[Reader-list] WSJ on India's Dangerous Divide

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

DECEMBER 6, 2008
India's Dangerous Divide
Wall Street Journal

India's Muslims are prominent in Bollywood but still struggle with
their identity. In the wake of the Mumbai attacks, tensions have
mounted and loyalties have been tested. Ramachandra Guha on the path
forward for India and its Muslim minority.

In October 1947, a bare six weeks after India and Pakistan achieved
their independence from British rule, the Indian Prime Minister,
Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote a remarkable letter to the Chief Ministers of
the different provinces. Here Nehru pointed out that despite the
creation of Pakistan as a Muslim homeland, there remained, within
India, "a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they
cannot, even if they want, go anywhere else. That is a basic fact
about which there can be no argument. Whatever the provocation from
Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on
non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a
civilized manner. We must give them security and the rights of
citizens in a democratic State."

In the wake of the recent incidents in Mumbai, these words make
salutary reading. It seems quite certain that the terrorists who
attacked the financial capital were trained in Pakistan. The outrages
have sparked a wave of indignation among the middle class.
Demonstrations have been held in the major cities, calling for
revenge, in particular for strikes against training camps in Pakistan.
The models held up here are Israel and the United States; if they can
"take out" individual terrorists and invade whole countries, ask some
Indians, why not we?

Other commentators have called for a more measured response. They note
that the civilian government in Islamabad is not in control of the
army, the army not in control of the notorious Inter Services
Intelligence agency, the ISI not in control of the extremists it has
funded. They point out that Pakistan has itself been a victim of
massive terror attacks. India, they say, should make its disapproval
manifest in other ways, such as canceling sporting tours and recalling
diplomats. At the same time, the United States should be asked to
demand of Pakistan, its erratically reliable ally, that it act more
decisively against the terrorists who operate from its soil.

One short-term consequence of the terror in Mumbai is a sharpening of
hostility between India and Pakistan. And, as is always the case when
relations between these two countries deteriorate, right-wing Hindus
have begun to scapegoat those Muslims who live in India. They have
begun to speculate as to whether the attackers were aided by their
Indian co-religionists, and to demand oaths of loyalty from Muslim
clerics and political leaders.

There are 150 million Muslims in India. They have gained particular
prominence in one area: Bollywood. Several top directors and composers
are Muslim, as well as some of India's biggest movie stars. One, Aamir
Khan, was a star and producer in "Lagaan," a song-and-dance epic about
a game of cricket that was nominated for an Academy Award in 2002. But
Muslims are massively underrepresented in the professions -- few of
India's top lawyers, judges, doctors and professors are Muslim. Many
Indian Muslims are poor, and a few are angry.

Pakistan was carved out of the eastern and western portions of British
India. To this new nation flocked Muslims from the Indian heartland.
Leading the migration were the lawyers, teachers and entrepreneurs who
hoped that in a state reserved for people of their faith, they would
be free of competition from the more populous (and better educated)
Hindus.

Pakistan was created to give a sense of security to the Muslims of the
sub-continent. In fact, it only made them more insecure. Nehru's
letter of October 1947 was written in response to a surge of Hindu
militancy, which called for retribution against the millions of
Muslims who stayed behind in India. Three months later, Mahatma
Gandhi, who was both Father of the Indian Nation as well as Nehru's
mentor, was shot dead by a Hindu fanatic. That act shamed the
religious right, who retreated into the shadows. There they stayed
until the 1970s, when, through a combination of factors elaborated
upon below, they came to occupy center-stage in Indian politics.

If the first tragedy of the Indian Muslim was Partition, the second
has been the patronage by India's most influential political party,
the Congress, of Muslims who are religious and reactionary rather than
liberal and secular. Nehru himself was careful to keep his distance
from sectarian leaders whether Hindu or Muslim. However, under the
leadership of his daughter, Indira Gandhi, the Congress party came to
favor the conservative sections of the Muslim community. Before
elections, Congress bosses asked heads of mosques to issue fatwas to
their flock to vote for the party; after elections, the party
increased government grants to religious schools and colleges. In a
defining case in 1985, the Supreme Court called for the enactment of a
common civil code, which would abolish polygamy and give all women
equal rights regardless of faith -- the right to their husband's or
father's property, for example, or the right to proper alimony once
divorced. The prime minister at the time was Rajiv Gandhi. Acting on
the advice of the Muslim clergy, he used his party's majority in
Parliament to nullify the court's verdict. After Rajiv's widow, Sonia
Gandhi, became Congress president in 1998, the party has continued to
fund Muslim religious institutions rather than encourage them to
engage with the modern world.

Partition and Congress patronage between them dealt a body blow to
Muslim liberalism. The first deprived the community of a professional
vanguard; the second consolidated the claims to leadership of priests
and theologians. In an essay published in the late 1960s, the Marathi
writer Hamid Dalwai (a resident of Mumbai) wrote of his community that
"the Muslims today are culturally backward." To be brought "on a level
with the Hindus," argued Dalwai, the Muslims needed an "avant garde
liberal elite to lead them." Otherwise, the consequences were dire for
both communities. For "unless a Muslim liberal intellectual class
emerges, Indian Muslims will continue to cling to obscurantist
medievalism, communalism, and will eventually perish both socially and
culturally. A worse possibility is that of Hindu revivalism destroying
even Hindu liberalism, for the latter can succeed only with the
support of Muslim liberals who would modernize Muslims and try to
impress upon these secular democratic ideals."

