- All articles

All articles

- THE PROBLEM

- MINORITIES, LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS

- INTERPRETING BJP'S PASMANDA OUTREACH IN NEW INDIA

- MUSLIM WOMEN'S STRUGGLE FOR GENDER JUSTICE

- MUSLIMS IN THE LABOUR MARKET

- ONLINE MUSLIM POLITICS

- RHETORIC OF POLITICAL NEWNESS AND MUSLIM POLITICS

- THE CHURN IN MUSLIM POLITICS IN KERALA

- MUSLIMS AND HINDUTVA IN ASSAM

- INDIAN MUSLIMS AND THE 'MUSLIM WORLD'

- THE DISEASED BODY POLITIC AND BOMBAY CINEMA

- MAPPING MUSLIM PERCEPTIONS: CSDS-LOKNITI RCHIVES

- BOOKS

- IN MEMORIAM

The problem

Syed Shahabuddin, one of the most controversial Muslim political figures, coined the term ‘Muslim India’ in 1980s to describe the nature of postcolonial Muslim identity. He began to employ this term as an explanatory template in his popular writings in English and Urdu by carefully replacing the prevalent and widely used expression, ‘Indian Muslims’. In order to further legitimize the term, he started publishing a journal, Muslim India in 1983. As expected, this provocative term was overwhelmingly criticized, especially in the aftermath of the Shah Bano controversy. Shahabuddin was also condemned for nurturing Muslim separatist-communal politics.

I conducted a series of interviews with him in the early 2000s to understand the nature of his political thinking and ideas. In one of these long conversations, he tried to explain the idea of Muslim India. According to him: ‘When I say Muslim India, it is a combination of an adjunctive and a noun; my substance (noun) is India… (Thus), one aspect of India which happens to be Muslim or Islamic. I say there is a Hindu India, there is a Muslim India... there is a Brahmin India, there is a Dalit India… There are many India’s… inseparable in space, interpenetrating each other forming one great cohort.1

This interesting definition of ‘Muslim India’ stems from the premise that the idea of India is plural and every identity gives its own specific contribution to this plurality. According to Shahabuddin, Muslim Indians have constitutionally and socially been recognized as a religious community in India; and precisely for this reason, their collective existence and political demands should be seen as an expression of democratic politics.

No one can deny the intellectual significance of this intelligent and creative conceptualization of Muslim identity. Yet, I was not fully persuaded by his explanation for obvious historical reasons. ‘Muslim India’ as a political metaphor has its own complicated history, especially in relation to Muslim separatist politics in colonial India. Jinnah’s claim that Muslims of British India belong to a separate nation (Qaum!), in a way, had very similar theoretical foundation. Although Shahabuddin did not subscribe to Jinnah’s two nation theory and wrote extensively on the Muslim League’s communal politics, his explanation of ‘Muslim India’ revolves around the idea of Muslim political homogeneity – an assumption that Muslims constitute an identifiable political community.

We must remember that Muslim leaders associated with the Congress such as Maulana Azad and Syed Mahmud also adhered to the idea of collective Muslim interests in overtly political terms. However, they worked hard to offer a non-controversial imagination of Muslim political homogeneity in the early decades after independence. These leaders intentionally avoided controversies to create a level playing ground for Muslim communities in the post-partition scenario. They relied heavily on constitu-tionally granted minorities rights to develop an acceptable vocabulary of Muslim politics.2

The idea of Muslim political homogeneity found a very different political expression in the 1970s. The dynamics of competitive electoral politics encouraged the Muslim clergy to carve out a space for itself as legitimate political stakeholder. The formation of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board in 1972 was a watershed moment in this regard. Around the same time, the Imam of Jama Masjid, Syed Abdullah Bukhari began his fatwa politics. He emerged as one of the most powerful Muslim leaders in the 1980s. This new assertive Muslim politics paved the way for a rather radical reconceptualization of Muslim political identity. Shahabuddin’s conceptualization of ‘Muslim India’ might be seen as an outcome of this political crystallization. Although the Pasmanda Muslim discourse of the 1990s somehow posed a challenge to Muslim homogeneity thesis, the idea of ‘Muslim India’ continued to survive. The Sachar Commission Report officially recognized the collective Muslim interests as a form of political marginalization; while, Hindutva groups embraced it rather politically to justify their interpretation of Muslim appeasement.

Shahabuddin’s notion of ‘Muslim India’, in this sense, is an important point of departure to asks a few fundamental questions related to Muslim political identity and its placing in the contemporary Hindutva dominated political discourse, the ‘New India’. Three sets of critical issues are relevant in this regard. First, What is new in Modi’s New India? How does this newness respond to the constitutionally recognized values and principles such as secularism and minority rights? Does it recognize Muslims as a homogeneous political community? Second, What is the relevance of Muslim representation in New India? How should we look at the debates on declining Muslim presence in public life, especially in legislative bodies? Finally, How should we address the caste, class and gender issues among Muslims? Do we need to have a different, and somewhat modified, conceptual apparatus for understanding Muslim political identity and its diverse manifestations?

Let me begin with the idea of New India. Unlike poplar perceptions, I do not think that New India can merely be seen as a political slogan. It is true that Narendra Modi used this expression in his Independence Day speech of 2017 for the first time. However, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s leadership worked hard to transform this idea into a political principle. The party enthusiastically evoked New India as an official party line to legitimize its critique of Congress and Nehru. More importantly, New India was also introduced as a policy framework by the Modi government in later years.

There are, at least, two features of the doctrine of New India, which are relevant for our discussion. First, it offers a revisionist interpretation of postcolonial history of Indian politics. The Congress’s emphasis on a socialistic pattern of society is described as an economic betrayal; while, accommodation of Muslim leaders in non-BJP parties are termed as a form of appeasement. Second, it is argued that the role of the state is to facilitate the smooth functioning of the market; and therefore, there is no need for old style identity based affirmative action. These explanatory features of New India empower the Modi-regime to underline the political importance of the sab ka sath sab ka vikas slogan while adhering to its imagination of an ideal duty-bound responsive citizen.3

It is worth noting that the doctrine of New India is religion neutral. This stated neutrality contributes directly to the Modi-led BJP’s attitude towards Muslims in an interesting manner. BJP leaders speak of Muslims in two distinct ways: Muslims of India are part of an international Islamic umma, and for that matter they have to prove their patriotism. Second, Muslims are an unimportant constituent of a larger national community, the citizens, and therefore, there is no need to address them as a specific social group/minority.

In other words, Muslim identity is either defined as a visible threat to the nation or it is invisiblized to reproduce nation as an undifferentiated collectivity. This interplay between Muslim visibility as a threat and deliberate invisibilization of Muslims as a policy oriented way out poses a very obvious question: What are is the relationship between New India and the constitutional provisions that recognize Muslims as a legitimate constitutional minority?

There is the popular argument that Hindutva politics is going to change or even revoke the Constitution because they want to declare India a Hindu Rashtra. This argument is not entirely invalid, at lease historically. Hindu nationalist politics of the 1960s was apprehensive about the Constitution. Although parties like the Bhartiya Jana Sangh (BJS) declared their adherence to constitutional politics, they were committed to what they called the Dharmrajya. This critical attitude towards the Constitution led the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government to constitute the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution (NCRWC) to assess the usefulness of the Constitution. The Modi-led BJP, however, does not take this position. The party is interested in exploring the potentials of the Constitution for nurturing its Hindutva-centric political agenda. This is what I call the ‘Hindutva constitutionalism’: a legal-political mechanism that is created to operationalize the doctrine of New India.4

Two features of Hindutva constitutionalism are important from our point of view. First, it relies on an essential distinction between the moral-political principles, which the Constitution evokes (such as secularism and minority rights) and the legal technicalities and restrictions that it imposes on citizens. The principles and values enshrined in the Constitution are seen as static and fixed ideals that are frozen in time. On the contrary, legal technicalities are treated as administrative concern for effective rule. Precisely in this sense, the Constitution is treated as a sacred rule book.

Second, Hindutva constitutionalism draws its inspiration from a very different interpretation of the concept of minority. It is true that that Hindutva politics has created a powerful discourse of majoritarianism; yet, it is very much interested in an imagined conception of ‘Hindu victimhood’. That is one of the reasons why Hindutva groups take an ambivalent position on minority rights. The Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 is a good example to underline this strategic reformulation. This law emphasizes the vulnerability and helplessness of non-Muslim minorities, especially Hindus, living in neighbouring Muslim majority states. In a way, it offers a completely different interpretation of the idea of minority from the vantage point of Hindutva politics. The Hindutva constitutionalism, hence, empowers the BJP to invisiblize Muslims as minority without even declaring India a Hindu Rashtra!

It is obvious that the Hindutva groups are deeply invested in the collective Muslim existence as a political threat. However, the electoral success of the BJP in the post-2014 period has also forced them to rethink the limits of the Hindu-Muslim binary for obvious electoral purposes. In recent years, the BJP has made a conscious attempt to reach out to the most marginalized Muslim communities, the Muslim Pasmandas. In fact, during the BJP’s recent national executive meeting in Hyderabad, Narendra Modi urged the party workers to mobilize Pasmanda and Dalit Muslim communities to strengthen the party at the grassroots level.5

The BJP’s attitude towards Pasmandas, it seems, is determined by two strategic considerations. First, the BJP wants to address a particular section of Muslims without deviating from its stated policy on affirmative action. New India actually represents a state, which is not committed to offer welfare services as any kind of political duty. Instead, citizens are addressed as labharthi (or beneficiaries) in this schema. Pasmanda Muslims belong to this category of labarthis. They are socially backward, culturally subjugated and economically marginalized. It is important for the BJP to reach out to these Muslim communities to legitimize the ‘sab ka sath sab ka vikas’ slogan while simultaneously demonizing the Muslim presence as a political threat.6

Second, there is an ideological compulsion as well. We must remember that Hindutva politics recognizes two kinds of Muslims in India: (a) the foreign based Muslims (the Turks, Afghans and Arabs, who, according to them established powerful Islamic empires in India and subjugated local Hindus). And (b) the converted Muslims, the local indigenous Hindus, who were forcibly converted to Islam. This categorization is always used to substantiate the argument that Muslim rulers desecrated Hindu temples and forced Hindus to embrace Islam. Despite adhering to this history of Hindu-Muslim conflict, the Hindutva elite does not show any sympathy to those poor and marginalized Hindus, who were converted to Islam, and thus the real victims of the atrocities committed by foreign Muslim rulers in medieval India. Instead, all Muslims are asked to prove their patriotism! A few contemporary Hindutva ideologues are serious about this ideological inconsistency. Mohan Bhagwat delivered three lectures on Hindutva in 2018 to offer a rather inclusive meaning to RSS politics. His remark that ‘DNA of all Indians is the same, irrespective of religion’ also underlines the eagerness of Hindutva politics to accommodate the most backward Muslims into its nationalist schema. However, this openness towards Pasmanda Muslims is always guided by the actual requirement of Hindu-centric political mobilization.

The success of Hindutva politics, it seems, has forced the opponent of Hindutva, especially the non-party liberal intellectuals and secular civil society activists, to assert Muslim political homogeneity, or ‘Muslim India’, in a different way. The declining numbers of Muslim MPs and MLAs and BJP’s reluctance to nominates Muslim leaders to contest elections are seen as a systematic political exclusion of Muslims.

Muslim representation, we must note, is one of the most insufficiently analysed political phenomena in India. There is a universally acceptable formula to assess effective Muslim representation. Assuming an intrinsic relationship between Muslim legislators and Muslim communities, it is suggested that if the total Muslim population of the country is divided by the number of elected Muslim MPs and MLAs, we might be able to reveal the exact level of Muslim representation or under-representation!

In a recent article Trinamool Congress MP, Mahua Moitra made a very similar argument. She claims that by ‘the simple law of averages, in a country where Muslims comprise 15 per cent of the population, a fair and representative process would normally result in a few Muslims being selected.’ In order to justify this observation, she further makes a rather provocative point. In her view, ‘perhaps the inclusion of Muslims in BJP’s legislative bodies would have sensitized the party’s spokespersons to a world less bigoted than their own and prevented a blunder of international proportions.’7

A refined and perhaps more legalistic argument is advanced by the BJP in recent years to refute this line of reasoning. It is argued that the Indian Constitution does not recognize religion based political representation.8 And for this reason, Muslims need not to be represented only by the Muslim MPs and MLAs.

Although there is a merit in these two conflicting sets of arguments, I find them naïve, simplistic, and in a way misleading. Various studies conducted by the Lokniti-CSDS show that the Muslim communities do not participate in politics only on the basis of their religious identity. Muslims do recognize the significance of community based representation in political decision making; yet they do not always prefer to have Muslim leaders as their representatives.

Similarly, the assertion that the presence of Muslim leaders in BJP would sensitize its approach towards Muslims is empirically incorrect. The Muslims leaders of BJP have always supported the party line overwhelmingly in the last eight years on every critical issue. In fact, they have presented themselves as living examples of the sab ka sath slogan!

BJP’s winnability-centric legal argument is also problematic. It is true that the Constitution strongly advocates a secular imagination of political representation. Nevertheless, it makes special provisions to protect the interests of the marginalized groups – Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and religious and linguistic minorities. These serious inconsistencies in the public discourse are the outcome of our intellectual laziness. We still rely on the colonial perceptions of communal representation – both in terms of method and substance.

I propose a revisionist explanation of Muslim representation to go beyond these fixed interpretations. More specifically, I underline three structural aspects that determine the contours Muslim representation in today’s India. First of all, there is a need to clarify the constitution of Muslim community as a ‘political stakeholder’. There are two conflicting ways in which Muslim identity is politically formed. On the one hand, there are number of culturally diversified communities that tend to define themselves as Muslims in a variety of ways. This process of self-identification produces a kind of ‘substantive Muslimness’ – a contextually constituted Muslim identity.

The Muslim communities, nevertheless, are also addressed as a homogeneous group – either to protect them as a ‘religious minority’ within the liberal constitutional framework or to demonize them as the anti-national ‘Other’. In both cases, a discourse of Muslimness is created. It is a kind of interpellation that works in a particular manner by offering a set politically marked identity attributes to Muslims.

Any discussion on Muslim representation will remain meaningless if it does not recognize the political interplay between ‘substantive Muslimness’ (in terms of diversity) and ‘discourse of Muslimness’ (in terms of homogeneity). Mahua Moitra’s argument responds positively to the discourse of Muslimness as it is principally concerned with the declining number of Muslim MPs and MLAs. Her argument, however, cannot explain the political aspirations of Muslim communities at the grassroots level because substantive Muslimness requires a nuanced frame-work of analysis.

Second, Muslim representation is inextricably linked to the political structures, especially the institutional set-up. The direct election based on the first past the post system in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies forces the political parties to form wining configurations of voters at the constituency level. The old KHAM (Kshatriya Adivasi, Harijan, Muslims) model in Gujarat and MY (Muslim-Yadav) model in UP and Bihar are revealing examples of such configurations. The rise of the BJP as the dominant party has destabilized these older coalitions. This is one of the reasons behind the declining Muslim representation in the Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabhas.

The institutional set-up of the Rajya Sabha and state councils is very different. These institutions are used by the political parties to accommodate their Muslim leaders by nomination. My study, Muslim Representation in Rajya Sabha: Forms and Trajectories (2015), shows that unlike in theLok Sabha there has always been a fair Muslim presence in the upper house (9-10 per cent).9 This is the first time since 1952 that Muslim representation has dropped to almost 6 per cent in the Rajya Sabha. This structural difference between Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha reveals that Muslim representation is always contingent upon the actual political functioning of legislative bodies.

Finally, Muslim representation is also about the leadership function. Broadly speaking, there are three types of Muslim leaders in India: Professional Muslim politicians, Muslim elites and Muslim influencers.10 The professional Muslim politicians operate as a link between parties and the particular Muslim community they claim to represent. The Muslim elite, on the other hand, functions as a systemizer – either to sustain the internal power structure in its favour or to challenge it to get legitimacy. The influencer asserts his/her presence in the media driven public discourse. These three types of Muslim leaders perform very specific functions in different political contexts by producing concrete everyday expressions of Muslim representation.

The political parties, on the other hand, evolve different strategies to accommodate these leaders. For instance, the BJP does not need the professional services of Muslim MPs even in the Rajya Sabha now. Instead, it requires a dedicated set of Muslim influencers like Tarik Fateh or Syed Rizwan Ahmed to nurture its Hindutva constituency. The non-BJP parties have also accepted this logic in a different way. They are interested in Muslim elites – primarily because it suits their soft Hindutva. After all, they know that Muslim communities will have to eventually vote for them.

This revisionist explanation of Muslim representation, I argue, is useful to further explore the complexities of contemporary Muslim political identity and its various manifestations. This issue of Seminar is a modest attempt in this regard. It is a critical response to Shahabuddin’s conceptualization of ‘Muslim India’ by acknowledging what he himself wrote in 1987: ‘No academician today and no historian tomorrow writing on Muslim Indian can ignore Muslim India as a source material.’11

HILAL AHMED

Footnotes :

1. Interview with Syed Shahabuddin, 30 March 2004, New Delhi.

2. Hilal Ahmed, 2014. Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India: Monument, Memory, Contestation. Routledge, New York, 2014.

3. Hilal Ahmed and Subir Sinha, ‘The Problem’, Seminar 756, August 2022, pp. 10-12. https://www.india-seminar.com/semframe.html accessed on 20 August 2022.

4. Hilal Ahmed, ‘New India, Hindutva Constitutionalism, and Muslim Political Attitudes’, Studies in Indian Politics 10(1), 2022, pp 1-17.

5. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/pm-modi-reaches-out-to-pasmanda-muslims-asks-cadre-not-to-make-mistakes-of-opposition/articleshow/92639248.cms?from=mdr accessed on 20 August 2022.

6. This is exactly what Danish Azad Ansari, the only Minister in the Yogi Adityanath cabinet in UP, said in an interview. He argued: ‘Pasmandas making for a big proportion of schemes like scholarship schemes, Awas Yojana, PMJVKY, there is a growing trust for PM Modi and CM Yogi and the recent by-poll wins in Azamgarh and Rampur validate this.’ https://economictimes.

indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/pasmanda-muslims-plight-in-focus-after-pm-modis-appeal/articleshow/92708890.cms accessed on 20 August 2022).

7. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/mahua-moitra-writes-muslim-mps-mlas-bjp-7960555/ accessed on 20 August 2022.

8. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/kerala-governor-arif-mohammed-khan-muslims-minority-india-1862785-2021-10-09 accessed on 20 August 2022.

9. http://164.100.213.102/rscmsnew/careers_documents/Hilal_Ahmed.pdf accessed on 20 August 2022.

10. This is one of the key findings of our ongoing research project, ‘Muslim Leadership in India’.

11. Editorial, Muslim India 50, January 1987, p. 3.

Minorities, laws and institutions

M.R. SHAMSHAD

AT the beginning of the 20th century the West had propagated the notion that ‘minority rights’ were part of larger ‘human rights’. During World War I, minority rights were both granted and restricted due to political considerations.1 Even after World War II, in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, minority rights, as a group right, was missing. In today’s time, minority rights, as a separate group right has undeniable status. However, in the changed contemporaneous politics in India, we hear some voices trying to put the clock back and take us to a century before by reiterating the same propaganda that human rights include minority rights. At the same time, there are judicial pronouncements in India weakening the rights flowing from Article 29 and 30 of the Indian Constitution.

Undoubtedly, some components of minority rights overlap the larger façade of human rights. It is like other group rights, relating to Scheduled Castes and Tribes, the disabled, women and the transgender. All of them have, separately, established their rights as special group rights while retaining individual inferences. Nevertheless, at the political and institutional level, a different enthusiasm and energy has been unleashed to protect these rights. Rightly so, the courts have come out with extraordinary interpretations to strengthen them. However, minority rights have not received the same sense of protection by either of them.

Being a sovereign democratic republic, the Indian Constitution has recognized the rights of minorities based on their religion, language, and culture. It is against the concept of majoritarianism in which certain cherished values of people, in fewer numbers, are likely to be oppressed. One must not confuse the larger sphere of rights which are covered and protected under Article 21 where minorities, being citizens and individuals, have equal protection along with every other individual in our country.

The recognition of minority rights gives both individuals and groups the right to be different by practice and continue with the value system with which they have grown up and is close to their heart, life, existence, and identity. In a democratic process, where people’s repre-sentatives are necessary, one can claim representation of any group that feels culturally and religiously suppressed in all public bodies and institutions.

In a polity like India, governments have always given legitimacy to the cultural practices of the majority while dealing with public issues. However under the changing circumstances, in recent times, granting ‘legitimacy’ has moved a few steps further where cultural practices of the majority are being ‘promoted’ in public spaces through use of state mecha-nisms. It is here that the cultural practices, identity of the minorities and their legitimate expectations of being treated equally, finds little space.

All of this has been done under the larger facade of general rights being extended to every citizen while sidelining the concerns of smaller groups thereby making them a disadvantaged class. The majority of society may choose a decent dress code or adopt decent eating habits. Apparently, the concept of ‘decency’, coloured with exclusionary impositions to minority practices, may look to be ideal, justifiable, and convenient to majority practices. However, at the same time, an equally decent dress code, lifestyle, and eating preferences of smaller groups (minorities) are excluded at the level of policy decisions to make a suitable cultural marketplace for the ‘national majority’. That is where the concept of equal treatment is defeated and smaller groups are unfairly placed at a disadvantaged place. Precisely for these reasons, one finds separate rights for minorities as group rights in our Constitution being the charter through which was founded Nation India.

Articles 29 and 30 of the Constitution are a part of the fundamental rights which are merely the expression of basic freedoms reserved for the people. Under Article 29, rights are available to ‘conserve’ distinct language, script, or culture. Under Article 30, all minorities based on ‘religion’ or ‘language’ have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their ‘choice’. If these freedoms are reserved by the people themselves, any executive action under the pretext of morality and decency, cannot seek to unify the diversity of individuals in the public space. If fundamental freedoms can be available to an individual under extraordinary circumstances like in an emergency, why should they be diluted under normal circumstances just to give precedence to the proposed definition of decency and morality as defined by the majority? If the Parliament has no authority to revoke these freedoms, how can executive action be used to create a situation where minorities are confined by the definition of decency and morality imposed by the majority?

The protection of ‘cultural’ rights under Article 29 cannot be subjected to ‘public order, morality and health’. The right under Article 29(1) is an absolute right and not subject to any restrictions whatsoever as held in Jagdev Singh Sidhanti v. Pratap Singh Daulta.2 Issues like wearing of the hijab and sporting a beard are certainly matters of cultural right as well. These practices can be determined with the strength of protection under Article 29 – without involving Articles 25 or 19 which talk about restrictions. However, the court system has been reluctant to independently invoke Article 29. In this process, the intent and spirit of constitutional protection provided at different places in the Constitution lose their relevance and proceed to justify the practices proposed by the majority under the pretext that they will serve the national interest. This way of promoting national interest is an assault on the diverse value systems assured to the ‘national minority’.3

In recent times, it has been debated as to why the ‘national majority’ should not be a ‘regional minority’ considering India’s diverse population. The protection granted under Articles 29 & 30 can be availed by the cultural, linguistic, and religious minority groups. In the same way, in smaller states where a population of the ‘national majority’ is less than the ‘national minority’, the national majority shall be able to claim all benefits. This issue was debated in the Supreme Court of India in the year 2002 in the TMA Pai case.

By placing reliance on the principles in Kesavananda Bharati judgment (1973), one of the judges in the TMA Pai case held that the context in which the Constitution was framed and the political content of the special rights given to the minorities, their rights are a part of the Constitution’s basic structure, and, so, unamendable and unalienable. On the issue of who can be a minority, the Supreme Court stated that ‘Article 30(1) deals with religious minorities and linguistic minorities.

The opening words of Article 30(1) make it clear that religious and linguistic minorities have been put on a par, insofar as that article is concerned. Therefore, whatever the unit – whether a state or the whole of India – for determining a linguistic minority, it would be the same in relation to a religious minority.

India is divided into different linguistic states. The states were carved out on the basis of the language of the majority of persons of that region. For example, Andhra Pradesh was established on the basis of the language of that region, viz. Telugu. A linguistic minority can, therefore, logically only be in relation to a particular state. If the determination of ‘linguistic minority’ for the purpose of Article 30 is to be in relation to the whole of India, then within the state of Andhra Pradesh, Telugu speakers would have to be regarded as a ‘linguistic minority’. This would clearly be contrary to the concept of linguistic states. Finally, the court stated that if the state has to be regarded as the unit for determining the ‘linguistic minority’ vis-à-vis Article 30, then with ‘religious minority’ being on the same footing and the unit to determine a religious or linguistic minority can only be the state.

On the face of it, the proposition laid down in the TMA Pai case appears to be a balancing proposition considering the political history of India, prior to and post the 1946-1950 period, when the Constitution of India was worked upon and implemented and the British passed the Indian Independence Act 1947. However, when we see its working at a different level, it becomes apparent that the ambit of constitutional rights has been restricted at all levels, particularly on three levels – political, administrative, and judicial.

While adjudicating and determining the rights of minorities, in most of the cases, the judiciary has adopted an approach of taking a view in the ‘National Interest’, both explicitly and implicitly. Accordingly, there have been controversies, among others, over hijab, beards, and eating practices, on the one hand, and over appointment of teachers, admission of students in educational institutions. This approach of the courts is a clear indication they are using the ‘homogeneity’ principle and not going by the true spirit of the mechanism created through the Constitution – to maintain the diversity of practices, cultures, and languages. At the same time, it appears that the court is ready to adopt the states as a unit to determine a minority, as the national religious majority is seeking to declare themselves as ‘minority’ in the states where they are numerically in a ‘minority’.

Second, there are technical reasons where the rights of minorities have been restricted, like through a clearly erroneous principle of law as laid down in the S. Aziz Basha case of 1967.4 The Supreme Court stated that the words ‘establish and administer’ in Article 30(1) would have to be read with distinction if the very same institution, though initially established by the same minority, was subsequently converted into a university by passing legislation through the Parliament and in that case, the protection under Article 30 would not be provided as the institution had granted degrees on its own. Hence, the court took the view that the conversion of the college into a university was not by the Muslim minority but by the government as it was done through legislation. To make it clear, if institutions established by minorities are converted into universities through legislation – for which there is no other way – the university cannot be said to have been established by the concerned ‘community’ or minority but effectively by the government. As a result, a university cannot be an ‘institution’ with the protection of rights under Article 30.

This view of the Supreme Court is contrary to the protection of rights of minorities. Because of this principle, a few leading institutions – Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia, became the subject matter of intervention through the process of the court system. Such an intervention, based on this principle, resulted in the Muslim community at large feeling vulnerable, insecure, and disappointed. Financially unaided minority universities have not yet become victims of this view of the Supreme Court but they remain vulnerable. Recently, the correctness of the principle of law laid down in the Basha case has been referred to a larger bench of seven judges for reconsideration and is pending.

Our system faces a dilemma: are the guarantees given to minorities in the true spirit of the Constitution to be honoured, or to restrict the rights thereby transforming them into a decorative concept. There is no doubt that the Supreme Court has on numerous occasions effectively intervened in laying down the ‘principle of law’ which has strengthened the concept of constitutional protection of minorities. However, when those principles of law were sought to be implemented on the ground, in policy matters at the administrative level, and while scrutinizing the judicial process, they could not be given effect. Occasionally, those principles were successfully invoked when individuals went to the courts to assert their rights under Article 30. However, based as they were on individual cases, they rarely became a precedent at the administrative level.

Ours being a quasi-federal framework of the Constitution, the central government and the states, both have powers to recognize the diversity in language and religion of non-dominant communities in their territory. Initially, the central government took a stand in the Supreme Court that both the Parliament and state legislatures have concurrent powers in this regard. However, during the pendency of the same proceedings in the Supreme Court, the central government’s stand was vague and opportunistic. In a subsequent affidavit, the Centre took the stand that the power to notify minorities vests with the central government.

This stand of the Centre is bound to create friction within our federal constitutional framework. Interestingly, in addition to the Centre’s  powers, regional languages are subject to regulation by the legislature of states. All the laws affecting religious rights are the subject matter of public order, health, etc., and are also within the powers of state legislatures. These two basic points of determination of a ‘minority’, i.e. ‘language’ and ‘religion’ are within the concurrent jurisdictions of the state and the Centre.

Considering this aspect, can we exclude the state from the power to declare a ‘minority’? This changed stand of the Centre will only concentrate more power with the Centre. It will be cumbersome and complicate issues that will result in the non-representation of different regions in the decision-making process. We cannot forget the fact that one of the basic features of our Constitution is its federal structure, which again cannot be amended. Simply recognizing the diversity of our population at the local level would be the best way for such determination. Whatever view the Supreme Court takes in this regard, it is evident that in addition to the Centre, state legislatures should have the power to recognize a group as a minority.

The central government promulgated the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions in 2004 to enable educational institutions to seek recognition as minority educational institutions, with the central government having the power to notify who is a ‘minority’. As per this act, the central government declared six religious and linguistic communities as ‘minorities’. But it has not taken into consideration the Pai principle. If this principle is applied, the exercise will have to be done by taking states as units and in that process, ‘Hindus’ in Mizoram, Nagaland, Meghalaya, and Arunachal Pradesh may fall in the minority category. As Ladakh, Kashmir, and Lakshadweep are not ‘states’, they could fall in the grey area.

Prior to that, the central government had set up the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) in 1992 to evaluate the progress and development of minorities and monitor the working of constitutional safeguards to protect their interests. Unfortunately, NCM proved to be toothless and only of ornamental value. It will be interesting to see whether NCM will change its ways of functioning should the majority community be added to the list of minorities.

We have a strong overall majority in India, whom one may refer to as the ‘national majority’. If we apply the TMA Pai principle, the national majority will become a ‘minority’ in certain pockets of the nation to claim benefits which are essentially meant for the substantive minorities at the national level. Other than that, many communities who practically have the same language, script and culture, and similar religious followings (Jains, Buddhist) as the ‘national majority’, are already included within the definition of ‘minorities’. These communities in a real sense, be it culturally, linguistically, and also to a great extent religiously, are a part of the national majority – their religio-cultural practices are not distinct like those of Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs.

The TMA Pai judgment mentioned India’s diversity, saying that each person’s identity – irrespective of language, caste, or religion – has to be preserved. Applying this principle, if Hindus are recognized as a minority community in different regions, it will fly in the face of the ‘homogeneity’ agenda that the central government has been pushing. Consequently, the overall ‘majority’ community in the country, the Hindus, will also have a share in the budgetary allocations meant for the upliftment of substantive minorities in India. Accordingly, India will become an example of a country where the dominant religious and political community with authoritative political power needs constitutional safeguards essentially meant for communities that are socially, economically, politically non-dominant, and inferior in the overall population of the country, to protect them from majoritarianism.

