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A key theme that emerged from the previous qualitative studies is that entrepreneurs of hate construct inter-group relations in such a way that under certain conditions, extreme hostilities or the sanctioning of such violence against ‘enemy’ out-groups are celebrated. It has been contended that these exclusionary conditions emerge from a combination of two things: a) Out-group threat; and b) A virtuous in-group.

The ways in which this internal moral logic that leads up to such a violent conclusion is constructed have been analysed and discussed in the previous chapters. Largely, it is exemplified in poster no. 11 of the first qualitative study in this thesis (p. 66). Recall the poster of a Hindu king chopping off the hands of a Muslim butcher with the caption, “cow-killer deserves to be slain”. This is also seen in other forms in the exhortation of the political leader’s speech in chapter 3 (the second qualitative study of this thesis). Hence, violence becomes virtuous when it is directed against out-groups that threaten a virtuous in-group.

Yet to show that this is how leaders seek to motivate out-group hatred by analysing discourse is not the same as demonstrating that such constructions are effective in creating out-group hatred in the population, or that such conditions will lead to demands

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for hostile measures and behaviours against the Muslim out-group. Hence, the aim of this study is to provide experimental data for the contention that the worst or the most stringent forms of repression and suppression happen when an in-group norm of virtue is made salient in conjunction with the presence of out-group threat. In research terms, this study aims to experimentally demonstrate that an in-group norm of tolerance would predict higher violence under conditions of threat, than when the in-group norm is not of tolerance.

4.1.1

The cultural context for the present study:

Since the experiment was to be conducted in India, a cultural understanding of Hindu (Indian) in-group norms and commonly held stereotypical notions of the particular ways in which Muslims threaten the in-group was drawn upon to design materials for the two Independent factors of the experiment. The Dependent Variables outlining various methods for ‘effective’ suppression and repression of Muslim ‘menace’ were also developed from themes that emerged from the qualitative studies and from the researcher’s cultural experience. Presented below is a background to the development of the materials:

Independent factors: Virtuous in-group:

“India and Hindu are often equated when defining Indian culture, whose core characteristics are most often taken to be Hindu” writes David Ludden in the introduction to his incisively titled edited book ‘Making India Hindu’ (Ludden, 2005, p. 4). The Indian in-group is constituted as essentially virtuous and pious and is posited with qualities that are thought to be uniquely linked with Hinduism (see 3.2.1 of this thesis). In particular, ‘tolerance’ has been emphasized as the basic strain of Hindu civilization. It is to be noted that in the Indian context, ‘tolerance’ is not understood as a negative term but has

strongly moral and positive connotations reflective of Gandhian principles of respect for peaceful coexistence among religious groups informed by the notion that the ‘Hindu civilization is basically tolerant’(Veer, 1996). Hence, for this experiment the in-group

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norm manipulation was designed to appear Indian with tolerance as the distinctively Hindu characteristic.

Threat:

Extensive studies have been conducted on the impact of realistic threats and symbolic threats, and symbolic threats have consistently been shown to evoke strident reactions as opposed to realistic threats (Pereira, Vala, & Leyens, 2009; Riek, Mania, & Gaertner, 2006; Schneider, 2008; González et al., 2008). However, for the purposes of this experiment, we decided to use realistic threat as an independent variable since the experiment was to be conducted with an impressionable population that would have been directly susceptible to accepting hate discourse without a critical lens. Therefore, we drew on realistic threats from the previous qualitative studies to formulate the items.

A common anti-Muslim joke is ‘us five, ours twenty-five’ (Pandey, 2006; Sarkar, 1996), usually caricatured by a figure of a Muslim man surrounded by 4 wives with twenty-five children. This stereotype is rooted in the provisions of the Muslim Personal Law in India that allows for polygamy. As noted in the prologue this particular construction of numerical strength of out-group threat was also used in the leaflets that were distributed in preparation for the Gujarat carnage (see prologue of this thesis). The notion that the Muslims are reproducing and increasing their numerical strength exponentially is a recurrent theme in the hate rhetoric of Hindutva (see 3.2.3.1 of

previous chapter).

Also, in a set of posters that were put up in the same tent as the posters that was used for data analysis in the first study, a series of the ‘increase in Muslim and Christian numbers’ was presented as ‘facts’ that were then reinforced with statistical figures. These posters were sprinkled with official-looking figures with one punchy headline, capturing the apparent meaning of all those numbers. The numbers were faded prints of district-wise data, but only just, to fit the official look of mouldy Government documents. It was captioned: Increase in Muslim and Christian population and it’s influence on elections.

This fear of the purported increase in Muslim population (Bhagat & Praharaj, 2005) is linked with the notion of the ‘Muslim’ vote as one consolidated political identity

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(Varshney, 2002) as opposed to the loosely based Hindu identity, deeply divided on caste, regional and linguistic lines (Datta, 1993). This idea that the community votes as a single bloc of voters is what is referred to as ‘vote bank’ politics.30 _{That the Muslims with their}

‘vote-bank’ politics will come to ‘influence’ (or, if one is to accept the Hindutva propaganda, have already started influencing) core issues with greater political clout than the relatively loosely defined majoritarian Hindus is a cause of perpetual panic for most Hindu-Indian citizens. Inculcating and mobilizing the fear of this projected influence of the ‘Other’ on a range of issues from greater electoral power than Hindus to cultural dominance over the Hindus is therefore, central to the threat discourse, and most in India would recognize Muslim ‘influence’ as a code for threat.

Dependent Variables:

Extreme acts of hatred have a strong ‘moral’ component. In the trajectory of combining the in-group virtue of tolerance with a fearsome out-group threat, aggression against the out-group is defended in terms of ‘tolerance’ of the in-group. In other words, since the very value of tolerance is under threat of annihilation, it is in defence of the Hindu nation

that tolerance must be substituted with intolerance. Entrepreneurs incite a range of hostile

behaviours from the in-group members as ‘reasonable reactions’, and a complex mix of emotions like anger, frustration, humiliation are mobilized in the service of sanctioning hostility against the out-group (see 3.2.3 of this thesis) The one used to justify the anti- Muslim pogrom in Gujarat of 2002, for instance, was of provoked ‘spontaneous Hindu outrage’. The other instances call for direct violence, active repression, and cultural suppression. For example, a Hindu ideologues’ call to stop all financial and business transactions with the Muslim community (see chapter 3 of this thesis) or a woman ideologues’ exhort to curb inter-mixing between Hindu and Muslim communities especially Hindu women and Muslim men (see chapter 3 of this thesis). For dependent variables, an affect scale measuring anti-Muslim feeling was developed with items culled from previous qualitative research and a few from previously tested studies in India (Tausch et al., 2009). 12 Action-statement items were put together informed by the ‘appropriate’ reactions that have been proposed by the Hindutva ideologues.

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4.1.2

Hypothesis:

An interaction effect (Virtue X Threat) is predicted on the DV’s. In research design terms, in the conditions with out-group threat present, there will be more

(a) negative feelings towards Muslims (b) cultural suppression of Muslims (c) repressive action against Muslims (d) sanctioned violence against Muslims;

in the condition of in-group virtue than the condition with no in-group virtue.