by Sudhir Kakar
Deriving from the paranoid potential which lies buried in all of us, rumours are the conversational food that helps in the growth of a collective ‘community body’. There is little doubt that rumours are the fuel and riots the fire in which a heightened sense of community is also forged. Lending words and images, however horrific, to the imminent threat of deathly violence against the self and one’s community, rumours give rise to complex emotions, not only the feelings of dread and danger but also of exhilaration at the transcendence of individual boundaries and the feelings of closeness and belonging to an entity beyond one’s self.
Almost half of the rumours in Ahmedabad were common to both Hindus and Muslims: ‘Don’t buy anything from the bakery; it will be poisoned’; ‘The milk has been poisoned. Poison has been injected into the milk pouches’. Except for changes in technology—milk in pouches instead of being delivered by vendors; bakeries instead of grocery shops—some of these rumours seem to be perennial since they have circulated in most riots over the last six decades. During the riots in Rohtak following Partition, there were rumours among the Hindus that milk vendors had been bribed by the Muslims to poison the milk.29 Four children were said to be lying unconscious and two dogs had died (in Ahmedabad in 2002, it was a cat) after having drunk the poisoned milk; many claimed to have personally seen the dogs in the throes of death. Women had hurried to empty out the pails of milk, and they said strange sticky patches of white soon covered the cobbled stones of the streets. It was reported that Muslims had broken into grocery shops in the night and mixed powdered glass with the salt. A police van was said to be driving around the town, warning people not to buy salt.
We would call these perennial rumours about poisoned food—food that kills instead of nourishing—fundamental rumours. Fundamental in the sense that they attack what the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson called our sense of ‘basic trust’, received in our earliest experiences with an empathic mother, that lets us experience ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ as an interrelated goodness.30 Poisoned milk makes the secure maternal presence we carry inside us recede. It breaches the individual’s ‘background of safety’, releasing our paranoid potential and its accompanying persecutory anxiety.31 The persecution anxiety is further heightened by another rumour common to both groups which attributes danger to hitherto safe activity in common public spaces, such as travel by train and bus.
The second category of rumours that can also be described as perennial has to do with sexual violence. In our particular case, this category is represented in both communities by rumours about the rape of the community’s women and, additionally, among Hindus, by the threat of castration of its men: ‘Don’t let girls go out of the house. They kidnap them and do ‘bad things’ with them’; ‘They are saying they will castrate all the infidels so that the whole race dies out.’
In undermining our familiar controls over mental life, a riot is like a midwife for unfamiliar, disturbing fantasies and complex emotions. The overcharged atmosphere of violence breathed day in and day out by a person lifts the lid on the cauldron of instinctual drives as civilized sensibility threatens to collapse. Rumours of sexual violence during a riot, and the mixture of horror and relish with which they are recounted, also release the more shameful excitement that bespeaks instinctual desire in its rawer form. Besides expressing moral outrage, rape rumours may also be used by the men as an unwanted but wished for vicarious satisfaction of their sadistic impulses. Perfectly ordinary men talk at length about rape and defilement in graphic language otherwise encountered only in extreme, psychopathic pornography.
Besides the commonality of some rumours to both communities, there are others that are group specific and betray the distinct and long-standing fears of each community that rise up to the surface during a riot.
In the case of Muslims, these rumours relate to a perceived threat to their religious identity: ‘Islam is in danger’, ‘They are breaking our mosques’, ‘Now they will try to convert us to Hinduism, be vigilant’, ‘They force Muslims to say the name of Rama and kill you if you refuse.’ These rumours are born of a religious minority’s fear of being drowned in the sea of the majority. Thus, to protect themselves from possession by malignant spirits, of which minor Hindu divinities—the devis and devatas—are considered the most dangerous, Muslims all over the subcontinent are enjoined to be pious and constantly proclaim their faith. Such calls to the battle stations of faith reflect the primary fear of Indian Muslims of somehow lapsing from the faith and becoming reabsorbed by the insidious Hindu society that surrounds them.
