Communal violence, even if a common feature in India,8 has grown neither progressively nor continuously, spurting excessively once in a while. The situation today is not the worst we have seen, yet, undeniably, it has deteriorated in recent times. In 2015, according to India’s Ministry of Home Affairs, India suffered a 17 per cent increase in reported communal violence, with 751 reported incidents as compared to the 644 reported in the previous year.9 In addition, there were at least 365 major attacks on Christians and their institutions in 2015, compared to 120 in 2014.10 In 2017, India has risen to the fifteenth rank on the Open Doors World Watch List of the fifty countries in which it is hardest to live as a Christian.11 Also, statistics show that as of 2014, only 5 per cent of marriages in India are inter-caste.12
As opposed to communal riots, which might make it to a sensational newspaper headline, there are individual cases of intolerance-induced violence that appear routine.
Mohammad Akhlaq, a fifty-two-year-old Muslim man in a village close to Delhi, was lynched by a mob in September 2015, after rumours that he had eaten beef and was storing cow meat at home.13 Meanwhile, Kannur, in Kerala, has been a hotbed for political violence for several decades, witness to a number of deaths across party lines. Police data between 2000 and 2016 shows that of the sixty-nine political deaths in this district, thirty-one were of Hindus from the BJP or the RSS.14
In Jharkhand, two cattle traders, thirty-two-year-old Mazlum Ansari and fifteen-year-old Imteyaz Khan, were caught by a group, beaten and left hanging from a tree in March 2016.15 In 2017, a twenty-three-year-old RSS worker in Tamil Nadu was brutally hacked to death in broad daylight allegedly by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The victim was an accused in a case related to the murder of a Democratic Youth Federation of India worker in 2013.16 On 10 July 2017, seven Hindu pilgrims died in a deadly assault in Anantnag, a Muslim-majority region in Kashmir.17 In 2000, an attack on the same pilgrimage also killed thirty people, most of them Hindus, and was blamed on the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba.
The list goes on, and will go on.18
There are people being attacked, beaten up and murdered on the basis of various accusations or political interests. Article 48 of the Indian Constitution restricts or bans cow slaughter in twenty-four out of twenty-nine Indian states as of 2015.19 This, indeed, is a law in India, even though it economically marginalizes the people who work in the beef industry, which includes slaughter for consumption, hauling items, and producing leather goods.
Let us be clear that murders and lynching have happened before, under all governments. Communal and political violence in India has occurred across all political regimes. The old slogan ‘unity in diversity’ should be practised and preserved by all government and political parties.
Hegemony is power with legitimacy, and it is the majority groups that are hegemonic today. A gay man can be harassed or killed by a mob, because his murderers would have measured homosexuality by societal values (despite and because of these being ever-changing), and found it shameful, abnormal or just ‘wrong’. A woman can be bullied, harassed and raped by a group of men because she would be considered according to societal norms to be wearing the ‘wrong’ length of skirt. These members of majority groups are immune or deadened to the respect for another individual’s freedom to live a dignified life. They are not educated—despite any number of degrees—in a way that they can think rationally and independently for themselves either. How else can one explain the continual killing of human beings? Even the laws of the Constitution have failed to save man from man—this is a country where homosexuality has always been a legally contentious20 issue.
Freedom in India is therefore subjective, dependent on where you live, which family and caste you were born into, your gender, religion, sexuality, source of livelihood. The guarantee of freedom for our marginalized communities—be it on the basis of religion, gender, sexual orientation or economic status—has always been the most fragile. This will not change, no matter how many laws are drafted, religious doctrines invoked, and societal norms established, unless all our children—regardless of their background—are educated to be rational, independent-minded individuals who respect one another. It is possible to create various kinds of freedoms by pursuing such an education facilitated by home, school and society.
Because at the end of the day, it is important to ask: What is the defining characteristic of our nation? Is it the territorial boundary or the collection of Indian people in all their diversity? If it is the former, we can focus on only political freedom, but if it is the latter, we do need a larger framework of ‘freedoms’ in India to be truly free.
References
BBC News. 2015. Why India man was lynched over beef rumours. 1 October. http://www.thehindu.com/data/just-5-per-cent-of-indian-marriages-are-intercaste/article6591502.ece.
