India: A mirror image of Pakistan

As in a mirror, the images of the two countries have reversed, with one edging towards secularism, and the other slipping into communalism

Pakistan wanted to be constitutionally communal, but has begun to secularise. India wanted to be secular, but has communalised itself. Both nations share a penal code given to them by Macaulay a century and a half ago, but they have amended some laws to enable the State to target minorities. This is today happening in India and is something that Pakistan went through and is now exiting.

At Independence, Pakistan integrated religion into law because it felt this would lend a positive impulse to the nation. Explaining this, Pakistan’s first prime minister Liaquat Ali Khan said material and scientific development had leapt ahead of the development of the human individual. The result was that man was able to produce inventions that could destroy the world and society. This had happened only because man had chosen to ignore his spiritual side and if he had retained more faith in god, this problem would not have come up.

It was religion, he said, that tempered the dangers of science and as Muslims, Pakistanis would adhere to Islam’s ideals and make a contribution to the world. The State’s enabling of Muslims to lead their lives in alignment with Islam did not concern non-Muslims, so obviously they should not have a problem with the reference to that, he said.

What happened instead was that the laws concerning Pakistan’s Muslims fell away in time. Early Islam existed at a time when there were no jails. Punishment for criminal offences was usually corporal instead of detention. Pakistan introduced amputation of limbs as punishment for theft and trained a set of terrified doctors to carry these out. But Pakistan’s judges, trained in Common Law like India’s, were reluctant to pass these sentences and so the laws remained frozen and unused. Pakistan introduced stoning as a punishment for adultery but nobody has been stoned to death.

A brief period of enthusiasm for lashing those accused of drinking alcohol ended, and, in 2009, the Federal Shariat Court read down the punishment for lashing, with the judges saying drinking was a lesser crime. Under president Pervez Musharraf Pakistan changed the punishment for rape — which was conflated with fornication if the survivor could not produce witnesses to the act — from shariah back to the penal code. The law enforcing zakat by debiting 2.5 per cent from the bank accounts of Pakistan’s Sunnis failed because people withdrew their money just before it was due to happen. The Shia, who have a hierarchical clergy to whom they give the money directly, had previously objected and were exempted.

The law enforcing fasting in Ramzan — quite needless because most subcontinental Muslims observe the fast anyway — ran into opposition after Muslim restaurant owners and multiplex owners complained. A shariat court order demanding a ban on interest in the banking system has been ignored by successive governments.

The last major attempt to Islamise Pakistan was over two decades ago under Nawaz Sharif: The so-called 15th Amendment, which was defeated in the Senate. Pakistan remains insufficiently Islamic and, with no hierarchical clergy like Iran’s, can never become theocratic. Unlikely Saudi Arabia it has never had moral police because Pakistanis are culturally South Asians with local practices.

Illustration: Binay Sinha

While Pakistan has moved towards secularism, India has moved substantially in the other direction. Since 2014, laws have been introduced which have gone after India’s minorities. In 2015, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) states began criminalising the possession of beef, triggering a series of beef lynchings. In 2019, India’s Parliament criminalised the utterance of triple talaq in one sitting, punishing Muslim men for a non-event (because the Supreme Court had already invalidated triple talaq earlier). After 2018, five BJP states criminalised interfaith marriage by disallowing conversions and invalidating such marriages, including those which had children. Conversions to Hinduism — defined as “ancestral religion” — are exempt and not counted as conversions in the BJP states of Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh. A sixth BJP state, Karnataka, is this month squeezing Christians through an anti-conversion Bill. Nobody has ever been convicted of forced conversion so this is not required but the intent is to harass.

In 2019, Gujarat tightened a law that keeps Muslims ghettoised by denying them access to purchase and lease of properties from Hindus. In effect, foreigners can buy and rent properties in Gujarat that Gujarati Muslims cannot. We need not get into the treatment of Kashmiris here because the collective punishment imposed on them no longer arouses interest in us.

The one thing India can claim is that it does not prevent Muslims from holding high office. Pakistan constitutionally restricts minorities from becoming president or prime minister. India has had Muslim presidents but unlike Pakistan, India’s presidents are figureheads with no real authority. If they had the power to dismiss Parliament, such as Pakistan’s presidents had, it would be interesting to see how many Muslims India would have elevated.

Today, there is no Muslim chief minister in India, no Muslim minister in 15 states, in 10 states there is only one Muslim minister (usually given minority affairs, as is the case in the Union government also) and of the majority 303 Lok Sabha MPs of the ruling party, none is Muslim. There was no Muslim in the previous 282 Lok Sabha majority either.

Whether the exclusion is through law or through practice, the exclusion is real. In effect there is no real difference between India and Pakistan as they move towards each other from two sides. One began at the communal end but has edged towards secularism. The other began at the secular end and has slipped into communalism.

The writer is chair of Amnesty International India