On the final stand of the Centre that it alone shall have the right to determine or recognize ‘minorities’, will create friction between the powers of the state considering the issues as discussed. The central government cannot usurp the powers of the state in the overall constitutional set-up. All laws affecting religious rights are the subject of public order – within the powers of state the legislature.

In any case, the political process in contemporary India has been unkind and hostile to the ‘national minority’ of India. It has playfully sought to question every cultural and religious practice of minorities. In this process, the issues have been raised one by one so that aggrieved persons are compelled to approach the courts and they are tactfully settled through the judicial process. The judicial process has unfortunately taken an exclusionary view. On the concerns of minority issues, the ‘reasonable accommodation’ approach is missing despite there being an ocean of diversity in our country.

The application of the concept of gender justice has emerged as a result of the subjective view of a couple of judges of the Supreme Court, who have taken different views on different practices. The issues raised in the Sabrimala case is an example where the view of three judges, then five and then again five judges, ultimately going to nine judges in a short span of time. The common citizens of India, here minorities, see that the Triple Talaq case was initiated on suo motu basis in 2015 and decided by a Constitution Bench in two years’ time, but a wrong principle of law of 1967 in the S. Aziz Basha case, could not be reviewed till 2019 despite a much larger bench (of eleven judges) in the meantime dealing with the issue of Article 30 in 2002 in the TMA Pai case.

Contrary to the rules of the Supreme Court, petitions challenging the judgement of the Karnataka High Court (2022) holding the hijab (head scarfs for girls) as not an essential practice of Islam, were not listed for hearing for months despite three assurances given by the then CJI in open court after the counsels mentioned them and flagged the urgency of hearing the case. With few exceptions, which can be counted on one’s fingertips, the role of the executive and the court process have not been encouraging in upholding the essence of diversity qua national minorities. I hope, after we have seen 75 years of functional democracy, minorities rights will receive equal weight and significance, like other groups’ rights, while interpreting Article 30. The courts must consider the requirements of  group rights rather than diluting its essential components in vaguely defined terms, using the subjective concept of ‘national interest’.

Footnotes:

1. Great Britain and France opposed Wilson’s idea of universal minority protection through the League of Nations. See Ulrike Barten, Minorities, Minority Rights and Internal Self- Determination. Springer, 2014, Chapter 7.

2. Jagdev Singh Sidhanti v. Pratap Singh Daulta, (1964) 6 SCR 750.

3. At the national level, the Muslim population is 14.23%, Christians 2.3%, Sikhs 1.72, Buddhists 0.70%, Jains 0.37 as per the Census of India 2011. Hence, I refer Muslims, Christian’s, Sikhs etc as ‘National Minorities’ in comparison to the national level population of Hindus being 79.8 %. I refer to them as the ‘National Majority’.

4. AIR 1968 SC 662 (judgment delivered by a bench of five judges; opinion written by K.N. Wanchoo CJ).

Interpreting BJP’s Pasmanda outreach in New India

KHALID ANIS ANSARI

PRIME MINISTER Narendra Modi’s instruction to the BJP to reach out to the Pasmanda Muslims in its two-day National Executive Meeting held in Hyderabad on 2-3 July 2022 seems to have surprised many. However, Modi’s interest in Pasmanda Muslims, a conglomerate of the OBC, Dalit, and Adivasi Muslims that constitute about 85% of Indian Muslims, is not new. As Gujarat chief minister, he had listened patiently to a contingent of Pasmanda activists from Uttar Pradesh for about forty-five minutes during Ramadan (July-August) in 2013.1

By the end of 2013, the UP BJP had formed the ‘weavers’ cell’ to reach out to Pasmanda Muslims. An explicit reference to Pasmanda Muslims by PM Modi was made in the BJP Conclave in Orissa in 2017, where he said ‘that there are OBCs even among the Muslims and other religions. The benefits meant for OBCs are also for them and should go to the Muslim OBCs too… these welfare measures are usurped by the Syeds and Pathans.’2

In the recent Hyderabad conclave, he stressed the ‘need for exploring new social equations within minority communities, the need to look at communities not as monoliths but with different interests and different positions within the social and economic hierarchies of these communities. That issues on which the elites or different ethnicities of particular communities respond to are different from what the other ethnicities and poor and marginalized within these communities respond to.’3

The reference to elite domination within variegated minority communities was combined with the BJP’s universalist development language of welfarism and the need to carry out ‘sneh yatras’ for bridging the trust deficit with Pasmanda Muslims.

There have been two broad responses to the BJP’s overtures from the Pasmanda community. The first response is from the section that may be labelled as the political worker. The political worker may be characterized as a unique product of electoral politics that mediates between the political parties and the concerns of the masses and gets work done through networks across parties and institutions of governance. Extremely catholic in terms of loyalties to ideologies and parties, the political worker, quite akin to the Turk, Abyssinian, or Purabiya Rajput mercenaries of the medieval era, is driven by personal ambition and offers her services, mainly the ability to fetch votes, to the highest bidder. This class of workers among the Pasmanda community, captured in the vernacular as ‘lobharthis’, has welcomed the BJP’s Pasmanda outreach.

Building on the legitimacy accorded to the Pasmanda category by  PM Modi, on which most opposition parties have maintained a deafening silence, the allocation of a ministry and other critical positions to Pasmanda Muslims by the Yogi 2.0 government and the welfare benefits to the most deprived, including Pasmanda, sections (‘labharthis’), this class is out in the field transacting Pasmanda votes for the BJP. While the figures of 8% of Pasmanda votes shifting to the BJP in the UP Legislative Assembly elections in 2022 need to be scrutinized for their validity, one cannot deny that there was some traction for the BJP among the direct Pasmanda beneficiaries of welfare programmes.

The BJP, being one of the most resource-rich political parties in the country today, holds a definite appeal to the class of Pasmanda political workers, who sources tell me, have been given the responsibility to fetch ten thousand votes for the party from each constituency in UP. In closely contested elections, where often the margin of victory is less than ten thousand votes in many constituencies, this may cause worry for the opposition parties.

The second response has been from what may be characterized as the ideological worker. The ideological worker imagines herself as an ethical and self-sacrificing ‘missionary’ (‘karyakarta’) that indulges in conscientization and awareness raising action on behalf of emancipatory ideological/identity formations. The Pasmanda ideological spaces, particularly the Ali Anwar-led All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz (henceforth Mahaz), avowedly locate themselves in the anti-caste (Ambedkarite) and social justice (Lohiaite-Mandalite) tradition of politics and characterize the RSS-BJP combine as a Brahmanical-Manuvadi and communal formation.

The Mahaz has taken a cynical, if not rejectionist, view of the BJP’s Pasmanda outreach framing it as a paternalistic move inspired primarily by electoral calculus. In an open letter to Modi, Ali Anwar opined, ‘It was a pleasant surprise to hear you talk about “Pasmanda”,’ but the Pasmanda Muslims want “sam-maan” (equality and dignity), not “sneh” (affection). The term “sneh” has a specific connotation: That the Pasmanda Muslims need “sneh” denotes that they are an inferior lot requiring patronage from the ones who are superior... Has the sudden move to take out “Sneh Yatra” for Pasmanda society something to do with vote-bank politics?’4

However, the distinction between the political and ideological worker must be construed as analytical with much more porous boundaries in empirical reality. While the motivations of the political worker are too instrumentalist and immediate, that of the ideological worker may be more utopian and prone to ideological closures that may impede a more persuasive interpretation of the dynamic changes in the political sphere. The limitations of the ideological become more glaring as one begins to unravel a core question: why has the BJP explicitly launched the Pasmanda outreach campaign in a context where it can forge electoral majorities sans Muslims and has made the Muslim vote almost irrelevant to its electoral fortunes?

While the intuitive temptation to answer this question through electoral calculus may have some justification, I would contend that one needs to take a detour to a different political landscape to better grapple with it. The logic that I want to work with is that more than the immediacy of the electoral, the BJP’s Pasmanda outreach is intimately connected to attempts of the RSS-BJP to transact its foundational schizophrenia vis-à-vis the ‘Muslim’ question itself.

A few assumptions will be in order here. My approach to understanding social phenomena is broadly constructivist and interpretative, dispensing with any objectivist or essentialist meanings. Knowledge is contingent on discourses, which are systems of meanings that work with inclusions and exclusions in a field of power. No discourse can exhaust the field of meaning. Therefore, the ideological character of any discourse is revealed when it tends to forget its origin and contingency and present its partial view as a totality.

In this sense, the Hindutva project is a discursive formation that attempts to institute the social order in a particular manner among rival possibilities. It works with specific exclusions and inclusions of meanings and renderings of ‘us’ and ‘them’, just like any other political project. If it gains traction, it is owing to specific meanings and truths that resonate with the masses rationally or affectively. Hence, the evaluation of Hindutva from an ‘ethical’ (good versus evil) lens must be reconsidered in favour of the ‘political’ lens that plots its discourse and attendant consequences in a field of power.

Two, the Hindutva discursive space is not monolithic and subject to internal contestations and new articulations in the face of emerging challenges. The RSS-BJP confronts a perpetual tension between the high caste, conservative motivations of its top leadership, and the dynamic challenges from intensifying capitalism and democratic deepening. The Sangh Parivar has consistently adapted to new situations and reworked its cultural, political, and economic vision. BJP’s New India is its most recent articulation in a neoliberal-plutocratic context. Andersen and Damle assess that ‘RSS is a very cautious group that slowly evolves, a generalization that one could make about India itself. The RSS has never been revolutionary and is not likely to be so any time soon. Its goal is social harmony and cultural assimilation. However, it does change….’5

In its formative stage, several factors colluded to produce the cultural vision of the RSS: (a) The orientalist-colonial mapping of India and reading of history from a religious lens that privileges the simplistic story of perennial Hindu-Muslim conflict. The pan-religion high caste elite increasingly began using religion as a proxy to secure its interests and compensate for their numerical deficit after the installation of semi-parliamentary practice from the 1920s onward; (b) The supremacist polemical tradition of Christian and Islamic missionaries that held a disparaging view of the Hindu faith and labelled the Hindus as ‘pagans’ and ‘infidels’; (c) The emergence of anti-caste and labour militancy, particularly in Maharashtra; (d) The increasing instances of communal violence, particularly between 1920-1940s, where Muslims were usually framed as the prime instigators, and so on.

In a world where the privileged classes were increasingly insecure, a few Brahmins in Maharashtra formed the RSS in 1925 as a cultural organization for the Hindus. The RSS discourse over time borrowed heavily from ultra-nationalist Nazi and fascist visions of mythocracy, corporatism, soil and blood narratives, militarization, and nationalization of culture, and the ends justify the means logic on behalf of the nation.

The RSS’s founding vision was inspired by the Savarkar-Golwalkar framework that articulated ‘territorial nationalism’ with ‘cultural nationalism’ and imagined a homogeneous Hindu race inhabiting the territory of Bharat and unified by a common Hindutva (Hindu-ness) culture. Savarkar defines a Hindu as ‘a person who regards the land of Bharatvarsha from Indus to the Seas as his Fatherland, as well as his Holy land – that is the cradle land of his religion.’6 This foundational imagination combines internal Hindu catholicity with the exclusion of those religious communities that have a foreign origin.

The Muslims and Christians, mainly because of their proselytizing faith traditions, become the Other and objects of demonization that must be accorded limited citizenship rights. Hindu identity is stabilized by deflecting the internal assertion from the lowered castes and Adivasis to the Muslim/Christian Other. While most Muslims and Christians are indigenous converts and therefore definitionally share the imagined Hindu race and Fatherland (pitrbhumi), the innovation of the Holy Land (punyabhumi) also renders them alien. To regain equal citizenship, they must revert to the Hindu faith, ghar-wapsi (homecoming), as it is termed in the RSS literature.

Interestingly, most founding icons of the Indian nation shared the foreign-Indic distinction in religion, including the cosmopolitan Babasaheb Ambedkar, when he argued that conversion to Islam and Christianity would ‘denationalize’ the Dalits. Article 25 (b) of the Indian Constitution and the Hindu Code Bills (1955-56) definitionally incorporates all sections of the Indian population that do not practice Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, or Judaism (foreign faiths) as ‘Hindu’. In fact, in the absence of centralized ecclesiastical authority in Hinduism, the Indian state has played a crucial role in defining, unifying, and reforming the Hindu faith.

Intimately connected with this is the process of ‘Semiticization’ of Hinduism, where Hinduism is reworked in the image of the Abrahamic traditions in its theocratic, soteriological, and organization dimensions. These are manifested in the desire for the state to be governed by Hindu principles, the attempts to save the non-believers by sending Hindu missionaries across the globe and forging a centralized ecclesiastical authority in the form of the RSS, VHP, and the four Shankaracharya’s.7 Traditionally, Hinduism was theologically pagan, tolerant of propositional truths, and socially hierarchical. The semiticized Hinduism works with core revealed truths and a definitionally monolithic, egalitarian community as reflected in the RSS’s slogan of ‘Ek Mandir, Ek Kuan aur Ek Shamshaan’ (a common temple, well, and crematorium).

Culture is the crucial category in Sangh Parivar’s lexicon. The RSS has never clearly defined Hindutva. Hindutva plays the role of a ‘myth’: it performs a metaphorical function by offering a surface of inscription for varying emerging demands and unifying the discourse. Myths can mobilize affective energies and sub-conscious fantasies and are an invitation to action. The enacting of myths may be termed as ‘ritual’, which in the case of the RSS ideology may embrace the character-forming sessions in the daily shakhas, campaigns like the Ram Mandir movement that produces the unified Hindu, or even violence against Muslims and Christians as a sacrificial ritual to propitiate the ‘Nation God’ a term that Golwalkar used.

The present RSS, steered by its chief Mohan Bhagwat, has distanced itself from the far more radical interpretations of Hindutva in the Savarkar-Golwalkar imagination in favour of a more reflexive and assimilationist position on Muslims/Christians in the Mukherji-Upadhyaya framework of ‘Integral Humanism’ and ‘Indianization’ (Bharatiyata). Bhagwat’s recent utterances betray a more marked slide from the religious to regional connotations of the term Hindu. While Shyama Prasad Mukherjee dissociated from the Hindu Mahasabha and formed the Bhartiya Jan Sangh in 1951 on the core question of membership of Muslims and Christians, the RSS opened its membership to the latter in 1979 under the stewardship of Balasaheb Deoras. Since 2002, the RSS-backed Rashtriya Muslim Manch (RMM) has been outreaching Muslims to bring them to the ‘mainstream’.

To paraphrase the relevant points in this revised formulation. One is the distinction between ‘Dharma’ as righteous conduct and code of duties and ‘Panth’ as alluding to various sects and their modes of worship. In Balraj Madhok’s view, ‘While following this Dharma people are free to follow different forms of worship and adopt different approaches to realise God and attain salvation. They have come to be described as the different paths of worship or “Panthas”… Christianity and Islam have also been added to this plethora of panths or ways of worship that co-exist in this country.’8

Issues are taken with translating Dharma as religion and secularism as Dharma-nirpekshita. The RSS understands secularism as Panth-nirpekshita and has historically levelled the charge of Muslim appeasement against secular parties like the Congress.

Two, a distinction between religion and culture is made, ‘Culture is associated with a country and not with a religion. The whole of Europe follows Christianity, but there is a distinct German culture, French culture and Italian culture. The whole of West Asia is mainly Muslim but there is a distinct Turkish culture, Iranian culture and Arab culture. There is no such thing as Muslim culture or Christian culture in India. There is only one Indian culture which is common to all Indians.’9 In this respect, Indian Muslims are expected to pride themselves on the Indian nation, culture, and revered icons like Rama and Krishna. Indonesia is cited as an exemplary case that is predominantly Muslim but glorifies its connection with its Hindu past.

Three, the focus on the historic vivisection of Bharat by Muslims in 1947, Islamic militancy, particularly the Sunni-Deoband orthodoxy, and the modernization of Islam. Fourth, a distinction between ‘rashtra’ (nation) and ‘rajya’ (state) is drawn to dissociate the meanings of theocracy associated with the Hindu Rashtra. The Constitution is reaffirmed while simultaneously adapting it to RSS-BJP’s cultural-political vision through a method that Hilal Ahmed has dubbed ‘Hindutva Constitutionalism.’10

There are certainly points of affinity and conflict between the revisionist RSS-BJP discourse and the Pasmanda narratives. In the first wave of Pasmanda politics (1926-1947), the Abdul Qaiyum Ansari-led Momin Conference contested the bi-nationality thesis and the demand of Pakistan that the Jinnah-led Muslim League raised. The leaders of the Momin Conference were characterized as ‘nationalist Muslims’ as opposed to the Muslim League’s ‘communalist Muslims’. However, the Muslim League members who could not relocate to Pakistan turned into Congress supporters overnight. Their rehabilitation at the expense of nationalist Pasmanda Muslims was facilitated by upper caste Ashraf leaders like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.

In Ali Anwar’s view, ‘The very sections of the Muslim society that sacrificed the most for the Independence of the country, that fought against Mr. Jinnah’s two-nation theory, were thoroughly marginalized in Independent India.’11 In Pasmanda discourse, ‘Muslim appeasement’ is deconstructed as Ashraf appeasement. The Mahaz has foregrounded nationalist icons like Veer Abdul Hamid, a Pasmanda Muslim from the Darzi (tailor) caste, who was heroically martyred in the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965.

Another Pasmanda spiritual icon is Sant Kabir, belonging to the Julaha (weaver) community. Ali Anwar mentions the poet Taju, belonging to the Rangrez (dyer) caste, and quotes Ram Manohar Lohia, ‘I have recently heard of the poetess Taju, dyer by trade and Muslim by birth around the time of 1857, whose Krishna poetry matches Mira’s devotion.’12 There is a reference to Saint Daryadas belonging to the Muslim Darzi (tailor) caste, who had spoken against religious and caste-based discrimination in the late 17th century and had followers from all communities.13

Babasaheb Ambedkar had interpreted the Hindu-Muslim struggle ‘as a struggle for mastery for dominance… The masses whether of the Hindus or of the Musalmans are merely used for establishing the ascendency of the classes. This struggle that is going on is really a struggle of the classes. It is not a struggle of the masses.’14 In contrast to the high caste Ashraf political motivations embedded in the nostalgia of being the historical ruling class, Ali Anwar suggests that the struggle of the Pasmanda Muslims is not ‘to achieve “dominance” of any kind over any other group or groups inside or outside the Muslim society. Our fight is for equality.’15

The Mahaz has emphasized contesting Muslim communalism and the imperial theologies of conquest articulated, for instance, by the Deobandi tradition as a precondition to contain Hindu communalism that often masquerades as nationalism. The Pasmanda discourse has privileged regional-vernacular languages and parochialized the claim of Urdu as the language of Muslims. The arbitrary tradition of Triple Talaq was consistently opposed, and the modernization and democratization of madrasas is a persistent theme. The Mahaz has taken issues with the concept of minority and has articulated pan-religion horizontal solidarity of indigenous lowered castes and Adivasi groups.

The RSS-BJP has favoured the language of ‘Samrasta’ (harmony) over the anti-caste imagination of ‘Samta’ (equality). It has attempted to symbolically integrate and coopt various lower caste and Adivasi communities not taken seriously by the social justice parties by reworking their spiritual-community narratives, giving them samman (respect) and some representation. The inclusion of Danish Ansari in the Yogi Adityanath cabinet in UP, allocation of some critical positions to members from the Pasmanda community, and the organization of Pasmanda Samman Samaroh (minus the pictures of any Pasmanda icon) in Uttar Pradesh is an extension of its tested strategy. This is what Gramsci called ‘hegemony through neutralization’ or ‘passive revolution’, referring to ‘a situation where demands which challenge the hegemonic order are appropriated by the existing system so as to satisfy them in a way that neutralizes their subversive potential.’16

The Mahaz has raised the issue of the caste census as a precondition to any significant categorical revision within SC, ST, or OBC quota. On this issue, the BJP has backtracked. However, a more contentious issue has been the religious neutrality of the SC category on the lines of OBC, ST, and EWS quota. While pan-religious caste groups are included in all categories, the SC category excludes the Muslims and Christians belonging to Dalit origins (while the Dalits belonging to other minority faiths like Sikhism and Buddhism are included). The background logic governing

this exclusion is the Indic/foreign dichotomy regarding religion, which renders Islam and Christianity as ‘foreign’ faiths and the related anxieties over religious conversions. The BJP has taken a strong position against it. In the face of Hinduism taking a soteriological shift and strong anti-conversion laws, the Mahaz has pressed for a new conversation on this exclusion.

The BJP’s embrace of the neoliberal and plutocratic economic order has been disastrous for non-corporate forms of capital. Several peasants, artisans, labourers, and small shopkeepers – and most Pasmanda Muslims belong to these categories – have been pauperized. While this pauperization is being compensated by welfarism, it can only ensure survival, not the dignity of work. However, the most striking point of discontent is the shrill anti-Muslim discourse and violence launched by the organizations close to the Sangha Parivar in the form of cow protection, love jihad, and so on, in which most victims belong to the Pasmanda communities. The recent felicitation of the remitted perpetrators guilty of violating Bilqis Bano, a Pasmanda Muslim, and murdering her family during the Gujarat riots in 2002 can only be interpreted as a symbolic injury by Pasmanda Muslims.

The BJP’s Pasmanda outreach has less to do with expanding its electoral base than a response to its constitutive schizophrenia in its approach to the Muslim question: Hinduization of Muslims through conversion or Indianization of Muslims through assimilation? PM Modi’s unequivocal acknowledgment of the Pasmanda category marks a definite shift towards the latter and resolution

of the Muslim question through the Pasmanda route. While the conversation on the Pasmanda question has been ongoing within the RSS-BJP for some time, one may speculatively attribute its precipitation to the recent diplomatic humiliation the Indian government has faced from West Asian countries over the Nupur Sharma fiasco. The high caste Ashraf Muslim elite, owing to their West Asian genealogies and theological and cultural connections, have probably been identified as active interlocutors against Delhi.

With the mooting of Sneh-Yatras and Pasmanda outreach, the BJP has hit many birds with one stone. It has advanced a healing language and hypothetically expanded its electoral base. At the same time, it has signalled a containment strategy for the dominant Ashraf intelligentsia, political parties, and community organizations. However, there is a clear cleavage in the moderate language employed by the top RSS-BJP functionaries and the more fundamentalist language and actions of affiliates and fringe organizations like the VHP, Bajrang Dal, and so on. Is this cleavage a case of strategic doublespeak or a genuine difference of opinion? The success of the BJP’s Pasmanda outreach will depend on how convincing an answer it gives to this question.

Footnotes:

1. As told to me by the senior journalist Yusuf Ansari who was a part of the contingent.

2. R.M. Chaturvedi, ‘PM Narendra Modi Speaks for Pasmanda Muslims at BJP Conclave’, The Economic Times, 17 April 2017. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/pm-narendra-modi-speaks-for-pasmanda-muslims-at-bjp-conclave/articleshow/58212241.cms

3. N. Hebbar, ‘PM Modi’s “Minority Move” Aimed At Delinking Them from “Elite” Concerns’, The Hindu, 5 July 2022. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/pm-modis-minority-move-aimed-at-delinking-them-from-elite-concerns/article65602672.ece

4. The Satyashodhak Staff, ‘Ali Anwar Ansari Writes Stern Letter to Narendra Modi on BJP’s Pasmanda Outreach’, The Satyashodhak, 21 July 2022. https://thesatyashodhak.com/ali-anwar-ansari-writes-stern-letter-to-narendra-modi-on-bjps-pasmanda-outreach/

5. W.K. Andersen & S.D. Damle, The RSS: A View to the Inside. Penguin/Viking, 2018, p. xxiv.

6. Cited in T. Basu, P. Datta, S.  Sarkar, T. Sarkar & S. Sen, Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right. Orient Longman, 1993, p. 8.

7. Sebastian Kappen, Hindutva and Indian Religious Traditions. Notion Press, 2019.

8. Balraj Madhok, Indianisation. Orient Paperback, 1970, pp. 22-23.

9. Ibid., pp. 27-28.

10. Hilal Ahmed, ‘New India, Hindutva Constitutionalism, and Muslim Political Attitudes’, Studies in Indian Politics, 2022, pp. 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/23210230221082833

11. Ali Anwar, Masawat Ki Jung (The Battle for Equality). Vani Prakashan. 2001, p. 171, Tr.

12. Ibid., p. 57; Rammanohar Lohia, Guilty Men of India’s Partition. B.R. Publishing Corporation, 2000, p. 9.

13. Ibid., pp. 58-59.

14. B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Civilization or Felony’, in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, Volume 5 (Third, pp. 127-144). Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, 1979, p. 128.

15. ‘Open Letter to the PM Shri Narendra Modi’ released by Ali Anwar Ansari, Founder President of the All India Pasmanda Muslim Mahaz and former MP (Rajya Sabha) on 15 July 2022.

16. Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. Verso, 2013, p. 77.

Muslim women’s struggle for gender justice

ZAKIA SOMAN

POLITICS in New India has brought Muslims face to face with harsh new realities, although they are no strangers to poverty and economic hardships. This hugely diverse community is united in low socio-economic status since independence. Most Muslims have been living with poverty, educational backwardness, lack of jobs, communalism and without a political voice. Moreover, the community suffers from religious conservatism, absence of democratic leadership, denial of women’s’ rights – all of which never get discussed openly.

The Sachar Committee report of 2005 highlighted the dismal condition of the largest minority in our secular democracy. It only reinforced what the Gopal Singh Committee had established in 1983. It tells us that Muslims are increasingly getting educationally, economically and politically excluded. Further, they live in ghettos across the country with a sense of fear and insecurity. Besides, they suffer from a perception of discrimination and a sense of alienation. The two reports spread apart by nearly three decades and both commissioned by Congress governments expose persis-tent marginalization of Muslims under the rule of supposedly secular political parties. Since 2014, religious polarization and open hate makes the disenfranchisement of the community nearly total.

Despite persistent marginalization since 1947 there has not been a tradition of Muslims agitating for their democratic rights. In contrast to Dalit rights movements or other social justice movements, Indian Muslims are not known to have launched agitations for their secular demands. On the other hand, vocal conservative voices over emotive issues related to identity and religious way of life have been fairly common. The Shah Bano controversy in 1985-86 is a good illustration. The whole community led by clerics, social leaders, politicians, eminent citizens joined hands to deny rightful compensation to a 65-year-old divorced woman.

They united in a ghastly demonstration of cruelty and inhumanity against a woman facing hunger and destitution. There was a nationwide campaign to uphold Shariat by denying monthly maintenance to Shah Bano who had nowhere to go after her husband divorced her. The Muslim leadership wants the world to believe that Islam is a religion of justice even as they freely indulge in misogynist and unjust behaviour. Such behaviour has continued to define the community over the decades.

The Shah Bano episode is a precursor to the fraught Hindu-Muslim relations today. The Rajiv Gandhi-led government overturned the Supreme Court ruling granting a paltry monthly alimony to Shah Bano through an ordinance. This was done ostensibly to safeguard the right to religious freedom for Muslims. In effect, it amounted to violating the rights of half the Muslim population comprising women. It was clearly a gesture meant to appease clerics and other vocal sections. This provided impetus to the BJP’s charge of Muslim appeasement and breathed new life into hitherto dormant Hindutva politics. The charge of appeasement began to appear credible to many Indians. It contributed to the rise of the BJP from two MPs in Parliament to an outright majority in 2014.

The Muslim leadership has been singularly male and overtly religious, a leadership which has spoken out only when they felt that there was a ‘danger to Islam’. Islam khatre mein he is the familiar rant with which my generation grew up. In their world view women empowering themselves through education or jobs and demanding fair treatment is a clear danger to their authority and position. For them women’s equality leads to Islam khatre mein he. They keep parroting that Islam gave rights to women 1400 years ago but never entertain any possibility of translating those into reality. They could neither be credited as having respect for other faiths nor tolerance for Muslims who think differently.

The All-India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) and the Babri Masjid Action Committee lacked a comprehensive democratic vision that would result into meaningful participation of Muslims in our secular multifaith polity. Both bodies limited themselves to identity issues. Most leaders from these outfits posed as ‘Muslim leaders’ as though they represented the entire population of over 12 crore. Most amongst them cultivated close relationships with various political parties and enjoyed their patronage. These relationships never transcended the personal and worse, never translated into any collective gains such as well-being for the larger community through education or protection from communal riots. The low education and economic status of Muslims is proof of this.

Women speaking out openly over the last one and half decades against patriarchal practices such as instant triple talaq, polygamy, halala has been a historic new development. It would hardly be an exaggeration to state that the religious male leadership was rendered irrelevant when ordinary women took up the democratic fight against instant triple talaq and for justice within marriage and family. Women also led the efforts for peace and harmony in society and against communal hate or against unfair legal mechanism such as the CAA-NRC.

How did women’s struggle against a patriarchal practice come about? What were the challenges faced by Muslim women seeking justice at home and in society? What are the challenges now in New India? It is common knowledge that women are treated as second class in most cultures and geographies. Thanks to the patriarchal world order women and girls have to struggle against numerous odds to reach their potential. Women are discriminated in the name of culture, traditions, morality, religion and society.

In the Indian subcontinent women face subjugation and oppression in the name of religion. Practices such as sati, a man taking multiple wives, widow ostracization amongst Hindus were abolished by law. Nehru and Ambedkar had attempted to bring in a Uniform Civil Code to enable female citizens of India to become equal within families and thereby in society. But their noble effort for UCC had to be abandoned under pressure from mainly Hindu men of religion who viewed it as an onslaught on ‘our ancient civilization and heritage’. The Constituent Assembly debates make fascinating reading on how BJP’s ideological forefathers viewed UCC as an onslaught on Hindu culture and rejected it outright.

Post-independence, Nehru and colleagues found another way of reforming society and providing rights and safeguards to women through the Hindu Code Bill. This led to the enactment of various laws such as The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, and few other laws giving legal protection to women. These laws provided a framework for Hindu women seeking justice within the family.

Muslim women have remained out of the ambit of legal protection in matters such as age of marriage, triple talaq, polygamy, custody and guardianship of children, inheritance and share in property and other family matters. Despite Quranic injunctions and affirmative provisions such as consent and mehr, women continue to be discriminated. Any mention of reform or codified family law is thwarted thanks to the politics of Islam khatre mein he.

Beginning early 2011, Muslim women started speaking out against the arbitrary practice of instant triple talaq. Women started reading the Quran for themselves and educating others that there is no Quranic sanction for the abominable practice of ‘talaq’ as prevalent in India. They openly challenged misinterpretations by self-appointed custodians of religion who had perpetrated this unjust practice in society.

Over 500 women from across India participated in a national conference in Mumbai in December 2012. Survivors provided personal testimonies about how they were rendered homeless overnight, without any support, no help for the children after being divorced orally and in an instant. Most women were traumatized for life and carried emotional scars. In several cases the women were not even present when the husband uttered talaq thrice. Some women narrated how they did not find help from any of the existing religious bodies that they approached. They narrated how Qazis unilaterally issued decrees upholding this form of talaq as valid. The event was widely covered in the English as well as vernacular print media.

