In Violence of Democracy Ruchi Chaturvedi tracks the rise of India’s divisive politics through close examination of decades-long confrontations in Kerala between members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and supporters of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive archival research, Chaturvedi investigates the unique character of the conflict between the party left and the Hindu right. This conflict, she shows, defies explanations centering religious, caste, or ideological differences. It offers instead new ways of understanding how quotidian political competition can produce antagonistic majoritarian communities. Rival political parties mobilize practices of disbursing care and aggressive masculinity in their struggle for electoral and popular power, a process intensified by a criminal justice system that reproduces rather than mitigating violence. Chaturvedi traces these dynamics from the late colonial period to the early 2000s, illuminating the broader relationships between democratic life, divisiveness, and majoritarianism.
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
I. Pastoral Power, Masculinity, and Interparty Conflict
1. Containment and Cretinism: The Early Democratic Decades 27
2. The CPI (M) and the Making of an Antagonistic Political Field 58
3. Care, Connectedness, and Violence in Hindu Right Communities 88
II. Judicial Responsibility and Subterfuge
4. Law’s Subterfuge: Affording Alibis and Bolstering Conflict 115
5. Individuating Responsibility: The Problem of Intention, Injustice, and Justice 145
Conclusion 167
Notes 173
Bibliiography 225
Index 245
