US-based political scientists Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur have come up with a new book titled ‘Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State’. In this book, they have concluded that large-scale violence in India has significantly reduced in the last 20 years as compared to the time period between 1970 to 2000.
Summing it up, aggregate levels of violence in India – public and private – have declined in the first two decades of this century compared to the last two decades of the previous century. Both authors are teaching faculties in US-based universities. Professor Amit Ahuja is teaching at the University of California while Professor Devesh Kapur is at Johns Hopkins University.
According to a report by BBC, the finding by these two researchers stands in sharp contrast to the conclusion peddled by Thomas Blom Hansen, an anthropologist at Stanford University, that violence has now taken the center stage in public life in India. Thomas Blom Hansen drew these conclusions in his book ‘The Law of Force: The Violent Heart of Indian Politics’ published in 2021. However, Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur have come up with detailed statistics on every aspect of the large-scale violence to prove the former incorrect.
The authors combed through decades’ worth of government documents to conduct their research, which included a wide range of violent incidents in India, including riots, election-related violence, caste-based, religious, and ethnic violence, insurgency, terrorism, political murders, and hijackings. They discovered that during the “peak quarter century” from the late 1970s to the early 2000s, violence in India actually decreased across a number of these variables – in some cases, significantly.
Ethno-religious massacres
The duo found that, since 2002, India has not seen any ethnic or religious massacres to the same extent as the riots in Gujarat in 2002, the riots in Delhi in 1984 that targeted the Sikh community, or the murders of purportedly unlawful immigrants from Bangladesh in the small Assamese town of Nellie in 1983. In only these riots, more than 6,000 individuals officially lost their lives.
Terrorist attacks
The researchers noted that 8,749 individuals have died in terrorist acts in India since 2001, according to the Global Terrorism Index 2020. But after 2010, these attacks decreased significantly. Comparing the decade from 2000 to 2010 and the next decade, the number of terrorist events decreased by 70%, from 71 to 21, with the exception of Kashmir.
Incidents of riots
The number of riots increased about five times from the 1970s to the turn of the century. However, by the late 1990s, they had started to diminish. When the population is taken into account, currently, the number of riots in India is at a record low.
Violence during elections and high-profile murders
High-profile political killings and electoral violence have decreased significantly in India as per the research. Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi were assassinated in 1984 and 1991, respectively. India hasn’t seen a high-profile political assassination since then. Between 1989 and 2019, violence at voting centers decreased by 25%, while deaths associated with election violence decreased by 70%. This happened even though voter turnout increased, elections became more vigorous, and the number of voting booths doubled.
Plane hijacking incidents
In the three decades between the 1970s and 1990s, there were 15 hijackings of passenger aircraft operated by India. There haven’t been any since December 1999, when an Indian Airlines aircraft from Kathmandu to Delhi was hijacked.
The researchers credit the government for better control of situations
Though there are various factors behind this decline in the incidents of violence, Professor Amit Ahuja and Professor Devesh Kapur credited this to the state to a major extent. According to them, the increased state capacity has contributed to the reduction of riots, insurgencies, and election-related violence. The tide of this violence has been slowed down in part by greater deployment of paramilitary troops, the use of helicopters and drones for surveillance, the erection of cell phone towers, strengthened police stations, new roads, and health and educational facilities in the afflicted regions.
The researchers mention, “The decline of violence is more due to enhanced state capacity and less the sort of political settlements that would provide consent of the governed and ensure that new cycles of violence don’t occur.”
