Muslimophobia in India: Reasons and Remedy (Part Four)
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By A.
Faizur Rahman
11 June
2023
(With
Permission from the author to publish this chapter ‘Muslimophobia in India:
Reasons and Remedy’ from the Book 'Politics of Hate -Religious
Majoritarianism in South Asia' Edited by Farahnaz Ispahani -
Published by Harper Collins Publishers India.)
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The Way
Forward
India’s
historical greatness lies in the fact that despite its religious and cultural
heterogeneity, it has always been a secular polity. Efforts to homogenize the
diverse ethnicities, religions, castes, theistic schools of thought and
atheistic philosophies under the ‘Hindu’ identity have invariably failed
because of their sheer richness, variety and spread across the length and
breadth of the country. This means that it is almost impossible to formulate
and enforce a parochially uniform concept of nationalism that is acceptable to
all Indians, especially the Hindus, whose traditions are more diverse than
those of the other communities.
Historian
Raj Mohan Gandhi perhaps had this reality in mind when he wrote, ‘Counting
Dalits and Adivasis in the Hindu fold, Hindu radicals reserve their public ire
for Muslims. “Hindu consolidation” against Muslims is the political equivalent
in India for the American call, open or subtle, for white supremacy.’ He went
on to say that if ‘enough is enough’ will not escape the lips of political
leaders, ‘everyday Hindus must utter the words, in their homes to kith and kin,
outside their homes to fellow citizens’.
The good
news is, Hindus seem to be saying those words already. A survey of 24,236
voters conducted in 2019 by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
(CSDS) across 211 parliamentary constituencies in twenty-six states revealed
that nearly 75 per cent of Hindus (who use social media) were for an India that
belonged to all religions. This was confirmed by the aforementioned Pew
Research Survey, which found that 85 per cent of Hindus feel that respecting
all religions was very important to being truly Indian, and 80 per cent of them
say that it is a very important part of their religious identity.
Muslim
secular and religious leadership must take heart from this fact and seek to
increase the percentage of Hindus who believe in inclusive nationalism. This
may be done by promoting Hindu– Muslim harmony through massive information
campaigns to counter the deluge of disinformation in at least the following
five areas.
1. Demographic Threat: There must be a sustained
nationwide effort to inform the Hindu masses that Muslims do not pose a
demographic threat to them. The Hindus must know that in 1941, the Muslim
population of India was 92 million (about 24 per cent of the total
population),89 but Partition brought this figure down to 35 million (9.8 per
cent) in 1951. Although it reached 172 million (14.2 per cent) in 2011, the
growth rate of the Muslim population has been steadily declining since 1991, when
it was 32.87 per cent. It fell to 29.52 per cent in 2001 and 24.6 per cent in
2011.
According
to the Sachar Committee Report, India’s population growth will eventually cease
and possibly decline for all communities as the process of demographic
transition progresses. By the end of the twenty-first century, India’s Muslim
population will stabilize at 320–340 million (in a total of 1.7 to 1.8
billion), about 18–19 per cent of the total population.91 In other words, at 19
per cent of a
stabilized
total population, the question of Muslims overtaking the Hindu population does
not arise.
These
findings were more or less confirmed by a recent study published in The Lancet
which suggested that by 2048, India’s population will peak at about 1.61
billion and decline to 1.093 billion by 2100. And if India is able to meet UN
Sustainable Development Goals for education and contraceptives, the population
would peak earlier and decline to 929 million by 2100.
The
political import of these scientific projections is momentous. It explodes the
myth that Muslims in India are plotting a ‘demographic-jihad’ to capture power.
Hence any legislative attempt to regulate population based on unfounded fears
would be as counterproductive as China’s failed population policy, which not just
affected the sex ratio, but reduced the productive workforce and resulted in an
ageing society. The Communist state is now considering ‘more inclusive
population policies’ to boost the birth rate.94 But they are not expected to be
able to improve the situation. There is a lesson to be learnt from this.
