This chapter introduces the phenomenon of party violence, discusses the scope conditions and central arguments of the book, and offers a methodological justification for the distinct cross-regional comparison of Kenya and India. It also details the multiple data sources used to develop the book’s main claims as well as the subnational research sites investigated in both countries. Substantively, the chapter holds that party instability is an underappreciated factor in the broader instrumentalist literature on elites’ decision-making about conflict. It argues that instability matters because it can make the deployment of violence less costly and risky for politicians and thereby incentivize the production of recurring and severe conflict.

This chapter traces political party development in Kenya and India from a comparative and historical perspective. It shows that despite many shared experiences as British colonies, nationalist parties with transoceanic connections to one another, and dominant party structures that endured for several years after independence, party development in the two countries took very different routes in the medium and long terms. In Kenya, the Kenya African National Union (KANU) emerged as a narrow, divisive, and ethnically oriented party. By contrast, the Indian National Congress (INC) developed deep societal roots, penetrated rural areas, and sought to unite Indians across caste and ethnic divides. These divergent trajectories influenced the development of new party entrants and generated differing incentive structures for instrumentalizing party violence in the two countries.

This chapter illustrates the relationship between politicians, parties, and communal conflict in India from the 1950s through the late 1980s. Combining national-level violence and volatility data with in-depth qualitative interviews, it shows that the weakening and decline of the Indian National Congress (INC) in the late 1970s spurred an escalation of riot violence across many parts of the country through the 1980s. Since then, however, severe riots have dramatically declined in India, as party stabilization has rendered the risks of provoking such violence prohibitive for many political parties. However, other forms of conflict – including rural clashes and targeted low-level attacks against Muslims – have escalated in recent years under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The chapter suggests that these newer modalities of conflict are part of the same recalibrated elite strategies that have contributed to declines in communal riots across India.

This chapter offers a subnational accounting of patterns of riot violence in Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh and Meerut in Uttar Pradesh. It shows that much like at the national level, these cities fell prey to repeated and severe riots when soaring party instability incentivized conflict on the part of both Congress elites as well as politicians from its emerging electoral rivals. However, following the restoration of relative party stability in the late 1980s, both Hyderabad and Meerut have witnessed communal quiescence. The chapter further shows that this quiescence is due to the fact that elites are keen to avoid sanctioning from voters for engaging in conflict.

Many of the unofficial advocates for states-in-waiting were individuals affiliated or identified with the international peace movement. These transnational advocates often found themselves championing independence struggles in states-in-waiting that were situated within newly decolonized postcolonial nation-states. While some within these postcolonial state governments may themselves have relied on these advocates during their own independence struggles, they opposed such advocacy after they won their independence, since it had the potential to undermine their own state sovereignty. The 1963 Friendship March – launched by the World Peace Brigade, a transnational civil society organization set up to find peaceful solutions to global decolonization, exemplified this contradiction. The Friendship March started in New Delhi, India, and intended to cross the Chinese border in the immediate aftermath of the 1962 Sino-Indian War.

Canberra’s foreign policy orientation has shifted inexorably towards the Asia-Pacific region over the last quarter century. Into the 1970s, Australia viewed itself as in, but not of, Asia. The demise of ’White Australia’ notwithstanding, Canberra remained the capital of a far-flung European outpost. Today, that geopolitical identity seems quaintly archaic. Australia is unambiguously an Asia-Pacific country. Its chief trading partner is Japan; its main ally is the United States; and its strategic analysts’ main focuses are Indonesia and China. Within this broader regional context, Canberra considers North-East Asia, South-East Asia, and the South Pacific as sub-regions of particular concern for Australian foreign and defence policy. But what about South Asia, an area conventionally defined as encompassing India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Maldives, and Bhutan? What role do these countries play in Australia’s international relations? Do Australian policy-makers perceive them as important? Have Canberra’s links with the subcontinent traditionally been characterised by amity or enmity? What is the nature of these relationships today?

