The Indian political and intellectual elite has generally played the ostrich whenever it came up against the Hindu-Muslim problem in the past two decades. That is why it is taken by surprise every time communal violence breaks out. That is also why it is able to suggest only minor palliatives like greater police vigilance, anticipatory action by the authorities, appeals to reason, formation of joint peace committees and so on.
The elite has taken the attitude that the problem will gradually disappear if only it maintains the pretence that the riots are the handiwork of small groups of communalists and anti-social elements. In the process it has managed to build a world of make-believe and to salvage its conscience by passing the blame on to others – the administrative machinery, the communal and anti-social elements, foreign interests and agents provocateurs.
It should at least now be clear that this approach is untenable and that a proper diagnosis is not possible unless the grim reality is squarely faced.
Minimal Contact
To begin with, it should be recognised that the dialogue between the two communities which broke down before partition in the ’forties has not been resumed since independence. In spite of the intense politicisation that has followed the introduction of adult franchise, the contact between them has been minimal and functional. Even the Hindu and Muslim intellectuals who meet at various seminars and conferences talk at one another rather than to one another. The result is that the wall of incomprehension has, instead of crumbling, become thicker and bigger. The two communities have grown separately and fed themselves on the worst interpretations of each other’s intentions. A study of newspapers and periodicals published in various Indian languages, especially Urdu, will bear this out.
The second fact that must be faced is that the virus of communalism has infected a very large part of the country’s body politic. To be more precise, the infection was already acute at the time of partition. It was suppressed for about a decade by various factors – the shock of the partition riots and Gandhiji’s martyrdom, Mr. Nehru’s unchallenged ascendancy, the Congress Party’s monopoly of power and a steady increase in economic opportunities. By 1961 almost all these factors had begun to lose much of their effectiveness and the malady had begun to reappear. Since then its virulence has greatly increased.
Lest it be said that the picture is heavily overdrawn, it should be pointed out that nowhere have the secular parties succeeded in organising their followers to oppose communal violence actively and purposefully and that in one riot after another from Ranchi and Jamshedpur to Bhiwandi, industrial workers led exclusively by leftist organisations have played by far the most destructive role. The secular leaders should be willing to acknowledge that their followers do not suffer any sense of anguish or remorse for their participation in heinous crimes against their fellow workers and countrymen. No amount of rhetoric can dispose of this ugly reality. The nation was not shocked by the massacre in Ahmedabad and it has not been shocked by the tragedy in Bhiwandi, Jalgaon, Mahad and other Maharashtra towns.
It also needs to be emphasised that the communalists cannot succeed in provoking trouble unless they are assured of the sympathetic acquiescence of the vast majority and the active support of a significant minority in their respective communities. They, like the guerillas, must, in order to be effective, be able to swim in a sea of friendly people.
If it is indeed true that the tensions between the Hindus and Muslims are so endemic, widespread and acute that it takes only a minor incident to spark a conflagration, it follows that there are limits to what the civilian authority can do. Only a police State with all the paraphernalia of terror at its disposal can forestall trouble, and there should be no illusion that such a State can ever protect the rights of a minority. Witness the destruction of the cultural identity of the Tibetans and other non-Han nationalities in China and the anti-Semitism in various communist countries.
False Parity
As part of its generally escapist approach, the Indian elite also finds it convenient to establish a false parity between Hindu communalism and Muslim communalism because it can then condemn both without compromising its “impartiality”.
The main distinction between the two is not the one suggested by Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, President of the Jana Sangh, when he said in the Lok Sabha in last week’s debate that Hindu militancy was the result of Muslim communalism. Statements of this kind only attract the counter-retort that Muslim communalism is a defensive reaction against Hindu militancy. Such arguments move in a circle and are, therefore, futile and unproductive.
The distinction, in fact, springs from the difference in the levels of development of the two communities. The Hindus are communal but they have not organised and cannot organise themselves as a community. This is not because of caste or the linguistic divisions among them but because of something which is much more relevant in the present context. It is that the Hindus have become sensitive to economic and other pressures of the modern age and are therefore being organised on political and ideological lines. They have also accepted the need for modernisation and are grappling with the painful problems of adjustment. The reverse is true of the Indian Muslims as a body. They are organising themselves once again on a purely communal basis and they have turned their back on modernisation and, therefore, on secularisation.
This means that while Hindu society has produced a sizable secularist elite which can establish and extend communication with the main body in spite of the latter’s communalist bias, the Muslim community has not thrown up an elite of this type to the same extent. A genuinely secularist Muslim, in fact, finds it difficult to get a hearing from his community. Mr. MC Chagla provides an example.
Modernisation
It should, therefore, be obvious that a meaningful Hindu-Muslim dialogue cannot begin unless a fairly sizable intelligentsia capable of responding to contemporary problems in the spirit of the age emerges from among the Muslims. It is the inescapable duty of the State to take steps to promote such a development by pushing through the requisite schemes of education, by providing employment opportunities to the educated Muslim youth and by encouraging young people in the community who are capable of defying the obscurantist Ulema and their supporters.
It will not take any student of Indian Islam much effort to realise that the resistance will be fairly tenacious. The opposition to a common civil code and the proliferation of Madrassas, where traditional education is imparted, illustrate the point. Also, modern education in its first phase will not so much erode the hold of orthodoxy as it will heighten communal consciousness and therefore result in new demands and pressures on the prevailing political system. The demand for partition came from educated Muslims and not from the orthodox ones. But there is no other long-term solution to the problem.
It is also self-evident that only a rapidly developing economy can cope with such demands. A polity based on a stagnant economy is likely to break down under their weight. If the present stagnation continues for even a few years, we can expect a further worsening of communal tensions. The Shiv Sena is as much the result of radicalisation of mass politics in the midst of poverty as the Naxalite movement.
Meanwhile, such leadership as the Muslim community possesses should realise its responsibilities and show a greater sense of realism. The issue is not whether the charge of Muslims having taken the initiative in 22 out of 23 riots in the last 18 months is correct, partially correct or wholly incorrect. It is that it has not taken steps to mitigate the prejudices and the suspicions that undoubtedly exist in the minds of the Hindus as a result of their view of the history of the last 800 years. For instance, it could, as Sheikh Abdullah advised it recently, take a more positive attitude towards Hindi.
It can be argued that it is unjust to ask a minority to make the adjustment without making a similar demand on the majority community. But this amounts to logic chopping. Who can, for instance, say that the Hindus in Punjab and Kashmir have not adjusted themselves to the reality of the power situation in the two States?
Anyone who encourages the Muslim community to believe for whatever reason or motive that it does not need to change is not doing a service to it. It must change in its own interest. It can perhaps retain its identity on the basis of an obscurantist interpretation of the past but in the process it will condemn itself to backwardness, stagnation, frustration and desperation. Neither modernisation nor adjustment with the mores of the dominant community will destroy its personality. That will in fact give it the necessary resilience, flexibility and intellectual power to cope with the challenges of the modern age.
The Hindus in turn, must realise that aggressive and unthinking communalism on their part will only push the Muslims further into their shell, sharpen their sense of separateness and persecution and help to consolidate them on a purely religious basis.
The Times of India, 20 May 1970