Keynote Speakers
Christophe Jaffrelot (CNRS-CERI/Sciences-Po)
"Hindus and Muslims in the Communal Era"
Even
though Indira Gandhi had the notion of secularism inserted in
the Indian Constitution almost twenty years after independence,
in 1976, the political regime set up during the reign of her father,
Jawaharlal Nehru, was already designed along those lines. Secularism,
here, is not a synonym for the French word ‘laïcité’,
which implies a form of separation between the State and the Church ;
it rather designates the equidistance of the State vis-à-vis
all the religions and an equally positive attitude towards them
all. For instance, article 25 of the Constitution emphasises that
‘all persons are equally free to profess, practice and propagate
religion’ and article 30 that ‘All minorities, whether
based on religion or language, shall have the right to establish
and administer educational institutions', which can also receive
subsidies from the State.
The religious minorities, the Muslims (12.12%
of the population in the 1991 census) and the Christians (2%)
were also entitled to use their personal law - based on the Shariat
in the case of the former - for regulating their community life,
whereas the Hindu majority (82%) was submitted to the Hindu Code
Bill which, in the 1950s reformed the traditional practices regarding
divorce, inheritance and adoption in the light of the western
law, something the most militant Hindus still regard today as
an unbalanced treatment.
The relationship between the Hindus and the religious
minorities has always been in the form of a dialectic. This interaction,
in addition to economic factors and the emergence of a proto-democratic
political arena during the British Raj, gradually led all the
communities to reshape their identity along ethno-nationalist
lines - what is known as ´communalismª in India. I shall
examine this process by focusing on the case of Hinduism in order
to show that it has probably reached its culmination point (or
its logical conclusion) in the last decade of this century, as
suggested by the growing marginalization of the Muslims.
The Hindu pattern : stigmatizing and emulating
´threatening othersª
The word ‘Hindu’ primarily designated
those who lived beyond the river Sindhu, or Indus, not the followers
of a creed. In fact, Hinduism has not been considered to be a
religion for a long time, since, although it sanctions a strong
orthopraxy embodied in the caste system, it does not contain an
orthodoxy. It has no Book which can serve as a common reference ;
the relevant books have been written by gurus for their
sects (sampradayas or panths) which indeed represent
the basic units of the Hindu world. The only approximate form
of ‘ecclesiastical structure’ was created by Shankara
who, in the 8th century established monasteries in
the four corners of India. Interestingly, he did so as a way of
countering the growing influence of Buddhism which threatened
to displace the Brahmins as the religious élite. The head
of the four monasteries were ordained to exercise a spiritual
authority comparable to that of the Buddhist clergy : a Hindu
pattern of reaction to exterior threats was taking shape which
consisted, for the brahminical élite, in imitating those
who were perceived as posing upon them a threat in order to resist
them more efficiently.
This modus operandi was reactivated in the 19th
century in the context of the European colonization. Upper caste
Hindus reacted to the British - utilitarian - administration and
the Christian missions, which shared an aversion to Hinduism for
its idolatrous polytheism and its caste system, by inventing a
Vedic golden age where God was presented as unique (as said Ram
Mohun Roy, the founder of the Brahmo Samaj in 1928 in Calcutta)
and where the Aryans were supposed to occupy positions in the
social system according to their merits (as advocated by Swami
Dayananda, the founder of the Arya Samaj in 1875 in Bombay). The
19th century socio-religious reform movements tended
to modernize Hinduism along western lines - they protested against
child marriage and the sati, militated in favor of female
literacy etc. - but they also emulated the British in order to
fight their influence more effectively. For instance, the Arya
Samaj reinterpreted the old notion of Shuddhi - a ritual which
traditionally enabled an upper caste Hindu to purify himself when
he has been soiled by some polluting contact - in order to transform
it into a re-conversion procedure and thereby make of Hinduism
a proselyte creed, allegedly like Christianity and Islam.
The Muslims’ attitude precipitated the next
stage in the formation of a Hindu, nationalist identity. The peace
negotiations following the First World War worried Indian followers
of Islam because they apprehended that the Caliphate, hitherto
embodied in the person of the Ottoman Sultan, would be suppressed.
