‘Reducing Indo-Pak hostility will reduce communal divide’

Compared to the treatment of Germans in the US after World War 1 and Japanese after World War 11, Arab Americans have been protected in a more effective manner today. There have been random attacks here and there. Worse, 9/11 has given birth to an anti-immigrant brand of politics. But civil liberties organisations have been constantly fighting against such xenophobia.

Has 9/11 increased police powers in the US? It seems to have empowered the police in India under the POTA Act.
It has even in the US. For instance, in the past police could only get permission to tap one phone number of a suspect, now they can tap the suspect, meaning all phone numbers of the suspected person. It has made inroads into our right of privacy.

Despite such changes, the European police is even today much more powerful than the American police. Nevertheless, there are some changes in the US which are essentially anti-democratic, for instance, attempts to do away with lawyer-client confidentiality in the case of suspected terrorists. That hits at the base of our judicial independence.

Minorities are underrepresented in most democracies. Reverend Jesse Jackson has highlighted how blacks suffer from underrepresentation in the US. In India, the representation of the Muslim community in legislatures has fallen after independence. Can constitutional guarantees help to correct such structural underrepresentation?
I don’t think so. I am against having quotas in representation, although I support affirmative action in admission to universities or even in jobs. In the United States, the first thing we need to do is enforce the Constitution, not change it. We have a Constitutional system that is perfectly sufficient both to protect minorities and to allow the police to do the kind of work that terrorism requires the police to do.

True, blacks are underrepresented in the Senate like Muslims in Indian legislatures. In addition, the present voting rules affects the chances of black presidential candidates like Jesse Jackson. However, representation of blacks in the lower bodies has increased over the years. It is almost close to being proportional to their population.

Why are you against quotas for minorities in representation? Is it antithetical to democracy?
Some leaders demanded quotas for Muslims during our Constituent Assembly debates but Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru shot down the proposal.

I would tend to agree with Nehru. Politics is essentially local and there is no one model of politics that is applicable for the entire world. But it is important to remember that modern democracies are most often political creations. American patriotism, for instance, is a political creation that has no historical or ethnic tradition. There were no national homelands; everyone had different homelands to begin with. What we share commonly with all other communities is our politics. It is what the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas called ‘‘Constitutional patriotism’’. It will be wrong to introduce new divisions into our politics. Our politics holds us together. Citizenship should be the great unifier in democracies.

Therefore, our national holidays are on the Fourth of July and the Memorial Day, not during religious festivals. Quotas for Muslims in India or blacks in the US would only have a backlash affect and further divide society along communal lines.

What about other institutional solutions like an all Indian Muslim party for the Muslims, or a black political party for the blacks, or even proportional representation so that the underrepresentation problem is solved for the minorities?
I believe that because the majority is generally divided over economic and social issues, over left versus right, political parties have interests in coalition politics. Therefore, they are compelled to select minority candidates. There are an increasing number of cases of blacks being elected as local level mayors and state representatives with our simple majority system.

One hopes that other divisions on Indian society—regional, class, and caste—will become sufficiently important in the future so that they remove the unique salience of Hindu-Muslim divisions that have temporarily dominated the political scene. Creating political ghettos is no solution. Democratic competition for votes is bound to create newer coalitions cutting across all communities.

What is the biggest challenge for democratic societies in the new century?
Unfortunately, we do live in a world where some kind of religious nationalism has become a threat for decent society. By decent society, I mean the minimal level of tolerance necessary while living with the other. Such religious nationalism has become a threat to peace and security globally.

The answer is not minority exclusivism. Minorities must integrate politically and economically even if they maintain their cultural separateness for long-term success of democratic politics. The best path for minorities in a democracy is to seek a share of political power and attempt to build coalition politics with other communities. They must use political power to sustain their institutional life in civil society.

How would you suggest that we deal with this new threat of religious divide that seems to be splitting India asunder?
Aside from an increasing culture of tolerance, greater civil society interactions would surely help. A radical reduction in external conflict between India and Pakistan, would reduce the internal religious divide between Hindus and Muslims. At least political parties would not be able to exploit religious divide to the same extent as they do now.

There is a strong parallel here with the Israeli versus Palestine conflict. In this case, it is just the reverse: For instance, if a line was drawn and a Palestinian state created, the fate of the Arab minority in Israel, I think, would change immediately. The external conflict feeds upon the internal one and the internal one on the external one in both cases.

Part I: ‘Your Bangladesh war was just but Pak’s J&K intervention isn’t’