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POLITICS OF SOUTH ASIA

Religion, Extremism and

Violence in South Asia
Edited by Imran Ahmed · Zahid Shahab Ahmed ·
Howard Brasted · Shahram Akbarzadeh
 Politics of South Asia

Series Editors
Sumit Ganguly, Department of Political Science, Indiana University
Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA
Ronojoy Sen, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of
Singapore, Singapore, Singapore
Neil DeVotta, Department Politics and International Affairs, Wake
Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA
Katharine Adeney, School of Politics & International Relations,
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
This book series focuses on the contemporary politics of South Asia. To
that end it covers a range of subjects including but not limited to elec-
toral politics, party systems, political economy, social movements, ethnic
and religious conflicts, foreign policy, inter-state dynamics and migra-
tion. Publications in the series are theoretically grounded with intellectual
rigor, combining propositions from the fields of political science and
international relations, with sound regional and area knowledge.
The series publishes full-length monographs, edited volumes, as well
as shorter Palgrave Pivots, that are cutting edge, as well as accessible.

More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15911
 Imran Ahmed · Zahid Shahab Ahmed ·
Howard Brasted · Shahram Akbarzadeh
Editors

Religion, Extremism
and Violence in South
Asia
Editors
Imran Ahmed Zahid Shahab Ahmed
Institute of South Asian Studies Alfred Deakin Institute
National University of Singapore Deakin University
Singapore, Singapore Burwood, VIC, Australia

Howard Brasted Shahram Akbarzadeh

University of New England Alfred Deakin Institute
Armidale, NSW, Australia Deakin University
Burwood, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2523-8345 ISSN 2523-8353 (electronic)

Politics of South Asia
ISBN 978-981-16-6846-3 ISBN 978-981-16-6847-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6847-0

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Elvele Images Limited/Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore
189721, Singapore
 Acknowledgements

We are thankful to all who have been involved in this project from
the beginning. This project started through panels on ‘Violent religious
extremism in South Asia’, organised parallel to the second biennial confer-
ence of the Middle East Studies Forum at Deakin University in 2018. We
appreciate the effort of all speakers who travelled from across Australia
and abroad to participate in our panels. We are indebted to the confer-
ence committee comprising of Professor Shahram Akbarzadeh, Dr. Zahid
Shahab Ahmed, Dr. Dara Conduit and Safiullah Taye for organising an
excellent event. This would not have been possible without the generous
financial support of Deakin University and University of New England,
Australia.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Howard Brasted, Imran Ahmed, Zahid Shahab Ahmed,
and Shahram Akbarzadeh
2 Colonial Transformations, Postcolonial Afterlives:
Extremism, Exclusion and Distrust in India
and Pakistan 25
Imran Ahmed
3 Religion, Extremism and Buddhist–Muslim Relations
in Sri Lanka 45
DB Subedi
4 Social Media and Hindu Extremism in India 71
Stuti Bhatnagar
5 Ram Was a Prophet Too: Syncretism as a Hindu
Nationalist Political Strategy 101
Felix Pal
6 Islamic State’s Recruitment Strategies: The Case
Study of Bangladesh 121
Shafi Md Mostofa and Howard Brasted

vii
viii CONTENTS

7 Religious Extremism and Terrorist Recruitment: The

Case of Al Qaeda in Bangladesh 143
Shafi Md Mostofa
8 Mobilising to Counter Violent Extremism in Pakistan:
Innovative Undertakings of Non-state Actors 165
Anita M. Weiss
9 Between God, the Nation, and the State: Paradoxes
of Islamisation in Pakistan 185
Imran Ahmed
10 Women and Violent Extremism in Pakistan: A Critical
Assessment of Policies and Actions 213
Farah Naz and Zahid Shahab Ahmed

Index 237
 Notes on Contributors

Imran Ahmed received his Ph.D. from the University of New England
(Australia) and is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of South
Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Dr. Ahmed writes on
religion, law and politics in late-colonial India and contemporary Pakistan.
His current research projects focus on religion, constitution-making, and
blasphemy in South Asia. He has published in leading international jour-
nals in history, politics and law including South Asia, the Journal of
Contemporary Asia, Third World Quarterly, The Round Table, Griffith
Law Review and the Journal of Law, Religion and State.
Zahid Shahab Ahmed received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the
University of New England (Australia) and is a Research Fellow at Deakin
University in Australia. He studies politics, foreign affairs and regional
organisations in South Asia and the Middle East. During 2017–2019, he
was a non-resident research fellow with the University of Southern Cali-
fornia’s Center on Public Diplomacy. Prior to joining Deakin University
in 2016, he was an Assistant Professor at the Centre for International
Peace and Stability, National University of Sciences and Technology,
Pakistan. He is the author of Regionalism and Regional Security in
South Asia: The Role of SAARC (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013) and has
published in numerous international journals, such as Politics and Reli-
gion, Asian Studies Review, Third World Quarterly, and Territory, Politics,
Governance. He is the secretary of the South Asian Studies Association

ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

of Australia and an executive board member of the International Peace

Research Association Foundation.
Shahram Akbarzadeh is Professor of Middle East and Central Asian
studies at Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University (Australia). He
researches political Islam and regional politics. He has an extensive publi-
cation track record, including the Routledge Handbook on Political Islam
and the Routledge Handbook on International Relations in the Middle
East. He has recently completed a collaborative project on proxy wars in
the Middle East and Central Asia, sponsored by Carnegie Corporation
NY.
Stuti Bhatnagar is a Sessional Academic with the University of New
South Wales, Sydney and an adjunct fellow at the University of Adelaide.
She also serves as the Executive Officer—South Asian Studies Associa-
tion of Australia (SASAA) and as the Social Media Editor for South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies. With a Ph.D. in politics and international
relations from the University of Adelaide, she specialises in Indian foreign
policy and South Asian politics. She has several peer-reviewed academic
publications to her credit and is the author of India’s Pakistan Policy:
How Think Tanks Are Shaping Foreign Relations published by Routledge
in 2020.
Howard Brasted is Emeritus Professor of history and Islamic studies in
the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and co-Director of the
Asia Pacific Centre for research at the University of New England (UNE),
Armidale, Australia. A long-time Editor of the journal South Asia (1984–
2001) and coordinator of the postgraduate programme in Islamic studies
at UNE (1994–2020), he has published widely on a range of themes
including Indian nationalism, decolonisation in South Asia, labour stan-
dards in Asia, and Islam in South Asian politics. Currently researching in
the field of Islamic radicalisation, his recent publications on that theme
include: A New World Disorder in the Making?, Revisiting S.P. Hunt-
ington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” Thesis, and Recognition and Dissent:
Constitutional Design and Religious Conflict in Pakistan. He is currently
working with a collaborative team on a Routledge Handbook project on
‘Populism in Asia’.
Shafi Md Mostofa (Ph.D.) is a theologian and security studies scholar
with broad interests in political Islam, authoritarianism, modern South
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi

Asian history and politics, and international relations and clash of civil-
isations. He is an Assistant Professor of World Religions and Culture
at Dhaka University’s Faculty of Arts and an Adjunct Lecturer of the
University of New England, Australia. He has published extensively
with Routledge, Springer, Cambridge University Press, Oxford Univer-
sity Press, Wiley and Blackwell, SAGE; and the journals: Politics and
Religion, Politics and Policy, Asian and African Studies, Perspectives
on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Terrorist Analyses, and Peace and
Conflict Review. His forthcoming single-authored book with Palgrave is
on Islamist Militancy in Bangladesh: A Pyramid Root Cause Model.
Farah Naz received her doctorate in Government and International Rela-
tions from the University of Sydney and is an Assistant Professor at
the Department of Government and Public Policy, National University
of Sciences and Technology, Pakistan. She has presented and published
extensively on gender issues, radicalisation and violent extremism,
terrorism, militant groups and their target types and foreign policy issues.
She has recently published a book COVID-19 Challenges for Pakistan
and her another book Pakistan Under Hybrid War is coming soon. Dr.
Naz is also a member of the National Security Expert Advisory Group to
the Prime Minister Office Government of Pakistan. She has served as an
academic staff at the University of Sydney, Australian Catholic University
and Macquarie University.
Felix Pal is a Ph.D. candidate at the Australian National University’s
Department of Political and Social Change. They have a B.A. (Islamic
Studies) from the University of Melbourne (2015), and a B.A. (Asia-
Pacific Studies) (Hons) from the ANU (2016). Their academic interests
centre around the contemporary far-right Hindu nationalist movement
in India, focusing specifically on organisational ties within the move-
ment, and its relationship with India’s minorities. More broadly, Felix
is interested in contemporary Indian politics, ethnic conflict, far-right
organisational networks, and contemporary South Asian Islamic thought.
Felix’s Ph.D. dissertation explores the politics of pluralism within far-right
movements building on extensive fieldwork with the Muslim Rashtriya
Manch, the Muslim wing of the militantly Islamophobic Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). Suggesting that pluralist ideals can be repur-
posed for bigoted agendas, Felix’s work proposes a rethink of how the
contemporary far-right engages with progressive thought.
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

DB Subedi is a postdoctoral research fellow in sociology and peace

studies in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at
the University of New England in Australia. His current research
project examines the interface between right-wing politics and religious
extremism and its implications for peace, social cohesion, social justice
and statebuilding in South Asia. He is the author of Combatants to Civil-
ians (Palgrave, 2018) and co-editor of Reconciling in Conflict-Affected
Communities (Springer, 2018).
Anita M. Weiss received her doctorate in sociology from UC Berkeley
and is professor of International and Global Studies at the University of
Oregon. She has published extensively on social development, gender
issues, and political Islam in Pakistan. She has published eight books,
the most recent being Countering Violent Extremism in Pakistan: Local
Actions, Local Voices (Oxford University Press, 2020), which identifies
the various ways in which local people are responding to the violent
extremism that has manifested in Pakistan, recapturing their culture,
finding the ‘sparks of hope’ to counter extremism, and creating alternative
narratives about culture and identity. Professor Weiss is the former Head
of her department. She has been a member of the Research Advisory
Board of the Pakistan National Commission on the Status of Women,
a member of several editorial boards, and actively involved with the
International Studies Association.
 List of Figures

Fig. 8.1 Explosions in Pakistan, 2010–2018 166

Fig. 8.2 Early stencils used to cover hate language, painted
late at night on the walls of Karachi, Rang de Karachi
(Courtesy Munawar Ali Syed) 171
Fig. 8.3 Larger stencils promoting peace in Karachi, Purskoon
Karachi 173
Fig. 8.4 Munawar Ali Syed checking the quality of a stencil,
Purskoon Karachi 173
Fig. 8.5 Various activities of Reimagining the Walls of Karachi;
Munawar Ali Syed sitting in front of a painting, lower right 175
Fig. 8.6 Before and after, reimagining the walls of Karachi project 176
Fig. 8.7 Walls of Peace 177

xiii
 List of Tables

Table 4.1 Social media followers of prominent political parties

and figures in India 88
Table 10.1 Research participants 218

xv
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Howard Brasted, Imran Ahmed, Zahid Shahab Ahmed,

and Shahram Akbarzadeh

Religious extremism is among the most pertinent challenges to state and

society in the contemporary world. While it is a global phenomenon and
the subject of considerable academic scholarship and journalistic inquiry,
in South Asia those challenges manifest in equally deadly but often decid-
edly different ways. Whether it is the coordinated suicide attacks allegedly

H. Brasted (B)
University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia
e-mail: hbrasted@une.edu.au
I. Ahmed
Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore,
Singapore
e-mail: iahmed@nus.edu.sg
Z. S. Ahmed · S. Akbarzadeh
Alfred Deakin Institute, Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia
e-mail: zahid.ahmed@deakin.edu.au
S. Akbarzadeh
e-mail: shahram.akbarzadeh@deakin.edu.au

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
I. Ahmed et al. (eds.), Religion, Extremism and Violence in South Asia,
Politics of South Asia,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6847-0_1
2 H. BRASTED ET AL.

orchestrated by the Pakistani-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) on the Indian

parliament in 2001 and the central business district of Mumbai in 2008,
or the ‘epidemic’ of ‘mob’ lynching of Muslims in 2017–2018 carried
out by Hindu extremists in India under the guise of enforcing doctrines
of cow protection,1 or the murderous assault by Bangladeshi militants in
2016 on the Holey Artisan Café in Dhaka in which 29 people, mainly
tourists, were killed, or the Sinhala Buddhist attacks on Muslims in Sri
Lanka in the wake of the 2019 Easter bombings by an Islamist militant
group on Christian Churches that killed several hundred worshippers,2
few challenges create violent conflict as fervently as religious extremism
does in the region. The question is in what ways and why? The papers
in this collection are designed to provide some of the answers. While
religious extremism can manifest in a variety of forms—political, social,
theological—and be activated for quite different reasons, it is the political
dimension of religion and violence that informs much of their treatment.
To date Islamic militancy has been the focus of much of the literature,
and research has often been framed by questions and assumptions guided
by the West’s ‘war on terror’. While Middle Eastern reference points have
understandably attracted most attention because of this, in the context of
terrorism and counterterrorism it is Pakistan that has begun to be cited
as the epicentre of global terrorism.3 Because of Pakistan’s known ties
to Muslim terrorist groups the suspicion has grown that it is actually a
training entrepot for terrorists, and as such might better have qualified
for President George W Bush’s ‘axis of evil,’ than topping his ‘A list’
of anti-terrorist partners.4 Bangladesh, the third largest Muslim majority
country in the world, has been touted to join it as a comparable ‘hotspot’

