Lives of Muslims in India

Politics, Exclusion and Violence

Abdul Shaban

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138598362
• eBook ISBN: 9781351227605
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

The fast-consolidating identities along religious and ethnic lines in recent years have considerably 'minoritised' Muslims in India. The wide-ranging essays in this volume focus on the intensified exclusionary practices against Indian Muslims, highlighting how, amidst a politics of violence, confusing policy frameworks on caste and class lines, and institutionalised riot systems, the community has also suffered from the lack of leadership from within. At the same time, Indian Muslims have emerged as a 'mass' around which the politics of 'vote bank', 'appeasement', 'foreigners', 'Pakistanis within the country', and so on are innovated and played upon, making them further apprehensive about asserting their legitimate right to development. The important issues of the double marginalisation of Muslim women and attempts to reform the Muslim Personal Law by some civil society groups is also discussed. Contributed by academics, activists and journalists, the articles discuss issues of integration, exclusion and violence, and attempt to understand categories such as 'identity', 'minority', 'multiculturalism' and 'nationalism' with regard to and in the context of Indian Muslims.

This second edition, with a new introduction, will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in sociology, politics, history, cultural studies, minority studies, Islamic studies, policy studies and development studies, as well as policymakers, civil society activists and those in media and journalism.

1
Minority and Minorityism: The Challenge before Indian Muslims

M. J. Akbar

The Muslims in India have evolved, after the trauma of Partition, into a politically powerful minority group which has had a decisive impact on electoral fortunes, both at the Centre and in crucial states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Maharashtra. This process was hardly without its share of problems; the community suffered various subtle and not-so-subtle discriminatory prac tices. But it is of little help if minorities adopt victimisation as a creed: it becomes, in a counter-intuitive way, a psychological slavery of sorts.

Democracy offers the unique platform for assertion of rights available under the Constitution; at a functional level, the vote is an opportunity to maximise one’s influence in the body politic, an art which Indian Muslims have begun to specialise in. It is obvious that political parties, particularly those who depend on the Muslim vote, would like a more convenient relationship, in which they can be assured of support in return for minimal rewards, through a compliant community leadership. This ‘secular’ establishment promoted a thin layer of Muslim ‘leaders’ who invested in the rhetoric and politics of fear, a sentiment conducive to control as well as corruption, since it enabled these self-appointed leaders to siphon off a bulk of the little that the state offered in the guise of positive discrimination. This ‘public–private’ partnership worked because its terminology was never examined with any rigour; and institutions which should have led the debate, like the Urdu media in the Gangetic belt, were co-opted into class of beneficiaries.

This article attempts to redefine the meaning of ‘minority’ and understands the situation of Indian Muslims today within that framework. In the process, the paper dwells on various historical facts (including what happened during the freedom struggle and in the making of India and Pakistan), philosophical and religious issues, and current attempts by the Indian government (including state governments) to empower the Muslim community and its politics. If democratic India presents an opportunity to Muslims for genuine development, then this can also be a source and seed of learning, change and development for a majority of Muslims living in other parts of the world.

The Meaning of 'Minority'

Did the Muslims of India consider themselves a minority under Mughal rule? Did the Muslims of Hyderabad, never more than 10 or 11 per cent of the population, consider themselves a minority when their fellow-Muslims, the Nizams were in power?¹ The population of Muslims in the vast Mughal domain has been estimated at around 15–20 per cent. Muslims first arrived in the sub-continent as traders; followed by Sufi missionaries who brought the message of Islam to shores of Ganga, Jamuna and the five rivers of Punjab; the armies came much later, and their triumphs only began in the last decade of the 12th century, nearly half a millennia before the first Muslims settled in South Asia. In demographic terms Muslims have always been a minority. But did they see themselves as a minority when the political power of Muslims was far above their demographic weight? The answer is ‘no’. ‘Minority’ and ‘majority’ are not, therefore, a function of numbers, but a derivative of empowerment. If a community feels empowered, it does not see itself as a minority. Empowerment, obviously, has an economic definition as much as a political one. It is possible to argue that the only genuine minority of this country are perhaps the Dalits because they have never enjoyed political or economic power until democracy released them from the vicious trap of history. This is where the good news lies for Indian Muslims, who, unlike Muslims in most parts of the world, live in an uninterrupted, and now uninterruptible, democracy. There are not many Muslim communities in the world which can claim this privilege or good fortune. Democracy is the only functioning system which permits the evolution of empowerment. It permits this through non- violent processes, but one also has to understand the demands and opportunities of democracy in order to utilise the potential of this opportunity.

