The Sensible Way to Respond to Provocation

This sort of utterly superficial leadership always proves costly for a community. As someone has very aptly put it: The cheaper the politician, the more he costs his country. I would like to cite an instance here—of an internationally-renowned Islamic institution in India. The authorities of this institution once played a key role in Indian politics. The solution they devised to solve the problems of the Indian Muslims was to insist that Muslims must damage their opponents. They claimed that sometimes communities have to give proof of their capacity to damage others in order to teach them a lesson and said that this is what the Muslims of India, too, should do. Until Muslims demonstrated that they could cause damage to others, they argued, their right to lead a respectable life in this country would not be accepted. In 1967, general elections were round the corner in the country. In accordance with this institution’s recipe of inflicting damage on others, it called for Muslims to support opposition parties in the upcoming elections and defeat the then ruling Congress Party. Vast numbers of Muslims were taken in by this appeal, and so this institution became for a short while (1966-67) the headquarters, as it were, of Muslim politics in India. This, then, was the ‘solution’ that this Islamic institution presented for solving the problems of Muslims. But when, just a few years later, in 1974, this very same institution was faced with a serious internal crisis, it adopted a totally opposite approach! While it had claimed that inflicting damage on others was the solution to the Muslims’ social problems, when it was faced with a serious internal problem, it advocated something totally different! It called for winning over people’s hearts, as opposed to confrontation. Just adjacent to this grand Islamic institution is a big university. Now, this physical closeness of the university was a continuing problem for the institution. The students who resided in the university hostel—who were almost all non-Muslims—routinely troubled the students of this Islamic