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Journalism of Courage
When the issue of Nandigram roiled Parliament last month, there was a significant pronouncement by A.R. Antulay, minister of minority affairs, created for the first time in independent India by the UPA government. Emerging out of Sansad Bhavan, he told reporters: “We’ll send a team of the National Commission for Minorities to study what happened at Nandigram. Many people living there belong to the minority community.” What’s objectionable about the statement or the visit, you might ask. A lot, actually.
Was Nandigram a majority vs. minority or a government vs. minority issue? Not at all. Mere presence of Muslims does not warrant viewing the Nandigram incident through the prism of minorityism. By this logic, both NCM and Antulay’s under-worked ministry can justify expanding their jurisdiction to any incident anywhere in India, and to any action of the central and state governments.
I remembered this unwarranted Muslimisation of the Nandigram issue in the context of the Allahabad High Court’s judgment on Thursday that Muslims in Uttar Pradesh do not constitute a minority. It has created a storm both in the state and national politics, and is sure to impact the assembly elections in UP. The judgment is clearly ill-timed. The judiciary should desist from the habit of giving rulings on issues that are likely to influence an ongoing election process. Nevertheless, the judgment itself is momentous and needs to be examined not on the narrow criterion of what percentage constitutes a minority. By this yardstick, Muslims will self-evidently continue to be a minority until their population reaches, nationally or in a particular state, 49.9 per cent. The debate should rather focus on the growing propensity of a section of our ruling establishment to treat “minorities” as a permanent category in India’s society and polity.
Muslims and Christians (and, to a lesser extent, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains) are being constantly reminded that they are a “minority”. This reinforces their own self-perception that they are separate from the “majority”. They are led to think that they can get justice in a society where Hindus are in an “oppressive majority”, only through the instrumentalities of more minority-specific policies (hence, minority census and minority quota in government spending), legal initiatives (hence, the scrapping of POTA and insistence on retaining IMDT in Assam), and reservations in jobs and education. (Tamil Nadu is the latest to have joined the bandwagon of reservations for Muslims and Christians.) This is being justified in the name of secularism. It is as if “religious minorities” are to be treated as a separate political category, needing separate Constitutional safeguards. In all this, little thought is being given to how perpetuation of the minority tag and the resultant minority mindset can gravely undermine national integration.
It is necessary to remind ourselves that Muslims in India are not a “minority” in the way African-Americans are in USA or the Hindus and Muslims are in Britain. There is no history of systemic injustice and discrimination by the “majority” community against “minorities” in India. And unlike in Britain, Muslims are not a separate ethnic or national group that came to India from outside. The ancestral roots of over 90 per cent of Muslims in India are native. True, they have a distinct religion and must have untrammeled freedom to follow their faith. But that freedom is already guaranteed in our secular Constitution. Hence, if the term “minority” suggests historical bias and bigotry, it is totally inappropriate to describe the status of either Muslims or Christians in India. In what sense, then, are Muslims a “minority”?
An equally important question: “At what point in the last thousand years did Indian Muslims become a minority?” It is remarkable that this question is rarely debated in our intellectual and political circles. M.J. Akbar raises it in his thought-provoking introduction to the late Rafiq Zakaria’s must-read book Indian Muslims: Where Have They Gone Wrong? “Muslims have never been a minority on the Indian subcontinent; even before Partition they were less than 30 per cent of the population. But did Indian Muslims see themselves as a minority during the Mughal empire, which was finally buried in the rubble of the uprising of 1857? And even 90 years later, in 1947, did Hyderabad’s Muslims see themselves as a minority as long as the Nizam of Hyderabad had sovereignty? No. A minority is therefore not a function of numbers, but a definition of empowerment. As long as Muslims felt that they were an important, and even decisive, element of the ruling group they did not feel that they were a minority, a term that implicitly condemns a community to the margins.”
The notion that Muslims in India are “disempowered” and “condemned to the margins” in independent India is a myth recently created by the Sachar Committee report. True, many Muslims suffer from serious disabilities due to socio-economic and educational backwardness. But so do many Hindus. Their common as well as specific problems can and must be addressed in a non-discriminatory manner through strict adherence to the norms of democracy and good governance. Deepening the “majority” vs. “minority” divide is both discriminatory and dangerous.