Many more conferences, workshops, conventions, trainings were held in different states and in the national capital as more and more women joined the movement demanding justice based on Quranic values as well as constitutional principles. Ground surveys were conducted and case studies compiled. In our national study ‘Seeking Justice Within Family’, out of a sample of 4710 women, 525 were divorced. Of these, 346 women were divorced orally, 40 women were sent letter of divorce by their husbands, 18 women were divorced on phone, 1 via SMS, 3 on email and 117 through other methods. In the same study 92% respondents called for a legal ban on this practice.

Over the years, women not only mobilized the Parliament and the Supreme Court, but they also educated the whole community and entire Indian population. ‘Allah created man and woman as equal.’ The conservative clergy has come in the way of gender rights granted by the Quran, women were saying in unison. Women highlighted what mullahs had failed to mention – gender justice is fundamental to Islam. Shayra Bano and a few more women petitioned the Supreme Court and we impleaded in the matter. Finally, triple talaq was declared illegal in

2017 by the constitution bench of the Supreme Court.

I am not suggesting that Hindu women or Christian women have attained outright equality in family and society. But they enjoy legal protections under the Hindu Marriage Act and the Indian Divorce Act; similar protection is denied to Muslim women. The Shariat Application Act, 1937 is vague and highly inadequate to be of substantive use. It merely states that ‘Shariat will apply’ in all matters concerning Muslims. However, it does not clarify which Shariat or whose Shariat. Where are the written down rules or guidelines? Where are the codified sections of Muslim family law? We have been indulging in talaq ostensibly under Shariat. Shariat has come to be a connotation that in effect means anything and everything as decided by clerics. There cannot be a greater travesty than to give absolute power in the hands of clerics without any accountability mechanism.

Shariat law of 1937 is silent on consent, age of marriage, mehr, nikahnama, divorce procedure, polygamy, custody and guardianship of children, inheritance and women’s share in property – all of which are important matters in the lives of women. Not surprisingly, the demand for reform came from the women themselves.

Women speaking out against triple talaq entered into direct confrontation with the conservatives. They denied outright that triple talaq is an evil practice. The AIMPLB filed an affidavit defending the practice. They joined the Shayra Bano matter as opponents to defend this abhorrent practice. They filed an affidavit defending polygamy as well.

Some conservatives took to attacking the women and ran campaigns maligning them. The petitioners Shayra Bano, Afreen Rehman, Ishrat Jahan paid a heavy price for demanding their rights as granted by the Quran. They were socially boycotted and pressurized by neighbours in Muslim mohallas. They were labelled as BJP stooges. There were attempts at pressurizing our women volunteers who were helping survivors in different states. The TV debates specially in Hindi saw vicious slander and innuendo cast on women by co-panelist men of religion. The men felt that their religious authority and dominance was being questioned. This made them angry and insecure. They made every effort to thwart the women’s campaign for justice by indulging in mudslinging.

I too, personally bore the brunt of these attacks. One prominent clean shaven TV face of AIMPLB regularly attempted to cast direct aspersions on my ‘Muslimness’ and invariably received a snub from the host of the show. Sample the message reproduced below circulated to Muslims in India and abroad on WhatsApp and Facebook:

‘Name, Zakia Soman married to Soman Nambiar. Married as per Hindu Rite; Son, Arastu Zakia, self-declared Atheist. Zakia has formed Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan along with Noorjehan Safia Niaz of Dongri Mumbai. They have written to PM to abolish Muslim personal law and want common civil law to be applied. Last week they created a new fitna at Haji Ali Dargha protesting that Women should be allowed inside Dargha just to cool down Sabarimala temple issue where women are not allowed to enter. Now they have got first women Qazi in Rajasthan to perform Nikkah. Please create awareness this lady has nothing to do with Islam she is being used by RSS to create fitna. Please do your own research and circulate to everybody so that we avoid fitna.’

Opposition from conservatives is understandable, even expected. But the reaction of some experts and eminent persons was shocking. One lawyer wrote that following the Shamim Ara judgment of 2002, triple talaq was no more an issue in India and began citing anomalies in Hindu Marriage Act and how it was unjust to Hindu women. A prominent legal academician wrote a painstaking article highlighting gaps in our research report and questioning our thinking on gender justice for Muslim women. One sarkari musalman who was famously a member on a government commission wrote that our 115 case studies of triple talaq survivors was too small a number to blame the entire community; it was insufficient for drastic action such as Islam ko kathgare me khada kar dena. This is comparable to the Hindutva argument that a dozen mob lynchings are of no significance in a country of 135 crores. An eminent JNU academic said that triple talaq was a non-issue and it was solely a media creation. This shocking support for the evil practice of triple talaq from ‘educated’ sections made the women more determined than ever to fight on.

Skullcaps and beards make it easy to identify conservatives, who are also straight forward about their opinions. I learnt the sad truth that closet conservatives and misogynists in influential academic, legal and public positions are more dangerous stumbling blocks to Muslim women’s equality.

Parliament is lawmaker in our democracy. Legal reform is not possible without support from political parties and the government. The Modi government’s law ministry filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court supporting the abolition of triple talaq. The affidavit mentioned that the fact that this form of divorce is not valid in several Muslim countries establishes that this is not an essential practice of Islam. This was a good argument to make. Besides, gender equality is the constitutional oblig-ation of government. It is another matter that most governments are found faltering rather than upholding it. Support from the Centre at once led to more voices blaming the women

for going to court at such a sensitive time. They forgot that injustice to Muslim women predates the Modi government.

The BJP-RSS came out vocally in support of the agitating Muslim women. On the other hand, so-called secular parties such as Congress, SP, BSP, TMC and others remained silent or ambiguous. Till date, I have not seen any official statement or position document from these parties on the question of triple talaq or on the issue of reform in Muslim personal law. Perhaps, caught up in the old bind of politician-cleric equation, they have failed to register that a lot has changed about Indian Muslims in the last two decades.

The movement for gender justice led by Muslim women from within the community failed to attract their attention or interest. Barring some progressive MPs who spoke out individually supporting the abolition of triple talaq, it was a missed opportunity for the opposition parties to correct their politics on the Muslim question. I wonder what prevented them from coming out openly in support of the Muslim women. This would have energized the political climate and ordinary Indians would have seen through the Hindutva strategy. The near total absence of opposition parties from the triple talaq debate allowed the BJP to walk away with the credit. This only shows how inextricably Indian political parties are caught up in an outdated patriarchal way of thinking.

The support of ordinary Muslims for abolition of triple talaq was a fitting democratic retort to the hegemony of the conservatives as well as inaction of politicians. Our campaigns during 2010-2017 such as sending postcards to the President, letters to MPs, letters to the women’s commission, public protests across multiple cities, signature drives received a good response from ordinary citizens – particularly the drives during Ramzan received support in cash and kind.

We received consistent support from women in the media, both print and electronic. Many women journalists made it their mission to support the Muslim women’s movement. They did indepth stories and ground reports besides analytical writings and news shows. Yes, it helped that the campaign had government support. But no, it was not the only reason. Women in media and generally men journalists as well, saw the merit of the arguments that Muslim women were so painstakingly making. All the work over the years to educate and generate an informed understanding of religion, not to mention progressive interpretations of the text, had led to women demanding equality. These women were able to articulate their point of view in public with admirable confidence about their religion as well as their rights as citizens in democratic India.

Muslim women campaigning against triple talaq received tremendous support from the general public as well. Several of us were invited to speak at universities, various associations, media gatherings and other civil society interactions. People made small cash donations to support different campaigns. Overall, it was a collective journey that made the outcome possible. The women had turned into activists and most remain vocal on issues of social justice.

The AIMPLB belatedly mobilized copycat campaigns like holding women’s rallies and sending postcards. Journalists covering the rallies reported that most women participants they spoke to were clueless about why they had been brought to the rallies. Some of our volunteers attended the rallies and talked individually to the participating women about the evil practice of triple talaq. Many attendees sympathized with them and expressed support to the cause of its abolition. These rallies were nothing but blatant instrumentalization of women to preserve patriarchal hegemony and power over the community.

It is true that despite the Supreme Court judgment of 2017, incidents of instant triple talaq were still being reported. All hell broke loose when the government suddenly announced in 2019 that it was bringing a law against triple talaq. By now, the climate of religious polarization and communal hate was quite alarming. Muslims were under onslaught of mob lynchings in the name of gau raksha, the bogey of love jehad and hate speech. In such a scenario the government’s announcement invoked hostile reactions. The law ministry which could have consulted all stakeholders and involved MPs from all parties, failed to do so. The entire opposition staged a walkout when the Bill was presented and passed. The AIMIM representative termed it a plan to ‘fill up the jails with Muslims’. It is sad that women suffer alone without anyone taking notice but the slightest possibility of erring men being jailed invokes so much concern.

We welcomed the law while suggesting several amendments in the provisions. The final draft included some amendments wherein only the aggrieved wife or her family members can register an FIR against the husband. Moreover, the offence

of triple talaq was now made compoundable if the couple reconciled and the wife decided to withdraw the FIR. There was huge opposition to the seven-year jail term for the husband provided in the law. Motives were attributed to the criminalization of triple talaq. Although several women affirmative laws such as the bigamy law, dowry law, domestic violence law prescribe jail term, this law

was viewed with greater suspicion perhaps owing to the climate of religious polarization.

For those who never supported the abolition of triple talaq this law became a golden opportunity to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Following the passage of this law, triple talaq became a ‘Modi issue’ and Muslim women’s genuine concerns were yet again forgotten. Opposing the Modi government was more important than supporting justice for Muslim women.

Protests against the CAA-NRC too were ably led by Muslim women in 2020. These were peaceful democratic protests where women were asserting equal citizenship and reminding the government of its constitutional obligations towards all citizens irrespective of faith and background. However, there is a major difference between CAA-NRC protests and the long-drawn struggle against triple talaq. Significantly, the whole community, clergy included, supported the protests against CAA-NRC and rightly so. The women protesters were not harassed or attacked from within the community. The women protesting against CAA-NRC were not challenging the power imbalance inside the home and within the community. They posed no threat to the dominance of men of religion and therefore they did not face slanderous attacks unlike the women fighting against triple talaq.

The abolition of triple talaq became possible thanks to the arduous democratic struggle by Muslim women. Support by the government definitely helped the cause. Ambiguity and inaction of the opposition was unfathomable. Muslim women asserting their Quranic rights and demanding equality as citizens has been one of the most significant developments of our times.

Muslims in the labour market

MOHD. SANJEER ALAM

ACROSS societies, access to eco-nomic resources and opportunities has been determined by historically grown values and norms associated with social division of labour. In the pre-modern society and economy, the large majority of jobs were filled on the basis of ascribed characteristics of individuals – gender, race, ethnicity, colour, creed, caste and so on. Invariably, most of high-status occupations were held by socially privileged groups. Most members of social groups facing structural disadvantage were placed in the marginal occupations.

The historical bond between an individual’s social location and occupational attainment, however, is said to have broken in the modern context. Several factors such as modern political culture (that promotes universalism rather than particularism), widening access to schooling and economic transition (from primary to tertiary sector), among others, have created an enabling context for socially and economically disadvantaged groups to improve their labour market position.

Probably in no other society has the association between social origins and access to economic opportunities been so strong as in India. Nevertheless, rapid changes in India’s key social institutions over the course of the last seven decades have rendered the older form of social and economic relations a thing of the past.

In the context of economic and labour market restructuring in more recent periods, it is argued that a massive spurt in opportunities of relatively good employment has led to movement of workers from poorer to better jobs; from informal to formal jobs; from casual employment to regular employment; from wage employment in the unorganized sector to wage employment in the organized sector.1 All this has given rise to the belief that just as a rising tide lifts all boats, enhanced openings of good quality jobs and remarkable diversification of occupations have enabled historically disadvantaged groups to improve their labour market position. Simply put, the world of work has become socially more equitable. Secularization of the labour market is under way.

Undeniably, the older forms of social and economic relations no longer make sense. But more recent data on various indicators of labour market outcomes points to the fact that little has changed in the world of work. By and large, social groups’ relative position in the occupational structure remains the same as before. As is evident (Table 1), the distribution of workers belonging to different socio-religious groups (SRGs)2 across the structure of employment3 is skewed, revealing a sort of social polarization. While the workers belonging to Hindu Forward Castes (HFCs) appear to dominate the upper end of the employment spectrum (that is, regular salaried employment, often seen as ‘decent employment’), those of dis-advantaged socio-religious groups (SRGs) – Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), Hindu Backward Classes (HOBCs) and Muslims show a tendency of heaping on the lower end (casual worker – the most precarious form of employment).

In 2011-12, about a third of male workers among HFCs were placed in the regular wage/salaried employment. It was nearly three times the proportion of STs, and a little less than double the proportion of SCs and Muslims. Even so, Muslims were less likely than SCs to have access to regular salaried employment. The finer the breakdown of jobs within the category, the more apparent are disparities between Muslims and all others.

Needless to say, that the category of regular wage/salaried employment is internally vastly heterogeneous. There is a sea of difference – both in terms of social prestige and economic pay off – between any two given jobs falling under this category. Yet, access to jobs under this category is seen as important for the fact, if not for other reasons, that such jobs provide an assurance of reasonable quality of employment in terms of regularity of work, reasonable level of earnings and a measure of social security. Given this, if relative position of social groups in the labour market is to be judged by degrees of access to regular salaried work, Muslims are one of the most disadvantaged groups.

The extent of social segregation in the labour market is better captured by Dissimilarity Index (D).4 This index represents the percentage of workers that would have to change from one employment category to another in order for the two groups (which are compared) to attain the same occupational distribution. As is evident (Table 2), the D value was the highest for SCs (0.353), followed by STs (0.233), Muslims (0.166) and HOBCs (0.151). To illustrate, about 35% of workers belonging to SCs would have had to change employment categories – moving from low to high status category – to have the same distribution as HFCs. Conversely, about 35% of workers belonging to HFCs would have had to move into lower status category in order for having the same distribution as the SCs. As for STs, Muslims and HOBCs to be identically distributed as HFCs, about 23%, 17% and 15% respectively would have had to shift from low to high status employment categories.

Often times, as noted earlier, it is hypothesized that sustained growth of and improvement in labour market opportunities benefits workers across the social spectrum, leading to weakening, if not dismantling, the traditional bond between social and occupational stratifications. It would be of great interest to explore how the growth processes and concomitant structural shifts in the labour market, marked by robust growth in the opportunities of regular salaried employment, have impacted different socioreligious groups.

a

If social inequality in the distribution of workers across the employment spectrum has reduced, the D value should decline over time. It appears that during the period of economic boom, between 1999-2000 and 2011-12, the D values for STs and SCs declined to some extent (by 6 and 5 percentage points respectively). The same also reduced for HOBCs, although only a bit.  But for Muslims, the D value increased, though slightly, during the same period (Table 2). From this, one can infer at least two things. One, an upturn in the economy hardly works to the advantage of socioeconomically disadvantaged groups so as to significantly improve their labour market position relative to the advantaged groups. Two, during the period of economic boom, while other disadvantaged groups gained relative to HFCs, Muslims, in contrast, lost a bit.

Other indicators of labour market outcomes only reconfirm Muslims’ disadvantaged position in the labour market. For instance, even among regular salaried workers, Muslims are much less likely to be paid than others.5 In 2011-12, the average earning of Muslim regular wage/salaried workers was the lowest of all. They, on average, earned half the wages those of ‘Others’. With this, the wage gap between Muslims and Others was the widest.

Even more disturbing is the fact that the wage gap has widened rather than narrowed over time. Between 2004-05 and 2011-12, wages for regular salaried workers increased for all SRGs, Muslims included. But the rate of increment was the lowest for Muslims. As a result, the wage gap between Muslims and Others increased substantially during the same period. On the other hand, the wage gap between SCs and Others remained stable, and between STs and Others attenuated (Table 3). An assortment of various factors, including the possibility of Muslims being employed in relatively low wage regular work, may partly explain this, but the widening wage gap between Muslims and all others attests to increasing marginalization of Muslims in the labour market.

For many analysts, social differentials in labour market outcomes are basically a function of human capital differences with which members of different social groups enter the labour market. Put another way, exclusion of disadvantaged groups, Muslims included, from the opportunities of better employment is due more to their pre labour market disadvantages, what may be called ‘attribute disadvantage’ (educational deficits in particular), than any other factors (viz., arbitrary practices, including invidious discrimination). Given the relative lack of education among disadvantaged SRGs, this explanation sounds plausible on the face of it, although the education – labour market relationship is quite complex. Does education pay off the disadvantaged SRGs, Muslims in particular, in the labour market? If so, to what extent? Does it really help them close the gap?

A simple, and yet a refined way, of accounting of education for social gaps in regular salaried jobs is to locate and/or allocate the educated workers of different social origins across employment types. Table 4 presents distribution of workers with educational attainment secondary and above across employment types. If we read Tables 1 and 4 together, the following quick observations can be made. First, educational attainment is a great opportunity enhancer. It enhances access of disadvantaged groups to regular salaried jobs and leads to drastic decline in the proportions of casual workers.  Second, educational attainment being equal, SCs/STs are as likely as HFCs to be in regular salaried jobs. Put another way, education bridges the gap between SCs/STs and HFCs. Third, while educational attainment raises the probability of HOBCs and Muslims to have access to regular salaried employment considerably, it does not seem to push them up the occupational hierarchy with the same force as it does in the case of SCs/STs.

This, then, should not come as a surprise if the considerable gap between Muslims as well as HOBCs and HFCs remains.6 To put it a little differently, education for these two groups falls far short of being a leveller in the labour market. Withholding this observation, Muslims appear to show a different pattern. As education factors in, the proportion of self-employed workers among Muslims, unlike others, increases considerably. Only a deeper investigation would reveal if Muslims chose self-employment after their attempts to get regular salaried jobs failed, or the jobs they were likely to get were simply not attractive.

For disadvantaged groups, lack of and/or lower level of human capital is indeed a great barrier to economic success in general and getting access to high wage/high status jobs in particular, but there is much more involved in the persistence of social disparities in the labour market outcomes. Recent research has thrown up compelling evidence of the presence of what is termed as ‘ethnic penalty’ in the Indian labour market. Much against the belief held by neoclassical economists that in the modern labour market equally qualified individuals, even though they differ in several other characteristics, have the same chances of success as discrimination sows the seeds of its own destruction, it has been shown that the hiring process in the labour market’s formal sector is influenced by socially induced biases.

While biases against lower castes run deep in the hiring processes, they run even deeper against Muslims.7 If education is not a path to social equality in the labour market, one wonders what else can assure disadvantaged groups of a modicum of economic security and occupational mobility. Scholars at large have consistently warned of the social and economic consequences associated with social closure of more desirable job or occupational opportunities by the advantaged groups.

If Muslims fell way behind others during the period of economic growth and prosperity, how are they placed in the labour market in the time of economic downturn that seems to have crept in lately? The hypothesis of ‘last hired, first fired’ suggests that the patterns of hiring in an upturn economy may not necessarily advantage the workers belonging to vulnerable social groups, but they are more likely to be let go during an economic downturn.

A more recent study appears to attest to this. According to it, the current phase of economic slowdown and job losses has fundamentally altered the patterns of employment. Even before the pandemic broke out, a significant fraction of regular wage/salaried workers had already moved into self-employment and daily wage work. The situation was further exacerbated as the pandemic set in. While the labour market shock has adversely affected the workers across the social spectrum, its impact has been most pronounced in the case of Muslims. For instance, during the pandemic year (2020-21), about 43% of permanent salaried Muslim workers moved into self-employment and 15% in daily wage work. In sharp contrast, among permanent salaried Hindus, the corresponding shares were lower at 34% and 9% respectively.8

For Muslims, self-employment has always constituted a fallback sector, but even this precarious form of employment and source of livelihood has lately come under threat. Never heard before, some forces in many parts of the country have, of late, unleashed an open and virulent campaign aimed at economic boycott of Muslims. It involves, among other things, refusal to buy products and services flowing from establishments owned by Muslims. In many situations, state governments have, by their actions, disrupted some avenues of self-employment bearing disproportionate concentration of Muslims. These unfair and economically irrational practices have pushed many Muslims out of self-employment into the most precarious form of employment and source of livelihood – casual work.

Of course, Muslims are not the only group to reflect disadvantages in the labour market, but they are more vulnerable than other vulnerable groups. There are several reasons – some obvious and some not so obvious – for it. But the most disturbing one is that even investment in human capital does not seem to help them much in overcoming the barriers to entry into the mainstream labour market. One can only hope that this deviation from the general trend is merely a blip, and that the so-called invisible hand of market will, in due course of time, sort this distortion out. The more the allocation of individuals to jobs/occupations through democratic and rational mechanisms, the more advantageous it is for all.

Footnotes :

1. See, A.K Ghose, India Employment Report 2016. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2016.

2. Comparison of social groups in the context of labour market involves conceptual and analytical issues, suggesting that due care must be taken when comparisons are made. Of particular importance, however, are the issues associated with age and gender. For several reasons, individuals do not join the labour force exactly at the same age. For one thing, labour market entry for those pursuing post school education is fairly delayed. As participation in post school education varies a great deal by social groups, this has clear implications for participation of social groups in the world of work. Since all, but very few, finish education as they turn 25 and are most likely to join the labour force unless unfit for work owing to certain physical or mental disabilities and so on, the comparison of social groups makes more sense if employment or occupational status is compared for workers aged 25 years and above instead of 15 years and above (often used by labour market analysts). As for gender, not only has women’s labour force participation rate been abysmally low compared to that of men, some women are doubly disadvantaged – as women and as member of certain socio-religious group. It is argued that even as the construct of men’s role as the ‘bread winner’ and women’s as the ‘bearer of social reproduction’ is universal across India’s social space, sociocultural codes and norms associated with women’s work in the public domain are variable across socio-religious communities. All this suggests that comparison of labour market outcomes for different social groups makes more sense when only men workers are compared. Considering these, the ensuing analysis focuses on male workers of prime age (25-59 years).

3. The National Sample Surveys on employment and unemployment classifies structure of employment into three broad categories: casual laborers, self-employed and regular salaried. Casual laborers are those who work as a daily wager. Self-employed are those who work in household enterprise as own account worker; as an employer; and as helper. Regular salaried workers are those who work regularly (either on contractual basis or permanent basis) and draw salary for the work performed.

4. The dissimilarity index (D) introduced by Duncan and Duncan (1955) is a simple and widely used measure of occupational segregation. It is statistically captured as follows: D = ½ Ó |Xi/X - Yi/Y|, where Xi is the number of workers belonging to the group which is compared, say SCs in the current context, in a particular category of occupation/employment and X is the total number of workers of the given group; Yi is the number of workers belonging to the referent group, say HFCs, and Y is the total number of workers belonging to the given (referent) group. The value of D ranges between zero and 1 (or 0 and 100 when converted in percentage terms), with zero implying a perfectly even distribution and 1 (or 100) complete segregation.

5. T.S. Papola and K.P. Kannan, ‘Towards India Wage Report’. ILO, 2017.

6. Part of the differential return to education, seen in terms of access to regular salaried work, among socially and economically disadvantaged groups lies in differential benefits of affirmative action policies in the labour market. For SCs/STs,

seats are reserved in public employment, which still has greater share in the formal sector employment, in proportion to their share in overall population. HOBCs are also protected by the reservation regime, but the quantum of reservation is much less than their share in overall population. While a section of Muslims is included in OBCs and thereby enjoys the benefit of reservation, a large majority of Muslims are out of the reservation system.

7. See for example, A. Banerjee, M. Bertrand, S. Datta, S. Mullainathan, ‘Labour Market Discrimination in Delhi: Evidence From A Field Experiment’, Journal of Comparative Economics 37(1), 2009, pp. 14-27; S.S. Jodhka and K. Newman, ‘In the Name of Globalization: Meritocracy, Productivity and the Hidden Language of Caste’, Economic and Political Weekly 42(41), 2007, pp. 4125-32.; S. Thorat and P. Attewell, ‘The Legacy of Social Exclusion: A Correspondence Study of Job Discrimination in India’, Economic and Political Weekly 42(41), 2007, pp. 4141-45.

8. See, ‘State of Working India’. Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, 2021.

Online Muslim politics

NAZIMA PARVEEN

THE All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen’s (AIMIM) rising graph of electoral success under the leadership of Asaduddin Owaisi in the era of growing Hindu-majoritar-ianism is seen as a Muslim response to Hindutva.1 The party, and for that matter its leader Owaisi, has been accused of ‘counter-polarization’ of Muslims that in turn, is seen as a betrayal to weaken the ‘secular’ vote. Although Owaisi is also known for his criticism of the BJP-led NDA government on issues like demonetization, privatization, unemploy-ment, national security, anti-Dalit violence and reservation for Other Backwards Classes (OBCs), his image of a scull-capped, bearded and traditionally-dressed devout Muslim with elitist mannerisms seems more relatable to what is known as Muslim separatism.

The paper is primarily concerned with Owaisi’s political presence. It takes Owaisi as an online political phenomenon to examine the manner in which his political ideas are disseminated to establish his multi-faceted image as a Muslim leader. For this purpose, I invoke the idea of online Muslim politics – a network of networks that defines Muslim political identity in cyberspace through certain symbols and metaphors.

This form of Muslim politics is inextricably associated with the expansion of social media. With growing urbanization and accessibility to smartphones and networks, social media has broadened the spectrum

of political mobilization and the formation of a constituency beyond electoral politics through the circulation of all kinds of propaganda and counter-propaganda material. These sites represent a domain where a different form of political mobilization takes place. However, no statement, policy or vision goes without being examined critically. This is a public domain where the statements made by political parties and public representatives are critically scrutinized.

The political campaigns of AIMIM through the party-run social media handles like Facebook pages, Twitter handles, Instagram, and YouTube channels etc. are very significant. A content analysis of these online activities – number of followers, nature of posts/tweets and re-tweets, posters, events, linked pages – unfolds the larger political agenda and Asaduddin Owaisi’s visibility in political, journalistic and other social media circles.

Asaduddin Owaisi, a lawyer by education, is a four-time Member of Parliament representing the Hyderabad constituency in the Lok Sabha. Owaisi is also known for his articulate speeches and active partition as an MP. He is the recipient of the prestigious award, the Sansad Ratna 2014, for his outstanding performance  as an MP in the15th Lok Sabha.2 He outscored the list of top MPs by a great margin with his active participation in debates.3 His speeches in the Lok Sabha are taken seriously by the media. He is also known for using empirical data and official documents for making persuasive arguments. Owaisi has set another record by introducing three private member bills in Parliament in 2019.4

The Owaisi-led AIMIM’s growth over the last fifteen years in Indian politics has made it very relevant. Despite the fact that the party has only one Lok Sabha seat (Asaduddin Owaisi’s own seat, Old Hyderabad city), seven out of 119 MLA seats in Telangana, two MLA seats in Maharashtra, and five in Bihar, Owaisi is often presented as the most powerful Muslim leader of the country.

Unlike other mainstream political parties such as the BJP and Congress, AIMIM does not have its own specific IT cell. In in an interview with me, the party’s official spokesperson justified this tentative and unorganized online engagement. He gave a politically charged explanation: ‘AIMIM is involved in BJP or Congress type IT cells politics, which run or manage the propaganda material, fake news items and other inflammatory material through their private social media handles. Hence, it does not need to have any designated IT cell’.5 However, he did not rule out the significance of virtual space. According to him, online activities are conducted either through the party’s official account or individual accounts of party MLAs and MPs, including the official social media accounts of Asaduddin Owaisi. In addition, multiple social media platforms, which have now become a necessity for gaining popularity amongst the masses, are used and managed by party members.6

AIMIM’s official website, featuring a broad view of Asaduddin Owaisi, followed by a clip from his public speech on the front page, provides information regarding party’s mission statement, historical legacy, leaders’ profile, and activities in the field of infrastructural development, education, healthcare, minority upliftment, relief initiatives, and governance. The mission statement of AIMIM reads: ‘AIMIM is… dedicated to protect and promote the rights of Muslims, Dalits, Adivasi and Other Backward Classes, other minorities and all other underprivileged communities in India. It further says, ‘…It bears true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India, It strongly believes in the nation’s secular democracy and strive to protect and enhance its quality by effective representation from local municipal councils to the parliament.’7

The web page dedicated to ‘our leaders’ list down the political profile and achievements of Asaduddin Owaisi, who is addressed as Naqeeb-E-Millat, which means chief/head or the advocate of the nation/community.8 The other pages in this category list Akbaruddin Owaisi as Habib-E-Millat (beloved of the nation), and Owaisi’s, Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi, as Salar-E-Millat (chief of the nation).9 This description is followed by the history of AIMIM and its achievements in the field of politics, governance and reforms listing down women’s empowerment and political parti-cipation as an important focus of AIMIM since 1986. The website is linked to the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts.

It is important to note that the website does not have any official document of the AIMIM, such as party constitution, election manifestoes or any specific resolution. This is an interesting omission. The party has been representing the Hyderabad constituency for a long time and has expanded across regional boundaries in the last few years. The parliamentary speeches of Asaduddin Owaisi, speeches delivered by the party’s elected members including Akbaruddin Owaisi, parliamentary or assembly questions, and private member bills that Owaisi has presented in Parliament or even press releases are not archived on the AIMIM’s website.10

The description of the party’s leadership lacks any information on its organizational structure or even a list of MLAs as if they do not exist. Even health and education, and minority upliftment related information is reduced to the Salar-E-Millat Educational Trust, Owaisi School of excellence, Owaisi Livelihood Trust and other Darussalam institutions. There is no mention of AIMIM’s development related achievements in terms of MLAs’ work or MP-led developmental activities at the constituency level in Hyderabad where the party has held seven out of 15 MLA seats since 2014.

AIMIM’s Facebook (FB) page was created on 25 June 2011.11 The profile photo of the page represents party’s election symbol, the Kite, and its slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Justice’ along with a slogan: Patang ka nishan, suraksha aur samman.12 The page is linked to a number of other FB pages. Most of these web links are dedicated to AIMIM’s electoral missions in different states like Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. In addition, the personal FB page of Asaduddin Owaisi, his brother Akbaruddin Owaisi and some pages created by other AIMIM leaders’ and followers are also linked.13

Asaduddin Owaisi’s FB page was also created in the same year on 9 October.14 Owaisi’s FB page starts with a statement in Hindi, ‘dke;kch feys ;k uk feys] eSa Hkkjr ds dksus dksus esa tkmaxkA vc eq>s dksbZ ugha jksd ldrk] flok; esjh ekSr ds’ (Whether there is success or not, I will reach to every single corner of India. No one can stop me now).15 A short video clip showing Owaisi attending election rallies with popular support in different states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, UP, Gujarat, Maharashtra, and West Bengal follows the FB page. The video depicts Owaisi as a powerful, courageous, daring, bold and fearless leader urging Muslims to stand on their feet to raise voice against injustice with his voice saying: ‘this is my duty and commitment to reach every corner of Hindustan to spread the message of my organisation. No one can stop me from this except Allah’16.

