Saumitra Jha on tolerance

Saumitra Jha has an article on Mumbai titled 'Tolerance by accident, Trust by Design'. 

It begins thus- 

“They have torn down the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. We must leave tonight.”

Hindus tore down a structure which had been a mosque, but which, according to Islamic law, ceased to be so some 40 years previously. Though Bombay is hundreds of miles away from Ayodhya, Muslims there ran amok. Since they were a minority, they got stomped the very next day. It is a familiar pattern. Muslims start the riots and, if they are the minority, they take disproportionate losses within 24 hours. 

On December 6, 1992, many towns across India erupted into flames as activists destroyed a 16th-century mosque. 

Because Muslims ran amok though they were bound to get stomped. 

The Babri Masjid was commissioned by a Muslim ruler (the first Mughal emperor Babur) but had been built on a site many believed to be the birthplace of the Hindu deity, Rama.

That was the finding of the Court. What was more important was that there had been continuous worship of a specific deity with legal personality at that spot for hundreds of year.

Riots sparked among Hindu and Muslim communities that had lived side by side for centuries.

save when Muslims ran riot and, if in a minority, got stomped.

 Even the religiously integrated crime families of Bombay, many of their fortunes seeded with smuggling from the Middle East, saw brother turn against brother in the name of religion.

Don't forget cash from the Pakistani ISI.  

Indian politics and its occasional cousin, Indian organized crime, would not be the same. 

Yes it would. Exactly the same parties and personalities ruled before and after the riots. 

The ethnic bloodlettings of India’s past were not the ancient history that I had thought.

What is this cretin talking about? The biggest killing of Muslims occurred during Partition. The next biggest was the Nellie massacre in the early Eighties which, it must be admitted, was wholly unprovoked. 

At that time, I was in high school in the Himalayas. The morning after the mosque was destroyed, we were scheduled to take an eight-hour bus ride south to Delhi. The old heartland of the Mughal empire, the region we were to travel through had some of the most religiously mixed cities in the country.

All with Hindu majorities- so Saumitra was safe enough.

 Stories spread that, that night, groups searching for members of the ‘other side’ were pulling people off buses.

But the police and paramilitary outfits were overwhelmingly Hindu and had a taste for killing Muslims.

 We left in darkness, our bus winding through rural backroads to avoid the main highways. Though we ultimately arrived safely, I remained deeply troubled.

Quite sensibly, the lad resolved to study hard and get the fuck out of a shithole country where Muslims might suddenly run amok. 

Religious hatred and violence seemed so medieval. 

Because Mohammad Ali Jinnah lived in the 12th Century- right?

Yet, it had revealed itself even in some of the richest, most modern parts of the country. 

Which were still pretty shitty compared to anywhere in Amrika.

Why—I wondered—wasn’t India’s economic growth and development solving these problems?

Coz Muslims be kray kray. Another pair of Hindu American economists published a paper a few years back claiming that when Muslims get a bit richer the first thing the do is run amok. Oddly, this was meant to be an anti-BJP paper. 

I found a path to begin understanding why, during my junior year of college, when I first encountered the work of economist Douglass North. 

This silly boy didn't realize that riots only happen if the police don't immediately kill the first bunch of nutters they run across. Why was there no rioting in Delhi- which the lad reached on his School excursion- the next day? The answer is that an IPS officer on the spot gave shoot to kill orders after a police constable was knifed. That's it. That's the whole story.

The British had created an Institution which dealt firmly with Muslims running amok. Shoot and keep shooting till everybody becomes nice and peaceful. An even cheaper way to do it is to round up troublemakers before they can get up to mischief.

On the other hand, riots make money for some connected people and police SHOs. Fixing that problem is political. It has nothing to do with institutions. 

North once worked in the study where I do now, in a COVID-friendly corner of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) that overlooks the Stanford campus.

