Sources of Indian Traditions

A fourth, quite different challenge to the received histories of nationalism in South Asia has come not from political leaders, but from a group of historians, political scientists, and anthropologists; this group has called for a radical reinterpretation of all these forms of Indian national narrative. The main concern of this Subaltern Studies Collective is to show the role of “subaltern” classes—that is, peasants and other non-elite groups in modern Indian history—in contrast to the elite leadership of groups like the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, and the Hindu nationalist organizations. The subalterns, these scholars argue, existed in an autonomous domain that neither originated from nor depended upon elite politics.

The clearest statement of the position of these scholars is found in the many volumes of Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha. The following excerpt is taken from Guha’s introductory essay to the first volume.

1. The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism—colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism. Both originated as the ideological product of British rule in India, but have survived the transfer of power and been assimilated to neo-colonialist and neo-nationalist forms of discourse in Britain and India respectively. Elitist historiography of the colonialist or neo-colonialist type counts British writers and institutions among its principal protagonists, but has its imitators in India and other countries too. Elitist historiography of the nationalist or neo-nationalist type is primarily an Indian practice but not without imitators in the ranks of liberal historians in Britain and elsewhere.

2. Both these varieties of elitism share the prejudice that the making of the Indian nation and the development of the consciousness—nationalism—which informed this process, were exclusively or predominantly elite achievements. In the colonialist and neo-colonialist historiographies these achievements are credited to British colonial rulers, administrators, policies, institutions and culture; in the nationalist and neo-nationalist writings, to Indian elite personalities, institutions, activities and ideas.

3. The first of these two historiographies defines Indian nationalism primarily as a function of stimulus and response. Based on a narrowly behaviouristic approach[,] this represents nationalism as the sum of the activities and ideas by which the Indian elite responded to the institutions, opportunities, resources, etc. generated by colonialism.

4. The general orientation of the other kind of elitist historiography is to represent Indian nationalism as primarily an idealist venture in which the indigenous elite led the people from subjugation to freedom. … The history of Indian nationalism is thus written up as a sort of spiritual biography of the Indian elite. …

6. What, however, historical writing of this kind cannot do is to explain Indian nationalism for us. For it fails to acknowledge, far less interpret, the contribution made by the people on their own, that is, independently of the elite to the making and development of this nationalism. …

7. … In all writings of this kind the parameters of Indian politics are assumed to be or enunciated as exclusively or primarily those of the institutions introduced by the British for the government of the country and the corresponding sets of laws, policies, attitudes and other elements of the superstructure. …

8. What clearly is left out of this un-historical historiography is the politics of the people. For parallel to the domain of elite politics there existed throughout the colonial period another domain of Indian politics in which the principal actors were not the dominant groups of the indigenous society or the colonial authorities but the subaltern classes and groups constituting the mass of the labouring population and the intermediate strata in town and country—that is, the people. This was an autonomous domain, for it neither originated from elite politics nor did its existence depend on the latter. …

15. It is the study of this historic failure of the nation to come to its own, a failure due to the inadequacy of the bourgeoisie as well as of the working class to lead it into a decisive victory over colonialism and a bourgeois-democratic revolution of either the classic nineteenth-century type under the hegemony of the bourgeoisie or a more modern type under the hegemony of workers and peasants, that is, a “new democracy”—it is the study of this failure which constitutes the central problematic of the historiography of colonial India. …

16. … The elitism of modern Indian historiography is an oppressive fact resented by many others, students, teachers and writers like ourselves. … We claim no more than to try and indicate an orientation and hope to demonstrate in practice that this is feasible. In any discussion which may ensue we expect to learn a great deal not only from the agreement of those who think like us but also from the criticism of those who don’t.

[From Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981), 1–7.]

SMITU KOTHARI: THE NARMADA MOVEMENT, NATIONAL PLANNING, AND POPULAR RESISTANCE

The use of the great rivers of India to provide hydroelectric power, drinking water, and water for irrigation had been a dream of Nehru and other planners; Nehru had once referred to the great dams that would be built as the new temples of India. Some such dams were built, with great acclaim, but when the government, with the assistance of the World Bank, started one of the largest dam undertakings of the century, the Sardar Sarovar Project, to develop of the valley of the Narmada, the great river in western India with its deep cultural and religious associations—a project that promised benefits to hundreds of thousands of people—the result was a storm of protest. Farmers whose lands would be inundated protested, as did tribal people living in the neighboring hills, but so did socially conscious and environmental groups throughout India. Medha Patkar, a social science graduate, and Baba Amte, a social worker, helped mobilize people against the dam. Patkar argued that development must be undertaken only for a sustainable, just society based on nonexploitative relationships, and she gained support not only in India, but in Europe and North America.

In this selection, people’s movement activist Smitu Kothari (1950–2009), using the language of social science, links the opposition that developed to the Narmada Dam Project both to other resistance movements that grew up in India after 1947 (Kashmir, Punjab, Nagaland, Telangana, and the Naxalites) and to earlier resistance movements against the British. This selection should be read against those of Vinoba Bhave, Amartya Sen, Jagdish Bhagwati, and the Planning Commission.

Like many other contemporary social and political movements, the Narmada movement is part of an important history of resistance. Politically, it shares the legacy of earlier protests and revolts against the British—particularly in India’s tribal areas—… in that it represents a sustained response to centralized state control over local economies as well as the imposition of “remote” administrative and political controls on local societies. At another level, however, its politics are singularly different. The movement is not, for instance, organized along class lines, neither is it an effort to withdraw the internal boundaries of the country to achieve a more politically and culturally autonomous region. In fact, we can possibly call it a class movement of the third kind in that it encompasses groups belonging to many different classes that are bound together by cultural and social dynamics, by place, and by being in reaction to centralized, “external” control.

The Narmada movement also differs from the militant Naxalite movements or elements of the secessionist movements in the Punjab and Kashmir or the insurgencies in the Northeast, in that its politics of resistance is self-consciously non-violent. By affirming pluralism of knowledge and culture, these “terrains of resistance” are also representative of growing assertions of marginal populations for greater economic control over their lives.

This leads us to an important question that needs to be explored. There has undoubtedly been significant mobilization in the Narmada valley. This has involved not just the people to be adversely affected by the project but also other political and social groups, lawyers, scientists, the media (mostly outside, but increasingly also in Gujarat) along with leading intellectuals and concerned citizen groups all over the world. What is crucial in this process is the recognition that, while the strength of the movement will depend on the strength of local mobilization, the range and intensity of activity beyond the immediate context represents an important cognitive and organizational shift from the local to the national level. Stated differently, the realization that local problems have extra-local origins and legitimation has inspired a widening of the ambit of struggle; in the process, challenging the profound limitations of the present processes of democracy. … Increasingly, there is also public acknowledgment and support for the Narmada movement by many other groups and movements who have been impressed by the sustained mobilization of the movement, its tenacity, and its complex strategies and tactics. However, there continues to be little sustained response among other concerned sections in the middle classes, in the trade unions, and among the academia. Why?

Some commentators argue that at the current historical juncture, other issues are draining the political and emotional fabric of individuals and communities. Growing religious chauvinism and fundamentalism, communal strife, escalating lawlessness by both state and nonstate actors, coupled with the continuing economic stress (including the implications of the recent changes in the economic policy and the ramifications of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank conditionalities) are, they state, possibly exhausting the ground for wider citizen response to situations like those in the Narmada valley.

It is somewhat paradoxical that the national press and a significant cross-section of the regional press have consistently been favorable to the Narmada movement and have, on numerous occasions, exposed the repressive and apathetic nature of the official response. … It is possible that, in their minds, a majority of individuals to be affected are “marginal” people who are relatively unconnected or peripheral to national politics and to the middle classes. Is the difference and apathy then indicative of the social and economic gulf between groups affected by development projects and the concerned middle classes and elites? … It is easier to understand the response of political parties across the political spectrum. After all, none of them wants to threaten its potential electoral base in Gujarat where, because of a variety of factors, there is a perceived mass support for the project. Several years of drought have been politically exploited by the ruling elites to sell the Sardar Sarovar Project as a panacea for the vagaries of such calamities.

It has often been officially proclaimed that the Sardar Sarovar Project will be the “lifeline of Gujarat.” This rhetoric, coupled with the expanding demands of Gujarat’s industrial and cash crop economy, has created a wide base of support for the project and a climate in which criticisms of the project are denounced as anti-development and anti-Gujarat. … The role of the central government has been no different. Movement representatives have met with successive prime ministers and concerned ministers at the state and central levels, but the response to the basic demand for a public dialogue in light of the continuing social, economic, and environmental problems has never been conceded.

[Smitu Kothari, “Damming the Narmada and the Politics of Development,” in Toward Sustainable Development: Struggling Over India’s Narmada River, ed. William F. Fisher (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 421–426.]

THE CONTINUING OPPRESSIONS OF CASTE

During the years immediately following Independence, hopes were high that the new state, founded on a constitution emphasizing socialism, secularism, and democracy, with inbuilt safeguards for individual rights and with directive principles aiming at increased social justice, would experience a lessening of caste consciousness and caste discrimination. The center’s reservation policies for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes did yield certain benefits, but by the 1970s it had become clear to analysts, policy-makers, and some politicians that the expected strides forward in terms of opportunity and advancement for all sections of the low castes had not materialized. One response continued to be legislative, with additional groups of the population agitating for inclusion in government reservation policies. The greatly controversial Mandal Commission Report—filed in 1980 but first implemented (abortively) only in 1989, and in the process causing the fall of the V. P. Singh government—is an excellent example of the politics of affirmative action.

Concurrent types of activism included the founding of caste-based political parties, the publication of literature that revealed the horror of caste stigma and degradation, the repudiation of Hindu caste culture (often by conversion to a different religious tradition), and the use of the law courts to redress wrongs. The degree to which such measures have—and have not—been successful is indicated by the selections below, in which low- and out-caste Indians write of their pain and anger. Even when a Dalit’s outward circumstances have been materially ameliorated, upper-caste disdain and hatred remain obstacles. In 2009, looking back over two decades since the passing of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act of 1989, observers were forced to admit that although the act was intended to enable the social inclusion of Dalits in Indian society, because of a near-total lack of implementation, it had failed to live up to expectations.

THE MANDAL COMMISSION AND THE OTHER BACKWARD CLASSES (OBCS)

Under the Indian Constitution, following policies that had begun under the Raj, reservations were made for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) in Parliament and for administrative positions in government. Such a policy of affirmative action was designed to help the very lowest in Indian society, and since the SCs and STs constituted 22.5 percent of the total population, this percentage was reserved for them.

In 1979 the government of India set up the Mandal Commission on the backward classes. The commission’s report, submitted in 1980, called for a further reservation of 27 percent for the so-called OBCs (Other Backward Classes, i.e., other than the Scheduled Castes and Tribes). The OBCs adjudged backward, and thus in need of assistance through some scheme of further affirmative action, constituted a considerable segment of the total Indian population. But because the Constitution stipulated that total reservations must be under 50 percent, and because 22.5 percent was already committed to the SCs and STs, the OBCs were limited to 27 percent.

Because of their sensitivity, the recommendations of the commission were not implemented until 1989. The prime minister at that time, V. P. Singh, head of the National Front government, announced on August 7, 1990, that he had decided to implement the recommendations. Riots and then suicides ensued, especially among high-caste students in northern India who believed that they particularly would be deprived of positions in government and educational institutions by this large bloc of reserved places. The pattern of riots mapped neatly onto areas of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) strength—and L. K. Advani’s ratha yātrā (chariot journey) to liberate the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya was announced quickly thereafter (see further below). However, an India Today poll of the time revealed strong popular support for, not against, the Mandal recommendations.

At first, parties such as the Congress and BJP were wary of backing the report, but as the demonstrations died down and they saw the large caste vote blocs involved, they too came to accept the Mandal Commission’s recommendations, which have since been implemented.

The selections to follow are summaries of the various chapters of the 1980 report.

CHAPTER IV—SOCIAL BACKWARDNESS AND CASTE

Castes are the building blocks of the Hindu social structure. They have kept Hindu society divided in a hierarchical order for centuries. This has resulted in a close linkage between the caste ranking of a person and his social, educational, and economic status.

This manner of stratification of society gave higher castes deep-rooted vested interests in the perpetuation of the system. The priestly castes evolved an elaborate and subtle scheme of scripture, ritual, and mythology and perpetuate their supremacy and hold the lower castes in bondage for ages. Most of our Shastras uphold the four-fold Varna system and, because of this religious sanction, caste system has lasted longer than most other social institutions based on inequality and inequity.

In view of the permanent stratification of society in hierarchical caste order, members of lower castes have always suffered from discrimination in all walks of life and this has resulted in their social, educational, and economic backwardness. In India, therefore, the low ritual caste status of a person has a direct bearing on his social backwardness.

CHAPTER V—SOCIAL DYNAMICS OF CASTE

Caste system has been able to survive over the centuries because of its inherent resilience and its ability to adjust itself to the ever changing social reality. The traditional view of caste system, as contained in Chapter IV, is based more on Hindu Shastras than the actual state of social reality. Moreover, caste restrictions have loosened considerably as a result of the rule of law introduced by the British, urbanization, industrialisation, spread of mass education, and, above all, the introduction of adult franchise after independence. But all the above changes mark only a shift of emphasis and not any material alteration in the basic structure of caste.

It is generally agreed that whereas certain caste taboos have weakened as a result of the above changes, the importance of casteism in Indian politics is on the increase. This, perhaps, was inevitable. Caste system provided the political leadership with readymade channels of communication and mobilization and, in view of this, the importance of caste was bound to increase in Indian politics. As Rajni Kothari has observed, “those in India who complain of ‘casteism’ in politics are really looking for a sort of politics which has no basis in society.” …

CHAPTER VI—SOCIAL JUSTICE, MERIT, AND PRIVILEGE

Equality before the law is a basic Fundamental Right guaranteed under Article 14 of the Constitution. But the principle of “equality” is a double-edged weapon. It places the strong and the handicapped on the same footing in the race of life. It is a dictum of social justice that there is equality only among equals. To treat unequals as equals is to perpetuate inequality. The humaneness of a society is determined by the degree of protection it provides to its weaker, handicapped and less gifted members. …

It was in view of these considerations that our Constitution makers made special provision under Articles 15(4), 16(4), and 46 etc. to protect the interests of SCs, STs, and OBCs. Some people consider provisions like reservation of posts for backward classes, etc., as a violation of their Fundamental Rights and denial of [a] meritorious person’s legitimate due. In fact, “merit” itself is largely a product of favourable environmental privileges and higher rating in an examination does not necessarily reflect higher intrinsic worth of the examinee. Children of social and educationally backward parents coming from rural background cannot compete on an equal footing with children from well to do homes. In view of this, “merit” and “equality” should be viewed in proper perspective and the element of privilege should be duly recognized and discounted for when “unequals” are made to run the same race. …

CHAPTER IX—EVIDENCE BY CENTRAL AND STATE GOVERNMENTS

Two sets of questionnaires were circulated to all State Governments, Union Territories, and Ministries and Departments of Central Government for eliciting information on various aspects of our inquiry. These questionnaires were designed to obtain a comparative picture of status of backward classes in various States, steps taken for their welfare, views of various Government agencies on the question of social and educational backwardness, and any other useful suggestions regarding the Commission’s term of reference.

Most of the State Governments favoured caste as an important criterion for determining social and educational backwardness. Eighteen State Governments and Union Territories have taken special steps for the welfare of Other Backward Classes, though there is wide variation in the quantum of assistance provided by them. For instance, reservation in Government services for OBCs ranges from 50% in the case of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu and 5% in Punjab and nil in the case of Rajasthan, Orissa, Delhi, etc. Representation of OBCs in local bodies, State Public Service Commissions, High Courts, etc., is also negligible. Social discrimination is still practiced against OBCs. There are a number of castes and communities which are treated as untouchables though they have not been included in the list of Scheduled Castes. All the State Governments which have launched programmes for the welfare of the backward classes have to fund the same from their own resources as no separate Plan allocation is made by the Centre for this purpose.

From the information supplied by the Central Government Ministries and Departments it is seen that Other Backward Classes constitute 12.55% of the total number of Government employees, whereas their aggregate population is 52%. Their representation in Class I jobs is only 4.69%, i.e. less than 1/10^th of their proportion to the country’s total population. …

CHAPTER XIII—RECOMMENDATIONS

Reservations for SCs and ST are in proportion to their population, i.e. 22.5%. But as there is a legal obligation to keep reservations under Articles 15(4) and 16(4) of the Constitution below 50%, the Commission recommends a reservation of 27% for OBCs. This reservation should apply to all Government services as well as technical and professional institutions, both in the Centre and the States.

Special educational facilities designed at upgrading the cultural environment of the students should be created in a phased manner in selected areas containing high concentration of OBCs. Special emphasis should be placed on vocational training. Separate coaching facilities should be provided in technical and professional institutions to OBC students to enable them to catch up with students from open quota.

Special programmes for upgrading the skills of village artisans should be prepared and subsidized loans from financial institutions granted to them for setting up small scale industries. To promote the participation of OBCs in the industrial and business life of the country, a separate network of financial and technical institutions should be created by all State Governments.

Under the existing scheme of production-relations, Backward Classes comprising mainly small land holders, tenants, agricultural labour, village artisans, etc., are heavily dependent on the rich peasantry for their sustenance. In view of this, OBCs continue to remain in mental and material bondage of the dominant castes and classes. Unless these production-relations are radically altered through structural changes and progressive land reforms implemented rigorously all over the country, OBCs will never become truly independent. In view of this, highest priority should be given to radical land reforms by all the States.

At present no Central assistance is available to any State for implementing any welfare measures for other Backward Classes. Several State Governments expressed their helplessness in undertaking more purposeful development programmes for backward classes in view of lack of resources. It is, therefore, recommended that welfare programmes specially designed for OBCs should be financed by the Central Government in the same manner and to the same extent as done in the case of SCs and STs.

[Reservations for Backward Classes: Mandal Commission Report of the Backward Classes Commission, 1980 (Delhi: Akalank Publications, 1991), 66–69.]

VIRAMMA: THE LIFE OF A RURAL DALIT WOMAN

Between 1980 and 1990, a Tamil-born ethnomusicologist, Josiane Racine, held a series of conversations with Viramma, a Tamil Dalit woman from the Pariayar (Pariah) caste, illiterate and then in her sixties, about her life. What emerged from the closeness and trust that grew between the two women is a remarkable collection of oral transcriptions, originally published in French (1995) and translated into English as Viramma: Life of an Untouchable.

The excerpts selected here hint at the changes occurring in modern India, as an anti-Brahman, politicized egalitarianism seeks to undermine the old ideology of caste—according to which the degraded status of Untouchables is blamed on their bad karma, which justifies village demands that they fulfill their distinctive caste obligations (the Pariayars were drummers) with humility, respect, and a proper acknowledgment of their debasement. Married as a girl to a Pariayar man from Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu, she lived all her subsequent life in his village ceri, the Untouchable “colony,” or section of the village, outside the upper-caste ur. Viramma does not attack oppression—she never uses the term “Dalit” to refer to herself, preferring “Paraiyar”—but takes instead a practical approach to the indignities she must face in life, worrying about the fate of her more politicized, indignant son, Anban, and fearing the hollow promises of politicians that threaten to challenge the “protection” she receives from the oppressive Reddiar landlords. Viramma’s narrative reveals the everyday, internalized oppression of a Dalit woman.

“Sinnamma” is the affectionate name Viramma gives Josiane; “Velpakkatta,” or “girl from Velpakkam village,” is a nickname for Viramma.

