Peace with Muslims - Indian style

Aug 2005, VFR Indian reader:

I have always wanted to write about this to you. How is it that India has a massive Muslim population and yet manages to get along with relative calm? Many leftists/liberals in the West could misuse that example to say: “Look, Muslims aren’t trouble. India has 150 million Muslims!”. The way peace is maintained in India is by fear of mob fury. Muslims in India are generally peaceful because they know that if they stretch the limits of Hindu tolerance and kill people, Hindu mobs would descend upon them with a fury that would kill many more Muslims. This is fundamentally the way in which peace in a relative sense is maintained in India – by fear of violent retribution. A good example is a Muslim attack on a train of Hindu pilgrims in 2002. They burnt 50 Hindu women and children alive. Inevitably, in retaliation, violent Hindu mobs killed 2000 Muslims.

It is barbaric and it is brutal. The mentality that we witness is from the age of barbarism. But that is how peace is actually maintained. I have a feeling that if Hindus were more “civilized” like Westerners and played everything by the book, the Muslims would probably run riot with no end in sight. They don’t because they know that the majority could turn blood-thirsty at any moment. And so relative peace is maintained ...

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And the lesson for Australia is, not a call to arms, but to think twice before inviting a large Muslim population into your country - if this is the end result of relations.