Ethnic Conflicts, Communalism, Religious Revivalism

Defining Ethnicity and the Ethnic Group

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• The word “ethnicity” derives from the Greek ethnos (nation), though ethnicity itself is not simply nationhood — it denotes a collectivity of people distinguished by shared race, descent, and culture. An ethnic group is a social collectivity bound by a certain shared historicity and common attributes — race, tribe, language, religion, dress, diet — perceived as a distinct social entity both by its own members and by outsiders. This self-perception can usefully be called ethnic consciousness, since ethnicity is claimed and asserted, not simply inherited as a fixed biological fact.
• E.B. Tylor’s classic definition of culture — “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society,” in short, “the man-made part of the environment” — underlies why ethnicity is best understood as a cultural, not a racial or biological, phenomenon: no culture is intrinsically superior or inferior to another, since culture belongs to a people in the same way any other possession does.
• Ethnicity is not a static or pre-ordained category. It is better understood as a manifestation of shared economic, political, social, and cultural interests, actively protected and asserted by members of a plural society — meaning ethnicity functions, at times, as a deliberate instrument of mobilisation for realising collective goals, not merely a passive inherited identity.
• India’s population includes, alongside its thousands of Hindu castes and sub-castes (Herbert Risley’s early count of 2,378 main castes has since risen substantially through processes of fission and mobility), religious communities such as Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Parsis, Jains, and a wide array of tribal groups, each of which restricts marriage and much everyday social interaction largely within itself — a plural, poly-ethnic structure distinguished simultaneously by race, caste, language, religion, and territory, in which ethnic, caste, and class groupings frequently overlap rather than mapping cleanly onto each other.

The Nature and Roots of Ethnic Conflict

• Ethnic groups tend toward conflict when their real or perceived interests clash directly. Deepankar Gupta frames ethnic movements specifically as movements oriented toward the nation-state — concerned with territory and sovereignty — arguing that ethnic mobilisation characteristically questions an ethnic group’s own loyalty to the nation-state as the ultimate referent of political identity, which is precisely what distinguishes an ethnic movement from an ordinary interest-group demand.
• Several structural mechanisms recur across accounts of why ethnic conflict emerges:
  • Numerically or socially dominant groups may capture a disproportionate share of national resources, leaving smaller communities feeling that their “legitimate claims” are being denied — a dynamic captured by the framing of ethnic groups as “primordial collectivities” whose mutual distrust and disaffection can escalate quickly once resource competition intensifies.
  • Relative deprivation is frequently identified as the single most important root cause of ethnic strife — conflict driven less by absolute poverty than by a group’s sense of falling behind others it compares itself to.
  • A lack of distributive justice, unequal access to resources, and genuine cultural difference are commonly cited as the principal structural causes of ethnic problems.
  • An “insider” versus “outsider” distinction — the “we” against “they” attitude found in some form in every society — frequently structures ethnic tension in India, where speakers of one regional language (Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Marathi, and so on) may treat migrants from other linguistic regions as outsiders undeserving of local employment, even though, strictly speaking, linguistic-regional identity of this kind is not always properly “ethnicity” so much as a narrower sub-regional line-drawing exercise that borrows the same logic.

Communalism: Concept and Definitions

• Communalism has become, in India’s current socio-political landscape, an especially complex and contested phenomenon, variously theorised across disciplines as an ideology, a form of false consciousness, a struggle over scarce resources, a mode of job competition, an instrument of ruling-class politics, or — given its markedly intolerant, anti-democratic character — a precursor to fascism.
• W.C. Smith’s widely cited definition frames communalism as “that ideology which has emphasised as the social, political, and economic unit the group of adherents of each religion, and has emphasised the distinction, even antagonism, between such groups” — a definition that captures communalism’s core move: converting a religious identity into a competing political and economic interest bloc.
• Bipan Chandra argues that communalism was, historically, a “false consciousness” — since, in his reading, no genuine, objective conflict of interest existed between Hindus and Muslims as such; rather, communalism expressed the interests, aspirations, and anxieties of the middle classes, arising specifically in a context of economic stagnation and the absence of a vigorous struggle to transform society — in his words, “the communal question was petty bourgeois question par excellence.” Chandra’s later, more schematic account traces communalism through three stages: first, the recognition of distinct identities rooted in religious difference; second, the belief that these religious differences imply genuinely different secular (social, economic, political) interests; and third, the conviction that these secular interests are not merely different but actively opposed to one another — with this third, most virulent stage carrying the clearest potential to tip into fascism, on Chandra’s own analysis.
• K.N. Panikkar defines communalism as “a state of consciousness… which primarily draws upon certain assumptions of distinct cultural identity for members professing the same religion,” while Gyanendra Pandey frames it as a form of colonialist knowledge — in its specifically Indian usage, a condition of suspicion, fear, and hostility between members of different religious communities, a category whose very salience, on Pandey’s account, is partly a colonial-era construction rather than a timeless social fact. Louis Dumont states more simply that “communalism is an affirmation and assertion of the religious community as a political group,” while Ashish Nandy frames the phenomenon as the use of religion specifically for political gain.