But North wasn't so stupid as to think he'd need to go and study in India or Nigeria to understand why riots broke out in America when he was young. 

Prior to North—and the “New Institutional Economics” that he helped establish—many benchmark economic models simplified the world by assuming that individuals were perfectly rational: capable of flawlessly solving even the most complex of math problems.

But both prior and post North, economic models were and are shit. 

 Further, these rational actors often enjoyed similar information and well-defined property rights.

And thus could only exist in an Occassionalist Universe were God was the sole efficient cause. 

In this highly abstract world, the invisible hand of the market could lead to efficient (though, even then, far from equitable) outcomes.

But, in that world, there would be need for language or consciousness. 

New Institutional Economics (NIE) adopted a more rounded, if disturbing view. People are only rational at times, argued the NIE: they use rules of thumb, often conceal information, cheat, and even employ violence. Societies develop institutions—informal and formal rules—that shape how individuals navigate the complexity of the world. However, looking at history, North noted that if such institutions are ever optimal, it is “usually by accident.”

If North had looked at India he'd have seen that the relevant Institution- viz. the Indian Police Service- was optimal by design but ceased to be so whenever it was politically convenient for it to be utterly shit

This view gave me a lens to understand the puzzle that troubled me since I was as a boy. 

It didn't trouble me coz I just asked my Uncle who was a cop and he laid out the whole thing.

As societies got wealthier, one might hope that people would have better opportunities, which would make violence and hatred simply not worth it.

Why? Wealth is defined as the set of assets required to generate a given level of utility. If Society does not use violence against, and express hatred to, those who might diminish that asset set then Society doesn't really get wealthier. 

Violence is a learned skill. Technology has made some instruments of violence highly productive and low cost per kill. That's what makes violence not worth it. This also tends to diminish the utility of hate. You may as well tolerate what you can't safely throttle. 

 But the NIE suggested that even with prosperity, sometimes even terrible social norms and formal rules could often persist and shape our thinking and behaviors.

OMG! Is this cretin gonna say Islam has some terrible social norms and formal rules? That could get him fatwa'd. 

 And, too often, trade and globalization even reinforce the incentives for coercion and violence instead.

Very true. If the Saudi Crown Prince wasn't so rich- thanks to trade and globalization- he couldn't have had Kashoggi killed in Turkey. On the other hand, America spending a trillion dollars to kill Afghans doesn't seem to have done it any good. 

To be honest, I found this view both accurate and pretty depressing. As a PhD student, I set out to try to understand what, if anything, we could do about it. Again, I was inspired by India’s example.

But everybody in India knows that if the police extern the hotheads and shoot to kill from the get go, then there won't be no fucking riots. 

India does have a history of tragic waves of religious violence. 

Which parts? Only those where Islam or Sikhism or tribal converts to Christianity can be found. Even elsewhere, proactive killing prevents the thing from occurring. How come there were no riots when the new Ram Temple was consecrated? The answer is that people were afraid of being shot. True, there were riots during Trump's visit. But a pusillanimous police commissioner was to blame for that mess. 

But it also possesses centuries-old traditions of tolerance as well;

which is why it kept getting conquered.

 its communities provide a haven for many groups fleeing religious persecution elsewhere, including Jewish, Parsi, and Muslim communities. Even within a single state, like the rich coastal state of Gujarat,

Gujarat has a per capita income of under 3000 dollars. Americans are 20 times better off.

 this contradiction was apparent. Despite witnessing appalling religious violence in 2002, Gujarat was also the homeland of Gandhi

just as Palestine was the homeland of Jesus Christ who said 'resist not evil' and 'turn the other cheek'. Yet there has been plenty of religious violence there.

and was a region with storied traditions of “ahimsa,” or nonviolence.

Unlike Christianity which tells you to go around stabbing random people. 

I wanted to understand when and why some Indian communities developed “good” rules—institutions that support long histories of tolerance—and why others remained powder kegs for violence.