In 1919, some of their leaders launched a ‘Khilafat Movement’
against the British, who took part in the negotiations (G. Minault :
1982). This mobilization degenerated in some instances into Hindu-Muslim
riots, especially on the Malabar coast in 1921. It triggered off
a cycle of violence which lasted till the late 1920s in North
India and reinforced a sense of vulnerability among the Hindus.
As a result, Hindu activists launched the movement ´Hindu
Sangathanª (for the Organization of the Hindus). Hindu nationalism
crystallized in this context as an ideology and a political movement.
The Hindutva movement, an ethno-religious
nationalism
The Hindu nationalist ideology was first
thoroughly codified in 1923 by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966)
in Hindutva [Hinduness], who is a Hindu? In this
work, a Hindu is primarily someone who lives in Hindustan, the
land beyond the Indus, between the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean.
But Savarkar does not believe in territorial nationalism, a notion
which implies a universalistic worldview. For him, Hindustan is
remarkable because it is so strongly retrenched that the first
Aryans, in Vedic times, were immune from foreign influences and
intermarried in such a way that all the Hindus ´can claim
to have in their veins the blood of the mighty race descended
from the Vedic fathers... ª (Savarkar : 85). In
addition to geographical and ethnic unity, Savarkar, paradoxically,
emphasizes India’s linguistic unity by arguing that Sanskrit
is set up as the referent of all the sub-continental languages.
Thereafter, every political program based on the Hindu nationalist
ideology would call for recognition of Sanskrit or Hindi–the
vernacular language closest to Sanskrit–as the national language.
The tenets of Hindu nationalist ideology
were subsequently revised by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS–Association
of National Volunteers), which was founded in 1925 by an admirer
of Savarkar, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar (1889-1940) and which soon
became the leading organization in the Hindutva movement. Golwalkar,
who succeeded Hedgewar as chief of the RSS in 1940, gave the movement
its ideological charter in 1938 with his book We, or Our Nationhood
Defined, where religious minorities are called upon
to pledge allegiance to Hindu symbols of identity as the embodiment
of the Indian nation (Golwalkar 1939). Hindu culture being the
essence of Indian identity, religious minorities are requested
to limit expressions of community distinctiveness to the private
sphere.
The concept of "Chiti" or "Race-spirit"
in the writings of Savarkar and later of Golwalkar conveys the
idea of the soul of the nation rather than biological connotations
(Jaffrelot : 1995). This conception allows–in fact insists
upon–integration of minorities by means of acculturation
and at a subordinate level, whereas the tenets of biological racism,
reasoning in eugenic terms, could well have incorporated an idea
of total exclusion. This difference reflects the importance of
social categories in Hinduism, a civilization which has always
been characterized by an ability and a determination to assimilate
the Other at a subordinate level as part of the organicist, hierarchical
rationale of a caste-based society. Golwalkar considered as mlecchas
(barbarians) foreigners "who do not subscribe to the social
laws dictated by the Hindu religion and culture" (Golwalkar,
1966 : 62), a definition which closely coincides with the
traditional usage of this term. In ancient India, a mleccha
was someone on the fringe of the orthopraxy specific to the caste
society dominated by Brahminical values.
The Hindu nationalist network
The Hindu nationalist network first spread
among the high castes of northern India and is still largely confined
to this area. This geographical situation can be explained in
two ways. Firstly, the Sanskrit Great Tradition on which their
ideology is based is closely related to the Hindi-speaking north;
secondly, this is a region inhabited by a large proportion of
high-caste Hindus who are attracted by the Hindutva movement because,
with its emphasis on social organic unity, it seems well equipped
to protect them from the rising power of the low castes.
The Hindu nationalist movement, especially
the RSS which is its backbone, has always regarded itself as destined
to encompass the whole of India; this being so, it determined
at a very early stage to spread throughout Indian society. First,
it developed a network of shakhas (local branches), which
organized daily physical training and Hindu nationalist propaganda
sessions in urban neighborhoods and villages. The RSS’s ultimate
ambition was to reach all the cities and villages of India in
this way. Its membership rose from 10,000 in 1932 to 600,000 in
1951 and today stands at around 2 millions, divided among 25,000
branches (shakhas) and 31,000 sub-branches (upshakhas).
(The upshakhas are the RSS’s real basic units since
the number of shakhas simply indicates the places where
the movement is present ; a town or village may contain several
sub-branches).
