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Group Violence, Terrorism and impunity: Challenges to Secularism and Rule of Law in India: A Workshop

Sponsored by the Program on Human Rights and Justice at the Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this workshop was held on April 9-10 2010, at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In recent decades, group violence, especially communal violence, has become a recurrent theme in the lives of Indians in many parts of the country. Starting with the anti-Sikh massacres in 1984, communal violence has continued to challenge India’s secular credentials in the Ayodhya riots (1992), Mumbai bomb blasts (1994), Gujarat pogrom (2002), in the Orissa riots (2008). There is a rising phenomenon of terrorism, as seen in the Mumbai terror attacks (2008), which lead to societal and State responses that centrally challenge secularism and rule of law. There is a dire need to study these forms of violence and the impunity enjoyed by its perpetrators. This workshop thus aims to fulfill a timely need to examine the roots and processes of such violence. The workshop begins with the premise that rather than being endemic to the region, group violence needs to be contextualized and is always historically contingent. Violence, whether perpetrated by terrorists or civil society or states, is a process rather than a discrete product of random “mob” activity.         India has had a history of violence based on religious and cultural differences since the colonial period culminating in the Partition violence of 1947. The workshop seeks to explore how and why such violence continues, or is different in the postcolonial period. Among the ideological reasons for violence are differing ideas of India, of who, what groups or communities belong to it and who are the others/outsiders even if they meet the criteria of legal definition of citizenship. Similar is the case with variant definitions of secularism and its implementation by the postcolonial state.

This workshop seeks to critically engage with the relationship between group violence and the rule of law. In doing so, it seeks to test many definitions of "secularism" and examine the role of the Indian state in relation to its varied responses to the persistance of group violence.

Prof. Paul Brass, University of Washington will give the keynote address.  Besides the organizers, participants include Prof. Angana Chatterji, California Institute of Integral Studies; Prof. Parviz Ghassem-Fashandi, Rutgers University; Dr. Ratna Kapoor, CFLR New Delhi; Shafiq R. Mahajir, Attorney, Hyderabad; Harvinder S. Phoolka, Attorney, New Delhi; Prof. Arvind Verma, Indiana University; R.K. Raghavan, IPS, retd; former Director of Central Bureau of Investigation;   Prof. Bish Sanyal, MIT; Attorney Mukul Sinha, Jan Sangharsh Manch, Ahmedabad; Prof. Srirupa Roy, University of Massachusetts-Amherst; Meenakshi Ganguly (Human Rights Watch); and Manoj Mitta, of The Times of India .

To view the full conference schedule, please click HERE.

For further information, please contact Dr. Omar Khalidi.

Organizers:

Prof Balakrishanan Rajagopal

Prof Haimanti Roy

Dr. Omar Khalidi