A response to Aakar Patel’s “call to action” to Bollywood
While UP has the dubious distinction of leading the nationin these statistics in absolute numbers, it must be noted in per capita terms,
the state is not always the worst performer because it’s a large state.
Looking at incidents, UP’s share of the total is 18%, 30%
and 20%, in these three years respectively. Given that UP accounts for
approximately one fifth of India ’s
total population, you would expect incidents of communal incidence in the state
to be in accordance with its population share. In 2012 and 2014 that was indeed
the case, but in 2013, the year in which widespread communal violence took
place in Muzaffarnagar, its share was much higher.
We can get more precise information on which states exhibit
more communal violence than their population share by comparing each state’s
incidence of communal violence with its share of the population over each of
the last three years. (See charts for all states and union territories for the
years 2012,2013 and 2014 respectively. Each dot represents the incidence of
communal violence in a given state in a given year from which is subtracted its
share of the total population of the country. The line through zero would be a
state, which has the same incidence of communal violence as its share of the
total population. Dots above the line represent states that have greater
incidence of violence than their population share would suggest, and similarly,
for dots below the line representing states that have a lower incidence of
communal violence than their population would suggest.)
This statistical exercise reveals that as noted UP is
slightly above average in 2012, 2014 but a huge outlier in 2013, a year after
Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party became chief minister.
