Fears for Democracy in India

By MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM

On February 27, 2002, the Sabarmati express train arrived in thestation of Godhra, in the state of Gujarat, bearing a large group ofHindu pilgrims who were returning from a trip to the purportedbirthplace of the god Rama at Ayodhya (where, some years earlier, angryHindu mobs had destroyed the Babri mosque, which they claimed was ontop of the remains of Rama's birthplace). The pilgrimage, like manyothers in recent times, aimed at forcibly constructing a temple overthe disputed site, and the mood of the returning passengers, frustratedin their aims by the government and the courts, was angrily emotional.When the train stopped at the station, the Hindu passengers got intoarguments with Muslim passengers and vendors. At least one Muslimvendor was beaten up when he refused to say Jai Sri Ram ("Hail Rama"). As the train left the station, stones were thrown at it, apparently by Muslims.

Fifteen minutes later, one car of the train erupted in flames.Fifty-eight men, women, and children died in the fire. Most of the deadwere Hindus. Because the area adjacent to the tracks was made up ofMuslim dwellings, and because a Muslim mob had gathered in the regionto protest the treatment of Muslims on the train platform, blame wasimmediately put on Muslims. Many people were arrested, and some ofthose are still in detention without charge — despite the fact that twoindependent inquiries have established through careful sifting of theforensic evidence that the fire was most probably a tragic accident,caused by combustion from cookstoves carried on by the passengers andstored under the seats of the train.

In the days that followed the incident, wave upon wave of violenceswept through the state. The attackers were Hindus, many of them highlypoliticized, shouting slogans of the Hindu right, along with "Kill!Destroy!" and "Slaughter!" There is copious evidence that the violentretaliation was planned before the precipitating event by Hinduextremist organizations that had been waiting for an occasion. No onewas spared: Young children were thrown into fires along with theirfamilies, fetuses ripped from the bellies of pregnant women.Particularly striking was the number of women who were raped,mutilated, in some cases tortured with large metal objects, and thenset on fire. Over the course of several weeks, about 2,000 Muslims werekilled.

Most alarming was the total breakdown in the rule of law — not onlyat the local level but also at that of the state and nationalgovernments. Police were ordered not to stop the violence. Some eggedit on. Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi, rationalized and evenencouraged the murders. He was later re-elected on a platform thatfocused on religious hatred. Meanwhile the national government showed aculpable indifference. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee suggestedthat religious riots were inevitable wherever Muslims lived alongsideHindus, and that troublemaking Muslims were to blame.

While Americans have focused on President Bush's "war on terror,"Iraq, and the Middle East, democracy has been under siege in anotherpart of the world. India — the most populous of all democracies, and acountry whose Constitution protects human rights even morecomprehensively than our own — has been in crisis. Until the spring of2004, its parliamentary government was increasingly controlled byright-wing Hindu extremists who condoned and in some cases activelysupported violence against minority groups, especially Muslims.

What has been happening in India is a serious threat to the futureof democracy in the world. The fact that it has yet to make it onto theradar screen of most Americans is evidence of the way in whichterrorism and the war on Iraq have distracted us from events and issuesof fundamental significance. If we really want to understand the impactof religious nationalism on democratic values, India currently providesa deeply troubling example, and one without which any understanding ofthe more general phenomenon is dangerously incomplete. It also providesan example of how democracy can survive the assault of religiousextremism.

In May 2004, the voters of India went to the polls in large numbers.Contrary to all predictions, they gave the Hindu right a resoundingdefeat. Many right-wing political groups and the social organizationsallied with them remain extremely powerful, however. The rule of lawand democracy has shown impressive strength and resilience, but thefuture is unclear.

The case of Gujarat is a lens through which to conduct a criticalexamination of the influential thesis of the "clash of civilizations,"made famous by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington. Hispicture of the world as riven between democratic Western values and anaggressive Muslim monolith does nothing to help us understand today'sIndia, where, I shall argue, the violent values of the Hindu right areimports from European fascism of the 1930s, and where the third-largestMuslim population in the world lives as peaceful democratic citizens,despite severe poverty and other inequalities.

