Understanding Majoritarian Violence: Evidence from India

• In Event: Mixed Methods in Comparative Politics

Abstract

Extralegal violence threatens human rights and public order in many societies. These threats are growing especially fast in India, where -- against the backdrop of communal tensions at the national level -- mobs increasingly punish transgressions of majority-community norms through targeted vigilante violence. In this paper, we develop a new theory explaining mob violence in India, drawing comparisons to and distinctions from extrajudicial violence in other contexts. We use newly-available data to show that spatial variation in fatal hate crimes in India is strongly associated with the strength of majoritarian institutions, measured via the presence of majoritarian-ideology schools. We show that the violence is concentrated in communities where majoritarian institutions have persisted longer. To account for these finding, we then examine three recent high-profile hate crimes in India and identify patterns in the characteristics of hate crime attacks: Attacks often seem spontaneous and mass-driven, but they are usually coordinated by a core group of organized perpetrators who use the spectacle of violence to generate a larger group of peripheral participants and bystanders. Because vigilante violence in India is not spontaneous or a grass-roots response to state weakness, we caution that efforts to increase the capacity of local law enforcement or the legal system are unlikely to curb majoritarian violence.

Authors

• Aidan Milliff, Florida State University

• Blair Read