This is stupid shit. Tolerance does not matter. Punishment does. We may all tolerate the fuck out of each other but still try to kill guys we are told on good authority are planning to kill us and rape our wives. 

 My PhD co-advisor, Avner Greif, had emphasized that to understand such institutions, however, you need to understand not just the rules that people adopt but the nature of the beliefs and organizations that sustain these rules. 

The man is a cretin. The rules people adopt don't matter. Is there a high likelihood that they will be immediately killed or very quickly incarcerated if they run amok? If yes, then you have peace and tranquility. It doesn't matter if, behind closed doors, everybody vents their bigoted spleen against everybody else. 

And that required diving deep into the historical and social context.

Nonsense! After the post-Godhra riots were determined, by the Indian Home Ministry, to be a Pakistani ploy to hinder troop movements to the Rann of Kutch, the Defense Minister, George Fernandes, turned up with the Army. He knew they would obey shoot to kill orders because of the imminent Pakistani threat. Also a top Cop was sent in to clear out the corrupt SHOs who were hand in glove with the 'land-sharks' and boot-leggers behind the riots. Shooting rioters and transferring corrupt cops does not require any deep diving into 'historical' and social contexts. 

To do this, I began by looking into the very first encounters of Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat and the rest of India, going back to the seventh century, studying contemporary travelers’ narratives and accounts. I traveled to Gujarat in 2006, visiting and talking to members of communities around the state that had been affected by the riots and those that had remained peaceful. And I gathered a lot of data.

It was useless. Businessmen needed to know immediately which areas would be peaceful and which would remain under lock-down. They could get this information sitting in London making a few phone calls. It was enough to speak a little Hindi- most Gujjus are fluent in it- to achieve this. By contrast, eye-witness accounts add noise to signal. 

So, where do institutions of tolerance emerge? 

There are no 'institutions of tolerance'. The Police are pretty fucking intolerant of crime- unless it pays them not to be. 

Combining the historical accounts, the fieldwork, and the data, it became clear that such institutions develop in very specific places, where two conditions were satisfied. First, Hindus and Muslims needed to have incentives to work together: for example, engaging in business relationships that complemented each other, rather than competed against one another. 

But a community which is targeted during riots loses capital and thus has a worse bargaining position. Thus, the complement for the dominant community becomes cheaper which means that their offer price can go up. Wholesale ethnic cleansing is another story. But that's about one group of displaced people having to displace others of the enemy faith. So that is about territory. Business relationships are irrelevant. 

Second, this complementarity had to be robust: it had to be difficult for one group to replicate or simply steal the source of the others’ complementarity.

Necessity is the mother of invention. After the ethnic cleansing of Partition, new 'complements' or substitutes were quickly found. Thus 'robustness' is a figment of the author's imagination. 

One important set of examples of these were ports—like Mahatma Gandhi’s own hometown, Porbandar—that had traded to the distant Middle East during the medieval period.

As had Junagadh and even Karachi. Yet Junagadh's Muslim ruler was chased away and Karachi's Hindus had to flee. Lots of Gujarati Muslims did leave for Pakistan which is why Godhra had a close link to gangsters in Karachi. 

 For one month a year, for close to a thousand years, Mecca had been one of the largest markets in the world during the Hajj—and one had to be Muslim to go to Mecca. This gave Muslims in ports—in India, but also on the African coasts, the Malay peninsula, and beyond—a strong advantage in overseas trade and shipping. And, yet, this advantage nonetheless benefited the communities they connected by sail.

Then the Portuguese and Dutch and Brits etc. showed that the Arab dhow wasn't so very wonderful after all. It is noticeable that Hindus rose quickly after the Muslims lost their maritime hegemony.

Further this complementarity in overseas trade came from a trading network that was intangible, and so impossible to seize, 

yet it was seized by Western European nations who went on to greatly surpass anything that had previously existed. Around this time Muslim power went into terminal decline in non-Muslim majority areas of the sub-continent.

and the scale of the Hajj was so large it was impossible for a Hindu to replicate.