The possibility that Dalwai feared has come to pass. From the 1980s,
the dominance of the Congress party has been challenged by the
Bharatiya Janata Party. The BJP seeks to make India a "Hindu" nation,
by basing the nation's political culture on the religious traditions
(and prejudices) of the dominant community. Charging the Congress with
"minority appeasement," with corruption and with dynastic rule, the
BJP came to power in many states, and eventually in New Delhi.
However, its commitment to the secular ideals of the Indian
Constitution is somewhat uncertain. For the party's members and fellow
travelers, only Indians of the Hindu faith are to be considered full
or first-class citizens. Of the others, the Parsis are to be
tolerated, the Christians distrusted, and the Muslims detested. One
form this detestation takes is verbal -- the circulation of innuendos
based on lies and half-truths (as in the claim that Muslims outbreed
Hindus and will soon outnumber them). Another form is physical --
thus, the hand of the BJP lies behind some of the worst communal riots
in independent India, for example Bhagalpur in 1989, Mumbai in 1992,
and Gujarat in 2002; in all cases, an overwhelming majority of the
victims were Muslims.

The rise of the BJP owes something to the failures of the Congress,
and something also to the example of Pakistan. As that society has
come increasingly under the influence of Islamic fundamentalists,
there is a more ready audience, within India, for the rants and raves
of Hindu extremists. Likewise, the expulsion, by jihadis trained in
Pakistan, of some 200,000 Hindus from the valley of Kashmir in a
single year -- 1989-1990 -- has been used to justify attacks on
Muslims in other parts of India. But to explain is not to excuse --
for the BJP has stoked feelings and passions that should have no place
in a civilized society.

In its activities BJP is helped by a series of allied groups. Known
also by their abbreviations -- RSS, VHP, etc. -- these were in the
forefront of the religious violence of the 1980s and beyond. Roaming
the streets of small- (and big-) town India, they addressed their
Muslim prey with the slogan "Pakistan or Kabristan!" (Flee to
Pakistan, or we will send you straight to your graves). Meanwhile,
their ideologues in the press -- some with degrees from the best
British universities -- make the argument that Muslims are inherently
violent, or unpatriotic, or both.

In fact, the ordinary Muslim is much like any other ordinary Indian --
honest, hard-working and just about scraping a living. A day after I
heard a BJP leader denounce the Congress for making the Muslims into a
"pampered and privileged minority," I found myself making a turn into
the busiest road in my home town, Bangalore. Just ahead of me was a
Muslim gentleman, who was attempting to do likewise. Except that he
was making the turn not behind the wheel of a powerful Korean-made car
but with a hand-cart on which were piled some bananas.

That the fruit seller was Muslim was made clear by his headgear, a
white cap with perforations. He was an elderly man, about 60, short
and slightly-built. The turn was made hard by his age and infirmity,
and harder by the fact that the road sloped steeply downward, and by
the further fact that making the turn with him were very many motor
vehicles. Had he gone too slow he would have been bunched in against
the cars; had he gone too fast he might have lost control altogether.
Placed right behind the fruit seller, I saw him visibly relax his
shoulders as the turn was successfully made, with cart and bananas
both intact.

One should not read too much into a single image, but it does seem to
be that that perilous turn was symptomatic of an entire life -- a life
lived at the edge of subsistence, a life taken one day at a time and
from one turn to the next. In this respect the fruit seller was quite
representative of Indian Muslims in general. Far from being pampered
or privileged, most Muslims are poor farmers, laborers, artisans and
traders.

The failure to punish the perpetrators of successive pogroms has
thrown some young men into the arms of fundamentalist groups. But the
number is not, as yet, very large. And it is counterbalanced by other
trends, for instance, the growing hunger for modern education among
the youth. The desire to learn English is ubiquitous, as is the
fascination for computers. Even in the disgruntled valley of Kashmir,
a press survey found that the iconic founder of India's most respected
software company, Infosys Technologies, a Hindu named N. R. Narayana
Murthy, was a greater hero among Muslim students than the founder of
Al Qaeda.

Since the reasons for the poverty (and the anger) are so complex, a
successful compact between Indian Muslims and modernity will require
patient and many-sided work. It would help if the Pakistan center was
to reassert itself against the extremism it has itself, in past times,
encouraged. It would help some more, if, pace Hamid Dalwai, there was
a more forthright assertion of Muslim liberalism within India. But
perhaps the greatest burden falls on India's major political parties.
The Congress must actively promote the modernization of Muslim
society. And the BJP must recognize, in word and in deed, that the 150
million Muslims in India have to be dealt with in a civilized manner,
and given the security and the rights due them as equal citizens in a
democratic and non-denominational State.

Writing in 1957, the historian Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out that
Indian Muslims were unique in that they shared their citizenship "with
an immense number of people. They constitute the only sizable body of
Muslims in the world of which this is, or ever has been true." True no
longer, for in many countries of Western Europe and even in the United
States, the Muslims are now a sizeable but not dominant component of
the national population. This makes this particular case even more
special. For if, notwithstanding the poisonous residues of history and
the competitive chauvinisms of politicians, Indians of different
faiths were to live in peace, dignity and (even a moderate)
prosperity, they might set an example for the world.

Ramachandra Guha is the author of 'India After Gandhi: The History of
the World's Largest Democracy.' He lives in Bangalore.