During the recent informal get together at the Sariska sanctuary, a senior cabinet minister is reported to have narrated his experience in wooing the Muslim vote. He had, he said, promoted a lot of development in and around a predominantly Muslim area in his constituency. But when he visited it subsequently, a Muslim got up at the meeting to complain that the dargah in the locality still remained to be repaired and to suggest politely that unless this problem was taken care of, the minister could not be sure of Muslim support.
Knowing the minister as I do, I am pretty certain that he would have provided the necessary funds. He is not the kind of person who would alienate his constituents on such a “small” issue. Indeed, that kind of “helpfulness” is part of the Congress culture. That is, however, not the point which interests me. I would be interested in finding out the conclusion, if any, that the minister drew from this experience.
But whatever the Congress leader’s conclusion, I would regard it as an additional piece of evidence to confirm me in my view that the Muslims see themselves above all else as a religious community and a threat to that status, real or imaginary, is what moves them deeply. By that reckoning I do not see the Indian Muslims as a political community in being or in becoming.
Agency Ended
This assessment is contrary to much that has been written on the subject for a long time, especially since independence which is at once surprising and unsurprising. Surprising because the survival of pre-1947 responses and formulations speaks of an incapacity to take into account so significant a development as the elimination, on the one hand, of a powerful agency (the British Raj) which could manipulate the forces in play in the country and, on the other, of western Uttar Pradesh-centred Muslim elite which could make common cause with that agency. Unsurprising, partly because events leading to and following partition could not but have a traumatic impact on us and partly because partition violated the very concept of territorial nationalism which in the secular realm serves as India’s main raison d’etre.
Be that as it may, I believe that the Muslims are part of the larger political community that we have been trying to build out of our patchwork society and that essentially it is a hangover of the past that we continue to speak of the need to bring them into the mainstream. In a sense we all belong to little streams (caste, subcaste, language, dialect, urban, rural, land-owning, landless, business, employment and so on) which we are trying to link together to form a political community without which we cannot sustain a viable state that we desperately need to survive in the modem world.
Muslim separatism, as it developed in British India, has been discussed extensively and competently. Even so it is necessary to make some points in order to be able to discuss post-1947 developments in a meaningful way.
First, the British Raj in India was critically dependent on collaborators; it just could not have survived otherwise. The collaborators came from both the old and the new (British produced) order. If Sir Syed Ahmad Khan chose the path of collaboration, so did most leading Hindus of that period. His Persian ancestry is relevant in this context. He spoke for the Persianised Muslim elite centred in western UP which played a crucial role in the rise of Muslim “nationalism,” leading to the formation of Pakistan. There is no similar Persianised Muslim elite in today’s India and there is no power with which such an elite, even if it had somehow survived partition and subsequent modernisation, could have combined.
Second, even the first step towards Muslim “nationalism” could not have been taken in British India in the absence of separate electorates. This British move did not prove decisive, as the poor performance of the Muslim League in the elections to the state legislature in 1937 showed; in the Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab, the dominant Muslim parties and leaders made common cause with the relevant sections of the Hindus – the poor and the landless in Bengal and the Hindu and Sikh landowning peasantry in Punjab. Even so separate electorates laid the basis of Muslim separatism. Our founding fathers abolished the separate electorates and, mercifully for us, the rulers have not yielded to the opposition pressure for allowing the dangerous scheme to make a re-entry by the backdoor. Which is what the demand for proportional representation, pressed, among others, by the self-appointed guardians of the Hindus in the former Bharatiya Jana Sangh, amounts to.
Great tragedy
Even the joint electorate could have left some space for a Muslim political community if there was a sufficiently large number of Muslim-majority constituencies in independent India. But outside Jammu and Kashmir, there are only two such parliamentary constituencies in the whole of the Union of India. And, as we know, in that state the emphasis is on the Kashmiri identity and not on Muslim identity. Kerala is a special case in view of the unique (for India) Hindu-Christian-Muslim communal balance in the state’s population. That alone has made it possible for the Muslim League to function effectively there. It cannot do so in any other state with the possible exception of Assam at some stage.
Those of us who were adults in the late forties and early fifties will recall that partition was followed by the “demand” for “Akhand” Hindustan, as if it was in the power of the Congress government to reunite India. Even today there are individuals who regard partition as a great and avoidable tragedy and blame the Congress leadership, especially Pandit Nehru and Sardar Patel, for it. I am not one of them. For I take the view that the rise of Muslim “nationalism” could not have been prevented once the Congress had swept the polls to most state legislatures in 1937 and “threatened” to come to power in New Delhi; that it could at best have been frustrated if the Congress ministry had not resigned in the wake of the declaration of World War II in 1939 (this left the field free for the Muslim League) and if Mahatma Gandhi had not pushed the Congress into confrontation with the British in 1942, leaving them little option but to patronise Mr Jinnah and the Muslim League; that this frustrated Muslim “nationalism” would have made orderly governance of India impossible; united India, in my view, would have been an enlarged version of Lebanon.
Muslim “nationalism” found its “fulfilment” in the formation of Pakistan if anything so artificial (it was all along propped up by the Raj) and so negative (it arose out of the fear of “Hindu” domination in free India) could find “fulfilment.” Inevitably, that “fulfilment” marked its demise not only in India where the necessary conditions for its rise and growth inevitably disappeared but also in Pakistan. For Pakistan has been an utter failure in terms of the ideology of Muslim “nationalism.”
Within a couple of years of the establishment of Pakistan, the Punjabi identity asserted itself over Islamic universalism, provoking the assertion of language-based Bangla cultural identity which culminated in a sovereign Bangladesh in 1971. Incidentally, there has been no other similar case of a country breaking up under the weight of its own contradictions since World War II. And what has remained of Pakistan since, voluntarily serves the ends of the United States which must, by the very logic of its being, seek to undermine any Islamic assertion anywhere. Finally, the intensity of intra-ethnic clashes in Karachi and elsewhere speaks for itself. Pakistan is a grand failure in terms of its self-definition and the Indian Muslims know it in the heart of their collective heart even if they do not wish to recognise it just as they do not wish to take note of the total disarray in Muslim West Asia, including the Gulf region.
Non-Muslims of my generation do not tire of speaking of the trauma of partition for them. They have no idea of the depth of the trauma of the Indian Muslims. They felt orphaned as they felt orphaned after 1857. And they returned to the collaborationist role Sir Syed had recommended to them after 1857 – this time with the Congress government. Mr Nehru made it relatively easy for them to do so by ignoring their role in the country’s partition and denouncing as more dangerous the majority (his expression) communalism which existed largely in his own imagination. But I for one doubt whether the Muslim response to the new situation would have been very different if Mr Nehru’s pronouncements had been closer to the reality on the ground which was that the Hindus did not constitute a community in any relevant sense of the term, or if someone else was India’s first Prime Minister, provided, of course, that he fulfilled his obligation of ensuring that the Indian Muslims could enjoy their rights as Indian citizens.
A Major Role
The Indian Muslims have doubtless played a major role in ensuring Congress rule at the Centre for four decades, with a brief interlude in 1977-80. But they have had no hesitation in backing would be winners in the states. In 1977, they backed the Janata which was even otherwise assured of victory. They are less likely to favour chaos than the Hindus, the latter’s talk of worshipping Mother India, notwithstanding. Surely that does make the Muslims part and parcel of the emerging Indian political community, though in a somewhat special sense.
(To be concluded…)
The Times of India, 6 January 1988