The text in the video reads the AIMIM’s mission, ‘mazloomon ki awaz ko siyasi awaz banane ke liye, insaf ke liye, apni shinakht barqarar rakhne ke liye apni awaz khud banein aur Majlis se judhein (for giving a political voice to the marginalized, for justice, for keeping our identity/existence alive become your own voice and associate with Majlis).17

Owaisi’s Twitter handle was also created in July 2011.18 He is quite active on social media especially on Twitter in comparison to other opposition leaders. Although the number of Owaisi’s followers is less than other prominent leaders’ followers, the total number of Tweets that Owaisi has made ever since he joined the twitter is 37.5 K (increased from 31.7 K in February 2021). This number is much higher than the Tweets posted by leaders like Congress president Rahul Gandhi (6,323 till date), West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, Bahujan Samaj Party national president Mayawati, Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav, Shiv Sena’s Uddhav Thackeray, and Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan.

Owaisi’s Tweets are reposted and circulated through his and his party’s FB page. This active participation of Owaisi on social media is quite in line with his performance in the Parliament as an MP. Apart from this, there is AIMIM’s official Twitter handles and a number of individual accounts run by Owaisi’s fans such as AIMIM Fan Club, Habib-e-Millat Political Research Centre (dedicated to Akbaruddin Owaisi) and others.19 There is also an Instagram page assigned to Asad Owaisi with an ID asadowaisiofficial. The Instagram page also posts and re-posts Owaisi’s statements and news items.20

AIMIM official YouTube news channel called AIMIM Live was created on 10 March 2014. The channel mainly features the parliamentary and public speeches of Asaduddin Owaisi on different relevant issues, electoral campaigns in different states, interviews, TV news channel debates, and other party related information. It is linked with the 4TV News channel.21 Another AIMIM YouTube Channel, run privately by some Javed Alam, was created on 3 December 2017.22

A systematic content analysis of Owaisi’s social media activities underlines four broad themes. The targeted violence against Muslims, Dalits and other OBC communities is the first important theme. Owaisi and his party have been vocal about continuous lynching of Muslim men in the name of cow slaughter, cow theft, beef eating and harassment of madrasa students which have taken place as random incidents of violence in the state of UP, MP, Rajasthan and Gujarat.23

Owaisi also speaks against the incidents of caste based discrimination and violence which is very much in line with the party’s political agenda to emerge as a Muslim political party representing the marginalized sections of society across religious communities.24 For instance, he extended his support to the Bhima Koregaon agitation and aligned with the Bharip Bahujan Mahasangh during the Maharashtra assembly elections in 2018. The party leaders travelled across Maharashtra under the banner of the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi called the Third Front uniting Malis, Dangars, and smaller OBCs along with the Ambedkarite forces to symbolize Dalit-Muslim-OBC unity. Owaisi also re-Tweeted a number of newspaper articles showing solidarity for the cause.25 This stand is quite in line with AIMIM’s vision statement.

National security is the second significant theme that determines Owaisi’s social media presence. AIMIM has blamed the central government for adopting a soft policy towards the Pulwama attack, expansion of Chinese forces in Ladakh, terrorism and radicalization of youth. A terror attack on a Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) convoy that took place in Jammu & Kashmir’s Pulwama district in which 40 Indian soldiers killed has been thoroughly discussed.

Owaisi attacked the BJP-led Union government for its intelligence failure. He Tweeted, ‘The Pulwama attack is a political, bureaucratic and intelligence failure.’ He also criticized Jaish-e-Mmohammed (JeM) chief, who took responsibility for the Pulwama attack. He Tweeted ‘You can see that 300 cell phones were there in Balakot, but you failed to see how 50 kg RDX was moved to Pulwama under your nose.’26 He was very critical of the Pakistan based terror outfit JeM’s chief. Owaisi tweeted, ‘Masood Azhar is not a maulana (cleric) but a satan.’27 He also called the JeM a ‘Jaish-e-Shaitan’ (the Devil).’28 Owaisi also blamed the Pakistan government for Pulwama attack while he criticized the Indian government for its ‘political failure’.29

Radicalization of youth is the third thematic feature of Owaisi’s online politics. Owaisi has been very critical of the radicalization of Muslims. However, he does not subscribe to the given interpretation of radicalization. A systematic analysis of his social media engagement shows that he does not rule out the threat of an ISIS like organization and for that reason, he is more interested in opposing the agenda of terrorist organizations. Owaisi openly calls such terrorist groups as being anti-Islam and anti-Muslim. He can also be seen criticizing controversial preachers such as Zakir Nayak for propagating incorrect interpretations of Islam and the Quran.

Distancing himself and his party’s status from such controversial figures, Owaisi calls upon Muslim youth to stay away and be critical of such people who only teach the use ‘jihad’ against their own nation. He also appreciated the Maharashtra government’s efforts for the government’s strategic intervention in the direction of de-radicalization of those Muslim boys and girls who were suspected of being brain washed by such militant groups.

Owaisi, however, makes two crucial points in this regard. One, he criticizes governments and secular parties for their biases, violence and exploitation against Muslims, general demonization of the community, lack of economic and political representation and political isolation of Muslim youth as key factors potentially contributing to reactionary tendencies. At the same time, he appeals to Muslims to actively participate in democratic politics. In his view, if Muslims get trapped in radical politics, their future generations will have to face sever consequences. In addition, radicalization will also provide opportunities to terrorist groups and communal parties to manipulate Muslim vulnerabilities.

In one of his post-Eid public speeches in 2020, Owaisi strongly condemned the ISIS, calling them ‘dogs from hell’ and ‘enemies of Islam and humanity.’30 He said, ‘We have to acknowledge with all honesty that the Muslims have a problem called the ISIS. We cannot hide behind conspiracy theories or just blame others (read West) and sit easy… we have to introspect… (and) counsel our youth to keep them away from the death cult which goes by the name of Islamic State.’31

In another speech in Maharashtra on 13 March 2019, Owaisi called on the Muslim community for action against radicalization. He said, ‘don’t die for Islam. Live for India. We have all the democratic avenues to pursue our grievances. Live for India’s democracy and secularism. If you want to go for jihad, then educate the poor, feed them, fund education and marriages of girls. That will be real jihad.’32 Citing his party’s line of argument, he stated that Muslims need a powerful political voice, a party of their own to raise their concerns and fight for democratic rights.

Second, he also raises the issue of the radicalization of Hindu youth. Highlighting the increasing incidents of the lynching of Muslim boys, Madrasa students, and meat traders, Owaisi criticises the governments for letting, what he calls, Hindutva radicalization, to flourish. He said in an interview: ‘why there is no surveillance by the Counter Terrorism and Counter Radicalization (CTCR) division of the Union Home Ministry on the cow vigilantes. It is important to know how they are getting radicalized to such an extent that they are killing people in the name of cow slaughter and beef,’33 He further asked, ‘Are the acts of killing women, distributing swords and even ministers killing people not radicalization? Radicalization can happen anywhere… you have to investigate who were the persons who carried out the blasts at Ajmer Shrine and Mecca Masjid.’34 He blames the political parties for manipulating unemployed Hindu youth for their political interests.

On an incident of medical negligence against a Muslim couple that occured in Rajasthan in April 2020, he tweeted: ‘Hindutva radicalization has become so brazen because it is backed by the government or because it is embraced by a large section of society? Will anything be done to counter it?’35 He tweeted at other occasions: ‘Man who lynched a child, Junaid, was guest speaker there (Seemanchal). In 2017 mahapanchayat was held for Junaid’s killers too. In 2018 Union minister garlanded lynching convicts in Jharkhand. 2 BJP ministers spoke at rally in support of 8 yr old Ashifa’s killers 2/3.’36

The fourth important theme of Owaisi’s online politics is about the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) and Muslim personal law. A number of his Tweets address the religious and cultural diversity to abandon any call for having a UCC. He supports the personal laws to recognize Indian diversity, something that he finds in the Fundamental Right to freedom of religion. Owaisi was highly critical of the Triple Talaq Law 2019, calling it an anti-Muslim women and anti-family law. However, he is equally critical of the practice of Triple Talaq. He tweeted, ‘this law is against Muslim women & marginalizes them even more. The law forces a woman to stay in a marriage with an imprisoned man who’d verbally & emotionally abused her. It puts the burden of proof on Muslim women & forces her into impoverishment.’

Owaisi reiterates that the law is against the constitutional rights guaranteed to minority communities. He posted: ‘It is a testing time for those of us who believe in rule of law & the guarantees of non-arbitrariness, freedom of religion & right to distinct culture enshrined in the Consti-tution.’37 This adherence to consti-tutionalism is also invoked to offer support to the anti-CAA/NRC agitations, especially in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh. Owaisi established a direct link between the Triple Talaq law and CAA and called them discriminatory in nature. In his opinion, these laws use religion as a category to exclude Muslims silently. He tweeted: ‘We’ll protest against any law with religion as basis of citizenship.’38 He called it a communal design for displacing Muslims and for creating fear in their minds.

Apart from these four themes, one also finds a powerful critique of economic policies of the Union government. For instance, Owaisi criticized demonetization calling it a complete disaster.39 He commented, ‘what has demonetisation really effected, what has been the gain for the country, apart from distress, apart from people’s lives. Two per cent is the loss to the GDP.’40

The social media’s popularity has a very different connotation when it comes to translating it into actual significance or influence. The number of followers does not necessarily mean political support or ideological conformity. In this sense, Owaisi’s visibility on social media sites demonstrates the significance of his powerful political presence in the cyber space. This online political presence also favourable for TV news channels run TRP exercise. These channels find Asaduddin Owaisi as the most vocal and in a way most controversial figure to speak on ‘Muslim’ issues. They organize shows around his statements, comments, and social media posts. AIMIM, on the other hand, takes this wider acceptability of Asaduddin Owaisi very positively. The party-run social media handles post and repost Owaisi’s comments, interviews and statements verbalized on news channels at different occasions. As a result, a network of networks dedicated to online Muslim politics has been created, nurtured and sustained.

Footnotes :

1. I am thankful to ICSSR for funding and CSDS for providing intellectual and administrative support for this project. The paper is a small part of the larger study entitled, ‘Online/Offline Muslim Politics: A Study of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM)’, conducted under the ICSSR Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme 2018-2020.

2. The finalists for awards have been made as per the data released by PRS India on 10 December 2013 on the overall performance of the 15th Lok Sabha.

3. PRS India https://www.prsindia.org/mptrack/asaduddinowaisi

4. ‘Asaduddin Owaisi Pushes two New Bills’, Deccan Chronical, https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/current-affairs/040818/asaduddin-owaisi-pushes-two-new-bills-in-parliament.html. The three bills include: setting up the Seemanchal Region Development Council; against mob violence; and for reducing the age for contesting Lok Sabha and Assembly elections from 25 to 18 years.

5. Interview with the party spokesperson, Hyderabad, 25 December 2018.

6. Ibid.

7. AIMIM official website, http://www.aimim.org/about-us/

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. The parliamentary and public speeches delivered by Owaisi can be accessed on other linked pages like the YouTube channel but not on the party website.

11. It has 9,57,000 followers (increased from 8,99,601 from February 2021 and 5,35,491 (current updates are not available) people have liked the page to date.

12. AIMIM Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/PartyAIMIM , accessed in February 2021.

13. It includes AIMIM All India Majlis-e-ittehadul Muslimeen, AIMIM, AIMIM Uttar Pradesh, Akhtarul Imam Fans (politician), Akbaruddin Owaisi (Fan page), AIMIM Mission Bengal (political organization), AIMIM Jubilee Hills youth icon (political organization), Dr Kanhaiya Kumar Supporter, Campus Front of India Hailakandi (organization), Masjid-e-Ibrahimi Qader Bagh, JIH Humnabad (social service), AIMIM Morena All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, AIMIM Gorakhpur, Prayagraj ki Majlis (personal blog), AIMIM West Bengal, AIMIM Gujrat are linked to different pages especially the main FB page.

14. The page is followed by 3,731,569 (increased from 3,548,475 in February 2021) and is liked by 3,263,263 (increased from 3,174,960 in February 2021) people.

15. Asad Owaisi Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/Asaduddinowaisi/ accessed February 2021.

16. This promotional video was released on Owaisi’s and AIMIM’s FB account https://www.facebook.com/Asaduddinowaisi/

17. This promotional video was released on Owaisi’s and AIMIM’s FB account https://www.facebook.com/Asaduddinowaisi/

18. Link to Owaisi’s twitter Handle:  https://twitter.com/asadowaisi?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5

Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor accessed in February 2021. The twitter page has 1,414 followings and 2.4 million followers (increased from1.9 million in February 2021).

19. AIMIM, https://twitter.com/aimim_national?lang=en

20. Instagram page, https://www.instagram.com/asadowaisiofficial/related_profiles/ accessed in February 2021. The Instagram page is being followed by 3.6 million people and has recorded 3,785 posts till date.

21. AIMIM Live, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNJAFwJuwI-5hCf2ijuQrmg/featured.The channel has 104,000 subscribers and has had 13,100,654 views till date. It is also linked to Hyderabad Deccan NEWS. https://twitter.com/HYDDeccanN?ref_src=tw

src%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Eembe

ddedtimeline%7Ctwterm%5Escreen-name%3AAimimFansClub%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c1

22. AIMIM News Channel,  https://www.youtube.com/c/AIMIMNewsChannel/about, accessed August 2022. The channel has recorded 83,569,821 views till date. It also has a Facebook page with 131,520 people as followers and 49,903 likes. It has 684,000 million subscribers till date.

23. Tweets: https://twitter.com/asadowaisi/status/1139592336638218241?lang=en

24. Tweet: https://twitter.com/asadowaisi/status/1126107224508473344?lang=bg

25. Tweet: https://twitter.com/asadowaisi/status/1013732582788247552

26. ‘Not beef, Modi ate dhokla and slept during Pulwama attack: https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/asaduddin-owaisi-pm-modi-dhokla-beef-biryani-1486520-2019-03-26

27. Hindustan Times, ‘Asaduddin Owaisi Slams Pak for Pulwama Attack…’, https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/asaduddin-owaisi-slams-pak-for-pulwama-attack-calls-jaish-chief-masood-azhar-a-satan/story-W5ERxvp4tGHdtFS

6KuCa4N.html

28. Times Now, https://www.timesnownews.com/videos/times-now/india/what-has-government-learnt-from-pulwama-attack-asks-asaduddin-owaisi-over-the-blast-in-jk/25402

29. ‘Owaisi Blames Pakistan for Pulwama Attack, Modi for Political Failure’ https://www.outlookindia.com/newsscroll/owaisi-blames-pakistan-for-pulwama-attack-modi-for-political-failure/1484591

30. Ibid.

31. ‘Owaisi Surprised Many with his Remarks’ https://www.ndtv.com/blog/owaisis-speech-shows-he-can-be-a-good-leader-1430414

32. Ibid.

33. ‘Asaduddin Owaisi Slams Centre Over Watch on Muslim Youth’ https://www.deccanchronicle.com/nation/politics/230418/asaduddin-owaisi-slams-centre-over-watch-on-muslim-youth.html

34. Ibid.

35. https://twitter.com/asadowaisi/status/1246495219983331328

36. Ibid.

37. https://twitter.com/asadowaisi/status/1156209143914491906

38. Tweet on CIA: https://twitter.com/asadowaisi/status/1320276119124283392?lang=en

39. Tweet: https://twitter.com/asadowaisi/status/903493531615952896?lang=en

40. ‘Demonetization is a Disaster for the Country’, The Indian Express, https://indianexpress.com/article/india/demonetisation-a-disaster-for-the-country-says-asaduddin-owaisi-4822915/

Rhetoric of political newness and Muslim politics

JULIEN LEVESQUE

IN recent years, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly invoked the notion of ‘New India’ to describe its policies. In a Times of India column on 30 May 2022, Home Minister Amit Shah defined New India as ‘resilient, strong, capable and atmanirbhar’ (self-reliant), adding that its ‘foundations have been laid by the PM’. The idea denotes a political project that the government seeks to bring about, but also rings of self-congratulatory triumphalism – New India is not only a goal towards which the government strives, but it is in the making in the here and now.

What does the project of New India entail? The themes of the Home Minister’s article remarkably illustrate what historian Ravinder Kaur has termed as the ‘capitalization of the nation-state’. It insists on the economy, arguing that India recovered tremendously well from the Covid crisis and lauding India’s rise in the ease of doing business ranking. Amit Shah depicts the government’s economic policy as an inclusive project, repeating the official slogan ‘Sab ka sath, sab ka vikas’ and listing schemes and packages supposed to have benefitted ‘all sections of society’.

The article also mentions India’s standing in the world of nations, praising the prime minister for making ‘the world realize the importance and significance of India’ – a search for global recognition in line with what Kaur describes as an aspiration to ‘cleanse the shame of colonial subjugation’. This assertion rests on a ‘deep focus on national security’: the minister invokes the defence budget, the acquisition of new armament like the Rafale fighter jet, and a tough stance on terrorism as signs that the nation now has a decisive and unwavering leader in the prime minister. In short, in Amit Shah’s words, the advent of New India is something Indians should celebrate as the country commemorates its 75 years of independence. New India is the moment when what the independence was supposed to bring finally becomes a reality. New India, the reader seems to be implicitly told, is the moment when you finally get a chance.

The rhetoric of New India thus addresses a dual audience: it tells the world of India’s readiness for investment, while telling Indians that a new dawn has come. Ravinder Kaur thus describes New India as ‘the popular name for the postreform, techno-friendly, high-consumption entrepreneurial nation’ which is meant to be ‘an income-generating asset’.

The current government, however, is not the first to talk of New India. At the time of independence, Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of India’s new awakening, wishing the decolonial moment to see the triumph of democracy, with India as a moral leader among postcolonial states. Moreover, New India was to achieve prosperity through central planning and industrial development, led by rational engineers and technocrats. Yet despite the modernist character of Nehru’s post-independence project, it is interesting to note that a major book on the subject, Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India, does not mention the expression at all.

The idea of New India took on a different meaning with the liberalization initiated in 1991, one that sought, precisely, to consign to the past what were now seen as the problems of the Nehruvian era – a slow and bureaucratic state that impeded economic growth. The exercise of branding India to the world as a new capitalist Eldorado thus began not with the Bharat Janata Party’s ascent to power in 2014 but in the 1990s, later reinforced by the BJP’s India Shining campaign in 2004 and the Congress’ focus on the benefits to the common man, the aam aadmi. What is so new, then, about New India?

The political rhetoric of newness – vowing to bring about a new society – is also a common theme beyond India. During the French Revolution, the ambition to transform society and its members, both morally and physically, was expressed as a need for ‘regeneration’. Historian Mona Ozouf, in her analysis of revolutionary educational projects, highlights two opposite views of regeneration. The first was idealistic and expressed a miraculous belief in the Revolution’s capacity to automatically transform people. The second saw the Revolution as a painstaking work to weed out the remnants of the previous order, thus justifying coercive policies against its ‘dubious members’.

The example of the French Revolution shows that the rhetoric of newness, in its association of the idea of regeneration with that of the creation of a new society and a ‘New Man’, comprised both an emancipatory and an illiberal understanding. The latter approach justified coercive and totalitarian measures, as well as the invention of myths, rituals, and beliefs that translated into new street names, a new calendar, and new monuments and costumes.

Bringing about newness also remained central to many 19th and  20th century political ideologies and utopias. Totalitarian regimes sought to bring about a ‘New Man’, a higher form of human: from Nazism’s quest of a master race to Mussolini’s uomo nuovo, to the Soviet New Man of a classless society. The communist vision of course differed from Nazism and Fascism in its emancipatory universalism. Yet the goal of moulding the human species to fit collective projects is also what sets these ideologies apart from liberalism and its focus on individual development. This detour through history reminds us that it is difficult to disconnect a rhetoric of political newness from potential liberticide tendencies.

And yet there have been multiple utopian visions in the subcontinent’s recent past that hoped for a new, liberated mankind. Some of these invoked spirituality. Take for instance Congress leader and Sanskrit scholar Sampurnanand, who spoke of a ‘new type of humanity’ in which the ‘new man will be conscious of those spiritual bonds which unite him with all that lives’ and will serve humanity. Or the Sindhi leader G.M. Sayed, who believed that Sindh had a spiritual message of peace to give to the world.

A few years after India’s independence, sociologist B.P. Mukerji contrasted the ideal of a New Man in Tagore’s thought – an ‘affirmative-creative type’, rational and emotionally rich – with Gandhi’s vision of a ‘moral man, ready to sacrifice his all for truth, simple, direct and pulsating with the lowliest of the lowly’. Mukerji pragmatically concluded that engineers, technocrats, and bureaucrats were certainly the type of the coming generation, as they were best in tune with Nehru’s central industrial planning.

The idea of New India thus builds on a long discursive heritage in which political projects sought the advent of a new society and a ‘New Man’. While the rhetoric of political newness may be driven by an ideal of universal liberation, it also carries the possibility of illiberalism and violent coercion. What characterizes today’s New India is not an emancipatory universalism but an assertive majoritarian nation-alism. In fact, much of the rhetoric of New India seems to celebrate the triumph of the Hindutva worldview.

In his speech on the inauguration of the Kashi-Vishwanath corridor in Varanasi, Prime Minister Modi celebrated India’s emergence from centuries of oppression, an oppression which had tainted Indians’ self-confidence. Casting Varanasi as India’s cultural capital, he summed up New India as the combination of heritage (virasat) and development (vikas).

The speech was punctuated by multiple Hindu references – mother Ganga and father Vishwanath, the rule of Shiva, and the recurring ‘Har har mahadev’. Yet the prime minister also addressed multiple constituencies, by mentioning the residents of Varanasi, the residents of UP, the people of South India. He also cited specific personalities, such as historical heroes of anti-colonial nationalism (Chandra Shekhar Azad), good Muslims (the shehnai player Bismillah Khan), and bad Muslims (the atrocities of Aurangzeb). The speech ended with an exhortation to economic nationalism, calling for citizens to participate in India’s quest for self-reliance and to set-up innovating start-ups.

Three aspects of the speech thus indicate the triumphalism of the Hindutva worldview: the normalization of Hindu references in a political speech; the official endorsement of a reading of history that portrays Muslim rule as a period of enslavement; and the absence of reference to non-Hindu communities as social groups that constitute the nation. This assertive Hindutva also fuels a will to galvanize the nation into economic activity. The political rhetoric of New India thus combines assertive majoritarian nationalism, Hindutva triumphalism, and competitive engagement with global capitalism. Where do Muslims fit in this imaginary and what room does it leave for their political representation?

In the aftermath of the 2022 Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, many commentators drew attention to the BJP’s new strategy of reaching out to Pasmanda Muslims – that is, Muslims who belong to marginalized caste groups. The party appointed a single Muslim minister to its state cabinet, the 34-year-old Danish Ansari, with much talk of giving space to the Pasmanda.

Explicitly reaching out to Muslim voters goes counter to expectations from a party whose success has largely rested on the exclusion of Muslims, from the Ram Janmabhumi campaign of the 1980s to the polarizing measures of Modi’s second mandate such as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Yet as commentators have noted, there are very practical reasons for the BJP to woo Pasmanda voters. While the electoral strategy of the BJP has so far mainly sought to consolidate the Hindu electorate by polarizing the debate (Hindu/national vs non-Hindu/anti-national), the Pasmanda rhetoric may help the BJP further divide Muslim voters and gain some support from them. Rumours suggest that the new strategy may have helped the BJP win in the 2022 UP elections, but there is no solid data to prove that wooing the Pasmanda helped the party gain greater Muslim support.

What the BJP’s appropriation of the Pasmanda rhetoric means may be more appropriately searched beyond sheer electoral strategizing. The BJP’s Pasmanda strategy seeks to revert the anti-Muslim image of the party and project it as the actual protector of the majority of Indian Muslims. Since the 1990s, the Pasmanda movements – with several prominent leader such as Ali Anwar – have challenged the authority of the dominant Muslim caste groups, the Ashraf. Their claim is that, as a group, Muslim leaders, who overwhelmingly hail of Ashraf background, insist on the political unity of Muslims to sustain their own dominant position.

The BJP now seeks to appropriate the Pasmanda rhetoric to its benefit as it portrays itself as protector of the marginalized Muslims. The BJP thus wants to posit itself as the saviour of Muslims from their own elites – a framework that was also invoked to justify the criminalization of the triple talaq in 2019. In this logic, Muslims are kept backward by their own religious and political elites, and the government’s responsibility is to free them from their domination.

For the BJP, what New India brings to Muslims is the end of a model that did not benefit most of them but only a self-serving dominant section who happened to be high caste. The BJP’s Pasmanda strategy thus allows the BJP to claim that Muslims, too, are entitled to a share of New India.

The BJP, of course, has long been decrying the Congress party’s minority politics as ‘pseudosecularism’ and ‘Muslim appeasement’. In its policy towards Muslims, the Congress party has historically relied on the Deobandi ulama gathered in the Jamiat-ul Ulama-i Hind (JUH), considering the latter organization as a legitimate (although not the sole) intermediary to speak to and for Muslims. The Congress also had its own Muslim political leaders – loyal, ‘nationalist’ (as opposed to communal) Muslims, sometimes derided as ‘sarkari Musalman’. The 1986 Shah Bano case marked a key symbolic and historical turning point in this relationship: it fuelled the argument of the Congress’ opponents, who claimed that the Congress’ minority politics did nothing but accommodate the demands of conser-vative elites. Arif Muhammad Khan, the governor of Kerala and one of the BJP’s key Muslim supporters today, broke away from the Congress at that time.

Yet the BJP’s induction of a few prominent Muslim figures did not follow a starkly different pattern in terms of their social origins. Overall, the BJP also mainly chose Ashraf Muslims as nominees for positions of power – and more than one among them had a Congress background. This is true for instance of the former minister and governor of Manipur, Najma Heptulla. An exception to

this is the long-time BJP stalwart Sikander Bakht, who did not come from an Ashraf background. Appropriating the Pasmanda rhetoric may perhaps help the BJP gain a façade of consistency – to woo Muslims without engaging in ‘Muslim appeasement’.

Whether the BJP’s appropriation of the Pasmanda rhetoric may lead to the rise of a new leadership remains to be seen. It would indeed be a paradoxical achievement if the BJP’s politics allowed for the formation of new prominent Muslim figures from a Pasmanda background. Some among the Pasmanda commentators, though rare, seem to fall for it and hope

that the BJP may be the solution to caste inequality among Muslims. An example is Faiyaz Ahmad Fyzie, whose opinions pieces in the Hindi and English press have taken on a clear pro-BJP hue in the past year.

However, the BJP’s discourse of a New India that would be inclusive for Pasmanda Muslims is somewhat dubious. The BJP’s history, its composition, and its ideological foundations make it hard to believe that the party would now act in favour of Muslims. There are countless examples of supporters, party members, and elected officials engaging in overt or subtle anti-Muslim rhetoric. Moreover, one cannot entirely ignore that most Muslim victims of Hindutva violence are also Pasmanda. Numerous recent events – from the Ram Navami violence to bulldozing drives in UP and Delhi – may also leave one sceptical of the BJP’s claim to work for Pasmanda Muslims.

If greater equality is to be achieve among Indian Muslims, what we may hope is that other political parties – the Congress but also Muslim parties like the AIMIM or the IUDF – accept the Pasmanda critique and act to counter caste-based inequalities in their own organizations. By not seriously addressing the Pasmanda critique, these parties have left a space for the BJP to thrust itself into. If such parties stop being blind to caste inequality and work to ensure a more equal access to party tickets and power positions on committees or at the head of organizations, a significant progress may be gained for the Pasmanda. For Muslim parties and organizations, this means that leaders must think about the extent to which their internal composition is socially representative of the Muslim population. This may also be a winning strategy for Muslim parties and organizations: greater internal inclusiveness is likely to reinforce the cohesiveness of Muslims as a political minority. What this may lead to is not New India, but a more extensive implementation of the foundational principles behind India’s independence movement and constitutional text – principles of equality, mutual respect, and secularism.

The present-day rhetoric of New India may thus present itself as the moment when most Muslims

(the Pasmandas) are finally ‘brought into the mainstream’ and get access to opportunities supposedly inaccessible to them earlier. There are numerous reasons, however, to be sceptical of its emancipatory potential for Indian Muslims, as it implies disowning many of the principles that have in fact been held by many Muslims as essential legal and institutional protections in the Indian Republic. Most significantly perhaps, New India implies the disappearance of Muslims as a minority and the continuance of Muslims lives as atomized citizens not in a capacity to weigh on the political process.

The churn in Muslim politics in Kerala

R. SANTHOSH

ELECTORAL democracy in Kerala, despite claims about its secular character, is deeply interwoven with

and shaped by the religious and caste identities of various communities inhabiting the state. Around 8.8 million Muslims in Kerala, constituting 26% of the total state population, play an active role in democratic processes and have assumed a pivotal role in defining the electoral arithmetic of the state.

The community has been instrumental in shaping the contours of the coalition politics of Kerala, which revolve around the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) and the CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) for the past several decades. While the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) has posi-tioned itself as the traditional Muslim representative, claiming the over-whelming support of Muslims in the state, the scenario is changing in a rapidly transforming political landscape marked by the ascendancy of Hindutva influence and the transformation of coalition politics in the state. These changes provide exciting insights into the complex, reciprocal relationship through which religious and sectarian identities among Muslims negotiate with the ideologies and organizations inhabiting the political space in the state.

The history of organized Muslim politics in Kerala dates to the pre-Partition period with the formation of the district committee of the All-India Muslim League (AIML) in Malabar in 1937. The creation of a separate Muslim state, Pakistan, following the partition of India in 1947, forced the AIML to redefine its role in post-independent India. Subsequently, on 10 March 1948, the IUML was established to promote the religious, cultural, educational and economic interests of the Muslims of the Union. The party since then enjoyed great success in South India, especially in Kerala, where it played a fundamental role in the political mainstreaming of Malayalam-speaking Muslims.

The Kerala Muslims display a strong ethnic identity given the specific historical factors behind the genesis of the community, shared Malayalam language affinity and the region’s relative geographic isolation that minimized contact with Islam in North India. The Muslim League (by which name the IUML is commonly called) acquired this distinct Kerala identity from the beginning, and its historical trajectory is punctuated by various tensions arising out of negotiating its parochial identity along with the claims of representing a national minority community. These historical reasons, coupled with small pockets of Muslim majority regions in Malabar, enabled the Muslim League to become an active player in the post-independent political scenario in Kerala.

Interestingly, no political party in Kerala is bereft of specific caste and community affiliations and the arising electoral support base to varying degrees, but the Muslim League has often been called out for its overt religious character. Even the mainstream political parties such as the CPI(M) and Congress have derided the Muslim League for its alleged communal character in different phases of Kerala’s electoral history to suit their political positions. Many scholars and political observers have pointed out that the Muslim League, despite being painted a communal colour, mostly used its clout emerging from its religious affiliation in a communitarian manner, i.e. using the Muslim identity to bargain with the state and other political parties for availing resources and political power.

