This article offers an alternative framework for understanding ‘communal’ conflict in India. Largely because recurring sectarian conflicts involve groups whose boundaries are demarcated by religion, most scholars have focused their attention on either specific religious doctrines or the policy of secularism to explain the phenomenon. In this article it is argued that significance of religion, secularism or anti-secularism has been overemphasized in the interpretation of communal conflict in India. The concept of ‘racialization’ is deployed to argue that in India communal identities have in fact been ‘racialized’ and recurring conflicts share striking structural and ideological similarities with racial conflicts in other parts of the world. A historical narrative of the political process of ‘racialization’ of identities in India is offered with the aim of re-thinking existing explanations of such conflicts.
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