PAS40410.1177/00323292124611 46112525Politics & SocietyDhattiwala and Biggs Politics & Society 40(4) 483 –516 The Political Logic of Ethnic © 2012 SAGE Publications Reprints and permission: Violence: The Anti-Muslim sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0032329212461125 Pogrom in Gujarat, 2002 http://pas.sagepub.com Raheel Dhattiwala1 and Michael Biggs1 Abstract Ethnic violence in Gujarat in 2002 killed at least a thousand Muslims. Compiling data from the Times of India, we investigate variation across 216 towns and rural areas. Analysis reveals the political logic of violence. Killing was less likely where the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was weakest, but was even less likely where the BJP was strong; it was most likely where the party faced the greatest electoral competition. Underemployment and Muslim in-migration also increased violence. The political logic is confirmed by analysis of the subsequent election: the BJP’s vote increased most in districts with the worst violence. Police chiefs in districts where violence was severe were more likely to be promoted. Keywords ethnic conflict, violence, Hindu-Muslim, Gujarat, India 1University of Oxford, UK Corresponding Author: Raheel Dhattiwala, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, Manor Road, Oxford OX1 3UQ, UK Email:
[email protected] Downloaded from pas.sagepub.com at Univ.of Oxford - Library on November 16, 2012 484 Politics & Society 40(4) The Partition violence between Hindus and Muslims, which claimed 200,000 lives, marked the beginning of what was to become a pervasive phenomenon in independent India. Since 1950, Hindu-Muslim violence has claimed more than 10,000 lives.1 A systematic causal analysis of these events becomes a challenge in the absence of reli- able data, assuming that government data tends to be biased.2 That could be one reason why much of the study of ethnic violence in India has followed two approaches: First, the culturalist approach construes the context of violence rather than the cause.