have any technology of its own before the IITs? The answer is an emphatic yes. I have already mentioned the extraordinary achievements of the Harappan civilization, which included terra-cotta ceramics fired at high temperatures, a sophisticated system of weights and measures, and sanitary engineering skills in advance of the West of the nineteenth century. Our skill at digging up, cutting, and polishing diamonds goes back millennia. In the sixth century A.D. India made the highest-quality sword steel in the world. Iron suspension bridges came from Kashmir; printing and papermaking were known in India before anywhere in the West; Europeans sought Indian shipbuilding expertise; our textiles were rated the best in the world till well into the colonial era. But we were never very good with machinery; we made our greatest products with skilled labor. That was, in the end, how the British defeated us.
47. The Anatomy of Civil Conflict
DESPITE HAVING EARNED A PH.D. IN INTERNATIONAL POLITICS twenty-nine years ago, I have always squirmed a little at the expression “political science.” For all its fountains of theory and the associated outpourings of academic jargon, I always suspected that political studies were not and could not be a science because the best political analyses, in my view, were those that drew from the art of understanding human behavior. A journalist's eye, even a novelist's heart, I felt, were preferable in this field to a scientist's microscope and petri dish.
An Indian scholar has proved me wrong. Ashutosh Varshney, a forty-five-year-old scholar from Allahabad, currently associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan — by way of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and Notre Dame — has published a book, Ethnic Conflict and Civil Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, that has been ten years in the making and seems likely to prove seminal in its impact on the field. And it is indeed a work of science, based on comprehensive and wide-ranging field research, overflowing with charts and graphs and tables, testing a hypothesis assuredly as any lab scientist in a white coat, and coming up with answers (and further questions) that should offer further possibilities to a whole generation of political scientists to follow.
The thesis is deceptively simple: the greater the patterns of intercommunal civic engagement in a city, the lower the likelihood of violent conflict and communal riots. To prove this, Varshney examines three pairs of Indian cities: Aligarh and Calicut (Kozhikode); Hyderabad and Lucknow; Ahmedabad and Surat. In each pair, the demographics of the two cities are similar, with broadly comparable percentages of Muslims, but one of the pair is riot prone and the other is not.
Varshney asks, why not? What is there about Calicut that makes it a less likely site of Hindu-Muslim violence than Aligarh? He delves into history, studies the social and cultural factors, analyzes the politics of each place — but concludes that the real difference is that in Calicut but not in Aligarh, Hindus and Muslims engage with one another in strong associational forms of civic life, from political parties and nonreligious movements for social justice or land reform to trade unions and business groups. In Calicut, caste is a more important divider than religion, whereas in Aligarh much of Muslim civic life takes place within the Muslim community. Varshney extends the analysis, with obvious variations for local color, to the other pairs of cities, and arrives at the same conclusion.
Varshney's central insight is invaluable, and its buttressing with an impressive array of facts and figures from over seven years of research means that it is solidly grounded. Varshney has no illusions about how riots are instigated and manipulated: whatever the proximate trigger for violence, there is always a politician with an ax to grind, pulling the strings, inflaming passions, exploiting the victims for purely political ends. But his point remains that the chances for success of such politicians (he calls the breed “riot-entrepreneurs”) would be remarkably lower if there is vigorous and communally integrated civic life, not just through everyday casual contact but through formal associations that consolidate the mutual engagement of the two communities. The Hindus of Varanasi would not attack the Muslim artisans who make the masks and effigies for the annual Ram Lila, even if an irresponsible and bigoted politician egged them on to do so.
Since the tragic events in Gujarat shook my faith in this economically highly developed state, Varshney's chapters on Ahmedabad and Surat are particularly fascinating. Varshney describes two cities, which were largely peaceful communally but succumbed later. Since 1969, Ahmedabad has been one of the most riot-prone cities in the nation, and Surat's shantytowns suffered terribly after 1992. He asks why the civic structures of peace broke down in these cities. His answer is troubling. From the 1920s onward, Gandhian nationalism created a strong level of civic associational activity across communal lines, with the cadre-based Congress Party creating labor unions and mass-rooted social organizations that welded the society together before Partition. Gujarat's business associations were also intercommunal.
But the weakening of the Congress Party as a civic institution following its rise to power, the enfeeblement of the trade unions, and the emergence of new, less communally integrated organizations made the descent to violence in recent years possible. If Varshney is right, the increasing polarization we are seeing in the aftermath of the Gujarat horrors will make matters worse, not better, since the prospects for an integrated civic life in many parts of the state have worsened after the riots.
It has to be asked — and Varshney raises the question toward the end of his fine book — whether his findings could be relevant to the rest of the world. He seems to think so, though he acknowledges that much more research will have to be done. Having dealt with the former Yugoslavia myself, I think his thesis would falter there, because this was a thoroughly integrated society where 22 percent of the population either lived in mixed marriages or was the product of them. Yet people turned against each other in the most brutal way, with neighbors killing and raping neighbors — the very people with whom they went to school or belonged to the same chess club (or the same branch of the local Communist Party).
This might be the exception that proves Varshney's rule; perhaps one day a scholar will apply the same level of scientific rigor to research civic life in the former Yugoslavia as Varshney has in India. The results would be worth waiting for. Ashutosh Varshney has written a rich, complex book, meticulously researched, exhaustively analytical, and carefully argued. It is a fine work of scholarship that has broken new ground in the field of political science. But its greatest value lies not in academics but with those who must make public policy — the politicians and policemen in whose hands lies the safety of Indian citizens the next time a riot is instigated.
The promotion of Hindu-Muslim civic engagement, Varshney has demonstrated, is now an urgent priority for India's leaders if we are to prevent the spiraling descent into communal violence whose worst manifestations were seen in Gujarat.
48. Stephanians in the House
THE STARTLING NEWS THAT NO FEWER THAN TWELVE of my fellow Stephanians — alumni of that bastion of elite liberal education, Delhi's St. Stephen's College — currently hold seats in Parliament, and that eight of them were actually elected to the Lok Sabha, has provoked in me a mild state of astonishment.
The roster of Stephanians in the Lower House is impressive enough: Mani Shankar Aiyer, Kapil Sibal, Lakshman Singh, Sachin Pilot, Manvendra Shaha, Dushyant Singh, Sandeep Dikshit, and Rahul Gandhi. Add to these Natwar Singh, Ashwani Kumar, Arun Shourie, and Chandan Mitra in the Rajya Sabha, and one's surprise is complete. In my time Stephanians were expected to go into the IAS and IFS, not to enter politics. And they conquered babudom in large numbers every year, rising to the highest ranks of the civil service but believing profoundly that politics was not for them.