India

by Shashi Tharoor

  This has been augmented by the increasing importance of caste as a factor in the mobilization of votes. Candidates are picked by their parties with an eye to the caste loyalties they can call upon; often their appeal is overtly to voters of their own caste or subcaste, urging them to elect one of their own. (In India the workings of democracy have meant that the quest for social advancement has become inextricably linked with the pursuit of political power.) “Do not look at which party will get to rule after the elections,” former prime minister V. P. Singh told journalists after the 1996 polls. “Try to see the people [who have been elected] within all the parties and you will find a deep social change has taken place.” The lower castes have used their numerical strength in the Indian electorate to acquire political office: in the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, for instance, Yadav-dominated coalitions of the underprivileged, including Muslims and Untouchables, have acquired a stranglehold on power at the expense of the old Brahmin and Thakur elites. Upper-caste Indians have found themselves, for the first time in millennia, subordinates and supplicants to those whom they traditionally regarded as menials. The traditionally upper-caste-dominated national parties, especially the Congress and the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have bowed to the reality of electoral mathematics and promoted unprecedented numbers of low-caste members to leadership positions.

  The result of this politically led social revolution has been a phenomenon the leaders of the anti-British nationalist struggle would never have imagined, however inevitable it seems in retrospect: the growth of caste consciousness and casteism throughout Indian society. In a recent conversation, an uncle of mine by marriage, who was born just before independence, put it ironically: “In my grandparents’ time, caste governed their lives: they ate, socialized, married, lived, according to caste rules. In my parents’ time, during the nationalist movement, they were encouraged by Gandhi and Nehru to reject caste; we dropped our caste-derived surnames and declared caste a social evil. As a result, when I grew up, I was unaware of caste; it was an irrelevance at school, at work, in my social contacts; the last thing I thought about was the caste of someone I met. Now, in my children’s generation, the wheel has come full circle. Caste is suddenly all-important again. Your caste determines your opportunities, your prospects, your promotions. You can’t go forward unless you’re a Backward.”

  The emphasis on reservations and quotas as the most effective means of promoting affirmative action flies in the face of the constitutional provisions in favor of equal opportunity and equality under the law it is never easy to reconcile “special opportunities for some” with “equal opportunity for all.” Reserving parliamentary seats for Dalits and Adivasis is one thing, holding places in medical colleges for OBCs quite another. Not all federal or state institutions lend themselves equally well to the argument that representation is more important than efficiency: whereas legislatures must obviously be representative of the populations they govern, the same is not necessarily true of a research laboratory (the government runs several) or a public-sector hospital. Nor are reservations in themselves a magic solution to all ills. A dissenting judge in the Supreme Court case quoted the sociologist André Béteille:

  The problems of the backward classes are too varied, too large and too acute to be solved by job reservation alone. . . . [T]he masses of Harijans and Adivasis are too poor and too lonely even to be candidates for the jobs that are reserved in their names.

  Yet Béteille has been positive, elsewhere, about what affirmative action has done for India’s downtrodden:

  [T]here are now untouchables and tribals serving as vice-chancellors at universities, as doctors, airline pilots and lawyers. Positive discrimination has brought about considerable changes in how individuals define their own personal horizon of possibilities. You see this clearly in the contrast between the expectations and ambitions of younger untouchables and those of their parents.

  In other words, if you think Charlis has made it, wait till you meet his son.

  5

  Of Indians and Other Minorities

  So we are, as I have already observed, all minorities in India. A Hindi-speaking Hindu male from the Gangetic plain state of Uttar Pradesh might cherish the illusion that he represents the “majority community,” to use an expression much favored by the less industrious of our journalists. But he does not. As a Hindu he belongs to the faith adhered to by some 82 percent of the population, but a majority of the country does not speak Hindi; a majority does not hail from Uttar Pradesh; and if he were visiting, say, Kerala, he would discover that a majority is not even male. Worse, our archetypal UP Hindu has only to step off a train and mingle with the polyglot, polychrome crowds thronging any of India’s five major metropolises to realize how much of a minority he really is. Even his Hinduism is no guarantee of majorityhood, because his caste automatically places him in a minority as well: if he is a Brahmin, 90 percent of his fellow Indians are not; if he is a Yadav, 85 percent of Indians are not, and so on.

  To make this point is not to dismiss perceptions of “majority” and “minority” on the part of Indians, but to place them in some sort of perspective. Current estimates (2007) for India’s roughly 1.1 billion people divide them as follows: some 820 million Hindus, 150 million Muslims, 75 million “tribals” (largely animist in their worship), 25 million Christians, 20 million Sikhs, some 14 million Buddhists and Jains, a quarter of a million Parsis (followers of the Zoroastrian faith), and smatterings of Jews, Baha’is, atheists, and only-God-knows-whats.

