A year of restricting ourselves to the confines of four walls has made us keenly aware of our past exchanges, not only with our families, but also with the larger society. Of the many victims of the COVID-19 pandemic are social interactions and the millions of friendships that should have formed at schools and workplaces. In a country riven with oppressive prejudices, the past year may have widened the greatest fault line in the Indian society — religion.
Hindus and Muslims constitute not only the largest religious communities in India, but they perhaps also form the pair with the most fraught relations in the recent decade. Still, over the years, children and adults have mitigated the barriers created by socialisation through everyday interactions across religious groups. But what happens when everyone spends a year without forming new friendships or circumscribing their interactions to limited online (or offline) meetings? The pandemic’s collateral damage may include tolerance and understanding between the majority and the minority.
Comment | Caught in the heightened arc of communal polemics
Many inequities
The religious identities of Hindus and Muslims have shaped their social ties, their political loyalties and their interaction with the Indian state. The long history of Hindu-Muslim ties in the subcontinent is marred by grotesque violence fuelled by myths, rumours and prejudice.
The prevalence of cow-vigilante violence and ‘anti-conversion’ laws in recent years stands testimony to the worsening of inter-religious ties and deepening of prejudice by the majority community. In fact, tropes used to concoct fear about the Muslim community in the 1920s, such as ‘cow-killers’ and ‘abductors of Hindu women’, have found appeal even in the 21st century. The propagation of such stereotypes and the resulting prejudices allow for, and even normalise, violence against the minority to ‘protect the self’. While it would be an exaggeration to claim that every social encounter between members of the two groups is troubled, all is certainly not well in India. The display of prejudice need not take a violent form at all. The refusal to grant tenancy to members of the Muslim community pushes them to seek houses in a more homogenised area, progressively creating ghettos and further fuelling stereotypes. How do you mitigate a prejudice that is so pervasive and intense?
‘Contact Hypothesis’
In 1954, Gordon Allport published The Nature of Prejudice , which contained, among other analyses of inter-group behaviour, a theory on prejudice. Specifically, it contained a hypothesis on how to reduce prejudice among majority and minority groups, popularly called the ‘Contact Hypothesis’ . The idea was simple: contact (with some caveats) reduces prejudice. Subsequently, decades of social psychology research arrived at a far simpler idea: friendship reduces prejudice. Could it really be that simple? Could that work in India? The answer to both questions is the same: yes, to some extent.
The empirical evidence largely supports the proposition. Multiple studies have noted that frequent interactions between members of different religious groups vastly reduce negative perceptions and anxiety towards ‘the other’. For instance, a youth study in 2017, conducted by Lokniti-CSDS and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung , found that 83% of Hindus who had a non-Hindu friend were comfortable having a non-Hindu neighbour, compared to 70% of Hindus who did not have a non-Hindu friend. Another paper discovered that even among people who consume media plentifully, interactions with people outside their community weakens prejudice.
Education, however, presents an interesting puzzle. A recent study finds that college-educated Hindus are more likely than non-literate Hindus to perceive the Muslim community negatively, irrespective of whether they had a friend from the community or not.
Although close interaction may ‘significantly’ reduce prejudices, this reduction is minimal at best. Firstly, the attitudes of suspicion and negativity towards the Muslim minority are deeply entrenched in the Indian society. Secondly, as this newspaper has reported over the last few years, the ghettoisation of Muslims continues to define both urban and rural landscapes. This ensures that most instances of quotidian social interactions — be it an evening tea or meeting at markets — are effectively denied, thereby limiting the building of lasting friendships at workplaces and schools. Thirdly, while Hindu individuals might hold great respect and affection for Muslim friends, they might not hold the same view about the community as a whole since they would consider a Muslim friend to be an ‘exception to the rule’. As a result, whilst interactions do take place and reduce prejudice, they do not cross a threshold already laid down by generations of socialisation and stereotypes.
Redefining the ‘us’
Prejudice is a peculiar phenomenon. It is sustained through time, remains unaffected by even positive interpersonal relations, and provides the ammunition for communalism. Ashutosh Varshney asks in his book Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life , “Why do Hindus and Muslims live peacefully in Calicut but not in Aligarh?” . The answer, as he notes, lies in civic engagement and redefining the ‘us’. Ties need to be forged not just between individuals, but also across larger communities such that the relationships breach the confines of religious identities and encompass a multitude of identities. Be it local neighbourhood associations, professional unions or linguistic associations, membership of this civil society creates a new ‘us’. It allows society to maintain open lines of communication, even during a pandemic.
During a year in which students and professionals have remained within the confines of their houses, what they have missed out on are unencumbered everyday interactions with their peers. Bonds of camaraderie are built over watercooler chats and rants about bus mates. In the absence of such avenues, it behoves parents, teachers and employers to encourage engagement through social organisations or other forms of safe civic engagement.
Asha Venugopalan is a PhD Student, Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University
