INTERFAITH DIALOGUE LEADS
TO SOCIAL HARMONY

The only way to avoid social strife is to exercise tolerance. One must ignore or tolerate the behaviour of others if and when one faces some grievance from others.

In the course of a debate on the social conditions of India, a participant asked what the secret was to establishing harmony in a plural society like India. I conceded that the participant’s question was valid but pointed out that there should be one change in wording: “What is the secret of harmony in any society?”

Often, when people think of the question of harmony, they assume, consciously or unconsciously, that it is a question that concerns only a plural society. However, this is a fallacy. In effect, this is an issue in every society, in fact, every country.

The truth is that exercising tolerance is the only way to avoid social strife. That is, one must ignore or tolerate the behaviour of others if and when one faces some grievance from others. Maintaining a friendly relationship with another person is vital despite occasionally being unpleasant. 

In today’s pluralistic societies, people from different faiths and communities live together in the same space. As such, it is almost inevitable that at some point or the other, discord will rear its head. It is an inescapable fact of life, that the secret of harmonious living lies in finding a strategy to establish harmony, notwithstanding the existence of real reasons for strife. One such strategy is a dialogue that aims to promote a spirit of tolerance between people of different faiths and communities.

While engaging in such dialogue, we must remember that society cannot escape being governed by that same law of Nature that produces roses, but only when accompanied by thorns. Roses are inseparable from their thorns. Even if people everywhere join in loud protests about these thorns, there is no way that they would go away. Even if they bulldozed all rose plants out of existence except one tiny plant, that little plant would produce its roses, and multiple thorns would still accompany them.

In this way, nature tells us that bringing about harmony in society between different groups. We must learn to live in such a way that we accept that there will always be some ‘thorn’ things that we may not personally like or approve of but must tolerate to maintain the peace. Instead of quarreling with these ‘thorns’, we should tolerate them to have the ‘roses’ we like. We should know that without tolerating the ‘thorns,’ we simply cannot access the ‘roses’. As George Bernard Shaw so aptly put it: “Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is found on tolerance.”