by Sudhir Kakar
Among the Muslim poor, one becomes aware of a weary resignation in their dislike of the Hindus. They tend to see themselves as helpless victims of changed historical circumstances where India, irrespective of its formal constitution, has become a Hindu country. The regime is now of the Hindus and discrimination against Muslims a fact of life. This is the striking difference between the Hindu and Muslim poor: the former feel less like victims and have a greater sense of agency and control over the circumstances of their lives than the latter. The Muslim poor give the impression of following a purposeless course, buffeted by the impact of others in a kind of social Brownian motion.
With an inchoate sense of oppression and the looming shadow of a menacing future, the besieged Muslim feels compelled to mount the battlements of his faith. In other words, he withdraws further into the shelter provided by his religious community, holding on tightly to all markers of his religious identity—the Quran, the Sharia, the Urdu language, the madrassa or religious school—which his religious leaders tell him will lead him out of his current predicament. It is only thus that he can recapture the glory that came the way of his ancestors who strictly adhered to the tenets of Islam. To him, then, the present bad condition of the Muslims, their ghettoization is not due to historical changes but because of a glaring internal fault: the ‘weakening’ or loss of religious faith.
‘No wonder,’ says one mullah, ‘that Islam is bending under the assault of kufr (unbelief); Arabs are bowing before Jews and Christians, you before the Hindus. What is this preoccupation with worldly wealth and success? Allah says, I did not bring you into the world to make two shops out of one, four out of two. Does the Quran want you to do that? Does the Prophet? No! They want you to dedicate yourself to the faith, give your life for the glory of Islam.’18
The loss of a collective self-idealization, or self-esteem, is also evident in the case of the elite among the Indian Muslims. The despair at the moral decay and political decline of Muslim societies, the historian Mushirul Hasan tells us, is a recurrent theme in Urdu literature and journalism.19 For many, this mourning is never completed; the stock of narratives of loss and their elegiac mood, most vividly captured in the ghazal, is passed from one generation to the next. For these ‘dispossessed’ men and women of the elite classes, the sentiment expressed in the poet Iqbal’s line, ‘Barq girti hai to bechare Mussulmanon par’ (Lightning only strikes the hapless Muslims), has become part of their social identity. In other words, whenever such a person feels, thinks and acts like a Muslim rather than as an individual, there is an undertone of grief, a miasma of mourning in what has been called ‘the Andalus syndrome’.20 The syndrome, of course, refers to the great Muslim civilization on the Iberian Peninsula that ended abruptly in the sixteenth century, plunging the Islamic world into gloom and leaving a yearning for its lost glory in Muslim societies on the rim of the Mediterranean. For a long time, both during British rule and in an independent India with an overwhelming Hindu majority, the Andalus syndrome was a significant part of the psyche of the Muslim upper class. Now, the situation seems to be changing, in so far as the younger generation is better prepared to face the old challenges and seize the opportunities provided by modernization rather than remain in a state of perpetual mourning.
FROM CONFLICT TO VIOLENCE
As with an individual, where the ‘faultlines’ of personality are most clearly visible in a state of its breakdown, the psychological dimensions of Hindu-Muslim conflict become transparent when a dormant conflict breaks out in large-scale violence. These are the ‘communal riots’ which have been a recurrent feature of the Indian social and political landscape.
The build-up to violence
Leaving aside the conundrum of the ‘root’ cause of Hindu-Muslim violence (since all the possible causes—economic, historical, political, social-psychological, demographic—are encountered in almost every riot situation), the eruption of a riot is never unexpected and yet takes everyone by surprise. By eruption we do not mean that a riot is spontaneous and involves no degree of planning or preparation, but only that it generally takes place suddenly after a considerable degree of tension between the two communities has been built up. To change the metaphor, the riot is a bursting of a boil, the eruption of pus, of ‘bad blood’ between Hindus and Muslims which has accumulated over a few days or weeks in a particular location. In some cities—Ahmedabad and Hyderabad come immediately to mind—where the boil is a festering sore, the tension never disappears but remains at an uncomfortable level below violent eruption.
The build-up of immediate tension occurs when religious identities come to the forefront in a large number of people because of a perceived threat to this particular identity. The threat, a collective distortion of the meaning of a real event, makes members of the community act demonstratively through words and actions as Hindus, or as Muslims. In turn, the demonstration of this religious identity threatens members of the other community who, too, begin to mobilize their identity around their religious affiliation. Thus begins a spiral of perceived (or misperceived) threats and counter postures which raises the tension between the two communities.
In the period of tension, individuals increasingly think of themselves as Hindus or Muslims and see members of the other community as stereotypes. We have already seen these stereotypes—the Hindu and Muslim images of each other—that are attributed to the adversarial group and orally transmitted down generations. As tension mounts, all these are recalled, and there follows an inevitable homogenization and depersonalization as individual Hindus or Muslims become interchangeable. Each community perceives the other in terms of a group category rather than a collection of people with their personal, idiosyncratic natures. The individual disappears, and remarks such as ‘Look what the Hindus are doing!’ or ‘The Muslims have crossed all limits!’ increase markedly.
