Is Modi’s India safe for Muslims, by
James Traub
This
past March, a group of community activists in Aurangabad, an industrial city in
central India, convened a morcha —
a demonstration — to protest a series of blatantly anti-Muslim measures taken
by the state government in Mumbai, which is controlled by Prime Minister
Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The morcha
operated according to a well-worn protocol: A colorful tent was erected in a
vacant lot across the street from the office of the district commissioner, and
250 or so Muslim men sat in the shade while a succession of speakers — a very
long succession of speakers — denounced the state government and called for
civil disobedience, in the spirit of Gandhi’s famed Salt March against the
British, should their demands not be met.
The
leaders of the demonstration then walked up a long driveway to formally present
their demands to the district commissioner, who promised to relay them to the
Maharashtra state authorities. The humble folk stayed back in the tent so as
not to block traffic. Quite a few of them were qureish — cattle butchers — who had lost their
jobs when the government had banned the consumption of beef the week before.
They were trying to figure out how they were going to feed their families or
send their kids to school. And they were wondering who, if anyone, would
protect their interests amid India’s new politics of Hindu chauvinism.
Over the last year, since Modi became prime minister,
the news out of India has focused almost entirely on his struggle to open up
India’s economy and attract foreign investment. That has been reassuring both
for many Indians and for economic partners abroad. But Modi is himself a
product of the militant, trident-shaking wing of the BJP known as the Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He was chief minister of Gujarat state in 2002 when
Hindu mobs killed more than 1,000 Muslims, and he was blamed for failing to
stem the violence. The RSS chauvinists, who dream of a Hindu-dominant India,
adore him as their champion. That is precisely what India’s Muslims fear.
India’s
Muslims have noted every apparent straw in the wind. And there have been many
of late. In March alone: Subramanian Swamy, a senior BJP leader from the
southern state of Tamil Nadu, declared in a speech that mosques, unlike temples, are not
holy places and thus can be demolished. Two days later, the BJP chief minister
of the northern state of Haryana announced that the teaching of the Bhagavad
Gita, the Hindu holy text, would become mandatory throughout the state. A
number of churches were vandalized. A 71-year-old nun in the eastern state of
West Bengal was gang-raped. And the beef-ban movement was spreading to new
states.
India, of course, contains multitudes, and these
incidents could be dismissed as the usual turbulence. Modi has conducted
himself with remarkable circumspection, reassuring Muslims and other minorities
about their place in Indian society, avoiding loaded or ambivalent language,
and building bridges with Pakistan. He has not, however, tried to stop BJP
state governments from pursuing a more nationalist agenda or has done much to
curb inflammatory rhetoric. India has survived, and thrived, as a
multiconfessional, multicultural nation because of a shared faith in secular
principles enshrined in the country’s constitution. But India’s Muslims, who
have worn that secular identity as a suit of armor in Hindu India, now feel
more vulnerable than they have in many years.
I
lived and taught at the Maulana Azad College in Aurangabad almost 40 years ago.
Aurangabad then was a dusty backwater with a majestic history. The city owes
its name to Aurangzeb, the last of the Muslim rulers known as the Great
Mughals, who moved his court there from Delhi in 1680 in the vain hope of
crushing once and for all the rebellion of the Maratha hill tribes, which were
Hindu. Aurangzeb has the worst reputation among the Mughals; he is often
described, by both Hindus and Muslims, as an intolerant ascetic who banned
music and dance and who destroyed tens of thousands of Hindu temples. The truth
is more complicated and sheds light on the practical problem of governing the
vast and diverse subcontinent. (Aurangzeb’s empire included virtually all of
present-day Pakistan and most of India, save the south and northeast.) Rafat
Qureshi, a retired historian in Aurangabad, told me that Aurangzeb had been
“defamed.” The notorious icon-smasher destroyed only a handful of temples, and
those usually for plausible military reasons. (Non-Aurangabad historians
generally agree.) He only banned music and dance in the court. He gave land for
Hindu temples. Most of his generals and governors were Hindu; to this day the
names of Aurangabad's neighborhoods, like Jaisinghpura, reflect the gifts of
land the emperor had given to his trusted Hindu lieutenants.
