Hopeful Insights Into Sources Of Communal Peace
by Tom Atlee
Founder And Co-Director of the Co-Intelligence Institute
The article tells about a city in India which was once torn by ethnic riots and is now peaceful even when much of the rest of India is convulsed by battles between Hindus and Muslims. The change was created by a police chief who organized regular activities where respected Hindus and Muslims worked side by side to address shared community problems.
This approach offers interesting comparisons with Citizen Deliberative Councils (in which usually randomly selected citizens work together to address community problems or social and environmental issues http://www.co-intelligence.org/P-CDCs.html) and the grassroots citizen dialogues among ordinary Jews and Palestinians (such as the Compassionate Listening Project www.compassionatelistening.org/ and the Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue http://traubman.igc.org/dg-tlart.htm) that have worked to keep peace alive in the Middle East and elsewhere.
In the dialogues among polarized citizens (the Jewish/Palestinian dialogues), the peace-making impact is primarily on the participants and those connected to them -- and on those who hear of their inspiring conversations. The participants aren't chosen as leaders or representatives, nor do they necessarily do any common work. But they are fully engaged in working on the conflict embodied by their polarization.
In Citizen Deliberative Councils (CDCs), the participants are seldom chosen for their polarized stances, but they do symbolically stand in for the whole community in all its diversity. The (sometimes official) publicity around them is designed to engage the whole community vicariously in their learning, problem-solving and decision-making. The CDC approach is not primarily about resolving conflict, but about handling the ongoing affairs of the community.
In the approach described in the article below, respected members of each polarized side are brought into regular contact for conversation and action to solve shared community problems. In a polarized community, this BECOMES the ongoing way of addressing common issues, so that soon the conflict-resolution function becomes secondary.
There is much to contemplate in this story -- and in all stories of efforts to engage the full diversity of communities to work together for the common good.
Coheartedly,
Tom
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Excerpt from "The Bhiwandi Experiment: The Example of Hindus and Muslims Co-Existing Peacefully in India", in LSA MAGAZINE, University of Michigan (Fall 2003), adapted from Ashutosh Varshney's ETHNIC CONFLICT AND CIVIC LIFE: HINDUS AND MUSLIMS IN INDIA (Yale, 2002).
Bhiwandi, a town just outside Bombay, was infamous for Hindu-Muslim riots in the 1970s and 1980s. In the late 1980s, the local police took the initiative in ending the riots. The turning point was the arrival in June 1988 of a police chief for a three-year term. In that time, Bhiwandi was transformed from a town whose capacity for rioting had become legendary to one that could meticulously work for, and keep, communal peace, even in the worst of times, as between 1988 and 1993. The key was building Hindu-Muslim contacts in an organized way and around common issues of concernS
Bhiwandi is a rather unlikely site for healthy and robust civic engagement. A center of small textiles, Bhiwandi is full of sprawling hutment colonies, narrow streets, the never-ceasing rattling of power-looms, and the town's civic amenities are bursting at the seams under the increasing demands of the shanties mushrooming all round. Morever, Hindus and Muslims tend to live in segregated neighborhoods.
Undeterred by this setting and the history of violence, the new police chief argued that instead of fighting the fires when they broke out, it was better for the police to bring Hindus and Muslims together to create mutual understanding. The aim was to set up durable structures of peace. If the Hindus and Muslims could meet each other often enough and discuss common problems, a reservoir of communication and perhaps trust would be created, which in turn would play a peacemaking role at the time of communal tensions. Thinking that 'to be forewarned is to be forearmed,' the police chief decided to put together neighborhood committees (mohalla samitis) for the whole town under his supervision.
Since segregated living was the norm, each committee covered two adjacent neighborhoods and consisted of an equal number of Hindus and Muslims, selected on the basis of local knowledge. The committee members were those who wielded considerable influence in their respective mohallas (neighborhoods) and had a clean recordS. Whether professionals, coolies, or housewives, the only condition for committee members was that they be respected by their neighbors for probity and goodwill, for which local knowledge was used, and have no criminal records, for which police data were checked.
