Genocides and Xenophobia in South Asia and Beyond

Rituparna Bhattacharyya holds a PhD from the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, University of Newcastle, UK. She is a senior fellow at Advance HE (formerly Higher Education Academy), UK, and an adjunct professor at Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India. She also works as a research consultant and editor-in-chief (Joint) of the journal Space and Culture, India. She does volunteer work at the Prag Foundation for Capacity Building, a public charitable trust in India, and the Alliance for Community Capacity Building for North East India, a UK-registered charity. She has more than 65 publications to her credit with international publishing houses. Her latest book is Bhattacharyya, R. (2023). North East India Through the Ages: A Transdisciplinary Perspective on Prehistory, History, and Oral History. London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis.

"Across geographies of time and space, including India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, South Africa and Rwanda, the authors reveal how past and present coalesce in powerful and complex ways to manifest in the atrocities of xenophobia and genocide. While the world’s eye is on the Russian-Ukrainian war, with the accompanying genocide in Ukraine, the book is a stark reminder of the fragility of peace, the all too easy negation of the “never again” promise, and of humanity’s unfortunate propensity to decompensate into a brutalizing inhumanity. Against this background is Rwanda’s story of reconciliation, rebuilding and hope that the world might draw lessons from. A must read for anyone with a moral impulse towards an undivided and a more peaceful world!"Dr. Vishanthie Sewpaul, Emeritus Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), South Africa, Professor ii, University of Stavanger, Norway"Xenophobia and Genocide are contentious notions in the wider landscape of mass atrocities and violence. Xenophobia and Genocide in South Asia and Beyond is a provocative collection of substantive and innovative essays on understudied issues that intersect between violence, power, and prejudices in South Asia and beyond. The contributors to the volume use lesser known and some popular case studies across spatial landscapes to present a critical narrative of existing and emerging mass atrocities. In the process, these scholars critically re-examine and provide innovative analyses of the conceptual notions of Xenophobia and Genocide even as they consider established institutional perspectives. The essays brilliantly challenge our existing notions of atrocities and violence and stimulate our understanding of the same. To that end, the book is a necessary read for students, researchers, and practitioners who wish to become familiar with the critical attributes of violence (emerging from economic effects of debt, fiscal deficits, capital flows, international trade, militarization, and globalization) as it manipulates consent and challenges democratic norms in places."Dr Rajiv Thakur, Associate Professor of Geography, Missouri State University, West Plains and AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow - USAID"This is a wonderful collection of thought-provoking eleven chapters, discussing very relevant and timely needed topics. It will prove to be a significant contribution to the critical understanding of the cases of Xenophobia and Genocide in five countries. The book will be handy and highly useful for the academic community."Dr Subhash Anand, Professor, Department of Geography, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, Delhi - 110007, India.

• List of Figures List of Tables Foreword List of Contributors Acknowledgements 1 Understanding Xenophobia and Genocide RITUPARNA BHATTACHARYYA2 Nationalisms On(the)line: New Media and the Fanning of Fear and Xenophobia APARAJITA DE AND VIVEK TRIPATHI3 The Alchemy of a Sectarian Riot: New Delhi, 2020 AJOY ASHIRWAD MAHAPRASHASTA4 Genocide of Kashmiri Pandits KULBHUSHAN WARIKOO5 Narratives, Violence and Consent: The Normalisation of State Violence in Jammu and Kashmir DEVIKA MITTAL6 Communal Riot, Pogrom, or Genocide? Framing and Naming the Anti-Sikh Violence of Delhi 1984 SILVIA TIERI7 Is Assam Under the Shackle of a Silent Genocide? RITUPARNA BHATTACHARYYA AND PRANJIT KUMAR SARMA8 ‘Recovering Violent Pasts’: Revisiting moments of Xenophobic Violence and Uprooting from Partitioned North-East India BINAYAK DUTTA9 Genocide in Sylhet during the Liberation War of Bangladesh TULSHI KUMAR DAS AND MOHAMMAD JAHIRUL HOQUE10 Ethnic Violence in Sri Lanka: Politics of Sinhala- Tamil Tensions ROSHNI KAPUR AND AMIT RANJAN11 Xenophobia in South Africa: Can this Morph into Genocide? BRIJ MAHARAJ AND STEVEN LAWRENCE GORDON12 1994 Rwanda Holocaust: A Critical Analysis of Xenophobia Mutating to Genocide against the Tutsi RITUPARNA BHATTACHARYYA, VENKAT RAO PULLA, CHARLES KALINGANIRE, AND GASPARD RWANYIZIRIIndex