Breaking Secularism´s cast(e): The curious case of the poor Indian Muslim

In an opinion piece in The Hindu on the 3 March 2011, Vidya Subrahmaniam wrote of her discussion with a group of Muslims in Deoband about the reported validation that Maulana Ghulam Mohammed Vastanvi, the controversy shrouded new Vice-Chancellor of the Dar ul Uloom at Deoband. These are her words;

‘I raised the Modi issue and was instantly put down: “We are not saying that Muslims should forgive Modi or forget 2002. But all of you in the secular media want the Gujarati Muslim never to get out of his grieving. Hindu or Muslim, the Gujarati is a businessperson, and that is what Vastanvi was trying to say.” The words stung but they were true. The Congress and the secular media wanted the Gujarati Muslim forever to fight Mr. Modi but neither was there to protect him.’

Subrahmaniam should be credited for her perspicacity and sensitivity. This fact should be obvious to many an observer of the unfolding of Indian secular democracy, but has by and large remained unspoken.

The fact is that in addition to being pilloried as a result of the Orientalist and subsequently nationalist histories of India, the Indian Muslim is held hostage by another force that masquerades as its friend, the ‘secular’ Indian. The key article of faith of the secular Indian in contemporary times has been to moan the fate of poor blighted Muslim. Reams of paper, rivers of ink and oceans of tears are spent in this cause, to the extent that the cause of secularism – in this case the welfare of all minority groups in Indian – has become less of a concern, and has been replaced by a singular concern for the Muslim.The problem with the Orientalist and subsequently nationalist understanding of India is that it has understood India to be originally Hindu. All those who came ‘after’ are seen as the non-Indian, or less Indian. In the terms of scholarly debate, they are the ‘Other’ to the Hindu ‘Self’. Given the locus of dominant Indian nationalism in North India, the Muslim was seen as the ‘Other’ to the Hindu state, and blamed for all the shortcomings of nationalism, most significantly of all, Partition. Ever since, the Indian Muslim has been bludgeoned to the desperate condition they find themselves in today. The argument here is not that concern for them is misplaced. The argument is that by focussing on the Muslim ‘Other’ alone, what these secular Indians do is reaffirm the central place of the Hindu in the national imagination. The problem with Indian secularism is not the Muslim, it is the central place of the Hindu in the national imagination. This problem can be rectified only when we start realising that India is more than Hindu and Muslim, but includes tons of other minorities as well, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Adivasis, Dalits to name just a few. Displace this binary relationship, recognise the pluralism of the Indian reality, and we would have progressed multiple steps towards combating the problems confronting Indian secularism.

The question that remains unanswered in all of this however is why does the ‘secular’ establishment in India fail to grasp this seemingly obvious fact? Why does it persist in this obsessive focus on the Muslim and reaffirm the central place of the Hindu? The answer is once more hinted at by Subrahmaniam in her observation that ‘The Congress and the secular media wanted the Gujarati Muslim forever to fight Mr. Modi but neither was there to protect him.’ In her formulation of the problem, Subrahmaniam falls into the regular trap of identifying the Congress as secular, and the BJP as communal. We would grasp the nuances better if we harked to the words of Khalid Anis Ansari, a scholar researching the Pasmanda movement.

Ansari points out that ‘…there are a few differences between BJP and Congress … even when in the ultimate analysis they defend the same caste/class interests. For one Congress is dominated by anglicised and elite Brahmins, the BJP on the other hand is controlled by Brahmins from the rural or middle class backgrounds.’

In this formulation, Ansari helps us get to understand the obsession with the Indian Muslim. If one reads the ‘BJP’ and ‘Congress’ as symbols for opposing camps in Indian politics, and not merely – as normally done – as representative of the electoral parties, then one can see Indian politics as the struggle between the anglicised and elite dominant castes, and the rural and middle class dominant castes. The first group sold on the idea of western modernity, is empowered by its access to western cultural capital and drawing its power from international hierarchies, seeks to make a modern ‘secular’ India on these ideas. The other group as yet unable to acquire this western cultural capital, drawing its power solely from local hierarchies, seeks to delay this transition to western modernity until they too are in the seat of power. In the battle between these two dominant caste elephants, it is the Muslim grass that suffers. As Subrahmaniam rightly realised, the Muslim is by and large a pawn in the battle for access to State power. The ‘Congress’ claims to uphold Muslim interests, and the ‘BJP’ in response attacks them. In response to these attacks the ‘Congress’ calls the ‘BJP’ communal, and restricts our understanding of ‘secularism’ to essentially the Muslim cause. In the meanwhile secularism as a larger ideal of the protection of minority interests against majoritarianism falls by the wayside. What complicates this picture is that the battles are not between religious groups, but between caste (and especially dominant caste) groups. As such when the ‘Congress’ espouses the ‘Muslim’ cause what it is primarily doing is espousing the cause of the dominant Muslim castes. Further, it is quite capable of absorbing those people into its upper echelons who can walk the walk and talk the talk, be the Muslim, Christian or Hindu. All that is required is the ability to behave like an anglicised dominant caste. The power of the ‘BJP’ on the other hand, given its rural and middle-class character, is largely based on the assertion of ‘traditional’ caste structures. Thus this group too can make peace with non-cosmopolitan Muslim (or Christian) dominant caste groups toward the larger end of preserving rural social orders and traditional hierarchies.