That morning, Sinnamma, I went to see Grandfather Muniyan, the oldest of all of us in the ceri. “Grandfather, we’re called Pariahs. Do you know why we’re called that?”

“Listen, Velpakkatta! In the beginning, the divine beings ruled over the universe. Several yugam ago, men took over from them. In those days there were no castes. Well, if you like, there were two: men and women. As soon as humans took possession of the universe, there was the problem of how to share it out. It hadn’t been a problem before—the gods never needed to share it out to rule over it, because they are everywhere at the same time. There were quarrels when men wanted to divide it up. One of them, seeing it was turning ugly, began to hide things, belongings. And just when he was about to hide a drum, the others saw him and shouted, ‘Paraiya maraiyade,’ ‘Hey you with the drum, don’t hide.’ Since then we’ve been called Paraiyar and we’ve been rejected for being descendants of the thief who stole that drum. If that son of a whore hadn’t stolen anything, we would all have lived together in the ur, eh! Why did those dog fuckers do that? They could have waited to be given their share, couldn’t they? All of this for a drum! But Velpakkatta, it’s our fate and nothing will make it change, not even those politicians who say there mustn’t be Pariahs any more! You see, I’m going to leave soon. I was born a Pariah. I have done my duty during the time I’ve had, and I’m going to die a Pariah. Perhaps I’ll be reborn in the womb of the Reddiar, in the household where I was a serf, or perhaps I’ll be a wandering dog. Who knows? I’m not the one who decides! And it’s not the people from the political parties who are going to change the lot of the Pariahs and mix them up with other castes. Tell Sinnamma that those men want to destroy everything, the harmony and peace we have here. Everyone does their trade: the one who cuts hair will be in the barbers’ caste: the one who washes linen will stay a launderer; the one who quarters dead cows will be a shoemaker; the one who crushes sesame will be in the oil pressers’ caste and he who sells that oil will be a Chettiar. And there will have to be a Reddiar to be kambattam6 and to put twenty people to work. That’s how castes are made.”

“Grandfather,” I said to him, “what you say doesn’t suit this kaliyugam with these youngsters any more! Our Anban doesn’t even want to hear the word Pariah! You know that! You were alive in the days when we didn’t know anything and we were innocent.”

“My time is over now, Velpakkatta. It’s up to other people to run the world. I’m keeping quiet. You’re the one who’s come and stirred this up.” Things happen differently in this kaliyugam, because Pariahs have started to go to Mailam again.⁷ I went there once on foot a long time ago. We had our meal on the way. When we got there our feet were as swollen as elephants’ feet. I went back a second time after the marriage of Anban. There’s the bus now, you only have to pay two rupees and you get out right at the foot of the temple. We saw all the paintings, it was really very beautiful!

Anban insisted that I go in. He said, “De, calm down! We’ve spent our money to come here and instead of going into the temple, you want to go back home. What idiot claims we have no right to go into the temple?”

“No, my son! Don’t do that! This god will take away your sight! People like us haven’t the right to go into these places!”

“De, tchi!” Anban answered, “be quiet! Why spend so much money if we don’t see the sanctuary? Everything you’re saying is tradition, stories from the old days!”

My son didn’t want to listen and he always talks to me like that when I remind him we’re Pariahs and that we should live humbly at a distance from the other castes. How many times have I told him, “Pa, no, don’t go to the ur in such a beautiful shirt, with powder on your face and ash on your forehead! Don’t put on your rings. Leave all that at home. You’ll be able to do what you want after work. We’re poor. We are Pariahs. We live from day to day. We only eat if we’re given work. Those people from the ur employ us. We have to be humble, more humble than them. If you go around dressed like that, they’ll say, ‘What a nerve that Pariah’s got to come and work for us in trousers and a shirt!’ No, Appa, be humble and let’s live like we used to!”

But he always says, “De, tchi! Get away, you and your speeches! If I don’t wear trousers and shirts at my age, if I don’t put ash on my forehead, tell me, when will I do it? Perhaps you think only the rich have the right to dress up, to wear a watch or glasses? No one else? Not me?”

“My son! My son! Calm down! We Pariahs must live apart, discreetly!”

“But those traditions don’t apply any more in today’s world, little sister! Wake up a little!”

“Dei, boy! Yes, yes, I’m your little sister and I’m the one who should listen! I’ll tell you again, I came to this village as a little girl. I’ve grown up. I’ve had twelve children. I’ve honoured my name. Now I’m on the way out. It’s your turn to live here, to have children and to have a good reputation too. Listen to my advice. I’m your mother, I want the best for you!”

That’s how he makes fun of me and how I try to argue with him! …

[Viramma, Josiane Racine, and Jan Luc Racine, Viramma: Life of an Untouchable, trans. Will Hobson (London: Verso, 1997), 165–169.]

Take an example: you were the one who came to me. I didn’t go looking for you. What right would I have had to do that? I’m happy to know you, I love you like my own daughter. When it’s just us, I talk to you with an open heart, I touch you when I talk to you. But could I behave like that with you outdoors? No! I owe you respect, you are a higher caste! Everything else is the same. They want to make us one, when God said, “Each of you stay in your caste. Live apart. There’ll be no arguments. There’ll be harmony and the world will turn in the right direction!”

Nowadays people think the opposite. They want the world to be one, and everybody to be the same, all with the same rights. That is the kaliyugam! It’s good people want us to be raised up, but it’s better if we stay in our place. That’s what I’m always saying to my son, but he doesn’t want to hear any of it. He thinks I’m wrong and says, “Who is this miserable God who made us Pariahs? We’re all conceived in the same way! The husband screws the wife and we spend ten months in the womb! So why at birth do they become superior and us inferior? And we should have to accept that and work for a ten-rupee note? Who is the bastard of a God who’s done that? If we ever meet him, we’ll smash his face in! Why did he do that, that bloody God: them rich and us poor?”

My answer is, “De, Anban! Don’t talk like that! Be humble and polite. Don’t throw away the people who employ us. Honour them instead, that will do us much more good. We earn money through respect. People must say that the boy born from Velpakkatta’s womb is very polite, well brought up, respectful and not that he’s arrogant and a rogue who picks fights.”

But he’s always irritated by my advice. He says, “De! You really belong in the old days! You ask me to go to work dressed like a pauper. Every time I put something on to wear you find something wrong with it. You make remarks about my haircut and the same when I powder my face!”

Angry, I say to him, “Eh well, kid, get on with it, da! Powder yourself all you want and go off into the world without anyone’s respect. You’ll never have the name I had in this village. I got here when I was as big as that. I’ve had children and grandchildren. Your father was born here and now he’s an old man. Look at the affection people feel for him. You, you’re our absolute opposite!”

I lecture him kindly so he’ll see sense, Sinnamma. “If the master who employs you wants to hit you, bend down and let it happen. Seeing your attitude his heart will melt and he’ll let his arm drop. But if you rebel saying, ‘So, how can you raise your arm against me just because we’re a different caste? How can you hit me?’ If you answer back, his anger will only grow and he’ll tell you, ‘It’s the party dogs who’ve made you so arrogant!’”

That’s how it happens in the country, Sinnamma!

[Viramma, Josiane Racine, and Jan Luc Racine, Viramma, 191–192.]

KUMUD PAWDE: A DALIT WOMAN PROFESSOR DESCRIBES HER PROFESSIONAL LIFE

According to traditional Hindu social mores, a Dalit was not allowed to hear the Vedas, let alone learn them or recite their “refined,” “cultured” Sanskrit language. Hence the moving power of the account, excerpted below, by Kumud Pawde (b. 1938), professor of Sanskrit at Nagpur University. Pawde describes the irony, as well as the personal triumph and anguish, of mastering a language associated with the very Brahman ascendancy and dominance that had compelled her and her community to endure so much brutal oppression.

“The Story of My ‘Sanskrit’” is taken from her autobiography, Antasphot.

A lot of things are often said about me to my face. I’ve grown used to listening to them quietly; it’s become a habit. What I have to listen to is praise. Actually, I don’t at all like listening to praise. You may say that this itself is a form of self-indulgence. But that isn’t so. I mean it sincerely. When I hear myself praised, it’s like being stung by a lot of gadflies. As a result, I look askance at the person praising me. This expression must look like annoyance at being praised, for many misunderstandings have arisen about me in this connection. But it can’t be helped. My acquaintances get angry with me because I am unable to accept compliments gracefully. I appear ill-mannered to them, because there isn’t in me the courtesy they are expecting.

Now if you want to know why I am praised—well, it’s for my knowledge of Sanskrit, my ability to learn it and to teach it. Doesn’t anyone ever learn Sanskrit? That’s not the point. The point is that Sanskrit and the social group I come from, don’t go together in the Indian mind. Against the background of my caste, the Sanskrit I have learned appears shockingly strange.

That a woman from a caste that is the lowest of the low should learn Sanskrit, and not only that, also teach it—is a dreadful anomaly to a traditional mind. And an individual in whose personality these anomalies are accumulated becomes an object of attraction—an attraction blended of mixed acceptance and rejection. The attraction based on acceptance comes from my caste-fellows, in the admiration of whose glance is pride in an impossible achievement. That which for so many centuries was not to be touched by us, is now within our grasp. That which remained encased in the shell of difficulty, is now accessible. Seeing this knowledge hidden in the esoteric inner sanctum come within the embrace, not just of any person, but one whom religion has considered to be vermin—that is their victory.

The other attraction—based on rejection—is devastating. It pricks holes in one’s mind—turning a sensitive heart into a sieve. Words of praise of this kind, for someone who is aware, are like hot spears. It is fulsome praise. Words that come out from lips’ edge as filthy as [red] betel-stained spit. Each word gleaming smooth as cream. Made up of the fragility of a honey-filled shirish8-blossom. Polished as marble. The sensation is that of walking on a soft velvety carpet—but being burnt by the hot embers hidden in someone’s breast, and feeling the scorching pain in one’s soul. The one who’s speaking thinks the listener can’t understand—for surely a low-caste person hasn’t the ability to comprehend. But some people intend to be understood, so that I’ll be crushed by the words. “Well, isn’t that amazing! So you’re teaching Sanskrit at the Government College, are you? That’s very gratifying, I must say.” The words are quite ordinary; their literal meaning is straight-forward. But the meaning conveyed by the tone in which they are said torments me in many different ways! “In what former life have I committed a sin that I should have to learn Sanskrit even from you?” “All our sacred scriptures have been polluted.” Some despair is also conveyed by their facial expressions. “It’s all over! Kaliyug has dawned. After all, they’re the government’s favourite sons-in-law! We have to accept it all.” …

Beyond the accepters and the rejecters lies yet another group. In wholeheartedly welcoming the admiration of this group, every corner of my being is filled with pleasure. This group consists of my students. Far removed from hostile feelings. Without even an iota of caste consciousness. Away from the prejudices of their elders. Pure, innocent admiration, prompted by the boundless respect they feel, fills their eyes. Actually these girls have reached the age of understanding. The opinions they hear around them should by rights have made an impression on their mind. But these precious girls are full to the brim with the ability to discriminate impartially. …

In response to these hissings of wounded pride, I experience a mixture of emotions. Seeing this hostility and disgust, I slip into the past. This disgust is extremely familiar to me. In fact, that is what I have grown accustomed to, ever since I was old enough to understand. Actually, I shouldn’t have any feelings about this disgust, and if I do have any feelings at all, they should be of gratitude. For it was this disgust that inclined me towards Sanskrit. It so happened that the ghetto in which there stood my place of birth, the house where I was welcome, was encircled on all sides by the houses of caste Hindus. The people in our ghetto referred to them as the Splendid People. A small girl like me, seven or eight years old, could not understand why they called them “Splendid.” And even as today’s mature female with learning from innumerable books, I still cannot understand it. That is, I have understood the literal meaning of the word “splendid.” But not why it should be applied to them, or whether they deserve to have it applied. The girls who studied along with me were Brahmins or from other higher castes. I had to pass their houses. I paused, waiting casually for their company. Right in front of me, the mothers would warn their daughters, “Be careful! Don’t touch her. Stay away from her. And don’t play with her. Or I won’t let you into the house again.” Those so-called educated, civilized mothers were probably unconscious of the effect of this on my young mind. It wasn’t as if I could not understand them. …

With great eagerness and interest, I began my study of Sanskrit. As I learnt the first-declension masculine form of the word “deva,” I picked up the rhythm of the chant. I must make special mention of the person who helped me to learn by rote the first lesson about aspirates—my teacher Gokhale. If I omit to do so, I shall feel a twinge of disloyalty in every drop of my blood. Gokhale Guruji. Dhoti, long-sleeved shirt, black cap, a sandalwood-paste mark on his forehead. The typical robust and clear pronunciation of the Vedic school. And an incredible concern for getting his students to learn Sanskrit. At first I was afraid. But this proved groundless. What actually happened was the very opposite of what I had expected. …

Against all obstacles, I at last matriculated. On seeing the marks I got for Sanskrit, I announced, “I shall do an M.A. in Sanskrit.” Our enlightened neighbours laughed as they had before. Some college lecturers and lawyers also joined in the joke. “How can that be possible? You may have got good marks at Matric [the final year of high school, or tenth grade]. But it isn’t so easy to do an M.A. in Sanskrit. You shouldn’t make meaningless boasts; you should know your limitations.” The discouragers said what they usually do. The point was that the people who discouraged me were all of my caste. But their words could not turn me from my purpose. I didn’t reply—I wanted to answer them by action. For that, I needed to study very hard. In order to take an M.A. in Sanskrit, I would have to go to the famous Morris College. I had heard so many things about the college from my friend’s sister. About the learned professors with their cultivated tastes, about the mischievous male students, the beautiful girls, and the huge library. My interest was limited to the professors who would teach me, and to the library. And I joined the college. …

I passed my B.A. The figures in my B.A. mark-sheet were worthy of high praise. I had got good marks without falling behind in any way. Not only did I have respect for my teachers’ fairness, but it made me happy too. But in human life, no joy is unmixed. It can’t be attained fully without some little blemish. …

And now I would be a lecturer in Sanskrit! My dreams were tinted with turquoise and edged in gold. The images I nursed about myself were taking strange shapes in my mind.

A high-paid job would come to me on a platter from the government. For I must have been the first woman from a scheduled caste to pass with distinction in Sanskrit. Every nook and cranny of my mind was filled with such hopes and expectations. But those ideas were shattered. My illusions proved as worthless as chaff. I became despondent about the efficiency of the government. I started attending interviews in private colleges. And that was a complete farce. Some said, “But how will you stay on with us, when you’ve passed so well?” (In other words, they must have wanted to say, “How will you work for less pay?”) In other places, the moment I had been interviewed and stepped out of the room, there would be a burst of derisive laughter. I would hear words like sharp needles: “So now even these people are to teach Sanskrit! Government Brahmins, aren’t they?” And the ones who said this weren’t even Brahmins, but so-called reformers from the lower castes, who considered themselves anti-Brahmin, and talked of the heritage of Jyotiba Phule, and flogged the mass of the lower castes for their narrow caste-consciousness. And yet they found it distasteful that a girl from the Mahar caste, which was one of the lower castes, should teach Sanskrit. When people like these, wearing hypocritical masks, are in responsible positions in society, it does not take even a minute for that society to fall.

Two years after my M.A., I was still unemployed. There must be many whose position is the same as mine. In my frustration I took a bold step to get out of the trap. I presented my case in writing to the Honourable Shri Jagjivan Ram, the noted Minister in the Central Cabinet. …

[He] placed the letter before Pandit Nehru, who was astonished by it, and sent me an award of Rs.250/-, telling me to meet the Chief Minister of Maharashtra. Accordingly the Chief Minister of that time, Yeshwantrao Chavan, sent me a telegram asking me to meet him. Within a day or two, one wire after another had electrified me into wondering who I’d suddenly become. Getting past the ranks of spearmen and macebearers at the government office was quite an ordeal. But finally I got to see the “Saheb.” Now, I thought, I would get a job at once—as a clerk in the government office, at least. A naive expectation. The Chief Minister made me fulsome promises in his own style. “We’ll definitely make efforts for you—but you won’t get a job in minutes; it’ll take us some time. We’ll have to give thought to it; have to hunt out something.” …

Waiting for a job, I passed the first year of an M.A. in English Literature. It was just an excuse to keep myself occupied. That year I got married—an intercaste marriage. That is a story by itself—a different glimpse of the nature of Indian society. Let that be the subject of another story. The surprising thing is that two months after my marriage, I got an Assistant Lecturership in a government college. Deputy Director Sahastrabuddhe, who was on the interview board, was amazed. “How did this girl remain unemployed for two years?” Dr Kolte’s good will remained a constant support here, too. Today, I am a professor in the famous college where I studied, whose very walls are imbued with the respect I felt for that institution. But one thought still pricks me: the credit for Kumud Somkuwar’s job is not hers, but that of the name Kumud Pawde. I hear that a woman’s surname changes to match her husband’s—and so does her caste. That’s why I say that the credit of being a professor of Sanskrit is that of the presumed higher caste status of Mrs Kumud Pawde. The caste of her maiden status remains deprived.

[Kumud Pawde, “The Story of My ‘Sanskrit,’” trans. Priya Adarkar, in Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature, ed. Arjun Dangle (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1992), 96–106.]

KANCHA ILAIAH: THE SHUDRA CRITIQUE OF HINDU COOPTION

Kancha Ilaiah (b. 1952) is a scholar, activist, and spokesman for the rights of those traditionally considered low- or out-caste—Shudras (whom Ilaiah calls Bahujans [the Majority]) and Dalits, or Other Backward Castes and Scheduled Castes. Originally from a sheep-herding family in South India, he earned a doctorate in political science from Osmania University in Hyderabad, where he currently teaches and writes. In his most controversial book, Why I Am Not a Hindu (1996), Ilaiah disclaims any link, relevance, affection, or necessity among Dalits and other Backward Castes for “Hinduism.” What partially prompted the publication of the book was the renewal in India in the mid-1980s of the Hindu Right, espousing a politicized, nationalist form of the Hindu tradition which, after Savarkar, has become known as “Hindutva.” The “Sangh Parivar” refers to the “family” of such right-wing organizations.

I was born in a small South Indian Telangana village in the early fifties and grew up in the sixties. Our villages had undergone all the turbulence of the freedom movement as they were part of a historical struggle known as the Telangana Armed Struggle. Perhaps as part of the first generation that was born and brought up in post-colonial India, an account of my childhood experiences would also be a narrative of the cultural contradictions that we are undergoing. Village India has not changed radically from my childhood days to the present. If there are any changes, the changes are marginal. Urban India is only an extension of village India. There is a cultural continuum between village India and urban India.

Suddenly, since about 1990 the word “Hindutva” has begun to echo in our ears, day in and day out, as if everyone in India who is not a Muslim, a Christian or a Sikh is a Hindu. Suddenly I am being told that I am a Hindu. I am also told that my parents, relatives and the caste in which we were born and brought up are Hindu. This totally baffles me. In fact, the whole cultural milieu of the urban middle class—the newspapers that I read, the T.V. that I see—keeps assaulting me, morning and evening, forcing me to declare that I am a Hindu. Otherwise I am socially castigated and my environment is vitiated. Having been born in a Kurumaa (shepherd caste) family, I do not know how I can relate to the Hindu culture that is being projected through all kinds of advertising agencies. The government and the state themselves have become big advertising agencies. Moreover the Sangh Parivar harasses us every day by calling us Hindus. In fact, the very sight of its saffron-tilak culture is a harassment to us.

