Nation-state and Minority Rights in India

Comparative Perspectives on Muslim and Sikh Identities

Tanweer Fazal

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138476110
• eBook ISBN: 9781317751786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The blood-laden birth-pangs of the Indian "nation-state" undoubtedly had a bearing on the contentious issue of group rights for cultural minorities. Indeed, the trajectory of the concept 'minority rights' evolved amidst multiple conceptualizations, political posturing and violent mobilizations and outbursts. Accommodating minority groups posed a predicament for the fledgling "nation-state" of post-colonial India.

This book compares and contrasts Muslim and Sikh communities in pre- and post-Partition India. Mapping the evolving discourse on minority rights, the author looks at the overlaps between the Constitutional and the majoritarian discourse being articulated in the public sphere and poses questions about the guaranteeing of minority rights. The book suggests that through historical ruptures and breaks, communities oscillate between being minorities and nations. Combining archival material with ethnographic fieldwork, it studies the identity groups and their vexed relationship to the ideas of nation and nationalism. It captures meanings attributed to otherwise politically loaded concepts such as nation, nation-state and minority rights in the everyday world of Muslims and Sikhs and thus tries to make sense of the patterns of accommodation, adaptation and contestation in the life-world.

Successfully confronting and illuminating the challenge of reconciling representation and equality both for groups and within groups, this exploration of South Asian nationalisms and communal relations will be of interest to academics in the field of South Asian Studies, in particular Sociology and Politics.

1 Introduction

The ‘nation-state’ and its citizens

The nation-state, to borrow Tom Nairn’s expression, is a modern Janus.¹ The contradiction is inherent. The emergence of the nation-state on the one hand announced the arrival of modernity. Sovereignty of people implied a plethora of rights promising freedom from the shackles of tradition. Conversely, the cultural foundation of the state obligated frequent invocations of the pristine purity of national culture and the glorification of its age-old traditions. More often, individual liberty and freedom was sacrificed at the altar of nationalism, prompting Lord Acton to declare, as early as in 1868: ‘The theory of [nation-states] … is a retrograde step in history … [it] does not aim either at liberty or prosperity, both of which it sacrifices to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and measure of the State.’ More recently, in the wake of the ‘headscarf controversy’, the then French interior minister (later the President) Nicolas Sarkozy warned a gathering of Muslims: ‘This law cannot be changed; it is at the heart of the Republic. If you demand a different law, then you cannot enjoy the same rights as people of other religions.’²

Seen in these terms, the nation-state was, for all intents and purposes, a hegemonic idea that allowed states and ruling groups to impose cultural monism on a largely heterogeneous population. The term ‘state-nation’ or ‘state-lednationalism’ is often employed for polities in which state preceded the formation of nation. The cultural roots of the nation – its founding myths and cultural symbolism, the nationalist allegory and history, its language and literature, together with the rituals that are yearly observed – all tend to be drawn from the ruling culture. The nation-state had monopoly over the loyalty and identity of all its citizens, including those from minority cultures. Long before the decimation of Yugoslavia, Hugh Seton-Watson saw Yugoslavian nationalism as only a euphemism for the dominant Serbian nationalism: ‘Slovenes and Croats were considered to be bad Yugoslavs if they continued to be Slovene and Croat nationalists, but Serbs were never accused of this when they continued to be Serbian nationalists.’³

Insofar as a people were assumed to be an ethno-culturally homogeneous populace, the ‘nationals’ were to be treated as equal citizens. Simultaneously, therefore, the unhomogenized or culturally unassimilated groups within the nation-state were viewed as ‘non-nationals’ – representing the culture and interest of other nations. From a pre-political cultural entity, the term nation came to acquire a new connotation, whereby it was supposed to play a determining role in defining the political identity of the citizen within the state. National identity thus came to incorporate citizenship in the political vocabulary of the era.⁴ The extermination and exclusion of ‘non-nationals’ so defined from the political community of the state led to intermittent conflicts within as well as between states.

The task of rapprochement, arrived at through various peace treaties, led the European nation-state system to rearrange and redefine the relationship between state and citizens, nationals and non-nationals. Nation came to be defined in politico-territorial terms; and insofar as members of different collectivities shared a common membership of the state, they were recognized as ‘nationals’ sharing equal citizenship rights. The ‘nation-state’ that evolved operated at two levels. At the visible level, nation conceived of as a politico-cultural idea integral to the state could draw the cultural pluralities into civil society through secular institutions and organizations such as political parties, trade unions, interest groups and various other civic associations. And the state, by extending equal citizenship rights to all its members, could command the loyalty of its citizens, overriding other claims to their loyalties by different ethno-cultural communities to which they belonged. At another level, though, the nation-state operated as a politically majoritarian and culturally hegemonic institution as it sought to integrate ethnic minorities into a national society conceived of in terms of the ideological and cultural proclivities of the dominant community.⁵ As T. Asad finds in the case of Britain:

The life of the English governing class – its values, codes and sensibilities – is the core of British culture. It is therefore only others who need to be warned against the treacherous lure of dual loyalties: ‘One cannot be British on one’s own exclusive terms or on a selective basis …’. That is to say, participation in British life does after all require ‘forgetting one’s cultural roots’ if they cannot in some way be accommodated by Britishness.⁶

Nation-state in the ‘non-West’

