The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future

Martha Nussbaum's academic study of Hindu nationalism and Indian democracy opens from the anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, treating it as the book's central case study of religious violence directed by Hindu right organizations against a religious minority, and argues that India's legal and political institutions failed to deliver accountability for it. Nussbaum surveys both the Gujarat state government's official casualty count and the higher independent estimate produced by the Concerned Citizens Tribunal, an inquiry convened by retired judges and civil society figures, and situates the violence within the longer history of the Hindu nationalist movement she traces through the rest of the book.