Riot After Riot: Reports on Caste and Communal Violence in India

The author, one of India’s best-known journalists, visited numerous riot-torn cities, towns and villages-Jamshedpur, Moradabad, Sarhupur, Meerut-to discover what lay behind the outbreaks of communal and caste violence that have taken place in India after partition. In riot after riot, he finds that the basic cause for the communal frenzy is the same: poverty, economic deprivation and a history which has been perverted and misused by religious zealots. M.J. Akbar has the journalist’s eye for the revealing instance, but he also possesses the historian;s sense of the deeper trends-and he uses these gifts to provide an illuminating study of the violence beneath and on the surface of the land of Gandhi.