The Politics of Unmixing: Riots, Segregation and Votes in India by Diogo Bernardo Lemos B.A. in Journalism and Contemporary History, July 2006, Queen Mary, University of London M.Sc. in Comparative Politics, October 2007, London School of Economics and Political Science A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 31, 2017 Dissertation directed by Emmanuel Teitelbaum Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs i The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Diogo Bernardo de Castilho Penha de Lemos has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of August 1st, 2017. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. The Politics of Unmixing: Riots, Segregation and Votes in India Diogo Bernardo Lemos Dissertation Research Committee Emmanuel Teitelbaum, Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Dissertation Director Henry E. Hale, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Committee Member Irfan Nooruddin, Hamad bin Khalifa Professor of Indian Politics, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Committee Member ii © Copyright 2017 by Diogo Bernardo Lemos All rights reserved iii Dedication To Carolina iv Acknowledgements During the process of writing this thesis, I have incurred a long list of personal and intellectual debts. While I am grateful to all, I would like to express my special gratitude to those individuals who have had the strongest influence on the final product. My largest debt is to my dissertation committee, whose graciousness took the edge off my relocation to Europe at the beginning of this project. My advisor, Manny Teitelbaum, helped me make the difficult transition from unpolished graduate student into a hopefully more ‘sophisticated’ scholar. Intellectually, he pushed for this project to be broader than my initial conceptualization, which focused exclusively on the electoral effects of religious homogeneity at the constituency level. It was Manny who compelled me to consider the causes of constituency demography, which then led me to investigate the link between riots, unmixing and long-term electoral outcomes. I have known Henry Hale since taking his terrific course on ‘Theories of Ethnic Politics’ at the George Washington University. As a committee member, Henry has been one of the kindest and most insightful educators I have had the pleasure of know. Finally, Irfan Nooruddin gave me early and critical inputs on issues of definition and conceptualization relating to Indian party politics. I would also like to thank Ajay Verghese and Adam Ziegfeld for serving as external readers for the project. Previous versions of this project benefited from comments received at the 3rd Berlin Graduate School in the Social Sciences, the 2016 Graduate Student Conference of the v European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), at Tartu University, Estonia, and the 45th Annual Conference on South Asia. Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to the participants of a GW Comparative Politics Workshop, who provided helpful and detailed comments on chapter four of this dissertation. This dissertation would not have been possible without the technical support and advice of several individuals. Among these I would like to highlight Raphael Susewind, whose name-matching algorithm enabled me to measure religious demography at the constituency level; Nuno Simarias, who introduced me to the scraping script that extracted information from the PDF-format Indian electoral rolls; Sarvesh Kumar, who executed these tasks to generate the contemporary estimates of religious demography for Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata and Hyderabad; Seung Joon Paik and Johannes Zimmermann for their help with the statistical sections of this dissertation. This project also benefited from the financial support of the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, which funded me through the first years of my degree with a PhD studentship. Additional support was received from the Department of Political Science at the George Washington University and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs. In addition to countless trips, my family and I moved across continents thrice, living in four different countries along the way. Such itinerant lifestyle would have been intolerable without the institutional support of the Berlin Graduate School for the Social vi Sciences (BGSS) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (where I was a guest researcher in 2014-2015), the American Institute of India Studies (AIIS) and the Department of Political Science at the Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi (where I was affiliated in 2015-2016). Thanks are also due to the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Nehru Memorial Library, the Institute for Social and Economic Change in Bangalore, the Mumbai University Library and the Gujarat University Library in Ahmedabad. Special recognition goes out to the politicians, consultants, bureaucrats, journalists, activists, academics and riot survivors who agreed to be interviewed for this project. Our friendly and candid conversations were the highlight of my field research. They contributed immensely to shape my understanding of Indian party politics. While this debt can never be repaid, I hope that this work will serve as a token of my appreciation. In writing and researching this dissertation, I have relied on countless friends and family who have helped me in a variety of ways. When I hit a research wall, I turned to my friend Nuno Rocha, who possesses a preternatural disposition to make the impossible happen. He put me in contact with Maneesh Gulati, who fetched and scanned an old copy of the Census of India for this project. Shubangini Singh was my host, friend and enthusiastic culinary guide in Delhi. She took care of me when I became sick and looked after my girls when we all came to India in 2015. In my visits to Washington, I benefited from the hospitality of João Cabrita and Inês Lopes as well as Seung Joon Paik. My godparents, Tio Carlos and Tia Bita, supported and inspired me to conclude this study. My mother-in-law, Heide-Marie Seybert, released me from parental duties in Berlin so that I vii could conduct field research in India. My parents, Ana Penha and Manuel Lemos, have instilled in their two children – my brother, Pedro, and I – the values and the education that I hope will also come through in this work. They also provided much-needed financial support for this project in the bleakest periods and I am profoundly grateful for their kindness. Lastly, I owe my deepest debt of gratitude to my closest family, Carolina Seybert, and our daughter Magali. Magali has filled me with the joy and love that powered me through this process. In Carolina, I have found much more than a dedicated wife and exemplary mother to our daughters (the second of whom she has carried during the final stretch of this dissertation). She has been my closest friend, my most trusted advisor and my most shrewd supporter. For all these reasons, I hold my decision to talk to the girl who changed the radio station in a crowded car as my best so far. It is to her that I dedicate this dissertation. viii Abstract of Dissertation The Politics of Unmixing: Riots, Segregation and Votes in India Do ethnic riots have long-term electoral consequences? While strategic political calculations are said to play a key role in the production of ethnic riots, existing studies illuminate only how riots shape electoral competition in the short-term. Drawing on a study of Hindu-Muslim violence in India, this dissertation argues that ethnic riots may also be thought of as a particularly brutal spatial strategy, designed by political actors to violently refashion social geography in ways that highlight and fix an ethnic divide in the long-term. Briefly, I advance a two-part hypothesis: (1) recurrent and severe riots shift the ethnic composition of electoral constituencies, constructing homogeneous constituencies where relative heterogeneity had been the norm - following Brubaker I name this process 'ethnic unmixing' (Brubaker 1995; 1998); and (2) greater ethnic homogeneity at the constituency level promotes lasting electoral support for ethnic parties. This dissertation articulates and tests several hypotheses about the efficacy of this spatial strategy in promoting long-term electoral support for matching ethnic parties, employing a mixed methods research design that combines large-N statistical analysis with extensive in-depth case study research. In doing so, the dissertation utilizes original quantitative data on religious demography at the local level in India, extensive interviews, and archival data gathered during 13 months of field research in India. ix Table of Contents Dedication…..…………………………………………………………………………….iv Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..v Abstract…………………………………………………………………...........................ix List of Tables…….……………………………………………………...........................xiii List of Figures and Images………………….……………………..…………………….xiv List of Abbreviations……..……………………………………………...........................xv Chapter 1: The Politics of Unmixing……………………………………………………..1 1.1 Introduction 1.2 The Puzzling Rise of the Hindu Right in India 1.3 The Argument 1.4 Calculated or Unintended? 1.5 Research Design and Chapter