Aurangzeb
might have wished to rule as a Muslim chauvinist; but he couldn’t. Muslim
conquerors had ruled over Hindu India for most of the previous seven centuries,
and almost all had seen the wisdom of adaptation. They forged alliances with
Hindu princes and at times took Hindu wives. Over time, Islamic and Hindu
religious practice, art, and daily custom blended into one another. Britain’s
colonial masters did little to meddle with this syncretic culture, permitting
both Hindu and Muslim princes to rule over their subjects as they wished. The
independence movement was largely led by men committed to a secular India. In a
1940 speech before the Indian National Congress, Maulana Azad, the Muslim
political leader after whom the college I taught at is named, said, "I am
part of the indivisible unity that is Indian nationality. I am indispensable to
this noble edifice, and without me this splendid structure of India is
incomplete."
Nevertheless,
as independence loomed, some Muslim leaders embraced the idea that they were a
separate "people" threatened by the Hindu majority and requiring a
nation of their own in order to survive. The British, eager to let go of India
and unwilling to adjudicate an increasingly bitter debate among Indians, agreed
to divide the subcontinent into two countries, India and Pakistan. By the time
of Partition, in 1947, sectarian fear and hatred on all sides had been stoked
to such a level that millions of Muslims fled north to Pakistan, while Hindus
escaped in the opposite direction. Both sides carried out terrible massacres.
But while virtually all Hindus left Pakistan, the overwhelming majority of
Muslims stayed in India. With 170 million members of the faith, India has the
world’s second-largest Muslim
population — larger than Pakistan’s, smaller only than Indonesia’s.
India's
founding fathers reassured the nation's minorities of their place in that
"indivisible unity" by exalting the principle of secularism. India's
government would not have a national religion and would not legally
differentiate among faiths. The country’s first cabinet included not just Hindus
— of various castes — but Muslims, Christians, a Parsi, and a Sikh. Soon after
Partition, Gandhi embarked on a fast to call attention to the plight of
Muslims. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru single-handedly ended a religious riot
by protecting a Muslim from a Hindu mob. Muslims saw in Nehru's Congress party
the proof of the national commitment to secularism. Congress has dominated the
Muslim vote from that time to today.
But
the binding force of secularism began to slip after Nehru’s death in 1964. In
the late 1970s, his daughter, Indira Gandhi, began to cultivate the Hindu
nationalist vote. Her son Rajiv played both sides of the communal spectrum,
endorsing the language both of Hindu chauvinism and of the conservative Muslims
who demanded a separate "family law" to govern their faith.
Extremists from both religions staged an epic confrontation over a 16th-century
mosque allegedly built on the site of a temple to the Hindu god Ram in the
ancient city of Ayodhya. Destroying the Babri mosque and rebuilding the Ram temple
became a great rallying cry for the RSS, which secular Indians generally regard
as a quasi-fascist body prepared to use violence to achieve its goal of
"purifying" India of non-Hindu elements.
In
1992, mobs coordinated by RSS leaders dismantled the mosque brick by brick,
leading to riots across India, including in Mumbai and Aurangabad. In Nehru's
time, Hindu nationalist parties had barely registered in national politics. But
the BJP was on the rise: It governed India from 1998 to 2004, though the prime
minister at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was a polished member of the Indian
elite.
Narendra
Modi, by contrast, appeared to represent a decisive break with the sacrosanct
value of secularism. His role in the 2002 riots remained highly controversial, and
he was an ascetic, pious son of the soil rather than the kind of Westernized,
Anglophone figure who had long ruled India. Modi's victory looked like the
nightmare India’s Muslims had long dreaded. Yet virtually every Muslim I spoke
to in Aurangabad viewed his first year in office as a pleasant surprise.
Maqdoom Farooqui, the principal of Azad College, said, “Modi is trying very
hard to balance against the RSS forces. We can see from his body language that
he wants to do something good for the country.” The college was founded by
Rafiq Zakaria, the father of foreign-policy pundit Fareed Zakaria, and several
people cited to me, with great satisfaction, the words Modi had spoken in a CNN interview with
Fareed: “Indian Muslims will live for India; they will die for India. They will
not want anything bad for India.” While many people I spoke to viewed Modi as a
puppet of the RSS, none could cite anything he had said or done to advance the
organization’s cause, known as Hindutva, of forging a specifically Hindu
identity for India.