The question before me now is not whether I must treat Muslims or Christians or Sikhs as enemies, as the Hindutva school wants me to do. The question is What do we, the lower Sudras and Ati-Sudras (whom I also call Dalitbahujans), have to do with Hinduism or with Hindutva itself? I, indeed not only I, but all of us, the Dalitbahujans of India, have never heard the word “Hindu”—not as a word, nor as the name of a culture, nor as the name of a religion in our early childhood days. …

It is for this reason that I thought I should examine the socio-economic and cultural differences between us and the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas and the Baniyas. The socio-cultural differences would be better understood if we set them in the context of the different stages of our lives—childhood, family life, market relations, power relations, the Gods and Goddesses that we respect, death, and so on. Narratives of personal experiences are the best contexts in which to compare and contrast these social forms. Personal experience brings out reality in a striking way. …

I was not born a Hindu for the simple reason that my parents did not know that they were Hindus. This does not mean that I was born as a Muslim, a Christian, a Buddhist, a Sikh or a Parsee. My illiterate parents, who lived in a remote South Indian village, did not know that they belonged to any religion at all. People belong to a religion only when they know that they are part of the people who worship that God, when they go to those temples and take part in the rituals and festivals of that religion. My parents had only one identity and that was their caste: they were Kurumaas. Their festivals were local, their Gods and Goddesses were local, and sometimes these were even specific to one village. No centralized religious symbols existed for them. This does not mean they were tribals. My ancestors took to life on the plains about 500 years ago. They were integrated into the village economy, paid taxes to the village panchayat or to the state administration in whichever form the administration required. As long as they were shepherds, they paid the tax in the form of pullara (levy for sheep-breeding). …

Let me now narrate how my childhood experiences were shaped. The social structure in which I first became conscious of the world around me was a Kurumaa social structure. My playmates, friends, and of course relatives, all belonged to the Kurumaa caste. Occasionally the friendship circle extended to Goudaa boys and Kaapu boys. We were friends because we were all part of the cattle-breeding youth. We took the cattle to the field and then began playing chirragone (our cricket), gooleelu (a game with marbles), dongaata (a hide-and-seek game), and so on. Surprisingly, whenever a Goudaa friend came to my house he would eat with us, but sit slightly apart; when we went to Kaapu homes their parents would give us food but make us sit a little distance away. While eating we were not supposed to touch each other. But later we could play together and drink together from the rivers and streams. If we had carried our mid-day food to the cattle field, we sometimes attempted to touch each other’s food, but suddenly the rules that our parents had fixed would make their appearance: we would speak insultingly of each others’ castes and revert to eating separately. Within moments, however, we were together again. …

What further separated a Hindu from us was the nature of the consciousness of the other world, the divine and the spiritual. For children from our castes, Jeja (the concept of God) is introduced in the form of the moon. As children grow up, they also get acquainted with Pochamma, Polimeramma, Kattamaisamma, Kaatamaraju, Potaraju and other deities. Among Dalitbahujans, there is no concept of a temple in a definite place or form. Goddesses and Gods live in all forms and in all shapes and in different places. Every Dalitbahujan child learns at an early age about these Goddesses and Gods. The children are part of the caste congregations that take place during festivals such as Bonaalu, Chinna Panduga, Pedda Panduga, and so on. Every Dalitbahujan child learns at an early age that smallpox comes because Pochamma is angry. The rains are late because Polimeramma is angry. The village tank gets filled or does not get filled depending on the sympathies of Kattamaisamma. Crops are stolen by thieves because Potaraju is angry. For Kurumaas whether sheep and goats will prosper depends on the attitude of Beerappa, a caste-specific God. …

We knew nothing of Brahma, Vishnu or Eswara until we entered school. When we first heard about these figures they were as strange to us as Allah or Jehova or Jesus were. Even the name of Buddha, about whom we later learnt of as a mobilizer of Dalitbahujans against brahminical ritualism, was not known to us. …

A Hindu family is hierarchical. Girls must obey boys, children must obey elders. Sex and age are two determining and measuring rods of the status within the family. Children are trained not to get involved in production-related tasks, which Brahmins condemn as “Sudra” tasks. Similarly their friendship with Dalitbahujan children is censured. “Upper” castes speak of Dalitbahujans as “ugly.” “Sudra” is an abusive word; “Chandala” is a much more abusive word. “Upper” caste children are taught to live differently from Dalitbahujan children, just as they are taught to despise and dismiss them. Hindu inhumanism becomes part of their early formation; hating others—the Dalitbahujans—is a part of their consciousness. …

Among all these castes what was unknown was reading the book, going to the temple, chanting prayers or doing the sandhyaavandanam (evening worship). The Bhagavad Gita is said to be a Hindu religious text. But that book was not supposed to enter our homes. Not only that, the Hindu religion and its Brahmin wisdom prohibited literacy to all of us. Till modern education and Ambedkar’s theory of reservation created a small educated section among these castes, letter-learning was literally prohibited. This was a sure way of not letting the religious text enter our lives. In addition even the idol, or murthy,-based priest or pujari-centred temple was prohibited to the young, the adult and the old from the Dalitbahujan castes. Today, though some “lower” castes are allowed into temples they can never relate to that God or Goddess. …

Childhood formations are important for a person—female or male—to become a full human being. But our childhoods were mutilated by constant abuse and by silence, and by a stunning silence at that. There was the conspiracy to suppress the formation of our consciousness. For hundreds of generations the violent stoppage of the entry of the written word into our homes and our lives nipped our consciousness in the very bud. Even after schools were opened to us because of independence or swaraj, a word which even today I fail to understand, the school teacher was against us, the textbook language was against us. Our homes have one culture and the schools have another culture. If our culture was Dalitbahujan, the culture of the school was Hindu. The gap between the two was enormous. There was no way in which one resembled the other. In fact these two cultures were poles apart. …

Brahmin-Baniya temples were not only far from us, but the Gods sitting and sleeping in those temples were basically set against us. There were Brahmin-Baniya houses within our villages, but the very same houses built up a culture inimical to ours. The Brahmin-Baniyas walked over the corpses of our culture. They were the gluttons while our parents were the poor starving people—producing everything for the Other’s comfort. Their children were the most unskilled gluttons, whereas our children were the contributors to the national economy itself. Their notion of life was unworthy of life itself, but they repeatedly told our parents that we were the most useless people. Having gone through all these stages of life, having acquired the education that enabled us to see a wider world, when we reflect upon our childhood and its processes it is nothing but anger and anguish which keep burning in our hearts.

[Kancha Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture, and Political Economy (Calcutta: Samya, 1996), x–xi, 1, 2, 6–7, 9, 11, 14–15, 19.]

DALIT POEMS OF RESISTANCE, REJECTION, AND HOPE FOR RECONCILIATION

In Bombay in 1972, the Dalit Panthers were formed as a revolutionary organization for the furtherance of Dalit activist goals. Modeled on the Black Panthers, who had emerged in the United States in 1966, Panthers militantly supported Dalit rights, agitated for reservation policies, and inspired a number of writers, whose poems and songs gave voice to the movement’s grievances and chronicles of suffering, demands for human rights, and dreams of a society unburdened by discrimination.

The first of the two poems below, by Marathi poet Daya Pawar (1935–1996), illustrates the Dalit reconceptualization of the Buddha as an anti-caste activist; the second, by Gujarati poet Neerav Patel (b. 1950), asks the non-Dalit reader both to empathize with the Dalit’s oppression and to join him in creating a new world.

BUDDHA

BY DAYA PAWAR (1974)

I never see you sitting in

Jeta’s garden

sitting with eyes closed

in meditation, in the lotus position,

in the caves of Ajanta and Ellora

with stone lips sewn shut

sleeping the last sleep of your life.

I see you

walking, talking,

breathing softly, healingly,

on the sorrow of the poor, the weak,

going from hut to hut

in the life-destroying darkness,

torch in hand,

giving the sorrow

that drains the blood

like a contagious disease

a new meaning.

[Untouchable! Voices of the Dalit Liberation Movement, ed. Barbara R. Joshi (London: Zed Books, 1986), 159.]

SELF-INTRODUCTION

NEERAV PATEL (1980)

be my guest someday, sawarna [high-caste Hindu].

if you want to feel the pangs of woe

come in the guise of an untouchable.

see, yonder is the way to our village from the city.

avoid that tallest mansion—

our young girls are seduced there customarily.

that landlord is the king of our village—

he would not spare even a young bitch!

don’t ask for water from the public water-pots.

do you know

how to drink water with the bowl of your palms?

and don’t ask for my address there—

somebody may call you names.

here live brahmans,

kanbis

kolis

potters, blacksmiths and others.

yes, cross that hillock beyond the boundary,

and there appear huts buried under the tamarind trees,

or there may be two or three dogs licking bones.

dark and half-clad bodies:

yes, sawarna, they are my kith and kin—

mother is roasting beef at home,

father is rinsing hides in the tanning-pit.

this is my uncle

tailoring a leather bag for kanbis.

sister-in-law is peeling the aval stems.

and nanki has gone with a pitcher to fetch water from the tank.

that’s all, sawarna.

don’t cover your nose with the scented handkerchief,

you may suffocate,

you may nauseate at the sight of squabbles.

but see,

here i am reading pablo neruda

lying on the charpai under the neem tree.

i feel some times a lone man myself

on this island of ours.

my father said, sawarna—

your hic-cup was cured by the salty waters of our tanning-pit

in your childhood.

we can love each other

if you can shed your orthodox skin.

come and touch, we will make a new world—

where there won’t be any

dust, dirt, poverty, injustice, oppression.

[Untouchable!, ed. Barbara R. Joshi, 41–42.]

SEEKING WOMEN’S RIGHTS: FULFILLING CONSTITUTIONAL GUARANTEES

Perhaps the three issues that have most animated post-Independence activism in India are those of caste discrimination, the status of women, and Hindu–Muslim communalism. Successive governments have ordered commissions to report on the plight of low castes, women, and Muslims, and in each case the reports have mandated changes, some of which have encountered fierce resistance on the grounds that they are attacks on basic Indian social structure or religious practices as guaranteed in the Constitution.

Rammohan Roy, the famous reformer whose writings are quoted in the second chapter of this volume, early in the nineteenth century wrote that “the male part of the community” argued that women could not be given the rights to which they were entitled by human nature because they were regarded by men as not only weaker physically but also inferior in understanding to men. Then he asked his male audience the question of which the official report on the status of women in India of 1974 is a kind of extended comment: “When did you ever afford them a fair opportunity of exhibiting their natural capacity?” Selections from the writings of activists Madhu Kishwar and Asghar Ali Engineer provide further commentary on the challenges to Indian policies toward and treatment of women.

TOWARD EQUALITY: REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE STATUS OF WOMEN

In the years before Independence, there were demands from many quarters—religious reformers, humanitarians, women’s organizations—that when India became free, one of the urgent priorities should be consideration of the status of women, especially the disabilities and discriminations that were embedded in the structure of society and the legal system. The chief of such legal barriers, many believed, was the system of personal laws—that is, the body of laws governing marriage, inheritance, the adoption of children, and the power of husbands over wives within marriage. These laws and their application were governed by the religious community to which an individual belonged, not by laws common to all citizens. The British made sweeping changes in civil, criminal, and commercial law, but they moved with extreme caution in the field of personal law, because they feared that such interference would lead to violent opposition that would threaten their rule. Also, the British ruling classes regarded private morality as a concern of the religious authorities, not the state. Such reasoning led the East India Company to decree, early in the nineteenth century, an easy solution: “In all suits regarding inheritance, marriage and caste and other religious usages and institutions, the laws of the Koran with respect to Mahomedans, and those of the Shaster [Hindu religious texts] with respect to Gentoos [Hindus] shall be invariably adhered to.”⁹ This remained more-or-less true right up to Independence, but even when not verbalized, the thrust toward equality for women was implicit in the thinking of many of the leaders of the freedom movement.

In the Constitution, the State was directed to “endeavour to secure for its citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India” (Directive Principles, Part IV, section 44). The State was also to direct its policy toward equal pay for equal work for both men and women. There was an escape clause, however, for while the principles behind the directives were “fundamental to the governance of the country,” they were not enforceable in the courts (section 37). The fact that in the early 1970s a commission was established by the government of India, with the involvement of leading Indian women social scientists, to investigate the status of women and to suggest how the constitutional guarantees of equality for women could be put into practice, is a fascinating case study in Indian social history.

As of the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, many of the problems identified in the 1974 Report of the Committee on the Status of Women were still unsolved, in spite of welcome additional legislation. For instance, dowry has proven to be a continuing and significant custom. After the failure of the 1961 Dowry Prohibition Act, and after over two decades of activist struggle, in 1985 the act was amended to make dowry demands an actionable offense, with harsher punishments. However, dowry-related deaths have continued to escalate. The same is true of female child sex ratios, which have been in free fall since 1961, when there were 976 girls for every 1,000 boys under six. In 2011 the number was the worst ever, at 914 girls to 1,000 boys.

According to Veena Oldenburg, however, there are some encouraging developments for women’s rights in India. First, there is “a growing acknowledgment among feminist activists that dowry is not the sole cause of violence against women or even of dowry murders.”10 In addition, three amendments to the Indian Penal Code in 1983 recognized cruelty to women, of both mental and physical kinds, and whether leading to death or not, as a cognizable and nonbailable offense. Moreover, for the first time, in a landmark bill in 2005, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh daughters were given equal rights in the inheritance of property. The degree to which such legal provisions are known about and enforced, of course, will determine the benefit of such positive legislation.

Sectional numbers have been left for ease of reference to the original—very lengthy—document.

The review of the disabilities and constraints on women, which stem from socio-cultural institutions, indicates that the majority of women are still very far from enjoying the rights and opportunities guaranteed to them by the Constitution. … The increasing incidence of practices like dowry indicate a further lowering of the status of women. They also indicate a process of regression from some of the norms developed during the Freedom Movement. … We, therefore, urge that community organisations, particularly women’s organizations, should mobilise public opinion and strengthen social efforts against oppressive institutions like polygamy, dowry, ostentatious expenditure on wedding and child marriage, and mount a campaign for the dissemination of information about the legal rights of women to increase their awareness. This is a joint responsibility which has to be shared by community organisations, legislators who have helped to frame these laws and the Government which is responsible for implementing them. …

WOMEN AND THE LAW (CHAPTER IV)

2. Eradication of Polygamy in Muslim Law: Full equality of sexes can hardly be possible in a legal system which permits polygamy and a social system which tolerates it. The only personal law, which has remained impervious to the changing trend from polygamy to monogamy is Muslim Law. … Government has taken no steps towards changing the law for over two decades on the view that public opinion in the Muslim community did not favour a change. This view cannot be reconciled with the declaration of equality and social justice.

3. Enforcement of Provision Against Bigamy under Hindu Marriage Act: In our opinion the right to initiate prosecution for bigamy should be extended to persons other than the girl’s family with prior permission of the Court to prevent the current wide-spread violation of a most salutary provision of the law which very clearly lays down the social policy of the country. …

5. Restraint of Child Marriages: a) When the legal age of marriage in case of a female is below the age of discretion she cannot be expected to form an intelligent opinion about her partner in life. … Child marriage is one of the significant factors leading to the high incidence of suicide among young married women in India. Therefore, increasing the marriage age of girls to eighteen years is desirable. … c) There are large-scale violations of the Child Marriage Restraint Act, particularly in the rural areas. … We recommend that all offences under the Child Marriage Restraint Act should be made cognizable, and special officers appointed to enforce the law. …

6. Registration of Marriages: Compulsory registration of marriages as recommended by the United Nations will be an effective check on child and bigamous marriages. …

7. Prevention of Dowry: The Dowry Prohibition Act 1961 has signally failed to achieve its purpose. In spite of the persistent growth of this practice there are practically no cases reported under the Act. There is hardly any evidence of social conscience in this regard in the country today. The educated youth is grossly indifferent to the evil and unashamedly contributes to its perpetuation. …

8. Improvement of Laws of Divorce: The concept of “union for life” or the sacramental nature of marriage which renders the marriage indissoluble has gradually been eroded and through legislation the right on divorce has been introduced in all legal systems in India, but the same variations and unequal treatment of sexes characterises this branch of law also. … We recommend that mutual consent as a ground for divorce should be recognised in all the personal laws so that two adults whose marriage has, in fact, broken down can get it dissolved honourably.

9. Adoption: (a) We recommend that the right of adoption should be equal for husband and wife, with the consent of the other spouse. …

10. Guardianship: We recommend—That the question of guardianship should be determined entirely from the point of view of the child’s interest and not the prior right of either parent.

11. Maintenance: The provision for maintenance in the Criminal Procedure Code continues to reflect the old attitude to women…. Under Muslim law the wife’s right to maintenance lasts only as long as she remains a wife. If she is divorced, she loses her right and is only entitled to maintenance for 3 months. This has created discrimination between the Muslim and other Indian women. We recommend the removal of this discrimination and extension of right of maintenance to divorced wives. …

12. Inheritance: (a) The Indian Succession Act confers no restrictions on the power of a person to will away his property. … There is a need to incorporate some restriction on the right of testation, similar to that prevailing under Muslim law to prevent a widow from being left completely destitute. …

13. Family Courts: We strongly recommend the abandonment of the established adversary system for settlement of family problems, and establishment of Family Courts which will adopt conciliatory methods and informal procedure, aiming to achieve socially desirable results.

15. Uniform Civil Code: The absence of a uniform civil code 27 years after independence is an incongruity which cannot be justified with all the emphasis that is placed on secularism, science and modernisation. The continuance of various personal laws which discriminate between men and women violates the Fundamental Rights and the Preamble to the Constitution which promises equality of status to all citizens. It is also against the spirit of national integration and secularism. … We recommend expeditious implementation of the constitutional directive of Article 44 by the adoption of a Uniform Civil Code.

16. Needed Reforms in Criminal Law: a) Consent to sexual intercourse: In our view consent to have sexual intercourse requires more maturity than to have an abortion. The same limit should be applied in both cases. We recommend that the age of consent below which a girl’s consent to sexual intercourse is not legal should be 18. … c) Adultery: Adultery in our opinion should be regarded only as a matrimonial offence, the remedy for which may be sought in divorce or separation. Retention of this as a criminal offence brings out clearly the values of the last century which regarded the wife as the husband’s property. …

ROLES, RIGHTS AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR ECONOMIC PARTICIPATION (CHAPTER V)

The Indian Constitution guarantees equality of opportunity in matters relating to employment and directs the State to secure equal rights to an adequate means of livelihood, equal pay for equal work and just and humane conditions of work. The impact of transition to a modern economy has meant the exclusion of an increasing number and proportion of women from active participation in the productive process. A considerable number continue to participate for no return and no recognition. … Prejudices regarding women’s efficiency, productivity, capacity for skills and suitability debar them from employment in many areas, and result in wage discrimination. The criteria for determining their unsuitability for particular types of jobs are not clear or uniform. Recasting the employment policy for women requires re-examination of existing theories regarding their suitability for different types of work on scientific lines, and deliberate efforts to promote equality of opportunity by special attention to women’s disability and handicaps. …

EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR WOMEN (CHAPTER VI)

Social attitudes to the education of girls range from acceptance of the need to one of … absolute indifference. The number of illiterate women has increased from 61 million in 1950–51 to 215 million in 1970–71.

