Indian Muslim or Muslim Indian?

It's become crytsal clear that the fears of the highly educated Muslims were well-founded

The Madhya Pradesh government last Sunday had arrested 15 people for supposedly celebrating Pakistan’s win in the Champions Trophy final. By this token, Britain should be arresting almost all Indians with Brit citizenship for supporting India’s team.

Little wonder, then, that at one of those ‘Three years of NDA’ meetings someone said “Indian Muslims have never been under such severe pressure as they are today”. This usage reminded me of something that happened three decades ago when I was working for a large multi-edition newspaper. 

A highly respected former member of the ICS and scion of a very distinguished family had written an article for the paper. At the bottom of that article he had been described as an Indian Muslim.

There was no need to do that. His name was enough to tell the reader his religion.

A few days later he wrote to the editor, saying that he should have been described as a Muslim Indian instead of as an Indian Muslim. Clearly, it was a matter of some importance to him. It came as a big surprise to us.

But he had posed, in the most succinct way possible, the identity problem of Muslims in India. The problem hasn’t gone away. In fact, it’s been made worse over the years by the Sangh Parivar.

Always politics

The letter was published. It caused the usual talk in the office. The wags wanted all writers identified by their religions: Hindu Indian, Christian Indian, Sikh Indian, and so on. The edit page editor was not pleased.

That letter also led some of us to ask why such a distinguished person had insisted on his Muslim identity being emphasised. Why had he spoken somewhat like Syed Shahabuddin, a former member of the IFS, who had become a politician and, during the 1980s and 1990s, had set himself up as the sole spokesman for India’s Muslims? 

What, we asked, were these two members of the topmost echelons of India’s Muslim community trying to tell the rest of us, and indeed other Muslims? What was worrying them? 

Mr Shahabuddin, who died in March this year, clearly had a political reason. But what about the other gentleman who didn’t?

Was it the cynicism of the Congress, which has always regarded India’s Muslims as a mere political group and whose votes were essential? Or was it the persistence of the RSS and the BJP, which painted them as mortal enemies of the Hindus for all time to come?

Were they worried that the Congress was ditching them? Had Indira Gandhi’s gradual drift away been the trigger? Or was it the Rajiv Gandhi government’s decision to open the locks of the Babri Masjid?

Were they concerned that the victimhood syndrome was being appropriated by the BJP, which was making the Hindus feel as if they were the victims?

Majoritarian victimhood, by the way, was a new strategy at the time. Countries in West Asia have successfully adopted it since then.

Slippery slope

It’s become crystal clear in the 30 years since 1986 that the fears of those two highly educated Muslims were well-founded. They have become as relevant as pawns are in a game of chess: They make up the numbers but have no firepower.

This has led to a completely unexpected outcome. Just as the more urbane supporters of the RSS-BJP among upper-class Hindus never thought leadership would slip away to, shall we say, less urbane people, those two Muslim gentlemen also could not have anticipated that the leadership of their community would slip into the hands of people who thought very differently from them about political and social issues.

But this is what eventually happens when you bring in religion and nationalism into politics, whether overtly like the BJP or covertly like the rest of the non-southern Indian political parties. It makes the minorities politically influential as a group but at the same time increases the vulnerability of individual members of the group.

The overall consequence of this change can be seen most in the nature of leadership, strategy, and tactics. Thus, now, for the BJP the Muslims are only socially important inasmuch as anti-Muslim talk helps unite the Hindu vote for it. 

For the rest of the non-southern Indian political parties, they are important only politically, inasmuch as they do nothing much for them socially lest this upset their Hindu supporters. UPA I and II tried it and paid the price for it in 2014. 

They will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.