This position is often contradistinguished from that of communalism, where a party with overt religious identitarian affiliation posi-tions itself in antagonistic relations with other religious groups and organizations. In that sense, the Muslim League has often been credited with playing a crucial role in the political mainstreaming of Muslims in the state and substantially contributing to maintaining a rather peaceful, secular coexistence in a multi-religious state like Kerala. Since 1985, when politics in Kerala began to revolve around two antag-onistic coalitions, the Muslim League has remained an integral part of coalition politics and continues to be a significant constituent of the UDF.

In Kerala, the Muslim League managed to maintain a near hegemony in the Muslim populated districts of Malappuram and Kozhikode but has a negligible presence in the southern parts of the state. The party shrewdly used the religious charisma of various Hadrami Tangal families in Kerala, who are widely revered among the Kerala Muslims for their purported family lineage reaching up to Prophet Muhammad.

The appointment of a Tangal family member at the helm of the party helped in various ways. It provides a religious and spiritual aura and legitimacy to the party. At the same time, it assuages the feelings of most Sunnis who are critical of the increasing leadership role assumed by the reformist Mujahids in the party. Most importantly, the Tangal connection helps the party to effectively deal with internal schisms and conflicts within the community on various theological, political and organizational matters. Though the party found itself mired in controversies related to corruption charges against its leaders, and faced criticism for its bias towards the wealthy and influential persons within the community, its mass base remained intact for a long time.

The theological differences among the Kerala Muslims also are inextricably connected to the political arithmetic of the state. The Muslim religious sphere in Kerala is marked by intense debates between the traditionalist Sunnis and the reformist organizations such as the Mujahid movement and Jamaat-e-Islami. Among the traditionalist Sunnis, who constitute the vast majority of Kerala Muslims, the E.K. Aboobackar faction – widely known as the E.K. Samasta – is the mainstay of the political support for the Muslim League. As most of Tangal families among Kerala Muslims belong to this faction, the Muslim League has been able to ensure the unflinching support of most Sunnis.

The other faction, known as A.P. Samasta – founded by A.P. Aboobackar Musaliar – had to fight the organizational might of E.K. Samasta and the political clout of the Muslim League since they broke away in 1989 to establish their own organizations and institutions. E.K. Samasta lever-aged the support of the Muslim League whenever the UDF government came to power since the nineties in their tussle with the A.P. Samasta on the ownership claims over mosques and other institutions. Gradually, the A.P. Samasta faction forged a political affiliation to the LDF, especially to CPI(M), as a tactical move to check-mate the E.K. Samasta faction from using the political might of the Muslim League.

The LDF too made use of this opportunity to make inroads into the hitherto bastions of the Muslim League, especially in the Malappuram and Kozhikode districts by exploiting factionalism among the Sunnis. A.P. Samata is scathing in its criticism against the reigning influence of the Salafis in the leadership position of the Muslim League, whom they consider as their adversaries. They accuse the Salafis of distorting the true nature of Islam in Kerala and spreading radicalism among the youth. Both the Sunni sections are on a revivalist path by redefining the traditionalist concepts and practices by adopting modern professional education, technological innovation, neoliberal entrepreneurial pursuits and offering novel theological interpretations to their belief systems that were the targets of the Salafi criticism.

The near monopoly of the Muslim League and its clout over the Muslim community came under increasing stress after the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 as some sections of its followers criticized what they perceived as an overtly pacifist approach adopted by the party on the demolition. The first visible signs of a crack in the party emerged in the aftermath of the demolition. Ibrahim Sulaiman Sait, one of the most prominent faces of the Muslim League leadership, accused the party of surrendering to the Hindu appeasement of the Congress party. Not just stopping with the accusation, he resigned from the party and established the Indian National League.

Around this time, radical Muslim politics under the leadership of Abdul Nassar Maudany was taking root in Kerala. An orator known for his inflammatory speeches, Maudany was able to attract into his fold disgruntled Muslim youth who were in a state of ferment following the Babri Masjid controversy and the rising Hindutva violence. Maudany had established the militant Islamic Sevak Sangh in the early 1990s, which was banned in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition. He then went on to found the People’s Democratic Party, a more democratically oriented, pacifist political party.

The most concerted and ideologically driven project espousing more radical and assertive Muslim politics in Kerala was the establishment of the National Development Front by a group of Muslims in Kozhikode in 1994 and its expansion into the Popular Front of India (PFI) in 2006 by merging with similar organizations such as the Karnataka Forum for Dignity (KFD) in Karnataka and Manitha Neethi Pasarai (MNP) that was founded in Tamil Nadu in 2001 with similar political objectives. The PFI also established the Secular Democratic Party of India (SDPI) in June 2009 as its political front with the stated objective of contesting elections and competing for political power.

Jamaat-e-Islami is another Muslim organization that has tried to test the political waters of Kerala. Dumping their long-held ideology of abstaining from electoral politics and being vehemently opposed to ideas of democracy and secularism, the organization established the Welfare Party of India as its electoral arm in 2011. Despite significant media propaganda and campaign through its mouthpieces, the Welfare Party’s influence remains insignificant among Kerala Muslims. Both PFI and the Welfare Party continue to exhort the necessity to form a large alliance of Dalits, Other Backward Castes (OBCs), tribals and Muslims to fight the surging Hindutva forces. The traditional politics championed by the Muslim League is branded by the PFI and Welfare Party as ineffective and one that is reluctant to assert Islamic identity by taking on the Hindutva forces decisively.

While the new political formations like the SDPI and Welfare Party could not challenge the electoral dominance of the Muslim League, organizations such as the PFI have mounted a concerted ideological attack on the politics practised by the Muslim League. They accuse the Muslim League of elitism, a non-democratic way of functioning and, most importantly, failing to protect Muslim interests by compromising with the Congress party. On the contrary, the PFI adopted a con-frontationist stance against Hindutva and exhorted the community members to be prepared for physical resistance against the Hindutva forces.

These Muslim organizations project Hindutva as the greatest threat to Indian society, especially to the minorities and Dalits. The organizations extensively use the Indian Constitution to assert their political demands and add force to their campaigns. Though the PFI vouches by its secular democratic credentials, political observers have pointed out that it has a strong Islamist, exclusivist orientation where Islam is used instrumentally as its ideological and organizational foundation. The organization is involved in several violent incidents to ‘safeguard Islam’ and has punished those it deems to have ‘insulted Prophet Muhammad’.

Scholars have pointed out that like the politics of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS), the PFI has attempted to create an exclusive moral community based on an ethicized religion. The politics of PFI primarily plays out as a response to the rise of the Hindutva threat. It is dismissive of secular political parties, branding them as ineffective in protecting Muslim interests and further asserts that self-defence is the only way forward for Muslims in India.

Though founded in Kerala, the PFI has spread to almost every state in India having a sizeable Muslim population. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments have targeted the organization in various states. Several of them had banned the outfit, which was revoked following judicial interventions. The BJP governments view the organization as the epitome of Muslim extremism and terrorism and therefore they seek to ban the organization for security reasons and violence. However, the radical politics sown by the organization has attracted a significant section of Muslims, especially the youth. They perceive the organization as the only one capable of physically resisting and even mounting a counter-attack against Hindutva aggression and violence.

In Kerala, the organization has made it a point to openly challenge the RSS on the streets and resort to revenge killings of RSS functionaries if Hindutva forces attack their party workers. Recently, the PFI executed two revenge killings of RSS functionaries in Kerala within 24 hours of their office bearers being attacked and killed. This tit for tat strategy is a well considered one as they are unflinching in their conviction that Hindutva forces cannot be resisted by peaceful methods or by seeking safety and protection from the state. While there are debates within the community about the desirability of resorting to violence to resist Hindutva politics, this form of retaliation also has come to attract its own followers and admirers.

The Muslim League as a political party is at a crossroads. The traditional Muslim politics practised by the party under the influence and aura of Tangal leaders seems to be losing its sheen. The party is also seen as adopting more assertive positions regarding Muslim religious issues to checkmate the growing influence of organizations like the PFI. On the one hand, the party is forced to highlight its tradition of following pacifist, non-radical positions by asserting the virtues of secularism, and on the other, such virtues seem out of place in a political environment characterized by raging Hindutva politics and associated social conflicts.

However, the party and the religious leaders who guide it – especially the clergy of E.K. Samasta – are categorical in their opposition to the politics of PFI and radical tendencies within the community. They vouch for the tradition of communal harmony and peaceful coexistence in Kerala and assert that it alone is the true Islamic way forward.

The overall secularization of Kerala society is also reflected in the Muslim politics of the state and the emerging gender politics among Muslims is a case in point. Notwithstanding the opposition of religious clergy regarding the participation of Muslim women in politics and public activities, there is a surge in Muslim women’s participation in political and civil society spheres. The trajectory of Islamic reformism in Kerala is closely linked with the story of women’s empowerment. While traditional Sunni sections consciously avoided addressing the gender issues, reformist organisations such as Jamaat-e-Islami and Kerala Nadwatul Mujahideen adopted a proactive stand towards gender equality. The Gulf migration that helped Kerala since the 1980s financially, in particular, played a significant role in enhancing the educational achievements of Muslim women in the state.

The establishment of private educational institutions and the opening up of higher education by traditional religious organizations were crucial in this transformation. Highly educated Muslim girls occupied these organizations, and their interventions brought several important transformations within the community. These girls, who were exposed to the feminist gender politics in Kerala, also began to use arguments from Islamic feminism to fend off criticism from the clergy that feminist ideas are un-Islamic. While Muslim reformist organizations found it easier to accommodate women in their cadre and earmarked separate organizational wings, the Muslim League took a long time to follow suit as it had to reconcile with the traditionalist, patriarchal Ulema who wield a strong hold over the party.

One of the most significant transformations in the political sphere was state intervention in the 1990s to earmark reservations for women candidates in the local self-governing body elections. While every political party found it hard to find and field women candidates, the Muslim League’s problem was compounded as it had to negotiate with the traditional Ulema, who derided women’s role in politics. Eventually, pragmatic politics triumphed, and the party too began to field Muslim women candidates. The Vanitha League was established in 1996 as a separate organization for women by the Muslim League.

While this was an imperative brought in by state intervention, Muslim women currently constitute a significant section of elected women representatives in local bodies across Kerala, providing administrative and political leadership to the people. E.K. Samasta too had to tacitly acknowledge the imperative of permitting Muslim women to enter politics and contest elections.

Though the PFI and Welfare Party provide far greater representation to its women cadres, the Muslim League usually finds itself on the backfoot on this crucial issue. Recently, a group of women in leadership position of ‘Haritha’, the girl student wing of the Muslim League, openly criticized the party leadership for failing to address its continuing misogynist tendencies. It is evident that the party leadership failed to understand the language of gender politics articulated by these professionally educated women. Despite several incidents and statements that reaffirm the patriarchal and misogynist position of the traditional Ulema, it is evident that Muslim girls, irrespective of their organizational and theological back-grounds, have broken the barriers and are actively engaged in the political and social spheres of contemporary Kerala.

The changed gender relations within the community are also reflected in the increased participation of Muslim women in various agitations on the street. Muslim women’s participation is highly visible in demonstrations of political parties and in development-related agitations, among others. For instance, the anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) agitation, organized under the auspices of various Muslim organizations in Kerala, witnessed active participation from Muslim girls and women. They demanded equality and justice based on Indian constitutional provisions. This increased awareness and political activism are sure to reshape the contours of Muslim politics in the years to come.

The re-election of the LDF government in 2021 proved to be a game changer for coalition politics in the state. It was the first time since 1985 that such a feat was achieved by any coalition front. This is bound to have implications for Muslim politics in the state, especially for the political fortunes of the Muslim League. It is evident that many religious minorities, especially Muslims, voted for the LDF during the 2021 elections. Many political observers point out that this changing stance of Muslims reflects their growing confidence in the Left Front in resisting Hindutva forces in the state. Especially among the youth and students, the appeal of the Muslim League is on the decline, and that space is now claimed by the left parties and new Muslim political formations like the PFI. The vote bank politics so far practised by the Muslim League is undoubtedly facing a crisis under the changed socio-political conditions in the state. With the steady decline of the Indian National Congress at the national level, the Muslim League will find its political future increasingly uncertain in Kerala in the long run.

Like other places in the country, Muslim politics in Kerala, too, is undergoing significant transformations in the present era of Hindutva majoritarianism. While the demographic composition of religious communities and peculiar historical and socio-political formations of the state make Kerala relatively inaccessible to Hindutva forces compared to other parts of the country, this scenario is rapidly changing. The communitarian model of electoral competition is slowly giving way to a more direct, identitarian and communal mode of politics that is taking root in the state as well. Hate speech and overtly communal statements and campaigns, often broadcast via social media, have become commonplace in Kerala, unlike in the past when communal overtures were relatively absent in the political sphere. The rise of Hindutva politics and the response of radical Muslim politics feed into each other, in the process shrinking the space for secularism and communal harmony in the society. The state can no longer afford to bask in the glory of its history of communal harmony and peaceful coexistence. The relatively higher socio-economic development and a vibrant legacy of socio-political activism make Muslim politics in Kerala better equipped to deal with the challenge facing Indian democracy. However, the Muslim community in Kerala is increasingly getting fragmented based on ideological and organizational affiliations, resulting in diverse forms of political responses. The conventional Muslim politics practised by the Muslim League is on the wane for sure, but what will replace it remains highly uncertain.

Muslims and Hindutva in Assam

AKHIL RANJAN DUTTA

ADDRESSING the executive committee meeting of the state unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the run up to the 2021 state assembly elections in Assam, Himanta Biswa Sarma, the then state finance minister and the core electoral strategist of the party, said: ‘This election for us is all about saving our civilization, saving our nationality. This election is all about saving the jaati-maati-bheti (nationality, land and hearth). Our aim is not to ensure tickets to win elections, our aim is not to ensure positions in government offices, our aim is not to ensure high offices for ourselves. Our pledge is to save our motherland.’1

This civilizational war is the new political narrative in today’s Assam steered by the Hindutva forces. This narrative fixes the Bengal Muslims as the target whose civilization has allegedly posed a serious threat to the identities and age-old civilization of the local and indigenous people. This narrative has been built in a systematic manner both through decades’ long grassroots work undertaken by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and other Hindutva outfits, and the aggressive electoral strategies implemented by BJP. This narrative has intensified after May 2021 when Himanta Biswa Sarma became the chief minister of the state.

Sarma, in his new book, Eta Xaponor Pom Khedi: Asomor Unnayan Aru Suraxar 25 taa Nirnaayak Baktritaar Sangkalon (In Pursuit of a Dream: A Compilation of 25 Speeches Shaping Assam’s Development and Security),has coined a new term ‘Ajmal civilization’ to spearhead this new narrative of Hindutva forces in the state. Ajmal civilization refers to Badruddin Ajmal, the founder and the chief of the All-India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), a party which electorally represents the majority of the Bengali Muslim community in Assam since its inception in 2005. Sarma envisages the Ajmal civilization as a serious threat to the indigenous and local Assamese history, culture and civilization.2 Such a systematic and consistent campaign has gradually manufactured a mass hysteria against the community.

The pursuit of this civilizational war has two parallels: exploring the allies and manufacturing the enemies. Through its ‘Rainbow Alliance’, the Hindutva forces in Assam have co-opted the Khilonjiyas, i.e. the linguistically dominant Assamese speaking population, the ethnic tribal communities and also the Adivasis, the tea tribes, in a planned way. The objective of this social engraining is to manufacture the narrative of ‘our people’ and ‘the Other’.3

These communities, we must remember, have a long history of political struggle, especially with regard to right to self-determination. However, there was an interesting shift after these communities were co-opted by the Hindutva forces. The struggle for self-determination has gradually been reduced to a struggle for power and positions in the governments. The indigenous Muslims, who distinguish themselves from Bengali Muslims on linguistic and cultural lines, are also projected as partners of the Hindutva forces.4 The Muslims of a particular kind, the Bengali Muslims, have been targeted as enemies of the local and indigenous civilization of Assam.5 This formulation has an interesting demographic manifestation. There are around 35 per cent Muslims in Assam. A significant majority of this Muslim population belongs to Bengali Muslims (around 32 per cent). In this sense, it is easier for the Rainbow Alliance to propagate Hindutva as a unifying ideology against the Bengali Muslims.

Sarma also makes a set of arguments to legitimize his thesis of civilizational conflict. According to him, the ‘Ajmal civilization’ has intruded into and encroached upon Assam’s land and history. He provides a number of examples. It has purportedly already encroached upon land in the birthplace of Mahapurush Srimanta Sankardeva at Batadrawa, and has not even spared the rhinos – Assam’s pride – in the Kaziranga National Park. The rhetoric of ‘love jehad’ is also invoked to make a claim that Bengali Muslims target Assamese women for establishing their social and cultural hegemony.6 It has been alleged that this civilization has been using poisonous vegetables to kill the indigenous people. Sarma claims, ‘…they have conspired to kill a generation of the state by mixing poisonous chemical elements in the vegetables… There have been unprecedented rise in the kidney and liver diseases. We cannot ignore the fact that these diseases may have been caused by those chemicals.’7

In January 2017, the Struggle for Hindu Existence, a pro-Hindutva website, reported that Assam was planning to introduce a population policy that aims to curb the ‘unabated Muslim growth in the state.’ It went on to say that out of the 27 districts of Assam, nine had been declared as Muslim majority districts. Besides, the Muslim population was reported to have also challenged Hindus in three other districts. The report categorically remarked: ‘…end… Muslim appeasement in Indian politics, the Assam government is finding a process to put a control upon Muslim population in mainstream life.’8

The same report mentioned that the government was contemplating a population control policy ‘with the provisions where more than two children may disqualify for any government help or even losing government jobs.’ It further stated that a bill planned to be placed in the Budget session in March 2017 ‘also includes the provision of disqualification for being a candidate for contesting in any election whether it is a seat of Gram Panchayat, Municipal bodies or state assembly’9 for those having more than two children.

Both the BJP and the state government have not concealed the fact that they are haunted by the explosion of Muslim population in the state. Himanta Biswa Sarma, then Finance, Health and Education Minister, asserted in October 2016: ‘Hindus constitute about 68 percent of the state’s population. Considering the rapid population growth, particularly among immigrant Muslims, the community is all set to become a majority in the state. Under such circumstances, granting citizenship to Hindu migrants from Bangladesh will prevent Assam from becoming a Muslim dominated state’10.

The Government of Assam adopted the Population and Women Empowerment Policy of Assam (PWEPA), in September 2017 within six months of the announcement of its Draft Population Policy in March 2017. Both the draft population policy and its subsequent incarnation as the PWEPA primarily aim at curbing the ‘exponentially expanding population’ in the state. The draft policy talks about the entirety of the challenges confronted by the population – from poverty and illiteracy to flood, erosion and climate change, which contribute towards the decline of quality of human life in the state of Assam in addition to contributing to the recent population explosion. While capturing the challenges in the specific context of Assam, the draft policy has focused on demographic and development complications, highlighting issues like child marriage, constraints of livelihood sources, unemployment and illiteracy, high rate of prevalence of IMR and MMR etc. along with the specific problems confronted by spatial and social communities.11

Despite such a comprehensive insight and outlook, the overriding concerns of both the draft policy and the PWEPA, 2017, have been to prevent the explosion of population in the state. This is evident from the official notification of the Department of Health and Family Welfare through which the Draft Population Policy was made public. The first paragraph of the notification states: ‘As per 2011 census reports, the population of Assam increased to 3.12 crore from 2.66 crore in 2001. The continuous growth of the state’s population not only poses a severe strain on the natural resources and environment but also hinders the efforts of the government to improve the quality of life of its people.’12 It may be noted that the actual growth of population in Assam during 2001-2011 was 46 lakhs, but the Draft asserts that the ‘state witnessed an increase of almost one crore population in the last decade’.13

The factors contributing to the population explosion are explained rather differently. The high population growth among the Bengali Muslims, which must be attributed to the illiteracy, poor healthcare and mullah-driven patriarchy within the community, are given a political meaning. The Hindutva driven narrative has consistently called this growth a conspiracy against the local and indigenous civilization which wants to make Assam a part of Bangladesh.

Hitting out at the AIUDF in the state assembly, Chief Minister Sarma has also spoken about local peoples’ apprehension about Assam facing the same plight of the Kashmiri Pundits soon: ‘People ask me if Assamese people will face the same fate as Kashmiri Pandits. Ten years down the line, will Assam be like it is shown in the Bollywood movie Kashmir Files. It is the duty of Muslims to allay our fear. Muslims must behave like a majority and give us assurance that there will be no repeat of Kashmir here.’14 Such pronouncements reflect the mass perception about the Bengali Muslims in the state.

Population growth in the border districts in the state has also been seen as a potential political issue. Sarma has advocated strengthening the intelligence in the state police ‘in wake of an increase in Muslim population in districts bordering Bangladesh.’15 Citing relevant reports he argued that the districts within 10 kms from Bangladesh in the state recorded the population growth at 31.45 per cent during 2011-21 as against the projected national and state average of 12.5 per cent and 13.54 per cent.16 What is ironic is that these border districts, as reported, witnessed growth of Hindu population in higher rates than that of the Muslims. ‘Hindu population in the four border districts – Dhubri, Karimganj, Cachar and South Salmara – increased from 1,33,240 in 2011 to 1,77,141 in 2021, a rise of 32.9 per cent. The Muslim population, meanwhile, grew by 29.6 per cent in these districts. The total number of Muslims in 2011 stood at 3,95,659, which increased to 5,13,126 in 2021.’17

While campaigning for the 2014 general elections, BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi alleged that the incumbent Congress government in the state was killing rhinos in Kaziranga to settle Bangladeshis. He said: ‘Aren’t Rhinos the pride of Assam? These days there is a conspiracy to kill it. I am making the allegation very seriously. People sitting in the government... to save Bangladeshis... they are doing this conspiracy to kill rhinos so that the area becomes empty and Bangladeshis can be settled there.’18 The eviction drive in Kaziranga in September 2016 which was carried out in response to an order by the Gauhati High Court in October 2015 took a violent turn.19

The eviction drive was also charged with a communal narrative. Whereas both indigenous Assamese Hindus and Muslims who had settled in the vicinity of Kazaringa faced the atrocities of violence, the mainstream media projected it as a drive against suspected encroachers.

These narratives gradually took a violent turn with the formulation of ‘clash of civilizations’. The Garukhuti violence in September 2021, exactly five years after the Kaziranga violence of 2016, is a testimony to it. The violence erupted while carrying out evictions against the alleged encroachers. Garukhuti was already declared as a site for a multipurpose agricultural project with an allocation of Rs 9.60 crore in the state budget 2021-22. The chief minister in his tweet on 16 July 2021 mentioned that ‘¹  9.60 cr allocated for Garukhuti project in which 77,420 bigha land was freed from encroachment in Garukhuti under Sipajhar block in Darrang district.’20 However, on 23 September 2021 violence erupted when the administration undertook the eviction drive in the site that killed two persons, including a 12-year boy, belonging to the Bengali Muslim community.

The Gauhati High Court in responding to the Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed by the leader of the opposition in the Assam Legislative Assembly, Debabrata Saikia, to stop evictions and provide rehabilitation to those who have been evicted remarked: ‘Khoon zameen pe ghir gaya (blood has been spilled).’21 This incidence reminds us that the violence that marked the eviction drive on the Muslim villagers of Gorukhuti village is not something new to Assam.22

According to Himanta Biswa Sarma, Muslims should be seen as the majority, not as a minority, hence, the onus of protecting the minorities lies on them. He claims: ‘it is their duty to ensure that the rights of tribal people are protected and their lands are not encroached upon.’23 On the other hand, Muslim identity is not seen as monolithic whole in Assam. The Hindutva regime is interested in dividing Muslims on cultural and linguistic lines. The Assamese or indigenous Muslims have themselves sought to distinguish themselves from the Bengali speaking Muslims. They assert their educational superiority and economic status in relation to Bengali Muslims. There is also a contention that due to their numerical strength, the Bengali Muslims have a larger presence in the different layers of the representational bodies – from the panchayats to the parliament.

The Sarma government has taken deep interest in this internal heterogeneity. In May 2022, an official meeting was convened in this regard in which leading Assamese Muslims from different walks of life were invited. A panel to suggest the measures to protect and preserve the ‘uniqueness of the indigenous Assamese Muslims’ was also constituted.’24

Taking cognizance of the expert committee’s suggestions, the Assam Cabinet approved the identification of five Assamese Muslim sub-groups – Goriyas, Moriyas, Julhas, Deshis, and Syeds – as ‘indigenous’ Assamese Muslim communities in July 2022. The government claims that such a move will ‘ensure their development in health, cultural identity, education, financial inclusion, skill development and women empowerment.’25 What is ironical about such a move is that the substantive meaning of ‘indigenous’ and its implications on the rights of the Assamese Muslims are yet to be defined. It remains  a political rhetoric aimed at electoral mileage.

While both the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) 2019 are intensely debated in India, the issue of citizenship in Assam has transcended legal-constitutional boundaries. There has arisen a popular narrative of illegality that is unbound by the constitutional-legal and institutional meanings of citizenship. Citizenship is confused with cultural and linguistic identities, including the identity marked by food and dress codes. Both the mainstream and social media are filled with such narratives. The Hindutva forces have added fuel to it.

The debate on Miya poetry is a good example. Miya poetry endeavours to expose ‘a world of suffering and humiliation of a group of people whose life-world has passed through numerous political claims and counterclaims.’26 This version of poetry enriches ‘our understanding of the cultural and political landscape of Assam. It gives us a peep into how it is to live in the Char Chapori or riverine geographies in Assam.’27 However, once Miya poetry gained popularity there was a huge backlash from different quarters. Critics have pointed out that the backlash is ‘precisely the product of this Assamese hegemony’ and exhibits the ‘class condition’ in the state.’28

It is argued that Miya poets have thwarted the process of ‘dehumanizing the Miya community through the use of technologies of terror like the citizenship laws’ and have helped in ‘reclaiming their sense of justice and sending out a message loud and clear, “We have a voice, and we will be heard”.’29 As Miya poetry received more praise and patronage from both national and international agencies, the community was forced to being at the receiving end.

In other words, the ‘civilizational war’ manufactured by the Hindutva forces have brought about deeper political, intellectual and cultural challenges to the Bengali Muslim community in Assam. The community at large has to act cautiously, with insight and great foresight, while thwarting the mission of dehumanization and humiliation as well as political marginalization that has been launched by both hegemonic elements of the Assamese nationality and the divisive agencies of the Hindutva forces. It has to be more vigilant about the external forces that intend to act as patrons of the community.

Local history needs to be invoked, and the local allies need to be included in devising strategies to fight back the process of dehumanization. On the matter of both the NRC and Miya poetry, there were external actors who aided the community in representing the voice of dissent. In the process, the greater Assamese society was projected as ‘xenophobic’. The presence and contribution of the xenophobic elements cannot be denied in the process of building Assamese hegemony. However, there have also been voices of dissent against xenophobia from within the greater Assamese society. These voices have been targeted as ‘jati shatru’ (enemy of the Assamese nationality) and have been facing political coercion and brutalities for a long time, particularly during the Assam agitation.30

One reason behind such accusations and coercions has been the dissenters’ solidarity with the cause of the Bengali Muslims. Hiren Gohain is counted as the front runner among those ‘jati shatrus’. Ironically, Hiren Gohain has also been targeted as an element of those xenophobic forces for his position on NRC, which Gohain has defended while rejecting both the CAB and CAA, and also for his critical comments on Miya poetry.

Gohain has pointed out that ‘with the patronage of some national and international agencies, a powerful narrative of Muslim victimhood is gaining ground.’31 This pushed a section of the younger generation of the community ‘to total oblivion of local historical facts of great importance.’ Gohain has cautioned that the Hindutva elements are not deterred but helped by ‘this mirror-image of their own fantasies.’ Gohain further states that such fantasies ‘plays right into the hands of Hindutva elements by appearing to prove the insuperable otherness of immigrant Muslims.’32

Whereas the comments made by Gohain angered a number of young minds working in different parts of the world for the cause of the community, what needs to be learned and acknowledged is that the exclusionary forces are deeply rooted into the grounds and waging a war against them also invites local allies and politically sustainable strategies.

Footnotes:

1. Himanta Biswa Sarma, Eta Xaponor Pom Khedi: Asomor Unnayan Aru Suraxar 25 taa Nirnaayak Baktritaar Sangkalon. Saraswati Printers, Guwahati, 2021, p. 44. (Translation from Assamese to English by the author.)

2.  Himanta Biswa Sarma, Bhinna Samay Abhinna Mat. Saraswati Printers, Guwahati 2019, p. 5.

3. Akhil Ranjan Dutta, ‘BJP’s Electoral Victory in Assam, 2016: Co-opting the Khilonjiyas’, Social Change 47(1), 2017, pp. 108-124.

4. Indigenous or Assamese Muslims is a unique category of Muslims in Assam who are both culturally and linguistically different from the Bengali Muslims. Assamese Muslims are those ‘“Assamese Muslims”, who speak Assamese as their mother tongue, and who trace their ancestries in Assam back to the Ahom kingdom (1228-1826). By and large, they see themselves as part of the larger Assamese-speaking community, together with Assamese Hindus, and many of them are very conscious about being distinct from Bengal-origin Muslims.’ Recently, the Assam government declared five Assamese Muslim sub-groups – Goriya, Moriya, Julha, Deshi, and Syed – as ‘indigenous’ Assamese Muslim communities. (Tora Agarwala, ‘Assam’s Muslims: Why Some Have Been Declared “Indigenous” and Some Left Out’, The Indian Express, 13 July 2022. Available at https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-who-are-assam-indigenous-muslims-8022121/

5. Bengali Muslims are those who migrated to Assam from Bengal and settled in Assam at various times after undivided Assam was annexed to British India in 1826. These Muslims are often referred to as Miyas.

6. Himanta Biswa Sarma, 2021, op. cit., pp. 4-5.

7. Ibid., p. 21.

8. Upananda Brahmachari, ‘Assam to Get its Own Population Policy like China to Control the Population Explosion in the State’, Hinduexistence.org, 25 January 2017, accessed on 12 May 2017.

9. Ibid.

10. Daulat Rahman, ‘Himanta Talks of Bill Benefit’, Telegraphindia.com, 6 October 2016, accessed on 10 May 2017.

11. Akhil Ranjan Dutta, ‘Overstated Numbers and Underlying Agendas: Assam’s Population Policy, 2017’, Economic & Political Weekly 52(48), 2 December 2017.

12. Department of Health and Family Welfare, Government of Assam, ‘Draft State Population Policy, Assam: Comments/Observations Solicited’, Dispur, Public Notice No HLA 329/2017/15, 27 March 2017.