After independence, this coverage of the
Indian territory was supplemented by an effort to develop a network
of sectoral affiliates: the aim was not to penetrate society directly
by means of shakhas, but to set up unions or organizations
to defend specific social categories. These organizations give
the Hindu nationalist movement a foothold in most sectors of society,
where they work hand in glove with the shakha network.
All these bridgeheads are presented by the mother organization
as the "Sangh parivar", "the family of the Sangh",
i.e. the RSS.
In 1948, Delhi-based RSS officials founded the
Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP–the Association
of Students of India), a students’ union which was primarily
intended to counter communist influence on university campuses.
(Today it is the student union with the largest membership). A
few years later, in 1955, the RSS set up a trade union, the Bharatiya
Mazdoor Sangh (BMS–the Indian Workers’ Association)
primarily to oppose the "Red unions" in the name of
Hindu nationalist ideology, which attaches greater importance
to social cohesion than to the class struggle, in line with organicist
principles incorporating some Gandhian features. By the early
1990s, the BMS had become India’s biggest trade union.
Alongside these unions, the RSS developed
a number of more specialized organizations. In 1952, it founded
a tribal welfare movement, the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA–Center
for Tribals’ Welfare) whose purpose was primarily to counter
the influence of the Christian missionaries among the tribals
of central India where their evangelization and social work had
led to many conversions. The VKA imitated the techniques of the
missionaries by developing dispensaries and schools to bring about
a number of "re-conversions" : the strategy of
stigmatization and emulation was still at work.
The VHP, a Hindu consistory ?
In 1964, in association with Hindu religious
figures, the RSS launched the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP–World
Hindu Council), a movement designed to bring together the different
Hindu sect leaders and provide this loosely organized religion
with some kind of centralized structure. The VHP succeeded indeed
in gathering together the heads of different Hindu sects on a
covertly political platform.
Till the 1960s, few heads of traditional sects
had joined the Hindu nationalist movement. Digvijay Nath, the
chief of the Nath of Gorakhpur had been returned to the Lok Sabha
on an Hindu Mahasabha ticket. Before that, Swami Karpatriji, one
of the most influential ascetics of Benares had founded the Ram
Rajya Parishad (Association for the Kingdom of Ram) in 1948 in
order to fight the Hindu Code Bill which, according to him, went
against the Hindu traditions. He received the support of several
maharajahs in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh where he established
pockets of influence till the 1960s. He then played a key part
in the 1966 cow protection movement which aimed at prohibiting
cow-slaughter in the Constitution itself, something Nehru had
refused out of respect for the non vegetarian communities. Large
numbers of sadhus took part in the biggest demonstration that
had been held in Delhi till then. At that time, the VHP was instrumental
in bringing many more religious figures in the Hindu nationalist
movement.
The ground had been prepared for this task by
the profound change Hindu ascetics were undergoing. These sadhus
were generally known as itinerant individuals absorbed in the
solitary quest of God, even when they belonged to monk orders.
However, even before independence the urban middle class had been
a favorable milieu for the emergence of new kinds of sadhus
who, even though they were initiated in traditional orders, preached
in English and downplayed the individual relation with their disciples
in comparison to ‘mass enlightenment’. In fact they
specialized in the collective healing of the psychological distress
of the middle class which suffered from stress and urban anomie.
Even today their teaching aims more at making life a success than
at spiritual salvation. The modern sadhus almost ignore
their sectarian affiliation and, by contrast, emphasize their
‘Hinduness’. They develop philanthropic activities and
establish their reputation via lucrative travels in the West.
Many of them eventually joined the Hindu nationalist movement.
Swami Chinmayananda, a ‘modern guru’ who established
his ashram, the Sandypani Academy, in Bombay in 1963 was
one of the founders of the Vishva Hindu Parishad.
The VHP has been founded in the ashram
of Swami Chinmayananda, but under the auspices of the RSS which
seconded one of its pracharaks, Shiv Shankar Apte, to become
its General Secretary. Since then the objective of the movement
has been to strengthen Hinduism by endowing it with a centralized
organization. For the Hindu nationalists, there is an urgent need
for federating the sects of their religion which, otherwise is
at the mercy of the minorities. The circumstances of the foundation
of the VHP are illuminating in this respect : the movement
was launched in Bombay just before the visit of the Pope, which
had announced that he would convert a large number of Hindus to
Christianity. Once again, Hindus feeling threatened by a ‘semitic’
creed, responded by imitating its centralized structure. Indeed,
the VHP’s organization draws its inspiration from the Catholic
notion of consistory. Moreover, it then tried to evolve an Hindu
cathechism, to standardize the Hindu rituals and to deploy its
own preachers in the regions where the missionaries were operating :
it implemented the strategy of stigmatization and emulation in
its own way.
