Incidents of anti-Muslim violence are being reported from different parts of the country. What explains this sudden upsurge?
“I have studied communal riots of the 1990s, but this current violence in India is very different,” says Ashutosh Varshney, in this podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia. For one thing, he says, the state is abandoning neutrality in violence. Varshney teaches social sciences and political science at Brown University in the US.
He says the prime minister is keeping silent because “he believes in this ideology”, and India is also not worried about western criticism because “the calculation is that India is needed by the west”.