13. Ibid., p. 4.

14. OpIndia, ‘Muslims are the majority, they must ensure harmony and assure that minorities in Assam will not face the fate of Kashmiri Pandits: Himanta Biswa Sarma. 16 March 2022. Available at https://www.opindia.com/2022/03/muslims-are-majority-in-assam-must-ensure-harmony-himanta-biswa-sarma/

15. Biju Kumar Deka, ‘Assam: Muslim Population in Border Districts Rising, Need to Strengthen Intelligence, Says CM Himanta’, 4 August 2022. Available at https://www.news18.com/news/politics/assam-muslim-population-in-border-districts-rising-need-to-stregthen-intelligence-says-cm-himanta-

5690071.html

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Firstpost, ‘Assam Govt Plotting to Kill Rhinos to Make Way for Bangladeshi’s: Modi’, 31 March 2014. Available at https://www.firstpost.com/politics/assam-govt-plotting-to-kill-rhinos-to-make-way-for-bangladeshis-modi-1459257.html

19.  Anupam Chakravartty, ‘Two Die During an Eviction Drive in Kaziranga National Park’, Down To Earth, 19 September 2016. Available at https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-biodiversity/two-die-during-an-eviction-drive-in-kaziranga-national-park-55738

20. Tweet by Chief Minister of Assam, available at https://twitter.com/cmofficeassam/status/141598633967416

9345?lang=en

21. Time8.in, “Blood Has Been Spilled”: Gauhati HC observes Garukhuti Violence Unfortunate; Seeks Assam Govt. Response’,7 September 2021. Available at https://www.time8.in/blood-has-been-spilled-gauhati-hc-observes-garukhuti-violence-unfortunate-seeks-assam-govt-response/

22. Pamela Philipose writes: ‘The Nellie massacre of 1983, in which over 1,800 were butchered within a span of six hours, continues to define the face of mass carnage in post-independence India …dehumanization and othering of the Bengali-speaking Muslim, although the forms they assume may vary. The leaps, kicks and blows of a camera-carrying man as he assaulted a grievously wounded body of a lungi-clad man, felled by a bullet fired by the Assam Police at point-blank range, dramatized that intrinsic brutalization.’ Pamela Philipose, ‘Backstory: The Paper Trail Behind the Assam Eviction Violence’, The Wire, 25 September 2021. Available at https://thewire.in/media/backstory-paper-trail-behind-assam-eviction-violence-darrang

23. Tora Agarwala, ‘Assam: “Majority”, “Minority” Numbers, and CM Sarma’s New Calculation’, The Indian Express, 6 April 2022. Available at https://indianexpress.com/article/political-pulse/assam-defining-majority-minority-himanta-biswa-sarma-7855276/

24. Tora Agarawala, ‘Assam Cabinet Approves “Indigenous” Status for Five Muslim Communities’, The Indian Express, 7 July 2022. Available at https://indianexpress.com/article/north-east-india/assam/assam-cabinet-indigenous-status-muslim-communities-8011601/

25. Ibid.

26. Suraj Gogoi, ‘Miyah Poetry Weaves a World of Suffering and Humiliation in Contemporary Assam’, The Wire, 13 July 2019. Available at https://thewire.in/culture/miyah-poetry-weaves-a-world-of-suffering-and-humiliation-in-contemporary-assam

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid.

29. Masha Hassan, ‘“We the Sons of Bitches Are Doing Fine”: The Dissent of Miya Poetry’, Jamhoor 5, 7 August 2021. Available https://www.jamhoor.org/read/we-the-sons-of-bitches-are-doing-fine-the-dissent-of-miya-poetry

30. In his 2016 book, Bhinna Samay Abhinna Mat, Sarswati Printers, Guwahati, Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma attacked Hiren Gohain for his relentless opposition to the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 and accused him of being a mouthpiece of the Bengali Muslims.

31. Hiren Gohain, ‘Debate: Miyah Poetry in the Assam Context’, The Wire, 9 July 2019. Available at https://thewire.in/culture/debate-miyah-poetry-in-the-assam-context

32. Ibid.

Indian Muslims and the ‘Muslim world’

ASIM ALI

THE protests of the ‘Islamic world’ to the recent blasphemy controversy brought to the fore a fear that has often lurked at the back of the postcolonial Indian mind – the fear of trans-Islamic consolidation. The country’s greater neighbourhood is composed largely of Muslim countries, an arc extending from the Persian Gulf to South East Asia, crisscrossing the rugged terrain of central Asia. On its western border lies Pakistan, a hostile state which has attempted, at crucial moments, to rally the ‘Islamic world’ against India. Finally, India is home to a large Muslim presence, numbering nearly 200 million; it represents the third largest Muslim population in the world.

The Hindu nationalist movement has never shied away from overtly expressing the nature of the potential threat arising from Indian Muslims acting in concert with forces emanating from across the broader Islamic neighbourhood. Post 9/11 and the global war on Islamic extremism, this perception has also been periodically fuelled by certain sections of the Indian media as well as the national security establishment. This pan Islamic threat is implicated in political discourses varying from separatism and terrorism to communal violence and demographic challenges.

The BJP has skilfully employed this image of Indian Muslims, as privileging their extraterritorial loyalties to the global Muslim community (‘umma’) to their loyalty to the Indian nation, to drive its project of Hindu consolidation. Its success draws partly from the fact that these concerns have a long history and are deeply rooted in the Indian psyche.

It is the contention of this essay that this globalized image of Indian Muslims is not sociologically rooted: a function of the lived reality of Indian Muslims. A rich strand of sociological literature on Indian Muslims has consistently highlighted the prevalence of a bewildering diversities of Muslim communities. Many scholars have argued that it is impossible to even discuss Indian Muslims or Indian Islam in the singular because of these remarkable divergences in both religious aspects (observances, sects, practices) as well as socio-cultural dimensions (caste, class, language, culture).1

There is also scant evidence of a widespread identification with the interests and concerns of a globalized ‘umma’. The argument of certain observers of Indian foreign policy that Indian Muslims exert an organized force in the formulation of foreign policy choices is at the very least unsubstantiated by hard evidence.2 The surveys of electoral behaviour of Indian Muslims do not furnish any indication of foreign policy priorities playing a distinct role in the electoral choices of Muslims as compared to other communities. Similarly, the voting record of Muslim legislators in Parliament have not been marked by any significant break with the foreign policy positions of their respective parties.

There have been occasional protests organized by sections of the religious elite on global issues such as the Iraq war or Arab-Isareali conflict, but that does not necessarily entail the existence of organized ethnic pressures on foreign policy. The easing of Indian relations with Israel, for example, began under a Congress regime that was dependent on the support of Muslim voters; further this policy shift was free of any domestic backlash associated with the existence of a well defined ethnic pressure. At any rate, even those scholars who posit the influence of domestic constituency of Indian Muslims as one element in the formulation of India’s Israel policy, only ascribe to it a marginal role, compared to the determining role assigned to India’s relations with the Arab world.3

In the model presented in this essay, the construction of a globalized identity of Muslims has been dependent on the foreign policy regime of the country, and the global environment which it operates. This is a complex and evolving relationship shaped by a number of variables: one, the relationship is structured by the antecedent variable of the historical evolution of Indian nationalism’s engagement with Muslims; and two, the relationship is mediated by three intervening variables – political parties, state institutions, and the media which define the contours of the globalized identity of Muslims.

The first major mobilization of Indian Muslims in the nationalist movement was during the Khilafat movement (1919-1924) The Gandhi-led Congress backed the Khilafat movement as part of the larger non-cooperation struggle because the pan-Islamic concerns of the Khilafat movement could be moulded into a popular anti-colonial discourse. Even if the religious practices of Muslims were divergent, there existed a shared emotional attachment for the ‘Holy Places’ of Islam. The frequent intersection of pan-Islamist with anti-colonialist streams was a feature seen in large parts of North Africa, Middle East and South Asia, inspired by the writings of political philosophers such as Jamaluddin al-Afghani. In fact, the primary target of Al Afghani in India was the modernist Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, criticizing him for political servitude to the British instead of joining hands with the Indian nationalists.4

Even for the Indian Khilafat movement leaders such as Muhammad Ali, Abul Kalam Azad, M.A. Ansari, the quietist reformism of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was nothing less than behaving as the partisan of the British enemies which were destroying the beliefs of Indian Muslims and making them subservient to western political and cultural domination.

The anti-imperialist tenor of the Khilafat movement was expressed in the proposal for an Asiatic federation by M.A. Ansari, at the All-India Khilafat Conference of 1922, for more solidarity among the people of Asia so that they can be rescued from the bondage of Europe.5

The tensions between Indian nationalism and pan Islamism were not quite as developed in the 1920s as some retrospective evaluations might suggest. Indeed, there was a creative thrust on the part of quite a few Khilafat leaders to conjure up a synthesis of the imperatives of Islam and Indian nationalism, and to demonstrate that they were not incompatible to each other. Muhammad Ali offered a revealing description in 1930 of the nature of this synthesis:

‘Where God commands ... I am a Muslim first, a Muslim second and a Muslim last and nothing but a Muslim…But where India is concerned, where India’s freedom is concerned, where the welfare of India is concerned, I am an Indian first, an Indian second, an Indian last and nothing but an Indian... I belong to two circles of equal size but which are not concentric. One is India and the other is Muslim... We belong to these circles... and we can leave neither.’6

Even for Al Afghani, religious links did not preclude national links between people of different faiths, and he advocated to his Indian Muslim audience to join hands with the Hindus in the shared national cause.7 The ideological coherence to this project of reconciling religious belief to the ideal of a unified Indian nationalism was also provided by leaders such as Maulana Azad, who anchored a Hindu-Muslim alliance to the historical precedent of the Prophet’s covenant with the Jews.  He asserted that inter-communal harmony in the shared struggle against the British was an obligatory religious duty for Muslims.8

It must be mentioned here, though, that attachment to pan-Islamic symbols (such as Holy Mosques) were just one element of a gamut of symbolic resources that defined the worldview of Muslim communities of the early 20th century. Thus, it was the choice of the religious and nationalist elite to strongly evoke that symbol that caused it to transform from an emotional attachment to the ideological basis of community mobilization. In the instrumentalist approach of political sociology, elites select from a range of cultural symbols of a given ethnic group those symbols that serve to politically mobilise the group towards a certain set of political objectives.9 If the Khilafat movement succeeded in integrating the Muslim masses into the nationalist struggle, it also set a template for the political engagement of Muslims as a monolithic religious community.

A different process of symbol selection was to later form the basis of the Pakistan struggle. As Paul Brass has argued, the Muslim elites of the minority provinces, landlords, government servants and politicians, whose material interests were tied to separatism, nurtured a process of identity formation where they emphasized the significance of non-shared cultural markers, customs, attributes and institutional forms, while playing down the importance of shared cultural symbols. The Pakistan movement was thus rooted not in an exclusive ‘Islamic tradition’ but in the instrumentalization of ‘symbol selection and symbol manipulation’ through which Muslim elites leveraged political advantage in a colonial context.10

The post-colonial elite has taken from the experience of Partition an aversion to institutional forms that might incubate distinct political interests. Thus, the demands for proportional representation and inclusion of minorities in the constitutional scheme of reservation was denied as it was reminiscent of separate electorates and colonial era quotas of Muslims in minority provinces. However, the discomfort with a separate political identity did not extend to a separate religious identity.11 In the treatment of Muslims as primarily a religious community, the template of the Khilafat movement has cast a long and worrying shadow. The Constitutional protections accorded to Muslims were of a cultural-religious dimension as reflected in Article 30 of the Constitution.

Thus, the political mobilization of Muslims through the manipulation of cultural/religious symbols was not delegitimized by Partition, as long as such mobilization was carried out by mainstream parties. In fact, from the 1960s, a category of ‘Muslim issues’ was established in the political discourse – official patronage of Urdu, minority status of Aligarh Muslim University, a Uniform Civil Code, Babri Masjid – and secular parties fashioned themselves as the guardians of these special protections. Alongside, the Muslim religious elite were propped up as the favoured intercessors in the political process, and came to be recognized as the representatives of the community. Hence, a separate Muslim religious identity has been sustained in the political sphere as a convenient instrument of electoral mobilization by mainstream parties such as the Congress.12

This historical context is thus offered here as kind of an antecedent variable that structures the relationship between the globalized image of Muslim community and the foreign policy regimes of the Indian state.

The Indian establishment’s conception of Muslims as a distinct, monolithic community was refracted through the imagination of a global Islamic world, thus fostering the illusion of Indian Muslims as part of a globalized community. The particular form this illusion of a globalized identity depended on India’s foreign policy regimes and the external environment it operated within. Thus, whether this trans-Islamic identity of Indian Muslims was viewed as a benign influence and even an asset to be leveraged, or was in fact conceived as a malignant influence and a threat to be contained, depended on the broader grand strategy of India in a changing world.

For the purposes of analysis, we shall roughly divide Indian foreign policy regimes into three eras: the Nehruvian era of non-alignment, the pro-Soviet era, and the post-Cold War era to see how India’s grand strategy towards the Islamic world influenced the conception of the Indian Muslim community.

Ever since the Mughals, Indian rulers have been preoccupied with securing ties with the predominantly Muslim West and North-West. Nehru understood the importance of this region to India’s security and its ambitions of great power status. However, India did not have (and still does not have) a large military presence in the Indian Ocean littoral. Hence, the post-colonial Indian state immediate recognized the central importance of the ‘soft power’ legacy of the Indo-Islamic culture that blossomed under medieval Muslim rulers as a bridge towards cultural and economic ties with the region.13

Nehru built close ties with the Muslim leaders of Egypt, Turkey and Indonesia, and reached out to Arab and Persian politicians and intellectuals as part of the Non-Aligned movement. India was also a key organizer of the Bandung conference (1955) that became a symbol of Afro-Asian solidarity. Indeed, the ten-point declaration adopted at Bandung was influenced by Nehru’s five principles of peaceful coexistence (Panchsheel). Thus, anti-colonialism and ‘Third World’ solidarity grounded India’s ties to the Muslim countries of Asia and Africa. According to one estimate, the twenty-nine countries represented at the Bandung Conference represented more than half of the global Muslim population.14

Thus, the Islamic world was seen in this era as the resisting force to colonialism which the Indian foreign Minister V.K. Krishna Menon famously characterized as ‘permanent aggression’.15 This establishment’s benign view of the Islamic world was reflected in its accommodating stance towards a domestic Muslim community which was dependent on the patronage of the Congress party. This accommodation was primarily manifested in the cultural domain as protection of the distinctive religious character of Muslims, as evident by the exclusion of Muslims from the Hindu code bills passed in the 1950s. This differential treatment across religions has been celebrated as a distinctive form of Indian secularism which permits an enlightened differentiation on the grounds that it promotes freedom, equality, or any other value integral to secularism.16

The Indian polity started drifting towards the Soviet camp under Indira Gandhi. The Sino-Soviet split and the later Sino-US détente had changed the calculations of the Indian foreign policy establishment. The key position of Pakistan in the US-led anti-communist alliance, whose implications became manifest during the 1971 war, also pushed India further into the Soviet embrace.

However, India’s world view of the Islamic world changed little during this time, and India was still confident of the effectiveness of its strategy to thwart Pakistan’s objectives of rallying the Islamic world against its interests. A significant break in this world view came around the start of the 1980s as Islamic extremism came to being viewed as a ‘subversive’ or ‘destabilizing’ force. This was the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when the Indira Gandhi regime broke ranks with the non-communist world and effectively endorsed the invasion, denouncing the ‘outside powers’ that had backed ‘subversive elements’ in Afghanistan.17

The United States became a close military partner of Pakistan post the invasion, as Pakistan became a critical frontline state in the anti-Soviet alliance. For this anti-communist axis, Islam became an invaluable resource for resisting Soviet expansionism. This excited India’s discomfort for various reasons, not least being the threat of spillover of Islamist militancy within India’s borders. Alongside this burst of Sunni/Wahabbi militancy, the Iranian revolution of 1979 not only destabilized a friendly regime but also surcharged this spectre of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ at the doorstep.

The increasingly majoritarian politics of the country, reflected both in the rise of the BJP as well as the right wing turn of Indira Gandhi in her final term, was fuelled further by this ferment in the Islamic world. As Islam was no more a benign anti-colonial force but as a subversive and fundamentalist force, the Indian Muslim community began to be viewed with ill-concealed suspicion. The issue of ‘influx of Gulf money’ became a substantial factor in Hindu nationalist mobilization, and caused a spate of riots in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat.18 The upward mobility of Muslims in towns of western Uttar Pradesh owing to commercialization of agriculture was conflated entirely with ‘petrodollars’ and trading ties of Muslim businessmen with Gulf countries, and constructed as a trans-Islamic security threat to the majority community.

Similarly, the Meenakshipuram conversions of Dalits to Islam were also framed as a conspiracy fuelled by Gulf money, including by the ruling Congress and the national media.19 The critical role of the intervening variable of political parties becomes apparent here. As Wilkinson demonstrated, the petrodollars bogey could not create a similar Hindu nationalist mobilization in Kerala (which had much closer ties to Gulf countries) because of the bargaining power of IUML (Indian Union Muslim League) in the consociationalist framework of Kerala.

The inflated threat perception of this global Islamic resurgence, fuelled by majoritarian political mobilization, also perhaps explains the depth of backlash to the Shah Bano controversy, which was seen as not just a defence of orthodoxy, but also the expression of a malignant fundamentalism that was part of a global Islamic upsurge.20

The critical paradigm shifts of the post-Cold war era in India’s complicated relationship with its Muslim community came with the participation of India the post-9/11 global war on terror. As India constructed a sophisticated anti-terror state machinery, underpinned by draconian laws such as POTA, the engagement of the Indian state with Muslims became increasing security-centred and anchored to the objective of managing extremism. The human rights violations committed by security agencies in the ‘crackdown’ on terror have been exhaustively documented by civil society associations, such as The Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association (JTSA), which published a chilling report in 2012, detailing sixteen cases involving more than forty Muslim men who were framed and condemned to long stints in prison before being acquitted.21

The political vocabulary of using strong-arm measures or even violence to combat terror has been employed by Hindu nationalist forces to drive religious polarization in states such as Gujarat, which saw an anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002 after the ruling party alleged a Pakistan backed terror attack in the town of Godhra. The role of the media in propagating the stereotypes of ‘extremist Muslims’ is backed by a colossal body of evidence.22

The rise of the BJP in national politics is driven in no small part by its ownership of the national security issues through its uncompromising rhetoric on Pakistan and Islamic extremism, which are viewed as the main security threats in the popular imagination. When asked about India’s biggest threats in a 2014 Pew survey, 90 per cent respondents included Pakistan, 85 per cent included Naxalites and 80 per cent included Lashkar-e-Taiba. Both Pakistan and terrorism, by design, seamlessly align with its domestic politics of Hindutva and anti-Muslim prejudice.23

The post 9/11 engagement of the Indian establishment with the Muslim community has also been marked by the high point of a phenomenon the scholar Hilal Ahmad has termed as ‘Muslim politicophobia’.24 This Muslim politicophobia denotes a new political consensus emerging from the fusion of global anti-Islamism and anti-Muslim communalism in India. According to Ahmad, Muslim politicophobia is defined by three features: one, the ‘transformation’ of the Indian Muslim identity into a ‘reference point for global Islamic terrorism’; two, ‘the fear of active Muslim political engagement’; and three, the intensification of popular representation of Muslims ‘as a politically conscious community’.

The globalized image of Indian Muslims thus does not emanate organically from the sociological characteristics or religious beliefs of Indian Muslims, nor is it an inevitable outcome of the developments of the global Islamic world. As we have sought to demonstrate, this globalized image of Indian Muslim emerges from a complex relationship between Indian Muslims and Indian foreign policy regimes, structured by a historical context, and mediated by the critical role of political parties, state agencies and the media.

Footnotes:

1. P. Gottschalk, I. Ahmad, & H. Reifeld, ‘Mapping Muslims: Categories of Evolutionary Difference and Interaction in South Asia’, in Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld (eds.), Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation, and Conflict. Routledge, London, 2017, pp. 3-17.

2. T. P. Wright Jr, ‘Ethnic Group Pressures in Foreign Policy: Indian Muslims and American Jews’, Economic and Political Weekly 17(41), 1982, pp. 1655-1660.

3. P.R. Kumaraswamy, India’s Israel Policy. Columbia University Press, New York, 2010.

4. S.J. Ali, Sayyid Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani and the West. Adam Publishers & Distributors, Delhi, 2002.

5. A. Engineer, They Too Fought for India’s Freedom: The Role of Minorities. Hope India Publications, Delhi, 2006.

6. S.J. Burki, Pakistan: Fifty Years Of Nationhood (Third Edition). Taylor & Francis, New York, 2018.

7. M. Hasan, ‘Pan-Islamism versus Indian Nationalism? A Reappraisal’, Economic and Political Weekly 21(24), 1986, pp. 1074-1079.

8. Ibid.

9. A. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism.  Routledge, London/NY, 1998.

10. P.R. Brass, ‘Elite Groups, Symbol Manipulation and Ethnic Identity Among the Muslims of S. Asia’, in J. Hutchinson and A.D. Smith (eds.), Nationalism: Critical Concepts in Political Science (Vol 3). Routledge, London/NY, 2000, p. 879.

11. P.R. deSouza, H. Ahmed, M.S. Alam, Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in Contemporary India. Bloomsbury Publishing, India, 2021.

12. H. Ahmed, Siyasi Muslims: A Story of Political Islams in India. Penguin Random House India, 2019.

13. A. Pande, R. Dhage, & O. Jain, ‘Foreign Policy in South Asia: Promise and Peril’, in A. Pande (ed.), Routledge Handbook on South Asian Foreign Policy. Routledge, London/NY, 2021, pp. 1-16.

14. A.A. Mazrui, T. Uthup, R. Badran, Resurgent Islam and the Politics of Identity. Cambridge Scholars Publisher, UK, 2014.

15. Ibid.

16. R. Bhargava, ‘Political Secularism: Why it is Needed and What Can Be Learnt from Its Distinctive Indian Version’, in G.B. Levey and T. Modood (eds.), Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship. Cambridge University Press, UK, 2009,  pp. 82-109.

17. R.K. Singh, Relations of NDA and UPA with Neighbours. Gyan Publishing House, Delhi, 2010.

18. S. Wilkinson, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006.

19. B. Puri, Muslims of India Since Partition. India: Gyan Publishing House, Delhi, 2007.

20. M. Hasan, Indian Muslims Since independence: In Search of Integration and Identity’, Third World Quarterly, 10(2), 1988, pp. 818-842.

21. H. Mander, Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea of India. Penguin Random House India, 2018.

22. A. Kumar, ‘Mass Media and Muslims in India: Representation or Subversion’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 31(1), 2011, pp. 59-77.

23. A. Ali and A. Barthwal, ‘How BJP Has Owned the National Security Issue and Why China Won’t Change That’, The Print, 24 June 2020. https://theprint.in/opinion/bjp-owned-national-security-issue-china-wont-change-that/447554/

24. H. Ahmad, ‘The Emergence of Muslim ‘Politicophobia’ After 9/11’, The Indian Express, 11 September 2021. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the-emergence-of-muslim-politicophobia-after-9-11-7501708/

The diseased body politic and Bombay cinema

IRA BHASKAR

IT is three decades and more since Govind Nihalani’s Tamas warned us that the nightmare of the Partition is still with us. It is clear that the opening image-text of all the parts of Tamas, appearing even before the credits, to the anguished and heartrending cry of ‘O Rabba’ (‘O Almighty’):  ‘Those who forget History find themselves condemned to repeat it’ – is acutely relevant for the India of today. In what ways can we read Nihalani’s warning from 1987-1988 as it reverberates through the entrails of our body politic? How has cinema responded to the sectarian physical and psychological violence that impacts the lives of Muslims on an everyday level?

In this paper1 I draw from ‘critical medical humanities’ and the suggestion of Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard that ‘accounts of illness, suffering, intervention and cure’ ought to be situated ‘in a much thicker attention to the social, human and cultural contexts in which those accounts, as well as the bodies to which they attend, become both thinkable and visible’ to respond to the idea of disease literally and metaphorically.2

I use recent films like Dharm (2007), Shahid (2013), Mulk (2018), and Nakkash (2019), to examine their responses to a diseased body politic, and whether mainstream and ‘indie’ cinemas have taken cognizance of the normalization of a politics of hatred and fear that has created a serious ontological crisis of the idea of India and its polity. These films represent different production scenarios of today and come from what other scholars have termed ‘the production house culture’ of New Bollywood3 as well as ‘indie’ spaces.4 Reflecting on cinematic responses to contemporary hysterical discourses of visceral hatred of the Muslim, I examine what these films represent in terms of political and aesthetic interventions.

Before proceeding further, it is important for me to contextualize the films that I am discussing. There are three moments that precede the period I am looking at from 2007 onwards that are important for my discussion. The first is the New Wave cinema moment and its radical intervention to foreground repressed/ignored/silent histories of caste, gender and communal oppression and violence.5 The second is the focus on communal conflicts both historically and in the contemporary mainstream cinemas of India with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement culminating in the demolition of the Babri Masjid that led to communal riots from December 1992 onwards. December 1992 was not just a tectonic fault line for contemporary India but also a transformative moment for Indian cinemas. It actually blew the lid off the simmering cauldron of communal conflict and hostilities and led to the making of a number of films by mainstream cinemas that had earlier been hesitant or discreet about addressing the inflammable commu-nal issue. I would include here films like Bombay (1995) Zakhm (1998) Fiza (2000) and Hey Ram (2000).

And third, the 2002 Gujarat pogrom of Muslims and the cinematic responses to 2002 in films like Dev (2004), Parzania (2005-early 2007) and Firaaq (2008-2009). It is important to point out that these films were made by film makers not traditionally associated with mainstream cinemas. Nihalani, an important name from the New Wave moment, Rahul Dholakia, a new comer with his second film and Nandita Das, associated with alternative art cinemas were all making their films in a transformed production context, either producing these films themselves with finances raised individually or with production support from new film companies. At the same time these films did seek film industry support for distribution and exhibition. In that sense they represent new processes of production and release structures even as they attempt to represent the extreme commun-alization of the body politic and the disease of sheer hatred for the minorities that is gnawing at the soul of India.

It is not surprising that post 2014 a deranged majoritarian discourse has been enabled considering that lynchings, hate speech and extreme violence directed against Muslims have become commonplace since then, along with a political culture that draws on these methods as political strategy. While the communal riot has always been a template for attacks on Muslims, what we have been witnessing since 2014 is increased vigilante killings of Muslims. Marking this shift and fundamental to the causes of this violence is deep prejudice building up into intense hatred that is justified by an illogical and visceral revulsion against Muslims for eating beef, and the conviction that each one is a jihadi bent on destroying India, and hence needs to be eliminated.

This hatred is so intense and the impunity to Hindu vigilantes to act on their prejudices and predilections of destruction so wide and unqualified that we have seen mounting attacks and lynching of Muslims from 2014 onwards; Akhlaq (2015) Junaid (2017), Pehlu Khan (2017), Afrazul (2017) are just a few names of the hundreds who have been killed for no reason other than that they are Muslim and are perceived in terms of all the stereotypes that have suddenly become so inflammable. While the numbers of lynchings have only increased since 2014, as Harsh Mander points out when he says that ‘98% of cow-related lynching since 2010 occurred after 2014’,6 the prejudice and intense hatred that can be mobilized into mob violence against the minority community is older, but has become especially potent with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement,  the demolition of the Babri Mosque, and especially the ascension to power at the centre of the BJP since 2014.

All the films that I am speaking about in this paper demonstrate this. We see this in films that were made before 2014 – Dharm (2007) and Shahid (2013), and of course in the later films Mulk (2018) and Nakkash (2019) as well. Clearly, the communal histories that the New Wave addressed as well as the impact on mainstream cinemas of the communal mobilization from the mid-1980s onwards form the cinematic context of these films.

The issue of a deep-rooted prejudice against the Muslim is clear and is addressed in Bhavna Talwar’s Dharm where the Brahmin priest protagonist, Pandit Chaturvedi, undergoes a crisis of identity, ethical behaviour and what his dharm (duty) should be when in a flash he realizes that he has been polluted unknowingly by his contact with a malechha Muslim, the little boy Mustafa, who he has loved and raised as his own Kartikeya. The visceral horror at this contact demands of Pandit Chaturvedi rigorous puri-fication processes and penance. His punishing rituals of penance do not alleviate his internal crisis. This is finally resolved for him only when he realizes the true meaning of dharm (duty and religion) at a critical moment, both internally and externally, when in the midst of a violent communal attack on Muslims, Pandit Chaturvedi’s own conscience is shaken.

Displays of extreme hatred against Muslims and justifications for fatal attacks on them are heard by him as he arrives to conduct a havan in the midst of the communal carnage that is taking place in the city of Benaras (Varanasi). Deeply revolted, and concerned about Kartikeya, Pandit Chaturvedi leaves for the Muslim quarter where he encounters fires, dead bodies, devastated and deserted spaces and an eerie silence broken by the crackling of fires, before murderous shouts resound as a Hindu mob chases a Muslim into the area bent on taking his life.

Leading the mob is Surya Prakash, the young man who Pt. Chaturvedi has tutored and for whose family he has been the family priest for ages. In a dramatic encounter, Pt. Chaturvedi sternly tells Surya Prakash that violence is the opposite of dharma which the latter refutes with the logic that he does not need sermons since this is the time of action, and exhorts his group to kill the Muslim. However, the deadly rioters stop in their tracks as Pt. Chaturvedi looks at them. A moment later, as little Kartikeya responds to Pt. Chaturvedi’s calling out to him, Surya Prakash announces that the priest has forgotten his duty out of attachment to the boy, and that he is going to kill the little fellow. As he moves forward with his sword raised, Pt. Chaturvedi holds his uplifted hand and the camera circles this dramatic encounter of the two at the centre of the group to the sound of beating drums (Fig. 1).

Figure 1 – Dharm, 2007.

While the camera continues to circle the two in medium close-up, Pt. Chaturvedi firmly addresses Surya Prakash, while continuing to hold his uplifted arm with the sword, that he has learnt that day that dharm is not just meditation but also duty and action. On the one hand, it is positive emotions towards others (sadbhavna) while sacrificing prejudice and ill will, while on the other it is humanism, and that what dharm is not is the raised swords, the murderous mob and the fires and destruction around them, turning to look at each evidence of adharm (lack of dharm) as he utters the words.

Answering his call, Kartikeya/Mustafa runs down and into his arms. Holding the child up against his shoulder, Pandit Chaturvedi walks through a wall of raised swords that come down as he walks past, to the singing of a Sanskrit verse upholding right action as a lesson to others. The group is shamed into departing while Surya Prakash is left behind, and he too finally drops his bloody sword. Pandit Chaturvedi and Kartikeya now walk into the morning light as Gandhi’s hymn of communal amity, Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram, pateet pavan Sita Ram/Ishwar Allah tero naam, sabko sanmati de Bhagwan... resounds on the soundtrack.