31. The challenge of the widening illiteracy gap will have to be borne in mind in determining priorities in educational development in the years to come. The claims of the formal educational system which can cater to the need of only a minority for a long time will have to be balanced against the claims of eradication of illiteracy. This stands out as the most important and imperative need to raise the status of women who are already adults and constitute the largest group. … Imbalances in women’s education and literacy are the consequences of great disparity of educational progress between rural and urban areas, between different sections of the population and between regions, which reflect, to a great extent, variations in regional attitudes to women. … The influence of these and other sociological factors … which, for instance, influence the low educational development among Muslim women or women of Scheduled Castes and Tribes, … make the use of national or state averages in assessing progress of education or literacy rather meaningless.

42. Equality of Sexes as a Major Value to be Inculcated through the Educational Process. The educational system is the only institution which can counteract traditional belief in inequality of sexes. The educational system today has not even attempted to undertake this responsibility. …

Though women’s participation in the political process has increased … their ability to produce an impact on the political process has been negligible because of the inadequate attention paid to their political education and mobilisation by both political parties and women’s organisations. Parties have tended to see women voters as appendages of the males. …

43. Women’s Panchayats: We therefore recommend the establishment of Statutory Women’s Panchayats at the village level with autonomy and resources of their own for the management and administration of welfare and development programmes for women and children, as a transitional measure, to break through the traditional attitudes that inhibit most women from articulating their problems and participating actively in the existing local bodies.

[Towards Equality: Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (New Delhi: Government of Education and Social Welfare, 1974), selection from recommendations, 359–374.]

MADHU KISHWAR: REALITY FOR WOMEN IN POLITICS

Madhu Kishwar (b. 1959) is the editor of Manushi, an influential journal published in Delhi that concentrates on issues affecting the position of women in Indian society. The journal’s hard-hitting, well-researched articles have highlighted many of the problems raised in the official report on the status of women excerpted above. Kishwar and her colleagues are often accused of exaggerating conditions, but they are also widely credited with focusing attention on the barriers to the full equality of women in India.

A key component of politics is the art of building alliances. In a culture where even formal interaction with men unconnected to one’s own family is frowned upon, women are severely handicapped in politics because they cannot cultivate close association with men without jeopardising their position in the family. A woman operating on her own strength in a party filled with corrupt politicians who think nothing of slandering their own women colleagues would find the going very tough, even if she can somehow mobilise other compensatory resources by her own special efforts. … The fact that politics is dominated by the most unsavoury kind of men makes most women themselves reluctant to break taboos regarding free intermixing with men. A woman risks her reputation by even being seen with many of them, whereas a man does not have to prove his credentials by such fierce avoidance. …

Thus women are handicapped from getting crucial information which men pick up easily from casual gossip with all kinds of people. So much of our politics is carried out in late night sessions, often over booze, where deals are made and strategies planned. Most women politicians, including the corrupt ones, don’t dare to be seen participating in such sessions. …

Even in educated middle class neighbourhoods of Delhi, mohalla [neighborhood] associations are usually run by men. While a few families are willing to relax some restrictions on women and are supportive of their activism, the workload of women and the nature of their domestic responsibilities make it extremely hard for them to spare the kind of time required for making even a small difference in politics. …

Men enjoy meeting officials, having chai-pani [tea and snacks] with them, because that is how they build contacts which can be encashed for personal benefit in various ways. But women are always in a hurry to get back. They don’t want to hang around gossiping in tea shops, chatting with officials … all of which seem to be a necessary part of men’s political world. …

As long as working in the political realm involves endless petition mongering to uncaring, unaccountable authorities, as long as decision-making remains remote and in the hands of bureaucrats, as long as politics cannot be easily integrated into the everyday life of people without causing severe disturbances in domestic life, men are likely to control and dominate it. …

By keeping more than three-quarters of India’s women illiterate and providing shamelessly poor quality education to the few who manage to reach sarkari schools, the government plays a crucial role in discouraging and obstructing women’s participation in public affairs. Even for participation at the panchayat level, it is no longer possible for an illiterate person to function effectively because the sarkari panchayats have been integrated into the vast bureaucratic network, with its reams of forms to fill out and its dust-covered volumes of rules and procedures.

Most women, especially those who are uneducated, feel helpless and lost when they are required to deal with the impenetrable maze of the bureaucratic world which defines the parameters of the panchayat’s role. What appears to be a woman panchayat member’s incapacity is actually proof of our system’s ridiculous procedures and insensitivity to people’s requirements.

What goes by the name of politics in our country is an overly time consuming and debased activity. Even for those who are honest and sincere in their work, the nature of our political institutions makes it very difficult to make a real difference. Nothing comes to our citizens without sifarish [bribery] and influence because the government encroaches on too many aspects of our lives in negative ways. …

Considering all this, it is perhaps not a coincidence that the few women who have developed an independent political base and are able to compete with men in electoral politics are mostly single or widowed. … These women are able to give their undivided attention to politics because there is no man to hold them back and, therefore, they are not easily cowed down by scandal or character assassination. … The more successful among women politicians do not like to be seen as representing women’s interests. It is unfortunate that by and large only those who find it hard to maintain a secure foothold for themselves in elective politics tend to gravitate towards women’s issues. Our democracy will become more meaningful when ordinary women can take part in political deliberations without having to make heroic sacrifices and prove themselves stronger than men over and over again. … Therefore, it is crucially important for women to have more leisure for them to want to participate in politics. They tend to prefer political work that doesn’t take them too far away from home on a regular basis. Thus women can be effective only in decentralised polities where decisions affecting people’s lives can be taken locally. … All this only goes to underscore the fact that the problem is far more complex than simply that Indian women are lagging behind due to discrimination. We have to make politics worthy of women, tune it sensitively to their requirements or else even with reserved seats, only those who become like sari-wearing men will be able to survive in politics.

[Madhu Kishwar, “Women’s Marginal Role in Politics,” Manushi 97 (Nov.–Dec. 1996): 16–18, 19, 20, 21.]

ASGHAR ALI ENGINEER: AN INDIAN MUSLIM REFORMER ON THE PLIGHT OF WOMEN

Asghar Ali Engineer (1939–2013) was an Indian scholar and activist, internationally known for his progressive views on communal relations, women’s autonomy, Indian secularism, and reform in Islam. Before his early retirement in 1972, he worked as a civil engineer, but since then he has played a major public role in Hindu–Muslim relations. In 1980 he established the Institute of Islamic Studies, in Bombay, to create a platform for progressive Muslims in India, and in 1993 he founded the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism, to promote communal harmony. He has authored over fifty books, in addition to numerous articles. The selections below are from an essay called “Women’s Plight in Muslim Society.”

Imrana’s case from U.P. and Ayesha Azmi’s case from London are very much in the media’s glare these days.¹¹ Earlier in the eighties of the twentieth century the Shah Bano case remained in the media headlines for months. There is no doubt that the media pays more than needed attention when it comes to Muslim women. Muslims always complain about this extraordinary interest that the media, both electronic and print, takes in Muslim women’s matters.

Having said this I must say Muslims have to do serious thinking on what goes on in their society. Let them reflect honestly if they follow the Qurʾanic injunctions about women honestly. They time and again show their emotional attachment to the Qurʾan but when it comes to the practice of the Qurʾanic teachings, they are less than honest, and particularly so when it relates to women.

The Muslim ʿUlama are largely responsible for the plight of Muslims in all Muslim societies, whichever country they belong to. They are under great influence of patriarchal values of the society they live in, rather than the Qurʾanic values. The entire Qurʾanic discourse on women is right-based and for men dutybased. However, the ʿUlama have reversed it, and for them the entire discourse about women is duty-based and for men is right-based. So much for their honesty to the Qurʾan.

The Imrana case has again attracted media attention because of the fatwa issued by Darul ʿUlum Deoband and also by the village Panchayat. One can understand the behaviour of the village Panchayat, as it is not an Islamic authority, but one is greatly saddened by the fatwa issued by Darul ʿUlum Deoband, the great Islamic seminary second only to Al-Azhar, in importance.

Imrana, wife of a rickshaw driver from Muzaffarnagar district in U.P., was raped by her father-in-law. Ali Mohammad, the father-in-law who raped her, has been convicted, and the act of rape has been established. The ʿUlama, before the court verdict came, had even doubted her allegations against her father-in-law and had said that it was a property dispute and she was making false allegation against her father-in-law to take revenge. However, they said, if at all she has been raped, she should divorce her husband and marry another man, as she had sexual intercourse with the father of her husband.

The ʿUlama was hardly bothered about the fact that she was raped and it was not consensual sex. Had she had consensual sex with him, it would have been entirely different matter. If she has been raped, how can she be blamed? One should have all the sympathy for her and punishment should be given to her father-in-law. Instead our ʿUlama are for punishing her. They are not even taking the fact into account that she has five children from her husband and if she obtains divorce who will look after them? One of her daughters has reached marriageable age.

In rural India a woman cannot afford to defy a fatwa, justified or not. She has to live in that society and arrange the marriages of her children. Those who face boycott, they alone know the consequences. Our ʿUlama, without bothering to study the actual situation and the context, just open their Shariʿah books and mechanically issue fatwas. They are totally shy of applying the principle of ijtihad, which means the creative re-interpretation of Shariʿah rulings. The Prophet (PBUH) had himself encouraged Muʿadh, whom he had appointed as governor of Yemen, to practice ijtihad.

Unfortunately our ʿUlama come from a poor and backward society and have no knowledge of modern society and its dynamics. They never dare to think out of the box. They have been trained only to study classical Shariʿah. They even do not know that great Imams themselves differed from each other while giving their opinion on the same question. For example, Imam Abu Hanifa, who was a great legal genius and thinker, maintained that what is haram (prohibited) cancels what is halal (permissible). Thus according to the HanafiSchool if Imrana has been raped which is haram, the rape will cancel her nikah (marriage) which is permissible.

On the other hand, Imam Shafiʿi, another great jurist, is of the opposite opinion—i.e. what is haram cannot cancel what is halal which, in Imrana’s case, would mean that her being raped by her father-in-law which is haram cannot cancel her nikah, which is halal…. Had the fatwa been obtained from a Shafi’i mufti he would have declared her nikah as intact. …

There are several such women’s issues on which one or the other Shariʿah school is more favourable than the other. For example, triple divorce in one sitting is not valid in the Ahl-e-Hadith School, whereas it is allowed both in Hanafias well as Shafiʿi School. Thus this provision from Ahl-e-Hadith could be incorporated to abolish triple divorce in one sitting. Such compilation will greatly ease Muslim women’s position in India. … But there is total stagnation in Shariʿah laws in India and women continue to suffer.

Our ʿUlama simply consult their school of jurisprudence and issue fatwas without caring about the consequences. No wonder then that [the] whole world thinks that Islam oppresses its women and, what is worse, refuses to accept any change in the medieval formulations by the Islamic jurists. Our ʿUlama declare Shariʿah laws as divine to stall any attempt to change and to win Muslims in favour of no change.

It is simply not true. Shariʿah is by no means immutable. It is [a] product of human thinking, as much as divine laws given by the Qurʾan. At best it can be said to be [a] human approach to understanding and applying divine injunctions. Thus one can say Shariʿah is semi-divine and must change in as much as it is human. The conditions in which the great Imams thought have changed considerably and one has to think again in a new context.

Today women are active agents in the society and are greatly aware of their rights. Women during the Holy Prophet’s time were also very active on various fronts and fought their way even into men’s world. Often the Prophet consulted his wives from important tasks and assigned them important work including leading prayers in their house. They also actively participated in battles and worked as nurses on battlefields. …

India is a democracy and all have fundamental rights to freely express themselves. It is not a closed society dominated by ʿUlama that one will accept all they say without critically examining it. The ibadat (matters pertaining to worship and matters relating to [the] hereafter) should not be subject to any change but matters pertaining to muʿ amalat (between one human being and another) must be subject to change. Only Qurʾanic values will remain immutable, values like justice (ʿadl), benevolence (ihsan), compassion (rahmah) and wisdom (hikmah).

If the ʿUlama do not show sensitiveness to others’ suffering and continue to remain rigid, they will not serve the cause of Islam, much less that of women.

[Asghar Ali Engineer, Communalism in Secular India: A Minority Perspective (Gurgaon: Hope India, 2007), 92–96. Slightly emended for English.]

MUSLIMS IN POST-INDEPENDENCE INDIA

THE SACHAR COMMISSION AND INDIAN MUSLIMS

In November 2006 the Commission on the Social, Economic, and Educational Status of the Muslim Community, chaired by Justice Rajindar Sachar, submitted its 403-page report. It was the first such report focused exclusively on Indian Muslims in the post-Independence period and highlighted their relative economic, educational, and political lag. While Muslims form the largest minority community in the country and boast a significant number of high achievers, as a group they nevertheless suffer from neglect, backwardness, and a feeling of disempowerment.

The commission thoroughly investigated the state of the Muslims by studying sixty districts in detail and gathering general material covering the entire all-India community. Although faced with opposition from the BJP and Hindu communal organizations, who derided the commission and who claimed that the Muslims were a pampered and dangerous section of the population, the commission members completed their important survey, analyzed their findings, and included a host of recommendations about how India’s political leadership at every level might go about improving the status, educational level, and self-confidence of India’s Muslims. The six-member Commission included, aside from Sachar, Saiyid Hamid, T. K. Oommen, M. A. Basith, Akhtar Majeed, Abu Saleh Shariff, and Rakesh Basant.

CHAPTER ONE: CONTEXT, APPROACH, AND METHODOLOGY

… Since Independence, India has achieved significant growth and development. It has also been successful in reducing poverty and improving crucial human development indicators such as levels of literacy, education, and health. There are indications, however, that not all religious communities and social groups (henceforth socio-religious communities—SRCs) have shared equally the benefits of the growth process. Among these, the Muslims, the largest minority community in the country, constituting 13.4 per cent of the population, are seriously lagging behind in terms of most of the human development indicators. While the perception of deprivation is widespread among Muslims, there has been no systematic effort since Independence to analyze the condition of religious minorities in the country. Despite the need to analyze the socio-economic and educational conditions of different SRCs, until recently appropriate data for such an analysis was not generated by Government agencies. There have been welcome changes in the scope of data collection with respect to SRCs in the 1990, which, in turn, has made this report possible. The current effort is the first of its kind to undertake a data-based research on the Muslims of India. …

CHAPTER FOUR: EDUCATIONAL CONDITIONS OF MUSLIMS

… Relative deprivation in education of Muslims vis-à-vis other SRCs calls for a significant shift in the policy of the State, along with the creation of effective partnership with private and voluntary sectors. Given the vastness of the population to be served and the limited resources available with policy makers, the emphasis on provisioning of a minimum level of school education by the State seems justified. … Muslims have not been able to sufficiently reap the benefits of state intervention and growth in education. …

With regard to school education, the condition of Muslims is one of grave concern. The data clearly indicates that while the overall levels of education in India, measured through various indicators, is still below universally acceptable standards, the educational status of the Muslim community in particular is a matter of great concern. … Both the Mean Years of Schooling (MYS) and attendance levels of Muslims are low in absolute terms and in contrast to all SRCs except in some cases SCs/STs. In fact, in several contexts, SCs/STs are found to have overtaken Muslims.

While there is a significant rural–urban differential, it was observed that the gap between Muslims and the other SRCs is generally higher in urban areas than in rural areas. …

Analysis of time trends indicate that, despite overall improvement in educational status, the rate of progress has been the slowest for Muslims. … Indeed, the gap between Muslims and the advantaged sections has actually widened since Independence, and particularly since the 1980s. In fact, a steady divergence in the level of achievement has seen traditionally under-privileged SCs/STs catching up and overtaking Muslims in several contexts. The last point is of special importance as at the time of Independence, the socio-economic position of SCs/STs was recognized to be inferior to that of Muslims.

Moreover, the recent trends in enrolments and other educational attainments and Committee’s interactions with the Muslim Community are adequate to dispel certain misconceptions and stereotypes with respect to education of Muslims. …

Muslims parents are not averse to modern or mainstream education and to sending their children to the affordable Government schools. They do not necessarily prefer to send children to Madrasas. … A section of Muslims also prefer education through the English medium, while some others would like the medium of instruction to be Urdu. The access to government schools for Muslims children is limited.

There is also a common belief that Muslim parents feel that education is not important for girls and that it may instill a wrong set of values. Even if girls are enrolled, they are withdrawn at an early age to marry them off. This leads to a higher drop-out rate among Muslim girls. Our interactions indicate that the problem may lie in non-availability of schools within easy reach for girls at lower levels of education, absence of girls’ hostels, absence of female teachers and availability of scholarships as they move up the education ladder.

CHAPTER 8: POVERTY, CONSUMPTION, AND STANDARDS OF LIVING

… The analysis of differentials in poverty across SRCs shows that Muslims face fairly high levels of poverty. Their conditions on the whole are only slightly better than those of SCs/STs. As compared to rural areas, Muslims face much higher relative deprivation in urban areas. Over time changes in poverty levels also show that the economic conditions of Muslims in urban areas have not improved as much as the other SRCs. …

While there are variations in the conditions of Muslims across states, the situation of the community in urban areas seems to be particularly bad in relative terms in almost all states except Kerala, Assam, Tamil Nadu, Orissa, Himachal Pradesh, and Punjab. …

CHAPTER 10: THE MUSLIM OBCS AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

As per the latest round of NSSO survey, Muslim OBCs constitute 40.7% of the total Muslim population. They are also a sizable component (15.7%) of the total OBC population of the country. The NSSO survey however fails to provide disaggregated figures across individual castes/groups included in the OBC lists of the Centre and the various states. As a result, inter-OBC differentials along castes/groups in terms of crucial indicators such as educational attainment and employment share cannot be estimated. The Committee therefore is of the opinion that enumeration of castes/groups as part of the decennial Census exercise is critical to assess the equitable distribution of benefits meant for groups included in the category, OBC. …

While Hindu-OBCs continue to be relatively deprived in terms of the all-India data, the Muslim community as a whole is lagging behind Hindu-OBCs. However, overall, the conditions of Muslim-OBCs are worse than those of Muslim-Gen. The abysmally low representation of Muslim OBCs suggests that the benefits of entitlements meant for the backward classes are yet to reach them. …

Based on the arguments and data presented here, it is logical to suggest that Muslims in India, in terms of their social structure, consist of three groups—ashrafs, ajlafs, and arzals. The three groups require different types of affirmative action. The second group, ajlafs/OBCs, need additional attention which could be similar to that of Hindu-OBCs. The third group, those with similar traditional occupations as that of the SCs, may be designated as Most Backward Classes (MBCs), as they need multifarious measures, including reservation, as they are “cumulatively oppressed.”

CHAPTER 12: LOOKING AHEAD: PERSPECTIVES AND RECOMMENDATIONS

This report has probed the question of whether different socio-religious categories (SRCs) in India have had an equal chance to reap the benefits of development, with a focus on Muslims in India. It was stated at the outset that minorities have to grapple with issues relating to identity, equality, and equity. It was also recognized that these three sets of issues are inter-related. But since the mandate of this Committee is primarily on equity, the Report essentially deals with relative deprivation of Muslims vis-à-vis other SRCs in various dimensions of development. It may also be useful to recall the distinction made in the introductory chapter between issues that are common to all poor people and those that are specific to minorities, especially Muslims.

Our analysis shows that while there is considerable variation in the conditions of Muslims across states (and among the Muslims, those who identified themselves as OBCs and others), the Community exhibits deficits and deprivations in practically all dimensions of development. In fact, by and large, Muslims rank somewhat above SCs/STs but below Hindu-OBCs, Other Minorities, and Hindu-General (mostly upper castes) in almost all indicators considered. Among states that have large Muslim populations, the situation is particularly grave in the states of West Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Assam. Interestingly, despite such deficits, the Community has lower infant mortality rates and sex-ratios. In addition to the “development deficit,” the perception among Muslims that they are discriminated against and excluded is widespread, which exacerbates the problem.