The Beginnings of Disempowerment

At what point in time did Indian Muslims start feeling disempowered? A useful date is 1803, the year Lord Lake’s forces entered Delhi and made the Mughal emperor a puppet-prisoner in his palatial Red Fort. The leading cleric of the age, Shah Abd-al-Aziz, son of Shah Waliullah, understood the significance of British troops in the Red Fort and issued the famous fatwa² in which he defined India as a Darul Harb (land of war) after having been a Darul Aman (land of peace) for centuries. This was not the first time that a Mughal emperor in Delhi had become a puppet. In the 1770s, he was as helpless before the Marathas as he was before the British in 1803. Neither the Marathas nor the British removed the titular rights of the Mughals, even if he had become impotent. So why was there never a similar fatwa declared against the Marathas?

It is a myth that Indian Muslims did not live under Hindu rule. The Mughal empire began to crumble in the second decade of the 18^th century, with regional rulers re-establishing their control over territories that once paid true homage to the Mughal capital in Agra or Delhi. Powerful Hindu Maratha and Rajput rulers had substantial Muslim populations in their realms. So, why were there no fatwas against them? For the simple reason that both Hindu and Muslim monarchs understood that freedom of faith was a cornerstone of not only the Indian way of life, but also critical to peace among the people. We should not be misled by some ill-informed propaganda about Muslim rulers. They practised this principle as much as anyone else; and exceptions were precisely that, exceptions. This was the ruling philosophy during the Sultanate period, or under the various Afghan, Turk-Afghan and Mughal dynasties which controlled Delhi. A story about Jalaluddin Khilji illustrates perfectly the relationship between king and subject on the matter of faith. In his memoirs, he expresses great anger about the din that a procession of Hindus made every morning while passing his window on their way to the Yamuna for their ritual dip; their clash ing cymbals apparently disturbed His Majesty’s sleep. But it does indicate an important fact; the Sultan might be angry but he never interfered with his subjects’ right to practice their faith as they wished.

‘Secularism’ is a word from an European dictionary — a Voltairean–Marxist continuum that began as separation of church and state and evolved, in Communism, supporting the elimination of faith from public life. The word has quite a different nuance when used in the Indian Constitution. It legislates the equality of each faith before law, and is part of the guaranteed freedoms: a right of every citizen to practice any religion he professes. One does not have to believe in a neighbour’s religion in order to respect his right to believe what he does. I know of no renowned Hindu writer who was offensive towards Islam or its Prophet in these last thousand years of interaction; nor can I think of a Muslim poet or writer who is offensive towards Hinduism. As I have written elsewhere, modern India is not secular because Gandhi was secular; Gandhi was secular because India is secular. Gandhi used the idiom of religion to communicate with the masses because he knew that they were familiar with its metaphors and verses. He introduced faith into the national political discourse not because he was communal but because he was secular. Hinduism is well-known for being tolerant; Islam is equally tolerant towards other faiths. One cannot hope for a better de finition of secularism than in the Quran, ‘La qum din akum wa il ya din’ (Your faith for you and my faith for me). What else is secularism in a plural society?

The British and Jihad

The elimination of Mughal rule in 1857 initiated the age of Muslim depression, the prelude to angst and anger. ‘Disempowerment’ created real anxieties, particularly among the elite, who were the principal opinion-builders within the community. The pillars of Muslim society in the pre-democratic era were the court nobility, military aristocracy, landed gentry and the legal (qazi) and educational bureaucracy (madrasas), which began to crumble. Each one of these pillars provided economic sustenance to the community and the confidence that comes from association with power. The British, ever apprehensive of the community from which they had seized power along the Ganges, banned Muslims from their armies after 1857; the landed gentry, already touched with the dissolution that comes from being in power too long, slid towards bankruptcy, unable to recreate itself through the idioms and sensibilities of British modernity. And when in 1834, the British changed the language of governance from Persian to English, and British courts increasingly adopted British jurisprudence, the role of the qazi, arbiter of Muslim personal law, as well as Persian teacher, began to decline.