The real "clash of civilizations" is not between "Islam" and "the West," but instead withinvirtually all modern nations — between people who are prepared to liveon terms of equal respect with others who are different, and those whoseek the protection of homogeneity and the domination of a single"pure" religious and ethnic tradition. At a deeper level, as Gandhiclaimed, it is a clash within the individual self, between the urge todominate and defile the other and a willingness to live respectfully onterms of compassion and equality, with all the vulnerability that sucha life entails.

This argument about India suggests a way to see America, which isalso torn between two different pictures of itself. One shows thecountry as good and pure, its enemies as an external "axis of evil."The other picture, the fruit of internal self-criticism, shows Americaas complex and flawed, torn between forces bent on control andhierarchy and forces that promote democratic equality. At what I'vecalled the Gandhian level, the argument about India shows Americans tothemselves as individuals, each of whom is capable of both respect andaggression, both democratic mutuality and anxious domination. Americanshave a great deal to gain by learning more about India and ponderingthe ideas of some of her most significant political thinkers, such asSir Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi, whose ruminations aboutnationalism and the roots of violence are intensely pertinent totoday's conflicts.

A ccording to the Huntington thesis, each "civilization" has its owndistinctive view of life, and Hinduism counts as a distinct"civilization." If we investigate the history of the Hindu right,however, we will see a very different story. Traditional Hinduism wasdecentralized, plural, and highly tolerant, so much so that the visionof a unitary, "pure" Hinduism that could provide the new nation,following independence from Britain in 1947, with an aggressiveideology of homogeneity could not be found in India: The founders ofthe Hindu right had to import it from Europe.

The Hindu right's view of history is a simple one. Like all simpletales, it is largely a fabrication, but its importance to the movementmay be seen by the intensity with which its members go after scholarswho present a more nuanced and accurate view: not only by stridentpublic critiques, but by organized campaigns of threat andintimidation, culminating in some cases in physical violence. Here'show the story goes:

Once there lived in the Indus Valley a pure and peaceful people.They spoke Vedic Sanskrit, the language of the gods. They had a richmaterial culture and a peaceful temper, although they were prepared forwar. Their realm was vast, stretching from Kashmir in the north to SriLanka (Ceylon) in the south. And yet they saw unity and solidarity intheir shared ways of life, calling themselves Hindus and their landHindustan. No class divisions troubled them, nor was caste a painfulsource of division. The condition of women was excellent.

That peaceful condition went on for centuries. Although from time totime marauders made their appearance (for example, the Huns), they werequickly dispatched. Suddenly, rudely, unprovoked, invading Muslims putan end to all that. Early in the 16th century, Babur, founder of theMughal dynasty, swept through the north of Hindustan, vandalizing Hindutemples, stealing sacred objects, building mosques over temple ruins.For 200 years, Hindus lived at the mercy of the marauders, until theMaharashtrian hero Shivaji rose up and restored the Hindu kingdom. Hissuccess was all too brief. Soon the British took up where Babur and hisprogeny had left off, imposing tyranny upon Hindustan and her people.They can recover their pride only by concerted aggression against alienelements in their midst.

What is wrong with that picture? Well, for a start, the people whospoke Sanskrit almost certainly migrated into the subcontinent fromoutside, finding indigenous people there, probably the ancestors of theDravidian peoples of South India. Hindus are no more indigenous thanMuslims. Second, it leaves out problems in Hindu society: the problemof caste, which both Gandhi and Tagore took to be the central socialissue facing India, and obvious problems of class and genderinequality. (When historians point to evidence of these things, theHindu right calls them Marxists, as if that, by itself, invalidatedtheir arguments.) Third, it leaves out the tremendous regionaldifferences within Hinduism, and hostilities and aggressions sometimesassociated with those. Fourth, it omits the evidence of peacefulcoexistence and syncretism between Hindus and Muslims for a good dealof the Mughal Empire, including the well-known policies of religiouspluralism of Akbar (1542-1605).

In the Hindu-right version of history, a persistent theme is that ofhumiliated masculinity: Hindus have been subordinate for centuries, andtheir masculinity insulted, in part because they have not beenaggressive and violent enough. The two leading ideologues of the Hinduright responded to the call for a warlike Hindu masculinity indifferent ways. V.D. Savarkar (1883-1966) was a freedom fighter whospent years in a British prison in the Andaman Islands, and who mayhave been a co-conspirator in the assassination of Gandhi. M.S.Golwalkar (1906-73), a gurulike figure who was not involved in theindependence struggle, quietly helped build up the organization knownas RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or National VolunteersAssociation), now the leading social organization of the Hindu right.Savarkar's "Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?," first published in 1923,undertook to define the essence of Hinduness for the new nation; hisdefinition was exclusionary, emphasizing cultural homogeneity and theneed to use force to ensure the supremacy of Hindus.