The conscious experiencing and expression of identity through religion rather than through other group identities such as those of family, caste or profession varies with individuals. At the one extreme there are always some Hindus and Muslims whose personal identity is not overwhelmed by their communal identity even in the worst phases of a violent conflict. These are persons who wear their group identity lightly and are capable of acts of compassion and self-sacrifice, such as saving members of the ‘enemy’ group from the fury of a rampaging mob even at considerable danger to their own physical safety. On the other extreme there are others—the fanatics—whose behaviour even in times of peace is dictated by their communal identity, an armour that is rarely taken off.
In both communities, communal identities also tend to be less salient for women than men, a difference that seems to be rooted in their developmental histories. In Hyderabad, where Hindu-Muslim riots are frequent, a study revealed that there was a significant difference between boys and girls between the ages of ten and fifteen when they were given the task of constructing an ‘exciting’ scene using toys and dolls easily identifiable as Hindu or Muslim.21 Scenes of violence between the two communities were relatively absent in the girls’ constructions, whereas they dominated those of the boys. Even when they identified the dolls as Hindu or Muslim, girls tended to construct peaceful scenes from family life, with the excitement—such as a policeman chasing a robber—banished to the periphery.
With the movement of religious identities to the forefront, one knows that any particular conflict between the two communities, generally resulting from a blend of political and economic aims or grievances, will be imbued with religious ultimacy. In other words, the involvement of religious identities will ensure that the issues at stake become life and death issues through the employment of the arsenal of powerful religious symbols and rhetoric.
The role of religious-political demagogues
While the rhetoric of violence becomes frequent in times of tension, it still remains a substitute for action. The activation of a full-scale, violent Hindu-Muslim conflict—a riot—needs powerful additional impulses. The ‘zone of indiff
erence’ with regard to one’s faith and religious community in which everyday life is lived, free of excessive and obsessive scrutiny, may be breached by momentous external events such as the demolition of the Babri mosque. But the breach needs considerable widening before violence becomes possible. It is here that religious demagogues, owing allegiance to fundamentalist religious-political formations, enter the scene. On the one hand, they stoke the group’s persecution anxiety with images of a besieged and endangered community on the verge of extinction at the hands of the ‘enemy’ group. On the other, they heighten the group’s narcissism by singing of its glories while ridiculing the other community.
Let us first listen to a notorious Hindu nationalist demagogue, Sadhavi Rithambara:
The long-suffering Hindu is being called a religious zealot today only because he wants to build a temple. The Muslims got their Pakistan. Even in a mutilated India, they have special rights. They have no use for family planning. They have their own religious schools. What do we have? An India with its arms cut off [a reference to the map of India after Partition]. An India where restrictions are placed on our festivals, where our processions are always in danger of attack, where the expression of our opinions is prohibited, where our religious beliefs are cruelly derided...
In Kashmir, the Hindu was a minority and was hounded out of the valley. Slogans of ‘Long live Pakistan’ were carved with red-hot iron rods on the thighs of our Hindu daughters. Try to feel the unhappiness and pain of the Hindu who became a refugee in his own country. The Hindu was dishonoured in Kashmir because he was in a minority. But there is a conspiracy to make him a minority in the whole country. The state tells us Hindus to have only two or three children. After a while, they will say do not have even one. But what about those who have six wives, have thirty or thirty-five children and breed like mosquitoes and flies?.
I submit to you that when the Hindu of Kashmir became a minority he came to Jammu. From Jammu he came to Delhi. But if you Hindus are on the run all over India, where will you go? Drown in the Indian Ocean or jump from the peak of the Himalayas?...22
The Muslim demagogue retorts with apocalyptic images: ‘Awake, O Indian Muslims, before you disappear completely! Even your story will not find mention in other stories.’23 Here, the demagogue can count on memories of previous Hindu-Muslim riots all over the country which have almost always had their origin in the fear of one community being exterminated or seriously damaged by the other. The demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992 played into the long-standing fear of Indian Muslims of being swamped by a preponderant and numerous Hindu host, a chain of associations leading from the razing of an unused mosque to the disappearance of Islam in India. The 1969 riot in Ahmedabad was preceded by a period of tension when the RSS, the spearhead of Hindu nationalism, began a campaign demanding the ‘Indianization’ of Muslims and thus initiating a similar chain of mental associations.
For the Hindus, the Muslim threat is to the very survival of their homeland; India is imperilled either through the Muslim’s identification with pan-Islamic causes or in the demand for a separate cultural identity, expressed through the insistence on maintaining Islamic personal law or in demanding a greater role for Urdu. Here the threat to the Hindus travels through an associative chain where such Muslim demands are viewed as precursors to violent Muslim separatism (as in Kashmir), the creation of another Pakistan and, ultimately, the dreaded revival of medieval Muslim rule.
As in individuals, where persecution anxiety often manifests itself in threats to the integrity of the body, especially during psychotic episodes, the speech of the demagogues is rich in metaphors of the ‘community-body’ under concrete, physical assault. The imagery of the Hindu or Muslim body amputated, raped, slashed, harnesses the power of unconscious fantasy to amplify the threat of persecution, anchoring the dubious logos of a particular political argument deeply in the popular imagination through the power of mythos.
