'Communalism arises either due to power struggle or relative deprivation.' Argue by giving suitable illustrations.

Communalism as power struggle

• Colonial ‘divide and rule’, separate electorates from 1909, and the later Pakistan demand turned religion into a bargaining chip for state power, not only into piety.
• Partition riots of 1946–47, including the Calcutta killings, showed how party and League–Congress rivalry could set neighbourhoods on fire when the prize was a new map.
• Post-Independence, riots have often clustered around elections, rath yatras, and disputes over a shrine or a procession route, because polarisation can convert a vote bank.
• The Babri Masjid–Ram Janmabhoomi campaign, peaking in 1992, was a struggle over national symbolism and party space as much as over a plot of land in Ayodhya.
• Control of police, municipal contracts, and university or Waqf boards can make a local strongman light a communal fuse to keep a ward.

Communalism as relative deprivation

• Relative deprivation is the feeling that one’s group is falling behind another in jobs, housing, honour, or state favour, even if absolute income is rising.
• Deindustrialisation of some Muslim artisan towns, ghettoisation after riots, and the Sachar Committee (2006) findings on education and credit fed a story of Muslim lag that communal entrepreneurs on all sides could use.
• Among Hindus, myths of ‘appeasement’ and competition for scarce government jobs or old-city shops have been used to claim that the majority is deprived in its own land.
• Refugee memory after Partition, and later migrations, created groups who measured loss against a neighbour’s gain.
• Economic shocks—downsizing of mills, youth unemployment—do not automatically cause riots, but they supply anger that can be aimed at a religious other when a leader offers that script.

How the two join, with illustrations

• Gujarat 2002 and Muzaffarnagar 2013 mixed electoral and street power with rumours about dignity, girls, and livelihood in mixed rural–urban belts.
• Anti-Sikh violence in 1984 after Indira Gandhi’s assassination was a state-linked power crime, not a poverty riot, yet it also fed long relative fear in a minority.
• Cow, festival, and loudspeaker disputes are small honour contests that become communal when parties and rumours scale them up.
• Thus power struggle supplies organisation, weapons, and impunity; relative deprivation supplies the crowd’s sense of grievance. Either can start; both usually finish the episode.

Limits and way forward

• Not every poor or jobless person is communal; ideology and impunity matter.
• Equal policing, mixed housing, and honest data on jobs undercut both the elite game and the deprivation myth.
• Sachar-style inclusion and a secular, firm state are the policy reply; matching hate with hate is not.