Golwalkar's We, or Our Nationhood Defined was published in1939. Writing during the independence struggle, Golwalkar saw his taskas describing the unity of the new nation. To do that, he looked toWestern political theory, and particularly to Germany, where what hecalled "race pride" helped bring "under one sway the whole of theterritory" that was originally held by the Germani. By purgingitself of Jews, he wrote, "Germany has also shown how well nighimpossible it is for Races and cultures, having differences going tothe root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for usin Hindusthan to learn and profit by."

In the end, Golwalkar's vision of national unity was not exactlythat of Nazi Germany. He was not very concerned with purity of blood,but rather with whether Muslim and Christian groups were willing to"abandon their differences, and completely merge themselves in theNational Race." He was firmly against the civic equality of any peoplewho retained their religious and ethnic distinctiveness.

At the time of independence, such ideas of Hindu supremacy did notprevail. Nehru and Gandhi insisted not only on equal rights for allcitizens, but also on stringent protections for religious freedom ofexpression in the new Constitution. Gandhi always pointedly includedMuslims at the very heart of his movement. He felt that respect forhuman equality lay at the heart of all genuine religions, and providedHindus with strong reasons both for repudiating the caste hierarchy andfor seeking relationships of respect and harmony with Christians andMuslims. A devout Muslim, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, was one of his andNehru's most trusted advisers, and it was to him that Gandhi turned toaccept food when he broke his fast unto death, a very pointed assaulton sectarian ideas of purity and pollution. Gandhi's pluralistic ideas,however, were always contested.

On January 30, 1948, Gandhi was shot at point-blank range byNathuram Godse, a member of the Hindu political party Mahasabha andformer member of the RSS, who had long had a close, reverentialrelationship with Savarkar. At his sentencing on November 8, 1949,Godse read a book-length statement of self-explanation. Although it wasnot permitted publication at the time, it gradually leaked out. Todayit is widely available on the Internet, where Godse is revered as ahero on Hindu-right Web sites.

Godse's self-justification, like the historical accounts of bothSavarkar and Golwalkar, saw contemporary events against the backdrop ofcenturies of "Muslim tyranny" in India, punctuated by the heroicresistance of Shivaji in the 18th century. Like Savarkar, Godsedescribed his goal as that of creating a strong, proud India that couldthrow off the centuries of domination. He was appalled by Gandhi'srejection of the warlike heroes of classical Hindu epics and hisinclusion of Muslims as full equals in the new nation, and argued thatGandhi exposed Indians to subordination and humiliation. Nehru believedthat the murder of Gandhi was part of a "fairly widespread conspiracy"on the part of the Hindu right to seize power; he saw the situation asanalogous to that in Europe on the eve of the fascist takeovers. And hebelieved that the RSS was the power behind this conspiracy.

Fast-forward now to recent years. Although illegal for a time, theRSS eventually re-emerged and quietly went to work building a vastsocial network, consisting largely of groups for young boyscalled shakha,or "branches"which, through clever use of games and songs, indoctrinatethe young into the confrontational and Hindu-supremacist ideology ofthe organization. The idea of total obedience and the abnegation ofcritical faculties is at the core of the solidaristic movement. Eachday, as members raise the saffron flag of the warlike hero Shivaji,which the movement prefers to the tricolor flag of the Indian nation(with its Buddhist wheel of law reminding citizens of the emperorAshoka's devotion to religious toleration), they recite a pledge thatbegins: "I take the oath that I will always protect the purity of Hindureligion, and the purity of Hindu culture, for the supreme progress ofthe Hindu nation." The organization also makes clever use of modernmedia: A nationally televised serial version of the classic epic Ramayanain the late 1980s fascinated viewers all over India with its concoctedtale of a unitary Hinduism dedicated to the single-minded worship ofthe god Rama. In 1992 Hindu mobs, with the evident connivance of themodern political wing of the RSS, the party known as the BJP (BharatiyaJanata Party, or National People's Party), destroyed a mosque in thecity of Ayodhya that they say covers the remains of a Hindu templemarking Rama's birthplace.