Other rumours, specific to the Muslim community although not among the most frequently mentioned, relate to the role of the police. ‘Muslims are being arrested and taken away by the police’ or ‘The police are beating any Muslim found on the streets’ or ‘The police are taking away Muslims in trucks and dumping them in Hindu areas where they are killed’ are some of the rumours that are a reflection on the partisan role of the predominantly Hindu police. Indeed, in many towns and cities of North India, such as Meerut, confrontations between the police and the Muslims have led to violent explosions.
The community-specific Hindu fear is encapsulated by rumours such as ‘Large amounts of arms and ammunition have been sent to the Muslims from Pakistan’ and ‘Terrorists have infiltrated from across the Kachch border and spread all over Gujarat.’ The mention of ‘terrorists’ makes these rumours the contemporary version of the rumour heard during the 1969 Ahmedabad riot of armed Pakistani agents seen parachuting into the city at night.
Here, by linking it with an armed and dangerous enemy, the Muslim minority becomes a psychological threat that is otherwise not justified by its numbers. The rumours reflect and revive the Hindu nationalist’s deep-seated distrust of Muslim loyalty to the Indian state and a doubt regarding Muslim patriotism if the community is faced with a choice between the country of its birth and that of its coreligionists across the border. The rumours conjure up images of a vast Islamic army poised at the country’s borders, of medieval Muslim marauders like Mahmud, the sultan of the kingdom of Ghazni, one of the most cruel and rapacious of Muslim invaders, who swept over North India every year like a monsoon of fire and was famed far and wide as the scourge of the Hindus.
Are the rumours during a religious riot also gendered, in the sense that some are more frequently to be found in the discourse of women than of men? They are not gendered as far as the most common rumours are concerned. However, women, both Hindu and Muslim, seem to show a preference for the more apocalyptic ones. ‘Now there will be war and India will be destroyed’, ‘They are saying, “Hindus have darkened the sky [with arson], Muslims will dye the earth red [with Hindu blood]’, ‘Bhagwan has taken birth; not a single Muslim will survive now’—these are only three such rumours favoured by Hindu women. ‘It is coming to pass as written down in the Quran: universal destruction’ is their counterpart among Muslim women. Women, not unexpectedly, are also partial to rumours pertaining to the safety of their children, in the sense that more rumours about the kidnapping of children by the enemy community circulate among women than among men.
Rumours, then, are the motors of violence when individuals begin to feel helpless and frightened (but also manically exhilarated), loosened from their traditional cognitive moorings and thus prepared to give up previously held social, economic or political explanations for communal conflict. The strong anxiety accompanying the birth of violence can take many people away from ‘knowing’ and back to the realm of ‘unknowing’—from a ‘knowledge’ of the cause of their distress to a state where they do not know what it is that makes them anxious though they do know that they are in distress. One antidote to paralysing anxiety is anger, preferably in a violent assertion that is psychically mobilizing, a violence almost invariably viewed by its perpetrators as pre-empting the enemy’s imminent attack.32
Amplified by rumours, stoked by religious demagogues, the persecutory anxiety signals the imminent annihilation of one’s group identi
ty and must be combated by its forceful assertion. Acting demonstratively in terms of this identity as a Hindu or Muslim, though, threatens members of the rival community who too mobilize their religious identity as a defence. The spiral of religious rhetoric on one side triggering the same on the other, of threats and reactive counter-threats further fuels persecutory anxiety, and only the slightest spark is now needed for a violent explosion.
The involvement of religious rather than other social identities does not dampen but, on the contrary, increases the violence of the conflict. Religion brings to conflict between groups a greater emotional intensity and a deeper motivational thrust than language, region or other markers of ethnic identity. This is at least true of countries where the salience of religion in collective life is very high, as it is in India. With its historical allusions from sacred rather than profane history, its metaphors and analogies having their source in sacred legends, the religious justification of conflict involves fundamental values and releases some of our most violent passions. Moreover, rhythms of religious ritual, whether in common prayer, processions or other congregational activities, are particularly conducive to breaking down boundaries between the individual members of a group and thus, in times of tension and threat, forging violent mobs.
