After the recent terror blasts in Mumbai I re-read Amartya Sen’s two related books — The Argumentative Indian, and Identity and Violence —to see if there was any insight I’d missed in the first reading. I don’t think so. In fact, the ideas that took Sen two books to develop are age-old and can be written on the back of a postage stamp: Don’t stereotype people. Or yourself.

The danger of seeing oneself, or others, through singular identities (Hindu/Muslim, Maharashtrian /non-Maharashtrian) is that it can easily degenerate into Us Vs Them thinking. In extreme cases, like the train terrorists of Mumbai, it can lead to mayhem. In Gujarat, similar thinking led segments of the Hindu population to presume that the Godhra train fire could only have been the result of a Muslim mob setting fire to the Sabarmati Express. As a subsequent enquiry showed, there is an equal chance that the fire could have been an accident. But Narendra Modi pandered to Hindu insecurities by using deadly identity politics for his own political ends.

Sen’s basic proposition 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—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 others, and how one can deal with identity issues that are tearing society apart.  I found the answers in David Berreby’s Us and Them.

A former science and culture writer, Berreby's fascinating book brings us up-to-date 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 before appending a reason for their decision.

Berreby also tells us how behaviours and attitudes change depending on circumstances and experiences. He quotes an experiment, where 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 under time pressure to hurry somewhere; another was 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, only some helped. In the last, most helped. The conclusion: not that some are less endowed with the milk of human kindness; but that others had time to show it.

In another experiment, one group was told to list the positive qualities of comic book heroes and the other specifically asked about Superman. When members of both 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. For those who ended up in Amartya Sen’s cul-de-sac, I recommend Berreby’s book as an antidote.

Email: r_jagannathan@dnaindia.net