Politically, the BJP began to gather strength in the late 1980s,drawing on widespread public dissatisfaction with the economic policiesof the post-Nehru Congress Party (although it was actually Congress,under Rajiv Gandhi, that began economic reforms), and playing, always,the cards of hatred and fear. It was during its ascendancy, in acoalition government that prevented it from carrying out all its goals,that the destruction of the Ayodyha mosque took place. The violence inGujarat was the culmination of a series of increasingly angrypilgrimages to the Ayodyha site, where the Hindu right has attempted toconstruct a Hindu temple over the ruins, but has been frustrated by thecourts. Although the elections of 2004 gave a negative verdict on theBJP government, it remains the major opposition party and controlsgovernments in some key states, including Gujarat.

For several years, I have studied the Gujarat violence, its basisand its aftermath, looking for implications for how we should viewreligious violence around the world. One obvious conclusion is thateach case must be studied on its own merits, with close attention tospecific historical and regional factors. The idea that all conflictsare explained by a simple hypothesis of the "clash of civilizations"proves utterly inadequate in Gujarat, where European ideas wereborrowed to address a perceived humiliation and to create an ideologythat has led to a great deal of violence against peaceful Muslims.Indeed, the "clash of civilizations" thesis is the best friend of theperpetrators because it shields them and their ideology from scrutiny.Repeatedly in interviews with leading members of the Hindu right, I wasinformed that no doubt, as an American, I was already on their side,knowing that Muslims cause trouble wherever they are.

What we see in Gujarat is not a simplistic, comforting thesis, butsomething more disturbing: the fact that in a thriving democracy, manyindividuals are unable to live with others who are different, on termsof mutual respect and amity. They seek total domination as the onlyroad to security and pride. That is a phenomenon well known indemocracies around the world, and it has nothing to do with an allegedMuslim monolith, and, really, very little to do with religion as such.

This case, then, informs us that we must look within, asking whetherin our own society similar forces are at work, and, if so, how we maycounteract them. Beyond that general insight, my study of the riots hassuggested four very specific lessons.

The rule of law: One of the most appalling aspects of theevents in Gujarat was the complicity of officers of the law. The policesat on their hands, the highest officials of state government egged onthe killing, and the national government gave aid and comfort to thestate government.

However, the institutional and legal structure of the Indiandemocracy ultimately proved robust, playing a key role in securingjustice for the victims. The Supreme Court and the Election Commissionof India played constructive roles in postponing new elections whileMuslims were encouraged to return home, and in ordering changes ofvenue in key trials arising out of the violence. Above all, freenational elections were held in 2004, and those elections, in which theparticipation of poor rural voters was decisive, delivered a stronglynegative verdict on the policies of fear and hate, as well as on theBJP's economic policies. The current government, headed by ManmohanSingha Sikh and India's first minority prime ministerhas announced afirm commitment to end sectarian violence and has done a great deal tofocus attention on the unequal economic and political situation ofMuslims in the nation, as well as appointing Muslims to key offices. Onbalance, then, the pluralistic democracy envisaged by Gandhi and Nehruseems to be winning, in part because the framers of the Indian statebequeathed to India a wise institutional and constitutional structure,and traditions of commitment to the key political values that structureembodies.

It should be mentioned that one of the key aspects of the founders'commitments, which so far has survived the Hindu-right challenge, isthe general conception of the nation as a uni-ty around politicalideals and values, particularly the value of equal entitlement, ratherthan around ethnic or religious or linguistic identity. India, like theUnited States, but unlike most of the nations of Europe, has rejectedsuch exclusionary ways of characterizing the nation, adopting in itsConstitution, in public ceremonies, and in key public symbols thepolitical conception of its unity. Political structure is notev-erything, but it can supply a great deal in times of stress.

The news media and the role of intellectuals: One of theheartening aspects of the Gujarat events was the performance of thenational news media and of the community of intellectuals. Both printmedia and television kept up unceasing pressure to document andinvestigate events. At the same time, many scholars, lawyers, andleaders of nongovernnmental organizations converged on Gujarat to takedown the testimony of witnesses, help them file complaints, and preparea public record that would stand up in court. The only reason I feltthe need to write about these events further is that their analyseshave, by and large, not reached the American audience.