The Committee strongly suggests that the policies to deal with the relative deprivation of the Muslims in the country should sharply focus on inclusive development and “mainstreaming” of the Community while respecting diversity. There is an urgent need to recognize diversity in residential, work, and educational spaces, apart from enhancing inclusion of the really deprived SRCs in “spaces” created by public programmes and policy interventions. The need for equity and inclusion in a pluralistic society can never be overemphasized. But the mechanisms to ensure equity and equality of opportunity to bring about inclusion should be such that diversity is achieved and at the same time the perception of discrimination is eliminated. This is only possible when the importance of Muslims as an intrinsic part of the diverse Indian social mosaic is squarely recognized.

[http://minorityaffairs.gov.in/sites/upload_files/moma/files/pdfs/sachar_comm.pdf, 1–2, 84–85, 161–162, 213–214, 237–238.]

ASGHAR ALI ENGINEER: A MUSLIM’S REACTIONS TO SACHAR

Immediately upon the release of the Sachar Commission Report, Engineer penned the following short essay, entitled “Indian Muslims: Reservation or No Reservation?,” published the following year.

Indian Muslims are very much in news these days after the Sacchar Committee Report was submitted to the Prime Minister. Though it has not revealed anything new about Indian Muslims, yet since its contents are under discussion, much light is being shed on their plight. Before the Sacchar Committee, Indira Gandhi had appointed the Gopal Singh High Power Committee in 1980, which had submitted its report to Mrs. Gandhi in 1982.

The Gopal Singh Committee had also worked hard to collect valuable data and made concrete suggestions for improving the economic condition of Muslims. However, the report was an election gimmick and was not even tabled in Parliament, let alone implemented in right earnest. When I suggested to Shri V. P. Singh when he was Prime Minister, in a Muslim leaders’ and intellectuals’ meeting to implement the report, V. P. Singh said, which Gopal Singh Report? He did not know that such a report was submitted to the Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi. He promised to table the report in the next session of Parliament, but his Government fell on the Question of Babri Masjid. The Report remained in the cold storage. …

The report has been submitted to the Prime Minister Shri Manmohan Singh. The data of course is embarrassing for the Government as it shows Muslims have slipped even below dalits in government jobs and poverty line and literacy level. The national literacy average is around 65%, whereas among Muslims it is around 59 percent. The share of Muslims in govt. jobs in almost all states is far below their population.

In Assam their population is 30.9 percent whereas their percentage in government jobs is just 11.2. Shockingly, with all left front governments’ commitment to minorities, the percentage of Muslims in West Bengal government jobs is just 4.2 percent, though their population in that state is 25.2 percent. In Kerala Muslim percentage in government jobs is 10.4, as against their population of 24.7 percent. In the largest state of Uttar Pradesh their share in jobs is 5.1 percent though their population there is 18.5 percent.

In Bihar their plight is a shade better with 7.6 percent share in government jobs whereas their population is 16.5 percent. In Delhi, under the very nose of Central Government, their share in government jobs is 3.2 as against their population of 11.7 percent. Not so surprisingly their plight in Southern states like Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka is far better, with 8.8 and 8.5 per, cent respectively, whereas their population in these two states is 9.2 and 12.3 percent. Gujarat also is not so disappointing with share of Muslims in government jobs being 5.4 percent as against their population of 9.1 percent. …

Now the important question is who is to blame? Muslims, their leadership, or the government? I think the question is very complex. Firstly, most of the Muslims in India are converts from various dalit, OBC and artisan castes. They were poor before conversion and remained poor after conversion.

Even the ruling-class Muslims during the medieval ages had absolutely no sympathy with these low-caste Muslims. They were referred to as ajlaf or kamin zaten (Muslims of lowly origin) and shunned. These low-caste Muslims never acquired higher status in the caste-ridden society of India. Short of untouchability, every other evil was there. Thus one reason for their low economic status is historical in nature.

Secondly, the partition of the country delivered a hard blow to Indian Muslims. The upper feudal class Muslims and Muslims belonging to middle and upper middle classes and those holding higher posts in ICS [Indian Civil Service], IPS [Indian Police Service], Army etc. migrated to Pakistan leaving mostly poor and illiterate Muslims behind. These poor Muslims had no role in creating Pakistan and they had no advantage in migrating to Pakistan and hence they remained here. This is another cause of poverty among Muslims today in India. …

The new middle class … needs very high qualifications and has to face tough competition in this global economy. With no influence and no facilities to equip themselves with high-class education for new jobs, they need greater educational facilities. Neither government has done much for them nor their own leaders are interested in helping them. …

About the government, the less said the better. All secular parties including the Congress and Janata Dal and others who swear by secularism have not done anything concrete for poor and downtrodden Muslims. They do announce some schemes at the time of elections to lure them for votes, but all those schemes are quietly dumped as soon as elections are over. No one even mentions them.

No one knows what will be the fate of Sacchar Committee Report also. This time media has given wide coverage to it. Elections in important states like U.P. are due, and the Muslim vote in U.P. plays important role. It all depends how Muslim leaders bargain with various parties.

One important question is whether Dalit Muslims should be given reservations like Hindu Dalits. The Sacchar Committee has wisely avoided recommending reservation, though it has recommended an equal opportunity commission to be set up like the one in the U.K. and other countries. Short of reservation, the Committee wants government to make all possible efforts to recruit Muslims and expand job opportunities for them. In this competitive age, without especial efforts, it is very difficult to get them jobs. …

If Muslim leaders demand reservation for Dalit Muslims, there will be stiff opposition not only from the Sangh Parivar but also from many secularists. Reservation does not evoke favourable response even for Dalits and OBCs. For Muslims it will evoke huge opposition and will push up communal tension. It will provide Sangh Parivar with an issue they are eagerly looking for.

Also, strangely enough, some Muslim leaders themselves oppose reservation for Dalit Muslims saying there is no caste system among Muslims and if reservation is to be given it should be given for entire Muslim community. It will not be accepted even for Dalit Muslims, let alone the entire community. And in either case one has to amend the Constitution, as reservations are provided for on a caste basis in the Constitution, not on religion basis. To amend it one needs support from all political parties, which will obviously not be coming forth.

Thus best thing will be, as recommended by the Sacchar Committee, to set up equal opportunity commission and also provide additional facilities for education and coaching to Muslims. Also, artisans should get low rate interest from nationalised banks; it will greatly boost the economic situation of artisans who have to borrow from private lenders at very high rates of interest. Government should make it obligatory for nationalised and even private sector banks to reserve funds to lend to the poor dalits and minorities at low rate of interest.

Also, the left parties have suggested that all departments of the government, state as well as Centre, should spend at least 15% for Muslims and Left Front Government has already taken decision to do so. Thus Left Front Government of West Bengal has shown the way. … Expenditure from the budget on Muslims in proportion to their population is a much better alternative to reservation.

[Engineer, Communalism in Secular India, 102–107. Slightly emended for English.]

HINDU NATIONALISM, COMMUNALISM, AND SECULARISM

When the word “secular” was added by an amendment to the Preamble to the Constitution in 1976 so that it defined the Indian nation as “secular, socialist, and democratic,” those who supported the change saw it as a necessary defense against the two other forces in this section’s title: Hindu nationalism and communalism. Some saw secularism as the ideal for which India should strive; others, as a betrayal of all that Indian civilization and the Indian nation stand for. What is clear is that the meaning of the word has moved far from its everyday English usage of “not religious,” to encompass a multitude of issues of great importance to Indian national life. It has been at the heart of many discussions about the unity of India, the nature of Indian nationalism, Indian nationality, freedom of religion, toleration, communalism, separation of religion and the state, and what it means to be a modern nation. During the first sixty years after Independence, all the many connotations of the word “secular” kept surfacing in Indian political and social discourse in civil society, just as they had in the previous sixty years of nationalist discourse. It is fair to say that “secularism” has become a kind of shorthand in referring to many aspects of society that touch upon religious belief and practice in civil society.

By contrast, the assertion that Hindu culture should be the defining feature of Indian national life is implicit in many of the writings in chapters 5, 6, and 7 of this volume, including those of V. D. Savarkar, the originator of the term “Hindutva,” and prominent members of the Indian National Congress, such as B. G. Tilak. The Hindu Mahasabha, founded in 1915, gave formal structure to Hindu opposition to the Muslim League, founded in 1906. Many of the Mahasabha’s leaders were also members of the Indian National Congress, with this dual membership being uneasily accepted by those in the Congress who, like Nehru, regarded themselves as secular and socialist.

The separation of religion, nationalism, and politics was thus a constant struggle even before the coming of independence, but it took on a new urgency after 1947, when the partition of British India led to the antagonism between India and Pakistan that has so markedly influenced the domestic and international politics of both countries. In India, the antagonism was not directed solely against the Muslim leaders who had founded Pakistan, but was generalized, as is shown in some of the selections below, to include the huge Muslim population that remained in India, numbering in 1947 about fifty million.

Questioning the role of Indian Muslims in the national life of India was closely linked with the assertion of the defining role of Hindu culture in Indian nationhood. Two political parties in particular, the Jana Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), played a major role in the politicizing of Hinduism. Both of them derived much of their ideology, as well as their leadership, from an older group, founded in 1925, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), although the leadership of the RSS always insisted that it was a cultural, not a political, organization.

In this section, a variety of conflicting views on secularism, communalism, and Hindu nationalism are given, beginning with a statement from Jawaharlal Nehru, a vigorous spokesman for the secular state. This is followed by the opinions of his equally vigorous opponents. Behind them all is the declaration that India is a “united, socialist, secular, democratic republic,” and to parse these words is the prolegomena to understanding contemporary Indian civil society.

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU’S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

For Nehru, the cardinal doctrine of the modern nation-state was the separation of the state from religion. The idea that religion should play a part in society was an idea, he believed, that had been given up in Europe centuries before, and had “no place in the mind of the modern man.”12 And yet he knew that the culture of independent India was saturated and colored by religion. In his devotion to a secular India, how could he avoid that most defining of religious rituals: the death ceremony? How could he avoid being identified with what he feared most, the fostering of communalism? Problematically, much that he held most dear in nature was saturated in religious symbolism. It was with this thought in mind that in 1954 he wrote this moving last will and testament, which was not published until after his death in 1964.

I wish to declare with all earnestness that I do not want any religious ceremonies performed for me after my death. I do not believe in any such ceremonies, and to submit to them, even as a matter of form, would be hypocrisy and an attempt to delude ourselves and others.

When I die, I should like my body to be cremated. … A small handful of my ashes should be thrown into the Ganga. … My desire to have my ashes thrown into the Ganga at Allahabad has no religious significance, so far as I am concerned. I have no religious sentiment in the matter. I have been attached to the Ganga and Jumna rivers in Allahabad ever since my childhood, and as I have grown older, this attachment has also grown. … The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, around which are intertwined her racial memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India’s age-long culture, ever-changing, ever-flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga. … And though I have discarded much of past tradition and custom, and am anxious that India should rid herself of all shackles that bind and restrain her and divide her people, and suppress vast numbers of them, and prevent the free development of the body and the spirit; though I seek all this, yet I do not wish to cut myself off from that past completely. I am proud of that great inheritance that has been, and is, ours, and I am conscious that I, too, like all of us, am a link in that unbroken chain which goes back to dawn of history in the immemorial past of India.

The major portion of my ashes should, however, be disposed of otherwise. I want them to be carried high up into the air in an aeroplane and scattered from that height over the fields where the peasants of India toil, so that they might mingle with the dust and soil of India and become an indistinguishable part of India.

[Dorothy Norman, ed., Nehru: The First Sixty Years (New York: John Day, 1965), 2:574–575.]

S. P. MOOKERJEE: HINDUISM IS “SYNONYMOUS WITH INDIA’S WIDEST NATIONAL ASPIRATIONS”

Shyama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) was a key figure in the political expression of Hindu nationalism. An urbane and cultured product of the Bengal of his time, at home in both Indian and Western literature, he was elected to the Bengal Legislative Council in 1929 and became vice chancellor of Calcutta University (1934–1938). Influenced by V. D. Savarkar, he joined the Hindu Mahasabha. Elected to the Constituent Assembly, he became a minister in Nehru’s first Cabinet. Strongly disagreeing with Nehru’s handling of the Kashmir issue on the grounds that it was too favourable to Pakistan and Muslims, he resigned from the Nehru government in 1950. He organized a political party, the Jana Sangh, which for a time had quite a strong base in North India, winning 10 percent of the votes in the elections to Parliament (the Lok Sabha) in 1967. Mookerjee did not live to see this development. In 1953 he went to Kashmir to protest what he regarded as the appeasement of Pakistan over its occupation of part of Indian territory. He was arrested and died in prison. A reminder of continuity in Indian political life: Mookerjee’s private secretary was Atal Bihari Vajpayee (b. 1924), a member of the RSS, who became prime minister of India as leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The following brief selection from Mookerjee’s writings indicates why he appealed to Hindu nationalist sentiments. The rejection of Gandhi’s doctrine of non-violence is an important aspect of Hindu nationalism.

Who can dare question that Hinduism, if correctly understood, is the highest embodiment of toleration and catholicity and is synonymous with India’s widest national aspirations? The Mahasabha wants that India should be completely free of foreign domination and be governed by a constitution which will give equal right of citizenship to one and all, based on universal adult suffrage. It is genuinely anxious that the religion and culture of all groups be duly protected and there should be no bar to the enjoyment of any right or privilege merely on the ground of caste, creed, sex or religion.

A spirit of non-violence that saps the power to resist evil or aggression is against the true teaching of Hindu religion and the Hindu Mahasabha believes that both the Bhagavad Gita and the Sword must remain side by side to maintain peace and progress according to India’s best traditions. While it is proud that the sacred duty of maintaining the welfare and integrity of this great and holy land must primarily rest on 75 per cent of its population, comprising the Hindu race, it also genuinely expects that all others inhabiting India, though pursuing different religions, will identify themselves wholly and completely with India’s destiny. … It aims however to install into the minds of Hindus, interpreted in the broadest sense possible, an undying faith in the sacredness and justice of their call and in the possibility of three hundred millions of Hindus remaining united for the purpose of wresting freedom for their beloved motherland.

[Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, Awake Hindusthan (Calcutta: R. C. Banerjee, 1945), 174–175.]

THE RASHTRIYA SWAYAMSEVAK SANGH: DEFINING HINDU NATIONALISM

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded in 1925, was not of great importance until after Independence. The writings of V. D. Savarkar had a central place in the formation of its ideology, but what gave it strength was a tightly controlled cadre of devoted and disciplined followers under able leaders; the leadership of two major political parties, the Jana Sangh and the BJP, came from the RSS. The publicists of the RSS emphasize that it is neither a religious nor a political group, but one that understands that a nation is a composite of territory, culture, language, history, and religious practices. They claim that India is unique in combining all of these in what they describe as Hindu nationalism.

When in 1949 the government forced the RSS to provide its constitution if it wanted to be recognized, it produced one accompanied by this short statement of its aims. These aims are bland enough—one could substitute the name of any religion for Hindu—but behind each phrase can be read, as many people in India do read, a sinister agenda for the domination of the nation by a faction that excludes those who reject its vision of a good Hindu society, built on Hindu values.

To eradicate the fissiparous tendencies arising from diversities of sect, faith, caste and creed and from political, economic, linguistic and provincial differences among Hindus; to make them realize the greatness of their past; to inculcate in them a spirit of service, sacrifice, and selfless devotion to the Hindu Samaj as a whole; to build up an organized and well-disciplined corporate life; and to bring about an all-round regeneration of the Hindu Samaj.

[Translation of Hindi original by D. R. Goyal, in Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, 2nd rev. ed. (New Delhi: Radha Krishna, 2000), 256.]

M. S. GOLWALKAR: THE CENTRAL CORE OF NATIONHOOD

M. S. Golwalkar (1906–1973) became the sarsangchalak, or supreme guide, of the RSS in 1940. The authority vested in the post recalls that of the guru of the classical Indian tradition, although the RSS does not use the term. Because of the association of Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, with the RSS, the organization was banned until 1949.

Golwalkar argued that while the nation was built on territory, racial unity, culture, and language, religion was of overriding importance. The three readings given here are rather stilted translations from Hindi (the translator is not identified), which should not conceal the emotional appeal their ideas can make to readers. The RSS claim that Golwalkar’s books had “hundreds of thousands” of readers may be correct.

THE HINDU WAY OF LIFE

This first reading, in which Golwalkar argues that dharma, duty, and discipline—not meditation or devotion—are the foundation of a good society, is in the form of a dialogue.

Q. What does the word “Hindu” indicate, according to you?

A. The word “Hindu” denotes a society. …

Q. Is the word “Hindu” to be found in our Shastras [scriptures]?

A. Why not? The word is formed with the letter Hi from the Himalayas and Indu from the Indu Sarovar (the Southern Ocean), conveying the entire stretch of our motherland. …

Q. Why not the word “Bharatiya” instead of Hindu?

A. No doubt, Bharatiya too is our own name, associated with us since hoary times. But today there is a misconception regarding the word. It is commonly used as a translation of the word “India” which includes all the various communities like the Muslim, Christian, etc., residing in this land. So, the word Bharatiya is likely to mislead us when we want to denote our particular society. The word “Hindu” alone connotes correctly and completely the meaning that we want to convey. …

Q. You have always equated the “Indian Nation” with “Hindu Rashtra.” How far is it correct?

A. Let me try to be clear at the very outset, one misconception about “Hindu Rashtra.” The word “Hindu” is not merely “religious,” it denotes a people and their highest values of life. We, therefore, let our concept of nation emphasise a few basic things: unqualified devotion to the motherland and our cultural ideals, pride in our history which is very ancient, respect for our great forefathers, and lastly, a determination in every one of us to build up a common life of prosperity and security. All this comes under the one caption: Hindu Rashtra. We are not concerned with an individual’s mode of worship. …

Q. What is the proof that the Hindu way of life is founded on a firm basis?

A. There were countless attacks from various foreign groups such as Shakas, Hunas and Muslims. We stood like a rock and faced them, keeping the frame of our society intact. Then came the European people like the Portuguese, French, Dutch, and the British to annihilate us in a shrewd manner. Still we have continued to live as the same people. In addition to the galaxy of saints and emperors from the beginning of history, modern Bharat has produced giants like Vivekananda, Ramatirtha, and Mahatma Gandhi. Is this not a sufficient proof that our Hindu life is founded on a firm base?

[Interviews with M. S. Golwalkar in Spotlights (Bangalore: Sahitya Sindu, 1974), 106–107, 113.]

DHARMA AWAKENS THE COMMON INNER BOND

“It will be seen,” according to M. A. Venkata Rao in the preface to Golwalkar’s best-known book, Bunch of Thoughts, “how full, how positive, how patriotic, how practical and idealistic at the same time, the principles and methods of nation building adopted by the Sangh are.”

According to our philosophy, the very projection of the Universe is due to a disturbance in the equilibrium of the three attributes—sattva, rajas and tamas13—and if there is … a perfect balance of the three attributes, then the Universe will dissolve back to the Unmanifest State. Thus, disparity is an indivisible part of nature and we have to live with it. Our efforts should be only to keep it in limits and take away the sting born out of disparity. So any arrangement that tries to remove the inherent disparities altogether on the basis of superficial equality is bound to fail. Democracy, even in the advanced state in the Western countries, is after all the rule by a few who are well versed in the art of politics and capable of winning the masses to their line. The concept of Democracy … is, to a very large extent, only a myth in practice.

