The Psychology of Riots
The dark side of religious identity is communal identity , characterised by intolerance and potential for violence
In countries where the salience of religion is high, as it is in India, our religious identity as a Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jain, exercises significant influence on our thoughts, demotions and behavior at different times of our lives. The religious group identity is first conveyed to the child by one’s parents and family. As has been perceptively remarked, “A baby has no history. Soon, the parents will give him theirs.”
The child’s image of her religious community is formed through the stories that are told, from one generation to another. And these stories often come with shared multi-generational rituals and communal gatherings of all ages, anchoring the religious identity deep in the psyche. The growing child identifies with the emotional investments of her family and loved elders in the religious community’s symbols and traditions, and incorporates these idealizations of the community which have served them so well – as they will serve the child – in the enhancement of self-esteem for belonging to such an exalted and blessed entity.
Much less conscious is the dark side of religious group identity that is also simultaneously taking birth in the growing child’s psyche, and which accompanies it throughout life as its shadow. We in India call this dark side ‘communal identity’, characterised by its exclusivity, intolerance and potential for violence against the ‘enemy’ group viewed as a perennial threat.
The dark, communal identities come to the forefront in periods of rising tension between religious groups because of a perceived threat to the group’s religious identity. The threat, a collective distortion of the meaning of a real event, makes members of the community act demonstratively through words and actions as Hindus, or as Muslims. In turn, the demonstration of this religious identity threatens members of the other community who, too, begin to mobilise their identity around their religious affiliation. Thus begins a spiral of perceived (or misperceived) threats and counter postures which raises the tension between Hindus and Muslims.
The movement of the dark side of religious identities to the forefront of consciousness still needs powerful additional impulses before the outbreak of violence becomes possible. The “zone of indifference” with regard to one’s faith and religious community in which everyday life is lived, may be breached by external events seen as a threat to a group’s religious identity, but the breach needs considerable widening before violence comes pouring out. It is here that demagogues, owing allegiance to religious-political formations, enter the scene.
On the one hand they stoke the group’s persecution anxiety with images of a besieged and endangered community on the verge of extinction at the hands of the other, enemy group. On the other they heighten the group’s narcissism by singing of its glories, while ridiculing the other community. In the collective imagination, irrespective of the demographic realities, both the groups experience themselves as potential targets of the other group’s impending violence.
We need to be singularly aware of the dangers of religious identity, or rather its dark twin, communal identity, coming to the forefront of our psyches. Each one of us has many group identities: of family, region, profession, language, nation and so on. The involvement of religion increases the violence of the conflict. Religion brings to conflict between groups a greater emotional intensity and a deeper motivational thrust than language, region, or other markers of group identity. With its historical allusions from sacred rather than profane history, its metaphors and analogies having their source in sacred legends, the religious justification of conflict involves fundamental values and releases some of our most violent passions.
And as long as the perpetrator of violence maintains his religious commitment he rarely displays guilt or shame for his murderous actions, something that is not true of the same actions as a member of other kinds of groups. The perpetrators of violence in the riots who otherwise generally belong to the margins of their communities, pejoratively called goondas, anti-social elements, etc, are viewed as the community’s protectors for the duration of the violence.
In the short term, we know from studies of riots all over the world that what is vital for their prevention is the effective deployment of force by the state, especially in the period of lull, the 12-24 hours between the first incident and the major outbreak of violence. Where the required will is weak or absent, the horrors of mass violence soon overcome any effort at their containment; the fire can no longer be controlled even by those who were involved in lighting it in the first place.
In the long run, we need a massive educational effort for our children that openly addresses the issue of the dark side of our religious identity, which can be disavowed only at the peril of it being then available to demagogues who seek to harness it to the goal of divisiveness and differentiation. This education will not be limited to the mere provision of information but also harness all the resources of art – musical, visual and cinematic – to reach the deeper layer of the psyche where communal identity has its home and which is inaccessible to language alone.
In the absence of such an effort, Gandhi’s gloomy diagnosis made almost a hundred years ago in 1924 will continue to haunt us far into the foreseeable future: “I see no way of achieving anything in this afflicted country without a lasting heart unity between Hindus and Mussalmans … There is no question more important and more pressing than this. In my opinion, it blocks all progress.”
fabulous work
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