  How useful is it to extrapolate notions of minorities from such figures? Muslims, just over 12 percent of the population, are a majority in only one state and a minority in 24; however, they are the majority in several districts within states in which they are a minority; and they are politically influential in many districts where they are not a majority, because their votes hold the balance between rival elements of the “majority” population. In six states they account for more than 15 percent of the electorate, rising to 22 percent in Kerala, numbers significant in India’s “first past the post” electoral system, where a winning candidate in a divided field may have no more than 35 to 40 percent of the votes cast. In addition, Muslims are proportionately more urbanized than Hindus, and constitute a third of the population in many Indian cities. As a result of all this, Muslim chief ministers have held power in a number of states in which Muslims are numerically a modest minority, including Bihar, Gujarat, Kerala, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan.

  Or take language. The Constitution of India recognizes twenty-two (eight, including the language of the Pakistani province of Sind, having been added to the original list of fourteen in response to political pressure). In fact, there are thirty-five Indian languages that are spoken by more than a million people — and these are languages, with their own scripts, grammatical structures, and cultural assumptions, not just dialects (and if one were to count dialects within these languages, there are more than 22,000). Each of the native speakers of these languages is in a linguistic minority, for none enjoys majority status in India. Thanks in part to the popularity of Bombay’s Hindi cinema, Hindi is understood, if not always well spoken, by nearly half the population of India, but it is in no sense the language of the majority; indeed, its locutions, gender rules, and script are so unfamiliar to most Indians in the south or northeast that any attempt to impose it as a truly “national” language would destroy the country’s unity. English, on the other hand, is spoken by a minority estimated by the 1991 census at 2 percent of the population (almost certainly a severe undercount, since a far larger proportion — by my reckoning, at least 10 to 15 percent — have a basic acquaintance with the language, including reading and writing it). But this minority is scattered throughout the country, and the Indian professional elite is educated in English, so that English has a far more genuine “national” existence: it is the language in which two Indian government officials would naturally converse, in which two teenagers might discuss cri
cket or music, in which a Madras journalist might instinctively address a Bombay businessman, and in which the “national media” (those publications aiming at a countrywide audience) are published. It is undoubtedly the language of a small minority, but its speakers feel no “minority complex” at all.

  Ethnicity further complicates the notion of a majority community. Most of the time an Indian’s name immediately reveals where he is from and what his mother tongue is; when we introduce ourselves we are advertising our origins. The difference this reflects is often more apparent than the elements of commonalty. A Karnataka Brahmin shares his Hindu faith with a Bihari Kurmi, but feels little identity with him in respect to appearance, dress, customs, tastes, language, or political objectives. There would similarly be little in common between a Jharkhand tribesman in north India and a Bodo tribesman of Assam despite their aboriginal identities; between a Kashmiri Muslim and a Moplah of Malabar, who both owe allegiance to the Islamic faith; between a Naga Pentecostalist and a Syrian Orthodox Keralite, both Christians separated by thousands of miles and nearly as many shades of complexion. At the same time a Tamil Hindu would feel that he has far more in common with a Tamil Christian or Muslim than with, say, a Haryanvi Jat with whom he formally shares a religion.

  Affinities between Indians span one set of identities and cross into another. I am simultaneously Keralite (my geographical state of origin), Malayali (my linguistic-cultural affiliation), Hindu (my religious faith), Nair (my caste), Calcuttan (as a result of my schooling and by marriage), Stephanian (because of my education at Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College), and so on, and in my interactions with other Indians, each or several of these identities may play a part. Each, while affiliating me to a group with the same label, sets me apart from others; but even within each group, few would share the other identities I also claim, and so I find myself again in a minority within each minority.

  If I stress this point, it is because I believe it dangerous to draw the wrong conclusions from the ostensibly crushing majority that “Hindus” appear to represent in the Indian population. Yes, there is a sense in which all Hindus have the broad elements of a common faith, but it would be impossible to list the basic beliefs to which we all swear adherence. We have, within Hinduism, different ways of worshiping God, and prefer to do so in different forms in different parts of the country, even naming our deities differently; there are major variations in the theological underpinnings of our faith, in which scriptures we emphasize, in the rituals we conduct, and in which (if any) of the 333,000 divine manifestations of God we choose to place our faith. Because of these multiplicities of approach, the clearly defined (and restrictive) consciousness of collective faith typical of Christianity, Islam, or Judaism never evolved in Hinduism. The fourteenth-century religious philosopher Madhavacharya identified sixteen fundamentally different Hindu schools of thought in his celebrated treatise Sarva Darshana Samagrha. Nor are rituals, cultural practices, ecclesia, or social customs universally held in common by all Hindus. One cannot say, for instance, that a Hindu is someone who prays to Ram, worships at a Shiva temple, believes in caste and in reincarnation, reads the Vedas, treats the Bhagavad Gita as holy writ, heeds the injunctions of the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram, considers the cow sacred, abjures beef, wears ash on his forehead, and washes away his sins in the holy Ganga, because it is possible to do none of those things and still consider oneself a Hindu.

