The government of India has launched a drive to convince Arab governments that Muslims in this country are not being maltreated and to impress Indian Muslims that Arab leaders recognise and appreciate its support for Arab causes. New Delhi has thus sent special envoys to Arab capitals, invited Arab journalists for interviews with Mrs. Gandhi and organised special radio and TV programmes. Some “overzealous” individuals in New Delhi are also visiting Arab embassies to plead India’s “case”.
New Delhi clearly considers all this as a normal diplomatic exercise which, in its view, has become especially necessary on account of the recent carnage in Assam. For it so happened that a vast majority of those who got killed in Assam in intra-ethnic (Bengali-tribal and Bengali-Assamese) clashes happened to be Muslims.
In acting the way it has, the government has ignored the important fact that by and large Indian Muslims have seen the killings in Assam to be what they were – the result of the Assamese-Bengali conflict with no specific religious-communal overtones and of the official decision to go ahead with elections to the Vidhan Sabha in a highly disturbed law and order situation. If an explanation is needed to be offered, it should have been to the Indian people, including Muslims.
Many Indians are unhappy over the government’s moves on the ground that developments in Assam, as in Punjab or any other part of the country, are wholly our internal affair and as a sovereign republic we do not owe an explanation to any foreign government. This is a legitimate view. It is, for example, inconceivable that Britain, the US, China, the Soviet Union or Egypt would ever discuss the problems of their minorities with any foreign government or agency. India’s pride is humbled when its government seeks to explain its conduct in respect of any section of its own people to outsiders, be they Arabs or some self-appointed guardians of human rights in the US Congress. And why only Arabs? Why not other important Muslim countries such as Indonesia (which has the largest Muslim population in the world) or Malaysia?
Wrong Approach
The issue here is not just the infringement of national sovereignty; it is also the orientation of Indian Muslims. And it should hardly be necessary to point out that any move which encourages even a small section of the community to look to foreign governments and agencies for its protection and well-being would be contrary to the goal of national integration and that New Delhi’s present efforts cannot but have such an undesirable result.
The government alone is not guilty of adopting this approach. The opposition has also reacted differently to Ambassador K.R. Narayanan’s “informal meeting” with US Congressmen to discuss Assam and the government’s efforts to convince Arab governments that Muslims in India are not maltreated. Opposition leaders who were quick to denounce Mr. Narayanan have gladly acquiesced in the latter moves. Apparently they too take it for granted that it is only right and proper that New Delhi should present its case on the treatment of Muslims to Arabs.
This is a shocking state of affairs. Implicit in it is acceptance of the Arab assumption that they are guardians of Islam and therefore of Muslims. They are nothing of the kind. Unlike Christianity, Islam is not an organised church. As such it has no headquarters and therefore no head. In any case, we cannot accede to the Arab view because that would be an invitation to them to interfere in our internal affairs. We have to reject and be seen to reject this self-assumed Arab role. Indeed, even in the case of Roman Catholic Indians, we cannot accept the proposition that the Vatican is entitled to inquire whether or not they are being treated properly in this country. The community, of course, has every right to ventilate its grievances and seek redress for them, which they do.
Muslims are as divided along state boundaries as Christians or followers of any other faith. Despite all their rhetoric regarding Arab nationalism, the Arabs themselves are woefully divided so much so that even the Israeli occupation of Arab territories and invasion of Lebanon have not sufficed to bring them together. Indonesia and Malaysia virtually went to war in the late fifties and early sixties. On top of it, the old Shia-Sunni schism has got accentuated as a consequence of the Islamic revolution in Iran.
Whatever their problems and grievances Muslims are very Indian and should be treated as such. Indeed, they make it a point to emphasize that they have stayed on in this country, because they rejected the two-nation theory. They no longer suffer from any sense of guilt on account of partition.