1 Cassie Adcock and Radhika Govindrajan, “Bovine Politics in South Asia: Rethinking
Religion, Law and Ethics,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42, no. 6 (2019):
1095–1107.
2 Siobhán O’Grady, “‘Hundreds of Pieces of One Person’: The Death Toll
in Sri Lanka Was Wrong—This Might Be Why,” The Washington Post, April
25, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/04/26/hundreds-pieces-one-
person-death-toll-sri-lanka-was-wrong-this-might-be-why/.
3 P. Sakthivel and P. Sakthival, “Terrorism in India: The Unholy Neighbours,” The
Indian Journal of Political Science 71, no. 1 (2010): 159–161.
4 Rohan Gunaratna and Khuram Iqbal, Pakistan: Terrorism Ground Zero (London:
Reaktion Books, 2012); Leon T. Hadar, “If Iraq, Iran, and North Korea Are the “Axis of
Evil,” Why Is Pakistan an Ally?,” Cato Institute, February 28, 2002, https://www.cato.
org/publications/commentary/iraq-iran-north-korea-are-axis-evil-why-is-pakistan-ally.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

for terrorist incubation and export.5 Supplying mujahideen (soldiers of

God) in helping eject the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in the 1980s
and in aiding and abetting the Taliban to impose a fundamentalist form
of government in Kabul, Pakistan and Bangladesh have subsequently
faced increasing religious pressure themselves to radicalise along similar
lines. How they respond to this challenge is an unfolding story that will
doubtless impact South Asia as a whole.
But what also makes religious extremism in South Asia worthy of
investigation in its own right is that it is not only the home of the
largest concentrations of Muslims in the world, it is also the birthplace
of Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. In Huntington-esque terms, South
Asia uniquely provides fault-lines of religious intensity and inter-action. A
study of religious extremism in South Asia that re-examines conventional
wisdom about its underpinnings and motivations has much to offer and
not simply in the cause of countering radicalisation and serving coun-
terterrorism. It also presents complex political, sociological, historical and
legal debates on the role of religion in politics and pertinent case studies
of the complex process of radicalisation.
In the generalist literature—especially in the aftermath of 9/11—much
of the investigative focus has centred on uncovering the ‘broad-spectrum’
nature of the relationship between religion and violence and identifying
the causal intersections between them. In this global project the exam-
ination of religious extremism and its association with terrorism and
violence has not to date extended to detailed geographic investigation.
This is certainly true of the monumental The Oxford Handbook on Reli-
gion and Violence (2016 ed.), which legitimately claims to be the first
‘Road Map’ of this particular field of study.6 In what is undoubtedly
a panoramic guide, this volume looks at every major religious tradition
through a range of disciplinary lenses and analytical angles to provide
generic clues about why religions can inspire and indeed justify various
forms of violent action. These can vary from individual acts of killing to
large scale outbreaks of warfare, including references to and depictions of

5 By Staff, “Bangladesh, New Epicentre of Terror: Jaswant,” OneIndia, June

2, 2008, https://www.oneindia.com/2008/06/02/bangladesh-new-epicentre-of-terror-
jaswant-1212406623.html.
6 Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts and Michael Jerryson, eds., The Oxford Handbook
of Religion and Violence (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3.
4 H. BRASTED ET AL.

the ultimate sacred battle predicted in both ancient and present-day apoc-
alyptic religiously inspired narratives.7 To be fought-out between good
and evil, between the forces of belief and the followers of the devil, this
cosmic battle is predicted to destroy the current world order and replace
it with a single religious civilisation. Depending on the origin of the end-
time story in question, the post apocalypse civilisation will be entirely
Christian, Islamic or Judaic.8
What emerges very clearly from the 40 chapters in The Oxford Hand-
book of Religion and Violence is that while violence may not be intrinsic
to any religion, it enduringly pervades their sacred texts, their images and
their practices, and can be invoked in the name of god or gods to legit-
imise or cloak often less than holy pursuits.9 Religion may not ‘ordinarily’
cause violence,10 but it is never far removed from worldly matters that
can.11 Issues such as, for example, the essence of national identity, the
basis of moral society, the place of religion in public life, the globalisa-
tion of secular international rules and standards are almost guaranteed to
generate religious, often violent, responses. Empirical evidence suggests
that there is a direct correlation between religiously inspired violence and
the growing apprehension, certainly in poorly governed countries, that
the world is going awry and needs to be put right and suitably in accor-
dance with the ways religious texts lay down. Secular forms of government
have been facing mounting pressure from religious parties, particularly in
Muslim majority states, demanding their eradication and the installation

7 Mark Juergensmeyer, “Religious Terrorism as Performance Violence,” in The Oxford

Handbook of Religion and Violence, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts and Michael
Jerryson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 281–286.
8 See Chapters 6 And 7 in this collection.
9 Juergensmeyer, Kitts and Jerryson, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence.
10 Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence,
4th ed. (Oakland: California University Press, 2017), 10.
11 In a comprehensive review of literature on religious fundamentalism and religious
extremism, Ahmed and Bashirov trace roots of religious fundamentalism and religiously
motivated violence in some of the most prominent religions like Islam, Christianity,
Judaism and Hinduism. They argue that “in contrast to other religions, it is Islamic
fundamentalism that is widely considered to be prone to violence, so much so that Islam
equals fundamentalism equals violence in popular parlance”. Zahid Shahab Ahmed and
Galib Bashirov, “Religious Fundamentalism and Violent Extremism,” in The Difficult Task
of Peace: Crisis, Fragility and Conflict in an Uncertain World, ed. Francisco Rojas-Aravena
(Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 245–260.
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

of constitutions that enshrine the place and role of religion in politics

and society.12 These demands are increasingly being made not necessarily
through democratic channels but also and increasingly on the streets.
All this places a premium on relating actual outbreaks of violence in
the name of religion to the specific contexts in which they occurred.
What were the actual circumstances that led to these events, carried
them along, and conceivably explain them? This set of essays rests on
the basis that South Asia, as a geographic region, provides an often-
clearer testing ground for the application of theory and the provision of
specific disciplinary case studies than almost anywhere else in the world
of investigative scholarship. It arguably did so with respect to both the
phenomenon of decolonisation—a process deemed to have begun with
the ending of British empire in India—and the development of subaltern
studies or the study of nationalist politics from below, and the transfor-
mative part the peasantry and proletariat played in that history. That said,
the wide-ranging, ostensibly definitive The Oxford Handbook of Religion
and Violence hardly touches on South Asia at all. Apart from a general
overview of the religious traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism
in the first part of the book, there are no specific chapters on South Asia
in this otherwise comprehensive volume.13
Much the same can be said of The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism
(2019). In a study of encyclopaedic scale, The Oxford Handbook of
Terrorism does mention the coordinated 4-day attacks in 2008 on a
variety of public places in Mumbai by the Pakistan-based Islamist terrorist
LeT. But in a book of 795 pages, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Sri
Lanka do not rate more than a few passing references.14 There is a chapter
on ‘Terrorism in Asia’, but its emphasis is on violent ‘Islamic extremism’
and its particular role in the ‘upsurge’ in the region of ‘militant ideology

12 Imran Ahmed and Howard V. Brasted, “Recognition and Dissent: Constitutional

Design and Religious Conflict in Pakistan,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 51, no.
2 (2021): 351–367.
13 Juergensmeyer, Kitts and Jerryson, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence.
14 Erica Chenowtha, Richard English, Andreas Gofas and Stathis Kalyvas, eds., The
Oxford Handbook of Terrorism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
6 H. BRASTED ET AL.

that sanctifies violence’. While it is acknowledged that this kind of reli-

gious activism extends beyond Asia’s Muslim communities, non-Muslim
forms of it are really only pointed to in passing.15
In the latest 4th edition of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise
of Religious Violence (2017), Mark Juergensmeyer includes a new section
on Hindu violence to a chapter originally entitled ‘The Sword of Sikhism’,
which analyses the Sikh separatist movement and its involvement in the
assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the Chief Minister of Punjab,
Beant Singh, in 1995; although both acts emerge as more politically than
religiously driven. The updated chapter—‘The Spear of Shiva, The Sword
of Sikhism’—adds the story of the brutal murder and removal of thou-
sands of Muslims living on the outskirts of Ahmedabad in 2002 and the
role and possible complicity of Narendra Modi, formerly a Hindu nation-
alist hardliner and Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time, in fomenting
this ‘carnage’.16 Traced back to the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque
in 1992 by extremist Hindus and the months of communal violence
that ensued, the Gujarat massacre takes place against the background
of the Hindu nationalist ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
(RSS), the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Hindutva
agenda which they promoted. But whether this history and the ‘threat
of religious politics’ it presages can be classified in terms of ‘terrorism’,
‘religious violence’ or ‘ethnic cleaning’ Juergensmeyer leaves somewhat
open-ended.17

II
While providing the detailed regional contexts of violent conflict, the
South Asia specific literature does not normally extend its treatment
of religious extremism to the global sphere or venture a model of

15 Brahma Chellaney, “Terrorism in Asia: A Rapidly Spreading Scourge Tests the

Region,” in The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism, ed. Erica Chenowth, Richard English,
Andreas Gofas and Stathis Kalyvas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 590–606.
16 Mark Juergensmeyer, “The Spear of Shiva, the Sword of Sikhism,” in Terror in the
Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, 4th ed. (Oakland: California Univer-
sity Press, 2017); Zahid Shahab Ahmed and Rajeshwari Balasubramanian, Extremism in
Pakistan and India: The Case of the Jamaat-E-Islami and Shiv Sena (Colombo: Regional
Centre for Strategic Studies, 2010), 12.
17 Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 104.
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

universal explanation based on any perceived trans-national ramifica-

tions. The exception, perhaps, is John Braithwaite and Bina D’Costa’s
Cascades of Violence: War, Crime and Peace-building Across South Asia
(2018), which uses South Asia to identify general preconditions and
patterns of violence.18 Drawing on dozens of multi-layered conflicts in
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Bhutan and
Myanmar since 1947, Braithwaite and D’Costa construct a conceptual
framework of ‘violence’ that has relevance not only to South Asia, but
also internationally beyond it.19 This model of violence, however, is not
so much about religious extremism per se as about how violence of any
kind tends to multiply and ‘cascade’ with cumulative effect.
By and large the literature on South Asia does confirm that religious
related violence manifests in as deadly a fashion as has been shown else-
where in the world, and arguably on occasion more so. Examples of
violent extremism in South Asia are always on a large scale, involving as
they do some of the most heavily populated countries in the world. None
was larger than the massacre of over 2 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims
during the 1947 partition of the Indian sub-continent and the creation of
the two separate sovereign states of India and Pakistan, which had osten-
sibly been formed because of irreconcilable social, cultural and religious
differences between Hindus and Muslims. In one of largest transmigra-
tions in history vast numbers of displaced peoples were killed as they
attempted to cross over newly formed borders into either India or West
and East Pakistan. Whatever the causal trigger of this tragedy, not only
were pent-up tensions arising from the politics of separation suddenly
released, but so also perhaps were long-standing if frequently dormant
religious enmities as well.
This foundation history has ever since cast a long and bitter shadow not
only over the relations between India and Pakistan as adjacent nations,
but also communally between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs living within
them. India and Pakistan continue to clash over the latter’s territorial
claim to Jammu and Kashmir, which acceded to India in 1947 despite
its predominantly Muslim population. Having gone to war on four
previous occasions—in 1948, 1965, 1971, and 1999—these two nuclear

18 John Braithwaite and Bina D’Costa, Cascades of Violence: War, Crime and Peace-
building Across South Asia (Canberra: ANU Press, 2018).
19 Braithwaite and D’Costa, Cascades of Violence, xv, 1–4.
8 H. BRASTED ET AL.

armed countries routinely engage in conventional military skirmishes

usually sparked by periodic incursions into Kashmir by Pakistan-based
Islamist terrorist groups, such as the LeT, though more recently Jaish-
e-Muhammed (JeM). Led by a Pakistani cleric, JeM aims to liberate not
only Jammu and Kashmir from Hindu rule, but also India itself.20
Sri Lanka too has experienced decades of violence since becoming inde-
pendent in 1948. In 1983 notably, a civil war broke out between the
Tamil Hindu minority and the Sinhala Buddhist majority, ending with
the military defeat in 2009 of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and
its objective of a separate homeland. In total, upwards of 140,000 people
were killed in the conflict that appears to have been fought, despite the
Aranthalawa killing of 33 Buddhist monks in 1987, largely along national
and ethnic, rather than religious lines. Not so the assault on a mosque by
a Buddhist mob in 2013 or the 2019 coordinated targeting of Christians
and tourists on Easter Sunday by Islamist terrorists linked to the National
Thowheeth Jama’ath. The 253 fatalities that were recorded in April 2019
shattered a relatively lengthy period of communal calm.21
In Myanmar the persecution of Rohingya Muslims by Buddhist nation-
alists and various governments dating back to the 1970s has seemingly
culminated in what the UN has labelled as ‘ethnic cleansing’ and the mass
exodus of over 700,000 Rohingyas into Bangladesh and other neigh-
bouring South East Asian states. Although many Rohingyas have been
able to trace their roots in Myanmar back centuries, both military and
civilian governments have considered them to be illegal immigrants orig-
inally from Muslim Bengal and over the years have refused to grant them
access to citizenship. Recently forced to carry national verification cards,
they are effectively classified as foreigners without basic political rights.22

20 Asad Hashim, “Profile: What Is Jaish-e-Muhammed?,” Al Jazeera, May 2,

2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/02/profile-jaish-muhammad-190215061
851082.html.
21 Michael Safi, “Death Toll in Sri Lanka Bombings Revised Down to 253,”
The Guardian, April 26, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/25/
death-toll-in-sri-lanka-bombings-revised-down-to-253; A. R. Imtiyaz, “The Easter Sunday
Bombings and the Crisis Facing Sri Lanka’s Muslims,” Journal of Asian and African
Studies 55, no. 1 (2020): 3–16.
22 D. B. Subedi and Johanna Garnett, “De-mystifying Buddhist Religious Extremism
in Myanmar: Confrontation and Contestation Around Religion, Development and State-
Building,” Conflict, Security & Development 20, no. 2 (2020): 223–246, https://doi.
org/10.1080/14678802.2020.1739859.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

