Politics Fuels Religious Riots in Secular India

[rug]

Bhuri Begum, right, pulls down the sleeve of Farhad's shirt to display bruises caused allegedly by police beating after security was enhanced in the area following rioting between Hindus and Muslims in New Delhi, India. Rioting started on the evening of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights after a drunken brawl broke out near a makeshift Hindu shrine set up just across the local mosque. By the next morning the tightly-packed neighborhood was abuzz with rumors and grainy cell phone videos and the police were conspicuous by their absence. Religious conflagrations are still surprisingly common in a secular country where tolerance is enshrined in the constitution. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das)

NEW DELHI — Nov 7, 2014, 3:09 AM ET
By MUNEEZA NAQVI Associated Press

First, the rumors start. Maybe a Muslim man threw garbage outside a temple, or a Hindu boy teased a Muslim girl. No one has any names or specifics, but that doesn't stop people from taking the rumors as fact. Crowds gather on both sides. Slogans are shouted, stones are thrown. A car goes up in flames.

And just like that, or so it seems, a religious riot rips through an Indian neighborhood.

Thirty years after the notorious anti-Sikh riots in 1984 — the worst communal violence since the bloodshed that followed the partition of the subcontinent at the time of India's independence in 1947 — religious conflagrations are still surprisingly common in a secular country where tolerance is enshrined in the constitution.

But while religion may spark violence in this diverse country filled with religious and cultural tensions, it is often politics that allow it to spiral out of control.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/politics-fuels-religious-riots-secular-india-26751620

[pennylane100]

1. Ah Religion,

the gift that keeps on giving.

[rug]

3. Yes, but this is article is about the politics driving it.

[MisterP]

2. BJP is for ethnic cleansing, misuse of science as a partisan tool, and neoliberalism

INC is for ethnic cleansing, misuse of science as a partisan tool, and neoliberalism

[rug]

4. Thanks. I'm going to look them up.

[MisterP]

5. India's problems--from the 20th century or the 18th--could be papered over for only so long

"dams and natalism to catch up with Europe by 1960" also backfired hideously (in 60s-70s Mexico and 60s China, too)