Unpacking Communal Violence in India: Causes, Impacts, and Patterns

Communal violence in India is not a series of isolated incidents – it is a recurring pattern woven into the country’s social, political, and economic fabric. From the catastrophic bloodshed of the 1947 Partition to the caste-driven massacres in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, and the religiously charged riots in Gujarat, the history of communal violence in India reveals a deeply entrenched crisis. Understanding this crisis requires looking beyond immediate triggers and examining the structural forces – historical, political, economic, and caste-based – that repeatedly produce and reproduce violence against vulnerable communities.

Historical context: from Partition to present-day riots 🔗

The roots of communal violence in India stretch back to the colonial era, when British administrators deliberately cultivated divisions between religious communities as a governing strategy. The partition of Bengal in 1905 by Lord Curzon, followed by the introduction of separate communal electorates through the Morley-Minto Act of 1909, laid the institutional groundwork for religious polarization that would outlast British rule itself.

The most defining rupture came in 1947. The Partition of British India into India and Pakistan displaced approximately 14.5 million people and triggered one of the largest episodes of mass violence in recorded history. Estimates of deaths during the Partition range from 200,000 to one million, with Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs all suffering enormous losses as newly drawn borders cut through communities with no preparation and little state capacity to manage the migrations.

Post-independence India did not escape this cycle. The Varshney-Wilkinson Dataset on Hindu-Muslim Violence, which tracked incidents between 1950 and 1995, documented hundreds of communal violence episodes across multiple decades and administrations. From the 1960s and 1970s onward, communal riots became endemic in urban centres of Uttar Pradesh – cities like Moradabad, Meerut, Aligarh, and Kanpur – largely driven by economic competition between Hindu and Muslim communities.

Key incidents in the post-independence decades include the 1961 Jabalpur riots, which emerged from economic rivalry between Hindu and Muslim entrepreneurs; the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi; the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 by members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal, which triggered riots resulting in at least 1,200 deaths; the 2002 Gujarat riots; and the 2020 Delhi riots linked to protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act.

Underlying causes of communal violence 🔗

Scholars and human rights organizations have approached the causes of communal violence in India from multiple angles. Three major explanatory frameworks dominate the academic literature: the primordialist approach, which attributes violence to deep-seated, “given” differences between communities; the ideological approach, which focuses on communal organizations and political parties that actively promote religious hostility; and the instrumentalist approach, which treats communal violence as a strategic tool deployed by political actors for electoral and resource-based gains.

Political manipulation and electoral incentives 🔗

The instrumentalist explanation has significant empirical backing. The Madan Commission, constituted to examine communal riots in Maharashtra during the 1970s, concluded that politicians and communalists are the primary architects of communal tension – not ordinary citizens driven by religious hatred. Riots, in this framework, serve a political purpose: they consolidate vote banks, generate fear along community lines, and allow local political networks to position themselves as protectors.

As political scientist Ward Berenschot argues, rioting can – depending on the political context – provide opportunities to develop and strengthen political patronage networks, whereas preventing violence might actually damage those networks. This analysis helps explain why state machinery has often been absent, slow, or complicit during major episodes of communal violence in India.

Communal violence since the 1990s must be understood in the context of the decline of the Congress party and the rise of the BJP as a dominant political force. The politicization of the Babri Masjid issue and the subsequent demolition of the mosque gave right-wing Hindu organizations a platform to consolidate their electoral base – while simultaneously deepening the communal divide across the country.

Socio-economic competition and structural inequality 🔗

Economic competition has repeatedly acted as an accelerant in communal conflicts. The 1961 Jabalpur riots, for example, were directly linked to the rise of a class of successful Muslim entrepreneurs who created new economic rivalry with Hindu business communities. More recently, new sites of communal mobilization in Uttar Pradesh have emerged in areas experiencing agrarian crisis, falling incomes, rising unemployment among educated youth, and cultural anxieties driven by globalization – revealing how socio-economic precarity becomes fertile ground for communal mobilization.