Modi
appears to find himself in the same situation as Aurangzeb: He may understand
India in sectarian terms, but he cannot rule it that way. Modi is an
extraordinarily gifted politician, far better than his nearest rivals. Good
politicians do not try to do that which cannot be done. And Modi plainly
understands that if, say, he had abolished India’s Ministry of Minority
Affairs, as some had hoped and others had feared he would do, he would have
aroused such fierce opposition that his supreme goal of making India a
high-growth, modern nation would have been dead on arrival. Even as it is, the
Congress party makes hay from every communal incident in the country. Defending
secularism is still good politics in India; it is, in fact, just about the only
thing the embattled Congress has left.
Indians
often despair about their feverish mass embrace of democracy. When I was
covering the election last year, many people told me they were rooting for Modi
to become a benevolent dictator, India’s answer to China’s strongmen. Modi may
have intended that as well, especially after he put together a thumping
majority in India’s lower house of Parliament, the Lok Sabha. Yet he has been
frustrated at every turn, most recently in his efforts to amend a
land-acquisition law that makes it difficult to put together plots for
industrial development. Aroon Purie, the editor of India
Today newsmagazine
and one of the country’s foremost journalists, recently wrote, “The way to govern this complicated
country is to engage in discussions and win arguments with those who disagree”
rather than “squashing dissent” and orchestrating a cult of personality. India
can’t be China for many reasons, perhaps foremost among them that Indians seem
to be less willing than Chinese to defer to a vision of the collective good
imposed from above.
Secularism
promises equal treatment before the law, but not equal opportunity or, of
course, equal outcomes. Muslims in Hindu-majority India are a disadvantaged
minority. According to a 2013 report by
the Rahman Committee, established by the government of Maharashtra in 2008 to
examine the condition of Muslims in the state, 60 percent of Muslims there live
below the poverty line, and 2 percent have graduated from college. They
comprise less than 1 percent of the elite Indian Administrative Service in
Maharashtra and only 4 percent of the state’s police force, which does not
require higher education. Muslims nationwide have less access than the average
Indian to credit, health care, and primary education. They are often the
victims of ethnic violence. A few years before I first visited Aurangabad, much
of the marketplace was burned down when a rumor spread that the son of a Muslim
butcher had turned a cow out of the shop with the point of a knife, drawing
blood. Religious violence in the city flared up anew in the late 1980s and
early 1990s (though not since).
Indian
Muslims, like African-Americans in the United States, are marginalized members
of a culture they have done so much to shape. The Sachar Committee, which studied the condition of
Muslims nationwide, reported in 2006 that "Muslims complained that they are
constantly looked upon with a great degree of suspicion not only by certain
sections of society but also by public institutions and governance
structures." Respondents said that they could not buy or rent property
where they wished or send their children to good schools. "Security
personnel enter Muslim houses on the slightest pretext." The committee
made dozens of recommendations to the central government, then controlled by
Congress; few were implemented. Muslim voters have largely stuck with Congress
nonetheless, just as African-Americans have remained loyal to the Democratic
Party in the United States. India’s Muslims, however, may have finally begun to
lose faith in Congress.
I
spent one afternoon in Begumpura, an ancient Muslim neighborhood where Aurangzeb’s
first wife — his begum— once had her palace. On the broad, dusty main
street I found Syed Ahmed, a miller, sitting barefoot among the sacks of flour
in his shop. Ahmed had never gone to school, though all four of his children
now attend Urdu-language public schools. (If he had any money he would send
them to one of the many private English-language schools in town.) Ahmed had
little interest in cow slaughtering or forced conversions; his chief complaint
was that Begumpura only received drinking water every third day, and then for
less than an hour. This was a problem across Aurangabad; the city’s Municipal
Corporation had regularly promised to install pipes but hadn’t managed to do
so. Ahmed said that even skilled young men in the neighborhood couldn’t find
employment. He had long voted for Congress, but in the state election in
October 2014 he had voted instead for the candidate of a little-known Muslim
party called the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM). “Parties
should be secular,” Ahmed said. “But the other parties are useless, so I
decided to try something new.” Thanks to a split among other parties, the
candidate, a journalist named Imtiyaz Jaleel, won and is now one of three
state-level AIMIM officeholders in India.