Piracy rendered the sea-route more and more perilous. It revived once the Royal Navy established hegemony. Sadly, they discouraged the slave trade- another factor in Islam's relative decline.

 Not surprisingly, then—before being disrupted by European colonial interventions beginning in the 16th century—Muslims had dominated overseas trade across the Indian Ocean, from the coasts of Zanzibar to India, Malaysia and beyond, as far as China.

Then tiny little Portugal ended their hegemony.

Ports emerged at natural harbors along India’s medieval coasts to accommodate these trading relationships.

There is evidence they existed a thousand years before Islam came into existence.

 These ports also witnessed not just the emergence of rules but also beliefs and organizations that supported trade, inter-group trust, and religious tolerance. 

No. There was not one single Guild or Shreni with any such characteristic. Either a particular Governor or princeling supported trade or it moved down the coast. There was no continuity. Some blame Islamic inheritance law for this. This meant, on the death of a merchant, all his assets had to be liquidated for disbursal to the heirs. This meant that Joint Stock Enterprises or limited partnerships or local variations of such things could not gain purchase. It has been suggested that hereditary 'Pirs' (preceptors) played such a role. But the same problem arose as with Princes or Governors. Today you might have a sensible guy. Tomorrow you may be dealing with a nutter. 

So much so, that even three centuries later—after Muslim trade advantages had ended due to European colonial interventions, and many of the ports themselves had silted up and become inaccessible to trade—this legacy of beliefs, norms, and organizations continued to shape the way people interacted with one another. 

No. There was no such legacy- just bitter memories of Islamic oppression. Smart Gujarati Muslims- like Jinnah's dad- wanted their sons to learn English and to do business with Englishmen in the English way. Jinnah was sent to England for this purpose. He chose to become a barrister instead. 

The institutions of peace and tolerance outlived the economic incentives that had once sustained them.

There were no such institutions. Gandhi spoke sooth when he told the Bengalis that the Kathiawad where he was born was a horrible place. The Prince might send his goons to batter down your door so as to rob you and abduct your daughter for his harem. 

An example of these tolerant, local, institutional beliefs can be found in Gandhi’s own life. Growing up in the erstwhile medieval port of Porbandar in the late 19th century, he would later reminisce about the syncretic nature of his mother’s temple, with a Koran kept inside the temple itself, and the active discussions that took place emphasizing the commonalities of both religions. This he credited as an important influence on his own beliefs and approach to nonviolence.

His mummy told him that if an untouchable touched him, he should go touch a Muslim so that the curse was passed on to the Mleccha. Gandhi himself was not a Pranami like his mother. His dad was Pushtimarga but after the Maharaj Libel Case- when the head of the order was discovered to have syphilis which he was spreading to the wives of his disciples- the Arya Samaj appeared safer. Gandhi himself became a celibate after meeting, the Arya Samaji, Bhai Parmanand. 

Norms also emerged that reinforced inter-religious trade. 

Like the norm of not stabbing the other guy before conducting business. 

As Europeans increasingly threatened Muslim advantages in overseas trade, Hindus in medieval ports began to adopt a custom called “Kaala-pani” (black water)—that any Hindu who ventured overseas (i.e., in competition with Muslims) would lose their caste, and be subject to ostracism by other Hindus.

Jhas are Maithili Brahmins and were considered erudite. They knew that Samudrolanghana- crossing the ocean- was listed as a sin in the Baudhayana Sutra which might date to the 6th Century BC. Why is this Jha telling such a stupid lie? Why not say 'any Hindu who did not suck off every passing Muslim was beaten and spat at by fellow Hindus?' 

 Even in 1891, Gandhi would have to engage in a purification ritual after returning from law school in London in order to be readmitted to his community.