Communism, too, has completely failed to realise any of its declared concepts of equality. … It has envisaged that after the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat … the state would [wither] away. … According to Communism, this is the highest state of equality that a nation can conceive of. But Communism, based as it is on materialism, cannot explain how that ideal state can come to life. …

Our philosophy, on the other hand, has pictured the highest state of society and offered for it a cogent explanation. It is described as … There existed no state, no king, no penalty and criminal. All protected one another by virtue of dharma. Dharma is the universal code of right conduct that awakens the Common Inner Bond, restrains selfishness and keeps the people together in that harmonious state even without external authority. There will be no selfishness, no hoarding and all men will live and work for the whole. … Both individual and society supplement and complement each other with the result that both get strengthened and benefited.

[M. S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts: Our World Mission (Bangalore: Vikrama Prakashan, 1966), v, xxxiv, 18–20.]

THE DANGERS OF MUSLIMS, CHRISTIANS, AND COMMUNISTS

In this next selection, Gowalkar writes of what he believes to be the sacred trust of the Hindu people, and of its enemies.

It is clear, therefore, that the mission of reorganising the Hindu people on the lines of their unique national genius which the Sangh has taken up is not only a great process of true national regeneration of Bharat but also the inevitable precondition to realise the dream of world unity and human welfare. For, as we have seen, it is the grand world-unifying thought of Hindus alone that can supply the abiding basis for human brotherhood, that knowledge of the Inner Spirit which will charge the human mind with the sublime urge to toil for the happiness of mankind, while opening out full and free scope for every small life-specialty on the face of the earth to grow to its full stature. …

Thus we find that even though some people may call us communal and all that, still their beliefs and our beliefs are the same. Only, we have the courage to say the truth, whereas they try to appease and propitiate out of fear, of course, under the garb of “broad-mindedness,” “secularism” and so on. That is all. No other difference. The conclusion that we arrive at is that all those communities which are staying in this land and yet are not true to their salt, have not imbibed its culture, do not lead the life which this land has been unfolding for so many centuries, do not believe in its philosophy, in its national heroes and in all that this land has been standing for, and are, to put it briefly, foreign to our national life. And the only real, abiding and glorious national life in this holy land of Bharat has been of the Hindu People. …

The Case of the Muslims. Have those [Muslims] who remained here [in India after Partition] changed …? Has their old hostility and murderous mood, which resulted in widespread riots, looting, arson, raping … come to a halt now? It would be suicidal to delude ourselves into believing that they have turned patriots overnight after the creation of Pakistan. On the contrary, the Muslim menace has increased a hundredfold by the creation of Pakistan which has become a springboard for all their future aggressive designs on our country. … We of the Sangh have been, in fact hammering this historic truth for the last many years. … Everywhere the Muslims are being abetted in their separatist and subversive activities by our own Government, our leaders and political parties. …

The Case of the Christians. So far as the Christians are concerned, to a superficial observer they appear not only quite harmless but as the very embodiment of compassion and love for humanity! Their speeches abound in words like “service” and “human salvation” as though they are specially deputed by the Almighty to uplift humanity! They run schools and colleges, hospitals and orphanages. The people of our country, simple and innocent as they are, are taken in by all these things. But what is the real and ulterior motive of Christians in pouring crores of rupees in all these activities? … Towards that end they feel that any tactics, however foul, is fair. The various surreptitious and mean tactics they employ for conversion are all too well known. There is the case of a village where, in the last census, the Christian missionaries got the whole population entered as Christians. When the mischief was known and the people there protested, the Christian missionaries told them, “Nothing can be done now. You have been registered as Christians in Government records. So you have to behave hereafter only as Christians.” The poor Hindu villagers, cut off from the support and succour of the indifferent Hindu Society, believed in their words and embraced Christianity. It is through such tactics that they are swelling their numbers day in and day out. … The creation in Assam of a Nagaland is glaring example of this. That the open rebellion going on in the Naga Hills is all engineered by the Christian missionaries was accepted even by Pandit Nehru. … So long as the Christians here indulge in such activities and consider themselves as agents of the international movement for the spread of Christianity, and refuse to offer their first loyalty to the land of their birth and behave as true children of the heritage and culture of their ancestors, they will remain here as hostiles and will have to be treated as such.

Communism. A serious failure of democracy in our country is the growing menace of Communism which is a sworn enemy of democratic procedure. In a bid not to be left behind the Communists in their economic appeal to the masses, our leaders are only making Communism more respectable by themselves taking up the Communist jargon and the Communist programmes. If the leaders imagine that they will be able to take away the wind out of the Communist sail by such tactics, they are sadly mistaken. …

Various are the attempts going on to neutralise the appeal of Communism in our country. Some people feel that the Bhoodan movement launched by Vinobaji will take away the appeal of Communism. On the contrary, with its Communistic slogan of “land to the tiller” and with threats by some of his shortsighted followers like, “If you do not give of your own accord, Communists are bound to come up and take away your all by force,” it will only give rise to an impression in the mass mind that after all Communism is correct and is inevitable.

[Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts, 7, 162, 167–168, 173, 179–180, 182, 186–188, 190.]

BALRAJ MADHOK: THE INDIANIZATION OF ALL ASPECTS OF NATIONAL LIFE

On S. P. Mookerjee’s death in 1953, leadership of the Jana Sangh passed to Balraj Madhok (b. 1920), a prolific author under whom the party won representation in Parliament. Many aspects of the manifesto he wrote for the Jana Sangh became part of the general current of Hindu nationalism. Hindu nationalism carries with it a strong criticism of “foreign” religions, specifically Islam and Christianity, as antipathetic to what he called “Indianisation.” Madhok was expelled from the Jana Sangh for “indiscipline,” including his criticism of the control exercised over the party by the RSS. In 1980 the Jana Sangh transformed itself into the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which became the leading member of an alliance that formed the government of India from 1998 to 2004.

Thinkers like S. P. Mookerjee and Balraj Madhok make little mention of religion in terms of belief, but they identify Indian nationalism as rooted in the greatness of India in pre-Islamic times. Implicit in this understanding of Indian nationalism is the need to purify India of foreign cultural elements, especially Islam and Christianity.

The call for Indianisation both as a concept and as a programme of action has evoked mixed reaction in the country. While most nationalist and patriotic Indians who have been worried by the growing strength of fissiparous and disruptive forces and tendencies in the country have welcomed it as the need of the time, the Communists, their fellow travellers and communalists with extra-territorial loyalties, who are mentally afraid of Indian nationalism, are upset by the popular response to this call. …

[After the reorganization of state boundaries on linguistic lines] the sense of glory of India began to be subordinated to the glory and greatness of the respective linguistic States which began to take the place of Bharat Mata [Mother India] in the hearts and minds of the people. … The net result of this is that most Indians today are Punjabis or Bengalis or Malayalis first and Indians only next or never. … That is one compelling reason for taking to Indianisation of our people in right earnestness before it becomes too late. … It is a painful fact that casteism has become more pronounced rather than getting weakened during the twenty-two years of freedom. There are many reasons for it. The most important of them is the exploitation of caste for political purposes by the political leadership and parties. … The reservations [of government jobs and seats in legislatures] given to Scheduled Castes [Untouchables] and Scheduled Tribes in the Constitution have created vested interests in the perpetuation of caste system. Before such reservations came, there was going on an imperceptible process of change of castes. The people belonging to lower castes tried to upgrade their social status with the improvement of their economic and educational condition. …

Lack of a strong sense of nationalism is not only reflected in the growing strength of the divisive forces of linguism [demanding political safeguards for various languages], regionalism, casteism and communalism but it has also resulted in intensification of mental slavery which came with foreign rule. This is particularly true of the intellectual elite and the upper classes of the society which dominate and control the apparatus of power in the name of the people. In the name of modernism, progressivism, socialism, and secularism everything Indian has come under a cloud. …

But the mental slavery of Indian leadership which looks upon everything with American or Russian eyes has stood in the way of reorientation of our economic thinking and policies. Indianisation in the economic field therefore also is a need of the hour. …

There are a number of reasons for the wayward behaviour and extra-territorial loyalties of this section of Muslims. [The] stress of Islam on renouncing and rejecting non-Muslim ancestors and heritage after a man is converted to Islam and its antipathy to the concept of territorial nationalism in which respect for past heroes and heritage plays a significant part is one reason for it. … Instead of creating respect for the Indian inheritance and bringing Muslims into the national mainstream, systematic efforts are being made at Aligarh [Muslim University] and elsewhere to completely insulate the Muslim mind from Indian life and thought, cultural tradition and other influences that could remove the canker of two-nation theory from their minds. … Their Indianisation [is] a vital necessity for the peace, security and integrity of India.

[Balraj Madhok, Indianisation (What, Why, and How) (Delhi: S. Chand and Co., 1970), 19, 25, 27, 30–31, 42, 45, 50–51, 53, 55.]

BIPAN CHANDRA: WHAT IS COMMUNALISM?

According to its proponents, secularism is the necessary antidote to Hindu nationalism and Muslim separatism, which both lead to communalism, a force destructive to democracy and the unity of India. Bipan Chandra (b. 1928), a noted economic and political historian, gives a succinct definition of communalism that suggests why he finds it a threat. He writes from a Marxist stance, but his general viewpoint is shared by many Indian scholars.

Simply put, communalism is the belief that because a group of people follow a particular religion they have, as a result, common social, political and economic interests. It is the belief that in India Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs form different and distinct communities which are independently and separately structured or consolidated; that all the followers of a religion share not only a community of religious interests but also common secular interests, that is, common economic, political, social and cultural interests; that Indians inevitably perceive such interests through the spectacles of the religious grouping and are bound to possess a sense of identity based on religion, i.e., religion has to become the basis of their basic social identity and the determinant of their basic social relationships; that they possess the inherent tendency to act and function as a separate group or entity or unit in these fields; that they constitute separate “organic wholes” or homogeneous and cohesive communities, especially in the political field; that each such religious “community” has its own separate history; that communal identity and division have always pervaded Indian society, though they may have been reinforced in modern times; that the religious “community” has become the basis of the organization of modern politics in India and of the perception of economic, political and cultural issues by the Indian people; that a “real” Hindu or Muslim can belong only to a party of the community and cannot differ politically from other Hindus or Muslims; that all Hindus or Muslims must think alike in politics because they are Hindus or Muslims; that, in fact, each religious “community” constitutes a homogeneous entity and even a distinct “society” in itself; that there is and can be no such thing as an Indian nation—India has been, is, and has to be, a mere “confederation of religious communities.” …

Herein lies the analytical value of seeing communalism as false consciousness. On the one hand, one can see the objective falsity of communalism and therefore not accept its surface view; on the other hand, one can see that false consciousness does not grow unless it reflects, though perversely, some aspects of social reality and serves a social function for some social groups, classes and interests.

[Bipan Chandra, Communalism in Modern India (New Delhi: Vikas, 1986), 1–2, 30.]

MUSHIRUL HASAN: SECULARISM, COMMUNALISM, AND THE RELIGIOUS SYMBOL OF THE BABRI MASJID

One of the most disturbing incidents in contemporary India was the destruction in December 1992 by a Hindu group of a sixteenth-century Islamic mosque supposedly built by Babur, the first Mughal ruler, on the site of a Hindu temple that had allegedly marked the spot where Rama had been born (the “Ram-janma-bhumi”). This led to violent outbursts in which hundreds of people, mainly Muslims, were killed. For many people, both Indians and foreigners, this seemed a dramatic—and successful—attack on the secular state.

Professor Mushirul Hasan (b. 1949), a historian and vice-chancellor of a liberal Islamic university, joined with fellow social scientists in analyzing the meaning of the violence in the context of the secular state.

The controversy over the Babri Masjid–Ramjanmabhumi issue has not just aroused deep religious passions but has raised the fundamental issue of how best to allow competing religious symbols to co-exist in a society committed to the secular ideal. Admittedly, the pressing need is to resolve conflicting claims over the mosque at Ayodhya. But, in the long run, all concerned citizens will need to marshal their intellectual resources so as to evolve a mechanism and, at the same time, define social codes for resolving controversies of this nature. Otherwise, the initiative, as always, will rest with those who manipulate both political institutions and processes to create and widen arenas of conflict.

It is not surprising that the flare-up, centred around the mosque in Ayodhya, should cause such deep concern. After all, no other issue since India’s Independence has generated such violent passions, led to such widespread riots, gripped the people with panic, fear and anger, and threatened to destroy the democratic, secular consensus envisaged by the architects of the Indian Constitution. Sentiments have been polarized to such an extent that two successive governments have fallen in the course of just a year, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) succeeding in placing the mandir (temple) issue on the national agenda. As the Times of India commented on 17 October 1989, “Jettisoning once and for all its mumbo-jumbo about Gandhian values, the BJP, under Mr. L. K. Advani’s spirited leadership, has gone on the offensive with a strategy clearly designed to polarise life in the country along antagonistic religious lines.”

This is not all. For the first time, religious zealots, bolstered by politically articulate groups, found both a cause and an opportunity to create a bond of fraternal unity among their divided and stratified constituency. In the Shilanyas ceremonies [the sanctifying of bricks to rebuild the temple], the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), backed by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), found a unifying symbol and a cementing bond which had, for centuries, eluded Hindu reformers and preachers. Through flamboyant demonstrations of religious worship and through mindless retaliatory acts, these groups have clearly succeeded in stoking the fires of communal unrest. …

The real issue is not the future of the Babri mosque or of Rama’s birthplace; in fact the seemingly endless debate among scholars over the existence of a temple on the present site of the mosque or the actual birthplace of Rama is of academic interest. The main concern of the people of Faizabad [near Babri Masjid] and their brethren in other parts of the country must be to create an ethos and a social order in which competing symbols can be blended into a harmonious whole. Individuals and groups have quite successfully done so in the past and there is no reason why it cannot be done in our times. In the ultimate analysis, India’s hope lies in areas like Faizabad where shared memories and common historical experiences should slowly but steadily strengthen bonds of unity and promote consensus and accommodation between different segments of society. Even though strewn with obstacles and difficulties, it is worth fighting for the realization of such an ideal.

[Mushirul Hasan, “Competing Symbols and Shared Codes: Inter-Community Relations in Modern India,” in Anatomy of a Confrontation: The Babri Masjid–Ramjanmabhumi Issue, ed. S. Gopal (New Delhi: Viking, 1991), 99–114, 115–116.]

THE BJP PERSPECTIVE: THE BABRI MASJID WAS A SYMBOL OF CONQUEST, NOT RELIGION

The academic denunciation of the destruction of Babri Masjid, called in the document quoted here “a campaign of calumny,” was answered officially in 1993 by the BJP in a “White Paper.” The “Ayodhya movement” refers to the campaign to replace the mosque with a temple to Rama at his supposed birthplace.

[The Babri Masjid] was purely and simply a symbol not of devotion and of religion but of conquest. … It was for the country the symbol of its subjugation. … The Ayodhya movement is a watershed in Indian history. … The BJP has always affirmed that the Ayodhya movement was not just a plea for a temple for Sri Rama, that instead it reflected a far deeper quest for recapturing our national identity. The movement is firmly rooted in the inclusive and assimilative cultural heritage of India. It represents the soul of the nationalist thrust of our freedom movement. The post-independence political creed of the Congress and of most other political parties has come to regard every thing that inspired this nation in the past as less than secular—in fact as communal, and even antinational. The Ayodhya movement symbolized the re-establishment of those roots of our nationhood which had dried up due to post-independence politics and a spiritually bankrupt idiom. Indeed, “secularism” became a perverted slogan—merely a means to catch votes and to shout down every nationalist. …

The ruling Congress with its overt and covert allies in the opposition relentlessly charge the BJP with politicising the issue of the temple at Ayodhya. This charge no doubt suits the pseudo-secular political parties in their competitive pursuit of Muslim votes, but it clearly lacks substance and a sense of history without which no polity, and certainly not the polity of a nation with a known history extending back 5,000 years, can function at peace with itself.

[Bharatiya Janata Party, White Paper on Ayodhya and the Rama Temple Movement (New Delhi: Bharatiya Janata Party, 1993), 7.]

SUMIT SARKAR: SECULARISM, NATIONALISM, AND THE RIGHT TO CONVERSION

Sumit Sarkar (b. 1939), until retirement a social historian at the University of Delhi, has noted that the history of modern India is dominated by the advance of the Hindu right and globalized forms of capitalism. It is from this perspective that he strongly criticized those who attack people’s right to convert from one religion to another.

A bill has been circulated to punish conversion through (a very vaguely-defined) “allurement” by a minimum of three years in jail. What is worrying is the way terms of discourse and commonsensical every day assumptions are getting moulded, as had happened during the Ayodhya agitation. … Conversion is always assumed to be Christian (or, in different contexts, Islamic or any other non-Hindu) conversion. The systematic work of the VHP [Vishva Hindu Parishad] ever since its foundation in 1964 to spread high-Hindu practices and norms among adivasis [tribal people] is never acknowledged as conversion, but described by terms like shuddhi (purification), “reconversion,” or parivartan (turning back). … The implicit assumption behind the use or acceptance of such terms is that being a Hindu is somehow the “natural” condition of any Indian. Discursively, therefore, we are already perilously close to Hindu Rashtra. And “Hindu,” as defined by the Sangh Parivar, is obviously worlds removed from the devotion of a Ramakrishna for whom the difference between Ishwar, Allah and God mattered as little as that between jal, pani and water [all words for water]. … The surprisingly apologetic tone about conversions, even among many critics of the anti-Christian campaign, makes necessary the restatement of some things which should be obvious. Conversion in the sense of voluntary change of religion is not just a logical corollary of the Article 25 clause about the fundamental right to “preach, practise and propagate” religion (why else should anyone seek to “propagate”?). Freedom of conscience surely includes the right to change one’s views about religion, and a curbing of that right can lead to restrictions on freedom of choice in general, with dominant groups dictating what one can think or do in politics, artistic tastes, dress, ways of life. Conversely, conversion by force or fraud is equally reprehensible, and one fails to see the need for any “national debate” about it. Given the current political and administrative situation in [India …] it should be obvious that groups like the VHP are far more likely to indulge in such methods. There is ample evidence, notably from Gujarat, that forcible or fraudulent Hindu conversions are in fact going on on a significant scale in adivasi (tribal) areas. …

The total implausibility of forcible Christian conversion in today’s India makes necessary a constant harping on Inquisition atrocities centuries ago. … Two inter-related questions arise here. Why target Christians, then, and how is the campaign attaining some plausibility? Christians, as a small and electorally insignificant minority in most parts of the country, are in the first place a conveniently safe target under conditions of coalition government. Adverse foreign reactions have so far been kept within limits by the new strategy of, not big riots, but everyday petty humiliation of Christians in many parts of the country, interspersed with occasional gross acts of violence against individuals. Attacking them helps to keep the wilder elements within the Sangh Parivar both satisfied and in good fighting trim for future, more aggressive phases. Perhaps more important, Christians represent a convenient and not entirely implausible surrogate for “swadeshi” at a time when BJP-led Union governments have speeded up the opening-up of the country to multinationals. …

The extent of missionary complicity with colonialism in India has also been much exaggerated and simplified. Early Company rulers like Hastings and Cornwallis, far from encouraging missionaries, often developed close collaborative relations with orthodox Brahman literati, and the Baptist mission had to set up its first outpost in Serampur, then outside British Bengal. Later, too, there have been many missionary critics of colonial policies. Above all, at the other end of the social scale, recent historical research is increasingly highlighting the extent to which sustained Christian philanthropic and educational work have had an empowering impact on significant sections of adivasis (tribal people), dalits and poor and subordinated groups in general. Such small gains in the direction of greater social justice may have been earlier the largely unintended fall-out of Christian proselytisation efforts, often among the very many who did not convert, but still found missions a helpful resource for their own upliftment. Today, with the churches clearly changing in quite striking ways, there is ample evidence of far greater awareness of such issues among many—though of course very far from all—Christian activists in India. And perhaps it is precisely these aspects that arouse the greatest anger and fear among adherents of Hindutva. Certainly Arun Shourie’s widely-circulated anti-Christian tirade, Missionaries in India (1994), is very clear on this point. It begins, and ends, with a violent denunciation of the ways in which the Church today “spurred by the new ‘liberation theology,” is spurring movements among so-called “dalits”—movements which he fears “would certainly disrupt Hindu society.”

