Chanakya's New Manifesto: To Resolve the Crisis Within India (6 page)

What needs to be noted is his crystal-clear vision in this vital matter, which if handled otherwise could well have led to the balkanization of India, or condemned it to endemic religious strife. Muslims in India are not confined to one geographical area. They number about 120 million—about 13 per cent of the population—and live in all parts of the country. Jammu and Kashmir is the only state where they are in the majority (65 per cent), but they constitute a significant proportion of the population in West Bengal and Kerala, and even more (about 30 per cent) in Assam. In Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) they number over 30 million and in Bihar about half of that, which is still more than the entire population of Hungary or Greece. They also have an important presence in the states of Karnataka (11 per cent), Andhra Pradesh (8 per cent) and Tamil Nadu (5 per cent). Nowhere are they isolated or cut off from the majority community.

Coexistence between people of every faith was, therefore, an imperative and not an option for our young nation, and credit must be given to the nation’s first leaders for having grasped this truth. It is not sufficiently appreciated that although communal conflicts have occurred in the past, and will probably occur in the future, the project of the peaceful and progressive integration of all communities has genuinely succeeded in India.

In a paper prepared in 1996 for the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies in New Delhi, two distinguished scholars from Harvard, Ashutosh Varshney and Steven Wilkinson, made an in-depth study of Hindu-Muslim riots during the period 1960-93. According to them, even in Gujarat, which has one of the worst records of communal violence, ‘twenty out of thirty-three years between 1960-93 had no or very few incidents of communal violence’. Hindu-Muslim violence, they concluded, is neither chronic nor pervasive but town-specific, with 24 towns nationally accounting for 62 per cent of the total deaths and 50 per cent of the total number of incidents. Even in the states of U.P., Maharashtra and Gujarat, which have most of the riot-prone areas, there are numerous towns that have remained peaceful. There were a total of 554 ‘communal’ incidents across India during 1960-93. Provided the close proximity in which Indians live, the historical memory of the terrible violence of Partition, and the role of criminals, manipulative politicians and other vested interests in fomenting disharmony, as also the contribution made by scarcity and poverty to exacerbate any cause of strife, this is not a catastrophic record by any standards.

Given the pro-secular bias of the State, particularly in the nation’s formative years, Muslims became an increasingly important factor in the political arena. This was especially so because the increasing acceptance of a secular polity by Indians everywhere, prevented the Hindu vote from ever consolidating and enlarging any anti-Muslim bloc of voters. In such a milieu, the road to power lay through collaborative structures and alliances, and the Muslims, as the nation’s largest minority, could not be ignored. For instance, in the 400 constituencies of the U.P. state assembly, the results in a hundred are determined by how the Muslims vote. Similarly, nationwide, Muslims have significant population density in as many as 125 parliamentary constituencies, which constitute almost one-fourth of the house. All politicians, both at the local level and in New Delhi, have no option, therefore, but to be sensitive to such an important electoral factor. The working of democracy has, thus, become in India the biggest bulwark against religious extremism.

Undoubtedly, political parties in the past have benefitted from manipulating religious sentiments. But, the strength of the secular argument has repeatedly shown the diminishing returns from fundamentalist politics. The Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) did profit electorally from the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 but not for too long. In the 1993 assembly elections the BJP formed the government, but the issue of the building of a Ram temple at Ayodhya has steadily lost its appeal for voters. The BJP actually failed to get a simple majority in the elections in U.P. in 1996, and has since ceased to be the single largest party in the state. Similarly, in spite of the unpardonable violence against Muslims in 2002 in Gujarat on Narendra Modi’s watch, there have been no incidents of communal violence in that state since. In neighbouring Maharashtra, the 1993 bomb blasts in Mumbai sparked off a frenzy of religious rioting. A decade later, when terrorists set off another round of destructive explosions, there were no riots. In fact, Muslims and Hindus stood side by side in queues to donate blood for the injured. And, remarkably, the very next day it was business as usual for the financial capital of India.

It is a tribute to the firm stand taken by the country’s leaders in 1947 that by now, the great majority of Hindus and Muslims have a pretty shrewd idea of any political attempt to divide them on religious lines. They have realized, too, that it is in their self-interest to swim away from the islands of religious exclusiveness inhabited by mullahs and mahants, towards the mainland of greater secular opportunities. Gradually, but definitively, identity in India is being defined not by notions of belonging to a majority or minority community, but by instances of individual success or failure. For instance, Azim Premji is admired not because he is a Muslim but because he is among the richest and most forward-thinking business tycoons in the country. Again, the Muslim identity of A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, the former president was subsumed by the stature he gained for his work in space technology and missile defence. Given the nature of our multi-religious country, this progressive reduction in the role of religion in the national discourse, is no mean achievement.

The fourth legacy of 1947 is the success of a conscious policy of affirmative action. Once again, this often disputed—or unfairly denigrated—achievement was a direct consequence of the ideology of our freedom movement, where Gandhiji made the social emancipation of the traditionally oppressed ‘lower’ castes a fundamental sine qua non of freedom itself. The goal, thus, was not only political independence, but the creation of a more equal society whose weakest sections could become progressively empowered. From the very beginning, therefore, our Constitution implemented one of the most advanced systems of affirmative action ever seen anywhere in the world. It stipulated that almost a quarter (22.5 per cent) of government jobs be reserved for those at the lowest rung of the social ladder—the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs)—who also constituted the largest number of the poorest.

Today we take this seminal step for granted, and the terms ‘SC’ and ‘ST’ have become part of our vocabulary, but it is useful to remember how significant the impact of this policy decision has been. In 1965, the percentage of SCs and STs in the higher echelons of government service was 4.5 per cent; by 1995 it had risen to 22.8 per cent. The reservation of seats in Parliament and the state legislatures has also yielded significant results. Of the 544 seats in the Lok Sabha, 106 are reserved, but representation is even higher because—and this is the important point—many members of this group are now strong enough to win elections from unreserved constituencies.