Indeed, Roshan Kishore of Hindustan Times warns that if the Indian government
were to formulate any policies which exclude families with more than two
children, 83 per cent of the affected families would be Hindus. Not only is
such a policy regressive, the article said, it will hurt the ‘have-nots’ more
than the ‘haves’, and ‘will also fail to achieve its communal design as more
Hindus will suffer than Muslims’.
2. Muslim
Religious Rule: Similar misinformation prevails regarding Muslim rule in
India, which often portrays Muslims as products of Islamic intrusions into
India. Renowned historian Richard M. Eaton writes that modern textbooks
routinely characterize the advent of Persianised Turks in India as a ‘Muslim
conquest’, and the entire period from the thirteenth to the eighteenth
centuries as India’s ‘Muslim Era’. ‘That is to say, the agent of conquest is
not a people as defined by their ethnic heritage or place of origin, but
rather, a religion, the Islamic religion,’ he laments.
In
comparison, even though the sixteenth century Spaniards justified their
conquest of Mexico in religious terms, modern texts never speak of a ‘Christian
conquest’ of America, nor is the post- 1492 period ever called America’s ‘Christian
Era’. It is always the ‘Spanish conquest’ of Central and South America and
‘European settlement’ in North America.
Eaton
blames medieval Indo-Persian chroniclers for promoting the notion of an
‘Islamic conquest’ of India and identifying Islam with the fortunes of their
royal patrons. However, Sanskrit sources claim that from the eighth to the
fourteenth centuries, Rajput, Brahman and other contemporary Indian elites
referred to the invaders not by their religion but by their linguistic identity—typically
as Turks or Turuska. These findings, says Eaton, permit dramatically new ways
of conceptualizing the character of cultural encounters at the dawn of the
appearance of Muslims in north India.
3. Conversion:
The belief that Muslims ruled India as Islamists, and not as covetous
conquerors who happened to be Muslims, spawned several theories about the
spread of Islam in the subcontinent. Some of the suppositions were (a) Muslim
rulers used ‘the sword’ to convert Hindus, (b) Indian Muslims are the descendants
of immigrants and invaders who settled in India, (c) Indians converted to Islam
to avoid taxes or to seek the patronage of the ruling class, and (d) Hindus
from the so-called lower castes, impressed by the egalitarian teachings of
Islam, converted en-masse to socially liberate themselves from the tyranny of
the ‘high-caste’ Hindus.
While
historians differ on the ‘immigration’, the ‘patronage’ and the ‘social
liberation’ theories, they reject the sword theory.
According to Eaton, if Islamization had ever
been the result of military or political force, regions exposed most
intensively to Muslim rule would, in modern times, contain the greatest number
of Muslims. Yet, the opposite is the case. Areas where the most dramatic
Islamization occurred, such as eastern Bengal or western Punjab, lay on the
fringes of Muslim political power, where the means of coercion were weakest.
Citing the
‘decentred perspective’ of recent scholarship, Eaton explains that South Asians
actively engaged with and creatively incorporated Islamic traditions into their
lives and cultures, thereby making them their own. This led to the
harmonization of the universal truth claims of Islamic traditions with the
particularities of South Asian cultures. Put differently, there is no single
explanation for the appearance of sizeable Muslim communities across South
Asia. Their social and ethnic diversity emerged under very different historical
circumstances.
4. The
Aryan Theory: As has already been pointed out, most right wingers in India
believe that the ‘noble’ Arya were the original inhabitants of India and the
Hindus descended from them. However, new studies have disproved this dogma,
which seeks to alienate and otherise certain
Indian communities.
Researcher
Tony Joseph, first in his pioneering 2018 study Early Indians: The Story of Our
Ancestors and Where We Came From100 and then in an article, showed101 that the
Arya were central Asian Steppe pastoralists who arrived in India roughly
between 2,000 BCE and 1,500 BCE, and brought Indo-European languages to the
subcontinent. In other words, Indians are a multi-source civilization drawing
their cultural impulses, traditions and practices from a variety of heredities
and migration histories.
