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ALIGARH, INDIA, September 28, 2001: One of the biggest fears for Indian authorities since the attacks on New York and Washington has been that the fallout could trigger a fresh flare-up between the country’s Hindus and Muslims. Fully 85% of India’s more than one billion people are Hindu, but the population includes 12% or 120 million Muslims, and tensions between the two communities, which live side by side across the heartland of the nation, are never far from the surface. Places such as Aligarh, 75 miles southeast of New Delhi in the midst of the mustard and wheat fields of the fertile Ganges floodplain, have in the past been torn by weeks of pitched sectarian battles, often triggered by something as innocuous as a squabble among children. “There have been so many riots here in the past that people now know the reality – only innocents suffer,” Brij Bhushan, the chief of police for Aligarh district, said this week. “We can pray for the Muslims in Afghanistan, but that’s it, [that is, no political activism is allowed],” said Rehan Salim, a Muslim resident who said he had witnessed riots in the town in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Scores were killed in that fighting and Aligarh, a city of 800,000, was often placed under 24-hour curfew. “No one – Hindu or Muslim – wants to go through that again,” Salim said. “People now are more educated, prosperous. They are more interdependent; they don’t want to disturb the balance.” “The artisans are Muslims, most of the traders are Hindus – they cannot live without each other,” said Bhushan, the police chief. “A riot throws this whole thing out of balance.” The spread of cable television, with its blanket coverage of American soap operas and Hollywood glamour, has also made sectarian strife seem outdated. “Our children eat onions and meat now,” said R.C. Aggarwal, a Hindu. Many Hindus are vegetarian, and some also do not eat garlic and onions; most Muslims eat meat. “The Muslims are becoming more like us and we are becoming more like them,” he said. “We all watch television . . . we are all becoming Americanized.”

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