One among a billion.
I could have been an accountant. Instead I choose to become a journalist.
I figured it was the only job where you are paid to read. But, who knew, what started of as a suit-yourself-job will become my life long passion...
 Email |
 Print |
 Share |
The real answers come from psychologists, for communalism is nothing but a kind of collective neurosis, brought on by a community’s hidden anxieties and fears. Politicians know this, and this is why they pander to a community’s insecurities for short-term electoral benefits. They fan communalism for their own ends.
Psychologists like Salman Akhtar and Sudhir Kakar, however, know that you cannot deal with the problem without understanding its roots. While violence and terror need to be put down clinically, the roots of communal feelings run deeper, and need to be combated with social measures as much as education. Akhtar, for example, suggests Hindus and Muslims can deal with their negative feelings for each other if they are given opportunities to experience the “other” in everyday, non-threatening circumstances. In a book edited by him, Freud Along The Ganges, Akhtar commends a 1960s programme by Hamid Dalwai where children, adolescents and young adults of the two faiths were given opportunities to live with a family from the other religion. The participants found the programme extremely beneficial in removing their misconceptions about the other community.
In contrast, Amartya Sen’s two related books – The Argumentative Indian, and Identity and Violence – fail to provide real insight on how to tackle communalism. I wrote about this in a DNA column some time back. Sen’s basic point is that we have several identities. And we choose these identities. Identity is not something we are born into, though some aspects of identity – race, gender, etc – may be predetermined. And the more one keeps stressing one identity over others, the more one is likely to sink into feelings of exclusivity and unconnectedness with the other. So, if you stop stereotyping entire communities, identity-based violence should start declining.
The real problem with Sen’s rediscovery of old truths is its limited practical utility. To have actionable insight, one needs to understand why people seek one identity over other, and how one can deal with identity issues that are tearing society apart. When two books by a Nobel laureate failed to deliver on this count, I found the answers in David Berreby’s Us and Them.
A former science and culture writer for The New York Times, The New Republic and other publications, Berreby’s fascinating book brings us uptodate on the essentially tribal aspects of the human mind. Based on scientific studies of human behaviour and the latest in neurosciences, Berreby explains why it is so important for human beings to slot people into our kind and their kind, and why some people may take to violence in pursuit of identity.
Leftists would have us believe that violence stems from poverty, and that feelings of separateness (as in Kashmir) must have economic causes. That may be true, but the science of the mind tells us that we can develop a sense of Us and Them entirely out of imagined feelings. Not only that, people do not necessarily develop a liking (or disliking) for other people based on real character traits; in fact, the human mind often works the other way round. We first decide who we like, or who belongs to our tribe, and rationalise the reasons for our likes and dislikes later. In other words, the bombers of Mumbai might well have decided they are going to kill a lot of “Hindu” enemies (just as the mobs in Gujarat decided to target Muslims) before appending a reason for their decision.
Berreby also tells us how behaviours and attitudes change depending on circumstances and experiences. He quotes one experiment, where some would-be pastors were divided into three groups to check if they would help an individual in trouble when they saw him. One group was put under time pressure to hurry somewhere; another was put under less time pressure, and the third group was free to take its own time to get wherever it needed to. The first group failed to help the victim; in the second group, some helped and others didn’t. In the unhurried group, most stopped to help. The conclusion is not that some pastors are less endowed with the milk of human kindness; it’s just that the others had more time to put the same milk to work.
In another experiment, researchers reported that subtle differences in mental experiences can completely alter human behaviour. In two groups of people, one group was told to list the positive qualities of comic book heroes. Another group was specifically asked about Superman. Later on, when members of the two groups were offered a chance to do community service, the first group had more volunteers than the second. Talking about positive traits helped.
Conclusion: If we want our people to be less communal, lectures on secularism or criticism of the RSS and VHP will not help. Instead, one needs to create a shared sense of community among Hindus and Muslims in actual practice to erase the communal divide. Salman Akhtar knows this. So does Sudhir Kakar. And David Berreby.
Newer post