Very true. The poor fellow was obliged to take a bath and say some prayers. What a terrible ordeal!

Organizations also emerged to support tolerance.

No they didn't. 

Members of Muslim trading communities engaged in local philanthropic endeavors,

which supported not tolerance but philanthropy. Spain at the time of the Inquisition was not tolerant but there was plenty of 'philanthropic endeavor.

 including dispensaries and providing relief in response to cyclones.

also some people built toilets. Toilets are actually organizations which support tolerance. 

 In some places, they even endowed Hindu temples.

Some also had Hindu names.

Yet, while Porbandar had a strong tradition of religious tolerance between Hindus and Muslims,

because it is 90 % Hindu.

 it was not naturally a peaceful place in general. The strength of organized crime was such that a 1999 Bollywood movie, Godmother, had been inspired by Santokben Jadeja, a mafia don turned politician.

She was from Kutiyana, a coastal village involved in gun smuggling etc. That's why gangs from there were feared. 

 But, unlike in the modern city of Bombay, the Porbandaris did not turn on one another. Instead, later, when asked why Porbandar remained peaceful during the pogroms of 2002, a Hindu respondent mentioned that there had, indeed, been attempts to incite violence. Community members were sent bangles to signify their lack of virility in not attacking their Muslim neighbors. However, no one in the community, including the local politicians, wanted violence. And, so, it did not happen.

There don't seem to have been any Muslim gangs in the District. There was no point attacking people who were posing no threat. Alternatively, it may be that the Machiyar community has a reputation for fighting back. Why go stab some guy who just might get his blade in first?   

These patterns were reflected in the data. Despite being, on average, somewhat poorer and more religiously mixed, I found that erstwhile medieval ports had five times fewer religious riots than otherwise similar towns through the colonial era, and were “oases of peace,” even during the widespread rioting in Gujarat in 2002.

Since this guy likes movies so much, why does not mention Shah Rukh Khan's 'Raees'? A Congress Minister had arranged a terrorist explosion in Surat- which is a port. 'Raees' was the bootlegger involved. He fled to Pakistan but came back after falling out with Dawood. The police 'fake encountered' him because they had been on his payroll. 

Further, even into the 21st century, the Hindu-Muslim wealth gap was smaller in these port towns than elsewhere. 

Such gaps are irrelevant. Clearly the Muslims did not run amok and thus were left alone. 

And, even though they were more religiously engaged, Muslims in these towns were also more likely to vaccinate their sons against polio. This was an important measure of societal trust,

No. It is a measure of faith in Scientific Medicine.

 since then, like now, vaccination was viewed with fear by many.

In contrast, in other medieval towns, like Ahmadabad, where Hindus and Muslims competed, or on inland trade routes where it was easy to replicate the other’s trade network, there were much weaker incentives to build institutions to support peace.

In Ahmadabad, there was a strong incentive for land-sharks to use riots to gain control of 'chawls' and replace existing 'hafta' extortion networks. 

The historic lack of mutual trust that resulted can still be seen in the shape of the cities themselves. In old Ahmadabad, each ethnic neighborhood had gates (“pol”) that were closed at night, and sentries posted above the walls to ward off potential attacks (Figure 2).

So, Muslim rule wasn't a bed of roses. People felt unsafe. By contrast, Raj Era 'Civil Lines' neighborhoods are spacious and open. 

Surat is a port city. According to Jha's theory, it should have no 'pols'. But it does have pols and khadkis. As for smaller ports, it is evident that some houses were strongly built to resist attack. During troubled times the lesser folk would shelter under the big man's roof-tree.

Working to understand institutional change in the spirit of North and Greif, I began to realize that a lot of the problems we face today of hatred, polarization, and conflict are also very old problems.

Easily dealt with by the methods which have always worked- viz. kill or incarcerate nutters who run amok- rather than methods which have never worked- e.g. telling everybody to be tolerant.

