As should be evident from the letters we have carried in the last two weeks, some of our Muslim readers have not taken well to our editorial “Playing With Fire” (December 16). I do not know how representative these individuals are of the Muslim sentiment and, indeed, whether such a thing as general Muslim sentiment exists.
It is a common practice for Indian commentators, academicians and public figures to rush from the particular to the general. As a class, we educated Indians are quite alien to Western empiricism which would dissuade a Western man from arguing that all swans are white because those he has seen are white. We tend to conjure up nightmares out of isolated incidents.
I am aware of this trap. This awareness is reinforced by my general scepticism regarding the representative capacity of the educated Indian, Hindu or Muslim. In my opinion, such an Indian cuts himself off from the ordinary people in the very process of being trained to think in a foreign language (English) with the help of Western concepts. A deliberate repudiation of these concepts by individuals we call revivalists or fundamentalists does not restore the organic links between them and the people. The revivalists and fundamentalists not only reinterpret the tradition selectively but also seek to impose their versions on the masses. Revivalism is as elitist a phenomenon as modernisation.
Persecution Feeling
In the specific case of the Indian Muslim public figures and commentators, these reservations are reinforced by the indisputable fact that not many of them have ever concerned themselves with the problems of small peasants, landless workers and artisans, though a vast majority of Muslims belong to these categories. They talk vaguely and patronisingly of poor Muslims. But they have made no effort to organise the latter on economic issues perhaps because a class organisation cannot be a communal one. And it is easier to whip up passion than to organise.
Despite these reservations, I accept at least for the purpose of the present article that Muslims in this country regard themselves as a minority and indeed a persecuted and beleaguered minority. I also take it that riots like the recent ones in Meerut and Baroda, whatever their background and cause, strengthen this feeling among Muslims and that even genuinely nationalist Muslims in public life regard it their duty to give expression to the community’s sense of grievance.
I tried to deal with this issue indirectly in my article “Basis of Indian Secularism” (December 29). In this article I argued that Hindus are not a religious community in any sense of the term and that in fact Hinduism is not even a way of life because it incorporates within it several ways of life. This is a crucial issue because there must be a religion-based majority community in order that there be minority communities.
Here I am not concerned with the issue of whether Muslims constitute a community in that the sentiment of pan-Indian unity overrides regional, linguistic and class factors. Perhaps it does, to an extent. But at present I am only interested in emphasizing that out thinking on this and related issues has not perverted because we have heedlessly accepted the majority-minority concept which does not apply to our country. It is not relevant in the case of India just as it is not in that of the United States, another major country without a well-defined majority.
This dangerous majority-minority concept has many fathers. Some Hindu writers have, for instance, interpreted Maharana Pratap’s and Shivaji’s struggle against the Moghul empire as expression of a Hindu upsurge, disregarding the well-known fact that on both sides were ranged Hindu and Muslim commanders and soldiers and that Moghul emperors faced more trouble from Muslim regional power centres than from Hindus.
Similarly, Muslim writers have traced the rise of the two-nation theory to Mohammad Bin Qasim’s invasion of Sind in the 10th century. They have rejected the well-known fact that Hinduism and Islam had influenced each other in a big way and north India even produced a common language – Urdu. One of the known Muslim writers, Aziz Ahmed, has argued that Muslims felt insecure even during the Sultanate and the Moghul rule because they were afraid of being submerged in the Hindu ocean.
Pakistani historians have worked this insecurity theme to death and in the process created serious problems for themselves. If, according to them, Muslims in united India were a nation by virtue of their history, religion and culture, so must be Indian Muslims today because these things have not changed with partition. But this is a proposition which the Pakistanis cannot advocate without calling into question their own country’s raison d’etre. And why did their own country break up in 1971? But these are problems for Pakistani intellectuals to cope with and not for us.
British Suppression
However substantial the contribution of Hindu and Muslim “historians” to the rise of the majority-minority theory, it was truly sired by the British as part of their policy of divide and rule. Immediately after the great mutiny of 1857, they suppressed the Muslim upper class whom they held responsible for the uprising and after 1870 they favoured the same Muslim upper class because the newly emerging Western-educated intelligentsia, which happened to be largely Hindu for a variety of historical reasons, had begun to demand a share in power. The formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 clinched the issue forever for the British. Divide and rule was to be their policy.
In passing, I might add that Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, father of the modernisation movement in Indian Islam, was perhaps the first leading Muslim to raise the spectre of Hindu domination. He did so to justify his case for Muslim loyalty to the British Raj.
This is not the place to go into his efforts to assuage British fears of Muslims, reconcile Muslims to British rule which he regarded as immutable as the laws of nature and above all interpret Islam to make it appear a variant of Western Christianity, that is not Christianity as preached by Jesus Christ but as shaped by the post-renaissance West in the light of its humanist liberal philosophy. Suffice it to say here that his theories came under sharp attack by, among others, Jamal al Din al Afghani, one of the major architects of Muslim revivalism in the 19th century. Sir Sayyid faced persecution and even excommunication and had perhaps to invent the bogey of Hindu domination to persuade educated Muslims to continue to stay away from the freedom movement and be loyal to the British.
Sir Sayyid was, of course, not a vulgar communalist. It will be a travesty of the truth to so describe him. But he was willing to commend the theory of divide and rule to the British. In 1858 he blamed the British policy of raising mixed army units for the mutiny. He wrote:
“When Nadir Shah … became master of … Persia and Afghanistan, he invariably kept the two armies at equal strength … When the Persian army attempted to rise, the Afghan army was at hand to quell the rebellion, and vice versa. The English did not follow this precedent in India…. Government certainly did put the two antagonistic races into the same regiment, but constant intercourse had done its work, and the two races in regiment had become almost one. It is but natural and to be expected, that a feeling of friendship and brotherhood must spring up between the men of a regiment, constantly brought together as they are … If separate regiments of Hindus and separate regiments of Mohammedans had been raised, this feeling of brotherhood could not have arisen”.
False Proposition
The British were then not willing to listen to him and other similarly inclined Muslims in 1858 but they were by 1870 when WW Hunter’s famous book “Indian Musalmans” appeared. The book both reflected the beginning of change in the British policy and helped to push it further in the same direction. London never retreated from this policy of divide and rule. On the contrary, it intensified it as the nationalist challenge grew. This policy reached its climax during World War II when the Muslim League was built up into a formidable force. In the election to the provincial legislature in 1937, the League had secured a small percentage of the Muslim vote under the separate electorate system and failed to form a government in any Muslim majority province. By 1945 it had become irresistible.
The British were so successful in their diabolical plans that we ourselves came to be convinced that there was a majority community (Hindus) and minority communities (Muslim, Christian, Zoroastrian and indeed even Sikh, Jain and Buddhist) and that there was an inevitable clash of identities and interests among them.
This false proposition has been bought not only by communalists out to destroy the country in the name of religion but also by well-meaning people anxious to build a just order where no one is discriminated against on grounds of faith. The latter invokes these categories as much as the former, though, of course, not with a view to inciting passion. They do not realise that by accepting this majority-minority conceptual framework assiduously sold by the British that are undermining the very basis of Indian nationalism. This has poisoned the very roots of our thinking and is, therefore, not easy to eliminate from our system. But we have to eliminate it if we are to become a nation and stay in one piece.
The Times of India, 5 January 1983