[“Conversions and the Sangh Parivar: A Conversation with Sumit Sarkar,” The Hindu (Chennai, India), Nov. 9, 1999.]

ARUN SHOURIE: MISSIONARIES IN INDIA

Arun Shourie (b. 1941), a high-ranking official in BJP administrations, has been influential both in India and in the West for his harsh criticism of Muslim and Christian activity in India. This selection is from the work referred to by Sumit Sarkar above. “Missionaries” needs careful definition. As used by Shourie it is meant to imply “foreigners,” but in fact few foreign Christian missionaries (in the old sense) are permitted to work in India. Most of the educational and medical work Shourie decries is now carried on by Indian Christians, although many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) supply financial aid to Indian-run Christian institutions.

As Gandhiji used to say, the work of missionaries quickened the efforts of Hindu reformers to set our own house in order. The missionaries’ zeal to convert Hindus and the realization that they were specially targeting the sections which had been trodden down, lent an urgency to the determination of reformers to work for the uplift and integration of these sections into the rest of Hindu society. Even the denunciations of Hinduism and India by the missionaries served a purpose. … The reformers were hastened in their work; the people were made more quickly aware of the defects in our society than they might otherwise have been. …

Where they introduced us to a smattering of western learning, they led us to completely forget and—with no knowledge of it at all—feel ashamed of our tradition. Where they introduced modern schools, they, along with the secular British rulers, completely erased the vast network of instruction which, as Gandhiji used to remind his readers … was in place all across the country. Where they established modern hospitals, the system and outlook of which they were a part made us completely oblivious of the vast medical knowledge that had been accumulated over the centuries here: a knowledge the richness of which we are being reminded today as the West rushes to patent those very herbs and cures!

[Arun Shourie, Missionaries in India: Continuities, Changes, Dilemmas (New Delhi: ASA Publication, 1994), 4–7.]

CASSETTE CULTURE AND THE PROVOCATION OF RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE

Ethnomusicologist Peter Manuel, doing field research in North India in 1989–1991 during the run-up to the destruction of the Babri Masjid, discovered that audio cassettes were being utilized to circulate inflammatory speeches and songs against Muslims and to promote a Hindutva-style ideology. In such productions, Muslims are portrayed as foreign marauders who deserve to have the mosque—and, indeed, any accommodative rights in India—taken away from them. Manuel found that such speeches and songs, whether live at rallies or played on cassettes, could easily lead to discord and even riots. Manuel concludes, “I have discussed these tapes and reproduced some of their vitriolic demagoguery at length here in order to illustrate the kind of poison that a ‘people’s medium’ is capable of disseminating. … Democratic, grassroots control of the mass media is hardly a guarantee of progressive, humanistic expression” (225).

In one cassette from 1990, then–BJP Member of Parliament Uma Bharti (b. 1959) made the following exhortation.

Chandra Shekar says we should build the temple, but change the location. I ask him would you change your father? … We’ve wasted 44 years while these elitists court the Muslim vote bank. We need people like [Sardar] Patel and Subhash [Chandra Bose], who are willing to sacrifice their lives for the motherland, who can wipe away her tears and gun down the traitors. … You Muslims link yourselves to [Mughal emperor] Aurangzeb, not to India. We sang songs of Hindu–Muslim amity, we were ready for brotherhood, but it didn’t happen. Your Quran preaches holy war, while our tradition calls for peace and accommodation even if we’re being ground underfoot. … So we have tried to have peace, but now we want our temple. … You’ll see on October 30th. When ten Bajrang Dal members sit on the chest of an Ali, then we’ll see whether the place will be called Ram Janmabhoomi or Babri. … We’ll see if this country will be Hindu or Muslim. … Hindus, wake up—they’ve looted you and you stayed silent; they sacked your temples and raped your mothers and daughters, and you kept quiet. What reward did you get for your equanimity?

[Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 253.]

PARTHA CHATTERJEE: SECULARISM AND TOLERANCE

Partha Chatterjee (b. 1947) is a public intellectual with a distinguished career spanning India and the United States. He has degrees in political science from Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Rochester, New York; he is a former director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta; and he teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. A founding member of the Subaltern Studies Collective, Chatterjee has made impressive contributions to the study of Indian history, nationalism, the situation of women, and other contemporary issues. He has also published poems in Bengali and is a well-known playwright and actor on the Calcutta stage. In this section he addresses one of the most controversial topics in contemporary Indian civil society, the role of the Hindu right and the question of religious tolerance.

[There is] a feature that has been noticed many times in the career of the modern state in many countries of the world: namely, that state policies of religious intolerance or of discrimination against religious and other ethnic minorities do not necessarily require the collapsing of state and religion, nor do they presuppose the existence of theocratic institutions.

The point is relevant in the context of the current politics of the Hindu right in India. It is necessary to ask why the political leadership of that movement chooses so meticulously to describe its adversaries as “pseudo-secularists,” conceding thereby its approval of the ideal as such of the secular state. None of the serious political statements made by that leadership contains any advocacy of theocratic institutions and, notwithstanding the exuberance of a few sadhus celebrating their sudden rise to political prominence, it is unlikely that a conception of the “Hindu Rashtra” will be seriously propagated which will include, for instance, a principle that the laws of the state be in conformity with this or that samhita or even with the general spirit of the Dharmasastra. In this sense, the leading element in the current movement of the Hindu right can be said to have undergone a considerable shift in position from, let us say, that of the Hindu Mahasabha at the time of the debate over the Hindu Code Bill some 40 years ago. Its position is also quite unlike that of most contemporary Islamic fundamentalist movements which explicitly reject the theoretical separation of state and religion as “western” and un-Islamic. It is similarly unlike the fundamentalist strand within the Sikh movements in recent years. The majoritarianism of the Hindu right, it seems to me, is perfectly at peace with the institutions and procedures of the “western” or “modern” state.

Indeed the mature, and most formidable, statement of the new political conception of “Hindutva” is unlikely to pit itself at all against the idea of the secular state. The persuasive power, and even the emotional charge, that the Hindutva campaign appears to have gained in recent years does not depend on its demanding legislative enforcement of ritual or scriptural injunctions, a role for religious institutions in legislative or judicial processes, compulsory religious instruction, state support for religious bodies, censorship of science, literature and art in order to safeguard religious dogma, or any other similar demand undermining the secular character of the existing Indian state. This is not to say that in the frenzied mêlée produced by the Hindutva brigade such noises would not be made; the point is that anti-secular demands of this type are not crucial to the political thrust, or even the public appeal, of the campaign.

Indeed, in its most sophisticated forms, the campaign of the Hindu right often seeks to mobilise on its behalf the will of an interventionist modernizing state in order to erase the presence of religious or ethnic particularism from the domains of law or public life and to supply, in the name of “national culture,” a homogenised content to the notion of citizenship. In this role, the Hindu right in fact seeks to project itself as a principled modernist critic of Islamic or Sikh fundamentalism, and to accuse the “pseudo-secularists” of preaching tolerance for religious obscurantism and bigotry. …

Thus, the comparison with fascism in Europe points to the very real possibility of a Hindu right locating itself quite firmly within the domain of the modernizing state, and using all of the ideological resources of that state to lead the charge against people who do not conform to its version of the “national culture.” From this position, the Hindu right can not only deflect accusations of being anti-secular, but can even use the arguments for interventionist secularization to promote intolerance and violence against minorities. …

What are the characteristics of the secular state? Three principles are usually mentioned in the liberal-democratic doctrine on this subject. The first is the principle of liberty which requires that the state permit the practice of any religion, within the limits set by certain other basic rights which the state is also required to protect. The second is the principle of equality which requires that the state not give preference to one religion over another. The third is the principle of neutrality which is best described as the requirement that the state not give preference to the religious over the non-religious and which leads, in combination with the liberty and equality principles, to what is known in US constitutional law as the “wall of separation” doctrine, viz. that the state not involve itself with religious affairs or organizations. …

No matter where this limit is drawn, it is surely required by the idea of the secular state that the liberty principle be limited only by the need to protect some other universal basic right and not by appeal to a particular interpretation of religious doctrine. This … has not been possible in India. The urge to undertake by legislation the reform of Hindu personal law and of Hindu religious institutions made it difficult for the state not to transgress into the area of religious reform itself. … It can easily be seen that this could lead to the entanglement of the state in a series of disputes that are mainly religious in character. …

The problem with the equality principle … is the way in which it has been affected by the project of reforming Hindu religion by state legislation. … What was the ground for intervening only in the affairs of one religious community and not of others?. … [This] anomaly has, in the past few years, provided some of the most potent ammunition to the Hindu right in its campaign against what it describes as the “appeasement” of minorities. …

[Regarding the third principle,] the conclusion is inescapable that the “wall of separation” doctrine of US constitutional law can hardly be applied to the present Indian situation. … This is precisely the ground on which the argument is sometimes made that “Indian secularism” has to have a different meaning from “western secularism.” …

Where we end up then is a quandary. The desire for a secular state must concede defeat even as it claims to have discovered new meanings of secularism. … [T]his is one more instance where the supposedly universal forms of the modern state turn out to be inadequate for the postcolonial world. … To reconfigure the problem posed by the career of the secular state in India, we will need to locate it on a somewhat different conceptual ground. … My problem is to find a defensible ground for a strategic politics, both within and outside the field defined by the institution of the state, in which a minority group, or one who is prepared to think from the position of a minority group, can engage in India today. …

My approach would not call for any axiomatic approval to a uniform civil code for all citizens. Rather, it would start from the historically given reality of separate religion-based personal laws and the intricate involvement of state agencies in the affairs of religious institutions. …

What this will mean in institutional terms are processes through which each religious group will publicly seek and obtain from its members consent for its practices insofar as those practices have regulative power over the members. It is not necessary that there be a single uniform pattern of seeking consent that each group will be required to follow. But it is necessary, if toleration is to be demanded, that the processes satisfy the same condition of representativeness that is invoked when a legislative body elected under universal franchise is found unsuitable to act on matters concerning the religion of minority groups. In other words, even if a religious group declares that the validity of its practices can only be discussed and judged in its own forums, those institutions must have the same degree of publicity and representativeness that is demanded of all public institutions having regulatory functions. …

Opposition to this proposal is likely to come from those who will see in the separate representative public institutions of the religious communities a threat to the sovereign powers of the state. If such institutions are to be given any role in the regulation of the lives and activities of its members, then their very stature as elected bodies representative of their constituents will be construed as diminishing the sovereignty of the state. I can hear the murmurs already: “Remember how the SGPC [Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee] was used to provide legitimacy to Sikh separatism? Imagine what will happen if Muslims get their own parliament!” The deadweight of juridical sovereignty cannot be easily pushed aside even by those who otherwise subscribe to ideas of autonomy and self-regulating civil social institutions.

I do not, therefore, make these proposals for a reconfiguration of the problem of secularism in India and a redefinition of the concept of toleration with any degree of optimism. All I can hope for is that faced with a potentially disastrous political impasse, some at least will prefer to err on the side of democracy.

[Partha Chatterjee, “Secularism and Tolerance,” Economic and Political Weekly 28 (July 1994): 1768–1777.]

AIJAZ AHMAD: THE RISE AND POWER OF THE HINDU RIGHT

Aijaz Ahmad is one of India’s leading public intellectuals. Marxist in his general orientation, he was born in Uttar Pradesh just before Independence, was raised in Pakistan, and later moved to the United States, where for several years he was a professor of literature. In recent years he has moved to India and become a leading commentator on political and cultural developments in South Asia, which he has astutely placed in their broader contexts. He often writes for Frontline and has been a fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, as well as at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

In the following selection, written in 2002 after the communal violence in Godhra, Gujarat, he analyzes the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allied organizations and their relation to structures of caste, class, economy, and culture. In 2002 the BJP was still in power at the Centre, and the Congress seemed to be fading into oblivion.

The destruction of Mir Baqi’s antique little mosque in Ayodhya in 1992 and the widespread pogrom in Gujarat in 2002, separated by a decade but also linked in a bath of innocents’ blood, mark major watersheds in the history of Indian communalism, and in Indian history more generally. The mass vandalism that brought down the tiny mosque, generally known as Babri Masjid, was staged as a fascist spectacle orchestrated by the core leadership of the RSS and the BJP, and executed by the stormtroopers of the VHP, the Bajrang Dal, Shiv Sena and sundry other outfits of militant Hindutva. Billed as a symbolic act to redeem Hindu pride, the Ayodhya vandalism nevertheless led to immediate communal carnage, notably in Bombay, carried out by the same forces. The statewide pogroms of 2002 in Gujarat were billed as an act of retaliation on part of the Hindu masses for the death of kar sevaks [volunteers] who were returning from Ayodhya, in a mysterious fire that broke out at Godhra. In reality, this pogrom too was orchestrated by the armed wing of the RSS, notably the VHP, and directly supervised by the BJP’s own state government, led by Narendra Modi, himself a former RSS pracharak [activist], while mass killings were supplemented with destruction of numerous mosques, dargahs and other symbols of religion and culture of Gujarati Muslims. Methodical killings are staged in the name of a war over Indian culture.

A common factor in the two events is of course that they occurred in both instances while BJP was in charge of state government, in UP and Gujarat respectively. Similarly, BJP gained electorally in both instances, adding two percent to its share of votes during the first state elections in UP after Ayodhya and adding substantially to its majority in Gujarat in the aftermath of the pogroms; indeed, the Ayodhya mobilisations contributed directly to the eventual emergence of BJP as the ruling party at the Centre, while its consolidation of power at the Centre greatly contributed to Modi’s ability to carry out the more recent pogroms. A sea-change in Indian politics is indicated by the fact that while the Ayodhya vandalism was condemned by all political forces outside the Hindutva fraternity, BJP was sheltered by a wide array of regional parties during the Ayodhya massacres, so that not even a meaningful debate could be held in Parliament, indicating how much the political Centre in India has shifted to the Right. The Indian State filed criminal charges against key leaders of the BJP after Ayodhya, who continue to face prosecution, at least in principle, while no such charges have been brought against Modi and his cabinet colleagues in state government against whom ample evidence exists. Kalyan Singh, who was the BJP chief minister in UP at the time when the masjid came down, eventually left the BJP in a faction fight and is now living in political wilderness; Modi, the Gujarat chief minister who masterminded the pogroms, was, by contrast, immediately exonerated at BJP’s national convention at Goa and has now emerged, after the sweeping electoral victory, as an important leader of the party and a possible prime ministerial candidate after the current generation of BJP leaders, Vajpayee and Advani, have taken their turns. …

The BJP … has been in power, at the head of a broad and broadening coalition, since 1998. This innings too began with widespread violence, this time against Christians, most notably in Gujarat but also in other states and as far afield as Orissa, and the wave subsided only when the burning of an Australian missionary fleetingly focussed international attention on this violence. Three aspects of that wave were notable. First, systematic violence against Christians put them in the same category as Muslims, as believers in a “foreign”’ religion and therefore worthy of extermination. Second, elements from among the dalits and adivasis were used systematically, specially in Gujarat, in something of a rehearsal for the more recent pogrom of Muslims. Third, the open participation of VHP and Bajrang Dal—the latter being certified by Home Minister Advani immediately as “patriots”—shrewdly tested the will of the allies and, predictably, the allies did not confront either the BJP or its parent organisation, the RSS. …

It is important to recapitulate this history briefly so as to offer a grim correction to the belief held broadly among the secular forces, which include the present writer, that communalism in India is a sectional pathology specific to an extremist fringe while the bulk of the nation marches on to greater liberality, secularity and tolerance. That can surely be said about active participation in communal violence, although even participation in actual violence seems to be on the increase among diverse strata, in terms of caste as well as class. After all the evidence that has accumulated over the past decade or more—pertaining to the incremental expansion of the RSS itself, of all its fronts ranging from Bajrang Dal to the BJP itself, and of the broad coalition it has been able to put in place, again ranging all the way from Shiv Sena to Mamata Banerjee and Chandrababu Naidu to the irrepressible Mayawati—one can no longer evade the perception that there are now formidable forces in the country, most notably in Western and Northern India, which partake of very active forms of communal politics and are even complicit in its violences. Elsewhere, these forces have made considerable inroads in Karnathaka and the Northeast, are poised to gain in Tamil Nadu and are mounting formidable pressure even in parts of Kerala and West Bengal. This signifies a sea-change, an unprecedented churning and shifting of the sands, in Indian politics, culture and social ethos. Not to face this fact amounts to an impermissibly populist romanticism, which cannot conceivably be a premise for strategies of resistance. …

We have long believed that since the RSS is a doggedly upper caste phenomenon it would be unable to make any substantial inroads into the middling and especially the lower castes. The first part of this assumption is certainly true: RSS is certainly a Brahminising caste phenomenon. However, given the highly segmented and fractured character of the caste system, the second part does not follow. Four basic points can be made in this regard. First, caste antagonisms in India are not only vertical but also horizontal, producing animosities among social factions occupying roughly analogous positions on the caste scale. Second, the sheer breadth of the horizontal divisions, all the way from the priestly to the forest-dweller, means that the upper and lower extremes always have the potential of coming together against the middling castes. Thirdly, sanskritization in the cultural sphere is and has been historically a patent analogue for upward mobility in class terms. Fourthly, there once was a time when caste was absolute and economic place relative to caste; we now have the economic class position (more often class aspiration) of diverse strata driving the politics of very novel kinds of caste coalitions. Each of these factors—and all four together—are capable of producing collisions unforeseen in the simple and binary upper–lower caste schema. Committed undoubtedly to an upper caste agenda, RSS has been nevertheless more adroit in utilizing caste contradictions than perhaps any other political force in the country, including the Congress in its heyday when it manipulated these contradictions before the advent of post-Emergency, post-Mandal politics. …

The same applies to the question of class and the professional elite. An argument was once made that since the RSS represents a form of Indian fascism, it was necessarily a petty bourgeois movement, at best rooted in the mercantile classes and castes; that, combined with its own propensity toward unremitting violence, would imply that the big bourgeoisie would not throw its weight behind the BJP government. A cognate argument has been that RSS and its affiliates are culturally too vulgar, too “rustic” to draw support from the modern bourgeoisie. Both presumptions have proved to be false. … RSS also does the bidding of Indian Big Business but the nature of the bidding itself has changed; this is fascism of the era of globalization and therefore wishes integration with imperialist capital; BJP and Big Business are quite agreed on that, hence the brisk commitment to neo-liberalism.