The Muslim reaction to these developments was, of necessity, gradual and phased. The initial salvo had been fired in the form of Shah Aziz’s fatwa, and it inspired a meteoric jihad in 1825 led by his disciple Syed Ahmed Barelvi, who chose the Northwest Frontier as his first battlefield because he wanted to reclaim ‘Muslim Punjab’ from the Sikhs who had become masters of the land under the leadership of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. Barelvi died in a battle at Balakot in 1831, but his jihad revived after the British had conquered Punjab in the 1840s and continued till the 1870s.

The 1857 war for independence has taken such a hold on our national imagination, and rightly so since we tend to forget that for those fighting a jihad against the British it was only another episode, albeit an important one, in a conflict that had begun much earlier and would continue much longer. This jihad, led uniquely by maulvis (clerics) and the clerical order, was in a very genuine sense a ‘people’s war’. It has not invited the historical attention that is its’ legitimate due, possibly because it was not fought under the standard of kings and emperors, but by commoners who could easily be dismissed as mavericks. It was fought and led by the clergy, the one section of the old establishment that surprised both the community and the government by its commitment and militancy. This cemented the traditional hold of clergy on Muslim opinion and extended it to the Muslim imagination. When other leaderships had withdrawn or collapsed, the interpreters of law and teachers of the Quran, fought the British on behalf of the people, rather than as activists of the old order.

This long jihad failed in military terms, but the British realised that oppression of Muslims had extracted a heavy price, and correctives were introduced. A commission under the senior bureaucrat W. W. Hunter recommended that the sympathies of Muslims could be best wooed through education (Hunter 2002). This was also the view of one of the great Muslims of the nineteenth century, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (interestingly, his mother was also a disciple of Shah Waliullah). In collaboration and cooperation with the British, Sir Syed offered the option of an English education as the panacea for a community that had lost its moorings on the way to the twentieth century.

Muslims, Khilafat Movement and the Congress

Sir Syed’s efforts were quickly swamped by a phase of politics that eventually flowered into the Khilafat movement. The high emotions, both at the apex of hope and the great slough of failure, shaped the attitudes of the Muslim community in the critical quarter century between 1920 and 1947. Muslims saw the Khilafat struggle as another jihad; and, most unusually, willingly handed over its leadership to a non-Muslim, Mahatma Gandhi. When Gandhi failed to dislodge the British, and suddenly withdrew the movement, there was a sense of betrayal.

One of the most important consequences of the Khilafat movement was that Indian Muslims never returned to Gandhi. The Indian Muslim passion, opinion and involvement peaked to an unprecedented level in 1920; such was the sentiment for national amity that even the Muslim League promised to support a ban on cow slaughter. Gandhi fuelled religiosity as well, supporting the slogan that ‘Islam’ was in danger from British imperialism in both India and the Arab region. This would come to haunt Gandhi when in the 1930s, the Muslim League resurrected the thought, but with a twist: the party declared that ‘Islam’ was in danger from Gandhi and his Congress! Little could have been further from the truth, or a greater calumny on Mahatma Gandhi, but it caught the imagination of Muslims in north India and eventually ensured the formation of Pakistan.

The Idea of 'India', 'Pakistan', and Indian Muslims

The question was inevitable: was Pakistan formed for Indian Muslims or was it created as a fortress of Islam? Mohammad Ali Jinnah, father of the nation, wanted a secular nation with a Muslim majority, and he was not the only claimant of the new nation’s identity. The founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami, Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi, who began as a fringe presence in Pakistan but slowly moved towards centre stage in the ideological debate, argued that a state for Muslims had to be ipso facto an Islamic state; and the salvation of Muslims lay in a theocracy. When Pakistan adopted its Constitution in 1956, it became the first Islamic republic in history, and Maudoodi’s nascent idea took on a powerful momentum when his disciple, General Zia-ul-Haq seized power in a coup in 1976. He asked, very effectively, that ‘if Pakistan is not made for Islam, what was it . . . just a second rate India?’