Despite the grave challenges we face in changing such deeply embedded processes, some societies have nonetheless addressed these issues, with some success, time and again, throughout history. 

By killing or locking up nutters not endless sermonizing about tolerance.

I discovered examples where technocratic political problem-solvers had created inter-group complementarities and used new organizational, economic, and financial ideas to bring people together and to expose them to the benefits of the common good.

Market makers do that in any case. 

I now convene the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab, where we are conducting modern randomized control trials, inspired by some of these successful historical natural experiments. We are finding that, in contemporary field experiments, too, these ideas can build support for peace.

Till quite suddenly they don't at all because somebody forgot you need to kill or lock up nutters who run amok.

This research has also left me with some hope that we are not condemned to repeat the past, or be stuck in a morass of poor rules. Instead, such historical institutions can provide valuable clues for informing contemporary policies. Poor rules can be—and, perhaps, are made to be—broken

Very good rules will also be broken. Only enforcement matters. The Stanford Conflict and Polarization lab is a waste of space. I found this ignorant article on their website

Gandhi’s Gift: Lessons for Peaceful Reform from India’s Struggle for Democracy Rikhil R. Bhavnani & Saumitra Jha

 We present a theoretical framework that highlights two key twin challenges faced by non-violent movements in ethnically diverse countries.

Sri Lanka is ethnically diverse. Yet it got universal suffrage in 1931. India had to wait till Independence to get rid of the restricted franchise.

The first is the challenge of mass mobilization across ethnic lines.

Which Sri Lanka found unnecessary. 

 The second challenge lies in overcoming the enhanced temptations faced by members of large mobilized groups to turn violent, whether to secure short-term gains from mob action or in response to manipulation by agents who stand to gain from political violence. We show how these challenges appear to match general patterns from cross-campaign data.

Brigadier Dyer and Police Commissioner Tegart, between them, showed that there is no enhanced temptation for turning violent if you know you will be killed or sent off to rot in the Andamans. 

Motivated by these patterns, we discuss how these challenges were overcome during the Indian Independence Struggle. We argue that the first challenge that of forging a mass movement was accomplished through the brokering of a deal that took advantage of external shocks - in this case, the Great Depression - to align the incentives of disparate ethnic and social groups towards mass mobilization in favor of democracy and land reform.

But there had been mass mobilization during the Congress-Khilafat campaign. The Hindus wanted independence and 'swadesi' (i.e. Indian textiles to replace British textiles) while the Muslims were worried about the Ottoman Caliphate. Then Gandhi called off the movement and everybody realized that the departure of the British Umpire would inevitably involve a show down between the Hindus and Muslims. Anyway, British rule was better than Indian rule because, most Indians believed, Indians were shit at running things. 

 The second key challenge - that of keeping the mass movement peaceful was accomplished

by the British Imperial police who had informers and agent provocateurs all over the place. Also they found that a bit of mayhem caused the Indians to come whimpering to them demanding 'the smack of firm governance'. In other words, riots were good for the Brits because it reminded people of how bad things were before they came.

 through organizational innovations introduced by Mohandas Gandhi in his reforms of the constitution of the Congress movement in 1919-20.

He got people to spin cotton and pay their membership fees with yarn. That was quickly abandoned because the organization needed cash not unusable yarn. 

 These organizational innovations took the Congress movement from one dominated by a rich elite to one organized on the principle of 

getting wealthy Hindu businessmen to pay for crack-pot schemes not

self-sacrifice, selecting future leaders who could then be trusted to maintain non-violent discipline in pursuit of the extension of broad rights and public policy objectives. 

Which did not materialize. 

We conclude by arguing that a key, but hitherto mostly neglected, aspect of 'Gandhi's Gift' - the example of non-violence applied to India's independence struggle - lies in understanding these organizational innovations.

But they failed. The Brits only left because the Americans wouldn't lend them money unless they threw in the towel. Thus, Indian independence was the gift of Hitler and Tojo. 