Seventy such committees were created to discuss matters of mutual concern covering the town. They would meet as and when necessary, at least once a week normally but daily in times of tension, with a police officer presiding. With time, they were deemed so successful that even nonmembers started attending important meetings, thus broadening the base of mutual confidence.
During 1988-1991, the nationwide mobilization, sponsored by Hindu nationalists, for the destruction of the Baburi mosque and 'liberation' of Ram's birthplace was at its peak. As a consequence, communal tensions in much of India were high, and there were many moments of tension and bitterness in Bhiwandi as well. But "when passions ran highSmembers on both sides came together and voluntarily undertook the task of patrolling the streets for nights on end. Rumours were suppressed on the spot and rumourmongers handed over to the policeS [As a result], the evil-doers preferred to lie low [and] were totally isolated by the constant vigilance against them by committee members."
In 1991, as the police chief left Bhiwandi for his next posting, his successor continued the committees. The utility of continuation was soon brilliantly illustrated. By the time the Baburi mosque was torn down in December 1992, Bhiwandi's citizens, both Hindus and Muslims, had developed such mutual understanding, confidence, and resolve that they successfully kept the peace of their neighborhoods and town. Not a single life was lost.
Bhiwandi's peace in the aftermath of the mosque-demolition was remarkable - not only because the town had such an awful past, but also because it was the period of India's worst post-partition violence. Rioting came as close to Bhiwandi as the neighboring city of Bombay. In December 1992 and January 1993, Bombay witnessed massive riots. Given the proximity of Bombay, rumors of the worst kind swept Bhiwandi, but they failed to trigger riots. A fierce communal storm thus passed Bhiwandi by, without shaking its new civic edifice.
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AND HERE'S AN ADDITIONAL PIECE ABOUT THIS BOOK, FROM THE WEB...
excerpt from FRONTLINE "India's National Magazine"
www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1911/19110710.htm
Of ethnic conflicts and causes
A book review by John Harriss
Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India by Ashutosh Varshney; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002;
...Varshney's research [which compares cities prone to major, fatal ethnic riots between Muslims and Hindus with cities which have a much lower incidence of ethnic violence]S show[s] the importance of the existence or not of the kind of civic life that brings together the members of the two religious communities. It is not 'social capital' as this has been defined by Robert Putnam in his influential books MAKING DEMOCRACY WORK (Princeton University Press, 1993) and BOWLING ALONE (Simon and Schuster, 2000), that counts. In other words it is not the extent of associational life and the strength of local organisation, which are usually taken as key indicators of 'social capital', that matter - indeed strong intra-communal organisation may well be conducive to conflict - but the extent to which there is organisation that brings people of different communities together and helps to give them shared interests or identities....
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PS FROM TOM ATLEE re the complexity of solutions to ethnic violence:
The fact is, from reading various reviews online, the power of bringing opposing groups together is only ONE (albeit very effective) factor in reducing violence in India. Despite the critique of Putnam, above, strong associations within the various subgroups (e.g., Muslim and Hindu communities) can, in fact, help -- especially when they can be recruited to support bridgebuilding and violence reduction. It is desirable to have BOTH strong intergroup AND intragroup relations. Other peace-making factors include economic interdependence (and shared participation in business and labor associations), political parties well connected with the people (since when they are not really connected they often use polarizing demagoguery to get and hold on to power), Gandhian social and educational organisations, and benign, bridge-building political leadership.
A major purpose of the book was to show that ethnic violence ISN'T caused by ethnic or cultural differences (e.g., "the Hindu-Muslim relationship is inherently prone to periodic outbursts of violence and killings" -
www.india-seminar.com/2002/513/513%20books.htm
by lack of police professionalism, or by the culturally disruptive processes of urbanization, per se - all reasons commonly given.
The role of extremist political parties, local mafias, and other manifestations of gross power distortion is obvious, but Varshney suggests that the ability of such groups to mobilize the masses is greatly undermined by well-developed civic and economic linkages among the potentially polarized groups.
Tom Atlee * The Co-Intelligence Institute *
PO Box 493 * Eugene, OR 97440
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