The Ayodhya movement
The Vishva Hindu Parishad became the spearhead
of Hindu nationalism in the early 1980s, primarily because the
RSS decided to make it the principal means of action after it
had distanced itself from the BJP which had shown itself to be
too prompt to dilute its Hindu nationalist movement, primarily
so as to form electoral alliances with parties of different persuasions.
The Sangh parivar then benefited from the
reactivation of a Hindu sentiment of vulnerability resulting from
the conversions of Meenakshipuram. In that village in Tamil Nadu,
several hundred Untouchables converted to Islam in 1981, apparently
under the influence of Muslim leaders. These conversions were
interpreted by the Hindu Vishva, the official organ of
the VHP, as constituting "part of a long-term plan intended to
transform the [Muslim] minority into a majority"(Hindu Vishva,
March-April 1982: 7). The VHP sponsored Hindu Solidarity Conferences
all over India to awaken solidarity among Hindus, for "Jana
Jagaran", according to the common expression which tended
to replace the RSS slogan "Hindu Sangathan".
The VHP organised the Ekatmata Yatra (literally,
"pilgrimage of unity") in the same perspective in 1983: three
caravans connecting Kathmandu and Rameshwaram (Tamil Nadu), Gangasagar
(Bengal) and Somnath (Gujarat), and Haridwar (Uttar Pradesh) and
Kanyakumari (Tamil Nadu), distributed water from the Ganges and
provided themselves with sacred water from local temples or from
other sacred rivers encountered on the way ; this mingling
was intended to symbolize Hindu unity and indeed all the caravans
converged in Nagpur, the headquarters of the RSS and the geographical
center of India. The Ganges - river of salvation - was a shrewd
choice since, just as the cow, it represents a symbol venerated
by all Hindus.
The manipulation of religious symbols appeared
even more distinctly in the Ayodhya movement. In Ayodhya, the
Great Moghol, Babur, had had a mosque built on a site which some
Hindus regarded as the birthplace of Ram, the most popular god
in North India. In 1984, the VHP started a movement claiming the
retrocession of the Ramjanmabhoomi (birthplace of Ram) to the
Hindus. In May-June, the VHP provided itself with a branch which
assembled young militants, the Bajrang Dal. Its founder, V. Katiyar,
had until then been a pracharak of the RSS. However, the
Bajrang Dal proved to be less disciplined than the RSS and violent
utterances as well as actions were to precipitate many communal
riots.
In Septembre 1984 the VHP conducted a march,
beginning in Sitarmahi (Bihar), in the name of the "liberation"
of the Ayodhya temple, which was reached on 7 October. In accordance
with this concern to create a pressure group, the march set out
to convey a petition to the government in Lucknow and then took
the route to Delhi, which it should have reached in December,
shortly before the elections foreseen for January 1985. However,
in the meantime, the assassination of Indira Gandhi completely
transformed the political atmosphere and led the VHP to change
its plans.
The Ayodhya movement knew a new development
in 1989 when the VHP decided to build a temple on Ram birthplace.
Its Ram Shila Pujans program consisted in taking the bricks with
which this temple was supposed to be built to thousands of towns
and villages in order to have them consecrated by sadhus
and to collect donations. More importantly, this campaign surcharged
the atmosphere with communal feelings which were to be influence
the results of the late 1989 elections. The BJP joined the Ayodhya
movement at that stage, realizing its growing popularity among
the Hindus of North India. It registered a significant electoral
advance (eighty-eight seats as opposed to only two in 1984), which
was further strengthened in 1991 (119 seats, of which six were
won by "modern gurus"). In September 1990, Hindu militants had
tried to take by storm the Babri Masjid - the domes had been damaged
but the repression of the militants which made a dozen of casualties
had enhanced the cause of the so-called ‘Hindu martyrs’.
Muslims as second class citizens ?
