The Hindu : The dilemmas of Muslim politics

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Friday, May 17, 2002

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The dilemmas of Muslim politics - I

By Pratap Bhanu Mehta

The fact is that Indian politics acknowledged Muslims, insofar as it did, only as a supplicant minority, not as full citizens.

TO SPEAK of the dilemmas of Muslim politics at this juncture would appear to be something of an act of hubris for many reasons. In a context where their mere being is increasingly seen by many as a kind of infringement on the Indian nation, where the state does not uphold its basic obligations to protect life and property, any talk of politics seems like a cruel joke. It would also be presumptuous to think that there is a single Muslim politics. But to make the future of Muslims in India more secure will require a new political imagination that combines principle with prudence to defeat the forces that are putting the interests of Muslims — and all citizens of India — at risk. The sad fact is that since Partition there has not been any form of meaningful Muslim politics for a variety of reasons. Politics, in the genuine sense of the term, requires the availability of a public space and a public discourse where issues of common concern can be debated without let or hindrance. Such spaces have been in an effective sense closed off to Muslims. The impediments to Muslim politics are both external and internal. Externally the terms of their inclusion in Indian politics have been set and circumscribed by dominant political configurations in society. Internally few Muslim leaders have had the imagination to carve out a proper political space for Muslims that can do justice to the diverse needs of the community without either succumbing to extremism or, more characteristically, becoming pliant tools of the state.

The impediments to the emergence of a robust Muslim politics lay in Partition itself. Before Partition, Muslim politics revolved around two sets of issues. Political representation, thought to be the principal means of not only protecting Muslim minorities, but also giving the community parity with Hindus, was, arguably, the single most important and unresolved issue in Muslim politics ever since representative government became a distinct possibility. Quite what a politics centred on the issue of the political representation of Muslims entailed is a historically contentious issue, but after 1947 this item was taken off the agenda. Labouring under the shadow of Partition, the Constituent Assembly swiftly dismissed any discussion of special representation for Muslims. Ever since, any discussion of the issue of representation immediately raises the bogey of separatism, special privileges and apocalyptic visions of a second partition. Even Muslim politicians have kept the issue off the agenda out of a combination of powerlessness and fear of a backlash.

The second contentious issue in Muslim politics was social reform. After Independence, much of the grassroots momentum for social reform simply vanished, and the laws then governing Muslims in matters such as property and marriage remained a kind of default indicator of the community's views on these matters. The reluctance to debate reform had a variety of sources. While Nehru was perhaps correct in thinking that such a debate could be meaningfully carried out only when the broader political atmosphere was not hostile to minorities, the default position also became a convenient political tool for the Congress. In hindsight it is easy to see that even in well meaning times the Congress set the parameters of Muslim politics. The Congress set itself up as a benefactor of Muslims. But in doing so, it defined which Muslim interests and vestments in identity were important and required protection, and it determined the range of acceptable views on issues relevant to Muslims. The result was that for almost four decades after Independence there was very little debate over precisely what constituted the interests of Muslims, and when genuine debate ensued in the wake of the Shah Bano judgment, the Congress promptly went on to stifle it. The Congress was simply interested in co-opting Muslims, not in their well-being. Such a position also suited entrenched interests within such Muslim politics as existed. For example, thoroughly unrepresentative bodies such as the Muslim Personal Law Board exercised unjustified authority in any discussion of these matters. Most Muslim politicians owed such authority as they possessed to the Congress rather than to any genuinely substantive links to their communities. As Hamid Dalwai so presciently noted three decades ago, cooption into the Congress was the surest way of eviscerating Muslim politics.

The result was a colossal anomaly whose ramifications are still with us. The Congress and the Indian state were Janus-faced towards Muslims. On the one hand, they presented their own solicitousness towards Muslims by selectively directing benefits towards them: funding madrassas, arranging Haj pilgrimages, protecting personal laws from judicial scrutiny. It is certainly not the case that only Muslims were beneficiaries of this politics. The state selectively doled out resources, that had no justification on any conceivable interpretation of our constitutional principles, to a variety of groups and it is part of the grave misinformation campaign of our times to suggest that the state and religion are illegitimately entangled only when it comes to Muslims. Hindu places of worship receive enormous maintenance grants from the state, so-called secularised laws of Hindus are as much about the consolidation of a Hindu communal identity as they are about modernising Hinduism. On the other hand, the state was doing its best to make sure that Muslims were more and more effectively alienated from the political process itself. Muslim representation in all spheres of public life: Parliament, press, police, civil service, big business was and still remains on average far below what their numbers would warrant. One does not have to believe in strict proportional representation to acknowledge that public life and public institutions of this country are thoroughly unrepresentative as far as Muslims are concerned. This alienation could not but have a deleterious affect both on Muslim politics and the politics of the nation as a whole. The alienation from public life produced its own vicious cycle. The less Muslims could acknowledge public life as being, in some important sense, their own, the more they turned inward to tradition; the more inward they turned, the more handle their opponents got to accuse them of being anti-national or anti-modern. The fact is that Indian politics acknowledged Muslims, in so far as it did, only as a supplicant minority, not as full citizens. In most cases, the state gives selective benefits to groups to integrate them into a wider process and co-opt them. In the case of Muslims, the resources of the state directed towards them were meant to reinforce their status as minority, not to integrate them more fully into the political process. Muslims remained locked in a dilemma not of their own making. The more their leadership and the state emphasized their status as minority requiring a distinct ensemble of rights and privileges, the more they set Muslims up for a majoritarian backlash. On the other hand, the wider political culture was doing its best to prevent Muslim integration into the wider process in the same breath as it was demanding it. The result: Muslim politics became impossible in any genuine sense of the term.

(The writer is Professor of Philosophy and Law and Governance, JNU.)

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