The fact is, it’s very difficult to go back to the pre-violent days after you have once participated and killed because you were not brought up or socialised to killing. You are a normal citizen living with a normal family which comes to know of your actions and you have to live with that. You may say it was a nationalist act, but when the chips are down, mass killers break down while describing how they killed men, women and children.
Hate stays, does not subside after polls
It is difficult to know how much of the media is actually interested in fomenting the violence and how much of it is about political campaign to discredit the other side. Many people think hate will subside automatically once the elections are over, but that never happens. Hate stays.
So there’s no surprise in cosmopolitan Delhi becoming the location of a bloody riot?
Not at all. On the contrary, the Indian record, as also South Asia’s, is that riots primarily take place in cities because of the anonymity factor and because people don’t know each other very well. Once prosperity comes, people become atomised, more isolated and individualistic. Increasing modernisation leaves you more and more as an individual. It weakens communities. The modern state always tries to weaken communities because it feels communities are a handicap to modernisation.
Modern states want uniformity, detest decentralisation and don’t want to leave any communities in the area of politics except the state and the individual. They want to ensure that the individual stands alone against the state. And they will go any distance to ensure that happens.
Ashish Nandy's old interview with Rajiv Mehrotra where he explains his understanding of secularism and its relationship with communal riots. https://youtube.com/embed/TGaiygrqnD0?start=462&end=1029
Ashis Nandy: Why Nationalism and Secularism Failed Together by Ananya Vajpeyi 18 October 2016 https://www.resetdoc.org/story/ashis-nandy-why-nationalism-and-secularism-failed-together/
At the beginning, many people said that secularism in India stood for treating all religions equally. That is not humanly possible; if you are a believing practitioner of religion, then you do not think your religion is the same as other religions. You have a nuanced preference for your faith, even though you might be very respectful of other faiths. In India, it is customary for people to have access to places of worship of other religions and they do show a certain catholicity of belief, a certain ecumenical approach. But nonetheless, they have their faiths, and these faiths were challenged by secularism, or at least it looked as if secularism was challenging faith.One by-product of this secularism was that it gradually created a situation where it looked as if the ideology of secularism was substituting faiths in the public sphere.
the Hindu nationalist project is a direct product, not indirect, of the secularist project, because the person who established it was an atheist and publicly so. It is very strange that in South Asia, both, the leader of the Hindus, who produced the Bible of Hindu nationalism — Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, and the leader of Muslim nationalism who carved out a Muslim state in the subcontinent, Pakistan — Mohammad Ali Jinnah, were non-religious. And both had a deep contempt for ordinary Hindus and ordinary Muslims. But both felt that we must follow the European pattern and have proper nation-states, and to have proper nation-states you have to have nationalities.
You propose an alternative to secularism, looking for new ideas. What would you call this alternative? I think “cultural pluralism” would work well, but because I think each religious system in this part of the world has had figures who have embraced that. Even Christianity had St. Francis of Assisi. In our part of the world, the church and the state are not separated like that, simply because there is no “Church”, so to speak.