In an
interesting passage, Joseph describes,
how the
Indian ‘pizza’ got made, with the base or the foundation being laid about
65,000 years ago, when the Out of Africa migrants reached India. The sauce
began to be made when the Zagrosian herders reached Balochistan after 7000 BCE,
mixed with the First Indians, and then together went on to build the Harappan
Civilization. When the civilization fell apart, the sauce spread all over the
subcontinent. Then came the ‘Aryans’ after 2000 BCE, and cheese was sprinkled
all over the pizza, but a lot more in the north than in the south. Around the
same time arrived the major toppings which we see today in different regions in
different amounts—the Austroasiatic and Tibeto- Burman-language speakers. And then,
much later, of course, came the Greeks, the Jews, the Huns, the Sakas, the
Parsis, the Syrians, the Mughals, the Portuguese, the British, the Siddis—all
of whom have left small marks all over the Indian pizza.
In short,
says Joseph, almost all population groups of India carry 50–65 per cent of
their ancestry from the First Indians (Out-of- Africa migrants), no matter
where in the caste hierarchy they stand, what language they speak, which region
they inhabit or what religion they belong to.104
5. Terrorism: This is another issue which has been used to
target Muslims in India despite the community having rejected the worldview of
terror outfits such as the al-Qaeda and ISIS. In its October 2017 report, The
Soufan Centre, ‘a non-partisan strategy centre dedicated to increasing
awareness of global security issues in the United States and around the world’,
listed seventy-five Indians as ‘foreign fighters’ who had gone to join violent
extremist groups in Syria and Iraq.
The report
quoted Turkish authorities as documenting a total of 53,781 individuals from
146 countries whose state of residence feared they might attempt to join the
fight in Syria and Iraq. This figure was as of mid-June 2017.105 Although
joining a terror outfit is a highly criminal and condemnable act, the number of
Muslims from India (seventy-five out of 53,781) who volunteered to fight for
such groups was insignificant. In terms of the number of the Muslims in India,
this figure—seventy-five out of an estimated 200 million—is even more minuscule,
and shows that the community as a whole has shunned violent extremism, thereby
justifying the faith Prime Minister Narendra Modi has in its peaceability and
loyalty to the country.
In
September 2014, soon after assuming office, in an interview to CNN’s Fareed
Zakaria, the Prime Minister said:
My
understanding is that they (terror outfits such as al-Qaeda) are doing
injustice towards Muslims of our country. If anyone thinks Indian Muslims will
dance to their tune, they are delusional. Indian Muslims will live for India.
They will die for India. They will not want anything bad for India.
This was in
response to Zakaria’s question on whether he was worried about an al-Qaeda
video announcing the attempt to create a base in India.106 Three years later, Home
Minister Rajnath Singh echoed the Prime Minister’s confidence when he said, ‘I
can say with full responsibility that despite such a large population (of
Muslims in India), the ISIS has not been able to set foot.’
A factual
confirmation of India’s top leadership’s faith in the Muslim community was
provided yet again by The Soufan Centre. Its January 2019 report revealed how
Indian Muslims had managed to ignore the lure of jihadi narratives, despite
being precariously close to the geographical hub of al-Qaeda. The report also
contains al-Qaeda leader Asim Umar’s lament about the lack of jihadi spirit in
Indian Muslims in a video message released in June 2013. Umar had provocatively
asked them, ‘Why is there no storm in your ocean?’ only to be humiliatingly
cold-shouldered.
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Previous
Parts:
Muslimophobia
in India: Reasons and Remedy (Part One)
Muslimophobia
in India: Reasons and Remedy (Part Two)
Muslimophobia
in India: Reasons and Remedy (Part Three)
URL: https://newageislam.com/books-documents/muslimophobia-india-remedy-part-four/d/129968
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