In August 1990, Prime Minister V. P. Singh, heading a shaky coalition government, sought to strengthen his political base by announcing that 27 per cent of all central government jobs would be additionally reserved for Other Backward Classes (OBCs)—intermediate castes with a mostly rural background. The upper castes denounced the move, convinced that the entire policy of reservations was wrong. The Dalits felt that the OBCs were undeservedly eating into their quota, even as that quota was being hijacked by a ‘creamy layer’ within their own group. The OBCs on their part felt that what they got was too little too late, and that the SCs and STs had been the sole beneficiaries of the policy of reservations for too long. But in this melee of group interests, there is no doubt that there was a further and enduring shift of real power towards the weaker sections of our society. To give an example: in 1997, by the time the impact of the new policy was beginning to be felt, 621 candidates qualified for the coveted civil services. One-third of these had their schooling in villages or small towns; 450 came from families whose monthly income was less than
500 a month; 114 candidates had illiterate mothers; and 87 were the sons of farmers.

Of course, it is true that the expanding policy of reservations could become excessive to the point where it becomes inimical to the national interest. The pressure of carefully orchestrated group interests playing on the populist instincts of vulnerable coalition governments is a continuing danger. But it is also true that real empowerment of the vulnerable of discriminated groups has been a consequence of such policies. An objective analysis of the 1993 law which gives women, who are the most deprived among the poor, a whopping 33 per cent reservation in panchayats across the country, will support this inference. Women elected to the panchayats for the first time were reluctant stooges fronting for men—husbands, fathers, brothers or sons; those who won in the next elections were much less so; and those who have won in the subsequent elections have been clear about wanting to wield power themselves. It is also instructive to remember that no country in the Asia-Pacific region has such a high level of reserved seats for women in local bodies. In Japan, the figure is 6 per cent, and in Australia and New Zealand the proportion is less than one-third.

The fact that past governments have often resorted to such initiatives for short-term, and sometimes cynical, political gains does not take away from the transformational change that does ensue far beyond the intent of planners. And significantly, this kind of change consolidates as it goes along, with every generation. A first-generation, partially educated villager, who manages to get a job at the lowest rung of government service because of the policy of reservations, begins to dream big for his children. He educates them better and wants them to be employed above his level, clinging to every opportunity he can avail of and building on it in every possible way. In a country of vast socio-economic discrepancies, this avenue of institutionalized upward mobility must be given its due.

A fifth dividend of 1947 is that, contrary to what the skeptics predicted at that time, India has remained one country. The fact that this would be the case may appear self-evident today, but it was not how many informed and uninformed commentators saw the nation’s prospects to be in 1947. Winston Churchill whose opinions, in retrospect, were often wrongheaded, gave expression to this dominant view when he said that India is merely a ‘geographical expression...no more a single country than the equator’. Like him, many others thought that, given the bewildering diversity of India, its many languages and ethnicities, and its deeply ingrained insular fealties, the country would not hold together for too long.

That this did not happen is a tribute to our nation builders, to the institutions they set up, and to the policies of conciliation and accommodation they adopted. Of course, there were grave challenges along the way. Very early on, in the 1950s, there was the potentially explosive demand from some states to redraw traditional geographical boundaries along linguistic lines. The central government handled it wisely, conceding to the demands. Again, when the project of a national language was opposed by non-Hindi speaking states, New Delhi defused the situation through the stratagem of deferment. The call for ‘national integration’ was pursued, but regional or sub-cultural parochialisms were never sought to be subdued with a heavy hand.

Most importantly, although the new nation rarely initiated violence against a potential internal threat, and often showed an initial passivity which bordered on inertia, it did not allow a single secessionist movement to succeed. The Mao-inspired Naxalite movement in the 1970s, the demand for independence in the Kashmir valley, the call for a separate Assam by the All Assam Student’s Union, the Khalistan movement in Punjab, and a menu of secessionist movements in the Northeast, were all dealt with by a variety of strategies—punitive action, appeasement, the offer of incentives, prolonged negotiations, the sensitive handling of egos, and the like.

Simultaneously, a new sense of pan-Indianness emerged, by which any Indian in any part of the country had more than one symbol by which he or she could identify with the country as a whole. Of course, the various parts of India have always had certain things in common. A people who have evolved in what were, for thousands of years, virtually impermeable silos could not but develop certain unifying traits, common beliefs and practices, cultural similarities and so on. In 1947, the loyalties of caste, kith, kin and region were still paramount. The manner in which these insular loyalties have been gradually diluted and remodelled to create a pan-Indian culture and a pan-Indian identity is very significant.

What facilitated the definitive conversion of the salad bowl of India into a melting pot? A variety of developments, including radio, TV, film, educational opportunities, job mobility, the all-India DNA of the State itself, the revolution of communications, the democratization of the social order, the expansion of the economy, and national obsessions like cricket were responsible for this transformation to a greater or lesser degree. Most importantly, this creeping harmonization (which is one way of defining it) took place not as a result of clumsy governmental pressure, but in spite of it. If the government of the day had sought to impose uniformity it would have backfired. It was enlightened good sense that led our leaders to eschew any attempt to create a homogenous state defined arbitrarily by only one set of acceptable parameters. Today, our pan-Indian identity has resilience because it was not the product of a definitive blueprint, and therefore could not be stifled by planning. The factors that have integrated the diverse people of this nation worked independently of partisan biases. The deliberately non-assertive manner adopted by the leaders of the nationalist movement in this regard, catalyzed the process of creating a unified India.