Muslims Need Redemption, Not Reforms

By Moin Qazi, New Age Islam 4 October 2023 India has many things going for it these days, but the growing authoritarianism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's right-wing Hindu nationalist government is not one of these. India's Muslims are the easy part of this story. The hard part is what has happened to our community. Every Indian Muslim knows about the pause: when another Indian, usually a Hindu, hears your name, waits a few seconds, and then, with a furrowed brow or a step back, acts surprised and confused that you, too, are Indian. The implication is suspicion, as though we are Indians with an asterisk—or worse, as though we are not Indians at all. When the British withdrew from the Indian subcontinent in 1947, paving the way for the independence of the newly partitioned nations of India and Pakistan, the Muslims of the region had a choice. They could resettle in Pakistan, where they would be among a Muslim majority, or remain in their original Indian homeland where they would live as a minority in a majority-Hindu but constitutionally secular state. India is a country of religious, ethnic, and linguistic diversity. Its estimated two hundred million Muslims, most of whom identify as Sunni, account for about 15 per cent of the population, by far the largest minority group. Hindus make up about 80 per cent of the people. The country's Muslim communities are diverse, with differences in language, caste, ethnicity, and access to political and economic power. Economic Marginalisation of Minorities in India When the country was partitioned, those who stayed back had traditionally been artisans, and most craft skills were overtaken by mechanization, rendering most artisans' skills obsolete under the prevailing political economy. These people have lost their traditional livelihoods and cannot regain them in export markets, for instance, without government and business support. On the contrary, Hindu traders and business people have prospered from the country's booming economic growth. The country's rulers must be prudent enough to realize that India's much-touted growth cannot be achieved if a vast section of its citizens feels unwelcome and targeted. When a community is repeatedly told that the forerunners of its faith were plunderers and were detrimental to the country, it is denied the deep historical ties of love and sacrifice that frame the identity of Muslim Indians and their place in the nation. The B.J.P. can't hope to realistically make inroads among any section of the community if its policies end up pushing patriotic Muslims, who take great pride in their Indian identity, against the wall. The government has taken a wide variety of policy initiatives for the development of minorities. Still, the general feeling among most of the Muslims is that these are cosmetic. Despite accelerated growth, the development deficit between them and others is increasing. There is a general perception among many Muslims that there seems to be some fear among various sections of society that the consequences of empowering Muslims by giving them unique benefits would strengthen communal politics in the country. This factor and the lack of necessary will on the parts of the Central and State Governments due to vote bank politics appears to have primarily dented the development process among minorities in the country. Recently, the union government has passed several laws that have made life more difficult for religious minorities. This is aggravated by brash majoritarian rhetoric and the sectarian roots of the B.J.P., grounded in a perpetual and polarising social conflict between Hindus and Muslims. Several state governments have also passed anti-conversion laws that make converting people to a new religion illegal. The ostensible purpose of the measures is to stop proselytization by Christians, which is their constitutional right, or to shield Hindus from Islam. But a conversion has historically promised members of the oppressed lower castes a way out of casteist society's repressive strictures. These are all attempts to scare minorities and make life miserable for them. Demonization of Social Groups Demonizing minorities through bigoted policies and holding them responsible for all the national ills have become a favourite narrative. This script has repeatedly played itself out in history with disastrous consequences. Fundamentally, the state is trying to reconfigure the concept of Indian identity to make it synonymous with being Hindu. The right-wing attempts to dismantle India's secular traditions and turn the country into a religious state as a homeland for Hindus. The Muslims can see a shadow world creeping upon them. This dangerous game will pull apart the diverse, delicate social fabric that has existed in India for ages. India's founders advocated an Indian brand of secularism designed to hold the country's disparate communities together under one roof. Indeed, Jawaharlal Nehru pronounced India's composite culture as one of its greatest strengths. Indian secularism is the by-product of a whole civilization. According to the famous novelist and member of the Nehru family, Nayantara Sahgal, "We are unique in the world that so many cultures and religions enrich us. Now, they want to squash us into one culture. So, it is a difficult time. We do not want to lose our richness. We do not want to lose anything... all that Islam has brought us, what Christianity has brought us, what Sikhism has brought us. Why should we lose all this? We are not all Hindus, but we are all Hindustani." Affirmative action refers to at least three measures available to help the socially disadvantaged: affirmative action, positive discrimination, strict school/college admissions and job quotas. It can take many forms, from setting up special schools or vocational guidance facilities to declaring that the government will encourage specific groups to apply for jobs. Quota-based seats for castes and tribes in educational institutions, legislative bodies, and public offices were seen as a way of ensuring equal opportunity for people who had been excluded, subordinated, and denied social and economic resources. Caste-based distinctions, especially untouchability and forced segregation