Thus, the vision of the film ultimately celebrates humanity as the highest religion and that it is from divine light that all human beings are born and hence there is no basis for discrimination. This is testimony to the values of plurality and equal respect for every community and religion – a vision of India that is enshrined in our Constitution and that our cinema has repeatedly stressed in the past, either implicitly or explicitly. It is this vision that is in crisis in the present which makes Dharm a film that speaks urgently to the issues of today. Echoes sound of Pattabhi Rama Reddy’s Samskara (1970) and of the protagonist Praneshcharya (Girish Karnad) who similarly battles with the meaning of dharm and Hinduism to arrive at a vision of a commitment to and the upholding of humanity as dharm at the end of that film.

Anubhav Sinha’s Mulk – addresses this issue further as it responds to the perception that all Muslims are terrorists – a perception that can become a dominant view about Muslim families when a member is in fact arrested as one. The legal case that follows against the father and uncle of the young man shot dead in an encounter is, as argued by their lawyer, Aarti, fundamentally premised on a visceral prejudice against Muslims and a widely held ‘Us vs Them’ discourse. In court, Aarti also raises the question of the allegiance of Muslims to their country eliciting from Advocate Murad Ali Mohammad, the uncle of the young terrorist, a statement that India is as much his nation as that of the Hindu public prosecutor’s, as well as statements about the right of Muslims to follow their religion while committed to their mulk, for it is to their nation that they are answerable and not to individual prejudices.

Aarti’s concluding remarks about the case point out how nations are not divided by lines on a map but in the minds of people, by colour, language, castes and creeds. And that the Public Prosecutor has divided the country into ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, whereas the Mohammad family chose the nation (mulk) over religion in 1947, a nation in which there are several different languages and religions. How then can justice in this nation be seen in terms of ‘Us’ and ‘Them’, she asks. Terrorism is a criminal act and not a communal one, she argues power-fully, for if this were so then one fourth of the population of the world would be cast under the clouds of suspicion.

Furthermore, she argues quite poignantly that ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ do not make the country – that people of different communities make the country together. Beginning as a Muslim Social, the film moves into the forms of court room drama where, in the judgement, the very idea of the nation at the time of Independence is powerfully upheld as are the laws of the land along with faith in the justice system and the Constitution of India (Fig. 2).

Figure 2 – Mulk, 2018.

That prejudice against Muslims and perceptions that Muslims are terrorists are so ingrained in the majority Hindu community that Public Prosecutors in cases against them vehemently echo these views is evident in both Mulk and in Shahid. Based on real stories and characters, the two films respond to what Hansal Mehta has called ‘the divisive times’ we live in.7 Both engage with the struggle of Muslims to live a life of dignity in circumstances that are stacked against the minority community for the reasons articulated above. Both update the Muslim Social in ways that the New Wave did addressing what every day real life means for Muslims in the increasingly majoritarian world of contemporary India. Both Mulk and Shahid also respond to questions of terrorism and become courtroom dramas where fundamental questions about being Muslim are raised, though the form of the two films is different.

Shahid was filmed using a gritty Naturalist vision that foregrounds the forces of heredity and environment that make a life of dignity almost impossible for Muslims. Naturalistic cinematic techniques of detailing the claustrophobia of lived environments and the challenges of daily living are combined in the film with radical guerrilla techniques of filming8 on location in the city whose quintessential post-colonial modernity has been repeatedly ruptured by communal violence for which Muslims are held responsible. Terror attacks have also reiterated and deepened perceptions that Muslims are terrorists or supportive of terrorism. Shahid, both the figure and the film, fights for poor innocent Muslims who are falsely charged, arrested. sometimes to die in custody only because they have the wrong name, as Shahid points out in court: ‘If this man’s name was Donald or Suresh, would he have been standing here?’ (Fig. 3).

Figure 3 – Shahid, 2013.

Shubhra Gupta reiterates this view in her review when she says, ‘if you were Muslim, and poor, and you were in the wrong place, or in the wrong eye, you were guilty of terrorism.’9 So, while Shahid fights for and wins acquittals in seventeen cases for Muslims falsely accused of terrorism, he himself becomes a victim of a terror act, killed by Hindu right wing vigilantes for having fought for and been responsible for the acquittal of accused Muslims who his murderers will not accept as innocent for the simple reason that they are Muslims. That the film thus articulates what Saeed Mirza calls a ‘no exit vision of the world’ for Muslims in this gritty naturalistic tale is clear.10 A memory of Mirza’s Salim Langde pe Mat Ro is also evoked both in the form and vision of this film. Will things ever change for Muslims in India; the films that have followed like Mulk and Nakkash do not suggest that they have.

A ‘no exit vision’ for Muslims is also articulated and complicated in Zaigham Imam’s 2019 Nakkash, a narrative about Allah Rakha, a Muslim craftsman who carves and sculpts beautiful images of Hindu gods and goddesses that are then plated in gold and silver and cover the walls of the sanctums sanctorum in the temples of Benaras. Allah Rakha takes immense pride in his ancestral profession, has tremendous respect and love for Hinduism and for Benaras as a Holy City, but is more or less ostracized by his own community who do not like that he works in Hindu temples. With increasing tension between the communities that seem bent on living in separate ghettoes, Allah Rakha’s journeys from his home to the temple he is currently working in seem rife with danger.

On the advice of Vedantiji, the head priest of that temple, he disguises his Muslim identity before he enters the complex changing from his lungi and kurta and skull cap to a trouser and a shirt and puts a red mark on his forehead to mark a non-Muslim identity. He spends his nights working in the sanctum sanctorum of the temple and leaves just before dawn, in time to change and wash and perform his fajr namaz at dawn on the ghats of the Ganga. And as he does his namaz, the call to prayer for Muslims melds with Hindu chants as the temples on the ghats also resound with the early morning awakening of the Gods. This image of Allah Rakha doing his namaz on a ghat on the banks of the Ganga, the holy river of Hindus, with the sounds of Muslim and Hindu prayers resounding on the soundtrack is extremely poignant, for it is this identity that is so threatened today (Fig. 4).

Figure 4 – Nakkash, 2019.

This soundscape makes an essential point about Benaras. Traditionally seen as the sacred city of Hindus, Benaras is equally a Muslim city, and Imam’s Benaras trilogy with Nakkash as the third film of the series11 reiterates this significant point which is also evident in Mulk.

While being a living symbol of the syncretic ganga jamuna tehzeeb for centuries, there is today an overwhelming contestation of this identity of Benaras with Hindutva politics violently appropriating the city as Hindu. What this contestation over the space and identity of the city signifies is brutal attempts at the negation of non-Hindu identities – both spatially and demographically. The current Vishwanath temple-Gyanvapi mosque controversy12 is the manifestation of these appropriations that may have begun earlier but which accelerated after 2014 with the building of the Kashi corridor and the appropriation of spaces around the mosque with the mosque itself being claimed now with demands for Hindu worship inside the mosque.  The Gyanvapi mosque is not just a powerful visible sign of Benaras being a Muslim city as well; it is also the locus of the debates around the identity of the people and the city of Benaras.

Imam’s Nakkash seems to eerily forecast this stage in the Hindutva appropriation of the city, as the ‘politics of religion’ (dharm ki raajneeti) as opposed to the politics of duty and commitment ‘karm ki rajneeti’ that the priest Vedantiji argues for, destroys all possibilities of a vision of intercommunity respect and amity that Vedantiji and Allah Rakha embody. It is this kind of violent politics of segregation of both communities that is bent on destroying the syncretic Hindu-Muslim identity of Benaras in which the temples of the city had beautiful images of gods and goddesses, quite often carved lovingly by Muslim artisans. The beauty of the city on the banks of the holy Ganga was not created by Hindus alone, and the image of Benaras is shadowed and darkened by the ugliness of the violent reality of the lives of the Muslims of this city

Ironically on the day of the unveiling of Allah Rakha’s work in the temple on Ram Navami day, when on a night of lights and fireworks,  the images of the deities are consecrated and believed to have been infused with life, and the city on the Ganga is manifest in her most beautiful form – a day that should have also been the celebration of Allah Rakha’s work – the violent ugliness of the disease of fundamentalism and the politics of religion negates the possibilities of coexistence. Shiva’s trishul is deployed by the cynical Hindutva politician, Munna Bhaiyya, to destroy the life of the one who embodies the spirit of mutual respect, tolerance and love.

Cruelly stabbing Allah Rakha with the trishul several times, Munna’s violent mobilization of the symbol of Shiva to kill Allah Rakha, the Muslim devotee of Hindu gods, demonstrates that Hindutva has completely distorted the meaning of Hinduism and of worship and devotion in Hinduism. And as Allah Rakha’s life slowly ebbs away, the shanti mantras (the verses of peace) resonating from the temple after the unveiling of the beauty of the gods whose home in the temple Allah Rakha has decorated so lovingly is poignantly and tragically ironic.

Three of the four films selected for this paper on the diseased body politic of contemporary India are set in Benaras, and the city seems to be the locus for the struggle for the soul of India as an earlier idea of a plural multicultural polity can be seen to be rent into shreds before our eyes.

The films I have been discussing dramatize this struggle and attempt in different ways to retrieve those ideas, forms of being and values that India represented and that is being destroyed so speedily by majoritarian Hindutva politics. It is the Muslims who fundamentally bear the brunt of this brutal reality and the films are both witnesses to the processes of literal and symbolic destruction as they are also critiques of and embodiments of the struggles against the reprehensible and diseased mentalities that are at the root of the ruination that we are experiencing today. Is there a space for a different vision of the body politic – or a cure/recovery from the malignancy that has set in? Do we wonder with Yeats:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?13

Or is the beast amongst us wreaking havoc at it tramples on all that has been sacred and valuable so far? It seems as if the latter were true.

Footnotes :

1. An earlier version of this paper was presented on 18 June 2022 at one of the seminar sessions on ‘New Perspectives on the Indian New Wave: Fifty Years on, I & II’. The seminars were part of an ACLA  conference held virtually between 15-18 June, 2022. I thank the organizers and participants for their responses.

2. Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, ‘Entangling the Medical Humanities’, p. 35 in Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods (eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2016, pp. 35-49.

3. Amrita Goswami,  ‘“New Bollywood” and the Emergence of a “Production House” Culture’, South Asian Popular Culture, 2017, pp. 1-13. DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2017.1294805

4. For a comprehensive account of India’s ‘indie’ cinemas, see Ashvin Immanuel Devasundaram, India’s New Independent Cinema: Rise of the Hybrid. Routledge, New York and London, 2016. See also his edited volume, Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood: The New Independent Cinema Revolution. Routledge, New York and London, 2018.

5. Ira Bhaskar, ‘The Indian New Wave’ in K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake (eds.), A Handbook of Indian Cinemas. Routledge, New York & London, 2013, pp. 19-33.

6. Harsh  Mander, ‘Lynching, the Scourge of New India’, The Hindu, 16 October 2019. https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/lynching-the-scourge-of-new-india/article29693818.ece?homepage=true&utm_

campaign=socialflow. Accessed 10 June 2022.

7. Hansal Mehta, ‘Screen Exclusive: In Conversation with “Shahid” Director and On Screen Shahid Azmi’, Interview with Screen, 18 October 2013, https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/entertainment-others/screen-exclusive-in-conversation-with-shahid-director-and-on-screen-shahid-azmi/ Accessed 10 June 2022.

8. Hansal Mehta, ibid., in the interview with Screen, Mehta speaks about the shooting of the film thus: ‘It’s been shot in guerrilla style. The film was shot on all available digital formats without really worrying about which lens was available.’

9. Shubhra Gupta, ‘“Shahid” Review: It needed to Have Been Made’, The Indian Express, 19 October 2013, http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/shahid-review-it-needed-to-have-been-made/1184193/1. Accessed on 10 June 2022.

10. Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen, Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema. Tulika Books, New Delhi, 2009, p. 294.

11. The other two films in this trilogy are Dozakh: In Search of Heaven (2015) and Alif (2017).

12. For a discussion of the political, emotional and cultural implications of this debate and controversy, see Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s ‘Weaponising Faith: the Gyanvapi Mosque-Kashi Vishwanath Dispute’, The Indian Express, 13 April 2021. https://indianexpress.

com/article/opinion/columns/gyanvapi-mosque-dispute-kashi-vishwanath-temple-asi-7270802/ Accessed on 14 June 2022; and Apoorvanand’s ‘Emotions Ignited: The Supreme Court is Battling Monsters of Its Own Making’, The Wire, 6 July 2022.

https://thewire.in/law/emotions-ignited-the-supreme-court-is-battling-monsters-of-its-own-making. Accessed 10 July 2022.

13. W.B. Yeats,  ‘The Second Coming’, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (1989). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming. Accessed 12 June 2022.

Mapping Muslim perceptions: CSDS-Lokniti Archives

SANJAY KUMAR

THE last decade has witnessed a significant change in Indian politics. Not only has the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) managed to win two successive Lok Sabha elections (2014 and 2019) and numerous state assembly elections in different states, but it has also emerged as the dominant party. At the national level, the BJP has more than doubled its vote share during last decade. From 18.8% votes in 2009 Lok Sabha elections, it managed to poll 37.4% votes during the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

The Congress support base has declined significantly during the last one decade. The BJP has swept the Lok Sabha election in many states of North India with a sizeable Muslim population. Despite the Samajwadi Party (SP), Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) alliance in 2019, the BJP went on to sweep the 2019 Lok Sabha election. Recently not only has the BJP returned to power in UP, but it has also won the crucial by-election in two Lok Sabha seats – Azamgarh and Rampur. It is important to note that both these constituencies have a sizeable number of Muslim voters. With these victories, there is an increasing belief that Muslim voters have also shifted towards the BJP in significant numbers.

All this evidence suggests there is hardly any shift in the Muslim support for the BJP. It has roughly garnered between 5-8% votes among Muslim voters – both from OBC Muslims as well as upper caste Muslims. This evidence does not indicate any significant shift in Muslim support for the BJP. On the other hand, what it suggests is a decline in Muslim support for the Congress – evidently more among the OBC Muslims and less among upper caste Muslims. There was a time when nearly 10% of Muslims voted for the left parties, but this has significantly declined over the years. The regional parties have been the biggest beneficiary of Muslim support over the last couple of decades. There has been a significant shift in Muslim support for regional parties in different states.

It is not surprising to note that only 1-2% Muslims claimed to be closer to the BJP while nearly 10% admitted to being closer to the Congress over the years. This is reflected in their political preference over several Lok Sabha elections. Evidence from surveys suggest Prime Minister Narendra Modi not only remains the most popular leader in India at the moment, but his popularity has also increased over the years, with some minor hiccups. However, his popularity among Muslim voters remains almost unchanged, with only a minor increase.

Evidence suggests that the army and the Election Commission of India remain the two most trusted institutions in India while political parties remain the least trusted. Evidence also suggests little change in the levels of trust shown by the people in these institutions over the years.

While one does not find major difference in the levels of trust among Hindus and Muslims in various institutions, however, when it comes to distrust in various institutions, there is a noticeable difference among them. A higher number of Muslims show no trust in Parliament compared to the Hindus. This is also the case with regard to the President of India with a sizeable number of Muslims showing no trust. Among Hindus, five per cent do not show any trust in the President.

Given the political preference of the Muslims, it is not surprising that a large number of Muslims do not show any trust in the Prime Minister; among Hindus, the figure is nine per cent. There is a significant difference among Hindus and Muslims who show a great deal of trust in the prime minister. Evidence collected systematically over the years clearly indicate lower degrees of trust shown by Muslims compared to Hindus in various other institutions like the army, Election Commission of India and political parties. Though there is a marginal difference between Hindus and Muslims who show a great degree of trust, the gap is much wider among those who show no trust in these institutions.

Evidence from surveys clearly indicates that Muslims are more religious compared to Hindus. Evidence also indicates that there has barely been any change in the levels of religiosity either among the Hindus or Muslims. A large number of Hindus engage in religious activities like offering prayer, observing fasts, or reading religious books, but not on a regular basis. A large number of Muslims engage in religious activity on a more regular basis compared to the Hindus.

Books

RELIGION AS CRITIQUE: Islamic Critical Thinking From Mecca to Marketplace by Irfan Ahmad. The University of North Carolina Press. North Carolina, 2017.

SIYASI MUSLIMS: A Story of Political Islams in India by Hilal Ahmed. Penguin, Delhi, 2019.

SELF AND SOVEREIGNTY: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 by A. Jalal. Routledge, London, 2000.

CONTESTED HOMELANDS: Politics of Space and Identity by Nazima Parveen. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2021.

CLAIMING CITIZENSHIP AND NATION: Muslim Politics and State Building in North India 1947-1986 by Aishwarya Pundit. Oxon, Routledge, 2022.

The religious bigot considers me an infidel

And the infidel deems me to be a Muslim!

– Allama Iqbal1

MUSLIM identity in India is so stereotypical that comments such as ‘you are too modern to be a Muslim, why don’t you wear a burqa? Do your parents support your education? Do you cheer for India or Pakistan in a game of cricket?’ are never seen as insensitive or offensive. Muslims are always perceived as a homogenous group who are averse to modernism and nationalism, hence asynchronous in the contemporary world.

However, the recent academic literature on Indian Muslims takes us beyond these conventional representations. The books written by Irfan Ahmad (2017), Hilal Ahmed (2019), Nazima Parveen (2021), and Aishwarya Pandit (2022) have tried to show how to think of Muslim identity in contemporary India. Using the historical approach, these authors have made a strong effort to argue that the present manifestation of Muslim identity cannot be explained without an adequate understanding of the past. This emerging literature, in this sense, contests the prejudices attached to Muslims by underlining the ways in which political, social, and even religious Muslim identities are historically constituted.

Irfan Ahmad’s Religion as Critique: Islamic Critical Thinking from Mecca to the Marketplace is a sequel to his former work Islamism and Democracy in India. He talks about the dichotomy that the West has created between secular and religious, rational and fanaticism, modern and traditional, and basically between itself and Islam. The author has a tedious task of going through genealogies of critique in the West and Islam. The dichotomy tells us about the power dynamics which make the West the subject and the non-westerners the object of critique. Ahmad has divided his book into two parts, the first part is ‘Formulation’ and the second part is ‘Illustration’. In the first part, he goes at great length to explain how the Enlightenment, which the West presents as objective, liberal, and devoid of religion, is actually ‘not a break from Christianity as commonly understood but its reconfiguration whereby the West/Christianity/Europe enacted an immunity to protect itself from any critique while subjecting all others – “the Rest” as it were – to critique’ (p. 64). The author considers the Enlightenment as an ethnic project and its focus on reason as thoroughly local and what he calls ‘pitted’ itself against a series of Others, Islam being one of them. The Enlightenment’s claim on universality gets challenged when the Black or feminist scholarship sees it as Eurocentric and androcentric (absence of the voices).

By setting its standards for civilization, the West has made non-westerners look inferior and dependent. To show a lack of intellectual ability in Islam, the West portrays Islam as anti-critique because the critique is a sign of Enlightenment. The author advocates that the tradition of critique is cultural and non-western traditions have their history of critique, which the West chooses to ignore. For him, ‘ideas, sentiments, mental conditions, types of knowledge, forms of authority, language capacity, motivations, the (un)sayable, notions about the private and public, facial appearance, hairstyle, conceptions of home’ etc. (p. 57) are paramount to understand a form of life it rests inside. Ahmad questions the popular narrative that the critique started with Immanuel Kant. He traces the Genealogy of critique to show that the tradition of critique started long before Kant. He considers the axial age (800 to 200 BC) as an era of critique wherein many thinkers, like Confucius, Buddha, Tzu, Socrates, among others, were reformers who were critical of the societies they were part of. Relying on his narrative power, Ahmad explains that a culture of critique existed at the time of the Prophet Muhammad and long after his demise. He shows the presence of tanqid/naqd (critique) in the Islamicate traditions of South Asia put forward in the Urdu language. The author cites the example of the Raushaniya Movement in India, where its proponents questioned why they could pray only in the Arabic language when God was all-knowing. He argues that there has been a tradition of immanent critique, which may not resonate well with the western understanding of the critique.

In the part ‘Illustration’, Ahmad discusses the ideas of Abul A’la Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami. According to the author, Maududi recognized critique as an essential aspect of religion. The Britishers, for effective management, divided the nation into the lines of caste/religion; the census counted those as Muslims who chose to call themselves so. However, Maududi did not consider anyone calling themselves Muslim as Muslim. Being Muslim required the critical ability to shed dogmas from the religion. Nothing was above the critique for Maududi. It was paramount ‘to critique from a Qur’anic viewpoint those thoughts and principles of civilization [tahzib v tamaddun] that are spreading in the world, to interpret the principles of the Qur’an and Sunna in the fields of philosophy, science, politics, economics, civilization, society, everything, and to apply those principles to the conditions of the modern age.’ (p. 136) While Maududi was doing tanqid (critique) of various past scholars, he was an object of critique for the Jamaat members. He was criticized for being too harsh on women (especially after his death by the followers of the Jamaat) and for being too loose about the Islamic laws (for backing the candidacy of Fatima Jinnah for the presidential elections).

Irfan Ahmad’s anthropological work compels one to appreciate the authenticity of non-western discourses that remain hidden under powerful narrations. Though Ahmad focuses more on western perceptions, his analysis is useful for making sense of the cultural and political manifestations of Islamophobia in India. It is clear that Hindutva is trying to impose its ideology on Muslims by invoking the idea of nationalism; the West, under the guise of modernity, is trying to universalize its radical ideas of Christianity. Irfan Ahmad is right in underlining the culture of critique in South Asia from a non-western perspective. However, one cannot overlook the fact that there is also a strange stagnation of certain socio-cultural values, which are justified in the name of Islam. The culture of critique, which Ahmed is trying to demonstrate, has its own sociology. The power structure among Muslims dominated by caste, class, and gender considerations plays a significant role. This might be why the critique involving the reformation of Muslim societies towards women-centric issues still wound many intellectuals.

Hilal Ahmed’s Siyasi Muslims: A Story of Political Islams in India tries to break stereotypes attached to the definition of Muslimness. He attempts to bring forth various aspects of being Muslim that our common political discourses overlook. The first word, ‘Siyasi’, which in Urdu/Persian means ‘political’ in the title, can be explained in two ways: ‘Muslims are often described as a politically conscious community. The discussion on Muslim vote bank and Muslim appeasement relies on the assumption that Muslims are fully aware of the complexities of the electoral system and therefore always act accordingly’ and second, ‘It is used to denote those individuals and groups who are not trustworthy, who work only to further their own vested interests and never join in with mainstream national interests’ (p. 28).

The book is divided into three parts. Part I is titled ‘Making Sense of Siyasi Muslims’, Part II is ‘Unpacking Siyasi Muslims’, and the last one is ‘The Politics of Siyasi Muslims’. Part I explores how the image of Muslims as Siyasi came into existence. Muslims seen as numbers today or census category of minority has roots in colonial India. The British state of India created a discourse of majority and minority on the religious lines to help them rule Indian subjects easily. The discourse created awareness of self-identity among Hindus and Muslims, and we still carry the impressions from the past and see ourselves through the lens of the created identities. The part also debunks the myth that Muslims are staunch believers (Pakka Musalman), which stops them from transcending the limits of their religion. The author, through the survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) taken in 21 states of India with a sample size of 5681 participants, shows that most Muslims do not consider themselves very religious. The question arises: does being religious connote aversion to modernism?

Part II debunks the myth that Muslims are a composite whole, not divided as Hindus. Hindutva often uses this notion to sustain itself among non-Muslims. The narration that the Muslims are a homogenous group falls flat on its face when we look at the diagonally opposite problems of different Muslims divided by castes. The author explains this point by bringing in the viewpoints of Muslims from different castes. Those belonging to the upper caste Muslims (Ashraf) did not consider the standpoints of lower caste Muslims (Pasmanda). While the upper caste Muslims were in favour of universalized reservation of Muslims in India, they were not in favour of the SC status of Dalit Muslims in India. Dalit Muslims were again not in favour of reservations for the Muslims because they felt they suffered differently than the rest. It also talks about the issue of Triple Talaq on which the Muslims were divided, yet it is assumed that Muslim men keep divorcing their wives indiscriminately and Muslim women have no one to save. It reminds me of the quote by Spivak, ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’, which can also be read as ‘Hindu men saving Muslim women from Muslim men.’

The last part of the book talks about the Muslim vote bank and appeasement and how ‘Muslim participation at various stages of political processes was recognized as homogeneous, collective community response’ (p. 173). It is generally assumed that there are so-called Muslim issues that, if addressed, would get political leaders victory in elections. Muslims are believed to be happy in their fanatic world, wherein they are not concerned about the issues like poverty, employment, inflation, and education.

The book seems to be descriptive, yet it is argumentative. There is the use of mixed methods research wherein the arguments are based on surveys, observations, reports, interviews, texts, short books, and photos for the ethnographic study of the research problems. The book differs from past scholarship because it does not treat Muslims as a monolithic group but suffers from the fallacy of oversimplification. Through a survey, the book’s first part concludes that most Muslims do not consider themselves religious. Following religious rituals and having a sense of being Muslim are two different things. Muslims may or may not heed to five pillars of Islam, but it cannot be deduced that Muslims are not conscious of their identity as Muslims. The author argues that Muslims are not politically conscious but does being politically conscious imply disloyalty? Moreover, the author does not discuss to what extent the state laws can interfere with the religious laws in India in the presence of so many Islams in India.

The title of the third book, Contested Homelands: Politics of Space and Identity by Nazima Parveen speaks for itself. The former books had titles with clear words such as Islam and Muslims to show who was being discussed in them. Despite the absence of such words in the title, it gives two pictures. One is of Muslims being strangers in their native land, and the second is of Muslims living poorly in ghettos because of their backwardness. This instant imagination speaks volumes about the forms of lives we share in India. The author does a historical study of the so-called Muslim areas in Delhi. The Muslim areas are often called ‘mini Pakistan’ because they are seen as sympathizers of Pakistan and have separatist ideologies. The book, according to the author, ‘examines the process of identification, demarcation, organization and/or reorganization of space on religious lines, questions the dominant imagination of ‘Muslim areas, an ambiguous yet politically vibrant category’ (p. 21). The book explores the gradual transformation of caste/craft based mohallas into Hindu-Muslim pockets in Delhi in the colonial and postcolonial eras. It studies the aftermath of segregation, quite evident today itself. The book takes us through four ‘canonical urban developments’ from the 1940s to the 1970s.

The transformation of the traditional craft/caste based mohallas in the 1940s was divided on religious lines, which the author explains were initially for religious processions and later for electoral representations. The second major transformation began in 1947 and continued in the 1950s. The Partition of British India, which led to the migration of people, changed the demography and reduced the Muslim population in India. Muslims who stayed back were compelled to shift to demarcated Muslim mohallas for the first time. The demarcation led to the invention of many spaces like ‘Muslim Refugee zone’ and ‘Muslim area’. The events added to the construction of imagined the Hindu-Muslim identities. The 1960s saw these Muslim zones being marginalized on the grounds of being unhygienic and underdeveloped. Finally, the Congress government’s National Regen-eration Programme in the 1970s targeted these Muslim zones as ‘mini Pakistans’ and posed them as an internal threat to national integrity.

The author is a natural storyteller who managed to explain complex and intertwined issues with simple yet powerful narration. The author has shown through historiography how space was defined in the colonial and postcolonial eras. Agreeing with Sudipta Kaviraj, the author argues that because of colonial modernity, communities that were fuzzy developed a new self-perception about themselves. The author emphasizes that ‘the statistical counting and spatial mapping contributed significantly to this process. Consequently, it became possible to think of a homogeneous community, the exact numbers of its members, its common interests as well as geographical distribution, which led to the further concretisation of community and space relationships’ (p. 24). The horrors of the community construction still haunt Muslims because they are not seen as Indians. The author also hints at the binary that gets created with the presence of dominant ideology.

What counts as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘allowed’, ‘prohibited’, ‘national’, and ‘anti-national’ depends on the one who has the power to define these terms. The ‘less or least powered’ are seen as opposing the mainstream ideology. In Indira Gandhi’s regime, Muslims arguing against male sterilization were targeted as anti-modern and anti-national. The situation is not different today. Muslims speaking against CAA-NRC, Triple Talaq, and mob lynching are termed as anti-national. The author has meticulously argued how changing notions of the Muslim community, and their living space is an aftermath of historical processes; however, she does not talk about the measures that can be taken to overcome the effect of the historical processes. It is easier to reach  urban educated classes of society but how can we create awareness among uneducated classes? Uneducated classes are often more vulnerable to mob lynchings and fake news.

Claiming Citizenship and Nation: Muslim Politics and State Building in North India 1947-1986 by Aishwarya Pandit sheds light on the notions of citizenship in Postcolonial India. She sets her story in Uttar Pradesh, known as Congress’s heartland. She aims to ‘examine the UP Congress relationship with Muslims and implications of that relationship for Muslims who stayed on after Partition. In particular, it draws upon “Muslim” experiences in UP and north India to understand the nature of Muslim politics after 1947’ (p. 19). She intends to challenge the common notion found in academics that all Muslims left India voluntarily. Pundit recalls Riazur Rehman Sherwani, the grandson of Habibur Rehman Khan Sherwani, claiming that in 1950, after the Holi riots, Muslims began to migrate. There was a constant threat to them caused by what she calls ‘Hindu counter-mobilization’. Pundit agrees with Tanweer Fazal’s claim that ‘Indian Muslims continue to suffer from persistent stigmatization to which they respond with aggressiveness, even brashness and sometimes meekness.’

Contrary to the common notion, Pundit explains that even under Nehruvian secularism, Muslims always felt threatened and were subject to humiliation and violence. She also challenges the notion that Muslims in India succumbed to their minority status after the Partition. Muslims, she claims, did not always accommodate the dominant Nehruvian Politics. They changed sides when the Congress government did not hear them.

The book argues that the news of Partition infuriated various rank and file Congressmen over Muslims in UP. The non-Muslims felt threatened by the presence of  Muslim community. The threat led to violence against Muslims, which the author believes has been ignored by historians. Muslims in UP were removed from government services, and eventually, there was a decline in Muslim representation in UP. The Hindu counter mobilization came in the form of the demand for making Hindi a Rashtriya (National) language. The idea was to unite the Hindu nation through this language. The first state to work in this direction was UP where Hindi was made an official language in the government services. In response to this development, Muslim politics of language demanding due recognition of Urdu at par with the Hindi language emerged across India. The author also talks about the case of the Husainabad Trust in Lucknow, in which Shias united to get control over the trust from the state. They showed their strength by actively participating in political discourses. They had a close association with the trust, so it was vital for them to fight for their cause. She is the only author here who has represented the Shia community in her book. The discussion on the Ahmadiyya community of Muslims is missing from all the books.

