“Relative deprivation is a major source of ethnic conflict.” Elaborate the statement with relevant examples. (2024, 15 Marks)
Groups rarely rebel because they are the poorest; they rebel when denied what they believe is their due, measured against a rival group or their own past. Aristotle anticipated this (Politics, Book V: inferiors revolt to become equal); Ted Robert Gurr made it a theory.
Gurr’s theory
In Why Men Rebel (1970), relative deprivation is the perceived gap between value expectations (the goods and conditions people believe they are rightfully entitled to) and value capabilities (what they think they can get and keep). The gap breeds discontent; politicised, it targets the state or a rival group, and with organisation becomes violence. Gurr identified three patterns:
- Decremental: expectations stay constant while capabilities fall.
- Aspirational: capabilities stay constant while expectations rise.
- Progressive: both rise, then capabilities stall or fall. This generalises James C. Davies‘s J-curve (1962).
His Minorities at Risk (1993) moved to groups: disadvantage plus shared identity and organisation predicts ethnic mobilisation.
Indian examples
- Manipur (2023– ): both sides feel deprived. Meiteis, confined to the valley’s tenth of the land, cannot buy hill land that tribes can buy in the valley, and so sought ST status. Kuki-Zo communities read that claim, with forest evictions, as a threat to their land and quotas; over 200 died and about 60,000 were displaced.
- Telangana (aspirational): an educated stratum measured its shortfall in water, funds and jobs against coastal Andhra. The grievance ran from the Mulki agitations to statehood on 2 June 2014.
- Jharkhand (decremental): Adivasi loss of land and forest to mines and dams, summed up in jal, jangal, zameen, produced the statehood movement (2000).
- Dominant castes (progressive): Jats (2016), Patidars (2015) and Marathas prospered from the Green Revolution, then met agrarian stagnation while reserved groups gained public jobs. They demanded backward status themselves; the Maratha agitation won a Kunbi-certificate order in September 2025.
A global example
In Sri Lanka, the Sinhala Only Act (1956) and the 1970s “standardisation” of university admissions cut Tamil youths’ access to jobs and education. The squeeze fed Tamil militancy.
Limits of the theory
- Donald L. Horowitz (Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 1985) rests conflict on group worth and fear of domination rather than material gaps. He found that backward groups in backward regions secede most readily, often at economic cost to themselves.
- Paul R. Brass: grievance becomes conflict only when elites mobilise it; many deprived groups stay quiet.
- Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler (“Greed and Grievance in Civil War”, 2004) found that opportunity, such as lootable resources and diasporas, predicted civil war better than grievance did.
- Once “expectations” include cultural values, as in anti-Hindi politics, the theory risks explaining everything and predicting nothing.
Frances Stewart‘s horizontal inequalities refine the thesis: what matters is inequality between groups across economic, social and political dimensions, not between individuals.
Conclusion
Relative deprivation explains why groups become aggrieved and when they mobilise; it is a major source of ethnic conflict, but not a sufficient one: identity, organisation, opportunity and the state’s response decide whether grievance turns into violence.