Communal Violence: Ideology, Politics, and the Riot as Symptom

• Bipan Chandra’s central analytic claim is that communal riots are only the dramatic, visible surface of a much deeper and more continuous process — the everyday spread of communal ideology and politics, propagated by communal politicians and ideologues in ordinary, non-violent times. “Communal ideology and politics are the disease,” in his formulation, “communal violence only its external symptom” — riots give retrospective credibility to communal precepts already circulating among ordinary people, and enlist further support for communal politicians, rather than erupting from nowhere.
• Communal violence has historically been substantially an urban phenomenon, disproportionately drawing in deprived and economically marginal participants, with rumour-mongering and organised communal mobilisation — more than religious sentiment as such — doing much of the work of turning latent tension into actual rioting; lawlessness of this kind also creates opportunities for looting and plunder pursued for straightforwardly economic rather than ideological reasons.
• Rajni Kothari’s analysis of the “numbers game” in a pluralistic democracy identifies two linked features of communalised politics: the rise of new political organisations that are blatantly or semi-covertly communal (often beginning at the local level before scaling up), and the capture of ostensibly non-political cultural or sectarian organisations by political purposes — organisations that publicly disclaim any political role even as their influence steadily extends into parties, trade unions, and professional and student bodies.
• Veena Das observes that the floating, transient population characteristic of modern cities is disproportionately available to act as rioters when communal incidents occur — a structural, demographic explanation for why urban communal violence can escalate so rapidly once triggered, independent of any deep personal animus among most participants.

Measures to Contain Communal and Ethnic Violence

• Before independence, communal violence could be explained substantially through British “divide and rule” colonial policy — Vishal Arora’s own reading of the origins of Indian communalism rests heavily on this same colonial-instigation argument. Today, however, the picture is considerably more complex: religion has been thoroughly politicised, and politics has itself become substantially criminalised, meaning containment now requires addressing both religious and political communalism as intertwined problems rather than treating one as simply an effect of the other.
• Sustained containment, on this literature’s account, requires action on several fronts simultaneously: decommunalising both civil society and the state apparatus (including sections of the bureaucracy and, where implicated, the police); value-oriented and historically accurate education — since communal, particularly medievalist, misreadings of Indian history function as a foundational plank of communal ideology; responsible media conduct, including careful restraint in how casualty figures by religious community are reported during active violence; the establishment of cross-community Peace Committees in riot-prone localities; decisive, even-handed state and police intervention at the earliest signs of communal mobilisation (strong administrative response is credited with preventing repeat rioting in Calcutta in 1984 and Mumbai in 1994); dedicated fast-track courts for communal offences; posting of secular-minded officials to riot-prone areas; and prompt relief and rehabilitation support for victims.
• A recurring caution in this literature is against the economic-reductionist assumption — the belief, associated with some left political currents, that economic development and industrialisation will automatically and sufficiently dissolve communalism on their own. Communalism is not simply a function of class struggle, and in practice tends to actively hamper working-class unity rather than the reverse — meaning economic development remains necessary but is not, by itself, a sufficient containment strategy.