In the early 1990s, scholars talked about Australia’s neglect of South Asia, in particular Australia’s failure to understand the rising importance of India. We spoke of indifference, blind spots, missed opportunities, general indifference and even ideological differences between the two countries that began with Jawaharlal Nehru and Sir Robert Menzies. During the last ten years, Australia’s engagement with South Asia has changed dramatically – Australia has been involved in a counterinsurgency war against the Taliban in Afghanistan intermittently since 2002, and India has emerged as Australia’s fourth largest export market. The paradox that this chapter addresses is the way in which Australia’s strategic engagement with South Asia was dominated by Afghanistan while Australian commercial national interests lay with India. These two relationships have overwhelmingly defined Australia’s connection with South Asia. The focus is on Kevin Rudd’s period as prime minister of Australia (2007–10) and his subsequent role as foreign minister (from 2010), because the Rudd years capture the essence of Australia’s new relationship with this part of the world where some two billion people live.

This chapter examines the development of public law in South Asia: a legal family that has been defined by its history of British colonialism and continued adherence to the common law legal tradition. It traces the evolution of constitutionalism in four countries – India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – since their independence from Britain, focusing on two common regional themes. The first is the judicialisation of politics through the adoption (or at least consideration) of the basic structure doctrine, which permits courts to define and enforce implicit limits on constitutional amendments. The second is the centralisation (and abuse of) executive power, which has imperilled democratic rule in all four countries. While neither of these developments is specific to South Asia, the interplay between them, resulting in separate spheres of unchecked judicial and executive domination, is perhaps unique to the region and warrants further attention from comparative scholars.

The birth of the nation in South Asia is inextricably linked to the sundering of our past and our communities along religious lines, a fracturing rehearsed endlessly in the bloodbaths of repeated partitions, riots, and pogroms, in the banality of daily lynchings. For South Asians today, “India” before the Raj is indeed a foreign country. Let me recount a tale from this faraway land, which cannot be located on modern maps, to show how wondrously strange it is.

On 1 April 1597, Gonçalo Toscano was arrested in Portuguese India.1 The Inquisition classified Toscano by “caste” as being “Muslim [mouro], originating from Balaghat [a range of foothills in present-day Maharashtra], freedman [forro], single,” and about twenty-three years of age. Some nine years before, after being baptized and owing to disagreements he had with “his friend,” a certain Matheus Carvalho, he had left the city of Bassein (Baçaim) to return to his hometown of Kalyan (Galiana, near Thane).

In the spirit of decolonization, the chapter argues that we read English as a vernacular and not simply a global or colonial language. It takes seriously the emphasis on “speakers” – people and technologies/media – in the “phone” of anglophone literatures to find vernacular grounds to read literary English from. The chapter parses the political meanings of English through the contested political and mediated lives it has across the world in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan), Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and anglophone Africa. For instance, English is not only a formerly colonial language in South Asia or a language of the postcolonial state in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. It is also a populist language that mediates Dalit, racioethnic, and Indigenous assertion against the fascist logics of postcolonial vernaculars like Hindi, Urdu, and Sinhala. Here, English often lives outside literary works – in other media and in other languages – as “less than a language,” as a sound, a sight, and materiality that inflects meanings on the page.Literary studies have long been concerned with the liberal axiom of voice – who speaks – and thus sought to bring new voices into the scholarly field. Through specific literary examples from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this chapter asks the critic to situate themselves and their conceptual categories: who listens and how? Which English is legitimized as “English” and which as its “other”? How do we, as readers, make English speak on the page? I use “vernacular” as a term to highlight the embodied and material mediations of English that alter its colonial meanings, as well as the very real political and multivalent desire to make common that animates English as eminently global and mobile. Vernacular names the colonial and transnational capitalist structures associated with English without re-inscribing them each time we discuss English.

Buddhist nationalism has emerged again as a topic of scholarly and media attention, driven primarily by campaigns of violence and expulsion against Muslims in Myanmar, but also by similar dynamics in Sri Lanka and Thailand. Recent research on the intersections between Buddhism and nationalism not only follows the scholarly critique of methodological nationalism – resisting the urge to naturalize the nation and read it back anachronistically into history – it also questions assumptions of Buddhism as a unitary or even stable object of inquiry. “Buddhist nationalism,” where it exists, does not necessarily follow a set pattern; moreover, it is the conscious and largely intentional creation of actors with the relevant authority and stature to frame the two components as intrinsically connected. In doing so, they construct it through narratives and symbols of legitimation that are recognizably Buddhist and linked to particular cultural, ethnic, or political configurations.