The ‘principle of nationality’ predominant in Europe could rarely be applied in the case of the colonies of Asia and Africa. For nation referred only to people endowed with history, and for the colonialists the ‘orientals’ clearly lacked it. Hegel saw history as the development towards the ‘consciousness of freedom’ expressed in the ‘political, cultural and religious institutions of a nation –Volkgeist’.⁷ This, in turn, is expressed externally through the formation of the state. The idea of the freedom of the Volkgeist struck the Germanic nations only; it expressed itself in the formation of nation-state. The orientals, according to this doctrine, lacked the consciousness of freedom of the Volk, and therefore continued to be ruled by despots. Following the dictum, William Logan, the colonial collector of Malabar, found the Malayali people to be content without a history and certain to remain so were it not for the colonial intervention: ‘The Malayali race has produced no historians simply because there was little or no history in one sense to record.’⁸

If nation-state is the convergence of culture and polity, nationalism is its ideological vehicle. In the multinational and poly-ethnic colonies of Asia and Africa, the consolidation of culturally homogeneous nations that could pave the way for the arrival of the natives’ ‘nation-state’ seemed far-fetched. Nationalism in the colonial milieu, it is argued, surfaced primarily in the course of the struggle for self-determination against colonial and imperialist exploitation. V.I. Lenin’s characterization of ‘imperialism as the monopoly or the highest stage of capitalism’ was the basis of Joseph Stalin’s theses on nationalism outside Europe: ‘Leninism broadened the conception of self-determination and interpreted it as the right of the oppressed peoples of the dependent countries and colonies to complete secession, as the right of nations to independent existence as states.’⁹ In such a schema, however, bourgeois nationalism for the privileges of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nations is not endorsed. As opposed to the linguistic nationalism of Europe, therefore, ‘It is opposition to colonialism so defined and to those natives who benefit from the colonial relationship that constitutes nationalism in under-developed countries’.¹⁰

Anti-imperialism as the forerunner of nationalism in the colonies has received scathing criticism from theorists such as Elie Kedourie and Rupert Emerson. Although these authors see colonial intervention as critical in explaining the emergence of nationalist consciousness among the natives, anti-imperialism loses its sheen. Thus Kedourie asks:

Why then has European domination in Asia and Africa evoked nationalism in these areas? To argue that it was alien is not enough of an explanation; to say that it represented economic exploitation is highly misleading. What then was there in European rule to distinguish it from other alien dominations and to call forth in its subjects such violence and resistance?¹¹

It was the superior administrative apparatus, ‘centralised, impersonal, uniform, undiscriminating in their incidence’, that inadvertently evoked natives’ nationalist consciousness, the argument goes. Modern European bureaucracy, despite its ‘leveling and pulverizing effect on traditional hierarchies and loyalties’, contends Kedourie, remained distant and unapproachable to subject populations.¹² If Kedourie’s imperialist thesis is to be believed, far from exploitation of the natives’ resources, anti-colonialism, the harbinger of nationalism in the colonies, had its seeds in this failure of colonial bureaucracy’s ‘public relations’ exercise. Again, the natives’ anger was misplaced, as the raison d’être of colonialism was not economic exploitation; instead it willy-nilly integrated the subsistent economies of traditional societies with the world market which brought them ‘new and vast riches’ and the occasional depression. Thus, it was not colonial power per se but impersonal forces of the market that triggered such protests.¹³

The natives’ nationalism is more or less an emulation of its counterpart in West Europe, a feat unachievable without the presence of the White man, a strand in the imperialist school suggests. Thus, for Emerson,

Imperialism scattered the revolutionary seeds of Western Civilization in haphazard fashion over the surface of the globe… . Its most important result, ironically enough, was to rouse against itself the nationalisms – and in some instances even to create the nations – which worked to make its continuance impossible.¹⁴

According to the said thesis, nationalism in much of Asia and Africa was neither a rise to self-awakening of a dormant people nor was it an upheaval against economic oppression by an alien power. In the absence of material conditions that could structure it, anti-colonialism or nationalism was ineluctably a gift of imperialism, a Western import. If, for Kedourie, it was the ‘superior yet impersonal colonial administrative structure that fuelled nativism’, for Emerson this import of nationalism was facilitated through colonial education:

Colonial educational systems have frequently been attacked … for teaching the history of metropolitan country or of Europe … but it was from European history that the lessons of the struggle for freedom could on the whole be most effectively learned.

Closer to our times, yet consistent with earlier pronouncements, Benedict Anderson’s constructivist argument portrays ‘imagined nations’ of postcolonial Asia and Africa as mimicking Western ‘modular forms’. Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’, once created in eighteenth-century Europe and the Americas, take ‘modular’ form as they are ‘transplanted’ to a ‘great variety of social terrains’, primarily to the erstwhile colonies. Given the argument, the new states that emerged from the debris of World War II, without fail, drew their ancestry from various models of nationalism available in the West – in retaining their European languages-of-state they resembled the Americas; linguistic nationalism was copied from Western Europe and, in vehemently pursuing official nationalism, the inspiration was Czarist Russification.¹⁵

Taking cue from Chatterjee’s critique, such theorizations emanating from Western scholarship assume the postcolonial world to be perpetual consumers of unbridled and unidirectional modernity, but never its producer. Imagination and creativity then is the realm of the West – for the rest, ‘even our imaginations must remain forever colonised’. Therefore the West scripted for us not only the ‘colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also … our anti-colonial esistance and postcolonial misery’, Chatterjee argues.^16a Iranian philosopher Jalal Al-e-Ahmad termed such mechanical aping of the West by the East, particularly by its Westernized intelligentsia, as Gharbz...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the ‘nation-state’ and its citizens
• 2 Nationalism, minority rights and the public sphere: the terms of an emerging discourse
• 3 Qaum, millat and ummah: liminality in the Muslim identity discourse
• 4 Beyond hybridity: evolution of a Sikh exclusive identity; from panth to qaum
• 5 Muslim perceptions: nation, identity and rights
• 6 Sikh narratives: nationhood and its discontents
• 7 Concluding remarks: comparative perspectives on Muslim and Sikh identities
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index