That any of these outstanding examples of violence by majority reli-

gious communities against minority religious communities can be traced
directly to extreme religious ideologies and motivations remains problem-
atic. Recent examples of communal and ethnic intolerance in South Asia
need to be balanced and weighed up against previous periods of apparent
harmony between Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims. Suffice to say that the
extent and brutality of current intercommunal violence throughout all the
countries making up South Asia fit the generalist overview that religions
themselves are seldom the cause of such violence, though when invoked
to further political agendas or whip up communal antagonisms they have
the propensity to fuel violence on a savage scale.23
While those antagonisms and agendas are likely to stem as much from
temporal as religious considerations and differ country by country and
region by region, the South Asia landscape of extremist religious violence
serves to confirm a number of common salient features. Terrorism
and theology do not generally go hand in hand. From his hideout in
Afghanistan Osama bin Laden, for example, may have based his concept
of offensive jihad against the non-Muslim West on contested passages in
the Qur’an and berated 153 of Saudi Arabia’s leading ulama for not being
able to see that there was no such thing as ‘non-violent’ Islam. There was
only Islam. But his declaration of war against the US and the West and
his call to Muslims to obliterate unbelief in the world, wherever it existed,
appeared conditional rather than ordained. If Europe and even the US
would withdraw completely from the Middle East and guarantee never to
return, Al Qaeda expressed its willingness to call a halt to its campaign of
violence against them.24
Though Jurgensmeyer and his team of researchers have interviewed
an impressive array of religious extremists around the world, the world
views they hold, rather than the particular theologies they may subscribe
to, seem to have underwritten the violent acts they carried out and are
remembered for. This is probably true as well of religious extremists and
the particular parties they belong to in South Asia, though there has been

23 Ishtiaq Ahmed, “The Politics of Religion in South and Southeast Asia,” in The Politics
of Religion in South and Southeast Asia, ed. Ishtiaq Ahmed (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011),
1–12.
24 Howard V. Brasted and Adeel Khan, “Islam and ‘the Clash of Civilizations’? An
Historical Perspective,” in Routledge Handbook of Political Islam, ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 283–285.
10 H. BRASTED ET AL.

no similar attempt to get into their minds and interrogate their motives.
That is a work yet to be done.
Again, in line with generalist trends, research seems to show that what
prompts religious violence, whether in the world at large or for instance
South Asia, is not necessarily any existential threat to Hinduism, Islam and
Buddhism as such, which are certainly not in danger where they are the
unchallenged markers of majoritarian national identity. More often than
not it is every-day economic, social and political factors such as poverty,
unemployment, inequality, state oppression and ethnic rivalry that lie at
the heart of religiously expressed discontent.25 Blame is easily attributed
to a godless world system that so openly privileges the corporate and
capitalist elites, but serves the interests of everybody else—including the
god-faring—so poorly.26
Disgruntled young South Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and
Sri Lankans), not unlike aggrieved Middle Eastern Muslims, can be seen
turning to religion to confront an ‘alien’ secular modernity that glob-
alisation seemingly foists on them from the distant financial centres of
New York, London and Tokyo and which pays no heed to cultural and
customary practices.27 Globalisation in this guise is easily depicted as a
post-colonial form of Western imperial hegemony and exploitation. It
is in this context that the time-honoured calls of ‘Islam in danger’ or
‘Buddhism in danger’ appear to strike a galvanising chord.28

25 Sajid Haider, Carmen de Pablos Heredero, Munir Ahmed and Sumaira Dustgeer,
“Identifying Causes of Terrorism in Pakistan,” The Dialogue 10, no. 3 (2015): 220–236;
Shafi M. Mostofa, “Islamic Militancy in Bangladesh: An Examination of its Cause and
Trajectory (2009–2017)” (PhD diss., University of New England, 2020).
26 James Kenneth Galbraith, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free
Market and Why Liberals Should Too (New York: The Free Press, 2008), 126ff; Joseph
Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited Anti-Globalization in the Era of Trump
(London: Penguin, 2017); S. Winchester, “Power, Ideology and Economic Change: An
Examination of Ideological Perdition Within Western Capitalism” (PhD diss., University
of New England, 2020), 1–18.
27 Jeffrey Haynes, “Religion and Terrorism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism, ed.
Erica Chenowth, Richard English, Andreas Gofas and Stathis Kalyvas (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019), 286–287; Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God, 280–281;
Jamal Malik, “Introduction,” in Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching Terror?, ed. Jamal Malik
(London: Routledge, 2008), 1–22.
28 Meera Nanda, The God Market: How Globalization Is Making India More Hindu
(New York: NYU Press, 2011); Martha C. Nussbaum, The Clash Within: Democracy,
Religious Violence, and India’s Future (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

On the other hand, while also responsive to grievances of this type, the
springs of violent religious extremism can be tapped by fundamentalist
ideology29 and revivalist attempts to restore a more conservative, purer
form of Islam.30 This has certainly been the case in the sub-continent
where madrasa or religious-based grass-roots education is concerned.
There are thousands of such schools in Pakistan and in Bangladesh,
where they are on the increase, but also in India as well.31 Featuring
in the popular imagination as the breeding ground and conduits of
terrorist ideology, madrasas are widely believed to teach a fundamen-
talist version of Islam that feeds into religious extremism and promotes
militancy of a jihadist kind.32 While recent research does not rule this
out, a lot depends on the particular South Asian Islamic sect madrasas
are funded and influenced by: whether the Deobandi who aggressively
promotes a puritanical interpretation of Islam and especially against the
Shias whom it regards as non-Muslims, the Barelvi who inclines to the
more mystical practices of Sufism and until recently eschewed the use
of violence, or the Wahhabi who promotes a Saudi brand of Islam that
strictly adheres to the original texts and the traditions of Muhammad and
is implacably opposed to Islamic modernism.33 With cultural pluralism an
anathema, madrasas have become ‘battlegrounds’ for contesting Muslim

29 Bassam Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics and Europe: Democratic Peace and Euro-
Islam versus Global Jihad (New York: Routledge, 2008), 21, 24, 78, 81; Benjamin
Schreer and Andrew T. H. Tan, eds., Terrorism and Insurgency in Asia: A Contemporary
Examination of Terrorist and Separatist Movements (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019).
30 James Warner Björkman, Fundamentalism Revivalists and Violence in South Asia
(New Delhi: Manohar, 1988); Samina Yasmeen, “Pakistan and the Struggle for “Real”
Islam,” in Islam and Political Legitimacy, ed. Shahram Akbarzadeh and Abdullah Saeed
(New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 70–87.
31 Zakir H. Raju, “Madrasa and Muslim Identity on Screen: Nation, Islam and
Bangladeshi Art Cinema on the Global Stage,” in Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching
Terror?, ed. Jamal Malik (London: Routledge, 2008), 125–141.
32 Sakthivel and Sakthival, “Terrorism in India,” 160–161.
33 Arif Rafiq, “Sunni Deobandi-Shi’i Sectarian Violence in Pakistan. Explaining the
Resurgence Since 2007,” Middle East Institute (December 2014): 9, 21, 29, https://
www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Arif%20Rafiq%20report.pdf.
12 H. BRASTED ET AL.

identities—what is ‘true ‘or ‘false’ Islam34 —and for the dissemination of

anti-minority propaganda.35
Hindus, Sikhs and Christians may not escape demonisation, but the
religious minorities commonly targeted in Pakistan, for instance, are
invariably sectarian: Shia for the most part, the outlawed Ahmadis—both
of whom are regarded by Sunnis as exercising ‘seductive’ power36 —but
also Sufis and any group whose Muslimness is considered question-
able.37 Sectarian violence is fast becoming an ‘indelible’ feature of the
Pakistani landscape.38 Constantly disparaged as non-Muslims by Sunni
extremist groups, the Shias have begun to fightback with force and the
Barelvis, through the recently formed Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, have
employed hate speech against religious minorities and taken to the streets
in furtherance of their views. They spectacularly did so in 2017 when
2,000 supporters marched from Lahore to Islamabad, laying siege to the
capital and securing the resignation of Law Minister Zahid Hamid on the
grounds of blasphemy.39
What emerges very clearly in South Asia is that religious extremism
is not limited to Islamic radicalisation and within the region’s unique
context of contiguous religious cultures can register very violently for
reasons that are characteristic of the region and indeed specific to it.
Prime among these is the unfinished search for the bases of national iden-
tity: by India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka almost three quarters of a century

34 Arshad Alam, “Making Muslims: Identity and Difference in Indian Madrasas,” in

Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching Terror?, ed. Jamal Malik (London: Routledge, 2008),
45–60.
35 Tariq Rahman, “Madrasas: The Potential for Violence in Pakistan,” in Madrasas
in South Asia: Teaching Terror?, ed. Jamal Malik (London: Routledge, 2008), 61–84;
Christopher Candland, “Pakistan’s Recent Experience in Reforming Islamic Education,”
in Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching Terror?, ed. Jamal Malik (London: Routledge, 2008),
102–112.
36 Faisal Devji, “Changing Places: Religion and Minority in Pakistan,” South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies 43, no. 1 (2020): 171.
37 Maria-Magdalena Fuchs and Simon W. Fuchs, “Religious Minorities in Pakistan:
Identities, Citizenship and Social Belonging,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
43, no. 1 (2020): 52–67.
38 Rafiq, “Sunni Deobandi-Shi’i Sectarian Violence in Pakistan,” 23, 98.
39 Sara Mahmood, “The Barelvis’ Tilt Towards Extremism in Pakistan,” South Asian
Voices, June 8, 2018, https://southasianvoices.org/the-barelvis-tilt-towards-extremism-in-
pakistan/.
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

after gaining their independence from Britain, and by Bangladesh since it

violently separated from Pakistan in 1971. That search has involved the
close interaction between religion and politics, the intensification of both
ethnic and sectarian rivalries, and the blurring of the boundaries between
religiously engendered and politically engendered violence.40 In fact, the
politicisation of religion appears to have entered a highly volatile phase
in South Asia with the generation of nationalist sentiment in religious
form—whether Islamic, Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist.
Although it was created in the name of Islam, Pakistan never Islamised
‘to anyone’s satisfaction’,41 but especially mainstream religious parties
like the Jamaat-e-Islami, and increasingly Sunni militant groups like the
Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP) and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) who have joined
forces to rid Pakistan of anyone they consider to be ‘unclean’ or
‘impure’.42 Bangladesh, which as East Pakistan broke with West Pakistan
over its failure to recognise the former’s demographic superiority or
respect its Bengali culture, now seems to be retreating from its founda-
tional secular constitution and re-orienting to Islamic, rather than Bangla,
culture as the basis of national unity. India, which also embraced secu-
larism at the start, has ‘launched a significant attempt’ to redefine itself as
a Hindu nation.43 And in Sri Lanka, Buddhist nationalism has come to
the political forefront as an anti-Muslim, anti-minority movement in the
cause of Sinhala Buddhist majoritarian supremacy. A number of Buddhist
monks have proceeded to join the ultra-nationalist Bodu Bala Sena (BBS)
or Army of Buddhist Power,44 which has taken up a decidedly anti-
Muslim stance and strongly campaigned in the 2019 Presidential elections

40 Douglas Allen, Religion and Political Conflict in South Asia: India, Pakistan, and Sri
Lanka (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 34; Joseph Chingyong Liow, Religion
and Nationalism in Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
41 Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia. A Comparative and
Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 233.
42 Rafiq, “Sunni Deobandi-Shi’i Sectarian Violence in Pakistan,” 48.
43 Howard V. Brasted, “Islam and Identity in South Asia: At the Crossroads of Confu-
sion and Confrontation?,” in Islam in World Politics, ed. Nelly Lahoud and Anthony H.
Johns (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 117–120.
44 Rosie Dimanno, “Sri Lanka’s New Public Enemy No. 1?,” Toronto Star, January
11, 2014, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1476501547?accountid=12528; Nirmal
Rajith Dewasiri, New Buddhist Extremism and the Challengers to Ethno Religious
Coexistence in Sri Lanka (Colombo: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2016).
14 H. BRASTED ET AL.

for Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who when Secretary of Defence is credited with

leading Sri Lanka’s armed forces to victory against the Tamil Tigers.
Underpinning much of the religious violence in all these countries is
the phenomenon of religious nationalism, which to a significant extent
has been generated politically and divisively from above. No matter where
religious nationalism has manifested and in what form—Islamic, Hindu or
Buddhist—it has been essentially exclusionary in nature and engendering
of communal and sectarian tensions on a rising scale. That religion is
increasingly being advanced as the basis of nationhood is because the issue
of national identity, which took on a critical importance with indepen-
dence, remains hotly contested at the constitutional, political and street
levels.45
What, for instance, has fuelled religious conflict in Pakistan’s case is,
as Rafique Zakaria has put it, its continued ‘ambivalence’ over the role
and place Islam should play in national life.46 While proclaiming itself to
be an Islamic republic, Pakistan has fallen short of ratifying the constitu-
tional centrality of Islam or providing the governmental mechanisms to
make this a reality. This is one of the reasons the Pakistani Taliban and
the LeJ have given for their resort to religious violence and their advocacy
of Sharia law as the only authentic hallmark of Islamic order.47 Resisting
this demand thus far, although paying lip-service to it, Pakistan’s polit-
ical leaders have not hesitated to call on Islam in order to legitimate their
regimes and suppress the voices of regional, ethnic and sectarian discon-
tent that began to be raised soon after independence.48 What Islamisation
has occurred since then, however, has tended to direct violence against
not only the ethnic interests of Bengalis, Baloch, Sindhis and Mohajirs,49

