A nation of minorities
Meghnad Desai : Sun Sep 02 2012, 02:45 hrs
Of course, a secularist does not say Muslims, he says ‘the minority’, as if India has no other minorities. The Kokrajhar conflagration is an instance where a fragile community —the Bodos—who thought they had carved out a small territory—Bodoland—where they could be a majority, discovered that they were a minority even at home.
They should talk to the Thackeray household. Ever since Samyukta Maharashtra was set up, the cry has been that the Marathi manoos finds himself not the ruling majority in Mumbai. All sorts of ‘outsiders’ —the South Indians first and then the UP-wallas and who knows which minority next, are illegitimately in Mumbai. Of course, within the Marathi manoos community, there is a struggle between the Marathas and the Brahmins as there has been since the days of the Peshwas. The beauty of Hindu society is that the elite rule by dividing people into a thousand cells, telling each that it is higher or lower than the other. This is how the Brahmins ruled for centuries without a powerful State to give them sanction.
The nationalist movement sought to overcome this. It tried to build a coalition of, at least, all the caste Hindus under the Congress (There was a small number of nationalist Muslims but they were a minority within a minority. The Congress was, and remained, a caste Hindu party). The rest—Harijans, Sikhs, were patronised to receive the crumbs off the top table. But at least the Congress tried to unite Hindu society under a non-religious umbrella. After independence, Nehru expanded the umbrella to include Muslims. For 40 years, the Congress leveraged its combination of caste Hindus, Harijans and Muslims. While the Congress system lasted, India had a single logic of unity though it was mean towards the outer margins—Dalits, tribals, other minorities. Even the linguistic division of India did not fragment the country since language was common across religions.
It was the Janata experiment which killed the vision of a united India. Ram Manohar Lohia’s slogan of deepening caste to overcome casteism may have been a delightful Hegelian paradox but it has been disastrous for Indian politics. We now live in a polity where fragmentation has been legitimised as a necessary strategy for inclusive development. The 7,000 jatis listed in the 1931 Census are so many such minorities, each struggling to carve out their own version of Bodoland. Mandal gave them new status and embedded them as legal entities in a radical rewrite of the Constitution. Democracy, alas, is a game of numbers. So each minority has to concentrate its numbers on a territory and then seek power so it can exclude the rest. This is an unstable game, which will go on while each minority gets its pound of flesh. The best way to get the Indian State to take note of your claim is to take to the streets and bomb and kill and rape. It always works, if not immediately, ultimately. The progressive Indian has a Left- wing delusion which glorifies political violence. Violent communities are ipso facto deprived and hence justified in killing. Congress has been unable to transcend this logic since it lost its monopoly on power in 1989. The BJP has dreams of Hinduism being a uniting force but that does not deal with the central fact of jati divisions. Neither of the two national parties has it within its ideology to unite India.
We, the People of India, were meant to be citizens, equal before the law. No political party has the courage to implement this revolutionary ideal.