Religious Revivalism: Sociological Explanations

• Religious revivalism in contemporary India can be read partly through a demand-supply framework: even as India formally glorifies secularism, the salience of religion in individual life has grown markedly, giving rise to new sects and cults whose leaders aggressively market their religious offering. Ashish Nandy’s observation that Indian sadhus succeed domestically in a way they rarely do in the West is read, on this account, as a reflection of comparatively low religious “supply” relative to persistently high domestic “demand.”
• Colin Campbell’s theory locates the psychological roots of religious revivalism in childhood adaptability to primary institutions — family and community. Using the paired concepts of endomorphic and sociomorphic adaptation, Campbell argues that a child who fails to adjust successfully to the demands of these early institutions tends to develop a more independent inner world and, in the process, a stronger, more committed relationship to religion than a well-adjusted child typically forms. Campbell further connects revivalism to threat: when a child, adolescent, or wider community experiences growing cultural hostility — particularly acute in multi-cultural settings — the experience intensifies possessive attachment to religious identity, producing individuals who may hold an outwardly secular political position while nonetheless reinforcing religiously coded behaviour, and who, in extreme cases, are willing to take militant action, including at the cost of their own lives, in its defence.
• Bainbridge’s critique of classical secularisation theory argues that the conventional modernisation narrative — in which secularisation and rising material happiness were assumed to proceed together — has found little support in the actual empirical record; the role of religion in modern society is consequently better understood as genuinely dynamic and unpredictable rather than following any single linear trajectory. On this reading, societies pass through phases in which secular and revivalist orientations alternate in relative dominance, rather than religion simply and permanently receding as modernisation proceeds — a pattern visible in events as varied as the religiously inflected break-up of the Soviet Union, the rise of religiously coded terrorism-anxiety in the contemporary United States, and the proliferation of New Age religious movements even within highly secularised Scandinavian societies.
• Lokanath Misra’s warning to the Constituent Assembly remains a striking early statement of the risk this literature traces: “the cry of religion is a dangerous cry… religion in India serves no higher purpose than collecting ignorance, poverty, and ambition under a banner that flies for fanaticism. The aim is political, for in the modern world all is power-politics, and the inner man is lost in the dust.”

Contemporary Manifestations: Manipur and the Politics of Ethnic Identity

• The most consequential live illustration of ethnic conflict in India today is the Manipur conflict, which erupted on 3 May 2023 between the predominantly Hindu, valley-based Meitei community and the predominantly Christian, hill-based Kuki-Zo community, and which — despite periods of relative calm, the resignation of the state’s chief minister, and the imposition of President’s Rule in February 2025 — has continued to see intermittent renewed violence through 2025-26. The conflict has killed over 200 people and displaced more than 60,000, with over 50,000 people still living in relief camps years after the initial outbreak; the loss of firearms looted from police and paramilitary armouries in the conflict’s early months has kept large quantities of weapons in circulation, complicating any durable de-escalation.
  • The conflict has also demonstrated ethnic conflict’s tendency to widen rather than resolve over time: renewed fighting in 2025-26 drew in a third community, the Nagas, in disputes with the Kukis over residence rights and territorial control in the hill areas — illustrating how an ethnic conflict organised initially around one binary (Meitei-Kuki) can restructure the wider regional ethnic landscape once violence, displacement, and militarisation have become entrenched.
• Contemporary religious revivalism and communal tension continue to intersect with digital-era mobilisation in ways this literature’s older frameworks (Kothari’s “numbers game,” Das’s “floating population”) only partly anticipated — social media’s documented role in accelerating communal polarisation, by enabling rumour and mobilisation to spread far faster than the print- and broadcast-era media environment these classical accounts were written against, has become a live governance concern in its own right, prompting calls for platform-level and civil-society counter-mobilisation strategies specifically tailored to this newer, faster information environment.
• Cultural revivalism — assertions of ethnic or sub-ethnic identity through performing arts, language revival and dissemination, and traditional crafts — represents a comparatively peaceable register of the same underlying dynamic this article has traced through its more conflictual expressions: a community’s assertion of a “real or factious commonality” (in the language this article opened with) can be expressed either through political mobilisation and, at the extreme, violence, or through the reassertion and public celebration of distinct cultural practice — both are recognisable outputs of the same underlying ethnic consciousness.