45 Ahmed and Brasted, “Recognition and Dissent.”

46 Rafique Zakaria, The Struggle Within Islam: The Conflict Between Religion and Politics
(London: Penguin, 1988), 228–240.
47 Matthew J. Nelson, “Islamist Politics in South Asia After the Arab Spring:
Parties and Their Proxies Working With—And Against—The State,” Brookings Institute:
Rethinking Political Islam Series (2015): 14, https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/
uploads/2016/07/Pakistan_Nelson-FINALE.pdf.
48 Howard V. Brasted, Imran Ahmed and Saira Orakzai, “Whither Pakistan: The
Ambivalence of Constitutional Road Mapping?,” in Governance and Political Adapta-
tion in Fragile States, ed. John Lahai, Karin von Strokirch, Howard Brasted and Helen
Ware (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 167–194.
49 Adeel Khan, Politics of Identity: Ethnic Nationalism and the State in Pakistan (New
Delhi: Sage, 2005).
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

but also the religious beliefs of Shias, Hazaras, Ahmadis or anyone the
militants accuse of tarnishing Islam. Emblematic of Pakistan’s troubled
relationship with its religious minorities has been the backtracking under
Islamist pressure of Imran’s Khan’s government, not only to help fund
the construction of Islamabad’s first Hindu temple, but also to stick to its
post-election promise of delivering religious co-existence.50
Making religious co-existence extremely difficult in the case of
Pakistan’s approximately 6 million Hindus, and problematic for India’s
more than 200 million Muslims is the ever-present reality that Hindu
India constitutes Pakistan’s omnipresent enemy and Muslim Pakistan
India’s. In part because of this, respective national discourses on terrorism
have proceeded to pinpoint Hindu and Muslim minorities as security risks
or the potential enemy within. Impacting on trans-national relations too
are the respective origin stories of India’s, Pakistan’s and Bangladesh’s
formation as modern states given that they are based on a mutually sensi-
tive and factually contested common history.51 Indeed, the way India,
Pakistan and Bangladesh treat their respective Hindu and Muslim minori-
ties tends to reverberate across their heavily militarised, if historically
shifting borders. It is in this context that the emergence of Hindu funda-
mentalism in India and the rise to political ascendancy of the BJP has
helped to fertilise the very conditions for religious extremism to thrive in
and to feed off across the sub-continent.
No country better exemplifies the relationship between violence and
religion than India in its recent attempts to alter the shape of nation,
state and citizenship by redefining Indian identity in terms of majori-
tarian Hinduness.52 Bursting on the political scene at the time the
world watched on as fundamentalist Hindus stormed the Babri Masjid at
Ayodhya and tore it down, the BJP rose to prominence and ultimately
power by promoting the philosophy of Hindutva to launch a distinct
shift in India’s political and national orientation. Whether this reflected

50 Maria Abi-Habib, “Islamists Block Construction of First Hindu Temple in Islam-

abad,” New York Times, July 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/world/
asia/hindu-temple-islamabad-islamists-pakistan.html.
51 Rowena Robinson, “The Politics of Religion and Faith in South Asia,” Society and
Culture in South Asia 3, no. 2 (2017): viii.
52 Robinson, “The Politics of Religion and Faith in South Asia,” vii–xx.
16 H. BRASTED ET AL.

the failure of a constitutionally derived secularism, or the marginal-

ising impact of other, particularly economic, forces at play,53 the BJP
successfully played the religion in danger card to outdistance the once
dominant secular Indian Congress party and question the ‘Indianness’
of the minority Muslim community.54 If Modi’s move in 2020 to alter
India-controlled Kashmir’s special constitutional status and potentially
strip Assam’s 4 million Muslims of Indian citizenship are any indications
of the BJP government’s policy direction, all of India’s 200 or more
million Muslims face the prospect of being rendered second class citizens
or worse foreigners.55 This is virtually the fate Hindu and other minori-
ties earlier suffered in Bangladesh when the Vesting of Property and Assets
Order of 1972 dispossessed them of their property.
That Bangladesh has faced rising religious pressure and suffered recur-
ring bouts of extremist violence from almost day one of its independent
existence ostensibly parallels the trajectory followed by South Asia as a
whole and for much the same reasons. The secular identity it assumed
in 1971 did not sit well with either the mainstream religious parties or
more militant rank and file members of fundamentalist groups such the
Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JMB) and Harkat-ul-Jihadal-Islami (HuJI); the
latter claiming responsibility for also launching violent attacks in India.
Even more so than the Muslim League and the Pakistan Peoples Party
in Pakistan, in Bangladesh the two main political contenders for govern-
ment, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Awami League, which
currently holds office, have variously integrated Islam into their nation-
alist ideologies. Standing initially on a platform of secular democracy,

53 Riaz Ali, “Religion as a Political Ideology in South Asia,” in The Politics of Religion
in South and Southeast Asia, ed. Ishtiaq Ahmed (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011), 13–25;
Surya Prakash Upadhyay, “Secular Democracies, Governance and Politics in South Asia,”
Society and Culture in South Asia 3, no. 2 (2017): 247–248, 257–258.
54 John McGuire, Peter D. Reeves and Howard V. Brasted, eds., Politics of Violence:
From Ayodhya to Behrampada (New Delhi: Sage, 1996); John McGuire, “The BJP and
Governance in India: An Overview,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 25, no.
3 (2002): 1–17.
55 Rebecca Ratcliff, “‘A Nightmarish Mess’: Millions in Assam Brace for Loss of
Citizenship,” The Guardian, August 30, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global-dev
elopment/2019/aug/30/nightmarish-mess-millions-assam-brace-for-loss-of-citizenship-
india; The Economist, “Modi’s Dangerous Moment: India and Pakistan Should Stop
Playing with Fire,” The Economist 430, no. 9132 (March 2019), https://link.gale.com/
apps/doc/A576257804/AONE?u=monash&sid=AONE&xid=27f2c574.
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

the Awami League has begun to patronise a number of militant Islamist

groups through the gradual Islamisation of society and the support of
madrasa education.56 Not that this or the fact that Bangladesh has consti-
tutionally transitioned into an Islamic state has put an end to religious
violence. If anything, the reverse has happened as Bangladeshi off-shoots
of Al Qaeda and Islamic State (IS), with their ‘extremist religious preten-
sion’,57 have actively sought to radicalise disenchanted youth to actively
prepare for cosmic battle—especially against India prior to the day of
judgement—and fulfil a prediction attributed to Muhammad. According
to Juergensmeyer, end-time conflict is a case where war and religion are
unequivocally ‘fused’.58
In Sri Lanka, violence has increasingly stalked the issue of national
identity since independence. In the long drawn-out civil war between the
minority Tamils in the far north and the majority Sinhalese, the discourse
of who was Sri Lankan and who was not centred on the ethnic and
linguistic differences separating them. But with the defeat of the Tamil
Tigers (LTTE) in 2009 and their separatist challenge seen off, a new
strain of Sinhala nationalism emphasising religion (Theravada Buddhism)
emerged with a decidedly extremist outlook.59 Appearing in Buddhist
form this nationalism proceeded to polarise society according to religious
difference and it found a new enemy: Sri Lanka’s Muslims. Reminis-
cent of the RSS-led attacks on the Ayodhya mosque in India, a Muslim
shrine in Anuradhapura was destroyed by Buddhist monks in 2011, and
a year later over 2,000 Buddhist nationalists forced the removal of a
mosque in Dambulla on the grounds that it too stood on a Buddhist
sacred site. Since then the BBS, which came to prominence in 2014,
has been targeting Muslims and whipping up anti-Muslim hostility—with
renewed intensity after the Easter killings—though not it would appear
because Buddhism was considered to be in any immediate danger from

56 Mubashar Hasan, Islam and Politics in Bangladesh (London: Palgrave Macmillan,

2020).
57 Mark Juergensmeyer, “Thinking Sociologically About Religion and Violence: The
Case of ISIS,” Sociology of Religion 79, no. 1 (2018): 21.
58 Mark Juergensmeyer, God at War: A Meditation on Religion and Warfare (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 74.
59 Peter Lehr, Militant Buddhism: The Rise of Religious Violence in Sri Lanka, Myanmar
and Thailand (London: Palgrave, 2019).
18 H. BRASTED ET AL.

Islam.60 Historic, economic, political and international grievances have

been pointed to as the likely motivation.61 But, another possibility is
that, as the head of the BBS told The Hindu in October 2014, the
BBS was seeking an alliance with the Indian RSS officially to create a
Buddhist-Hindu peace zone in South Asia—which presumably would
exclude Muslims and Christians—but unofficially to create a Buddhist
equivalent of Hindutva.62

III
Many explanations have been put forward to explain the current relation-
ship between religion and violence and to identify the causal links between
them. These, as earlier mentioned, can range from the legacy of religious
traditions63 to the ‘clash’ of hegemonic ‘world views’ based on religion.64
These elements are certainly present in the case of South Asia. As if in re-
enactment of a sacred text the followers of the Shiv Sena, for example,
conjured up the image of Shiva’s sword in waging war on Ahmedabad’s
Muslims in 2002 as the ‘army of Lord Shiva’.65 And the 1992 destruc-
tion of the Ayodhya Mosque was conceivably the concrete evidence S. P.
Huntington seized upon in formulating his thesis that the cultural wars

60 John Clifford Holt, “Introduction,” in Buddhist Extremists and Muslim Minorities:

Religious Conflict in Contemporary Sri Lanka, ed. John Clifford Holt (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2016), 8–10.
61 Bruno Marshall Shirley, “The Bodu Bala Sena: Sinhalatva Origins and International
Influences,” South Asia Journal, April 12, 2016, http://southasiajournal.net/category/
all-issues/issue-16-spring-2016/; Holt, “Introduction,” 8.
62 Holt, “Introduction,” 11; PTI, “Sri Lanka’s BBS ‘In Talks’ with RSS for Tie-Up,”
The Hindu, October 7, 2014, https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/news/national/
Sri-Lanka%E2%80%99s-BBS-%E2%80%98in-talks%E2%80%99-with-RSS-for-tie-up/articl
e20881752.ece.
63 Juergensmeyer, God at War, 70–73.
64 Juergensmeyer, “Thinking Sociologically About Religion and Violence,” 20, 27;
Bassam Tibi, The Challenge of Fundamentalism: Political Islam and the New World
Disorder (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 7, 15, 89;
Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics and Europe; Bassam Tibi, Islam in Global Poli-
tics: Conflict and Cross-Civilizational Bridging (London: Routledge, 2012), 55–58;
Thomas Hegghammer, “Introduction: What Is Jihadi Culture and Why Should We Study
It?,” in Jihadi Culture: The Art and Social Practices of Militant Islamist, ed. Thomas
Hegghammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 1–21.
65 Juergensmeyer, God at War, 72; Devji, “Changing Places,” 173.
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

that he envisaged breaking out in the twenty-first century were already

well underway in the sub-continent. A ‘Hindu Rage’, he posited, was in
the process of dividing India along ‘civilizational fault-lines’.66 But what
arguably stands out in recent times has been the politicisation of reli-
gion, particularly in reformulations of nationalism, not only by incumbent
governments from above, but also militant religious parties from below.
The stereotypical demonising of minorities in the cause of confirming and
reinforcing already existing majoritarian dominance along religious lines
has become a common feature throughout South Asia.
As a theatre of fruitful investigation into the relationship between
religion and violence, South Asia continues to provide both clues and
puzzles. Why have religions that co-existed in peace for large stretches
of history begun turning on each other with unmitigated hostility? Is it
that extremist or fundamental versions of religion have come to the fore
armed with narratives that promise a better life if other religions are totally
marginalised and unbelief of any kind is rooted out? For their part govern-
ments have sought to harness religious militancy by mobilising religion
‘in the name of the people’ and by directing the nationalist sentiment
thus generated against political and class opponents. Since nationalism
and populism have been deemed to ‘overlap’ in Europe67 a possible expla-
nation for the recent variants of religious nationalisms in India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka might be found within the framework of a
‘South Asian’ populism.68 As distinct from the Western European expe-
rience,69 in South Asia not only does religion play a central role in both
populism and nationalism, but so also does political leadership through

66 S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Making of World Order (New
York: Simon & Shuster, 1996), 137–138, 195.
67 Benjamin De Cleen, “Populism and Nationalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of
Populism, ed. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul A. Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo and
Pierre Ostiguy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 435; Rogers Brubaker, “Populism
and Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 26, no. 1 (2020): 1–23.
68 Christophe Jaffrelot and Louise Tillin, “Populism in India,” in The Oxford Handbook
of Populism, ed. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul A. Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo
and Pierre Ostiguy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 232–247; Priya Chacko,
“The Right Turn in India: Authoritarianism, Populism and Neoliberalism,” Journal of
Contemporary Asia 48, no. 4 (2018): 541–565.
69 Michael Minkenberg, “Religion and the Radical Right,” in The Oxford Handbook of
the Radical Right, ed. Jens Rydgren (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 534,
540, 550.
20 H. BRASTED ET AL.

the means of top-down mobilisation. Certainly, on the eve of the 2019

Indian general election, TIME captioned a portrait of Narendra Modi
on its front cover as ‘India’s Divider in Chief’ and ran an article that
portrayed him as ‘a friend of the mob’. Time will tell if history bears
out this judgement.70 Whether Imran Khan, Sheikh Hasina or Mahinda
Rajapasksa follow him down a similar path, what seems to be beckoning
in South Asia are expressions of populist sentiment in religious form,
whether Hindu, Islamic or Buddhist.
By examining religion, extremism and violence in a number of different
South Asian contexts, this volume is designed to throw light not only on
the complexity, but also the causative drivers of the relationship between
them in recent times. With incumbent governments ‘riding the tiger’ of
communalism, however, it remains to be seen how they are going to
rein in the forces of religious bigotry and violence that they have helped
unleash.