There
is a good reason why India has never had a significant national Muslim party,
despite the vast size and persistent disadvantage of that population: Muslims
are scattered across the country and constitute a minority everywhere save the
state of Jammu and Kashmir. The electoral math just doesn’t work. But the
enfeeblement of Congress, which is now hunting for leadership among the fourth
generation of the Nehru family, may force Muslims to start looking elsewhere.
The party now holds less than a tenth of the seats in the Lok Sabha and runs
only one of India’s 10 largest states. Nor has it demonstrated a gift for good
government. An alliance of Congress and a local party ruled Maharashtra for the
15 years prior to the BJP victory in 2014, and the residents of Begumpura have
nothing good to say about that period.
Yet
no one I talked to in Begumpura felt entirely comfortable with the idea of a
Muslim party. Syed Rizwan, who sells “chilled and normal drinking water” and
self-publishes an English-language newsletter, lamented that the AIMIM had
fought Hindu communalism with Islamic communalism and insisted that Congress
would rebuild — at least once the party’s standard-bearer, Rahul Gandhi, gave
way to his more politically adroit sister, Priyanka. At the same time, he
feared the consequences of persistent economic failure among Muslims. “What the
people will do?” he asked, as we stood in front of his tiny shop, open to the
street. “They will go join the terrorists?” This is a dark thought rarely
voiced by India’s Muslims, who are at pains to demonstrate their loyalty to the
nation.
Although the strain of Sunni fundamentalism known as
Deobandi was founded in India in the 19th century, the Islamic extremism now
all too common in Pakistan barely took root in India. The AIMIM has offered one
of the few examples of “political Islam.” In the 1940s, the party, based in the
princely state of Hyderabad, agitated for a separate state for Muslims; the
party’s founder was jailed and deported to Pakistan. In the 1980s and 1990s,
the AIMIM’s leader, Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi, led Muslim protests over the
planned demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. The party is now controlled
by his two sons. The more inflammatory of them, Akbaruddin Owaisi, consistently
ridicules Hinduism and Hindu deities, makes wild claims about the number of
Muslims killed in communal violence, and was jailed after a 2012 speech in
which he cried that Muslims would need only 15 minutes to show India’s Hindus
who is the stronger. Educated Muslims generally find the party embarrassing. No
one among a group of Muslim students I spoke to at Azad College admired the
party. One compared it to Shiv Sena, Maharashtra’s own rabid Hindu nationalist
party. Others called Owaisi a rabble-rouser.
No one, however, would say that of Jaleel, the new
AIMIM representative who won the Aurangabad Central seat. Jaleel was a highly
regarded television journalist who got sick of the more inane aspects of his
job and quit. He is charming, charismatic, and moderate; I was told that he ran
on the AIMIM ticket because Congress didn’t offer its slot to him. He performed
remarkably well for a political unknown representing a party that had never
succeeded beyond the level of municipal government, winning by 60,000 votes
over his divided field. Jaleel told me that he succeeded by attacking Congress
and its allies, who had repeatedly promised Muslims the moon at election time
and forgot about them immediately thereafter. “I said, ‘They betrayed you.’ And
that clicked.” At the time, Jaleel was running the AIMIM’s campaign for
elections to the Aurangabad Municipal Corporation. He planned on targeting the
24 Muslims on the Municipal Corporation who represented Muslim-majority
constituencies but belonged to Congress or the Nationalist Congress Party. When
the election was held in April 2015, the AIMIM took 26 of the municipal body’s
113 seats, making it the largest party after the ruling BJP-Shiv Sena
collection. The AIMIM even won several seats in non-Muslim-majority districts.
The impressive victory sent a signal that Congress may no longer be able to
count on the Muslim “vote bank.” Jaleel’s personal role in the triumph is
likely to hasten a showdown between his secular vision of the party and the
Owaisis’ sectarian one.
The
Aurangabad that I encountered in 1976 was a graceful, old Mughal capital slowly
subsiding into dust. (Tourists come not to see the city’s monuments but to
visit the ancient paintings and sculptures in the nearby caves of Ajanta and Ellora.) Over the last four decades, Aurangabad has
managed to undergo a dazzling growth spurt without, somehow, losing its air of
urban neglect. The population has ballooned from about 200,000 to 1.5 million,
and the fraction of Muslims has dropped from perhaps 40 percent to a quarter.
