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lchic
- 03:59am Feb 15, 2003 EST (#
8914 of 8916) ~~~~ It got understood and exposed
~~~~
violence
it looked like another incomprehensible example of the
strife that has plagued mixed communities from Northern
Ireland to Indonesia. But for Ashutosh Varshney, a political
scientist at the University of Michigan, it backed up his
theory that social organisations built on shared values - such
as trade unions or political parties - are more likely to
strengthen their communities against conflict. As he tells
Michael Bond, it might form the basis of a new science
How did you come to be studying violence?
In the 1980s I trained in political economy, the central
tenet of which is rationality - the idea that you can
understand human behaviour through a cool calculation of costs
and benefits. I found that idea valid for a lot of economics,
but as a political scientist I found it very limiting. I
wanted to work on a subject that involved more emotions than
those generated by the question of prices. When I finished my
PhD and started teaching at Harvard, Hindu-Muslim violence was
once again breaking out in many parts of India. And research
into this kind of violence left a lot to be desired. So in the
summer of 1990 I went off to Kashmir, which was in the middle
of a civil war, and I could see very clearly the role of
emotion in politics.
How did it change your intellectual outlook?
The emotional intensity I encountered in the Kashmir valley
not only overwhelmed me but also aroused deep intellectual
curiosity. Until that time, my fieldwork had dealt with the
politics of economic policy. Compared with that experience,
the loss, pain and suffering I witnessed in the Kashmir valley
appeared to belong to an entirely different realm of life, a
realm not easily amenable to standard political-economic
enquiry. I saw children who had lost their limbs, families
that had lost their children, and yet people were willing to
fight a war of insurgency. Their inner selves, they argued,
were at stake, and they were prepared to suffer a lot of pain
for dignity, identity and self-respect.
The intellectual challenge became obvious: can we create a
science of pain, suffering, loss and death experienced in
ethnic or communal conflict? In a way this subject is close to
my heart. I want to come up with some practical ideas about
peace. There is far too much violence in the world. I am also
a bit of a rebel and I find it extremely hard to accept
academic orthodoxy. Intellectually, if you give me an inch I
will take a mile.
Are you saying that when it came to studying human
behaviour, rationality was not a sufficient basis?
Let me put it this way: you cannot base your research into
ethnic politics on a cool calculation of costs and benefits,
which is the assumption a lot of people made through the
1990s. It is not irrelevant, but neither is it central. I am
not saying that ethnic politics is entirely irrational, but
emotions play a much greater role than people have assumed.
Have you ever witnessed violence yourself or been close to
it?
Yes. When I was 13 there was a very big riot in the town of
Aligarh, where we were living. It didn't affect me in a
profound way at the time because I didn't see anyone killed in
front of my eyes. I saw buses being burnt and the police
everywhere. We couldn't go to school for two weeks, so we
played cricket instead, which was great. There were people
being killed but I was kept away from it.
The thing I remember about Aligarh was that it was a very
segregated town. Before we moved there I had grown up with
Muslims for much of my childhood, but in Aligarh I realised
for the first time in my life that I had no Muslim friends and
that the Muslim children were not part of my cricket team. I
remember other things, such as seeing a Hindu nationalist
being very enraged and driving off saying he had to teach
Muslims a lesson. Things like that left a big impression on
me. I didn't come to study violence because of something in my
childhood, but whe
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