The constitutional dispositions which were intended
to found a multicultural polity after independence remained largely
non implemented because Hindu traditionalists from the Congress
were well entrenched in the States. Congressmen qualified by Bruce
Graham as ‘Hindu traditionalists’ were known for a staunch
attachment to Hindu culture which found expression in the promotion
of Hindi and Ayurvedic medicine and their association with the
cow protection movement. Subsequently, the rise of the BJP further
marginalized the Muslims in the administration and the political
system.
While the Indian Muslims still pride themselves
from the achievements of the Delhi Sultanate and the Moghol Empire,
the 1947 Partition has sealed their fate in India. Two thirds
of the Muslims of British India went to Pakistan and among them
were most of the members of the élite. The mass of the
peasants and craftsmen who remained behind were deprived of their
best customers by this exodus and the abolition of the princely
states. In addition, in spite of Nehru’s exhortations, the
Congress traditionalist bosses of North India - G.B. Pant, Sampurnanand,
R.S. Shukla, D. P. Mishra, Seth Govind Das etc. - showed much
reluctance to recruit Muslims in the administration. In 1964,
there were only 7.7% and 5.53% Muslims in the bureaucracy of Uttar
Pradesh and Bihar, two states were they represented respectively
15 and 14% of the population. In 1992, the Muslims formed only
4% of the police forces in Uttar Pradesh. Nehru promoted Muslim
leaders such Maulana Azad and Rafi Ahmad Kidwai who were among
his Ministers, or Zakir Husain the Vice President in 1962-1967,
and then President in 1967-1969. But at the state level Muslims
did not often reach posts of responsibility.
The hiatus between New Delhi’s policies
and politics at the state level was especially striking in the
linguistic domain. In 1963, the Official Languages Act
established English as an ‘associated official language’,
to the chagrin of the Hindu zealots who wanted Hindi to be the
only national language. In the states of the Hindi belt, where
almost half of the Muslims live and where Hindu traditionalist
congressmen were in command, the latters’ policy put Urdu,
the language recognized by the Muslims as an identity symbol,
in a jeopa rdy. Hindi was considered as the official language
by the states of this area after 1947. In Uttar Pradesh, the government
of G.B. Pant declared that Hindi was the language to be used in
the courts and by the administration, where Urdu had been an official
language during the British Raj. The Anjuman-e-Taraqqi-e-Urdu
organised a protest movement in the form of a signature campaign
and in 1958 Nehru demanded that the Urdu speaking population of
the state was allowed to be educated in their idiom. The reluctance
of the State authorities to amend the education policy - which
was in the State’s domain of competence - was such that Urdu
continued to lose ground, so much so that today Muslim institutions
have the Coran printed in Devanagari (the script used for writing
Hindi) in order to reach their co-religionists. Urdu newspapers
are also developing Hindi editions, but this effort does not enable
them to resist the general trend very efficiently.
Table 1: The Hindi and the Urdu presses
Dailies Weeklies
Bi-monthlies
1958
1990 1958 1990 1958 1990
Hindi 73 1381 233 4669 60
1652
Urdu 44 344 117 903 24
261
Source : M. Hasan, "Minority identity and its
discontents: Ayodhya and its aftermath", South Asia Bulletin,
14(2), 1994, pp. 32-33.
The Muslims of Uttar Pradesh had to wait
till the 1989 election campaign for seeing the Congress state
government declaring Urdu as the second official language. This
decision was obviously taken with an eye on the Muslim vote.
Such a tactical move was not new. In fact, the
Muslims supported the Congress after independence largely because
it appeared as a secular party. Nehru was especially regarded
as the custodian of the Muslims’ interests. The Congress
maintained this relationship after his death but it tended to
assume more and more a clientelistic form. In fact, the ruling
party was eager to co-opt and patronize Muslim leaders who often
turned out to exert a conservative influence over their community,
especially when they were religious leaders. Gradually, the notion
of secularism got perverted because of them and their association
with the Congress party. They erected the Shariat as a symbol
of the Muslim identity and of India’s multiculturalism, whereas
they did not show much tolerance themselves. This complex issue
was well illustrated during the Shah Bano affair.