Aurangabad now has good private schools, American chain restaurants, major auto
manufacturers, and a beer industry that earns $500 million a year. Five years
ago, the local corporate gentry bought 150 Mercedes cars in a single day, a
publicity stunt that made a splash in
the national press. I don’t think I saw a single Mercedes during my week in
town. The streets of Aurangabad are choked with bicycles and scooters and
three-wheeled auto-rickshaws, not to mention cows and goats. The three-wheelers
ease their way around and through giant potholes, turning traffic into a
snarled figure 8. Aurangabad, in short, looks like most Indian cities, with a
bright, busy rim of modernity surrounding a decayed and apparently irremediable
core.
Thanks
to a combination of industrial development and institutions like the Azad
College, which now educates 11,000 students (including those at the Women’s
College, for students — or parents — who prefer single-sex education), Muslims
in Aurangabad are better off than those in the impoverished northern states of
Bihar or Uttar Pradesh. Nevertheless, most Muslims work in the “informal
sector” as artisans, shopkeepers, or day laborers. Very few occupy upper levels
in the city’s big firms (or drive Mercedes vehicles). Muslims are also
underrepresented in the public sector, as they are throughout the country. This
problem used to beset non-upper-caste Hindus as well, but the states now set
aside fixed ratios of government jobs and seats in universities for a range of
officially disadvantaged groups — Scheduled Castes (formerly known as
Untouchables), Scheduled Tribes, and a category known as Other Backward Classes
(to which Modi himself belongs).
Muslims have long sought such “reservations” for
themselves, but generally without success. From the point of view of
Aurangabad’s Muslims, there is no better proof of political abandonment than
the snatching away of these benefits. The Rahman Committee had recommended an 8
to 10 percent reservation for Muslims in Maharashtra. The Congress coalition
government showed no interest in the issue until a few months before the state
election, at which point it suddenly proposed a 5 percent policy for Muslims
and a whopping 16 percent for Marathas, the indigenous tribal group of the
region, who are Hindu — and who dominate the state’s politics. The Bombay High
Court then voided the set-aside for Marathas, but concluded that a reservation
of university seats for Muslims would not violate India’s Constitution. But
Congress’s blatant handout policy wasn’t enough to win the state election. And
the BJP chose not to institute the policy once it took power in Mumbai.
India’s expansive reservations policy has less to do
with a mass recognition of the injustice of a system of inherited inferiority
than with the political mobilization of the poor. In some states, backward
groups are so numerous that close to half of available seats are reserved for
them. Perhaps for this reason, Modi has never advocated the rollback of
existing reservations even though they would seem to violate his belief in the
free market and self-reliance. He has, however, said that
religion-based reservations would destroy India. This concern for the delicate
threads that bind diverse Indians together seems a little late in the day for a
lifelong devotee of the RSS; like American opponents of affirmative action who
worry about “counting by race,” Modi seems more concerned about Muslim than
Hindu threats to secularism. It’s a safe bet, at least in BJP states, that
reservations will continue undisturbed and that Muslims won’t benefit.
The
reservations policy doesn’t much affect the common man. The beef ban, on the
other hand, is a visceral blow. Beef is the chief source of protein for most
Muslims and for many Christians (and for apparently large numbers of Hindus
eating it on the sly). Sufian Mohammad, a sturdily built Azad College student
who translated for me at the morcha, said that he had been suffering since the
ban had gone into effect the week before. “In my family,” he said, “we buy 2
kilograms” — 4.4 pounds — “of beef every three days.” When I asked whether he
could eat chicken, which costs about as much, Mohammad made a face. “We are a
people who eats beef. We can’t change.” If the ban is a serious misfortune for
eaters of beef, it’s a catastrophe for those who produce it. The secretary of
the cattle slaughterers’ society, Hajji Muhammad Isa Qureshi, a very jovial man
who hugged me and handed me his business card in the same motion, told me that
20,000 people in Aurangabad district alone make a living butchering cattle.
They were now out of work. What’s more, he noted, the 2,000 to 3,000 bullocks
they used to kill every day will now be abandoned. “What will become of these
animals?” he asked. “They will walk the streets without any water or food.” The
figure for Mumbai is said to be 9,000. The thought of those additional animals
crowding the road, feeding on garbage and growing ever more sickly, is not
pleasant.