IV
The second chapter of this collection emphasises the importance of under-
standing the colonial past in order to make sense of the phenomenon of
religious extremism in South Asia. In this chapter, Imran Ahmed surveys
some of the profound and unprecedented religious transformations which
took place under colonial rule and concludes that it is difficult to overes-
timate the impact of colonialism on South Asian religious traditions and
communities. As India and Pakistan wrangle over the meaning of their
national identities and struggle to reconcile the role and place of religion
in the state, Ahmed maintains that contemporary debates on religion at
the centre of extremist discourses not only have colonial origins, but also
embody colonial assumptions about religion and religious identities and
communities.
The remaining chapters in this volume examine individual country case
studies. In Chapter 3, D. B. Subedi examines the dramatic rise of violent
religious extremism within a section of the Sinhala Buddhist and Muslim
communities in Sri Lanka. Studying violent extremism and its effects
on societal relationships between the Sinhala Buddhists and Muslims, he

70 Aatish Taseer, “India’s Divider in Chief,” TIME, May 20, 2019, https://time.com/
5586415/india-election-narendra-modi-2019/?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=
socialflowtw&xid=time_socialflow_twitter&utm_campaign=time.
 1 INTRODUCTION 21

contends that the recent manifestations of violent extremism have histor-

ical as well as political and structural roots. These must be traced in the
processes of state formation and social change in post-independence Sri
Lanka. Subedi argues that the perpetuation of non-violent (or occasion-
ally violent) conflicts between the Buddhists and Muslims over several
decades, coupled with religious revivalism within the Sinhalese and
Muslim communities, the globalisation of Muslim identity, the nation-
alist politics of Sinhala Buddhism and the economic competition between
the two ethno-religious groups, have created a favourable condition for
the simultaneous rise of religious extremism and concurrent religious and
cultural polarisation of Sri Lankan society.
Chapter 4 focuses on the political dominance of the Bharatiya Janata
Party and the party’s shrewd political acumen in harnessing and capi-
talising on the sociological and technological transformations of Indian
society for political advantage. Since 2014, social media has become a
prominent tool used to deepen polarisation among communities in India
and spread misinformation on religious minorities. Stuti Bhatnagar high-
lights the increase in religious extremism in India since 2014, focusing
specifically on the political use and abuse of social media in propagating
and intensifying religious differences. In this chapter she focuses on the
Bharatiya Janata Party’s particular perspective on nationalism that calls
for the revival of a Hindu nation. While the BJP was elected in 2014
with hopes for a development oriented socio-economic agenda, after the
election the apprehensions regarding its Hindu nationalist ideology soon
resurfaced. And Bhatnagar maintains that this has had significant rami-
fications for India’s non-Hindu populations. The influence of Hindutva
is evident in institutional appointments, the free rein afforded to radical
groups and an increase in violence against religious minorities under
the guise of cow vigilantism and religious conversions. The party and
its associated Hindu nationalist groups have benefited from the strong
parliamentary position and in addition to the traditional print and TV
mediums, social media has been used as a crucial method for propaganda.
The BJP’s election campaign relied heavily on social media to promote the
party’s message and present an acceptable and often exaggerated image
of its leaders.
Responding to the escalation of Indian communal violence in the
1980s and 1990s, many social scientists documented syncretic beliefs as a
way of rejecting the exclusivist logic of Hindu nationalism. But Felix Pal’s
contribution in Chapter 5 demonstrates how religious syncretism can
22 H. BRASTED ET AL.

operate in the service of violent religious extremists. Far from being the
straightforward demonstration of peaceful intercommunal engagement
that characterises many descriptions of syncretism in India, sometimes
religious mixing can be used as a political strategy by a dominant reli-
gious community. This strategy is visible in the Muslim Rashtriya Manch,
the Muslim wing of the violently anti-Muslim paramilitary corps, the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Within the Manch the RSS choreographs
performances of Muslim syncretism like Ram worship or cow reverence as
a way of shedding their image as rabid communal bigots. In an India still
shaped by the traces of liberal pluralism, syncretism is the most potent
symbol of communal peace, a marker the RSS adopts to make their
exclusivist agendas less visible. Building on work that views syncretism
as profoundly political, Pal explains how the charismatic leadership and
clientelist networks of Hindu RSS leaders produce the authority to chore-
ograph Manch syncretism, and how this syncretism is used to project
the RSS as tolerant and even-handed, because the Manch is syncretic.
When violent Hindu nationalists promote syncretism, they do not look
like violent Hindu nationalists. In this way syncretism furnishes a political
strategy of obfuscation.
In Chapter 6, Shafi Mostofa and Howard Brasted look at Bangladesh,
the third largest Muslim majority country in the world, and its struggle
against Islamist militancy, which now attracts considerable media as well
as academic examination. Islamic militancy is not a new phenomenon in
Bangladesh. Indeed, a number of Islamic militant groups have been oper-
ating in Bangladesh since the mid-1990s and even earlier. Islamic militants
are reported to have killed around 156 people in the country between
March 1999 and January 2005. And on 17 August 2005, the country was
deeply shocked by a series of 459 bomb attacks that took place in 63 out
of the 64 districts in the country. While Islamic militancy has clearly posed
a serious challenge in the past, it constitutes an even more obvious and
present danger to Bangladesh now. While Al Qaeda has been operating
in Bangladesh for a decade or more, it has recently been joined by Daesh
or Islamic State whose recruitment campaign has ‘upped the stakes’ and
seen it begin to outdistance rival extremist groups and indeed move signif-
icantly ahead of them. Using data from interviews with not only expert
observers of this new phase of Islamic radicalisation, but also representa-
tives of a number of traditional religious parties, this chapter sets out to
explore how Bangladesh has become a fertile ground for Islamic State,
who have been radicalised, and by what means. This chapter will include
 1 INTRODUCTION 23

an examination of how the IS is impacting on and exploiting religious

beliefs, which religious groups are being targeted, and the content and
thrust of its religious message.
The militancy which has existed in Bangladesh has always had inter-
national connections. More recently, in 2014, Al Qaeda began focusing
on the country through the creation of a new organisation ‘Al Qaeda in
the Indian Subcontinent’ (AQIS). In Chapter 7, Shafi Mostofa suggests
that this creation opened a new era which began with the emergence of
new militant organisations directly aligned with international ones. These
new militant organisations are now receiving support from pre-established
local Islamist groups such as the Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT) and the
Jamaatul Mujaheedin Bangladesh (JMB). They are also recruiting youth
within secular educational institutions who are from upper middle class or
upper-class backgrounds. Mostofa focuses on the recruitment strategy of
AQIS and the challenge it represents for the Bangladeshi state, looking
at their online pamphlets, statements and magazines like Azan, Resur-
gence and the Bengali magazine Al Balagh. His study makes an important
contribution on radicalisation in Bangladesh by outlining the ideological
tools successfully used by AQIS to attract urban youth. Mostofa also high-
lights the limitations of the purely militaristic counter-terrorist approach
used by the current Bangladeshi government.
Violent extremism has manifested in a myriad of ways over the past
decades in Pakistan. In response, the Pakistan state and military have
sought to counter this extremism through different strategies. However,
these have been fraught with problems, and the violence continues, some-
times escalating with such agitations as those by Khadim Hussain Rizvi
and his Tehreek Labbaik Pakistan in November 2017. More importantly,
many non-state actors are engaging in various kinds of social negotiations
and actions to lessen the violence and recapture indigenous cultural iden-
tity and religious values. In Chapter 8, Anita Weiss addresses one of many
local efforts currently underway to counter violent extremism in Pakistan.
Her chapter derives from a book project, Countering Violent Extremism in
Pakistan: Local Actions, Local Voices, and is based on research conducted
in Pakistan between 2017 and 2019. The project focuses on innovative
ways that religious leaders and practitioners, throughout the country, are
promoting interfaith harmony and mobilising their constituencies and
others in these efforts. These include efforts to mobilise communities in
the event of an attack, to educate communities about other faiths, to
revise syllabi at madrasas and other religious schools. The chapter also
24 H. BRASTED ET AL.

questions the impact such efforts are having on countering extremism in

Pakistan.
The role and place of Islam in the state is perhaps the oldest, most
contested and ostensibly unresolved political debate in Pakistan and Imran
Ahmed, in Chapter 9, looks at the question of why this problem has been
irresolvable and a source of tension driving violent religious conflict in
Pakistan. Ahmed suggests that scholars should place greater focus and
scrutiny on the ideological framework of the nation-state in order to
understand why Pakistan has yet to reconcile its tensions with Islam. He
argues that the framework of the nation-state introduced several para-
doxes which have proved difficult to resolve for Islamic thinkers. The
chapter demonstrates the problems and contradictions of Islamisation as
a means of arriving at an agreed upon Islamic destination for the country.
It also argues that because Pakistan has been unable to resolve the locus
of its sovereign authority, the tensions and contradictions of this issue
remain at the heart of any discussion on the relationship between religion
and politics.
At the start of the US-led ‘War on Terror’ in 2001, violent extremism
in Pakistan came under international spotlight. Due to this atten-
tion, countering violent extremism (CVE) programmes, mostly focusing
on madrasas (Islamic seminaries), were initiated in the country. A
major limitation of CVE programmes is their limited scope in terms of
geographical, institutional and gender focus. The majority of programmes
focus on male madrasas in the north-west of the country. However,
Pakistani women’s involvement in violent extremism and CVE is an
under-researched topic. In the final chapter of this volume, Farah Naz
and Zahid Shahab Ahmed examine the extent to which extremist organi-
sations target women in Pakistan and are successful in accomplishing this
agenda. Their research also focuses on women’s role in CVE. The chapter
argues that women have not only been exposed to extremist ideologies
but have also been recruited to carry out fundraising, recruitment and
terrorist activities. Based on the primary data collected through inter-
views of CVE experts in Pakistan, this study examines CVE policies and its
approaches, and the causes and consequences of women’s recruitment by
violent extremists. The analyses of civil society and state-run approaches
show the neglect of women in terms of vulnerability to violent extremism
and potential in CVE efforts.
 CHAPTER 2

Colonial Transformations, Postcolonial

Afterlives: Extremism, Exclusion
and Distrust in India and Pakistan

Imran Ahmed

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun 1

Introduction
This chapter provides a brief discussion of the religious transformations
which took place under British colonial rule and outlines some of the
ongoing postcolonial political consequences of these transformations. The
chapter reviews some of the colonial attitudes, ideologies and policies

1 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (London: Chatto & Windus, 1953), 85.

I. Ahmed (B)
Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore,
Singapore
e-mail: iahmed@nus.edu.sg

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 25

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022
I. Ahmed et al. (eds.), Religion, Extremism and Violence in South Asia,
Politics of South Asia,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-6847-0_2
26 I. AHMED

towards managing, classifying and organising religion and governing reli-

gious communities in colonial India. It also sketches the connections
between the imperial project and the colonial production of knowledge
and surveys some of the ways in which the legacies of British rule continue
to profoundly shape the discourse on religion, politics and nationhood in
postcolonial India and Pakistan. In other words, the chapter traces the
colonial origins of some of the broader contemporary debates on reli-
gion and politics in the region and spotlights sources of contention and
controversy.
A fundamental source of contention in both India and Pakistan is the
place of religion in the state and this chapter historicises the significance
of this issue. Whether India is a Hindu nation and Pakistan an Islamic
one is a recurring point of contestation and admittedly, raises tensions
which foment agitation and violence, inspire extremism and evade clear
resolution or consensus in both countries. Indeed, the legacies of colo-
nial rule, the politics of the anticolonial struggle and the subsequent
partition of the British Raj shadow postcolonial developments in the two
states. Questions concerning the identity of the state are inextricably tied
to the politics of disputed borders, the policies of governing religious
communities and defining the minority. Colonialism has not only shaped
territorial borders, communal identities and how the nation is imagined
and debated, it continues to structure the discourse on these issues and
shape its political lexicon. In other words, colonialism has not only shaped
what matters when it comes to religion, it has also shaped why it matters
and how these issues are framed and discussed. This is because the colo-
nial construction of the category of “religion” continues to experience a
postcolonial afterlife. And this chapter aspires to briefly sketch some of
the details of these developments.

Orientalism and the Colonisation

of Indian Religions
It is difficult to underestimate the impact of colonialism on the Indian
subcontinent. Europeans produced an ahistorical construction of India
over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which assisted
them in their ambition to govern the region, subdue its indigenous
 2 COLONIAL TRANSFORMATIONS, POSTCOLONIAL AFTERLIVES … 27

populations and justify colonial occupation.2 In India, British colonial

occupation bound European scientists, ethnographers, philologists, trav-
ellers, adventurers, artists and colonial officials together in the project of
imperialism. The conquest of India enabled the subcontinent to emerge
as a bustling hub in the production of new knowledges, academic disci-
plines and scholarship. And intimate knowledge of the workings of Indian
society, cultural traditions, languages, religions, laws and political institu-
tions facilitated colonial governance.3 The depictions of India, however,
were far from consistent but nevertheless remained instrumental in the
impetus for and defence of empire.
The Indian subcontinent also provoked European imaginations to
articulate European selfhood in relation to an Indian “Other”.4 This
involved the establishment of commonalities as well as differences
between the East and the West. Sir William Jones, a renowned English
philologist, argued that the languages of India and Europe possessed
a common origin.5 This implied that perhaps as peoples, Indians and

2 Elisa Giunchi, “The Reinvention of “Sharı̄a” Under the British Raj: In Search of
Authenticity and Certainty”, The Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 4 (November 2010):
1124.
3 “The conquest of India”, Bernard Cohn writes, “was a conquest of knowledge”. Or
as Warren Hastings asserted in 1784: “Every accumulation of knowledge and especially
such as is obtained by social communication with people over whom we exercise dominion
founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state”. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism
and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1996), 16, 45.
4 Orientalism set up a binary between a European “Self” and an Oriental “Other”.
Orientalism, Said explained, “helped to define Europe (or the West)” by providing it with
“one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other”. The Orient delivers the
West with its “great complementary opposite since antiquity” and a “sort of surrogate and
even underground self”. Said contends that Orientalism has “less to do with the Orient
than it does with “our” world”. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1978), xii, 1–3, 12, 58. Roger Joseph points out in his review of Orientalism, that
Orientalism “is not a mirror on the East but one on the West”. Roger Joseph, “Review
of Orientalism by Edward W. Said”, American Anthropologist 82, no. 4 (1980): 948.
5 Jenny Sharpe notes: “William Jones is best remembered for his discovery of an Indo-
European family of languages … Jones’s so-called discovery, and the science to which
it gave birth, signals the emergence of a discourse sanctioning a colonial expansion into
Asia”. Jenny Sharpe, “The Violence of Light in the Land of Desire; Or, How William
Jones Discovered India”, Boundary 2 20, no. 1 (1993): 26–46.
28 I. AHMED