Two lessons emerge from Subrahmaniam’s observations. The first that the solidarity that large portions of the secular lobby in India show to the Indian Muslim are motivated by the desire to wipe out their contender for power. Second, is the lesson that these political divisions in India, are not so much about religion as they are about caste power and caste battles. It thus appears that we would make some progress towards secularism if we complicated the picture of secularism in India to look beyond the Muslim, and also accounted for the manner in which both groups seek to establish the norms for gaining power in this diverse country.

(First published in the Gomantak Times 9 March 2011)

The Muslim and the Catholic in Goa and India

This column is being written from Delhi where I have just completed a tour of North India with a bunch of Americans. It was while on this trip that I realised, with a fair amount of horror, the extent to which the Indian national identity is built on the idea of the image of an all-encompassing gentle Hinduism and an evil and barbaric Muslim. Despite the overwhelming Persian influence on this region, brought by the Islamic Turko-Afghans, at almost every site the tour guides stressed a ‘Hindu’ linkage where the Muslim emerged only as a destroyer of the wonder that was India. More often than not these stories twisted facts around to emerge with the Muslim as the villain of the piece.

Visibly agitated, I was asked the question if whether having a Muslim guide would have given us a different perspective. Thinking through this question I realized with sinking heart that this would not be a solution, since the nationalist narrative has effectively worked out the space for the Muslim. There is the good Muslim as represented by Akbar who is supposed to have Hinduised himself, and the bad Muslim represented by Aurangzeb who apparently violently asserted an Islamic identity over a syncretic option open to him. Whether they actually were or were not as this history represents them to be, is not really a choice open to the common man: we have to accept them as such, and then either praise or vilify the appropriate Emperor.

Arriving in Delhi this realization was further affirmed when I flipped through the brochure of a prominent centre for Islam in India. The Centre continues within a tradition that understands ‘Indo’ as code for Hindu, accepts the proposition that Islam is from outside and can never truly be internal(ised) but asserts at the same time that one can be a good Indian Muslim. This assertion, it should be pointed out, works for a particular class of Indian Muslims—the upper class/caste—who stress their foreign origins, and derive social distinction vis-à-vis the lower caste Indian Muslims from it. Further, their emphasis on clarifying the “true” meaning of Islam creates a space where their access to the text is privileged. This emphasis on the text of Islam, rather than the happy soup of lived practice inspired by the message of Islam, in fact creates the necessary background for fundamentalist Islam. In sum this acknowledgement confirms their place as leaders and representatives of Indian Islam and denies any space for lower class/caste Muslims to stress their vision of what it means to be Islam, a vision that could possibly escape the fundamentalist readings of what it means to be a Muslim.

In Goa, the Muslim shares a similar fate. There is a similar celebration of Hindu nationalist myths with the Muslim either erased or cast as the bad guy. The celebration of Indo-Portuguese art is a good example. The term Indo-Portuguese in fact operates as code for Hindu-Catholic and celebrates their union. The term leaves no space for the influence of the Islamicate in Goa, which though plentiful is expelled. The celebration of Indo-Portuguese art therefore casts the Muslim as the eternal outsider to Goa, while creating Goa as the legitimate space for the Catholic and the Hindu. This equation operates for only a certain kind of Catholic though, the upper-caste Catholic. The upper-caste Catholics are able to link up with the Hindu imagination for the nation through stressing their Brahmin, Kshatriya backgrounds. At the same time a textual interpretation of the religion stresses their distinction from the lower-caste Catholic masses. Both ways it leaves the lower class/caste Catholic without an option. It delegitimizes the easy mix of local and Catholic belief that marks Goan Catholicism and also leaves a lower-caste Catholic with no way to link up with a nation that is imagined primarily in upper-caste terms and pride in racial origin.

For years now the Muslim problem in India has been imagined as precisely that: as a problem of and by Muslims. Increasingly though we are coming to realize that this problem is the result of the history of Hindu nationalism and impacts equally on all communities that are not Hindu and upper-caste, or do not share in this exclusivist vision accepting a subordinate role within the narrative. In Goa our belly-gazing has still not allowed us to realize what exactly is going on, but for those who are willing to see, the writing on the wall is pretty clear!

(This essay is dedicated to Khaled Anis Ansari thanks to discussions with who I have been able to view the Indian Muslim community from a radically new perspective, which has allowed me to relook the Goan Catholic community as well.)

(Published as "A Celebration of Nationalist Myths" in the Gomantak Times, 30 January 2008)