Chandrachud, Abhinav. 2016. Of curbs to free speech. The Hindu, 27 July.
Economic Times. 2016. Communal violence up 17 per cent in 2015. 24 February. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/communal-violence-up-17-in-2015/articleshow/51125252.cms.
Engineer, Irfan. Neha Dabhade, and Suraj Nair. 2017. Communal violence in 2016. Matters India, 7 January.
Guardian. 2017. Attack by militants kills at least seven Hindu pilgrims in Kashmir. 10 July. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/10/attack-by-militants-kills-hindu-pilgrims-kashmir-india.
Hindustan Times. 2016a. 2015 worst year for Christians since Independence, 8,000 attacked. 19 January. http://www.hindustantimes.com/india/2015-the-worst-year-for-christians-since-independence-study/story-WmObF2tsphJPVq2mqBDesK.html.
Hindustan Times. 2016b. Cow activist, 4 others held after 2 Muslim cowherds hanged to death. 20 March. http://www.hindustantimes.com/india/five-arrested-after-two-muslim-cowherds-hanged-to-death-in-jharkhand/story-KcHi7nNS22Y6CXAych5eBJ.html.
Indian Express. 2015. Dadri: Mob kills man, injures son over ‘rumours’ that they ate beef. 25 December. http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/next-door-to-delhi-mob-kills-50-year-old-injures-son-over-rumours-they-ate-beef.
Khan, Shahzaib. 2017. India’s age of extremism. Indian Express, 14 July.
Milli Gazette. 2017. How much more blood is needed to outrage you, Madhu Kishwar. 31 May.
News in Asia. 2016. US expresses concern over rising intolerance and communal violence in India. 30 July.
Open Doors USA. 2017. World Watch List. https://www.opendoorsusa.org/christian-persecution/world-watch-list.
Reuters. 2017. Intimidation, death threats stalk gang-raped Muslim women after India’s religious riots. 9 February.
Scroll. 2017. How many BJP-RSS workers have been murdered in Kerala? Depends on whom you ask. 6 October. https://scroll.in/article/853061/how-many-bjp-rss-workers-have-been-murdered-in-kerala-depends-on-whom-you-ask.
Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf).
The Hindu. 2017. RSS worker killed in Kerala. 13 November. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/rss-worker-killed-in-kerala/article20368163.ece.
The Hindu. 2014. Just 5 per cent of Indian marriages are inter-caste: Survey. 13 November. http://www.thehindu.com/data/just-5-per-cent-of-indian-marriages-are-intercaste/article6591502.ece.
United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. 2016. http://www.uscirf.gov/sites/default/files/USCIRF%202016%20Annual%20Report.pdf.
World Watch Monitor. 2017. India’s religious freedom failings ‘enshrined in constitution’. 15 March.
1 ‘Religious restrictions vary significantly in the world’s most populous countries’ (Pew Research, 13 April 2017).
1 Nott and Gliddon 1854.
2 Hoeveler 2007, 57; Carmichael 2012.
3 Menand 2001, 110.
4 Stott 2013.
5 Darwin 1859.
6 Bergman 2011, 12.
7 Grehan and Schwartz 2009, 1823.
8 Wells 2007.
9 Culotta and Gibbons 2016.
/> 10 Author’s interview with Ramasamy Pitchappan, 6 January 2016.
11 Author’s interview with Anu Acharya, CEO, Mapmygenome India Limited, 27 July 2017.
12 Ambassadors from Greece were sent to the Indian subcontinent with gifts for Emperor Chandragupta Maurya (321–298 BC), and in turn they also wrote accounts of what they saw. They described Stone Age tribes in the Himalayas, as well as the cities in the plains, and said that it was a land of 118 nations, rich and fertile, with rivers so wide that they could not see on the other side. One of the rivers, they said, was worshipped by all Indians. Another traveller, the Muslim polymath Al-Biruni, travelled through India nearly a thousand years ago, and wrote about the emphasis on the purity of fire and water, the avoidance of touching between communities, and that men wore earrings and a girdle passing from the left shoulder to the right side of the waist, that they spat out and blew their noses without any respect for the elders present. Al-Biruni could have been writing this same text about India now, and he would not be far from the truth (Mookerji 1966, 38; Wood 2008, 285).