The Indian Penal Code defines communal violence as any act that promotes enmity between groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, or language, and that is prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony. But legal definitions alone do not capture the structural dimensions: the competition for scarce economic resources, the perception of relative deprivation by marginalized communities, and the absence of inter-community civic engagement all feed into the cycle.

Religious fundamentalism and polarization 🔗

The rise of organized religious fundamentalism – from Hindu nationalist organizations to radical religious groups – has contributed significantly to sustained communal tension. Hardline right-wing groups and Islamic fundamentalist ideologies have both played a role in deepening conflicts, with each side’s radicalization often feeding the other’s. Religious symbols, sacred spaces, and festive processions have repeatedly become flashpoints – whether disputes over mosque-temple sites or tensions during religious festivals like Holi and Eid.

Media – particularly local and partisan media – has also played a documented role in amplifying communal tensions. During the 2002 Gujarat riots, reports found that some newspapers carried inflammatory headlines designed to provoke and communalize public sentiment, demonstrating how information ecosystems can either inflame or contain violence.

The 2002 Gujarat riots: anatomy of a pogrom 🔗

No single event illustrates the convergence of political manipulation, state complicity, and communal ideology more starkly than the 2002 Gujarat riots. Triggered by the burning of a train at Godhra on February 27, 2002, which killed 58 Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya, the violence that followed lasted for months and spread across the state. According to official figures, over 850 people were killed – most of them Muslims – while unofficial estimates place the toll as high as 2,000.

Scholars studying the 2002 riots have argued that they were premeditated and constituted a form of ethnic cleansing, with state government and law enforcement complicit in the violence. Mobs arrived in Muslim neighbourhoods armed with lists of Muslim-owned properties, suggesting advance planning rather than spontaneous reaction. Political scientist Ashutosh Varshney, who co-constructed the Varshney-Wilkinson dataset on Hindu-Muslim violence, concluded that Gujarat represented the first full-blooded pogrom in independent India.

The gendered dimension of the Gujarat violence was particularly horrifying. Sexual violence was used as a systematic instrument of communal terror – Muslim women were gang-raped, mutilated, and in many cases killed, in what human rights organizations documented as a pattern rather than isolated incidents. Human Rights Watch’s report on the Gujarat violence described scores of Muslim girls and women subjected to brutal sexual violence before being killed, with the state government’s response characterized by deliberate inaction. A study examining sexual violence across multiple episodes of communal violence in Ahmedabad concluded that such attacks were not random but were motivated by Hindu nationalist ideology combined with patriarchal structures that sanction sexual violence as a tool of community subjugation.

The role of caste and religion in communal violence 🔗

In India, religious community identity and caste identity are not separate systems – they overlap, reinforce one another, and together produce some of the most brutal forms of violence in the country’s history. While much attention goes to Hindu-Muslim conflicts, caste-based violence targeting Dalit communities represents an equally grave and systematic form of communal violence.

The Kilvenmani massacre (1968): caste, class, and impunity 🔗

On the night of December 25, 1968, in Kilvenmani village in Tamil Nadu’s Nagapattinam district, 44 people – primarily women, children, and elderly men from Dalit agricultural families – were killed when landlords and their henchmen set fire to a hut where survivors had taken refuge. The massacre was the direct result of Dalit labourers organizing for higher wages under the influence of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), following increased agricultural output from the Green Revolution.

What makes the Kilvenmani massacre more than a labour dispute is its caste dimension. The Kilvenmani incident is inextricably linked to politics, gender, and caste issues – the labourers were Dalits exploited under the feudal “pannaiyal” bonded labour system, controlled by upper-caste landlords who wielded both economic and social power over them. Despite the horror of the event, the mainstream press at the time reported it as a generic “kisan clash” (farmers’ clash), erasing its caste character. The accused were ultimately acquitted by the Madras High Court.

As legal scholar Manoj Mitta observed, the Kilvenmani massacre was an omen – abolition of untouchability had not reduced the oppression of Dalits but had in some cases made it more violent, as Dalit assertion threatened upper-caste dominance. Kilvenmani set a template: Dalit communities would demand their rights, upper-caste groups would respond with organized lethal violence, and the state machinery – police, courts, local officials – would either fail to act or actively aid the perpetrators.