Europeans could also trace their lineages back to a shared ancestor.6 The
question of how India came to differ from Europe, and how the British
had come to rule over India, would form a foundational problem driving
the development of the so-called racial sciences in the late nineteenth
century.7 The issues which emerged from this problem of divergence
occupied later generations of orientalists who not only posited Indian
cultures, customs and religions as inferior, but focused on difference.8
India, Europeans argued, had no history9 : it was, in other words, time-
less and unchanging. If India was immutable, then Europe was dynamic.
If the Mughals were despots, then the British were enlightened, rational
and moderate rulers.
The Orientalist production of India as a static ahistorical construction
had far reaching and often detrimental consequences for Indians. The
pursuit of maintaining romanticised notions of Indian social life helped
preserve or transform aspects of Indian societies the British perceived
as authentic to an Indian social, economic and political order so long
as it also furthered British interests. These assumptions, however, were
often projections of Europe’s own social and historical realities.10 The
policies the British directed towards the administration and ownership of

6 Rama Sundari Mantena, “Vernacular Futures: Colonial Philology and the Idea of
History in Nineteenth-Century South India”, The Indian Economic & Social History
Review 42, no. 4 (2005): 529–530.
7 Thomas Metcalf writes: “Throughout the later nineteenth century, as they constructed
their ‘India’, the British had always to negotiate this disjuncture: between an acknowl-
edgement of similarity, and an insistence upon difference”. Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of
the Raj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 66.
8 Metcalf further notes: “the history of India was made to accommodate not just the
existence of the Raj, but a course of historical development that made the imposition of
British rule its necessary culmination”. Ibid., 67.
9 As Thomas Trautmann explains: “It was the unanimous opinion of the early Orien-
talists of British India that India had no history, at least in the sense of historical
writings”. Thomas R. Trautmann, “Does India Have History? Does History Have
India?”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no.1 (2012): 174.
10 Muhammad Qasim Zaman maintains: “In India the British constantly encountered
situations and institutions where no clear distinctions between the religious and the secular
or non-religious were made. To many, this situation was reminiscent of Europe’s own
medieval history, where such distinctions were frequently blurred, often to the advantage
of the Church. For all the horrors that this parallel suggested, viewing India dominated,
or determined, by religion meant that the Indians could be seen as not only different
from post-Enlightenment Europeans but also inferior to the colonial rulers and therefore
in need of the latter’s enlightened governance and liberating reform”. Muhammad Qasim
 2 COLONIAL TRANSFORMATIONS, POSTCOLONIAL AFTERLIVES … 29

land across India sought to create and maintain a more rigid class system
of landlords and peasants that reflected the feudal and class realities of
England with the hope of extracting a more consistent flow and larger
portions of taxable agricultural revenue. This manoeuvre was grounded
on the logic that Indian social life was given to social hierarchies and class,
like caste, was assumed to be another timeless and permanent feature of
Indian societies.11
Orientalism also shaped the colonial outlook on Indian law, the admin-
istration of justice and dispute resolution. The wars of religion had shaped
European societies and the British perceived Indian social and religious
life through this lens. Not only did orientalism emphasise religious differ-
ence but it also periodised Indian historical development in fixed religious
terms. James Mill, for instance, contrasted Mughal rule as an era of
Islamic rule distinct from Hindu rule which preceded it in his famous
book The History of British India.12
The issues concerning the ownership and administration of land and
the processes of implementing an efficient taxation scheme required
colonial authorities to approach law and legal reform with considerable
caution and focus.13 If the composition of Indian society consisted of
distinct religious communities known for their separate bodies of reli-
gious laws, the British simply had to learn what these laws were in order
to administer Indian society in accordance with their indigenous legal
traditions.14 But colonial assumptions about Indian law and society did

Zaman, “Religious Education and the Rhetoric of Reform: The Madrasa in British India
and Pakistan”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no. 2 (1999): 296.
11 Bernard Cohn writes: “It was felt by many British officials in the middle of the
nineteenth century that caste and religion were the sociological keys to understanding
Indian people”. Bernard Cohn, An Anthropologist Among the Historians and Other Essays
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 242.
12 James Mill, The History of British India, Vol. 1 (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and
Joy, 1817).
13 Julia Stephens writes: “Driven by the practical necessity of imposing order and
extracting profit, [East India] Company officials also introduced significant revisions to
laws governing land rights and crime, jettisoning older Indo-Muslim legal practices when
they conflicted with the Company’s strategic interests”. Julia Stephens, Governing Islam:
Law, Empire, and Secularism in Modern South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2018), 24–25.
14 Eleanor Newbigin also points out: “From the outset of British rule, India had been
seen as compromising not a society of individuals but a collection of different commu-
nities, bound first and foremost by religious identity”. Eleanor Newbigin, The Hindu
30 I. AHMED

not match the reality and complexity of actual local and living Indian legal
systems.15 While local religious legal experts were sought as informants to
understand what the actual content and sources of the law was, the actual
operation of the law in society was far more fluid, dynamic and flexible
than the mere application of some list of legal rulings.16 Indian law was
shaped and given to local customs and contexts. This meant that it varied
quite widely region to region and relied less on centralised political power
to adjudicate cases or resolve disputes. This proved problematic for colo-
nial officials and orientalist scholars.17 Islamic and Hindu law enabled
considerable scope for bargaining and negotiations between parties based
on unwritten, diverse and changing local customary norms which made
it difficult for colonial authorities to control legal outcomes, society at
large and consequently state revenues from agrarian activities. The legal
text-based outlook of colonial officials and orientalist scholars found local
legal practices wanting and an obstacle to their goal of exercising control
over Indian societies and economies.
The objective to govern India according to its own set of laws was
flawed in its assumptions and ideological at the outset. The complexity
and unwritten nature of Indian legal traditions disturbed the colonial
imagination of India as a land of distinct religious communities living
simply in accordance to their own distinct set of religious laws. The
British, rather than changing their perception of Indian law, laboured
instead to change Indian law altogether. They searched for canonical
legal texts of the Islamic and Hindu legal traditions. “There was”, Sugata

Family and the Emergence of Modern India: Law, Citizenship and Community (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2013), 3.
15 “The first question the newly empowered British administration faced” in India,
Rosane Rocher explains, “was which laws should be applied in their new courts”. Rosane
Rocher, “The Creation of Anglo-Hindu Law”, in Hinduism and Law: An Introduction,
ed. Timothy Lubin, Donald R. Davis Jr. and Jayanth K. Krishnan (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 78.
16 Stephens, Governing Islam, 26.
17 Rachel Sturman notes: “The British colonial state in India was continually forced
to grapple with the forms of law and governance appropriate to Indian society”. Rachel
Sturman, The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law, and
Women’s Rights, Vol. 21 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1.
 2 COLONIAL TRANSFORMATIONS, POSTCOLONIAL AFTERLIVES … 31

Bose and Ayesha Jalal explains, “a bias towards studying the more exclu-
sivist high traditions of both Hinduism and Islam”.18 The colonial state’s
reliance on Brahmins and the ulema in order to discover the law set
in motion a scripturalist frame to approaching religious law that has
continued into present day.
A rigorous campaign of translating religious legal texts and an impetus
towards the codification of religious legal rulings found in these books
ushered in a new Anglicised Indian legal order under British colonial
rule.19 Codification relieved colonial authorities from their reliance on
local indigenous experts.20 It also circumvented custom, narrowed legal
possibilities and brought more firmness and certainty to legal outcomes.
It papered over the complex relationship between cultural sensitivities and
local customs as a source of law.21 In doing so, codification also did away
with the informal aspects of legal settlements and dispute resolution for
strict adherence to the letter of the written law. It moved law from the
prerogative of local communities to the mandate and responsibility of the
political centre. The state would come to intervene in local affairs like
never before.22 The Hindu legal code displaced customs and local norms
as the preeminent legal reference for resolving disputes.23

18 Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political economy
(New York: Routledge, 2017), 63.
19 See Chapter 9 of this volume for more details and discussion of the process
of codifying and Anglicising Islamic law.
20 Rocher explains: “When applying Hindu law, British judges were at the mercy of the
pandits who served as law officers of their courts, and who quoted diverse authorities for
their vyavasthās according to their lights and to occasionally contradictory results. Going
from frustration to suspicion was an easy step”. Rocher, “The Creation of Anglo-Hindu
Law”, 81.
21 “It was a fundamental and persisting British policy”, Marc Galanter writes, “that, in
matters of family law, inheritance, caste and religion, Indians were not subject to a single
territorial law. Hindus and Muslims were to be governed by their own personal law, ie
the law of their religious group”. See Marc Galanter, “The Displacement of Traditional
Law in Modern India”, Journal of Social Issues 24, no. 4 (1968): 18.
22 Stephens notes: “One of the most important legal changes the [East India] Company
made, in comparison to its Mughal predecessors, was to expand the judicial authority of
the state”. Stephens, Governing Islam, 24.
23 “With the support of British power”, David Washbrook writes, “Hindu law expanded
its authority across large areas of society which had not known it before or which, for
a very long period, had possessed their own more localized and non-scriptural customs”.
Another random document with
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gather all possible information as to his whereabouts and the time for
his return. This done, in hot pursuit he makes his departure for the
seizure of his object. He travels forward with alacrity until he reaches
an extensive morass; then, with his colleague, ambushes both sides
of it, for a day or two, so as to close in from both ways, if opportunity
afforded, on his object, and make escape impossible—ready with a
convenient horse for any emergency which might occur. Despairing
of meeting with the sought after prize, onward he goes until he
reaches the ferry—the distance of a day’s ride from Mississippi City,
where he expected another opportunity for getting hold of the man
he wanted—so arranges as for one to remain on each side of the
ferried river—again rendering passage impossible without discovery.
Again disappointed, onwards he proceeds, and in a short time
comes in contact with the person in pursuit of, but in such a situation
as to mar his purposes at that point. They pass, both sides knowing
each other. He travels a short distance forward—then turns back
after his object, who has fled at the rate of about eight or nine miles
the hour—succeeds in reaching Augusta only two hours behind his
object. Then makes known his mission of arrest—seeing the
tremendous public excitement prevailing which threatened his
existence, politely agrees to wait a reasonable length of time for his
nominal prisoner—four days waiting for in making preparatory
arrangements to have a sufficient protective force to accompany,
when all set out for Mobile—here reached, then, the sheriff in the
buggy with him, then drives rapidly down one street, up another, and
round the corners with a velocity that kept some three or four of the
protective force in a gallop to keep up with the speed.
The reader will once more draw his own inferences. He will plainly
see that the principal aim again was assassination as the better
method among outlaws of disposing of troublesome persons. The
lying in ambush for one or two whole days on both sides of the
morass, on both sides of the next river, the hurried rapidity of the
return to overtake the sheriff before reaching Augusta, and the last
effort to get clear of the “protective force” in the city of Mobile by
forced speed through complicated streets; all these facts in
connection are plain to the unprejudiced mind as to the ultimate
object in view. Indirectly corroborative, there is another fact, which
will be further noticed in the sequel, to the effect of one by the name
of Cornelious McLamore from Kemper county, an important witness
on trial, who crushingly and effectively broke down the testimony of
the said Shoemake, but in all probability his life paid the forfeit; for
McLamore from that time to the present has never more been heard
of—his remains likely burnt or buried in some dismal swamp—
another victim to the vengeance of the “clan.”
Shoemake, the big dog among the band, this is the man, this the
agent from the Governor of Alabama, from the Governor of
Mississippi, employed to execute the highest of delegated State
authority! If the then Governor of Mississippi can reconcile the
rectitude of such action to his mind, the public is very far from
approving the same. At the time the press from almost every quarter
was loud in its denunciations against the conduct of the Governor.
He must have known that the extensive ramifications of the Wages
and Copeland Clan had produced a reign of terror almost
everywhere, and he must also have known that the “confessions”
had done more for its dismemberment and final dissolution than
anything else; then why did he attempt to play into its expiring hands,
against public sentiment and justice, when the imputed but
misnamed crime of publication was done in New Orleans, La., and
the author, who had only committed the “confessions” to paper,
residing in Mississippi, and more especially while hundreds were
satisfied of the truth of the narrations? However, from these
revelations, the fact is made patent that wealth and a few
distinguished persons can wield mighty influences against reason
and justice; against common sense and the best interests of society.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION GATHERED ABOUT THE BURIED

TREASURE.

