Varshney, Ashutosh. "Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society: India and Beyond". World Politics, Vol.53, No.3 (2001): 362-398.

Varshney, Ashutosh. "Ethnic Conflict and Civil Society: India and Beyond". World Politics, Vol.53, No.3 (2001): 362-398.

• Interethnic relations can consist of either associational connections, like clubs or shared professional groups, or everyday connections (370). Of these, associational connections provide more robust defenses against ethnic conflict; people are more likely to turn against neighbors than fellows in voluntary organizations (363, 375).
• Everyday connections enable the creation of neighborhood committees formed during rioting to prevent violence and kill harmful rumors; these organizations could not exist within basic connections between different communities. Associational connections link the economic and professional interests of different communities (375).
• The existence of a robust interethnic civil society will not guarantee that ethnic violence does not occur, it simply increases the general ability of the community to absorb ethnic tensions without collapsing. The strength of interethnic civil society affects the ability of societies to absorb these tensions (379).
• The contemporary system of civil societies in India came into being in the 1920s based around the two goals of gaining Indian independence and the social improvement of India. Most major Indian civil society organizations were created between the 1920s and the 1940s (363).
• Modern civil society emerged in India during the 1920s because it was during that time that Mahatma Gandhi became a major force in Indian politics, encouraging the transformation of Indian political life into mass politics; prior to this point, Indian politics was extremely elitist, with the Indian National Congress being a small group of English-speaking lawyers isolated from the mass of India. While Congress became a mass political organization, Mahatma Gandhi's call for the social transformation of India was championed by a plethora of voluntary organizations formed during this period (390).
• Communal violence and ethnic riots between Hindus and Muslims in India is overwhelmingly concentrated in urban areas, not villages. Moreover, only 8 cities -- Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Aligarh, Hyderabad, Meerut, Baroda, Kolkata, and Delhi -- make up almost half of all deaths from Hindu-Muslim riots between 1950 and 1995. Ethnic violence is thus concentrated in specific communities which experience it as a recurrent trend (371-373).
• Cities are likely to be the site of more ethnic violence than villages because it is more difficult to maintain connections between urbanites. As the population increases, more connections are needed to link everyone in a community, leading to more pairs of individuals from different communities without connections (376-377).
• Some scholars theorize that areas with larger Muslim populations are more likely to experience communal violence, either because their presence creates a demographic fear among Hindu politicians who react with violence, or because their increased value in elections leads politicians to pander to Muslim interests, thus discouraging Muslim leaders from fully integrating themselves into Hindu communities (373-374).
• Communal violence in Indian cities is enabled by the presence of connections between violent street gangs and politicians. These gangs receive political protection from politicians and in turn provide a readily mobilized violent group to jump start or intensify riots and ethnic violence. If politicians benefit from political polarization, then these groups are an asset (378).
• Aligarh, in Uttar Pradesh, and Kozhikode, in Karela, are both major urban centers with approximately 40% Muslim minorities and a Hindu majority. During the national controversy between 1989 and 1992 over plans to destroy the Ayodhya mosque, Aligarh experienced multiple communal riots during this period, while Kozhikode did not experience a single riot despite the circulation of numerous inflammatory rumors (380-381).
• Newspapers in Kozhikode investigated stories of inflammatory rumors as they came out, proving them false and printing these findings. Newspapers in Aligarh, on the other hands, printed the most salacious rumors without verification, leading to intensification of violence against Muslims in the city (381).
• Literacy in Kozhikode is among the highest in India, a legacy of civil societies running active literacy programs from the 1930s to the 1950s, and over 90% of denizens read newspapers. While newspaper readership is high among Hindus in Aligarh, fewer than 30% of Muslims read newspapers, mainly depending on word-of-mouth, which is easily manipulated and controlled by vicious rumor (387-388).
• In Aligarh, violent criminals and nationalist thugs had strong connections with both politicians and members of the press, allowing the vast majority of violent crimes to go unpunished and meaning that newspapers generally only reported crimes by the other ethnic group (381-382).
• During the period of intense tensions, multiple 'peace committees' emerged at the local level in Kozhikode to facilitate dialogue between sides and falsify rumors. When local bodies did form in Aligarh, they were neighborhood self-defense organizations of one ethnic group to coordinate defense and retaliation against attacks by other ethnic communities (382).
• In both cases, radical Muslim parties and Hindu nationalist parties, like the BJP, would have benefited politically from increased ethnic tensions. In Kozhikode, however, parties experienced concerns that if they were the first one to break the interethnic peace, they would be politically ostracized. In Aligarh, on the other hand, there was no peace to violate as the community is already polarized, meaning there are no political repercussions for increasing this polarization (383).
• Muslim and Hindu communities in Kozhikode are much more integrated in their social life and everyday interactions than those in Aligarh. Associational groups in Kozhikode are also more common and integrated than in Aligarh, with strong economic and commercial links between communities in Kozhikode (383-385). Laborers are unionized under Communist-affiliated organizations, who are firmly non-sectarian (386).
• Moreover, communities in Aligarh report that segregation has increased since the 1930s, when politicians began employing ethnic gangs and criminals to police neighborhoods, leading to a segregation of the city (384).
• Whereas most economic activity in Kozhikode is commercial and depends on credit relations between Muslim and Hindu traders, Aligarh has a substantial industrial base whose owners are often divided on political-religious lines. Banking and credit networks are religiously segregated (385-386). 
• Surat, in Gujarat, experienced rioting in 1992, its first in decades. The vast majority of the violence did not touch the main city, however, and was overwhelmingly concentrated in the slums surrounding the city. When tensions rose in 1992, the city proper saw the organization of local peace committees to quell rumor and coordinate peaceful responses, whereas the slums collapsed into horrific communal violence (389).
• The presence of civil society organizations on its own is not enough to effect the outbreak of ethnic violence. These organizations must cross across ethnic lines to restrain or calm potential ethnic conflict. Civil society organizations within ethnic groups if anything facilitate ethnic violence during periods of tensions (392).