Every society has certain lines of cleavage.The question is how & with what purposes these cleavages are managed or manipulated by the political & civil society actors at different levels in any given society at any given time.It seems violence bigets violence; that once a city or town is exposed to communal violence,it is more likely to have violence more often.Yet,such trends can be set aside with political & civil society intervention.A comparison of communal violence in Kolkata in the second quarter of the last century with its last two quarters may be instructive here.The opposite may also happen,as it has,for instance,in the case of Ahmedabad where a nearly exemplary communally peaceful city has been transformed into a communal cauldron from the late 1960s by the sheer unwillingness &/or inability of a set of political & civil society agents to intervene,leaving the space bare for manupulations by another set of communally-inspired actors.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 13:16:27 +0000
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