SUMMARY
Hindus (India) is a religious group in India, which has been involved in communal violence against the Muslims (India) religious group. In India, the Hindus constitutes the overwhelming religious majority group; as of the 2011 census, the Hindus accounted for roughly 80 percent of India’s total population, which in absolute terms translated to some 966 000 000 people. Rather than being a well-defined identity group, the Hindus of India represent a plethora of different, albeit related, sub-branches, communities, and cultural practices. Similarly, the Hindus include a large number of ethnic and linguistic groups. However, the Hindus still represent a salient communal identity, which for example exists alongside the Muslim and tribal communities. Some of India’s tribal populations (recognized in the Constitution as “Scheduled Tribes”) also practice Hinduism, but would generally not be included in the Hindu group described here.
Geographically, the Hindus constitute the majority population in most states, with a few exceptions in the north (Jammu and Kashmir) and northwest (for example Nagaland and Mizoram). Given the sheer number of Hindus in India, and the format of the country’s electoral system, parties representing the Hindu community have dominated Indian politics since 1947. At an aggregated national level, Hindus are generally socioeconomically more well-endowed than particularly the Muslims, which is India’s second largest communal group. One salient aspect of Hindu society has been the traditional caste system, which imposes a strict social hierarchy; while Indian law prohibits caste-based discrimination, such practices remain common to the present day.
The existence of Hindu nationalist and fundamentalist parties has been prevalent India. One idea central to political parties like Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is that of Hindutva, which equates religious and national identity, or that “Indians are Hindus”. A primary consequence of this idea has been that religious minority groups, such as Muslims and Christians, has been placed outside the concept of the nation. Hindu nationalists have often branded particularly the Muslim community in India as a dangerous and foreign element, which is not truly a part of the Indian nation.
Various formally organized groups have claimed to represent the Hindus in India, such as the right-wing nationalist Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), or the Ranvir Sena militia. As a result, the UCDP has also coded violence related to the Hindu-Muslim conflict as one-sided violence perpetrated by these more formally organized actors, even if it still was intimately linked to sectarian/communal tensions. For example, the dyad VHP – Civilians captures some of the violence during the 2002 Gujarat riots. Another organization known for stoking Hindu-Muslim violence iss the Rashtriya Swayam Sevaksangh (RSS), a Hindu supremacist umbrella organization formed in 1925; RSS was intimately involved in the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque in 1992.