13 French 2011, 18.
14 Butalia 2000, 45.
15 Dalrymple 2015.
16 Kumar, Prasad et al. 2012, 6.
17 Recent research by Analabha Basu, Neeta Sarkar-Roy and Partha P. Majumder at the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in Kalyani, West Bengal, says that Indians have five ancestral stocks, not two—one ancestral to all north Indians and the other to all south Indians—as was believed earlier. The three additional ancestries discovered were the Austro-Asiatic, the Tibeto-Burman, and an ancestral lineage dominant among the Jarawa and Onge tribals of Andaman and Nicobar Islands that was found to be similar to the present-day Pacific Islanders (Basu, Sarkar-Roy and Majumder 2016).
18 Kumar, Prasad et al. 2015a, 546.
19 Kumar, Prasad et al. 2015b, 493.
20 The ancient hymns of the Vedas, transmitted orally from the Bronze Age (1500–1200 BC), were not written down until thousands of years later. One of the hymns, Purusha Sukta, mentions that the entire cosmos as well as human society came into being out of primordial sacrifice.
1 Within that framework, there had been many perspectives. Auguste Comte in France explained that social change occurs primarily as the outcome of intellectual development, while Herbert Spencer in Britain was influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution to show, with empirical data, that every society goes through a series of fixed stages of evolution as a consequence of some sort of cosmic design over which man has no control. Spencer had thus explained the superiority of the Western cultures over others, as the latter were at an earlier stage of evolution than the former (Spencer 1860, 9–27).
Even in the America of the nineteenth century, anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan had applied evolutionary principles to social phenomena, to explain that society moved inexorably through stages he termed as ‘savagery’, ‘barbarism’, and ‘civilization’ (Bock 1955, 123).
2 See Chapter 8 titled ‘Nationalism’.
3 Pylee 2003, 64.
4 Das 2002, 28; Census of India 2011.
5 Tewari 2015; Socio-economic Caste Census 2011.
6 Water.org.
7 Census of India 2011.
8 Bongaarts and Guilmoto 2015, 241; The Economist 2017.
9 World Health Organization.
10 World Bank 2017; Rana and Sugden 2013.
11 In the varna system, each of the jatis broadly fits into one of the varnas, giving Hindus membership to a varna and jati each at birth. People of one jati often share a traditional vocation, and usually do not marry or dine outside the jati.
12 Das 2002, 140.
13 Bhaduri 2009, 47.
14 Adiga 2008, 12.
15 Identity withheld.
16 Kaminsky and Long 2011, 168.
17 Dalrymple 2008.
18 Colundalur 2011.
19 Hindu Business Line 2016.
20 Kumar and Kumar 2017.
21 Guha 2007, 3305.
22 Ganguly 2012.
23 Hindustan Times 2017.
24 Al Jazeera 2017.
25 Hardiman 2008, 423–25.
26 Neill 1986.
27 Guha 2008.
28 Firstpost 2015.
29 Jaffrelot 2016.
30 Statistics of School Education 2010–11.
31 World Bank 2017.
32 Guha 2007, 3305.
33 Fernandes 2007, 1.
34 Dalrymple 2015.
35 According to the most recent census in 2011, 79.8 per cent of the Indian population is Hindu, while 20 per cent of Indians follow other religions, of which I4.23 per cent—India’s largest minority population—are Muslim, and the rest are Sikh, Christian, Parsi, Buddhist or Jain.
36 Dalrymple 2015.
37 Haq 2016.
38 Bahri 2016.
39 Haq 2016.
40 Ministry of Minority Affairs 2016; Phadnis 2016.
41 Identity withheld.
42 Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India 2006.
43 Census of India 2011.
1 Menozzi 2016; Sims 2016.
2 Saha 2016.
3 Buhler 1886, 333; Olivelle ed. 1999, 134.
4 Callahan 2013.
5 The empire of Emperor Ashoka (268–232 BC) extended beyond Kandahar in the north, but did not go beyond Karnataka in the south, and did not encompass what is today north-east India (Alikuzai 2013, 64). Among the Guptas, Samudragupta (AD 336–80) did have an empire slightly beyond present-day Gujarat and Rajasthan. The Khiljis, under Alauddin Khilji (AD 1296–1316) ruled almost until Kandahar, once again. In the south, the Cholas, under Rajendra Chola I (AD 1014–44), controlled Sri Lanka.
