Those who delude themselves into believing that our society is a paradise of love amongst various communities are victims of their own rhetoric. The long, saddening history of communal strife proves that historical evidence is to the contrary. They must get one thing straight. The entire criminal justice system comprising the police, courts and government can enforce only communal peace because ‘disturbing public tranquillity’ is a criminal act punishable by law. Similarly, the system can prevent the spreading of communal hatred because it is also an offence.
Absence of enmity does not mean the presence of amity
Police, courts or government cannot engender communal amity; it must spring from within the society. This is a fine point and must be understood carefully. The law (Section 153A IPC, for example) speaks of ‘promoting enmity’ and ‘doing acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony’. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the words animosity, enmity and hostility, though loosely used synonymously, connote different degrees. Animosity carries the sense of anger, vindictiveness, and sometimes the desire to destroy what one hates. Enmity suggests true hatred, which may even be overt. Hostility implies strong, open enmity that shows itself in attacks or aggression. Harmony in this context means agreement or accord.
From an absence of conflict or the presence of ‘peace enforced by law’, it does not follow that there is love among the communities. Communities cannot be ordered or compelled by the force of law to love each other. Love cannot be ordered even between individuals; forget about love between communities!
The law had also understood it. That’s why it makes only the ‘promotion of enmity’ by ‘external acts’ punishable. This means it presupposes that enmity very well exists at all times, but manifests within tolerable limits. Harbouring enmity, being an ‘internal act’ of the mind, cannot be made punishable. Society must bother only about disturbances to public tranquillity, that is, harboured enmity growing to such an extent that it leads to ‘external acts’ that disturb the ‘normal tempo of life of the people’. ‘Acts prejudicial to maintenance of harmony’ also imply that people live under ‘enforced accord or agreement’ and that the status quo must not be disturbed by external acts. Similarly, while spreading hatred in public is an offence, harbouring hatred in your mind is not. People cannot be compelled not to harbour hatred against each other. Love and hate are internal processes of the mind and, unlike the dystopian world of George Orwell’s “1984,” we do not have the concept of any thought crime. Those who have difficulty understanding this may understand it by an example. You can rape or kill anybody in your mind and you cannot be punished for that. But if you spread a WhatsApp message that so-and-so should be raped or killed, that becomes an offence.
What does administrative experience of more than a century tell us?
Following every incident of communal tension in the country before and after independence, the system has been forming thousands of peace committees as a standard practice. Have they had the slightest effect ever? In fact, brutally violent incidents are known to have taken place immediately after peace committee meetings.
Have the police not been classifying thousands of localities as ‘sensitive’ for ages? There are unwritten rules that a religious procession of one community shall not be allowed on one pretext or the other ‘invented’ by the administration to deny permission for the procession through a so-called ‘sensitive area’? Why? The simple fact is that we have all along been in denial mode even as reality screams.
First, we must face the ugly reality of communal relations
The very fact that serious communal issues have continued to beset modern India in 2023 also; 1,311 years after the first invading Muslim armies set foot on Indian soil in 712 AD, proves that something so deep, so powerful is at work, which has resisted all the attempts of whitewashing and window-dressing the ugly realities of communal relations. Attributing communal strife to temporal factors bereft of historical continuity is intellectual fraud.
Eminent historian Dr R. C. Majumdar categorically maintains in ‘The Delhi Sultanate’ that, contrary to the ‘motivated’ propaganda of the historians ‘commissioned’ by the Congress in the pre-independence era (and the Left-Liberal cabal in the post-independence era), there is no running away from the fact that there were such irreconcilable differences between the two communities, which prevented any intermingling beyond the most superficial. Over the course of the centuries of forced coexistence in the same land, Islam touched Hindu life and was itself touched by Hinduism at many points. However, the twain could never really meet at heart; nothing could make them cross the ‘bridge too far’.
Students are taught of the mutual exchange in respect of language, music, art, architecture, dress food, etc. The question is how significant this exchange was. Could it make any difference in those things in the life of the Hindus that really mattered? As the world-famous historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar says, this exchange did not result in the slightest change in the attitude of the rulers, the nobility, the soldiers and the ulama (clergy) towards the Hindu subjects, which was the only thing that could have made any difference to their lives.
Dr. Majumdar hammers it in eloquently, “But all these touched merely the fringe and external elements of life, and even as such, their influence was confined to a small section of the Hindus and Muslims of India, taken as a whole…There was no rapprochement in respect of popular or national traditions, and those social and religious ideas, beliefs, practices and institutions that touch the deeper chord of life and give it a distinctive form, tone and vigour…In short, the reciprocal influences were too superficial in character to affect materially the fundamental differences between the two communities with respect to almost everything that is deep-seated in human nature and makes life worth living…So the two great communities, although they lived side by side, moved each in its own orbit, and there was no sign that the ‘twain shall ever meet’…Religion, which formed the very basis of culture and the key-note of life, both among the Muslims and the Hindus, kept them apart like two poles.”