The order of events will now be continued consecutively from the

time of the Sheriff giving bond and being released. Before the
opening of the city court he was left with thirty or forty days to
prepare for defense, during which time he visited Ocean Springs and
a few other watering places on the Mississippi Sound, remaining a
few days at Shieldsboro, now Bay St. Louis, and there made
acquaintance with old Mr. Toulme and two other prominent
gentlemen, who informed him that just after the publication of
Copeland’s confessions they took a copy of said work, and made a
visit out to Catahoula swamp, in that county, in quest of the buried
treasure referred to in the said confessions as having been
deposited there by the clan for safe keeping. The map of this
depository was lost during the famous Harvey battle, near Red
Creek, in Perry county. These gentlemen informed him that they
found the place as described by Copeland, and that every tree and
line of demarcation as delineated in his description of the place could
not have been more accurately given. They stated that there were
three places of deposit, showing that in time there had been three
kegs buried, which, from every appearance, indicated as though they
might have been removed some eight or ten years prior to that time.
The old keg staves and iron hoops were still remaining, and the
perfect impress made by the burial of these kegs still existed, with a
grown lining of moss which time had brought forth; on the whole
exhibiting quite an antique appearance.
There has been much speculation and curiosity manifested among
many as to who was the fortunate person who found this buried
treasure. Let it be remembered that the Harvey battle occurred in
some part of the year 1848. The description and mystic map of the
place in connection with this treasure was lost in the time of this
battle. Until the “confessions” were published in 1858 the public
knew nothing about the buried money, but when they come out
curiosity and opinion ran to an extensive height. Now this information
was given to the Sheriff by one living in that section of country when
the collision happened. He told him that a few days after the “battle”
he found an instrument of writing which he could neither read nor in
any way understand, and the same with all others around who saw
it. To them it appeared more of a wonder and “puzzle fool” than
anything else. He kept it by him for the sake of holding something
partaking of mystery and curiosity. But having business some short
time after in the city of Mobile, Ala., he carried this mystic paper
along with him to this place. While there one evening on the streets
he met with some of his former acquaintances. Thinking that this
curiosity would amuse, he exhibited it for common inspection, and
while examining and discussing the same, one by the name of
George A. Cleaveland came up to peep, and requested to examine
more minutely, when, after looking for a while, he folded it up in a
very careless manner which then found a place in his pocket,
remarking at the same time that it did not amount to much anyway,
and walked off.
The person who brought this paper, not being aware of its value,
did not care enough about it to make any objections to his carrying it
away with him.
But the new possessor, in all probability, fully understood the
mystic lines contained in it, and soon turned them to signal account.
From rather a pecuniary condition of embarrassment at the time, as
the Sheriff has been informed, he very soon afterward made an
advertisement through the public journals of the city, expressing a
desire to purchase twenty able-bodied negroes and the like number
of mules and drays, all of which he bought accordingly in a short
time afterward, and more; and from that time to the day of his death
remained independent, all the while increasing rapidly in wealth and
external prosperity.

THE TRIAL.
SIMPLE AND UNADORNED TRUTH STRUGGLING WITH ALL
THE FORCES
OF TALENT, WEALTH AND PROPPED UP FALSEHOOD—THE
CONVICTION
ONLY A VICTORY IN NAME FOR THE PROSECUTION,
BUT IN REALITY A LASTING TRIUMPH FOR THE DEFENCE.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS TOUCHING THE TRIAL.

An error—a fault in the working of a machine, or in physical

operations generally, is soon discovered and admits of very little
discussion, as to whether all is right or something wrong. Too much
friction, a cog broken, or some other mechanical defect in
mechanical construction, and the machine will soon stop; and so of
physical movements; a disease or some radical defect in the
constitution is soon discovered by bad pains and bad health; and if
no recuperative remedy can be applied, the consequence will soon
be a death stoppage. But in the moral world, the difficulties are far
greater and more extensive. Immaculate truth and unmixed error are
soon acknowledged, but when deeply blended together, ages may
elapse before any considerable or healthy progress can be made. In
physical science, and in mechanical discoveries, the progress has
been prodigious; but it is a question very much open to dispute,
whether the world is now purer, better, and happier than it was three
thousand years ago, notwithstanding the centuries of statesmanship
and legislation. In physical realities, all appear to hail improvement
with a welcome satisfaction, and gladly receive truthful discoveries,
no matter from where they come, as if immediately experiencing a
direct and general interest in all such demonstrations; but it is far
more complicated in moral phenomena. Effects, either for good or
evil, require a longer time for development, and are subject to
influences from far more numerous and intricate causes, less
capable of demonstration, and less capable of determining the share
each exercises in the production of compound effects. Two persons
may be equally honest, equally able, and equally desirous for the
common good of the nation; but they will hotly dispute as to the
proper means to be applied for this end; but if the opinions or
theories of each could be immediately put to the test, and the results
at once seen as in mechanical operations, a very different state of
society would soon exist. If we could have a process of analyzation
in moral transactions, so as to make the deformities of separated
error at once manifest, and so with respect to the beauties of
immortal truth, we might indulge a well grounded hope for rapid
conquests toward the perfection of mankind.
 Author’s Trial in Mobile, Ala.—See page 144.

Differences in organizations and in education, with vast extensions

of clashing interest; these, when properly directed, may be rather a
blessing than otherwise; but when allowed to run into the wildest
excesses without any restraint whatever, the evils must be frightful in
the train of consequences. The excessive philanthropist is on for
freedom, and will sacrifice every other consideration for the success
of his ardent object, regardless of the reacting forces of despotism.
The creature of inordinate ambition does not stop to consider who is
right and who wrong—down with every obstacle in his way, that has
a tendency to impede his ultimate design. The theological devotee
prefers his own denomination to all others—his own all right—the
rest all mixed up with much objectionable error. The individual who
has made so much wealth, and attained to so great a height of
pecuniary prosperity by means, no matter whether fair or foul,
desires no change, even though it may be for the benefit of tens of
thousands—his own individual or conventional interest will have
more value in his estimation than the interests of united millions in
conflict. Generally, those who have risen to honors, distinctions, and
emoluments by the vicious elements in society, will spare no
exertions which talent and wealth can command for the perpetuation
of the same circumstances of public wrongs. But, it is true, where
there are freedom of thought and action, public vices cannot
accumulate beyond a limited extent before conflicting interests and
passions will bring on the appropriate or temporary remedy; yet the
victors not unfrequently, ere long, run into as wild excesses as their
erring but fallen predecessors! so then it would appear that
revolutions only amount to a change from one sort of excesses to
another equally as pregnant with evils. Yet in spite of all these
apparently vain and oscillating circumstances, there are underlying
movements at work in the nature of occult causes driving on nations
to either dissolution or a better and more enduring form of
government.
If a government is so defective that it cannot sufficiently protect life
and property; if its conduct is so fickle and uncertain as to destroy
confidence and stability in the future, convulsion, decay, and death
must inevitably come if the organic abuses are too great to admit of
any other remedy.
Untempered liberty is worse than despotism; it is barbarism—
might reigns and not right. All the passions of licentiousness are let
loose, and the many weak are lawful prey for the few strong.
The idea which commonly prevails as regards frequency of
elections being the effective remedy for all abuses of government,
though plausible, is sophistry and the height of fallacy according to
the lessons which experience have taught. It is all very easy and fine
to contend for short terms of elections—all very captivating to
contend that if one officer well performs his duty, he can either retire
into private life with all the grateful honors of his country, or, for
meritorious services, he can be re-elected for another term, all of
which is the most powerful incentive to do right, and, at the same
time, the most formidable barrier against intentional wrong. But what
does experience loudly proclaim? “For the short term you will be in
office, make all you can, scruple at nothing, laugh justice in the face,
trample on the principles of rectitude, and you will be admired in the
present and immediate future only as a consummate political
trickster which may, without shame, be imitated by other succeeding
actors. But if you mean to be honest, and tender of just rights and
claims, with a desire for the common good of your country in
rewarding meritorious services and encouraging the sources of true
national prosperity, you will only be laughed at for your folly.” These
constant elections, as it were, open the store-houses for a general
scramble, for a wordy warfare of frothy declamation, for abuse and
misrepresentation of all the nobler traits of human nature—making
virtue a crime and fashionable vices respectable. The most expert in
business of this sort, are generally the successful ones in the
contest. Before the excitement of one election is over, another more
intense begins. Under present circumstances, no one can calculate
with any reasonable probability of continuance of the present form of
government beyond a period of four years while there is no security
for keeping wild and inflamed passions within proper bounds.
 Correct public sentiment, when free to choose, is apt to have a
government of the same nature. Is it public sentiment that forms the
character of government, or government which forms the character
of public sentiment? Both of these considerations may be true. It is
quite possible to conceive how a few intelligent and well-meaning
persons, commanding a sufficiency of power, can improve the
character of a nation; and under other circumstances, vice versa.
We want a government sufficient to restrain the strong and protect
the weak. We want a government competent to make good laws,
and strong enough to execute them. We want a government
determined to protect life and property, so that industry can be
encouraged, and a confidence in the permanent stability of it
maintained. We want a government that will purify the bar, and give
a judiciary of competency and integrity such as will grace and adorn
the bench for “its disposition to do justice to all.” We want a
government resolved to inflict punishment and stamp with enduring
disapprobation any league or infamous association for the triumph of
crime, no matter how distinguished or wealthy its members may be.
The particulars of the trial now to be given, is a striking illustration
of the league for the triumph of wrong, in which not only the
executive heads of several States were concerned, but also other
high officials in power, with more of distinguished persons in different
capacities.
As the caption states, their triumph was only in name. The
retribution of truth and justice is sometimes tardy in execution; but,
longer or shorter, it is sure to come. Nearly fifteen years have
elapsed, since this trial terminated, and the public has remained
uninformed to this day of the more important features connected with
it. This long silence has favored the continuance of wealth, power,
and the honors of office for the prosecutors; while the defendant was
unjustly brought to the verge of ruin by the enormous expenses
attending the trial. The phases are now being changed—one side
going out and the other coming in—one recovering strength and the
other experiencing decline and fall with reference to the future—
consequences which should immediately have followed the trial, for
if justice could be forthwith done without so much expense and
delay, the evil perpetrators would soon come to an end; or, at least,
would soon become diminished in numbers.
As stated in another place, the interval betwixt the times of giving
bond and trial amounted to near forty days. One part of this interval
was devoted to making preparations for trial; the other part was
consumed in visiting on the coast with a view to gather such
information as might be of interest afterwards. The information as to
the discovery of the place of deposited money in Catahoula swamp
is one link in the chain of circumstances which attest the truth of the
“confessions;” another is the finding of the mysterious map in a few
days after the famous Harvey battle, which is in perfect agreement
with another part of the said confessions, together with the singular
circumstances in connection, which were the means of George A.
Cleaveland getting possession of the map, with other subsequent
circumstances showing the strongest of probability that he not only
understood it, but also succeeded in getting the buried gold from
Catahoula swamp.
But the opening of the city court and the time for trial were near at
hand, and the sheriff or defendant, had to leave the coast hurriedly
to repair forthwith to Mobile. He arrived there some two or three days
prior to the opening of court. He there found considerable anxiety
and excitement prevailing on the subject. A number of collected
friends from distant parts of Mississippi were there to be present and
hear the trial, which was the general theme of conversation and
speculation everywhere. Fortunate for the defendant, he arrived in
time to summon quite a number of important witnesses, who were
accidently in the city from various points on the line of the Mobile &
Ohio railroad attending a railroad meeting. DeKalb, Kemper county,
was well represented in this meeting. The delegates from this town
all being men of moral worth and of superior intelligence; J. H. Gully,
P. H. Gully, H. C. Rush, A. B. Campbell, Cornelius McLamore, and
the illustrious J. S. Hamm, then presiding judge of his district, all
from the above named place. In DeKalb, S. S. Shoemake had
resided for a number of years, and these gentlemen from the same
place were very valuable as witnesses in the estimation of the
defendant; and, of course, he had them summoned without delay
right on the ground.

THE RECORDS OF THE TRIAL FROM THE CITY COURT OF

MOBILE.

The Clerk of the City Court of Mobile has twice been applied to for
particulars, or for a copy of the records of the trial. In his first reply
the present Clerk freely confesses the records of the case to be
misty, suspicious, deranged, and altogether unsatisfactory, without
venturing any further opinion on the matter. In his second reply he
confesses in still stronger terms, if possible, of the confusion of the
records; important papers not on file; much missing; more deranged,
and very hard, with any amount of application of labor to make
anything of value intelligible for rigid comprehension—one case,
Shoemake’s, entirely disappearing from the docket, and no
circumstances or account left to show the cause for the same.
In substance, here follows an extract from the Clerk’s replies: “I
find by the Clerk’s indorsement, that in the November term, 1858,
the Grand Jury found bills for four cases of libel against J. R. S. Pitts,
and four indictments were framed accordingly in the same term.
They are found docketed, numbers 61, 62, 63 and 64, to be
prosecuted severally by G. Y. Overall, C. F. Moulton, G. A.
Cleaveland and S. S. Shoemake. There are four appearance bonds
for six hundred dollars each, dated January 25, 1859. The writ of
arrest is dated January 15, 1859. But the indictments are all missing.
There is nothing here on file or on record showing any action of
either the Governor of Alabama or the Governor of Mississippi with
respect to the processes for arrest. The case number 64 has entirely
disappeared, and no trace left to account for the same. In the
February term, 1859, the trial of J. R. S. Pitts commenced on the
23d, continued through the 24th, and on the 25th was given to the
jury, who on the 2d day of March rendered a verdict imposing a
penalty of fifty dollars, to which finding the Court further ‘ordered that
the defendant be imprisoned in the common jail of the county for the
space of three months, and on the non-payment of the fine and costs
that he be further imprisoned until discharged according to law.’ The
case tried must have been that of Overall, 61, the papers of which
have entirely disappeared, as I cannot find them on file. The two
remaining cases, numbers 62 and 63, were continued from term to
term until February 28, 1863, when a forfeiture of bond was taken
against the defendant and his sureties, Colin McRae and James H.
Daughdrill, and then continued through several terms to 21st of
March, 1864, when judgment final was entered, and execution
issued, which execution was ordered to be returned by the
Commissioners of Revenue on the payment of all costs, the costs
being paid by said Daughdrill said execution was returned. The
matter remained in this condition until January, 1867, when the
defendant and his sureties were finally released by the
Commissioners of Revenue.
“The names of the Petit Jury who tried the case are Wm. B.
Hayden, James B. Post, George Mason, George M. Brower, Edward
Guesnard, John R. McBurney, W. H. Marchan, Henry T. Eatman,
Walter L. Young, Benjamin F. Hunt, John A. Bevell and Wm. H.
Vincent. The only witnesses I can find any record of are the
prosecutors for themselves. The attorneys for the prosecution were
R. B. Armstead, solicitor, and Anderson & Boyle, while Manning and
Walker appeared to have conducted the defense.
“Imperfect as this history of the case is, it has cost me much
search and labor to collect from the disconnected, confused and
garbled materials left me for reference. The whole affair is a myth.”

COMMENTS ON THE RECORDS.

