176 Marek Moroń As long as the local politics in British India did not require inventing instruments to attain power via the ballot box, traditional religious rituals, such as the sacrificial feast of Eid ul-Adha, were practiced mostly without ostentatiously emphasizing components that might offend other religious groups—e.g. the Hindus in the case of cow sacrifice. With growing political interest in shaping the community identity in India, religious traditions became useful in creating an enemy and exacerbating negative emotions causing communal violence. During the 1920s and 1930s, the political future of Bengal was at stake. The process of Indianization of the British India administration, along with the increasing employment of democratic election mechanisms, introduced new tensions and competing political aims, which destroyed the delicate balance of cohabitation between Muslims and Hindus. It seems that, in the second decade of the 21st century, there have been no players with political weight who would view the provocation of communal conflicts in Bengal (and, in fact, in all of India) as useful, by using Eid ulAdha sacrifices as an instrument of politics. That said, we may note that the potential for conflict arising from the use of religious components in Indian politics is something to bear in mind. References Bates, Crispin (2007) Subalterns and Raj: South Asia since 1600. London, UK: Routledge. Baxter, Craig, Syedur Rahman ([1989] 2004) Historical Dictionary of Bangladesh. Delhi, India: Vision Books. Chatterji, Joya ([1994] 2002) Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition 1932–1947. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dalrymple, William ([2006] 2007) The Last Mughal: The Fall of Dynasty, Delhi 1857. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. Garrett, John ([1871] 1991) A Classical Dictionary of India. New Delhi, India: D. K. Printworld. Hughes, Thomas P. ([1885] 1988) A Dictionary of Islam: Being a Cyclopædia of the Doctrines, Rites, Ceremonies and Customs, Together with the Technical and Theological Terms, of the Muhammadan Religion. New Delhi, India: Rupa and Co. Kieniewicz, Jan (1985) Historia Indii [History of India]. Wrocław, Poland: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich. Majumdar, Ramesh C. ([1981] 2006) History of Modern Bengal. Part 2. Kolkata, India: Tulshi Prakashani.
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