We can see here documentation of something long ago observed by theIndian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen in the context of famines:the crucial role of a free press in supporting democratic institutions.(Sen pointed out that there has not been a famine in recent times in anation where a free press brings essential information to the public;in China, by contrast, in the late 1950s and early 60s, famine wasallowed to continue unabated, because news of what was happening inrural areas did not leak out.) And we can study here what a free pressreally means: I would argue that it requires a certain absence oftop-down corporate control and an easy access to the major news mediafor intellectual voices from a wide range of backgrounds.

Education and the importance of critical thinking and imagination:So far I have mentioned factors that have helped the Indian democracysurvive the threat of quasi-fascist takeover. But there are warningsigns for the future. The public schools in Gujarat are famous fortheir complete lack of critical thinking, their exclusive emphasis onrote learning and the uncritical learning of marketable skills, and theelements of fascist propaganda that easily creep in when criticalthinking is not cultivated. It is well known that Hitler is presentedas a hero in history textbooks in the state, and nationwide publicprotest has not yet led to any change. To some extent, the rest of thenation is better off: National-level textbooks have been rewritten totake out the Hindu right's false ideological view of history and tosubstitute a more nuanced view. Nonetheless, the emphasis on rotelearning and on regurgitation of facts for national examinations isdistressing everywhere, and things are only becoming worse with theimmense pressure to produce economically productive graduates.

The educational culture of India used to contain progressive voices,such as that of the great Tagore, who emphasized that all the skills inthe world were useless, even baneful, if not wielded by a cultivatedimagination and refined critical faculties. Such voices have now beensilenced by the sheer demand for profitability in the global market.Parents want their children to learn marketable skills, and their greatpride is the admission of a child to the Indian Institutes ofTechnology or the India Institutes of Management. They have contemptfor the humanities and the arts. I fear for democracy down the road,when it is run, as it increasingly will be, by docile engineers in theGujarat mold, unable to criticize the propaganda of politicians andunable to imagine the pain of another human being.

In the United States, by some estimates fully 40 percent ofIndian-Americans hail from Gujarat, where a large proportion belong tothe Swaminarayan sect of Hinduism, distinctive for its emphasis onuncritical obedience to the utterances of the current leader of thesect, whose title is Pramukh Swami Maharaj. On a visit to the elaboratemultimillion-dollar Swaminarayan temple in Bartlett, Ill., I was givena tour by a young man recently arrived from Gujarat, who delighted intelling me the simplistic Hindu-right story of India's history, and whoemphatically told me that whenever Pramukh Swami speaks, one is toregard it as the direct voice of God and obey without question. At thatpoint, with a beatific smile, the young man pointed up to the elaboratemarble ceiling and asked, "Do you know why this ceiling glows the wayit does?" I said I didn't, and I confidently expected an explanationinvoking the spiritual powers of Pramukh Swami. My guide smiled evenmore broadly. "Fiber-optic cables," he told me. "We are the first onesto put this technology into a temple." There you see what can easilywreck democracy: a combination of technological sophistication withutter docility. I fear that many democracies around the world,including our own, are going down that road, through a lack of emphasison the humanities and arts and an unbalanced emphasis on profitableskills.

The creation of a liberal public culture: How did fascism take suchhold in India? Hindu traditions emphasize tolerance and pluralism, anddaily life tends to emphasize the ferment and vigor of difference, aspeople from so many ethnic, linguistic, and regional backgroundsencounter one another. But as I've noted, the traditions contain awound, a locus of vulnerability, in the area of humiliated masculinity.For centuries, some Hindu males think, they were subordinated by asequence of conquerors, and Hindus have come to identify the sexualplayfulness and sensuousness of their traditions, scorned by themasters of the Raj, with their own weakness and subjection. So arepudiation of the sensuous and the cultivation of the masculine cameto seem the best way out of subjection. One reason why the RSS attractssuch a following is the widespread sense of masculine failure.