In the body of their paper, these two cretins say

Yet, modern techniques of civil disobedience incorporated new organizational ideas that have been credited with a number of remarkable successes. These include the ceding of democratic rights to 30 million South Asians by the British Empire in the 1930s and the Civil Rights movement in the United States in the late 1950s and the 1960s

Ceylon got universal suffrage in 1931 because the elite was sensible and Anglophile and there was strong minority protection built into the Constitution. India got little because the minorities united against Gandhi at the Second Round Table Conference. 

Civil Rights succeeded in America because the State Dept. and the Army wanted it. American power would be enhanced by it. Presidents were prepared to send Federal States to recalcitrant States. 

If these two cretins are ignorant of history what of the times they themselves live in? Consider the following-

However, non-violent civil resistance has also often failed. Modern scholars of civil resistance point to the issue of maintaining ‘nonviolent discipline’ in the face of provocation as an important missing piece in our understanding of how to make civil resistance work. And on the ground, as historic episodes such as the violence of the 1942 ‘Quit India’ movement, the race riots that followed in the wake of the US Civil Rights movement, as well as the Arab Spring and the battles in Tahrir Square demonstrate, movements that begin peacefully are often prone to rapid breakdowns into violence that further facilitates repression. 

Spontaneous demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt did lead to regime change. Gaddafi put up military resistance as did Assad. The former is dead, the latter seems to have prevailed. But no organized non-violent movement was involved. Spontaneity can prevail- e.g against Ceaucescu- precisely because the Intelligence service is caught off guard. But organized, disciplined, non-violence fails miserably because it can be gamed by the other side. 

 The first is the challenge of mass mobilization: non-violent movements, more so than violent movements, are only effective when they are large in scale

No. A hunger strike by a venerated figure can be more effective than millions marching through the streets. There were mass mobilizations against nuclear weapons and various wars and the fact that Trump had a penis and the fact that Trump did not win the elections and so on and so forth. Stupid mobilizations fail unless stupid leaders decide to do stupid shit. That's what matters. Is the guy in charge a fool? De Gaulle ran away from the Paris students in 1968. That was cool, coz he was a French soldier and thus prone to running away. This alarmed the French because they preferred their own cowardly generals to crazy students. Anyway, the students' leaders were stupid and so De Gaulle came back.

In India, a little later, there was a mass mobilization against Indira Gandhi. She crushed it with insulting ease. Edward Heath, who had earlier declared a State of Emergency in the UK, failed miserably in his confrontation with the Unions. On the other hand a mass mobilization against Thatcher's poll tax did succeed- probably because it spontaneously turned violent. Something similar may be said about the Yellow Vests in France. 

What do our authors mean by 'non-violent mobilization? 

Let us define a ‘non-violent’ movement, in contrast, as only different from other movements in that the strategy either requires the leader to expel members who engage in looting or violence or imposes sufficient penalties on members that violence is not a preferred choice.

The Indian National Congress never had either of these two qualities. Gandhi didn't expel those who engaged in violence of any sort. Ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bihar was done by Congress-wallahs as he said at the time. 

Violence against the British or those who worked with the British was ruthlessly punished. However, the reason the British ruled India was that they were non-violent. The District Commissioner did not engage in looting or violence against the Chief Medical Officer. Indeed, British politics- unlike Indian politics- was wholly non-violent. Gandhi was pretending that Congress would be as non-violent as the Tory Party or the Liberal Party or the Labor Party. But he knew this was just pretense- a necessary one so that Indians could themselves become peaceful- not rely solely on Pax Britannica. . Sadly, the Brits were on their way out because non-violent politics is money politics and America pulled the financial plug on the Raj. Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and so forth then had to preside over a vast blood letting. Thankfully, the 'steel frame' created by the British proved its worth. Institutions like the Police and the Army could do their job provided politicians weren't as stupid as Saumitra Jha.