Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia
By Stanley J. Tambiah. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 405 pp., $50, cloth; $20, paper.
Government Policies and Ethnic Relations in Asia and the Pacific
Edited by Michael E. Brown and Sumit Ganguly. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. 607 pp., $25, paper.
"Enemies intimately known" is the striking phrase Stanley Tambiah uses to identify the participants in ethnonationalist conflict in South Asia. It is a description that applies with equal force to many other parts of the world where long-standing neighbors have cast aside the bonds of secular political association for politicized religious, racial, or linguistic solidarity. Why the former bond is so tenuous and the latter so attractive--and lethal--is but one of the questions considered in this complex study.
Tambiah's central argument is that the project of constructing the nation-state in South Asia has collided with the politicization of ethnicity. Through a series of case studies of incidents such as the 1983 Sinhalese attacks on Tamils in Sri Lanka and the 1984 Hindu massacres of Sikhs in New Delhi after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination, Tambiah identifies the actors and issues that constitute this politicization. One of the more interesting conclusions he reaches is that the collective violence by which politicized ethnicity is often expressed has become a part of the South Asian landscape along-side "normal" democratic processes: "Violence as a mode of conducting politics is a fact of life in South Asia."
How to deal with this violence is a main concern of Michael Brown and Sumit Ganguly's volume, which also shifts the predominantly Eurocentric focus of discussions of ethnic conflict to a region that has experienced similar tensions since long before the end of the cold war. Emphasis in the individual essays--which range from India and China to the Federated States of Micronesia--is on how each nation's government has handled ethnic issues. The overall conclusion--that they have not done a very good job, with the exception of Thailand and New Zealand--points up the fact that government policies or the lack of such policies are the most important factor in ethnonationalist matters. In a field that usually mirrors its subject matter in terms of emotionally charged analysis, Brown and Ganguly's volume stands out for its levelheaded, pragmatic approach.
W. W. F.
The Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace
By Sumit Ganguly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press/Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997. 182 pp., $49.95.
The conflict in Kashmir, a festering remnant of the politics of the subcontinent's partition has precipitated two interstate wars and retains the potential to be the cause of another--this time between a nuclear-armed Pakistan and India. Sumit Ganguly's brief study of Kashmir, which focuses on the rise of an indigenous Kashmiri insurgency since the late 1980's, provides a dispassionate examination of the conflict. Ganguly argues that the recent rebellion has its roots in a political mobilization fostered by India's advancement of literacy, media outlets, and economic development in Kashmir (the last, he would no doubt admit, a desultory initiative). This growth in political cognizance and expectations, coupled with India's parallel failure to advance democratic institutions in the state (especially the gross electoral malfeasance that has accompanied balloting in Kashmir), sparked the rebellion. Ganguly concludes with a helpful discussion of possible moves, by both India and Pakistan, that could help set the stage for a resolution to the conflict.
W. W. F.