Likewise the issue of culture. The Indian bourgeoisie is not nearly as “modern” as we presume just because they own businesses and banks and industries. Market-friendly Hinduisation is quite compatible with neo-liberalism, cultural deracination and the rest. It is a rootless bourgeoisie, with no bourgeois culture of its own, and large sections of it are therefore particularly attracted to a brand of Hindu ideology that has no roots in traditional Hindu culture, even of the upper castes, and is closer to rightwing European Romanticism and postmodern cultural pastiche than anything else. RSS provides precisely that kind of aggressive non-traditional traditionalism. … The exodus of large numbers from among the professional strata and the techno-managerial elite toward the world of the Sangh has continued ever since [1991], even though many of them do not formally join the party. …

The Western preoccupation with “Islamic fundamentalism” on the one hand and military containment of China on the other predisposes the Western countries, the US in particular, to ignore the cruelties of Hindutva and take up India as strategically the “most allied ally” in the whole region stretching from the Philippines to Turkey. …

This image of a “strong India” led by a “strong party” which is itself led by a “strong” Vajpayee/Advani dispensation was further buttressed then in the way that BJP was to singlemindedly implement its coalition just as it saw fit. We have referred to it as the RSS/BJP government precisely because it is the RSS itself which chooses what limits it would impose upon itself, provisionally, in pursuit of coalition politics, while it has methodically humiliated every coalition partner … not only because BJP is by far the largest party in the coalition, … but because BJP is, within the coalition, actually the only ideological party with a political agenda while all the rest are either money-hungry buffoons or regional satraps; each of them has a price.

This image of a “strong” and “stable” India dovetails for large sections of the upper and middle classes almost effortlessly into an image of “strength” in the economic sphere as well, since they are the true beneficiaries of neo-liberal policies, deregulation of trade, sweeping privatisations, open import of foreign-produced, fetishistic commodities and all the rest. The “haves” now have more, the “have-nots” have even less than before. While farmers commit suicide for lack of food, the speculators and money-bags pick up the privatised public assets for a song. It is significant that the decade between the Ayodhya demolition and the Gujarat pogroms has also been the decade of break-neck liberalisation which has really gathered momentum during the years of BJP rule. … It is not for nothing that … the most recent pogroms have occurred in industrially and commercially the most advanced state in the country. Affluent youth, brought up on the consumptions and gadgetries of post-liberalisation India, were a very strong element in the perpetration of those crimes. …

What happens, then, to nationalism? It seems to me that if you do not define your nationalism in terms of anti-imperialism, as well as social and juridic equalities within the country, you have no choice but to define nationalism in terms of ethnicity, race, religion, or some other kind of primordial particularity which is bound to be highly divisive in a society as diverse as the Indian. These two visions—that of an anti-imperialist nationalism of secular civility; and the pro-imperialist nationalism of religious particularity and communal aggression—have collided in India since the time when anti-colonial struggle became a truly mass national movement, after 1919; RSS was founded specifically to combat the nationalism of civic secularity, integrative Indianness, anti-imperialist struggle, and to divide Hindus and non-Hindus along religious lines. This tendency remained an organised but still very much a minoritarian current for the two decades prior to Independence and for the quarter century thereafter. The counter-attack began during the 1970s and 80s, as we have summarised above, but it came fully into its own during the decade in question, 1992–2002, when communal fascism began its ascendancy in national politics. Religiously-based, irrational nationalism was now to displace and replace the anti-imperialist, rational foundations of secular nationalism. A market-friendly Hindutva was, then, the answer!

This struggle over the meaning of nationalism has been deeply intertwined with the equally fundamental struggle over what we may metaphorically call “the soul of the liberal Hindu.” The religious minorities in India—Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Budhists [sic] and others—have had a deeply civilising role in our society, as individual belief systems but more particularly as components of our unique syncretism(s). The same is true of those despised peoples whom the RSS is trying to portray, uniformly, as part of a “Hindu nation”: those who have been at the lowest rungs of the caste system, and those even below it. And, yet, to the extent that caste Hindus command immense powers both of numbers and of all kinds of material privilege, it is their role in the polity that is decisive. This is the power bloc that the RSS wishes to hegemonise. Using the symbols and motifs of religious belief, … it seeks the loyalty of this power bloc to its version of a syndicated religious belief which it defines for them, as well as a political project which organises for them. In short, the dream of the RSS is that it become Church and State simultaneously, for a large enough and powerful enough bloc—not even necessarily a major—that would then underwrite its state power as well as ideological hegemony. …

I have deliberately not raised the question of the broad range of cultural interventions that the RSS brigade has made across diverse fields from education to the media. Considering that the RSS has always defined itself as a cultural nationalism in opposition to the “territorial” nationalism of Gandhi and others, it has logically concentrated on the transformation of the culture and consciousness of the Indian people, and like any nationalism that grounds itself in religious identity RSS too has set out to unite the Hindus not as they are but to bestow upon them brand new kinds of interpretations of their Hindu identity and its relationship with other religious identities. Its interventions thus range all the way from religious ritual to the electronic media, children’s textbooks to institutes of research and higher learning, mass print media in the regional languages to representations of Indian culture in foreign lands. This ambition to take hold of the cultural consciousness had always been there, and the founding of each single shakha [branch] or shishu mandir [school] is seen as a step in the long march toward cultural supremacy. However, it is only with the BJP’s coming to governmental power that the RSS has acquired the requisite material resources of the state and control over a substantial part of the institutional edifice of national culture with devastating effects. …

However, this decade has also witnessed resistance to that power across the nation. … Politics of the oppressed castes is still the great unpredictable element in the future of Indian politics, and any consolidation of them against the Brahminising project of the RSS still holds the great potential for defeating this project. Nor has the BJP been able to gain a parliamentary majority for itself, despite a decade of communal fires and the historic decline of the Congress; it still rules at the Centre by virtue of its coalition partners. Gujarat is in fact the only state where the BJP has acquired unassailable electoral power; significantly, it is there that the VHP has the largest membership among all the states, as proportion of the population, BJP holds little power in most states of the Union, and where it does, that is owed to reversible coalitions and precarious margins.

Outside (and alongside) the left parties, the most courageous and dogged resistance has in fact come from small and large activists’ groups, cultural organisations, grassroots anti-communal mobilisations, writers, artists, academics, and notable sections of the media including some of the most influential sections of the electronic and print media. The cumulative spread and prominence of this resistance is possibly no less than that of the Hindutva brigade; what this resistance lacks, rather, is matching material resource, agencies of coordination, a “collective intellectual,” a coherence, a strategy for accumulation of force. These are among our resources of hope.

[Aijaz Ahmad, “Somnath to Gandhinagar: A Night of Long Knives,” in Communalism, Civil Society, and the State: Reflections on a Decade of Turbulence, ed. K. N. Panikkar and Sukumar Muralidharan (Delhi: Sahmat, 2002), 26–39.]

FOREIGN POLICY: SOVEREIGNTY

In the first two years after Independence, the Indian government was confronted with the horrendous riots and chaotic influx of refugees that followed Partition. Sardar Patel (ca. 1875–1950) as deputy prime minister was concerned with many details of domestic policy and administration, while Nehru, as the undisputed popular leader of the country, was determined to find a place for India on the international scene—from which, since it was seen as a dependency of the British Empire, it had been largely excluded. This meant asserting India’s sovereignty as an independent nation-state that charted its own path in the world.

PRIME MINISTER NEHRU: AVOIDING FOREIGN ENTANGLEMENTS

Many of Nehru’s colleagues had little interest in international affairs or were clinging to a world where only Great Britain really mattered, and his speeches at the time to his colleagues, as well as to a wider public, are lessons in what India’s foreign policy should be: how decisions were to be made, and how they were to be carried out.

We have sought to avoid foreign entanglements by not joining one bloc or the other. The natural result has been that neither of these big blocs looks on us with favour. They think we are undependable, because we cannot be made to vote this way or that way. Last year when our delegation went to the United Nations, it was the first time a more or less independent delegation went from India. It was looked at a little askance. They did not know what it was going to do. When they found we acted according to our own will, they did not like it. … There was a suspicion in the minds of the first group [USA] that we were really allied to the other group [USSR] in secret … and the other group thought that we were allied to the first group. …

This year there was a slight change in this attitude. We did many things that both groups dislike, but the comprehension came to them that we were not really allied to either group. … They did not like that, of course … but they respected us much more, because they realized that we had an independent policy. … They understood we stood for something.

Foreign affairs are utterly realistic. … It is in this background that I should like the House to consider international affairs. … [It is not about] some statesmen in America and the USSR or British imperialism lurking behind the curtain. We have talked so much about British imperialism that we cannot get rid of the habit. We propose to keep on the closest terms with other countries unless they themselves create difficulties. … We intend to cooperate with the United States of America and we intend cooperating fully with the Soviet Union. …

We are not citizens of a weak or mean country and I think it is foolish for us to get frightened, even from a military point of view, of the greatest of the Powers today. Not that I delude myself about what can happen to us if a great Power in a military sense goes against us; I have no doubt it can injure us. But after all in the past, as a national movement, we opposed one of the greatest of World Powers. We opposed it in a particular way and in a large measure succeeded in that way, and I have no doubt that if the worst comes to the worst—and in a military sense we cannot meet these great Powers—it is far better for us to fight in our own way than submit to them and lose all the ideals we have.

[Jawaharlal Nehru, Independence and After, 1946–1949 (Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1949), 203–205, 210.]

KRISHNA MENON: BANDUNG, AND THE ORIGIN AND MEANING OF THE TERM “NON-ALIGNMENT”

“Non-alignment” is the term usually used for the foreign policy associated with Jawaharlal Nehru, but he does not use it in his early speeches quoted above, preferring to speak of being free from entangling alliances or identification with “blocs.” In 1955 India was one of the prominent organizers of the important Bandung Conference of Asian and African and a few other nations. The nations that assembled in Indonesia included several that were close to or linked to the Western or Soviet bloc, notably China, Pakistan, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, but that sought to move closer to the less aligned nations. The Bandung group affirmed their independence and freedom of action, and adopted a declaration that was intended to promote world peace and cooperation; it incorporated principles of the UN Charter. China was notably successful in reducing fears of its potential influence through overseas Chinese, and also in warming its relations with India and other Asian nations. Many of the same nations reassembled in Belgrade in 1961 and began to call themselves “non-aligned.”

In India the term became associated with one of Nehru’s closest associates, Krishna Menon (1896–1974). As Indian ambassador to the United Nations, Menon was famed for his vituperative attacks on the United States. As defense minister in Nehru’s cabinet, he was blamed by Indian critics for pro-Soviet policies that weakened India’s military, leading to the defeat of the Indian forces in the Indo-China war in 1962.

This selection is from an interview he gave in 1964 to a Canadian academic, Michael Brecher, who wrote a well-received book on Nehru’s policies. Here “B” represents Brecher and “M” Menon.

B. I would like to begin, Mr. Menon, with some questions on non-alignment. Who conceived the policy? What was your role in this? What was Mr. Nehru’s role? In short, could you go back to the origins of non-alignment and its foundations?

M. Even if nobody conceived it, non-alignment was more or less a residue of historical circumstances. In 1945, immediately before India got her independence, it was all “one world”; but by 1947 it was “two worlds,” and we, for the first time, had to make up our minds on the issue, how we would function and what we would do. We would not go back to the West with its colonialism; and there was no question of our going the Soviet way; we did not even know them much. And with the attaining of our independence we desired not to get involved in foreign entanglements. … Both the Prime Minister [Nehru] and I exclaimed or thought aloud simultaneously, “Why should we be with anybody?”

B. But the word “non-alignment” itself: who conceived this and when?

M. That, I used much later—spontaneously. I think it was at the United Nations but I couldn’t say for certain. We were being ridiculed about being “neutral.” I said then, “We are not neutral; we are non-aligned. We are not aligned to either side, we are non-aligned.” In fact, the Prime Minister didn’t approve very much of the word at the beginning, but it had quickly gained currency.

B. It was, then, at some meeting in 1950?

M. No. No. It was later than that. I don’t think you will see the word “nonaligned” used that early—to the best of my recollection. I think it was probably used some time in ’53–’54; that is my recollection, but you had better check up on that. But the word “non-alignment” was first used at the United Nations.

B. Mr. Menon, you would agree, I think, that in any foreign policy, non-alignment or other, there is bound to be a combination of “national interest” and idealist considerations. One wonders, in the Indian case, to what extent non-alignment was considered to be an instrument of the “national interest” and to what extent it was simply a projection of Indian ideals—or to what extent both were involved?

M. … What is non-alignment? It is merely independence in external affairs. What are external affairs? They are only a projection of internal or national policy in the field of International Relations.

B. Would you go so far as to say that non-alignment is the logical extension of nationalism?

M. Logical extension of nationalism, yes, and of the conflict between nationalism and military blocs, the fact that we had little in common with the raison d’être of the blocs; with the West, because to us the West meant Empire.

B. But is it not true that, as Mr. Nehru and you conceived a foreign policy for India, non-alignment was thought of as the most efficient path to economic development?

M. Yes, but I don’t think anyone thought about it that way at the time, because the question of foreign aid and things of that kind, which are so prominent today, did not figure in our minds very much. We didn’t think back from economics to politics. …

B. Apart from non-alignment as the core of India’s foreign policy, did you, in the early stage at any rate, think of it as something that could make a genuine contribution to international peace?

M. I did, but to what extent the Prime Minister did, I don’t know. I had an idea of what you might call the theory of it, but his mind didn’t work like that.

B. How precisely did his mind work on these questions?

M. He would pick up something which by intuition appealed to him and make use of it. What is more, if I said something and he adopted and repeated it that is all that the world would know about it. … I said to him [Nehru] at one time: “There is a difference between our national development—our nationalism and Western nationalism—in this way: in the West economic development came first and political independence came afterwards, in the sense of universal franchise, by the pressure of the working classes and so on; but here we have had a full fledged political revolution first—everybody is equal—and economic development has to come afterwards.” Ours is the reverse process, which will result either in instability or the death of democracy and the growth of Hitler Fascism, or in just plain but progressive decay.

We said from the very beginning that non-alignment was not just a policy of a nation but one of those things that the world requires; otherwise the world remains divided into two camps opposed to each other. There must be something, an “area of peace,” I called it, not territorially, but politically, diplomatically, morally, etc.

[Michael Brecher, India and World Politics: Krishna Menon’s View of the World (New York: Praeger, 1968), 3–5, 8–10, 13.]

PRIME MINISTER NEHRU: THE BETRAYAL OF INDIA BY THE CHINESE

As the Cold War developed in the 1950s, and as part of his effort to unite the nonaligned nations of Asia and Africa, Nehru championed India–China friendship and backed the efforts of the new communist government in China to gain membership in the United Nations. From the late 1950s, however, relations between the two nations deteriorated over boundary disputes and over India’s acceptance of Tibetan refugees, including the Dalai Lama. In 1959 Chinese troops occupied territory claimed by both China and India. Chou En-Lai wrote to Nehru that he was surprised that India was claiming vast areas of China because of borders drawn by the British imperialists. Nehru replied that the boundaries of India had been “settled for centuries by history, geography, custom and tradition.”¹⁴ After diplomatic efforts failed to resolve the dispute, a short border war broke out in 1962 between Indian and Chinese forces in the Himalayas—in what is now known as Aksai Chin, in Kashmir, and in the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which from 1947 until 1972 was called the North East Frontier Agency, or NEFA. This was a war for which Indian troops were unprepared, and they were decisively beaten. Despite his policy of non-alignment, during this crisis Nehru requested—and received—assistance from the American military in the form of equipment.

This demoralizing conflict with China had a devastating personal impact on Nehru, whose health declined rapidly thereafter. He saw the border war as a betrayal by a nation for whose place in the world he had fought, and it ended his dream of peace between the two heirs of ancient Asian civilization. In January 1964 Nehru suffered a stroke; he died in May. Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh remain disputed territories.

Comrades, friends and fellow countrymen. I am speaking to you on the radio after a long interval. I feel however that I must speak to you about the grave situation that has arisen on our frontiers because of continuing and unabashed aggression by Chinese forces. We are men and women of peace in this country, conditioned to ways of peace. … Because of this, we endeavored to follow a policy of peace, even when aggression took place on our territory in Ladakh five years ago. We have done our utmost to prevent war from engulfing the world, but all our efforts have been in vain insofar as our own frontier is concerned, where a powerful and unscrupulous opponent, not caring for peace or peaceful methods, has continually threatened us and has even carried these threats into action.

The time has therefore come for us to realize fully this menace that threatens the freedom of our people and the independence of our country. To conserve that freedom and integrity of our territory, we must gird up our loins and face this greatest menace that has come to us since we became independent. I have no doubt in my mind that we shall succeed. Everything else is secondary to freedom of our people and of our motherland, and if necessary, everything else has to be sacrificed in this great crisis. …

There have been five years of continuous aggression on the Ladakh frontier. Our frontier in NEFA remained largely free from this aggression. Just when we were discussing ways and means of reducing tension and there was even some chance of representatives of the two countries meeting to consider this matter, a new and fresh aggression took place on the NEFA border. … This was a curious way of lessening tension. It is typical of the way the Chinese government have treated us.

Our border with China in the NEFA region is well known and well established from ages past. It is sometimes called the McMahon Line, but this line that separates India from Tibet was a high ridge which divides the watershed. This has been established as the border by history, tradition and treaties long before it was called the McMahon Line. The Chinese have in many ways acknowledged it as the border, although they have called the McMahon Line illegal. The Chinese laid claim in their maps to a large part of NEFA, which has been under our administration for a long time. … Yet on this peaceful border where no trouble or fighting had occurred for a long time, they committed aggression and this also in very large numbers and after vast preparations for a major attack.

I am grieved at the setbacks that have occurred to our troops on this frontier and the reverses we have had. They were overwhelmed by vast numbers and by big artillery, mountain guns and heavy mortars. There may be some more reverses in that area, but one thing is certain—that the final result of this conflict will be in our favor. … We have to meet a powerful and unscrupulous opponent. We have therefore to build up our strength and power to face this situation adequately and with confidence. We must steel our will and direct the nation’s energies and resources to this one end.

We must change our procedures from the slow-moving methods of peacetime to those which produce results quickly. We must build up our military strength by all means at our disposal. But military strength is not by itself enough. It has to be supported fully by the industry of the country and by increasing our production in every way that is necessary for us. I would appeal to all our workers not to indulge in strikes or act in any other way that comes in the way of increasing production. No antinational or antisocial activities can be tolerated when one is in peril.

We shall have to carry a heavy burden. … The price of freedom will have to be paid in full measure and no price is too great for the freedom of our people and of our motherland.

We Cannot Submit. I earnestly trust and I believe that all parties and groups in the country will unite in this great enterprise and put aside their controversies and arguments, which have no place today, and present a solid united front to all those who seek to endanger our freedom and integrity. But the principal thing is for us to devote ourselves to forge the national will to freedom and to work hard to that end. There is no time limit to this.

We shall carry on the struggle as long as we do not win because we cannot submit to an aggressor or the domination of others. … Do not believe in rumors. Do not believe those who have faint hearts. This is a time of trial and testing for all of us and we have to steel ourselves to the task. Perhaps we were growing too soft and taking things for granted, but freedom can never be taken for granted. It requires always awareness, strength and austerity.

I invite all of you, to whatever party or group or religion you belong, to be comrades, in this great struggle that has been forced upon us. I have full faith in our people and in the cause and in the future of our country. Perhaps that future requires some such testing and stiffening for us. We have followed a policy of non-alignment and sought the friendship of all nations. I believe in that policy fully and we shall continue to follow it. We are not going to give up our basic principles because of the present difficulty. … I want you to hold your heads high and have faith and full confidence in the great future that we envisage for our country. Jai Hind! [Long live India!]

[Excerpts from Nehru’s “Broadcast to the Nation” on the Indian–Chinese border clashes, New York Times, Oct. 23, 1962.]