Shah Bano had been repudiated by her husband
according to the Shariat. She was granted some alimony by the
High Court of Madhya Pradesh, where she lived, but her former
husband went on appeal before the Supreme Court which reconfirmed
the judgement in 1985. Immediately, Muslim leaders started an
agitation with ‘Shariat in danger’ as the standard slogan
and went to Rajiv Gandhi, the Prime Minister. Rajiv Gandhi, who
did not want to alienate them, had the Congress party vote an
amendment in Parliament in order to substract the Muslim community
to the article of the Code of Criminal Procedure on the basis
of which the Supreme Court had pronounced its judgement. This
move was strongly disapproved of by the Sangh parivar which saw
in it a sign of ‘pseudo-secularism’ and of pampering
of the most obscurantist Muslims. The Shah Bano affair prepared
the ground for the Hindu mobilization around Ayodhya.
The attitude of Rajiv Gandhi was in tune
with the way his mother had tended to communalize politics after
her come back in 1980. On the one hand she had recognized to the
Aligarh Muslim University a long-awaited status of autonomy in
1981, on the other hand she had multiplied her visits to Hindu
temples and let one of her lieutenants, C.M. Stephen, declared
in 1983 that the Congress culture was on the ‘same wave-length’
as the Hindu culture. Simultaneously, she gave some indirect support
to the Sikh extremist Sant Bhindranwale in order to destabilize
the Akali Dal, the main rival of the Congress in Punjab. The second
reign of Indira Gandhi was thus marked by an erosion of secularism
which had been the dominant idiom of the Congress leadership at
the Center.
Rajiv Gandhi did not chose one community
against another but admitted the legitimacy of communal considerations
in the public sphere. In 1986 he tried to balance his decision
in the Shah Bano affair by accepting the demand of the VHP concerning
the unlocking of the Babri Masjid, so that the Hindus could worship
there. This concession, far from defusing the Hindu nationalist
agitation re-launched it. Similarly, in 1989, he accepted that
the first stone of the temple envisioned by the VHP was laid in
front of the mosque, on a disputed land. Rajiv Gandhi even started
his election campaign from the neighboring town of Faizabad, Ram’s
land as he said : he was obviously trying to hijack some
of the Hindu mobilization which were boosting the BJP’s electoral
prospects. In fact, his tactic was responsible for removing all
inhibition regarding the use of communal discourses and prepared
the ground for the unleashing of Hindu nationalism in the Ayodhya
affair.
The Muslims were the first victims of this mobilization.
The average number of communal riots per annum jumped from 400
in 1980-85 to about 700 in 1986-89 and rose from 1 000 to
2 000 between 1990 and 1993. Rioting was especially intense before
the elections, when the Sangh parivar used communal violence as
a means for polarizing the electorate along religious lines. In
1989, out of the 88 constituencies where the BJP won the seat,
47 had just been affected by communal riots. However the worse
riots took place after Hindu militants destroyed the Babri Masjid
on 6 December 1992. At that time, Muslims demonstrated in the
streets and attacked symbols of the state to protest against the
leniency of the Congress government which, according to them,
should have averted this tragedy. Police forces and then Hindu
activists retaliated. The toll was especially high in Bombay,
Surat and Bhopal. The BJP was in a way punished for these excesses
during the 1993 state elections when it lost Uttar Pradesh, Madhya
Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh. The party then shifted from its
strategy of ethno-religious mobilization to a more moderate approach
of politics. The graph of the riots started to go down at that
time.
