NEW DELHI, Nov 7 (AP): First, the rumors start. May be a Muslim man threw garbage outside a temple, or a Hindu boy teased a Muslim girl. No one has any names or specifics, but that doesn't stop people from taking the rumors as fact. Crowds gather on both sides. Slogans are shouted, stones are thrown. A car goes up in flames.
And just like that, or so it seems, a religious riot rips through an Indian neighborhood.
Political parties across the spectrum have used religious differences to manipulate both the country's majority Hindus and its Muslims and other minority groups, exploiting the idea that a polarized electorate is often more pliable.
The most recent riots erupted late last month in Trilokpuri, a largely poor neighborhood on the eastern edge of New Delhi. The fighting started on the evening of Diwali - the Hindu festival of lights - after a drunken brawl broke out near a makeshift Hindu shrine set up across from a mosque.
For hours, large groups of men fought pitched street battles, hurling rocks and stones at each other and injuring dozens of people. A Muslim-owned shop was set on fire, Hindus pelted the mosque with stones, and dozens of angry Muslim men attacked Hindu homes.
Largely-Hindu India's constitution promises equality and religious freedom to all its citizens, but politics and religion have a complex and troubled relationship in this diverse nation of 1.2 billion.
"Controlled violence creates an obliging polarized electorate," says Mukul Kesavan, a historian at the Jamia Millia Islamia university in New Delhi.
In elections about two months after the 1984 riots, Gandhi's Congress party won its largest victory ever. Victims identified Congress party members as leaders of many of the bloodthirsty mobs. News reports from that time said that the police did little or nothing to end the violence. Yet three decades later, only a few people have been prosecuted.
Rights groups say the seeds of India's religious riots were likely sown in the violence of 1984 and the lack of accountability and justice in their wake.
"The Indian government's failure to take even rudimentary steps to bring to justice the authors of the 1984 violence has perpetuated a climate of lawlessness," Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in a recent statement.
"Thirty years since the horrific massacre," Ganguly said, "communal violence still breaks out in India, raising the same concerns about accountability."