The
beef ban is bad for public health, bad for animal husbandry, and bad for
consumers, producers, and farmers — most of them Hindu — who depend on the $100
or so they once earned from selling a bullock for slaughter. As a policy, it
makes no sense save as a sop to Hindu fundamentalists and an insult to Muslims.
As Aziz Afroz, an unskilled laborer in Begumpura, said hotly, "They didn't
ban alcohol, even though both religions forbid it. They didn't ban cigarettes.
They know that Muslims depend on beef."
The beef ban had first been raised by the right-wing
Shiv Sena when it ran the state government and was then abandoned with the
Congress victory in 2000. When I asked Atul Save, a BJP state legislator, why
the new government had pursued the issue, he more or less confirmed the
Begumpura view. “India is a country of Hindus,” he said. “In Hinduism, the cow
is the mother of life.” I pointed out that while cows are holy in Hindu
mythology, bulls are just animals. “A bull also,” clarified Save, “is part of
the family of the cow.” I asked whether the BJP should have made some special
provision for the farmers and the butchers. Save noted that the plan had first
been mooted 15 years before. “They could have found some other job,” he said
blandly.
The BJP stoutly insists that the beef ban was not
intended to harm Muslims, but at the core of RSS metaphysics is an
understanding of India in which Muslims are strangers. I had, in this regard, a
very enlightening conversation with Sarjerao A. Thombre, a retired economist
and college president who occupies leadership positions in several local and
state RSS bodies. Thombre is a soft-spoken gentleman who professes no ill will
toward any of India's citizens. But he nonetheless patiently explained RSS
doctrine to me. "Muslims come from moderate temperature zones,” said
Thombre. “Eating meat is the nature of such places. But the natural food of
India is vegetarian. And a vegetarian diet is more environment-friendly.
Banning cow slaughter is not anti-Muslim; it is in favor of nature." In
the name of “Indianization,” he said, Muslims must change their habits.
"They live here," said the good doctor, "but they have not
acquired the Indian philosophy. Once they acquire the Indian thinking and the
Indian philosophy, there will be no problems."
Thombre often lapsed into Sanskrit as he cited the
great texts of India’s indigenous faith. Unlike other religions, he explained,
Hinduism rests upon a "way of life" rather than an orthodoxy. The cow
was holy to the ancients because it was so precious. The philosopher Kautilya,
"the first economist," stressed that man is embedded in nature, as he
is at one with the universe. Outsiders have sought to destroy these ancient
principles, said Thombre. The British tried to convert Indians from
self-sufficient farmers to "wage earners." The British-style
socialism that Nehru imported to India "crippled the common man and made
him live on the dole." Progressives and "leftists" have tried to
turn India into a nation like other nations. India has resisted and has at long
last elected the BJP and Modi to restore India to its origins. In short,
ancient Hindu values and mythology, free market economics, and reverence for
nature form a cosmic harmony.
I asked Thombre whether he worries that Modi has
decided to drop the party's cultural agenda in the name of political
expediency. Not at all, he said, reminding me that the Bharatiya Jana Sangh,
the party's predecessor, had collaborated even with leftists and progressives
to oust Indira Gandhi at the end of the Emergency period in 1977. Modi, he
said, is biding his time. This is precisely what Aurangabad's Muslims fear.
While I was in Aurangabad, two Taliban suicide bombers
blew themselves up in front of Christian churches in Lahore, Pakistan, killing
15 people. Lahore is located 18 miles from the border with the Indian state of
Punjab, but it might as well be in a different cosmos. The only terrorism news
from India during that time was the confession of Areeb Majeed, an engineering
student who, along with three friends, had gone to Iraq to join the Islamic
State. Majeed explained that while trolling extremist websites he had met and
fallen in love with “Tahira,” a female warrior. Once he reached Syria, Tahira
had changed her Facebook status to “married.” Majeed was wounded in several
engagements and returned home, disillusioned. It was a reassuring story; only a
lovelorn Indian Muslim would fall for the jihadi message. India has left-wing
rural revolutionaries (such as the Naxalites, who have waged a guerrilla war
against government officials and police detachments across a growing swath of
the Indian countryside), but no Muslim ones. And India, by and large, does not
export Islamic extremists. But why?