6 Das 2002, 10.
7 Al-Biruni (AD 973–1048) was an Iranian scholar, mathematician, polyglot, and traveller who came to India around AD 1000, and wrote of it in his travelogue Tahqiq ma li-l-hind min maqulah maqbulah fi al-aql aw mardhulah.
8 Loewenstein 1994, 79; Langevin 1971.
9 Ibid.
10 Butler 1954.
11 Tinker 1974; Davis 1968, 99.
12 Dalrymple 2015.
13 CNN 2012; Statistic Brain 2016.
14 Varma 2016.
15 Business Standard 2016.
16 Ibid.
17 The number of migrants who migrated rose by 18 per cent in 2015 from 8.5 million in 2010. Pew Research 2017.
18 Connor 2017.
19 President Donald Trump’s election campaign prior to his formal inauguration on 20 January 2017 promised to reduce illegal and legal migration into the United States. Accordingly, the RAISE Bill, an acronym for Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy, introduced as a bill in the United States Senate in 2017 (not yet passed as an Act till 2017), proposes to cut by half the number of legal immigrants accepted into the US each year. This bill would do three things: First, limit the number of foreign nationals who are able to get green cards to reunite with their families already in the US. Second, cut the number of refugees in half. Third, eliminate the diversity visa lottery—a programme that gives visas to countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. Another executive order under consideration will reduce the number of H1B visas awarded each year to employed migrants in the United States. Companies will have to show proof for why they chose an immigrant over a citizen for a job that paid up to a certain amount, which used to be $60,000 annually but which will now be revised to $100,000 annually.
In no proven correlation to President Trump’s actions, according to a survey of more than 250 American colleges and universities conducted by six top American higher education groups, students from India in the fall semester of 2017 registered a 26 per cent decline in undergraduate applications while a 15 per cent decline has been reported in graduate applications (Times of India 2017).
20 Anand 2017.
21 Ainsworth and Bell 1970, 49.
1 World Population Prospects 2017.
2 According to a survey in 2008 by the contraceptive co
mpany Durex, while 60 per cent of Indians claimed sex is ‘fun, enjoyable, and a vital part of life’, only 44 per cent were fully satisfied with their sex lives (Trivedi 2014, 70; News 18 2008).
3 Ibid, 41.
4 Ibid.
5 The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971. The Act came into effect on 1 April 1972.
6 Keer 1954, 106; Mishra 2010, 243.
7 Gandhi 2013 reprint, 129.
8 Trivedi 2014, 27.
9 Das 2002, 283.
10 Gandhi 1940; Adams 2010.
11 Connellan 2010.
12 Sil 1995.
13 Vivekananda 1915.
14 Sil 1995.
15 Vivekananda 1897, 20.
16 Trivedi 2014.
17 Ibid, 20.
18 India’s 0.3 per cent divorce rate is calculated based on Census 2011. However, data on the divorce rate in India varies across sources from 0.11 per cent to 1.3 per cent (Dutt 2015).
19 Trivedi 2014, 117.
20 Trivedi 2014, 47.
21 Ibid, 48.
22 National Family Health Survey 2015–16.
23 India’s National Family Health Survey 2015–16 shows that although 660 million condoms were distributed nationwide in 2008-09, that figure fell by more than half to 320 million in 2015–16. Andhra Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh recorded the highest falls, 83 per cent and 79 per cent.
24 Brisk and Kauffman 2004.
1 Krishnamurti 1952.
2 I have written more about this in Chapter 3 titled ‘Exploration’.
3 See Chapter 4 titled ‘Procreation’.
4 Chidbhavananda 1965.
5 Identity withheld.
6 Shafir and Mullainathan 2013.
7 Varma 2012.
8 According to the Census of India 2011, there were 4,225,940 divorces for a population of 1,247,000,000. On this subject, see Dutt 2015. I have also discussed this in Chapter 4 titled ‘Procreation’.
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