Cultural Heritage
There is a great deal of confusion on this issue. For many Indians, Hindus or Muslims alike, have a wrong perception of the character of the Indian Muslim community. They take it that the community is and sees itself as part of a world-wide brotherhood. The reality is very different. Indian Islam is very much a product of the interaction between the faith, Arab and Persian cultures and the Indian environment which of necessity includes this country’s variegated cultural heritage. Mother India, as Mr. Nehru said, sticks to all her children, Indian Muslims not excepted.
In fact this is true of Muslims in Pakistan and Bangladesh as well. They, too, cannot shake off their Indian heritage. But that is a different issue which we cannot discuss here because it would involve a long and complicated argument in respect of partition. Suffice to say here that partition was largely the result of the British policy of “divide and rule” and the secular forces which the British impact unleashed.
In any case, a powerful process of transformation of the Indian people along the lines of secular nationalism began with independence and this remorseless process does not leave any community any choice but to function as part of the larger Indian society, economy and polity. In two previous articles (May 11 and 18) I have tried to elucidate this point in respect of Sikhs. The forces in question influence Muslims equally because being in a minority except in the Kashmir valley, they have to come to terms with the larger reality.
Many of us, whether Hindus or Muslims, fail to recognise the winds of change and their sweep for a variety of reasons. We are still too close to partition to be able to overcome fully the trauma of the disaster that followed. We are not sufficiently sensitive to the dilemma Pakistanis face in their search for a new identity. We continue to react to, and interpret, socio-economic conflicts in religious-communal terms. We have an unrealistic view of nationalism and the process of modernization because we fail to appreciate that nowhere in the world have they led to the abolition of small entities and their self-awareness. While nationalism involves a measure of homogenisation, it does not produce a dull, monotonous uniformity – and thank God for that. We neglect the different social (caste) origins of Muslims, treat them as if they are a monolith and fail to relate the problems of upward mobility among them with similar problems among other people of similar background who have remained Hindus. We exaggerate the community’s external connections. For instance, without any worthwhile evidence, many of us have tended to take it for granted that the money Muslims have received from oil-rich countries for renovation of mosques or establishment of madrasahs (schools of traditional learning) has also been meant for proselytization and conversion.
The community sense among Muslims is stronger than among Hindus but it is in all probability no stronger than among Sikhs. The members of a minority tend to hold together. Muslims appear to be more traditional than Hindus perhaps because they are compared not with the appropriate sections of the Hindu society but with the more modern and better-off Hindus. Their resistance to change is more trenchant (witness their determined opposition to a modern uniform personal law). But that may well be an expression of their feeling of insecurity. While this feeling is as old as Islam in this country, it has been aggravated by the growing politicization of society and the erosion of traditional power balance and identities as a result of the modernization process. Even so it is a remarkable fact that Indian Muslims have not fallen a prey to the fundamentalist wave that has swept almost all Muslim peoples. The Indian environment has perhaps protected them against this wave. But the very fact that this barrier has proved effective is proof enough that Muslims are integrated into the Indian environment.
Ruling Elite To Blame
The country’s ruling elite as embodied in the Congress (now called the Congress-I) has been less than fair to Muslims as much because it has tended to take their electoral support for granted, as because it has often found it more expedient to promote communalist Muslim leaders to genuinely secular ones. The two are distinguished from each other not only by the nature of their loyalties but by the way they seek to serve their community. While the communalist, for example, exploits the Muslim sentiment in his own interest, the latter tries to encourage them to take to modern education, professions and commerce and industry. Despite all this, however, Muslims are moving forward as other Indians. In fields such as modern science, technology and business they are among the most advanced Muslim communities in the world.
Indians Muslims do not regard themselves orphans in search of protectors. This is as evident from the way they fight for their security and rights as from the fact that they have begun to move away from under the Congress (I) umbrella. The rest of us have no business to give them foreign patrons and protectors and in the process blur the distinction between Islam and Arab ways to life which incidentally differ from region to region.
The Times of India, 25 May 1983