Table 2: Hindu Muslim riots
|
Year
|
Number of riots
|
Number of deaths
|
|
1954
|
83
|
34
|
|
1955
|
72
|
24
|
|
1956
|
74
|
35
|
|
1957
|
55
|
12
|
|
1958
|
41
|
7
|
|
1959
|
42
|
41
|
|
1960
|
26
|
14
|
|
1961
|
92
|
108
|
|
1962
|
60
|
43
|
|
1963
|
61
|
26
|
|
1964
|
1070
|
1919
|
|
1965
|
173
|
34
|
|
1966
|
133
|
45
|
|
1967
|
209
|
251
|
|
1968
|
346
|
133
|
|
1969
|
519
|
674
|
|
1970
|
521
|
298
|
|
1971
|
321
|
103
|
|
1972
|
240
|
70
|
|
1973
|
242
|
72
|
|
1974
|
248
|
87
|
|
1975
|
205
|
33
|
|
1976
|
169
|
39
|
|
1977
|
188
|
36
|
|
1978
|
219
|
108
|
|
1979
|
304
|
261
|
|
1980
|
427
|
375
|
|
1981
|
319
|
196
|
|
1982
|
474
|
238
|
|
1983
|
500
|
1143
|
|
1984
|
476
|
445
|
|
1985
|
525
|
328
|
|
1986
|
764
|
418
|
|
1987
|
711
|
383
|
|
1988
|
611
|
223
|
|
1989
|
706
|
1155
|
|
1990
|
1404
|
1248
|
|
1991
|
905
|
474
|
|
1992
|
1991
|
1640
|
|
1993
|
2292
|
952
|
|
1994
|
179
|
78
|
|
1995
|
Non available
|
62
|
|
1996
|
Non available
|
24
|
Sources : C. Jaffrelot, The Hindu nationalist movement,
op. cit, p. 552 ; for 1993-1994, "Ministry of Home Affairs’
Note for Consultative Committee Meeting on Communal Situation",
Muslim India, n° 156, December 1995, p. 558 ;
for 1995 and 1996 A. A. Engineer, Communalism and communal violence
in 1995", Economic and Political Weekly, 23 December 1995,
pp. 3267-3269 and A.A. Engineer, "Communalism and communal
violence, 1996", ibid., 15 February 1997, pp. 323-326.
If the graph of the communal riots has returned
to its level of the 1950s-1960s, it does not mean that India is
back to the situation that was prevailing then. The rise of the
BJP is accompanied by a banalization of the Hindu nationalist
discourse as testified by the Supreme Court verdict of December
1995. The judges had been asked to decide over the legality of
the communal propaganda displayed by BJP and Shiv Sena leaders.
Their utterances were obviously at odd with the Representation
of the People Act which prohibits all references to religion
during the election campaigns. Surprisingly, the judges concluded
that there was nothing wrong in canvassing on the theme of Hindutva
since this notion, like that of ‘Hinduism’, refered
to ‘a way of life’, not to a religion.
Similarly, many communal riots have not been
investigated seriously - like that of Bhopal, which was responsible
for 120 casualties in 1992 - or the reports of the commission
of investigation have either not been tabled before the assemblies
or not followed of any pursuit. The Bhagalpur riot, which was
responsible for about 1,000 casualties in 1989, the worse toll
since 1947, was investigated by a commission but its report was
made public almost height years latterand the judicial procedures
was erratic : the 142 cases filed in the court accused 1,392
persons of participation in communal violence and looting. Six
years later, 87 cases against 901 accused were still pending.
Of the 38 cases related to murder, 12 have been decided and 1
resulted in conviction.
The growing under representation of the Muslims
in the elected bodies also bears testimony of their relegation
to the status of ‘second rate citizens’. The gap between
the percentage of the Muslims in the Indian population and their
share of the Lok Sabha has never been so pronounced. Not only
the BJP, which has become the largest party in Parliament in 1996,
does not give tickets to many Muslim candidates, but the Congress
is doing the same because the general atmosphere makes their winning
chances very slim.
Table 3 : Muslims in the Lok Sabha
| |
# of Muslim MPs |
Total # of MPs |
% of Muslim MPs |
% of Muslims |
| 1952 |
22 |
489 |
4.5 |
9.5 |
| 1957 |
26 |
494 |
5.3 |
9.5 |
| 1962 |
23 |
494 |
4.6 |
10.7 |
| 1967 |
30 |
520 |
5.7 |
10.7 |
| 1971 |
30 |
518 |
5.8 |
11.2 |
| 1977 |
32 |
542 |
5.9 |
11.2 |
| 1980 |
47 |
529 |
8.9 |
11.2 |
| 1984 |
47 |
542 |
8.7 |
11.4 |
| 1989 |
32 |
544 |
5.9 |
11.4 |
| 1991 |
27 |
544 |
5 |
12.1 |
| 1996 |
21 |
544 |
3.8 |
12.1 |
In the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament
where the MPs are elected indirectly by the Members of the State
Legislative Assemblies and of the Lok Sabha, there were only 18
Muslims out of 245, a mere 7.3%. The election of a Muslim President,
like in 1967 and 1974, is not something one can think about anymore.