As for the actual violence, most people do not take part in the looting, arson and the killings. These acts are generally the province of certain young men and older veterans of the community’s violence although everyone—man, woman, child—will pitch in when their own house or neighbourhood is being attacked by a mob. The goondas, the experts in violence, play a leading role; not only because of their expertise but also because of the moral ‘high’ the riot affords them. For the duration of the riot, they are no longer despised but see themselves, and are seen by their community, as soldiers protecting the community and its faith.
As for the role of politicians, there is little doubt of their involvement although their influence on the course taken by a riot is often exaggerated. Eyeing electoral gain, politicians certainly use the riot after the fact and may try to organize it in advance but usually find that the rioting mobs will not act according to their plans.
Moralities of violence
The large-scale replacement of personal identities by a communal identity in a riot does not mean that people are now in some regressed, amoral primitive state where the violent side of human nature is bound to be unleashed randomly. The replacement of personal by communal identity only means a refocusing, and the individual now acts according to the norms of the communal Hindu or Muslim group. For instance, in a riot, there is a very different code of morality—not its absence—that governs the actions of both Hindus and Muslims. In both groups, arson, looting and killing men of the other community are no longer the serious transgressions they would be in times of peace. Yet, among both Hindus and Muslims, there is a consensual condemnation of rape and killing of the women of the other community. In Hyderabad, where riots have been frequent, the two communities share in common the commandments ‘Thou shall not kill a woman’ and ‘Thou shalt not rape’, although the intensity of outrage associated with the transgression of these commandments varies with and within the communities. Both communities view a riot as a battle exclusively between men in defence of the honour of their ‘nations’. Women, for the most part, are noncombatants in this war.
In Hyderabad, the tradition of violence between the religious communities, the almost annual bloodletting, has developed certain norms which strongly disapprove of rape as a vehicle of contempt, rage or hatred that one community may feel for the other. Moreover, unlike some other ethnic/religious conflicts, such as the one in Bosnia, Hindus and Muslims still have to live together after a riot, carry out a minimal social and considerable economic interaction. Rape makes such interactions impossible and turns Hindu-Muslim animosity into implacable hatred. Like nothing else, it draws impermeable boundaries between the groups, separates them in an enmity where there is no longer a bridge between the two.
Not that there are no incidents of sexual violence. Accounts of such incidents, though, are almost always highly exaggerated. They seem to be necessary heralds of violence, events without which the tale of violence between the two communities will be only half-told, the account incomplete.
At an emotionally more neutral level, Hindus and Muslims also share a common disapproval of acts which hurt the religious sentiments of the other community. Such acts as throwing the carcass of a pig in a mosque or that of a cow in a Hindu temple, archetypal precipitating incidents for a riot—in the sense that there is an unarticulated expectation that such an incident should belong to the beginning of an account of a Hindu-Muslim riot—draw condemnation even at times when communal identities are rampant. This disapproval is often couched in terms of empathy: ‘Their religious feelings are the same as ours and we would not like it if it were done to us.’ The existence of this empathy, even in a time of murderous violence, prevents a complete dehumaniztion of the ‘enemy’, from a Hindu or Muslim considering the other as subhuman.
The future of Hindu-Muslim conflict
The awareness of belonging to either one religious community or the other—being Hindu or Muslim—has increased manifold in recent years.
