The religious clashes in India and their impact on election results

Mgr. Ladislav Kudláček

Bachelor's thesis

Abstract:

The present Indian democracy has the challenge of how to cope with the religious clashes and Hinduism's and Muslim's nationalism. These religious cleavages have brought problems such as terrorism and community riots. This work should analyse these problems of Indian religions in political life. The main goal of this thesis is to describe main religious conflicts and find the connection between politics and mainly the behaviour of the political parties and their voters. For the understanding of the context of the political life is necessary to know the fundamental base of the politics, which is the election system and also have some basic information about Indian parties and about the system of the political parties as a whole. I have attempted to describe the main and the biggest political parties in present India. The effort was to divide these parties to main groups by political, national and religious affiliation and make analysis of the main political goals in their programme which has the attitude to religion. The main part was found a significant point of the political and party life, which mainly impacts election and party behaviour in selected Indian state or on the federal level of government. This analysis also want to support the hypothesis that the consensus and secularism in politics can prevent riots and the effective number of the parties also has an impact on the number of communal violence. The main conclusion of this analysis and work as a whole is that the big influences on religious disorder and riots have a base in electoral system and in the number of effective parties.

Keywords

religious, clashes, cleavages, conflict, Indian, parties, election

Language used: Czech

Date on which the thesis was submitted / produced: 20. 12. 2006

Thesis defence

• Date of defence: 8. 1. 2007
• Supervisor: Mgr. Tomáš Šmíd, Ph.D.

Masaryk University

Faculty of Social Studies

Bachelor programme / field:
International Territorial Studies / Political Science