Pundit’s work can be seen as contributing to the historiography of UP. Her findings, based more on lived experiences, resonate well with the observations made by Nazima Parveen and Hilal Ahmed in different contexts. She, along the lines of Hilal Ahmed, shows that it is a myth created by BJP that Muslims do not vote for it. Muslims do vote for non-Congress parties as there is diversity in Muslim politics. Ahmed, Parveen, and Pandit argue that the idea of Muslim representation is highly diversified simply because the Muslim community is not a homogenous entity. Though Pundit and Parveen study two different regions, they find similar trajectories, especially concerning Muslim refugees. In this sense, the concept of an imagined and pure nation is problematized. Nazima Parveen rightly argues that the idea of Pakistan is always kept alive in postcolonial India to make notions such as Hindu Rashtra and secularism politically relevant, especially in the 1970s. Pandit and Parveen show that Congress’s stated politics of secularism has always been dubious. If we look at Indira Gandhi’s politics in the 1970s, especially her attitude towards leaders like Imam Bukhari, Bhindranwala, or Deoras, it becomes clear how she used the ideas of secularism to sustain Congress’s electoral success.

These four books, it could be argued, represent a specific intellectual trajectory. The authors take the everyday life issues as a point of reference to trace the genealogies of those factors that shape popular assumptions and belief, determine political attitudes, and produces new imaginations of Muslimness. They challenge the conceptual frameworks offered to study Indian Muslim communities. They also show constructive unease with established methodological premises. Perhaps that might be why these books can propose tentative, fixable, and open-ended arguments for future research on Muslims in India.

HINA MUSHTAQ

Assistant Professor

Department of Philosophy

Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh

WHEN GOD STOPS FIGHTING: How Religious Violence Ends by Mark Juergensmeyer. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2022.

IT is unarguably a truism to say that religion and war go together. Or, is it war and religion? Which is the cause and which is the effect? May be it is all in the mind, as the author, Mark Juergensmeyer states: ‘Religious ideas and images can also be of service in helping to legitimize the fight, to imply that this is not just a contest between two equally moral sides, but a battle where one side is favoured by God. The invariable implication, from the point of view of those imaging a treacherous enemy, is that God is on their side.’ Juergensmeyer, a very distinguished scholar in the area of war and religious violence, is quite unassuming in remarking that he would like to complete his comprehension of the ideas behind religious nationalism and religion-related violence. Along with this motive, he would also like to check out if there are natural endings to these intense and passionate movements, awash with violent outbursts.

In this short, but valuable, book, Juergensmeyer details the ideas behind three globally-relevant movements: the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (2015-17), the Muslim Mindanao in the southern Philippines (1969-2019) and, the Khalistan movement for Sikh separatism in Punjab, India. Of course, there is a personal disclaimer from the author that readers must not construe the cases he has taken up in the book, as reflecting the violent nature of any particular religion/religious movement. In keeping with his style of gathering information, there are over 40 interviews he has held for writing this book. Evidently, with a book of this nature and size, the readers would not find interview transcripts, but a well embroidered theorizing of thoughts and ideas of the partakers of the three religio-violent movements.

While writing about the Islamic State case, Juergensmeyer makes no effort to conceal the horrors of the violent movement, for that would have revealed but the half-truth. The personal stories of Ahmad, Samir, Hadiya or Khalid bring out the bitter façade behind IS-related violent movements in Iraq and Sudan. The Jihadi Movement, as it is known notoriously, also has a global undertone to it, with sympathizers belonging to non-Arabic nations like Germany and the USA. For instance, writes Juergensmeyer, ‘The ISIS-related terrorists in the 2015 attack in San Bernardino, California, who killed fifteen and wounded twenty-two others, were American residents from Saudi Arabia. The Paris nightclub assault that year and the Brussels airport bombing in 2016 were carried out by Belgians of Moroccan descent. The Orlando shooter at a gay nightclub in 2016 was an American of Afghan descent....’ However, such sympathizers outside the ISIS, and many even inside the ISIS, feel that the global Caliphate objective was unattainable, given the corruption rampant inside and the out-of-control hypocrisy propagated by the religio-centric leaders. For the last few years, the IS movement in Iraq and Syria have been hushed, but still there are many soldiers, who either abandoned IS, or who were either ejected out by the IS, who naively deem that a great Islamic Caliphate is possible. Hence, given a chance they would be willing to take up arms again. Maybe this is only a pause in violence, and not a full stop.

For reasons best known to themselves, Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) wanted a separate Muslim Mindanao (in the Philippines) region for themselves. Juergensmeyer, when writing about this, dwells deeply into the historical portion of how and why MILF began their ideological and socio-political warfare, of course replete with blood, death and gore. Though not as must romanticized as the IS, the Mindanao conflict has had its share of global recognition, from involving Libya to Canada to Norway. At long last, a peace negotiation with the Philippines government lay to rest the claims of the arch-enemies, who now pose for photos side by side. There are still shots in the region now, but these are the very important Covid-shots.

There is quite a focus on Zaffarwal, the leader of the Khalistan Commando Force, who spearheaded the Khalistan Movement along with others, after the death of Bhindranwale. From interviews with Zaffarwal, the reckless support of a neighbouring country becomes apparent, though it is not new knowledge. The Khalistan Movement is a case of how fragmentation, disorganization and ineptitude can effortlessly derail an ideology, a philosophy and a struggle for ‘respect’. It is also a strong example of state vs community scuffle. The Indian state whipping up a plan of action to completely derail the separatist movement is also documented in the book, so that the nation is not projected as being prejudiced and narrow-minded. As practical measures, development of pilgrimage centres of Sikhs are being carried out, with a view to ‘...provide the respect that many Sikhs felt they had not previously received.’ Nonetheless, it should not come as a shocker if the Khalistan Movement is revitalized, as the author understandably and agitatedly states: ‘The lure of Khalistan is still in the air...’

True to its title, the book enumerates a few reasons why ‘Gods Stop Fighting’, in the guise of humans: lack of leadership (as in the case of IS), schisms in the movement (as in the case of Moro Mindanao) and a loss of vision (as in the case of the Khalistan Movement). In addition to these solid reasons, a few other explanations for war-like movements to end were the desperation of the forces that they cannot win against a disciplined armed force, lack of support of local populace and most importantly, the change in perspective of leaders. By change in perspective, the leaders of these organizations begin to appreciate the concern and genuine approach of the ‘enemy’ (aka the state) to absorb them into the mainstream. May be movements lose their steam when the warriors know that the time has come to right a wrong, that their dignity will be restored and that their freedom will not be taken for granted.

In all, this is a very insightful book. The author himself has not minced any words to state that what he has written is not new and fresh. Rather, as a very unpretentious scholar, Juergensmeyer makes mention of other scholars in the field, whose inputs he has taken cognisance of. The bibliography is sound and wide-ranging, and would prove to be of great use to any scholar wishing to take up studies in this area. Moreover, Juergensmeyer’s book will be a starting point for readers to go back and read his previous books, since he has wittingly aroused one’s curiosity. This book is after all ‘the culmination of thirty years of studying the rise of religious violence around the world…’ What we know from this book is how violence ends, but how did it all begin? Time to check out Juergensmeyer’s other books.

G. Narasimha Raghavan

Associate Professor – Economics

Jansons School of Business

Coimbatore

THE MUSLIM VANISHES: A Play by Saeed Naqvi. Vintage, Penguin, 2022.

IN 2003, there came a film that threw up an imaginative and painful question: Can there be a nation without women? That movie was Maturbhoomi, and it looked at issue like female infanticide and gender equations. Reading Naqvi’s book, The Muslim Vanishes, seems similar in feeling, but very different in context, content, sentiment, and sensitivity. The core idea in the book, which is written in the form of a play, is what will happen to India, if one fine day, all Muslims disappeared! Will there be no community to blame for communal riots? Will Hindu gau-rakshaks be made redundant? Will the police find it difficult to find scapegoats?

Saeed Naqvi, a very respected senior journalist, who calls himself ‘an itinerant journalist’, raises many such pertinent questions in his well thought out and well written play. The play begins with two media personnel discussing a rumour that 200 million Muslims from India have just vanished. They are troubled for a variety of reasons. They are not able to make sense of the situation. Along with these two protagonists, many others like an emerging leader of a socialist party, an old-guard party hardliner, Dalit representatives, and common men find place. There is some confusion on how and what to make of the situation. So, a judicial court is organized where Hindu and Muslim representatives give out their points of view. The court has met to find explanations for two chief questions: Why did Muslims leave India? What should be done to welcome them back? Interestingly, there is a jury of very remarkable, inspiring and perceptive persons, who have time-travelled to watch the proceedings in the court and offer their wisdom.  The jury consist of personalities who had celebrated the diversity of India through their works – art, literature, social service, and music. It would be a grand surprise for the readers to note who they are. After reading the names, discerning readers would nod their heads in approval to Naqvi’s choice.

Incidentally, the book is also a play on how words can mean many different things to people, depending on their background, orientation, mentality and exposure to others’ ideas. For instance, one of the characters in the play, Anita, on hearing about the abrupt vanishing of Muslims from India, says this: ‘Isn’t that precisely what the Hindu Right project is all about? They have been telling us that India will be a land of milk and honey once the Hindu Rashtra is established. By the looks of it, that dream has turned into a reality.’ On reading this line, one cannot help smile at the exceeding immaturity of the character.  Now, take the situation where Naqvi talks to us through the voice of Shuklaji (another character in the play), when he notices that a Dalit person has been nominated to be a councillor: ‘Until last week you stood outside the gate. Only when Satyam opened the gate did you dare walk up even to the portico. You took off your shoes. You never dared enter this living room. That was the protocol. But I see things have changed. I am not blaming you but think about it.’

The author, in his own inimitable way, builds a case for understanding what Muslims had to go through during the last seven decades in India. He is neither claiming the victim-image for Muslims, not is he reproaching the Hindu community for atrocities. In this way, this play is well poised to act as a briefing to readers on what has been silently happening in the country, except a few sensational cases involving riots and lynchings. It can be noticed that Naqvi does not broach open the subject of Hindu-Muslim disharmony at the beginning. Instead, he slowly builds up pace, citing important incidents of disharmony/harmony between the two religions. Poets from Muslim community revering Hindu goddesses, Hindu poets writing in Urdu, are some examples. There are many such examples, which may surprise novice readers.

If you are looking for a conclusion to the debate between Hindu-Muslim unity/disunity, you will not find any, because the author, very skilfully, has managed to glide over this deliberation. Rather, he has voiced his thoughts on examining beliefs, dogmas and the politics relating to Hindu-Muslim relationships. However, lest it be surmised that this is also one of those books that let the question of inter-religious struggles float aimlessly in the air, be assured that this book does not belong to that category. The book has, indeed, come up with a suggestion to address this. Maybe everyone will not be enthralled by the suggestions though, because amending the Constitution is one among the submissions. Now, this is a big deal! But, the author has spelled out this proposal through a much respected Indian personality (time-traveller, so obviously the person cannot be ridiculed by vested interests). Sometimes, this proposal looks naïve, and at other times, it looks to be the only way out. It is best for the readers to take a stand.

One of the most enduring impressions of this small book is how impactful the dialogues are, when coming out from the dramatis personae.  For instance, read this insightful conversation by a Muslim Representative in the court: ‘Britain is a Christian-Anglican monarchy. But at one stage, there were four Muslims in the English cricket team; there were powerful Hindu ministers in the cabinet; for years, the most charismatic mayor of London was a Muslim – the rule of law obtains equal opportunity for all. Likewise, Hindustan would not have been anti-Muslim. Yes, the balance of power would have favoured the Hindus, but there would not have been any injustice towards the Muslims. After all, we have lived together in this country. To be Hindu does not mean being anti-Muslim.’ There are both contemporary and vintage flavours to the thoughts documented in this book. Saeed Naqvi’s book is provocative, but in a very sophisticated way.

G. Narasimha Raghavan

Associate Professor – Economics

Jansons School of Business

Coimbatore

LIBERALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS by Francis Fukuyama. Hachette India, 2022.

THIRTY years ago, following the collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, Francis Fukuyama, whose name is almost synonymous with liberal ideology, gained international recognition for his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man proclaiming the history’s ‘end’, arguing that liberal democracy was essentially the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution. He adopted Hegel’s historical teleology to announce what in his view marked the ultimate end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of western liberal democracy as the ultimate form of government. He was then seen as a naive believer in the inevitability of a western-defined idea of progress, and as someone who was blind to liberal democracy’s failings.

In Liberalism and Its Discontents Fukuyama provides a staunch defence of  what he calls ‘classical’ or ‘humane’ liberalism. Liberalism is famously difficult to define. It has become one of those words that mean different things to different political constituencies. ‘By liberalism’, writes Fukuyama, ‘I refer to the doctrine… that argued for the limitation of the powers of governments through law and ultimately constitutions, creating institutions protecting the rights of individuals living under their jurisdiction.’ Born of events such as the English Civil War and the Enlightenment, this liberalism encouraged diversity of thought, religion, and ethnicity. Classical liberalism, therefore, Fukuyama explains, can be understood ‘as an institutional solution to the problem of governing over diversity.’

While classical liberalism is realistic about the human propensity for discord and violence, it is idealistic about the need for political equality and our potential for collective improvement. Distinguishing between liberalism and democracy Fukuyama claims that the heyday of what came to be known as ‘liberal democracy’, classical liberalism’s apotheosis, was the period from 1950 to the 1970s. After that, liberalism began to change the course. It became self-destructive and even illiberal as its core principles were pushed to extremes. Fukuyama now admits that liberalism has been in retreat in recent years. Under attack from both left and right, it is from the left that the more serious intellectual challenge to liberalism comes. Fukuyama recognizes this fact and attempts to address the left’s criticism. Essentially a system that is founded on the principle of equality of individual rights, law and freedom, it has, in its evolution, given rise to  inequal-ities in each of those realms.

The glaring economic inequalities conspic-uously witnessed in counties such as USA and the UK can be attributed to the failure of liberalism which emerged as neoliberalism, the belief in unfettered markets as the means of delivering the goal of consumer welfare. As the author notes, ‘consumer welfare is also problematic as a standard of economic well-being because it fails to capture intangible aspects of well-being. Today’s large Internet platforms may offer consumers free services but they gain access to private data in ways that those consumers may not be aware of and of which they may not approve.’ Neoliberalism, according to Fukuyama, is congenitally flawed. Its emphasis on consumer welfare as the ultimate measure of economic well-being betrays

a lack of understanding of human behaviour. Neoliberalism’s foundational assumption that human beings are rational utility maximizers is profoundly incomplete, he states. We do, indeed, often act as selfish individuals, but individualism is a modern phenom-enon, not a historical constant, and people are perpetually making choices ‘between material self-interest and intangible goods like respect, pride, principle, and solidarity.’ We are, in short, social and emotional as well as selfish and rational creatures.

Neoliberalism created both winners and losers in the globalizing economy. Its uneven distribution of material benefits sparked serious challenges and crises. Herbert Marcuse in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man argued that liberal societies weren’t in fact liberal and did not protect either equality or autonomy. They were, in fact, controlled by capitalist elites who created a consumer culture that lulled ordinary people into compliance with its rules. Liberty, then was a mirage that would only be overcome by creating a radically different society.

Neoliberalism is often used as a pejorative synonym for capitalism but it should be more appropriately used in a narrower sense to describe a school of economic thought often associated with the Chicago and Austrian schools of economics, which sharply denigrated the role of the state in the economy. This was the philosophy popularized by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Fukuyama believes neoliberalism was a legitimate response to the excessive state control of the late industrial age that believed in the superior efficiency of markets but evolved into something of a religion and led to grotesque inequalities. There was an undue libertarian emphasis on personal responsibility. Fukuyama believes, however, that individuals need to be protected from adverse circumstances beyond their control. Markets need to be regulated by the state. Economic efficiency isn’t the sole purpose of human life; there is an abiding social component as well. People crave dignity, not just as individuals, but as members of groups with distinct religious beliefs, social rules and traditions. Fukuyama contends that the distortion of liberalism has much larger social and economic ramifications than simply affecting economic efficiency. It may also be the case that we have been propagating the wrong kind of liberalism or the kind of liberalism that has mutated into neoliberalism.

Sceptics, however, maintain that it is not simply a case of malfunction of liberalism but the malady results from its inherent foundational principles. The pursuit of individual autonomy or ‘self-actualization’, for example, has become mired in an identity politics that subsumes the individual into rigidly defined groupings based on ethnicity, gender or sexuality. In a way, argues Fukuyama, this is a necessary step to address structural inequalities and counteract the misplaced notion that the individual is the only unit of social importance.

The overall sense one gains from this book is that liberalism is in crisis because of the complacency that set in with its successes. Fukuyama is not an uncritical supporter of liberalism and concedes that there are many legitimate criticisms to be made of liberal societies. Liberal democracy has delivered on many fronts, but with each step forward it left many constituencies behind. The praxis not being commensurate with theory everything has not kept pace with the march of liberalism. So how do we address the structural discrepancies to redress social and economic inequalities? For the corrective measures liberalism cannot afford to rely on the flaws of its opponents. It needs to re-evaluate its own performance and chart its own trajectory.

Acknowledging that liberalism has at times been illiberal, endorsing racist and patriarchal ideas and policies, Fukuyama notes that these are not intrinsic to liberalism. Rather, they are more or less historically contingent phenomena. On the positive side, liberalism, as a universalist philosophy, provides the theoretical justification for its own self-correction. Thus, Fukuyama rightly observes,  it was the liberal idea that ‘all men are created equal’ that allowed Abraham Lincoln to argue against the morality of slavery before the Civil War. Accordingly, the goal of the sane version of identity politics, he goes on, is to win acceptance and equal treatment for members of marginalized groups ‘as individuals, under the liberal presumption of a shared underlying humanity.’ This, indeed, is the stellar achievement of liberalism.

The author notes that liberalism has many enemies on both the left and the right for its numerous yet correctable failings. He attributes the failings mainly to neoliberalism that has emerged over the past couple of generations and which has accelerated inequality, and in its wake numerous institutions have been eroded. Both left and right, the author argues, have trouble accepting that governing over diversity, the hallmark of liberalism, means governing over many ethnic and national groups, strata of income, and competing interests. He adds, however, that those on the ‘left-of-centre’ remain much more diverse in political outlook. While he insists that individual rights take precedence over group rights, he also observes that the social contract demands citizen participation. Essential to a liberal society, Fukuyama insists, is the right to vote: ‘Voting rights are fundamental rights that need to be defended by the power of the national government.’ On the whole, the author assumes that liberal democracy is the best way to manage competing interests in a diverse society.

Fukuyama argues that classical liberals need to recognize the need for government. The real issue is not its size and scope but its quality. The Scandinavian countries, for instance, provide a good example of successful welfarist liberal societies. As a priority, wealth must be distributed more equitably the world over. But for now, we only witness an increasingly unequal world. The widening gap between the rich and the poor is at a tipping point. Such grotesque inequalities have implications that pose serious challenges to our democracies founded on liberal principles.

According to Fukuyama, the best we can hope for is a liberalism aware of its flaws, a liberalism that prioritizes public-spiritedness, tolerance, open-minded-ness, and active engagement in public affairs, is unembarrassed by national identity and cultural tradition, seeks to devolve power to the lowest feasible levels of government, and accepts human limits and promotes the virtue of moderation. A liberalism, in short, which seeks to compensate for its own shortcomings.

Critics of Liberalism have often asserted that individualism is a western concept that does not accord with the more communal traditions of other cultures. Individualism, it has been asserted, never took root in East or South Asia, the Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa the way it did in Europe and North America. The liberal belief in the universalism of individual human rights thus betrayed a blinkered eurocentrism. For counties of these regions however liberalism has had its normative appeal even if inflected by indigenous systems of governance. We have no definite answer to the question if there is a superior form of government that could replace liberalism.

Are there alternative principles that should replace those that guide liberalism and replace its universalism premised on human equality and dependence on law? Liberal individualism may apparently fly in the face of the nature of human sociability. Fukuyama points out that there is no necessary contradiction between the need for national identity and liberal universalism. But for now, tensions do exist between the two principles. In volatile times national identities can turn into aggressive nationalisms to upset the applecart of liberal democracies.

What Fukuyama succeeds in showing us is that liberalism need not be commensurate with the extremes of individualism or rigidities of collective solidarity. His version of liberalism repudiates both with equal emphasis, as he observes: ‘Most liberal societies at present, are… vulgar, extravagantly consumerist, excessively permissive, not diverse enough, and dominated by manipulative and unresponsive elites. ...Liberal societies provide no common moral horizon around which community can be built... The spiritual vacuum at the centre of liberal orders is regrettable.’ It is indeed a sobering realization.

Satish C. Aikant

former Professor and

Head Department of English, H.N.B. Garhwal University; former Fellow, IIAS, Shimla

In memoriam

Kishore Saint 1932-2022

Kishore ji once told me that the root of desh is de which means body. I am sure he told this to many of the young people and students who came to learn from him and left with challenges and a greater sense of responsibility to the world and to life itself.  His student body was global, the number of lives he touched vast.

Last night after saying what turned out to be a final goodbye to this great soul, I was praying to the Devi for his care and realized this word too must be rooted in ‘de’. I believe he learned about the Devi the most through his relationships and work with tribal communities and he too believed in this great mystery of life.

I did not meet Kishore ji until he was nearly 80 years old, yet even in my mid-twenties I could not match his intellectual activity, did not have an answer for most of his questions and took several years to process the deeper points he was unfolding before me. I found myself in the lucky position as his friend due to his deep friendship and connection with my husband, so he called on me for help with small things he could no longer manage with age. Most of this involved re-typing his writings from well-kept fragile papers onto a computer so they could be in a digital format – he wanted this so he could share his writings with others with whom he was in continuous dialogue about the issues and possible solutions for the challenges of our times. He was concerned about the world and active right up to the end. All of this meant I had the honour of reading through much of his written work.

Kishore ji’s writings display his deep level of dedication to people, their dignity and nature – and vast experience gained from full engagement in an amazing life across four continents. He departed West Punjab for Kenya in his late teenage years as a refugee of the Partition. After his initial teaching experiences in Kenya, he won a scholarship to study geography in England, later followed up with a Master’s in Education. These studies brought him to experience a third continent. Kishore ji immediately put this education to work in Kenya and, naturally, his talent and enthusiasm caught attention. By 1968 Kishore ji was invited to join a great experiment in global education with Friends World College in New York City. He soon became the head of this institute, guiding students in experiential learning in communities all across the globe and found himself engaged in dialogue with such radical thinkers as Ivan Illich. Yet, Kishore ji’s deep desire was to return to the land of his birth, and soon, the opportunity presented itself in the form of an invitation to work in education in Rajasthan.

When Kishore ji returned to India from New York City after over two decades away, he did not slowly wade into the water – he dived in head first with his eyes wide open and took on all that was in his capacity to do practically, professionally, personally, organizationally and intellectually. His level of dedication, intellect and outright seriousness layered with a spiritual understanding that cannot easily be grasped probably caught many of his colleagues off-guard. He did not come so far, leaving behind inspiring educational work, for business as usual. He came to be reunited with his desh and give it all he had. At least, this is the impression I have gathered from reading his articles, taking years (with many remaining) to grasp his points, and seeing the love for him still held by the tribal villagers with whom he worked.  Kishore ji had a deep sense, very early on, of what was at stake.

The vigour and integrity he emanated created challenges for others, bringing people together, but also, in some ways, leaving him all alone. His fascination with life continued into his last years – seeing the morning sun with great pleasure and investigating the mystery of what he was sure was a self-watering plant he had been given. These conversations mixed with talks about where the world is going and the latest book he was reading. He faced the struggle of living through the unprecedented summer heat of his final summer, heat he had worked so hard for decades to prevent from rising in this region of the Southern Aravallis.

Kishore ji’s initial work in education in Southern Rajasthan soon transformed into an all-out campaign to address famine and the underlying environmental collapse that precipitated the human crisis. His new context of the degraded Aravalli hills with its distraught tribal community – their condition reflecting that of the land – elicited an year after year of intense action from this man and all that was in his power. His spiritual awareness and deeply compassionate nature did not allow him to feel separate from this community struggling for its existence. I saw him routinely bring dialogues with youth to the question of feeling the crisis well into the ninth decade of his life. He could not escape that feeling.

This sense of crisis drove him to initiate dialogues questioning the nature and definition of development, to initiate work with tribal village communities to reclaim their internal strength and regenerate their natural resource bases, to coordinate national level dialogues and bring in projects to address the degradation of the Aravalli’s – raising the alarm that this range has stopped the desertification of the heart of India for thousands of years. These efforts started when he was CEO at Seva Mandir in Udaipur and continued in the form of Ubeshwar Vikas Mandal, a small NGO he initiated directly with the local Bhil tribal community. He reached out for national and international dialogue and engagement however possible, this notably included his engagement with Lokayan, Ashoka Foundation, Oxfam, and governmental structures as and when relevant.

Kishore ji always worked to bring people, organizations, levels of governance and understanding together, to create platforms of collaboration, to move beyond personal aspirations to address the true crisis of our age – the age threatening the very existence of our species.  Despite many disappointments in these efforts, he remained a true gentleman to the end, never uttering a word of criticism or complaint about others or about his experiences, only reflective, constructive analysis to move ahead towards the best outcome feasible. Even in his 80s he carried a youthful hope and energy that was contagious in the face of all odds.

He passed away this morning, the day marking India’s 75 years of independence. On this day, his soul, no doubt under the care of the Devi, the great mother, departed from his deh to join all the elements of the desh, the body of the world he so dearly loved and so fiercely worked to save.

Mackenzie Shreve

Environmental activist; works on education around Udaipur

Abhijit Sen 1950-2022

Abhijit Sen was among the last of the economists for whom policy making was not a seat of privilege or power but a natural extension of their quest for a solution to the vexed problem of mass poverty, high inequality in a primarily agrarian society. For him, it was a natural extension of his deep engagement with issues of agriculture, poverty and inequality for almost four decades in which he not only contributed to a better understanding of the problems facing India but also contributed to designing policies which would make a difference. His untimely death on 29 August 2022 has left a great void in the academic community but also among policy makers for whom his unconventional solutions would help resolve some of the contentious issues.

He was unconventional in many ways. As a student who moved away from studying physics to producing one of the best theses on the agrarian question in India to a teacher who had the confidence to teach almost every course at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning (CESP) where he taught for three decades after his return from the United Kingdom (UK). His teaching style was unconven-tional in many ways but the students enjoyed his teaching. Primarily because of his own irreverence about the existing paradigms but also the pedagogy style which encouraged students to think out of the box.

In many ways, his irreverence of the existing paradigms was also his strength. This was visible in his early work as part of his PhD thesis where he combined his finesse in mathematical modelling with the heterodox approach of dealing with issues in agriculture. He was clear in his conclusions that deep-rooted problems of Indian agriculture could not be resolved using a technological revolution or through neoclassical solutions of sharecropping but needed state intervention to foster institutional changes to create employment given the relationship between farm size, land productivity, sharecropping and mechanisation.

His ability to move away from conventional paradigms also allowed him to question conventional wisdoms. This strength to do so came to him from his unflinching belief in facts and the ability to approach a problem from the first principles. He was among the best empirical economists in India given his command over official statistics and understanding of the data. His contributions to analysis of poverty and inequality are still standard references in India but also a guiding tool for economists abroad.

But analysis of poverty and inequality were not just academic issues for him. For him, resolution of the agrarian question was important for any fight against poverty. It was his intervention in the ‘Great Indian Poverty Debate’ in the early 2000s which pushed the then National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government to abandon the 1999-00 consumption survey for poverty estimation. His contributions on the issue of measurement of consumption expenditure and poverty were later incorporated by the official statistical system and also by the Tendulkar committee which revised the poverty line. More than his contributions to the methodological issues of poverty estimation, he was instrumental in making poverty a central issue of politics and policy. It was reflected in his policy role where every policy decision was seen from the perspective of its impact on poverty.

It was his firm belief in state intervention that allowed him to use his insights from his academic research to guide policy in several directions. His belief in the need for remunerative prices for farmers was rooted in his understanding that this was the surest way of improving the lives of farmers but also India’s quest for alleviating poverty. He vociferously argued for a price policy which gave the farmers his/her dues. At the same time, he was also concerned about the necessity of providing food security to millions of poor. As chair of the High-Level Long-Term Grain Policy, he advocated a universal Public Distribution System, something he continued to argue during the run up to the enactment of the National Food Security Act. His commitment to a universal public service delivery was also instrumental in convincing the policy makers to abandon the targeted approach to National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA).

But it was in agriculture, a subject that he has been engaged since the 1970s that saw several new initiatives. His contribution in formulating the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY) was instrumental in raising agricultural productivity. But it was also novel by allowing the states to take ownership of the programme. Despite a long stint in the Planning Commission where he was the member for a decade, he strongly believed in a decentralised approach, particularly on agriculture and rural development. The decentralised procurement scheme advocated by him allowed states such as Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh to become new centres of public procurement. He carried his conviction on greater role of states to the 14th Finance Commission of which he was a member.

His approach to many of the practical problems of policy making or academic debates came from his firm belief in dispassionate analysis of facts. The facts to him came from large scale secondary surveys but also from his understanding of primary surveys. But his greatest strength was his ability to listen to grassroots activists of all shades and ideology. He would often have extensive discussion with farmers and activists and try and understand their concerns and also advising them to fine-tune their demands. Not many were convinced by his arguments but none doubted his commitment to farmers, poor and marginalised.

One of the articles that he wrote just before the 2004 general election was for Seminar (issue 537). This was an analysis of the claims of ‘India Shining’ used by the then NDA government in the midst of large-scale agrarian and rural distress. He was not a psephologist although he had keen interest in analysing electoral data. He predicted a defeat of the NDA government. Not sure if it was his analysis of electoral data or his understanding of rural economy which convinced him to call the elections. But the message was clear that governments can ignore rural distress at their own peril. Perhaps, he would have been persuaded to write one more to make sense of the current situation of rural and agrarian distress. His knowledge and incisive analysis on many of the issues will certainly be missed. His passing away is a big loss to the civil society, journalists, academicians and policy makers but above all a big loss to all those who believe in the role of state as the primary stakeholder in resolving issues of mass poverty, inequality and agrarian distress.

Himanshu

Associate Professor

Centre for Economic Studies and

Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Delhi

Table of Contents

Seminar Magazine

All articles

THE PROBLEM

MINORITIES, LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS

INTERPRETING BJP'S PASMANDA OUTREACH IN NEW INDIA

MUSLIM WOMEN'S STRUGGLE FOR GENDER JUSTICE

MUSLIMS IN THE LABOUR MARKET

ONLINE MUSLIM POLITICS

RHETORIC OF POLITICAL NEWNESS AND MUSLIM POLITICS

THE CHURN IN MUSLIM POLITICS IN KERALA

MUSLIMS AND HINDUTVA IN ASSAM

INDIAN MUSLIMS AND THE 'MUSLIM WORLD'

THE DISEASED BODY POLITIC AND BOMBAY CINEMA

MAPPING MUSLIM PERCEPTIONS: CSDS-LOKNITI RCHIVES

BOOKS

IN MEMORIAM