To Gandhi’s cherished dream of ‘lasting heart unity’ between Hindus and Muslims, Sadhavi Rithambara’s response is this:
They ask what would happen to Muslims in a Hindu India. I tell them Muslims will not be dishonoured in a Hindu state nor will they be rewarded to get their votes. No umbrella will open in Indian streets because it is raining in Pakistan. If there is war in the Gulf then slogans of ‘Long live Saddam Hussein’ won’t be shouted on Indian streets. And as for unity with our Muslim brothers, we say, ‘Brother, we are willing to eat sevian at your house to celebrate Eid but you don’t want to play with colours with us on Holi. We hear your calls to prayer along with our temple bells, but you object to our bells. How can unity ever come about? The Hindu faces this way [when praying], the Muslim the other. The Hindu writes from left to right, the Muslim from right to left. The Hindu prays to the rising sun, the Muslim faces the setting sun when praying. If the Hindu eats with the right hand, the Muslim with the left. If the Hindu calls India ‘Mother’, she becomes a witch for the Muslim. The Hindu worships the cow, the Muslim attains paradise by eating beef. The Hindu keeps a moustache, the Muslim always shaves the upper lip. Whatever the Hindu does, it is the Muslim’s religion to do the opposite. I say, ‘If you want to do everything contrary to the Hindu, then the Hindu eats with his mouth; you should do the opposite in this matter too!’24
The vision of the Muslim fundamentalist—Ubedullah Khan Azmi in this case—too, is of Hindus and Muslims in eternal competition. Here, for example, is his view on which community is more civilized, stronger and generally better:
It was the believers in the Quran who taught you [Hindus] the graces of life, taught you how to eat and drink. All you had before us were tomatoes and potatoes. What did you have? We brought jasmine, we brought frangipani. We gave the Taj Mahal, we gave the Red Fort. India was made India by us. We lived here for eight hundred years and we made India shine. In thirty-five years you have dimmed its light and ruined the country. A beggar will not be grateful if made an emperor. Lay out a feast for him and he will not like it. Throw him a piece of bread in the dust and he will get his appetite back. Do not force us to speak. Do not force us to come in front of you as an enemy. God, look at their ignorance to believe we have no words when out of pity we gave them the power of speech.25
Azmi’s attempt to sharply differentiate Hindus from Muslims, suggesting that Muslims consider themselves as having come to India from outside the country eight hundred years ago (and from a superior racial stock) can be seen as a consequence of the heightened antagonism between the two communities on the eve of a riot. In such a situation, the fundamentalist exhorts the Muslims to shun contamination by any of the Hindu symbols and strive to keep their shared Islamic identity intact and pure. You should regularly say your prayers, he continues, keep your fasts even in the heat of summer. Give your life a religious cast. Live according to the Quran and then you are bound to be victorious: ‘We have passed under arches of swords. We have come through the battlefield of Karbala. We have passed through the valleys of Spain, through the hills of Gibraltar, through the plains of India. We can say with pride that in spite of thousands of ordeals it has undergone, the Muslim nation remains incomparable. No one loves his religion more than the Muslim loves Islam. Our faith becomes stronger with each challenge it faces and makes us more powerful.’26
Rumours and riots
One knows that the time of violence is at hand from the content of rumours that now begin to circulate in the two communities.27 Let us look more closely at some of the rumours that were circulating during one of the most horrendous episodes of communal violence in recent Indian history, the Gujarat riots of 2002.
On 27 February 2002, the Sabarmati Express was attacked, allegedly by a Muslim mob, at the railway station of Godhra, a small town near Ahmedabad in the state of Gujarat.28 The train was carrying activists of the VHP, the religious arm of a resurgent Hindu nationalism, on their way back from Ayodhya, the legendary birthplace of Lord Rama, where the VHP was planning to construct a highly contentious temple
—at the very site where the Babri mosque stood before it was demolished by a mob of Hindu nationalists.
In the attack on the train, around sixty Hindus, mostly men but also some women and children, were burnt alive when their coach was set on fire, it is commonly believed, by the mob (the cause of the fire has not been conclusively established). Two days after the gory incident, riots broke out in many parts of Gujarat, especially in the central districts of the state where both Godhra and Ahmedabad are located. The violence lasted for over a month and claimed more than a thousand lives, a vast majority of them Muslim.
The city of Ahmedabad, with a population of more than five million, the commercial, cultural and political capital of Gujarat (Gandhinagar, the actual state capital, is more or less a suburb of Ahmedabad), was the worst affected by the riots. Ahmedabad has a tradition of Hindu-Muslim violence going back more than thirty years. Indeed, isolated incidents of violence continued to be reported more than six months after the high tide of murder, arson and looting had subsided.
A Hindu informant remembered the reception of rumours thus: ‘Every day, night or day, many rumours reached us. They tormented all of us. People couldn’t sleep at night. For three months, the rumours deprived us of sleep. They had a very strong effect on women and children; women used to weep after hearing a new rumour and couldn’t carry out their household tasks. Men used to stand at crossroads, meet people from outside their locality and ask about what was happening in other areas. They would then tell others.’