What is the difference between India and Pakistan? We are the same people and share the same history and approximations of a common culture. Efforts by some Pakistanis to find a cultural heritage in the Arab world, or believe that their history begins with the arrival of an Arab army in Sindh in 712 AD are so foolish as to beggar the imagination. The harm that such illiteracy-cum-obstinacy does is evident, for instance, in the education policy of the country. The difference between India and Pakistan, in my view, is more simple. The idea of Pakistan is weaker than the Pakistani and the idea of India is stronger than the Indian. What is the difference between the two ideas? The Pakistan idea essentially moves around the urge towards theocracy and the Indian idea around the principle of democratic modernity (for further discussion, see Akbar 2011). Theocracy is essentially a medieval idea that looks to the past for inspiration and democracy is a modern concept that can inspire a future radically better than the past.

The definition of a demographic identity plays an important role in the politicisation of any community. Jinnah’s ‘Muslim India’ echoed, implicitly and explicitly, a past during which Muslim dynasties ruled large parts of India. He often urged the British to hand India back to the Muslims from whom they had seized it, and I am not too certain that his tongue was always in his cheek when he said this. He rejected secularism as a Gandhian trick through which ‘Hindu India’ would keep Muslims under permanent subjugation. He could not accept a mutli-faith secular India in which every Indian would be equal, irrespective of faith.

The debate has antecedents. When Maulana Muhammad Ali, one of the leaders of the Khilafat movement, was asked whether he was a Muslim first or an Indian first, he remarked that the question was irrelevant: Islam and India were two circles which intersected and claimed him equally. He could have added that the question was a trap, placing the two identities in conflict rather than in cooperation. The question had been raised primarily in order to shed doubt on the patriotism of Indian Muslims. It has become a false question in an age when India has emerged as a genuinely secular nation. Even the one great blot on this creed, communal riots, have come down sharply in number and intensity; the last such crime was the Gujarat riot of 2002.

Islam, Modernity and Muslims

Phrases demand specific explanation. What is modernity? Modernity is based on three equalities and one equity. First, every citizen must have equal political rights, irrespective of colour, creed, language, origin, etc. Second, a modern nation is a secular nation, where every faith is treated equally before the law, irrespective of how many adherents it has. Third, you cannot have a modern nation without gender equality. Jawaharlal Nehru is praised for many things, but he is not praised sufficiently for what he considered his landmark achievement — the Hindu Code Bill which he introduced and pushed through in Parliament. This legislation ended inequalities prevalent in Hindu society from time immemorial, and shaped the India that we see today. Unfortunately, Nehru could not ensure similar legislation for Indian Muslims, for reasons he explained in one of his interviews to Taya Zinkin, given in 1961, for her book on Nehru. His grandson, Rajiv Gandhi, failed for similar reasons when the Shah Bano case offered an opportunity. Political caution and the inability to generate the momentum for internal reform have been the bane of Indian Muslims. The resistance to reform comes not due to theological reasons but because of gender oppression.

Conservatives, for instance, have a standard reply whenever there is talk of reform in divorce laws. Yes, it is true that there are verses in the Quran on divorce; it must be noted in the same breath that eminent scholars have disputed the conservative interpretation of those verses. In any case, there are more verses in the Quran that say that the apt punishment for a thief is the cutting off of his hands. There is no movement led by conservative clerics in India demanding an amendment to the law and forcing India to cut off the hands of every Muslim thief who is convicted. If reform can be acceptable in one aspect of the law, t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1. Minority and Minorityism: The Challenge before Indian Muslims
• 2. The Muslim as Victim, The Muslim as Agent: On Islam as a Category of Analysis
• 3. Policies for Muslims in India: Locating Multiculturalism and Social Exclusion in the Liberal Democratic Framework
• 4. Muslims and Politics of Exclusion
• 5. Indian Muslims: Political Leadership, Mobilisation and Violence
• 6. Precedents and Exceptions: BJP's engagement with the Muslims
• 7. Structure of Violence and Muslims
• 8. Hindu–Muslim Riots in India: A Demographic Perspective
• 9. Police Conduct during Communal Riots: Evidence from 1992–93 Mumbai Riots and Its Implications
• 10. Ethnic Politics, Muslims and Space in Contemporary Mumbai
• 11. Social Exclusion and Muslims of Kolkata
• 12. Muslim Women and Law Reforms: Concerns and Initiatives of the Excluded within the Excluded
• Index