After the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh gathering in Nagpur, it is useful to think about the ways in which some of India’s Asian neighbours have dealt with their minorities. Comparing chauvinisms might help us understand why some Asian countries have gone further down the majoritarian road than India has and, conversely, why the Indian state has generally resisted majoritarian pressure to stand out as the protagonist of the Hindus. A comparison might also help us assess the weight of the sangh parivar’s claim that India’s minori-ties, especially Muslims, have been pampered by a “pseudo-secular” state.
The complaints of Hindu chauvinists nearly all relate to Muslims. This is not unusual: chauvinism anywhere in the world is always directed against an “alien” community that doesn’t automatically “belong” to the nation in the way that the “host” community does.
In Malaysia, the Malays consider themselves the original owners of the country and see Malaysia’s Chinese citizens as outsider aliens whose citizenship is conditional on their recognition of the prior and organic claim of the Malays to Malaysia. Malays and their culture, in this view, define Malaysian nationality. The language of the Malays by its very name proclaims Malay ownership of Malaysia: it is simply called Bahasa Malaysia, just as its Indonesian counterpart is called Bahasa Indonesia. The Chinese nationals of Malaysia and Indonesia are pressed to acknowledge bhumiputra hegemony by taking on “indigenous” names, by incorporating a “local” (Malay or Indonesian) partner in any ethnic Chinese enterprise, by acquiescing in their de facto exclusion from high political office despite their numbers (a third of the Malaysian population is ethnic Chinese).
The idea of the bhumiputra or the son of the soil is central to the construction of national identity in these countries. Bhumiputra insecurities are fed by the success of the Chinese business community and the obvious importance of Chinese enterprise to the economic life of the nation.
Less than a decade after independence, the Sri Lankan state under Bandaranaike’s Sri Lankan Freedom Party, moved to enthrone the majority by proclaiming Sinhala as the sole national language, and by explicitly promoting and subsidizing Buddhist institutions. When Sri Lanka became a republic in 1972, the new constitution formally gave Buddhism “the foremost place” in the life of the nation. Given K.S. Sudarshan’s tirade against Christianity’s foreignness it is important to remember that Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s first government in the early Sixties nationalized all private schools in response to Sinhala Buddhist allegations that Christians had a stranglehold on the nation’s educational system. The Sri Lankan flag is a symbolic statement of Sinhala hegemony: the Sinhalese-Buddhist icon of the lion rampant dominates it and tolerated at the margins of this Sinhala standard are two coloured stripes, orange and green, symbolizing Sri Lanka’s Tamils and Muslims.
Language, geography, ethnicity and religion distinguish the Sinhalese from the Tamils. The Tamils were concentrated in the north and east, they were non-Buddhists, their language was Tamil and their social origins lay in India’s Tamil country. Sinhala chauvinists saw the Tamil minority as a threat well before the Jaffna troubles degenerated into civil war. The heterogeneous Tamils, made up of plantation workers, subsistence peasants and a highly educated and socially mobile middle class, were clubbed together and characterized as an encroaching elite minority with a presence in the professions and government service that Sinhala chauvinists decided was out of proportion to their population. It is worth remembering that the political flowering of Sinhala chauvinism in the Sixties was, in terms of law-and- order, peaceful. It took 20 years of majoritarian rule before the first anti-Tamil pogroms of the early Eighties were organized and before the civil war in the north began in earnest. The sangh parivar’s prescriptions lead us down that road.
In Bangladesh, once East Pakistan, the substantial Hindu minority was resented as an exploiting landed elite that had for centuries oppressed the mainly Muslim peasantry. Hindus were distrusted as an urban Babu community and, after relations with India deteriorated, suspected of being Indian fifth columnists. A pattern of systematic discrimination and second class citizenship forced large parts of this Hindu population out of East Pakistan/Bangladesh.
To be tolerated at the majority’s pleasure is no substitute for full citizenship in modern democracies. It is a state of limbo, a chronically unstable condition. Second class citizenship is so contrary to the basic assumptions of a democracy and such a reproach to its functioning, that a democratic polity which cannot accept its minorities as full citizens quickly moves to disenfranchise them politically or to expel them physically on the grounds that despite being resident they aren’t nationals at all, that they actually belong elsewhere, in India or China or Pakistan or Tamil Nadu or Palestine.
What is interesting about these examples and any others we may choose to examine — the Jewish community in Weimar Germany for example — is that the demonized minority in each case is resented for being socially or economically more powerful than the “indigenous” majority. So the Jews are rootless financiers responsible for the subversion of the German economy, the Tamils are guilty of monopolizing Sri Lanka’s professional and bureaucratic institutions, the Chinese in southeast Asia stand accused of shutting local populations out of business through racial conspiracy (besides being guilty of being different) and Bangladeshi Hindus are stigmatized for the centuries of oppression their educated and (relatively) prosperous co-religionists visited upon Bengal’s plebeian Muslims.
The Muslim minority in India doesn’t fit this pattern. Even before Partition, the much larger Muslim community of British India wasn’t economically dominant anywhere in the subcontinent. Punjab was a partial exception, partial be-cause Muslim prosperity, such as it was, was based largely on landholding; trade, commerce and urban business were dominated by non-Muslims. The United Provinces (modern Uttar Pradesh) was home to a class of influential Muslim landowners and Muslims had a larger share of education and government employment in that province than they did in the rest of the country but it would be hard to show that they dominated politics or administration or business anywhere in north India. There was a tiny Muslim community in Bombay province of which the visible and prosperous tip was a community of Ismaili merchants and businessmen; there was a Muslim elite in Hyderabad city parasitic on the Nizam’s administration but apart from these islands of privilege and prosperity, the Muslim com-munity contributed more than its fair share to the ranks of India’s urban and rural poor.
This partly explains the other difference between India and countries like Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh: the unwillingness of the independent Indian state to formally sponsor majoritarian demands or to systematically discriminate against its most significant minority. The independent states of Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh succumbed to the temptation of institutionally entrenching the majority’s interest partly because in these countries minorities could be shown to be or were perceived as more privileged, more prosperous or more powerful than the rest. In India it was hard to sell such an idea and not only because the Congress, the party of anti-imperialist nationalism, was a pluralist and secular organization, though this was important. Despite the catalogue of historical and political sins attributed to predatory Muslims, there was no general sense of resentment born of envy simply because it was clear to everyone that Muslims as a community were backward rather than privileged.
If the Muslim population of India was relatively backward just before Partition, its economic and social standing after Partition declined further. It was numerically weaker: the larger part of the community was lost to Pakistan and what remained was a rump, an impoverished rump because many educated Muslims from parts of India other than the Pakistan areas migrated to the new Muslim state. By every criterion used to measure development — education, income, employment, life
expectancy — the Muslims of independent India were a depressed community even by the low standards of a poor
country.
Today, 53 years after independence, Muslims lag behind every major religious community in India. If the United Nations development programme’s country reports on human development were to organize information in community categories, the visible gap between Muslims and other Indians would embarrass the republic. It is in the context of this demonstrable backwardness that I want to explore, the next time round, the appeal of the sangh parivar’s conviction that the Indian state has pampered minorities in general and appeased Muslims in particular.
