Page 86 - Non-violence and peace-building

Nipping Inter-Community Conflict in the Bud

other members of the community must not sit back as
neutral spectators. Instead, they must intervene. If they
choose to remain indifferent spectators, the mischief of
a single person can easily trigger off anarchy in society,
which can engulf the entire community.
This principle can be directly applied to contemporary
inter-communal violence. Their extreme emotionalism
often leads Muslims to refuse to tolerate even a minor
discomfort or irritant, and so they immediately start
fighting with others. If these others are fellow Muslims,
the damage that is caused by this kind of reaction is
generally restricted to just one person or family. But if
the others are non-Muslims, the Muslims’ emotional
reactions engulf the entire Muslim community.
Opportunist leaders deliver angry speeches and whip
up people’s emotions and turn the issue into a major
communal controversy. And this rapidly degenerates
into inter-communal rioting. The cases of the riots in
Aligarh and Moradabad cited above are practical, real-
life examples of this.

Because in India communal riots often happen in
places where Muslims are economically slightly better-
off than elsewhere, Muslims often assume that such
violence is engineered as part of an organized conspiracy
to destroy their economic base. But the simple reason
actually is that where Muslims are economically better-
off, they also engage more in emotionally-driven
activities. Such activities require social support, and
Muslims easily obtain this support in places where they
are doing better economically than elsewhere. In such
places, internecine rivalries among Muslims are more

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