162 "Presenting" the Past
the secular and communal spaces and the pronounced communalism of
the assertive BJP, set the crisis of regime in the late 1980s. The crisis was
worse in UP because the political struggle for the state power had pitted
the upper castes and classes against the "backward" and lower castes, and
the intensified intercommunity conflicts were poised to displace the upper
castes from power. Although these political and structural developments
at the national and state levels formed the larger background, there were
always local factors in most of the communal strife. For instance, the 1991
riots of Varanasi had the undercurrents of business competition between
the traditional Hindu wholesale traders and the newly emerging Muslim
traders, who used to be the weavers.^39
The full-fledged communal violence was at its peak from mid-1990 until
mid-1993. For instance, as a result of Advani's rathyatra alone, there were
116 communal riots all over India that killed 564 people between Septem-
ber 1 and November 20, 1990. UP and Gujarat witnessed the maximum
number of riots (28 and 26, respectively), which killed 224 and 99 people
in those states.^40
The widespread carnage the country witnessed following the mosque
vandalism in December 1992 was the first massive wave of violence ever
since the partition holocaust in 1947. In that bloody aftermath, there were
more than 1,700 people killed and 5,500 injured all over India, with heavy
tolls in Maharashtra, Gujarat, UP, MP, Assam, and Rajasthan. However,
southern India, with the exception of Karnataka, remained almost peace-
ful, and in Tamil Nadu only two people died in police firing.^41 The final
tally revealed another important fact, that rural India remained much saner
than the urban areas. Some 1,100 people were killed and 3,300 injured in
major cities such as Bombay, Surat, Bhopal, Ahmedabad, Kanpur, Banga-
lore, Mysore, and so on.^42 So even when communal islands of India were
burning, they were surrounded by the sea of normal life in which Hindus
and Muslims were engaging themselves in business, pilgrimages, celebra-
tions, and daily living. The argument here is not to deny the shame of
recurrent communal violence, or to dismiss the victims' loss and pain, or
even to make the aberration argument, but just to point out the erratic
jumps in the communal curve of national life. For example, there were
scores of cities, towns, and villages all over India that witnessed commu-
nal violence for the first time since 1947.
Along with the human goodness and its inviolability advocated by all
different religions, communalism, its human provocateurs, and the vul-
nerability or acquiescence do coexist in ample measure. However, the civil
society does not fall prey to communal violence intuitively or impulsively.
The missing link is the "investment" in rioting. A group of social scientists
that investigated the communal riots that occurred in December 1990 and
February 1991 in a UP town called Khurja, which had had no communal