Abstract
Human rights education is no longer considered an alien normative and discursive practice in the inter-governmental discussions and civil society actions because human rights have increasingly become more universal in the sense that they are held to be a guarantee of ideals of equality and enhance moral autonomy of rational human beings, irrespective of their own specific desires, identities or partial interests. Seen from this perspective, this chapter discusses ethnic conflict and sectarian violence in India in the context of human rights violations by the state and by non-state actors. Given the relative silence of discussion of sectarian violence in human rights literacy, we argue that interrogation of various types of ethnic violence is urgently required for understanding the evolution of universal and inalienable regime of human rights in varying institutional and cultural contexts across nations. Based on empirical data, we conclude that the case studies of sectarian and communal violence from a plural, diverse democracy like India have potential to contribute to reframing the discussion of human rights literacy in the universities and college/school class rooms.
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Several accounts have gone into contemporary Hindu-Muslim violence in India. Engineer, who makes a historical review, has noted that when former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi consolidated her political base in the late 1960s, the massive communal riot which took place in Ahmedabad in 1969, helped the Jan Sangh to consolidate itself in Gujarat. “Competitive communalism between the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led to major cases of communal violence during 1980s. The Moradabad riots were followed by violence in Biharsharif (1981), Vadodara and Meerut (1982), Nellie (1983) and Bombay–Bhiwandi (1984)” (Subramaniam, 2007, p. 172).
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cf. “Hindu-Muslim riots are highly locally concentrated. Eight cities account for roughly 46% of all deaths” (Retrieved 31.01.2018. http://www.carnegiecouncil.org/resources/transcripts/143.html).
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Castes in Indian have largely become ethnic categories serving larger political, economic and symbolic purposes for solidarity in modern India especially since independence. Caste identities, constitute a form of what Bourdieu called symbolic capital, available for investment by politicians with the skill to manipulate its meanings. The evolution of a caste cluster into an ethnic group within a racially stratified system reflects a complex political process. Castes (which many students don’t like to relate barring Dalit or scheduled castes/former untouchables) are now more like interest groups as well ethnic categories. Thus, castes in modern India are ethicized, and racialized terms that are equally novel and that, in fact, resemble Western-style ethnic or racial groupings. In the words of great sociologist of India MA Srinivas, “the djinn (of caste) was released from the bottle [of little kingdoms].... All hell broke loose as society began to form itself into ‘castes’ which, so far from accepting the hierarchy of the Varna scheme, began furiously to contest their own places within it”. This is also called democratization of Indian society where lower castes are driving the political order. The former untouchables (Dalits) often face violation of human rights in India. However, modernists have challenged this view and favour castes dissolving too more like class. (cf. Kumar, 2008).
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Kumar, A., Banerjee, S. (2019). Sectarian Violence and Ethnic Conflict in India: Issues and Challenges. In: Roux, C., Becker, A. (eds) Human Rights Literacies. Interdisciplinary Studies in Human Rights, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99567-0_10
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