volence has moved to the "centre stage of Indian public life", Thomas Blom Hansen, an anthropologist at Stanford University, argued two years ago.

He wondered why ordinary Indians seemed to either "tacitly endorse, or actively participate" in public violence. "This development signals a deep problem, a deformation and pathology that may present a danger to the future of democracy," Prof Hansen wrote in his 2021 book, The Law of Force: The Violent Heart of Indian Politics.

Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur, two US-based political scientists, differ. In their upcoming book, Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State, they argue that large-scale violence has actually declined in the country. To put it more precisely, "aggregate levels of violence in India - public and private - have declined in the first two decades of this century compared to the previous two decades".

For their research, Prof Ahuja, of University of California, and Prof Kapur, of Johns Hopkins University, trawled through decades of official records of a swathe of violence in public life in India: from riots to election violence; from caste to religious and ethnic violence; from insurgencies to terrorism; and political assassinations to hijackings. 

They found that violence in India has actually declined in many of these indicators - in some cases, substantially - during the "peak quarter century" from the late 1970s to early 2000s.