Indian Muslims
By Pankaj Mishra
Mar 20, 2013
Indian
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is fond of boasting that not one of
India’s almost 180 million Muslims has been discovered to be a member of
al-Qaeda.
He could underscore an even more remarkable fact:
None of the foreign jihadists caught fighting alongside the Taliban has
turned out to be from the country with the world’s third-largest Muslim
population.
Indeed, Indian Muslims haven’t bothered to lend even
moral support to the anti-Indian insurgency in Muslim-majority Kashmir
that has claimed more than 50,000 lives in the past two decades.
According to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, this
is because Indian Muslims “are the product of and feel empowered by a
democratic and pluralistic society.”
A more
prosaic and less ideological explanation is that Indian Muslims have
many of their own problems to deal with, largely stemming from the swift
decay of democracy and pluralism.
According to a 2012 book, “Muslims in Indian Cities:
Trajectories of Marginalisation,” edited by Laurent Gayer and
Christophe Jaffrelot, Muslims are as badly off, if not worse, socially
and economically, than Dalits (formerly untouchable Hindus) and tribal
peoples.
Meager Minority
Almost 40
percent of Muslims in urban centers live below the poverty line. They
constitute almost 15 percent of the total population, but only 5.5
percent of the members of the Indian parliament are Muslims. Gayer and
Jaffrelot note the astonishing fact that many of India’s biggest states
do not have even one sitting Muslim representative in the Indian
parliament.
Underrepresented in the judiciary, Muslims form a
meager component of the police force. And that may be at least one
reason for what is now a disturbingly common sport in an increasingly
Hindu-nationalized India: blaming the Muslims (and locking up a whole
lot of them).
The terrorist attacks last month that killed 17
people in the central Indian city of Hyderabad reopened a cornucopia of
conspiracy theories. Faux-enraged television anchors fingered a
terrorist outfit called Indian Mujahideen, a group whose origins and
elements remain murky. The president of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya
Janata Party demanded that India retaliate against Pakistan.
The police promptly arrested four Muslims in Hyderabad.
All
this seemed par for the course. Muslims are routinely picked up after
terrorist attacks in India and often paraded before eager television
journalists, bearing the most conspicuous marks of their religion:
beards, skullcaps and striped scarfs.
But there was a problem this time. The Muslims
detained last month had been locked up before, after another bomb blast
near one of the oldest mosques in Hyderabad, the Mecca Masjid, in 2007.
While in prison, one of the accused ran into, in a bizarre twist of
fate, the real perpetrator of the crime, a Hindu extremist, whose
feelings of guilt pushed him into a full confession. The police case
against the Muslims -- an absurdist fiction, actually -- began to
collapse after that uncanny encounter.
New evidence came to light, showing how rapidly
anti-Muslim Hindu terror networks, which included at least one serving
army officer, had grown across the country, while the police and the
media ballyhooed the mass arrests of various alleged Muslim terrorists.
False Confessions
Finally,
the Muslims accused in the Mecca Masjid attacks were acquitted by the
courts, which slammed the police for extracting false confessions from
them under torture.
An extensive investigation by the newsweekly Tehelka
unearthed many such malign and bogus cases, revealing a countrywide
pattern of what its editor, the novelist Tarun Tejpal, called “a
chilling and systematic witch-hunt against innocent Muslims.”
Of course, not all Muslims like to see themselves as
victims of majoritarian prejudice. Indeed, “Muslims in Indian Cities”
challenges the popular stereotype of a stagnant and insular community in
thrall to reactionary, self-serving leaders.
Muslims employed in the Gulf remit almost one-third
of the $70 billion that India receives annually. A nascent
entrepreneurial middle class is emerging in, among other places, Bhopal
and Hyderabad.
But they have to overcome great mental barriers in a
mainstream culture largely inimical to them. It is not uncommon for
Muslim neighborhoods to be popularly tagged as “mini- Pakistans,” or for
even relatively affluent Muslims to be denied rented accommodation and
school placements.
As Jaffrelot writes, “to alienate those who invested
in education in order to be part of the brighter part of urban India
may result in the making of ’reluctant fundamentalists,’ to use the
title of a recent book.”
Certainly, a demoralized people living on their nerves are prone to see violence and bigotry everywhere.
Even
one of India’s biggest film stars, Shah Rukh Khan, recently complained
about being constantly “accused of bearing allegiance to our
neighbouring nation.”
Khan was immediately assailed by a storm of hostile
criticism, including accusations of rank ingratitude. Pakistani
politicians, blatantly unable or unwilling to protect their country’s
minorities, cynically called upon the Indian government to ensure the
safety of Indian Muslims.
Finally, a plainly nervous Khan backtracked with
some sad Friedmanesque jauntiness: “We have an amazing democratic, free
and secular way of life,” he said.
This is not
quite reflected in his own workplace, Bollywood, whose films now depict
Muslims as vicious anti- nationals and devious Fifth Columnists.
Secret Hanging
Muslims
wondering about their place in India can’t be encouraged by the media’s
recent outpouring of awe and admiration for the notorious Muslim-baiter
Bal Thackeray, or its eager flattery of the Hindu nationalist
prime-minister-in- waiting Narendra Modi, who is accused of complicity
in the murder of more than 2,000 Muslims in 2002.
Writing last week about the wrongful and prolonged
incarceration of a Muslim defense scientist, Praveen Swami, an Indian
journalist known for his close ties to the security establishment,
pleaded that “the harm caused to [the scientist] has to be read against
the possible harm to the community caused by the investigators’ failure
to arrest.”
More alarmingly, the Supreme Court invoked a
similarly imagined community of victimized and angry Hindus when it
confirmed the death sentence on Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri Muslim accused of
logistical support to a terrorist assault on the Indian parliament in
2001. Guru had to die because, as the court put it, India’s “collective
conscience” demanded it.
Last month, India secretly hanged Guru. His family
wasn’t given a chance for a final meeting with him; his corpse was also
denied to them, in violation of a fundamental Islamic custom of funeral
prayers.
Many Muslims, even the few who believe that Guru was
given a fair trial, are likely to see the stealthy execution as “state
vengeance against a co-religionist,” as the deputy editor of the
newsmagazine Outlook wrote.
Some Muslims will also wonder why the sacrificial
victim of India’s collective conscience was a Muslim, and not, say,
former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Hindu assassins, who had
been waiting on death row for much longer.
More than a month after the execution of Guru, most
Kashmiris continue to suffer an intensified regime of arbitrary curfews
and brutal crackdowns. Last week, two unidentified militants staged a
suicide attack on an Indian paramilitary outpost in Srinagar, the
biggest such assault in three years.
Clashes between Kashmiri protesters and Indian security forces in
recent weeks have also claimed several casualties. This surge in
violence -- and there is more to come -- was rendered inevitable by
Guru’s dishonorable execution following a dodgy trial, both hailed by a
ratings-mad Indian media.
One can only hope that its squalid fantasy about
traitorous Indian Muslims doesn’t prove to be self-fulfilling. For the
radicalization of even a tiny fraction of 180 million Muslims would not
only fatally undermine India’s increasingly unconvincing claims to
democracy and secularism. The not-so- reluctant fundamentalists would
make the country seem as ungovernable as its neighbor.
(Pankaj Mishra is the author of “From the Ruins of
Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia” and a
Bloomberg View columnist, based in London and Mashobra, India. The
opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this article: Pankaj Mishra at pmashobra@gmail.com
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