Communal Egos and Inter-Community Conflict

Often, newspapers come out with bold headlines: ‘Communal Riots in India!’, ‘Riots in Aligarh!’, ‘Riots Break Out in Hyderabad!’ Despite being true, such news reports are always also false. They tell the truth, but not the whole of it, because no communal riot ever engulfs the whole country or even the whole of a city or town. But the language and style that some of our writers and commentators use create the wrong impression that the whole country or an entire city is torn apart by communal violence. Whenever communal violence breaks out, it does not happen all across the country or even in every part of a particular city. In India, such violence happens more in the north than elsewhere. Likewise, in the city of Aligarh, inter-communal violence sometimes breaks out in the Old City, but rarely, if ever, in the relatively new Civil Lines area. Similarly, the older parts of Hyderabad are more vulnerable to communal violence than the newer parts. Our leaders are engrossed in the falsehood of generalizations. And that is the greatest reason why they have failed to find a proper solution to this very sensitive problem of violence between communities. Because some of them claim that the entire country or a whole city is drowned in communal violence, they do not see those parts of the country or of a city that are not affected by such violence. If they could see these parts, too, they might be able to investigate what had kept these parts free of violence. And then they could seek to evolve appropriate solutions, based on this knowledge, to address communal violence in those parts of the country or of a city that are affected by such violence. It is worth thinking about what leads some parts of a city to be rocked by communal violence at the same time as other parts of the city remain violence-free. The lessons one draws from this sort of analysis can be very helpful. If you know what keeps a certain locality free from such violence, you can draw lessons which you can apply to other localities that are prone to such violence.