At the same time, the RSS filled a void, organizing at thegrass-roots level with great discipline and selflessness. The RSS isnot just about fascist ideology; it also provides needed socialservices, and it provides fun, luring boys in with the promise of agroup life that has both more solidarity and more imagination than thetedious world of government schools.

S o what is needed is some counterforce, which would supply a publicculture of pluralism with equally efficient grass-roots organization,and a public culture of masculinity that would contend against theappeal of the warlike and rapacious masculinity purveyed by the Hinduright. The "clash within" is not so much a clash between two groups ina nation that are different from birth; it is, at bottom, a clashwithin each person, in which the ability to live with others on termsof mutual respect and equality contends anxiously against the sense ofbeing humiliated.

Gandhi understood that. He taught his followers that life's realstruggle was a struggle within the self, against one's own need todominate and one's fear of being vulnerable. He deliberately focusedattention on sexuality as an arena in which domination plays itself outwith pernicious effect, and he deliberately cultivated an androgynousmaternal persona. More significantly still, he showed his followersthat being a "real man" is not a matter of being aggressive and bashingothers; it is a matter of controlling one's own instincts to aggressionand standing up to provocation with only one's human dignity to defendoneself. I think that in some respects, he went off the tracks, in hissuggestion that sexual relations are inherently scenes of dominationand in his recommendation of asceticism as the only route tonondomination. Nonetheless, he saw the problem at its root, and heproposed a public culture that, while he lived, was sufficient toaddress it.

In a quite different way, Tagore also created a counterimage of theIndian self, an image that was more sensuous, more joyful than that ofGandhi, but equally bent on renouncing the domination that Tagore sawas inherent in European traditions. In works such as Nationalism and The Religion of Man,Tagore described a type of joyful cosmopolitanism, underwritten bypoetry and the arts, that he also made real in his pioneeringprogressive school in Santiniketan.

After Gandhi, however, that part of the pluralist program haslanguished. Though he much loved and admired both Gandhi and Tagore,Nehru had contempt for religion, and out of his contempt he neglectedthe cultivation of what the radical religions of both men had supplied:images of who we are as citizens, symbolic connections to the roots ofhuman vulnerability and openness, and the creation of a grass-rootspublic culture around those symbols. Nehru was a great institutionbuilder, but in thinking about the public culture of the new nation,his focus was always on economic, not cultural, issues. Because hefirmly expected that raising the economic level of the poor would causethem to lose the need for religion and, in general, for emotionalnourishment, he saw no need to provide a counterforce to the powerfulemotional propaganda of the Hindu right.

Today's young people in India, therefore, tend to think of religion,and the creation of symbolic culture in general, as forces that are intheir very nature fascist and reactionary because that is what theyhave seen in their experience. When one tells them the story of theAmerican civil-rights movement, and the role of both liberal religionand powerful pluralist rhetoric in forging an anti-racist civicculture, they are quite surprised. Meanwhile, the RSS goes to workunopposed in every state and region, skillfully plucking the strings ofhate and fear. By now pluralists generally realize that a mistake wasmade in leaving grass-roots organization to the right, but it is verydifficult to jump-start a pluralist movement. The salient exception hasbeen the women's movement, which has built at the grass roots veryskillfully.

It is comforting for Americans to talk about a clash ofcivilizations. That thesis tells us that evil is outside, distant,other, and that we are perfectly all right as we are. All we need do isto remain ourselves and fight the good fight. But the case of Gujaratshows us that the world is very different. The forces that assaildemocracy are internal to many, if not most, democratic nations, andthey are not foreign: They are our own ideas and voices, meaning thevoices of aggressive European nationalism, refracted back against theoriginal aggressor with the extra bile of resentment born of a longexperience of domination and humiliation.

The implication is that all nations, Western and non-Western, needto examine themselves with the most fearless exercise of criticalcapacities, looking for the roots of domination within and devisingeffective institutional and educational countermeasures. At a deeperlevel, the case of Gujarat shows us what Gandhi and Tagore, in theirdifferent ways, knew: that the real root of domination lies deep in thehuman personality. It would be so convenient if Americans were pure andfree from flaw, but that fantasy is yet another form that theresourceful narcissism of the human personality takes on the way to badbehavior.

Martha C. Nussbaum is a professor in the philosophy department,law school, divinity school, and the college at the University ofChicago. Her book The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future will be published this week by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.