  This laxness at the heart of the practice of Hinduism, this failure to require conformity, troubles many Hindus today. Today’s votaries of Hindutva have, in reaction, begun asserting a self-conscious collective identity, facilitated, many suggest, by the televising of Hindu myths and epics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which attracted over a hundred million viewers each across the country. But other Hindus find this kind of “national Hinduism” artificial; some have suggested that such movements are attempting to “Semitize” the Hindu faith, which lacks the dogmas, doctrines, and moral absolutism characteristic of the Semitic creeds. The proponents of Hindutva argue, however, that in rejecting such “Semirization,” liberals are also rejecting the collective self-consciousness without which the faith will stagnate or decline. It is precisely by denying what Hindus have in common, they say, that secular Hindus have made it impossible for Hindus as a whole to hold their own in a world where others, notably (in the subcontinental context) Muslims, have proudly asserted their own religious identity, whether as a minority or a majority.

  One of the intellectual godfathers of Hindutva, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s V. D. “Veer” Savarkar, described a Hindu as “a person who regards this land . . . from the Indus to the Seas as his fatherland as well as his Holyland.” The definition is simultaneously territorial (though Savarkar’s reference to the Indus predated Partition), atavistic (the reference to “fatherland” suggesting the continuity of bloodlines), and religious. The last element raises the question: What about those whose faiths originated outside India, and for whom India cannot therefore be their “holy” land? The Hindutva ideologues’ response is that they should “assimilate,” as others before them have assimilated, into Hindu India. The reaction of many members of minority faiths, particularly Muslims, is to assert their distinctiveness rather than their assimilability.

  The result of this sort of thinking is that, fifty years after Partition and independence, religion has again become a key determinant of political identity. It was the phenomenon of Indian Muslims beginning to think of themselves, politically, as Muslims first and Indians second that facilitated Britain’s “divide and rule” policy, gave the country separate electorates, promoted communal representation, impelled the separatist politics of the Muslim League, and led finally to Partition. With the creation of Pakistan, it might have been hoped that the Muslims remaining in India would relegate religion to a secondary place in their political life; indeed, with the emigration to Pakistan of much of the Muslim middle class (and upper middle class), the community was shorn of leadership at a time when many felt collective guilt over the breakup of the country. Not only has the emigration option now dried up — because of new Pakistani laws discouraging it, because of anti-Mohajir [immigrant] violence in Pakistan, and because the Pakistani economy no longer offers the attractive prospects of the immediate post-Partition days, when jobs and business vacated by Hindus could be had for the asking — but net Muslim migration in the subcontinent is to India, particularly from Bangladesh. Nonetheless, the trauma of Partition appears to have left most Muslims with an enhanced sense of their minorityhood, underscored by the conversion of so many of their co-religionists into foreigners.

  Despite the prominence of Muslim leaders in all the major political parties of the country, Muslim Indians found themselves unable to escape the politics of identity. Their leaders have tended to mobilize the community on three collective issues: identity first and foremost, as on the issue of Muslim Personal Law and in the major efforts made to construct schools, colleges, theological institutions, and clinics for Muslims; security, no small matter when Muslims account for a disproportionate number of deaths in communal rioting; and public-sector employment, where Muslims hold fewer jobs than their share of the population warrants, but probably less owing to discrimination than as a consequence of the skewed demographics of the community following the departure of most of its educated members to Pakistan. An additional factor, as always, is economics. Poverty has made many Indian Muslims insecure and conservative. A community that falls behind in the competition for economic advancement tends to cling all the more to its atavistic identity, in turn accentuating its separateness from the rest of the nation.

  There were notable exceptions — Muslim leaders whose standing had nothing whatsoever to do with their imagined place in their community, or their ability to win the allegiance and the votes of their fellow Muslims. The eminent Bombay jurist, diplomat, and statesman Mohammed Currim Chagla was one of them: a man of intellect, conviction, and style, who served as ambassador in Was
hington and London, foreign minister, and education minister, and characteristically resigned over an issue of principle unconnected with his faith (a faith he wore as lightly as did his former friend and comrade Mohammed Ali Jinnah). But his was a rare case. When a successful career diplomat with a socialist past, Syed Shahabuddin, resigned his ambassadorial post in 1977 to contest parliamentary elections as a Janata candidate, some of us expected the emergence of a left-wing Chagla, a figure of eminence in his field who would transfer his expertise to the political arena. It was not to be: within a short while Shahabuddin stopped writing well-informed exegeses on foreign policy and became instead a narrow-minded spokesman for Muslim sectarian interests, achieving literary notoriety as the man instrumental for the Indian government’s ban on Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.

  That ban was a classic instance of Muslim politics at work in India: passions inflamed over a book its critics had not read (“I do not need to wade in a gutter to know it is filthy,” Shahabuddin said memorably), the self-appointed “leaders” of the Muslim community presuming to speak for all their co-religionists, a government acting in its own political self-interest for fear of losing the “Muslim vote.” Had the government not caved in and preemptively banned the book, some Muslim leaders might well have provoked angry demonstrations that could have turned violent, so that in the end the dictates of public order might well have provided a rationalization for a ban, but the calculations on both sides had less to do with law and order than with the political manipulation of communal identities.