offices of census bureaus and national administrations. This is understandable,
for constructivism doesn’t mean ethnic identities aren’t real. Or race, for that
matter. Quite the opposite, administrative classifications have done much to
enhance ethnic differences, giving them salience.
Governments highlight or deny ethnic identities, with or without the consent of
those concerned. Thus an important aspect of group delimitation to note in this
connection is power, which makes us see that, rather than the quasi-natural fruit
of evolution, ethnic identities are often the result of conflict. And they lead to
conflict in turn. Examples are not far to seek.
In 1994, clashes between the Hutu majority of Rwanda and the Tutsi minority
exploded into the genocide of an estimated 800,000 Tutsis (and other
minorities). The conflict was the legacy of ethnic boundaries drawn in colonial
times. Genetically, Hutu and Tutsi are close relatives of Bantu extraction.
Centuries of living together and much intermarriage have blurred the boundaries
between them, but once distinguished for whatever administrative purposes by
the Belgian colonial government, the division provided a reason for interethnic
strife.
At around the same time, in the Bosnian war of 1992–5, which broke out in the
wake of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Serbian troops killed more than 100,000
Muslim Bosniaks. Before the war, Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians had lived
together more or less peacefully, but when the Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia broke apart and the pledge of intergroup tolerance with it, ethnic
fault lines re-emerged with devastating force. Again, genetic differences between
the three groups cannot motivate discrimination; and whatever linguistic
differences exist between Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian hardly hamper
communication. Thus, religion served as the principal criterion of demarcating
identities.
When faith can be made to dance to the tune of interethnic hatred, piety does not
protect against violence, as many other examples testify. Since independence,
India has been unable to prevent ordinary Hindus and Muslims from falling into
bloody conflict time after time, because, psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar argues,
traditional religious identifications are the most potent formative force in early
childhood.