Reflections on Communal Riots

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 marked. In the same way, conflicts between Muslims and others are more intense in places where Muslims consider themselves secure, numerically as well as economically. In the light of the Islamic commandments mentioned above, all efforts that Muslims have been making to end inter-communal violence seem completely useless. This is because these efforts are themselves against