were seen as discrimination that placed the excluded community in a disadvantaged position. Reservations, above all, were an acknowledgement of this injustice and a means of bringing these hitherto ostracised sections into the social and political mainstream. The policy of reservations in government jobs for castes and tribes has, to some extent, guaranteed their participation in public employment. Though the constitutionality of using religion as a criterion for selecting "backward" classes has not been explicitly challenged, the government and courts have rejected its application in practice; hence, minority groups were not identified as "backward" for special safeguards for the disadvantaged. There are three main reasons advanced: (i) it was incompatible with secularism; (ii) in the absence of a caste system among Muslims, there was no overt social discrimination suffered by them to justify special measures; and (iii) it would undermine national unity. In India, reservations have been formulated on the principles of social justice enshrined in the Constitution. The Constitution provides for reservation for historically marginalized communities now known as backward castes. But the Constitution does not define any of the categories identified for the benefit of reservation. One of the essential bases for reservation is interpreting the word "class". Experts argue that social backwardness is a fluid and evolving category, with caste as just one of the markers of discrimination. Gender, culture, economic conditions, educational backwardness and official policies, among other factors, can influence social conditions and cause deprivation and social backwardness. The notion of social backwardness could change as the political economy transforms from a caste-mediated closed system to a more open-ended, globally integrated and market-determined system marked by high mobility and urbanization. We are seeing this transformation at a much more exponential pace than our Constitution makers may have visualized. In one of its well-known judgements, the Supreme Court has made an essential point about positive discrimination in India. Justices Ranjan Gogoi and Rohinton F. Nariman of the Supreme Court said, "An affirmative action policy that keeps in mind only historical injustice would certainly result in the protection of the most deserving backward class of citizens, which is constitutionally mandated. It is the identification of these new emerging groups that must engage the attention of the state." We must actively consider evolving new benchmarks for assessing backwardness, reducing reliance on its caste-based definition. This alone can enable more contemporary groups to get the benefits of affirmative action through social reengineering, or else, the tool of affirmative action will breed new injustice. Muslims can become eligible for some forms of positive discrimination among new "backward" groups. India has 3,743 backward castes and sub-castes, which comprise about half the population. So, the potential for caste warfare is endless. As British journalist Edward Luce wrote in his book Despite the Gods, the result is "the most extensive system of patronage in the democratic world". With such a rich gravy train, it's no wonder the competition turns lethal. The pervasive discrimination perpetrated on Indian Muslims must compel us to re-examine facile assumptions about social backwardness stemming from historically ignorant, simplistic, or outmoded categories. In a larger landscape of increasing communication, the government should economically and socially empower the community to develop appropriate solutions for overall social reforms. The Hindu-right ideology has been there since the 1920s. It has never been the dominant strand of political ideology until recently. The Ayodhya movement was the starting point of the B.J.P.'s growth and its emergence as a solid alternative to the mainstream parties. In the thirties, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar [a leader of the Hindu-nationalist movement] enunciated the idea of the two-nation theory—that Hindus and Muslims are two nations—even before the Muslim League [which pushed for the creation of Pakistan] took it up. Today, everyone identifies the two-nation theory with [Pakistan's founding father] Muhammad Ali Jinnah, but Savarkar first articulated the two-nation theory. It is wise to remember the advice of Lyndon B. Johnson, "You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered." The pathology of such actions is best summed by the famous author Khushwant Singh in his book, The End of India: "Every fascist regime needs communities and groups it can demonize to thrive. It starts with one group or two. But it never ends there. A movement built on hate can only sustain itself by continually creating fear and strife. No one is safe. We must realize this if we hope to keep India alive." Instead of stoking ethnic tensions, the prudent approach would be to embrace the philosophy of Swami Vivekananda, who declared that he was "Proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth". It's absurd to try to consign the great diversity of our lives to one single identity, even one as splendid as the Indian tradition. Instead of constantly searching for a uniform and standardized culture, which would homogenize the entire population, we must strive for a stable and model democracy where the colours in the painter's palette find full expression. Therein lays the vibrancy of civilization and the fulfilment of the pluralist promises of our Constitution. Instead of using a binary of Muslims and non-Muslims, the state must adjust its lens and address the community's economic problems. Muslims have no more propensities for violence or anti-national sentiments than other Indians. Their faith encourages peaceful coexistence and mutual respect; liberal Muslims have given ample proof. This imbalance between Muslims and others must be recognized and addressed for India to retain its vitality as a plural society and vibrant civilization. ----- Moin Qazi is the author of the bestselling book, Village Diary of a Heretic Banker. He has worked in the development finance sector for almost four decades. 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