The scholarship on inter-religious relations in South Asia has overwhelmingly focused on "communalism," which refers to the violence involving religious communities, thereby leaving the peaceful coexistence between religious communities underexplored. In this context, contrary to the often-held notion of inter-religious peace as a "natural" or "passive" state characterized by the mere absence of communal strife, this research argues for the necessity of understanding communal peace as an active and dynamic process (Galtung 1969,1996). This understanding of peace as an, "active process," rests on two premises. Firstly, Peace and violence are not treated as dichotomous ends, rather intricately intertwined possibilities of the same social processes. Secondly, it contends that peace is primarily 'political', as power plays a constitutive role in the social relations that perpetuate communal peace, much like violence.
The presentation is divided into three parts. Firstly, it undertakes a critical review of the existing literature on inter-communal relations in India, focusing on the religious, social, political, economic, and psychological dimensions of both violence and peace. Secondly, I discuss the inadequacies of existing theoretical frameworks of inter-communal relations such as "primordialism", "institutionalism", "instrumentalism" and "constructivism", and critically explore the "civil society turn" in the study of communal peace and coexistence (Varshney, 2002; Williams, 2007, 2015). As I will show, this turn is predicated on a necessary and causative connection between the nature of civic engagements and the dynamics of communal relations. Critically engaging with the theoretical and empirical foundations of the "civil society turn," I argue that it suffers from a major conceptual issue of the "problem of missing the political." Predicated on a depoliticized portrayal of the "state" and "civil society," it obscures the influence of political ideologies in constituting communal peace and lumps political parties and associations into the broad category of civil society- thereby undermining the analytical and empirical distinctiveness of the political sphere. Thirdly, drawing from Dylan Riley's (2010) argument on the "autonomy of the political" as well as the recent scholarship that foregrounds the centrality of political parties in constructing socialities (Leon, Desai, and Tugal, 2009, 2015), I propose a mobilizational approach to understanding inter-communal dynamics. Anchored around the concept of "political articulation", the mobilizational approach simultaneously emphasizes the centrality of associational life while accounting for the role of political mobilizations in constituting the dynamics of inter-communal coexistence. I argue that such an approach enables us to understand how associational political mobilizations construct and normalize identities, public spaces, and claims of belongingness that constitute the dynamics of inter-communal coexistence.

Keywords: Peace, Violence, Civil society, Political mobilization, Coexistence