Every time violence between religious groups occurs in India or in some other part of the subcontinent, the reach and spread of modern communications ensure that a vast number of people are soon aware of the incident. Each riot and its aftermath raise afresh the issue of an individual’s identification with his religious group and bring it up to the surface of every individual’s consciousness in one way or another. This awareness may be fleeting for some, last over a period of time for others, but the process is almost always through a pre-conscious self-interrogation on the significance of the religious community for one’s sense of identity. For varying periods of time, individuals consciously experience their identity through their religious group rather than through groups based on caste, language, region or occupation. The duration of this period, or even whether there will be a permanent change in the mode of identity experience for some who will henceforth encase themselves in the armour of an aggressive communal identity, depends on many factors. Not least is the success of revivalist and fundamentalist political outfits in encouraging such a change.
As for the future, there is more than one scenario for the likely evolution of Hindu-Muslim relations. The Hindu nationalist, who views the conflict as a product of Hindu and Muslim religious-cultural traditions, believes the only way of avoiding large-scale violence is a change in the Muslim view of the community’s role, traditions and institutions so that the Muslim can ‘adapt’ to the Hindu majority’s culture. To ask the Muslims to recognize themselves in the Hindu nationalist version of Indian history, to expect them to feel their culture confirmed in Hindu symbols, rituals and celebrations is asking them to renounce their religious-cultural identity and to erase their collective memory so that they become indistinguishable from their Hindu neighbours. To be swamped by the surrounding Hindu culture has been the greatest fear of the Indian Muslim, articulated even by some medieval Sufis who are commonly regarded as closest to the Hindu tradition and as exemplars of the ‘composite, syncretic tradition’. Such an assimilation is feared precisely because it is so tempting, holding the promise of a freedom from the fear of violence and an active and full participation in the majority culture. The Hindu nationalist’s dilemma is that the Muslims continue to decline an offer that he believes is one that they cannot refuse. And so the nationalist finds that the Muslim is too big to either swallow or spit out.
The secularist, who views the conflict as rooted in socioeconomic considerations, is more sanguine on the future of Hindu-Muslim relations. The secularist believes that in the long run the economic development of India will alter the socio-structural conditions and thus consign the conflict, as the cliché would have it, ‘to the dust heap of history’ as religious identities fade away and play less and less o
f a role in private and, especially, in public life. However, we need to sound a sceptical note on the belief in the primacy of political and economic structures in the shaping of consciousness. Cultural traditions—including the beliefs regarding the devilish ‘Other’—are transmitted through the family and have a line of development separate from the political and economic systems of a society. What we would like to believe (that is, hope) is that we are moving towards an era of recognizing Hindu-Muslim differences rather than pursuing their chimerical commonalities. That we are moving towards a multicultural society rather than a ‘composite’ culture. Such multiculturalism is neither harmful nor dangerous but necessary since it enables different religious groups to deal with the modernizing process in an active way rather than withdraw in lamentation at the inequities of modernization or endure it as passive victims. We may have to give up Gandhi’s dream of ‘lasting heart unity’ and content ourselves with the creation of a common public realm while regarding the other community with ‘benign indifference’ in private. There will be inevitable violence on the way. In the long run one can only hope that there will be a declining acceptance of religious hatred and a general disapproval of violence in the service of faith. In the short term, there is no alternative to what the political scientist Donald Horowitz claims is vital for the prevention of ethnic riots all over the world, namely the effective deployment of force by the state, especially in the period of lull, that is, the twelve to twenty-four hours between the first incident and the major outbreak of violence.33 Where the required political will is weak or absent, as appeared to be the case in Gujarat in 2002, the horrors of mass violence soon overcome any well-meaning effort at containing riots.
The Indian Mind
In this book we have attempted to describe the manifestations of the spirit of India in various facets of Indian life and thought. By ‘the spirit of India’ we do not mean something elusive and ethereal, but are talking of the culturally shared part of the mind, a certain Indian-ness, that is reflected in the way the inhabitants of the subcontinent approach the daily tasks as well as the eternal questions of human existence. What are the building blocks of this Indian-ness which we have encountered in the foregoing chapters? Let us begin with the Indian (here, again, primarily the Hindu) view of the world.
