Sponsored by the Program in Human Rights and Justice at the Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this workshop will be held on April 9, 10 2010 at MIT in Cambridge, Mass.
 
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 put to test the many definitions of ‘secularism’ and examine the role of the Indian state in perpetuating 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; Meenakshi Ganguli, (Human Rights Watch);  Dr. Ratna Kapoor, CFLR New Delhi; Shafeeq R. Mahajir, Attorney, Hyderabad; Manoj Mitta,  Sub-Editor, The Times of India, New Delhi; 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;  Prof. Ornit Shani, University of Haifa, and Siddharth Varadarjan,  Chief of National Bureau and Strategic Affairs Editor, The Hindu.
 
A final program will be announced in late February 2010. For further information, please contact the organizers:
For further information & rsvp, pl. contact
Dr Omar Khalidi
AKPIA Librarian
okhalidi@mit.edu
Organized by Omar Khalidi, Prof. Balakrishnan Rajagopal and Prof. Haimanti Roy