DETERMINANTS OF VIOLENCE IN INDIA: ROLE OF ECONOMIC AND ETHNIC FACTORS

The paper examines what type of individuals face violence in India. We specify and estimate a probit model where the probability that a person would face violence depends on several individual, regional and institutional variables. Empirical application of this model on the IHDS data set for the year 2011-12 reveals presence of important interaction between economic and ethnic factors. We find that violence against a "backward" social group increases when it becomes upwardly mobile. In case of forward castes, a reverse pattern is seen. Among ethnic measures, fractionalization turned out to be the most important one in our study. Polarization turned out to be statistically significant only when regions affected by violent separatist or political movements were treated with a dummy variable. Interestingly, as predicted by Esteban and Ray (2011), the Gini-coefficient based on consumption did not turn out to be significant. Among other variables, political activism, access to sanitation and number of adult males in a household were important determinants of susceptibility to violence. Ongoing feuds in the village and radical or separatist movements in a state also increased the susceptibility to violence.