The under-representation of the Muslims in
the administration is also more pronounced. The average proportion
of Muslims in the States’ was 2.14% in 1984. In 1991 they
represented only 4.9% of the police forces in Uttar Pradesh (where
they formed 17,33% of the population), 4.2% in Maharashtra, 6.2%
in Gujarat and 2.3% in Delhi. At an all India level, Muslims represent
only 5.5% of the Central Reserve Police Force and 4.41% of the
central administration (and less than 3% of its elite group, the
Indian Administrative Service). In the private sector, a survey
conducted in the 8 largest Indian firms has shown in 1984 that
the share of the Muslims among the executives oscillated between
0 and 5.6%.
In the villages also, the National Samples Survey
Organisation has shown that in 1987-1988 the Muslims, as an average,
owned less land than the Hindus :
|
Table 4 : Land ownership among Hindus
and Muslims
|
|
Size of the plot of land
|
Hindus |
Muslims |
|
0.0 (landless peasants)
|
28% |
34.7% |
|
<1 acre
|
17.3% |
24.4% |
|
1-2.5 acres
|
18.3% |
17.5% |
|
2.5-5 acres
|
16.3% |
12.9% |
|
>5 acres
|
20.1% |
10.5% |
Source: Muslim India, n° 140, August
1994, p. 378.
The same survey has also highlighted the
Muslim backwardness in terms of education, especially in rural
India where 58.2% of the males and 76.1% of the females are illiterate,
as against respectively 51.3% and 75% for the Hindus (the figures
for the urban population are respectively 42.4 and 59.5% on the
Muslim side and 25.3 and 42.2% on the Hindu side). This lack of
education, which partly explains the under-representation of the
Muslims in the administration, is due to the anti-Urdu policies
of the states but also to the archaic system of the coranic schools.
Conclusion
The secular régime that has been enshrined
in the Indian Constitution half a century ago finds it difficult
to live to its expectations. Nehru’s dream of multiculturalism
has largely turned sour. One may argue that he is responsible
for this, that he prepared the ground for the Hindu backlash since
he failed to impose the same treatment (a common civil code for
instance) to all the creeds. However, communal tensions in post-independence
India have much deeper roots.
The interaction between the religions of India
has gradually transformed them into something different. At least
the worldly, non-spiritual part of them has acquired a political
and an ideological dimension. Of all, Hinduism has probably undergone
the most profound change after ideologues have attempted to endow
what they regarded as an amorphous and quietist collection of
sects with a proselyte and disciplined organization. Paradoxically,
in this process, they have tended to imitate the ‘semitic
religions’ they made a profession to stigmatize.
Islam was a case in point but Christianity provoked
a similar reaction. As a result, the Christians have started to
retaliate and to organize themselves. Prestigious personalities
like Mother Teresa asked for quotas in the administration for
the Scheduled Castes (untouchables) who have converted to Christianity
- an implicit admission that, even though they have left Hinduism
they have not emancipated themselves from the caste system, so
much so they needed the same positive discrimination as the other
Scheduled Castes. However, the indianization of the clergy and
the atmosphere of Hindu revivalism have also been conducive to
an inculturation program that led to the import of Hindu rituals.
This new trend suggests that Hinduism may dominate
India not only through political militancy but also because the
smallest minorities may find it difficult to escape its grammar.
The same conclusion partly applies to the Buddhist community.
This group representing 0.7% of the Indian population is largely
made of Scheduled Castes who left Hinduism under the auspices
of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar - who converted to Buddhism in 1956 - for
emancipating themselves from the caste system. More than forty
years after the first conversions, these Scheduled Castes are
often called ‘neo-buddhists’ and still regarded as untouchables.
The pervasiveness of caste among the minorities, including the
Muslims who observe endogamic rules among ashraf (those
descending from foreign invaders) and ashlaf (those descending
from local converts) shows how it is difficult to recreate a separate
identity outside the Hindu categories in India.
Yet, the ethnic identity and the sense of pride
or dignity that low caste Buddhists, Christians and Muslims have
acquired through religion may show the way to low caste Hindus
and prepare the ground for new alliances : instead of the
vertical arrangement in religious creeds, there may be horizontal
solidarities cutting across the religious communities. Muslims,
Scheduled Castes and some low caste Hindus already tend to vote
for the same parties in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, for instance.
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