When I asked people in Aurangabad this question, I
generally got blank looks. Hindu moderation is hardly taken for granted in
India, but Muslim moderation is (except, of course, by Hindu extremists). My
educated friends at Azad College sought explanations in the history of
tolerance for diversity dating back centuries. Simpler men had simpler
explanations. Wahid Khan, a retired driver I spoke to in the Lucky House of Biryani,
a cheap cafeteria in the heart of the teeming old city, said, "This
country is better than all other places. We are moderate; people don't go to
extremes." That may be so, but the Mughals ruled over the people who today
occupy both India and Pakistan. Ethnicity cannot explain why Indian Muslims
don't "go to extremes" while Pakistan is in real danger of being torn
apart by extremism. Nor can economics: India's Muslims may now have better
prospects than their Pakistani counterparts, but that has only been true for
the last decade or two. What's more, Muslims in Pakistan enjoy self-rule, while
in India they have the status of a disadvantaged and often mistreated minority.
By installing an RSS man in the highest office, the Indian people have driven
home that second-class status. Yet the closest thing to a sectarian reaction
among India's Muslims has been the victory of a Muslim party in a tiny handful
of local elections.
The sheer diversity of India requires rulers to reach
beyond their own group, but diversity has hardly proved to be a source of
political stability in the Middle East or the Balkans. In India, it has. The
reason for that, surely, may be found in India's politics, so different from
its sibling state.
Pakistan is a democracy, with an elected civilian
government, competing parties, and a loud press. It is, however, a very
circumscribed democracy. Real power belongs to the military and intelligence
services, which act with impunity; the political parties serve largely as the
instrument of tiny elites; the larger society remains feudal. Politics in
Pakistan are all spectacle and no substance. This is not true in India — and
not simply because of the deeply entrenched principle of civilian supremacy.
The era when a small number of Brahmins dominated India's political culture is
over. Indian politics are inclusive not simply in the formal sense that parties
seek to enlist the votes of all groups, but in the substantive sense that all
groups have the opportunity to advance their interests through the ballot. It
is a game that, owing to their modest numbers and geographical spread, Muslims
have a hard time winning at, but have nevertheless found very much worth
playing.
One
of the striking things about India is simply how much politics it has. In the
formal sense, Indians vote for representatives in national, state, and local
governments; and owing to the nation's federal system, real power lies at each
of those levels. In the informal sense, Indians are constantly holding morchas
or bandhs,
demonstrations that block the roads or shutter shops. When you're stuck for an
hour waiting for the police to reopen a highway closed for a bandh, you too may
start wishing that India could be just a little more like China; but a real
democracy encourages "voice" over "exit." And it is voice,
above all, to which India's democracy is almost helplessly devoted.
One
morning, while I was leafing through the Aurangabad edition of the daily Times
of India, I saw an articleabout
the decision by "top authorities" at the Babasaheb Ambedkar
Marathwada University — the local university, renamed for a Scheduled Caste hero — to exclude the media from the university
senate meeting. This was treated as an outrage: Leaders of the students’ union
and the Maharashtra Underprivileged Teachers Association called on those
authorities to accept the obligation of transparency suitable for a public
institution. That same day, the university teachers’ union staged an
"agitation" to demand that officials fill a long-vacant finance post
and take action against a college principal accused of sexual harassment. Such
confrontations seemed to occur on a daily basis.
India's
democracy, like America's, is better at mobilizing aggrieved minorities to
block proposed policies than it is at forging political consensus around needed
reform. This can be a real problem when an ambitious leader like Modi is trying
to make a sharp break with the past. It can, however, be a virtue in the face
of dangerous impulses. Thombre's hopes — and my Muslim friends' fears — that at
some point Modi will show his true colors and press for the Hindutva agenda may
well prove unfounded.
Should
that prove to be the case, Muslims would be reassured that, however vulnerable
their position in India, the political system will protect them from the worst.
They will not have reason to "join the terrorists," as Syed Rizwan,
the Begumpura water merchant and publisher, put it. It may be true that India
has too much democracy for its own good. That, however, is vastly preferable to
having too little.
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