The enmity continued unabated in modern times also. In his famous book, ‘Pakistan or the Partition of India’, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar writes at length on ‘The Riot-Torn History of Hindu-Muslim Relations, 1920-1940’ (Chapter VII, Part IV) where he describes every single riot that took place in India in this period. He says, “It would not be much exaggeration to say that it is a record of twenty years of civil war between the Hindus and the Muslims in India, interrupted by brief intervals of armed peace…These acts of barbarism against women, committed without remorse, without shame and without condemnation by their fellow brethren show the depth of the antagonism which divided the two communities. The tempers on each side were the tempers of two warring nations.”
Enraged by the barbarity on display in these riots, even an editorial of the ‘Hindustan’ in 1926, though a Congress paper, had severely criticized the Congress leadership. The editorial wrote: “There is an immense distance between the India of today and India a nation, between an uncouth reality which expresses itself in murder and arson, and that fond fiction which is in the imagination of patriotic if self-deceiving men. To talk about Hindu-Muslim unity from a thousand platforms or to give it blazoning headlines is to perpetrate an illusion whose cloudy structure dissolves itself at the exchange of brick-bats and the desecration of tombs and temples. To sing a few pious hymns of peace and goodwill a la Naidu will not benefit the country.”
Communal relations are not a one-way street
The responsibility of even hoping to engender communal amity must rest equally upon the shoulders of all the communities. There should be no discrimination in this regard for whatever reason. The cause of communal amity cannot be helped if one community is even indirectly told to place the Constitution before their religion, but the other is allowed to place their religion before everything else.
Appeasement of any community is poison to communal amity. It was a terrible mistake on the part of Man Mohan Singh, the then PM, speaking at the 52nd meeting of the National Development Council (NDC), to have said that the Muslims had the first right on the national resources. The nation is not a joint family of TV serials. His comment cannot be passed off as the sentimental outburst of some patriarch pontificating to the elder, well-earning brother in a joint family that he must surrender an undue share of the parental property in favour of the younger, poorly-earning brother. Why it should be so? Had the plans and policies of the governments of his party in the past decades been utterly unable to bring the benefits of development to the Muslims? If so, who is to be blamed? It was a classic Freudian slip that betrayed their subconscious.
Such things have led to an unfortunate situation today where both Hindus and Muslims try to avoid each other to the extent possible. If circumstances force them, they even work together or do business together, but keep the relations at the bare minimum necessary level—usually, quite like what it used to be in the medieval era. Except for die-hard liberals, most people try to avoid social intimacy at the level of families and visits to their respective houses and dining together, etc.
‘Mohabbat Kee Dukan’ is a logical and practical impossibility
If we desire genuine communal amity, we must not delude ourselves. First of all, we must have the moral courage to face reality as it is. Irrespective of all the contrived pretences of a composite culture; the so-called Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb; paying obeisance to Muslim saints at dargahs; Iftar parties; Holi-Milan functions; Sufi music concerts; mushayaras; biryani festivals, and similar gimmicks suggestive of supposedly harmonious co-existence, the harsh fact, as it screams out aloud from the sheer frequency of all sorts of communal troubles on the smallest of pretexts and horrific incidents of beheadings (‘sar tan se juda’) in the country, is that the two communities have all along been living with their fingers held on hair triggers without the slightest hint of any reconciliation or rapprochement!
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Therefore to talk of a ‘Mohabbat kee dukan’ is utterly farcical and an amateurish attempt to trivialize the most complex issue of communal relations in India. Love is not a commodity that can be sold, bought or distributed free of cost. Love blossoms spontaneously in one’s heart and not on order or request. The phenomenon of love is one of the most complex things in life that cannot be reduced to physiological or sociological components. Communal amity cannot be taught in schools. To hope that they could make communal amity a part of school curricula and students from different communities will start loving each other is bound to fail in exactly the same manner in which our wishful thinking with teaching ethics, moral education and sex education in our schools for long has failed. They have not had the slightest effect on unethical/uncivil behaviour, immorality, or sexual offences in the country. To even talk of ‘Mohabbat kee dukaan is therefore sheer rhetorical naiveté.
Love blossoms by itself only when the situations are just right for it in respect of both parties. Our effort must be to create such situations. For communal amity in our society, that requires, before anything else, a ‘Historical Closure’ of all that continues to haunt people for centuries. It cannot be done by trivializing the issue or by rhetoric.
Until such time, our effort must be to maintain communal peace at all costs by strict enforcement of the law without fear or favour. Amity can wait; peace cannot.