The Tsundur massacre (1991): caste terror in Andhra Pradesh 🔗

In August 1991, in Tsundur village in Guntur district, Andhra Pradesh, eight Dalits were lynched by a 400-strong armed mob of upper-caste Reddys, reportedly as a response to Dalit men being present in spaces the upper castes considered their own. Like Kilvenmani, the Tsundur massacre followed Dalit communities asserting social mobility and refusing to accept the subordination demanded by the caste hierarchy.

The attacks in Andhra Pradesh – including the Karamchedu massacre of 1985 and the Tsundur massacre of 1991 – represent brutal instances in which modern agricultural change provided the material basis for social transformation, and upper-caste groups responded with extreme violence to prevent that transformation. A special court convicted the accused, but the Andhra Pradesh High Court overturned those convictions in 2014 for “want of evidence” – a legal outcome that mirrors the impunity seen in Kilvenmani decades earlier.

The pattern across both massacres is consistent: mass killings of Dalits – in Kilvenmani, Tsundur, Bathani Tola, Laxmanpur Bathe, and elsewhere – have been followed by acquittals and reversals in higher courts, signalling a systemic failure of the legal system to deliver justice in caste atrocity cases. As Dalit writer Meena Kandasamy has argued, Kilvenmani does not exist only as a historical moment – it continues to repeat itself across India, in different names and places, with similar impunity.

How caste and religion intersect 🔗

It would be a mistake to treat caste violence and religious communal violence as entirely separate phenomena. Both operate within hierarchical systems that assign value, rights, and humanity unequally. Religious scriptures and traditions have historically been invoked to legitimize caste hierarchies, making religious identity a reinforcing layer in caste-based violence. In incidents like the Gujarat riots, caste identity intersected with religious community identity – with Dalit communities sometimes caught between or alongside Muslim communities as targets of majority-group violence.

Furthermore, the role of the state – police complicity, delayed intervention, inadequate prosecutions – runs as a consistent thread through both caste massacres and religious riots. India has significantly fewer police personnel per capita than United Nations norms recommend, and structural reforms in policing, judicial accountability, and minority protection remain incomplete. The absence of adequate institutional response has allowed cycles of communal and caste violence to persist across generations.

Patterns that persist 🔗

Across different episodes of communal violence – whether between religious communities or along caste lines – several recurring patterns emerge. Violence is rarely fully spontaneous: it involves prior mobilization, rumour-spreading, and often the participation or acquiescence of state actors. The victims are disproportionately from marginalized communities: Muslims, Dalits, and women bear the heaviest toll. Sexual violence against women is deployed as a tool of community subjugation, functioning simultaneously as an attack on individuals and a message to entire communities. And justice is systematically denied – through delayed prosecutions, inadequate investigations, and higher court reversals – creating a culture of impunity that emboldens future perpetrators.

Communal violence has serious implications for India’s democracy, its secular constitutional commitments, human rights, social harmony, and national integrity. The trauma it inflicts extends far beyond physical harm: survivors carry psychological damage, communities are displaced, and the social trust required for civic life is eroded. The challenge India faces is not merely to prevent the next riot but to dismantle the political, economic, and ideological structures that make such violence possible, repeated, and profitable for those in power.

What do you think? When communal violence in India consistently follows patterns of political manipulation and institutional impunity, what does that tell us about the relationship between democracy and minority protection? And given that both religious communal violence and caste-based massacres share patterns of state complicity and denial of justice, should they be understood and addressed as part of the same structural problem?

References

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12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilvenmani_massacre
13. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306078996_The_Din_of_Silence_-_Reconstructing_the_Keezhvenmani_Dalit_Massacre_of_1968
14. https://caravanmagazine.in/books/excerpt-manoj-mitta-caste-kilvenmani-atrocity
15. https://www.newsclick.in/50-years-later-shadow-keezhvenmani-continues-hover-over-our-republic
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