How Muslims Are Kept Mostly Peaceful in India
11/23/2017
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A job market paper:

Mob Violence and Militancy: The Case of Indian Muslims

Saurabh Pant

October 28, 2017

Abstract: When does militancy arise among marginalized minorities? Muslims are a minority in India who face substantial and wide-ranging marginalization. Yet, militant groups, who exploit such grievances, have only been able to create relatively little militancy among Indian Muslims. This is especially puzzling given that marginalized minority Muslim populations in other parts of the world do not exhibit this same reluctance towards militancy. Due to the limitations of existing explanations, I instead posit a novel theoretical framework that highlights a key factor determining the extent of militant mobilization within aggrieved minority groups: the group’s perception of protection. Using this framework, I argue that minority Indian Muslims police themselves to prevent militancy within their community because they fear retaliatory indiscriminate mob violence, and this fear stems from a lack of confidence in the state to definitively protect Muslims from the mob.

In other words, when some Muslims in India get out of line, this is what happens to all the Muslims in the neighborhood, guilty or innocent

So, Muslims in India try harder to police their own communities than they do in Britain or France.

Pant’s theory is not quite that novel … As I explained in a 2013 Taki’s Magazine column on Pakistani grooming gangs in England (a year before the Rotherham Report):

The pimps seemed convinced that since their victims’ families haven’t organized lethal vendettas against them like any honorable Pakistani family would, they must not have cared.

Moreover, since the English people hadn’t carried out mass communal violence, such as burning down Pakistani neighborhoods in the time-honored South Asian manner, clearly they didn’t mind.

And if the English government didn’t want Pakistanis to act Pakistani, they wouldn’t let them into England, now would they?

In England for many years the powers that be took the opposite view of Hindus in India: that prosecuting even individual Muslim malefactors was to be avoided because that would stereotype the Muslim community.

It seems like England ought to be able to find some compromise path between the BJP view of punish all Muslims (effective as it may be) and the BBC view of punish no Muslims (ineffective as it always is) such as, I dunno, rule of law and punishment of the guilty. But what did the English ever know about maintaining an orderly yet free society?

[Comment at Unz.com]

 

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