How has the nationalist movement contributed to terrorist activity?
That movement originated in the 1920s as an anti-colonialist movement, but remobilized in the 1980s in response to a variety of domestic political crises. Organizations affiliated with Hindu nationalist groups targeted India’s Muslim community (who constitute about 13 percent of India’s population and tend to be poorer and less advantaged socially and politically), destroying residential and commercial areas, inciting riots, attacking mosques. (Indian Christians have also been targeted by these organizations, especially in Orissa, an east-central state, and in the states of northeast India.) Mumbai, then known as Bombay, was the site of some of the worst riots in India’s history in early 1993, following Hindu nationalists’ destruction of a mosque in another state. Indeed, Mumbai is the new name that was selected by the Hindu nationalist sympathizers who controlled the city’s government in the 1990s. Mumbai’s class divide, its size, and its organized crime network set the stage for thos