This communication from the City Clerk of Mobile is valuable in

more points than one. In another place he states that there is in his
office on file an affidavit from Shoemake relative to the prosecution.
The nature and subject of this affidavit was not inserted in the Clerk’s
communication. Why this affidavit of Shoemake’s as one of the
prosecutors, and none to be found from any of the other three
prosecutors, is a profound mystery. Again, affidavits before Grand
Juries, in connection with prosecution for libel, surpasses ordinary
comprehension. The missing of so many papers, and the
derangement of all others, might be charged to the neglect or
carelessness of the custodian, the then Clerk, but how can the
legerdemain disappearance of Shoemake’s name from the trial
docket be accounted for? No reasons—no cause for the same can
be found! The present Clerk is bewildered, and can give no
explanation on the matter. Such being the case, is it not reasonable
to presume that the leaders of the prosecution then controlled the
files and records of the office to suit convenience? Prosecution foul
in the commencement needs props, subterfuges and mystery in
every stage of progress.
But the most impenetrable darkness of all is, Shoemake’s name
being found on the trial docket as one of the prosecuting parties. The
order in which they stand on the docket is cases number 61, 62, 63
and 64, corresponding with which the prosecutors are G. Y. Overall,
C. F. Moulton, G. A. Cleaveland and S. S. Shoemake; and in
agreement with the same, four appearance bonds are found. The
question now for solution is, did Shoemake really get a bill from the
Grand Jury of Mobile at the November term, 1858, along with the
other three? The files and records show that he did. Now let it be
borne in mind that this man was the agent to bear the requisition
from the Governor of Alabama to the Governor of Mississippi for the
arrest of J. R. S. Pitts. Let it also be borne in mind that J. R. S. Pitts
is positively certain that he never gave any bond to cover the case of
Shoemake—only three, Overall, Moulton and Cleaveland’s; and that
before receiving the Clerk’s communication, he never knew that
Shoemake was one of the docketed prosecutors; but he did learn
during the time of his trial, that Shoemake tried to get a bill in the
February term, 1859, and signally failed. Choose either end of the
dilemma and the difficulty is not at all obviated. If he did get a bill, the
rascality is equally manifest. To go to Mobile, Ala., to prosecute while
he was a resident of Mississippi, and J. R. S. Pitts also a resident of
this State, is utterly incomprehensible in any other light than a
flagrant outrage on every principle of law and justice. If he did not get
a bill, the files and records show forgery of the darkest hues. So,
then, from whatever stand-point the whole affair is viewed, atrocity
and corruption of the most aggravated character stare the impartial
inquirer in the face from every direction.
As before seen, the trial opened on the 23d of February, 1859.
The indictments were for libel in three cases as the defendant
understood the same. The prosecutors, first, G. Y. Overall; second,
C. F. Moulton, and the third, G. A. Cleveland. As it had been
previously arranged by them on the State docket, the defendant had
first to answer the charge of G. Y. Overall. Had he been placed the
last on the docket, the prosecution would have, in all probability,
signally failed in every case; and even this first case, with all the
deep-laid designs in connection, would have been a failure but for
the extraordinary resources for the forcing of a verdict by foul means.
The design here contemplated is only to give a brief abstract of the
more momentous features of the trial, because the whole given,
would be inopportune in a condensed work of this nature.

SHOEMAKE AND B. TAYLOR IN COURT.

As before noticed in another part of this work, S. S. Shoemake will

again be introduced as playing a very conspicuous part, not only on
trial, but also before the Grand Jury, which was organized for the
then present term of the City Court.
Notwithstanding the “records” to the contrary, the following
information was given to the defendant, at the time of his trial, by one
of the jurors himself. Shoemake, although an old resident of
Mississippi, the defendant also a resident of the same State, and the
work complained of published in New Orleans, Louisiana, yet he,
with audacity enough, went before the said Grand Jury to get
another bill for libel in favor of himself and against the defendant, but
was sadly disappointed. This Grand Jury had had more time for
thought and reflection than the preceding one, and peremptorily
refused his application. Had he been unjustly injured, his redress
would have been from the juries of Mississippi; but he had
penetration enough not to make any efforts of this nature in
Mississippi, well knowing that his character was too well-known here
to succeed in making juries subservient to his dark purposes of
crime and dissimulation.
On the day of trial, the counsel for the defence availed himself of
the earliest opportunity to make application for further time, on the
grounds of absence of material testimony, but without the desired
effect; the Court over-ruled the application, and both sides were
ordered to proceed to trial instanter.
While the Sheriff of this court was calling in witnesses for the
prosecution, the name of Bentonville Taylor was particularly noticed
by the defendant. This man, as was afterward learnt, had been
conveyed by the clan from Williamsburg, Mississippi, and appeared
quite unexpected on the part of the defence. His knowledge about
the case then pending, could have been but very little or nothing at
all, and was evident to all who were more conversant with the facts,
that his presence there was not in behalf of justice, but for sordid
objects of pecuniary gain.
The first witness brought to the stand by the prosecution was S. S.
Shoemake. He came up with an air of boldness and majesty not
easily described. Calm, deliberate, and with an external appearance
of the perfect gentleman, he gave his testimony with elegance and
beauty of language, almost sufficient “to deceive the very elect.” His
testimony, such as it was, was pretty much confined to a pretended
conversation betwixt the defendant and himself during the journey
together while under circumstances of arrest; to the effect that the
defendant had confessed to him that the names given in the life of
Copeland, were not at all reliable, and that the authenticity of the
work was entirely valueless. This pretended conversation was wholly
a concocted fabrication of his own to serve the ends of the
prosecution. But the character of this man in a few more minutes
elicited, will satisfy the reader as to what amount of credit his
testimony was worth.
His then uninterrupted evidence being given, the next ordeal was
his cross-examination by the counsel for the defence. The envelope
alone, which at first contained the John R. Garland letter, was
handed to him with this question asked: “Did you address this
envelope?” After looking at it for a while he answered: “I believe this
to be my hand-writing.” He was next asked if he had at any previous
time addressed a letter or communication of any sort to the Sheriff of
Perry county, Mississippi. He answered that he had no recollection
whatever of addressing a letter to the Sheriff of Perry county,
Mississippi, who was then seated at the bar before the Court. The
John R. Garland letter itself was next handed to him, with the
request to state to the Court and Jury if he was the writer of said
letter, which had been written and mailed at DeKalb, Mississippi.
Here Shoemake hesitated and faltered considerably; and, in a
moment, seemed to be fully conscious of the complete wreck before
him. A transition so sudden from the heights of promising success to
the most forlorn and abject condition of reverse, was too much for
him to surmount. In this instance, he manifested a great reluctance
to, or desire to evade giving a direct answer, but being forced by the
Court to give a definite reply, he answered at last with emphatic
words that he was not the writer or author of the John R. Garland
letter. Now, for the succeeding and successful conflicting testimony.
The witnesses who had been previously summoned, were now
called forth to testify to the hand-writing of the John R. Garland letter,
as well as to the general character of S. S. Shoemake, as to whether
or not his being a man of truth and veracity. After examining the
letter, several of them expressed, according to the best of their
knowledge, that the hand-writing was S. S. Shoemake’s; and also,
from his general character, they could not believe him on oath. But
another witness called for and introduced, Cornelius McLamore,
gave still stronger and more decisive testimony. No man could have
had greater facilities for thoroughly understanding all about
Shoemake than Cornelius McLamore. He, without any doubt
whatever declared the hand-writing to be, undoubtedly, S. S.
Shoemake’s, and that he for another could not believe him on oath.

M’LAMORE FELL A VICTIM TO THE VENGEANCE OF THE CLAN.

This is the same gentleman treated of in another place, who so

mysteriously disappeared the evening after the trial, and, from that
time to the present, has never more been heard of. Whatever fate he
met with, no one has ever been able to tell; but from all the
circumstances connected, it must be almost certain to the thinking
mind of all that he was cruelly murdered by the conspiring clan, who
had so long maintained a sad career of blood and revenge, with all
the practiced modes of concealment.
The following is an extract from a letter dated DeKalb, May 21st,
1871, written by a prominent gentleman and ex-Sheriff of the county
in which the town of DeKalb is situated:
“There has never been any person living in the county by the
name of John R. Garland. Mr. McLamore has never been heard of
since the time he was a witness in your case, during the month of
February or March, 1859.”
Two powerful motives predominated for the termination of his
existence. The first, the unrelenting revenge for the crushing defeat
he gave to others, and particularly to Shoemake while on the
witness-stand. And secondly, to prevent an indictment for perjury
against Shoemake; for it will be remembered that he swore positively
to the hand writing of Shoemake, who had immediately before
denied the same on oath in open court. These two considerations,
together with having just sold his cotton, the money for which he had
then in his possession, will account for his presumptive murder. No
one could better understand the hand writing of Shoemake than
Cornelius McLamore, for, as the defendant has been authoritatively
informed, the former was during some time book-keeping for the
latter.

G. Y. OVERALL PROVES AN ALIBI

Shoemake, the first witness for the prosecution, had made such a
wretched failure that no efforts were made to bring in the other
witness from Mississippi of the same character, Bentonville Taylor.
The prosecution next introduced two witnesses from Columbus,
Miss., and one by the name of G. W. Overall, all to prove an alibi,
and that G. Y. Overall was positively residing in another place at the
time referred to in Copeland’s confessions. This testimony was
satisfactory and unobjectionable; but, as will be shown in further
progress of the trial, did not in reality invalidate the confessions in
any material point whatever.
The examination and cross examination of the different witnesses,
with the arguments of the opposing counsel, occupied the Court for
about two days; and had G. Y. Overall’s object been nothing further
than the establishing of his own innocence, he might have
succeeded commensurate with his own unbounded desire; but what
was he doing associated with such men as S. S. Shoemake and
Bentonville Taylor? The complete unmasking of the infamous
conduct of the former was anything but auspicious for the
prosecution, and left a very unfavorable impression on all who heard
the proceedings as to the character of the prosecution.

THE ARGUMENTS FROM BOTH SIDES.

The closing of the testimony was immediately followed by the

opening arguments of the solicitor for the prosecution, which
continued for a considerable length of time. Next the argument of
Hon. Percy Walker, for the defense, which occupied a period of two
hours and a half in delivery. Distinguished as he had heretofore been
on all occasions, this, as was said by his friends, was one of the
greatest and happiest efforts he ever made. At the time the court-
room was crowded almost to suffocation, and outside of it thousands
were congregated to catch the utterances from his flowing lips. His
withering torrents against Shoemake electrified the court; but his
main argument went to show that G. Y. Overall had no right to
prosecute in the name of G. Overall, and that it was another person
referred to in Copeland’s confessions.
The prosecution replied; and now the arguments from both sides
being finished, the written notes from each, together with instructions
from the Court were furnished to the jury, and it forthwith retired to its
room for the purpose of trying to agree on a verdict. But it was soon
ascertained that there was a very strong probability of it not coming
to any agreement at all. After retirement for about twenty-four hours
without any harmonious result, it reported to the Court the almost
certainty of not being able to render any verdict on the case pending
before it.

THE COURT AND THE JURY.

Upon the reception of said report, the Judge made some changes
in his former charges to the effect that if doubt existed, the Jury must
give the defendant the benefit of such doubt; further adding, that he
should not discharge until the rendering of its verdict; and at once
ordered it to retire again, with additional information that if it required
any explanation on any points of law involved in the case before it, to
report accordingly to the Court, and it would give the proper
instructions sought for. After the Jury had remained some day or two
longer in retirement, the Court ordered it to report, on the arrival of
which, the Court desired to know the points of disagreement. In
answer, one of the jurors, W. L. Young, rose and respectfully
addressed the Court, stating that a majority of the Jury entertained
doubts; and as for himself, he had conscientious scruples as to the
propriety of confounding G. Overall and G. Y. Overall together; while,
at the same time, the principal part of the Jury did not believe that
when Copeland gave the name that he intended it for G. Y. Overall,
and that the latter had no proper authority for accepting the name of
G. Overall, as published in the confessions. The presiding Judge
appeared to be well pleased with the manly and intelligent conduct of
the young gentleman, but informed him at the same time that the
Jury must be governed according to the law and evidence before it.
To this declaration, Mr. Young made the following reply: “Please your
Honor, and suppose we do not believe the evidence in the case
before us.” This ready, but profound reply excited, to all appearance,
a pleasant smile on the Judge’s countenance, and created no little
sensation throughout the court-room among the legal fraternity,
some of which were heard to exclaim—“a pretty good lawyer
himself.” The Judge, feeling the weight of such an expression, did
not attempt any further remarks in reply for this time.
 TAMPERING WITH THE JURY.

The jury once more retired. The court kept furnishing fresh
charges in opposition to the first given; the last of which was so
pointedly as to declare in positive terms that according to the law
and evidence it, the jury, was compelled to find a verdict for the
prosecution! Six long days and nights had this jury remained in
confinement. Worn out by it and with excessive loss of rest, together
with no hope of immediate relief, as the judge had declared his
intention to keep it in strict confinement for an indefinite period,
unless a verdict could sooner be returned; all these miseries
endured, and in prospect to be endured, forced the jury at last to a
verdict against its better judgment by the understanding or
impression artfully made that it would be better to get liberty by
agreeing to a verdict with a small amount of fine in the way of
damages for G. Y. Overall, but had not the most distant idea of any
imprisonment resulting. But the judge better knew the law which
invested him with power to imprison for six months, but in this
instance he sentenced only for three months.
In addition to the torturing process resorted to for the purpose of
forcing a verdict from the jury in its last hours of confinement, other
shameful means were made use of by outsiders of a tampering
nature—such as the conveyance of notes and packages in bottles to
that part of the jury in favor of the prosecution—one end of the string
tied to the bottle, and the other end, in the form of a ball, thrown
through the window to be received by the parties intended. The
nature of these notes and packages could only be conjectured—the
recipients themselves holding the contents a perfect secret within
their own little circles. This information was conveyed to the
defendant by eye-witnesses and part of the jury.

SYMPATHY AND REGRET AS EXPRESSED BY SEVERAL

JURORS.

After the sentence was announced, Dr. Bevell and others, who
formed a part of the jury, openly declared that if they had been aware