India: an Empire in Denial
The Challenge of Ethnic Conflict
India: The Dilemmas of Diversity
Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr.
Journal of Democracy Vol. 4, No. 4 October 1993, pp. 54-68
[Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr. is the Temple Professor of the
Humanities in Government and Asian Studies at the University of Texas,
Austin. His numerous publications include India Under Pressure (1984)
and With Stanley A. Kochanek) India: Government and Politics in a
Developing Nation (5th ed., 1993)]
India came to independence in 1947 amidst the trauma of partition. The
nationalist movement, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, aimed
to gather what was then British India plus the 562 princely states under
British paramountcy into a secular and democratic state. But Mohammad Ali
Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, feared that his coreligionists, who
made up almost a quarter of the subcontinent's population, would find
themselves a permanent and embattled minority in a Hindu-dominated land. For
Jinnah, India was "two nations," Hindu and Muslim, and he was determined
that Muslims should secure protection in an Islamic state of Pakistan, made
up of the Muslim-majority areas of India. In the violence that accompanied
partition, some half a million people were killed, while upwards of 11
million Hindus and Muslims crossed the newly created borders as refugees.
But even all this bloodshed and suffering did not settle matters, for the
creation of Pakistan left nearly half of the subcontinent's Muslims in
India.
Muslims today are India's largest religious minority, accounting for 11
percent of the total population. Among other religious groups, the Sikhs,
some of whom in 1947 had sought an independent Sikhistan, are concentrated
in the northern state of Punjab and number less than 2 percent of India's
population. Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Parsees, and Jews add further
richness to India's religious diversity, but their comparatively small
numbers only accentuate the overwhelming proportion of Hindus, with some 83
percent of the population.
The Hindus, although they share a common religious tradition, are
themselves divided into a myriad of sects and are socially segmented by
thousands of castes and subcastes, hierarchically ranked according to
tradition and regionally organized. The geographic regions of India are
linguistically and culturally distinct. There are more than a dozen major
languages, grouped into those of Dravidian South India and Indo-European (or
Aryan) North India; Hindi, an Indo-European language spoken by 30 percent of
all Indians, is recognized by the Constitution of 1950 as the official
language (along with English). In addition to the many Indo-European and
Dravidian languages and dialects, there are various tribal languages spoken
by peoples across India, most notably in southern Bihar and in the seven
states of the Northeast.
In confronting this staggering diversity, the framers of India's
Constitution sought to shape an overarching Indian identity even as they
acknowledged the reality of pluralism by guaranteeing fundamental rights, in
some cases through specific provisions for the protection of minorities.
These include freedom of religion (Articles 25-28); the right of any section
of citizens to use and conserve their "distinct language, script or culture"
(Article 29); and the right of "all minorities, whether based on religion or
language," to establish and administer educational institutions of their
choice (Article 30). With respect to caste, the Constitution declared the
practice of "untouchability" unlawful (Article 17). To provide compensatory
justice and open up opportunity, a certain percentage of admissions to
colleges and universities and places in government employment were
"reserved" for so-called Scheduled Castes (untouchables) and Scheduled
(aboriginal) Tribes (Article 335). Similarly, to ensure adequate political
representation, Scheduled Castes and Tribes were allotted reserved seats in
the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, and in state legislatures in
proportion to their numbers (Article 330). These reservations were to have
ended in 1960, but they have been extended by constitutional amendment at
ten-year intervals.
Federalism and the Party System
Despite enormous pressures, India has been remarkably successful in
accommodating cultural diversity and managing ethnic conflict through
democratic institutions. This success has in large part been the product of
that diversity itself, for at the national level--what Indians call "the
center"--no single ethnic group can dominate. Each of the 25 states in
India's federal system reflects a dominant ethnolinguistic group, but these
groups are in turn divided by caste, sect, religion, and a host of
socioeconomic cleavages. Federalism provides a venue, however flawed, for
expressions of cultural distinctiveness, but it also serves to
compartmentalize friction. The cultural conflicts of one state rarely spill
over into another, and the center can thus more effectively manage and
contain them.
Even as India reflects a multitude of cross-cutting identities, however,
religion has the potential to shape a national majority. Political appeals
on the basis of pan-Hindu identity, facilitated by modern mass
communications, have begun to forge an increasingly self-conscious religious
community capable of transcending its own heterogeneity. The expression of
this communal awareness as Hindu nationalism poses a fundamental challenge
to India as a secular state.
India's party system, like its constitutional framework, has served to
sustain democratic politics and national unity, providing access to
political participation for newly mobilized groups. For 41 of the 46 years
since 1947, India has been governed at the center by the Indian National
Congress, the party that led India to independence. For the first two
decades after independence, the main arena of political competition at both
national and state levels was within the Congress party, but with increasing
frequency since the mid-1960's, regional parties have successfully
challenged Congress's hold on various states. Then in 1977, opposition
parties for the first time defeated Congress at the center.
Today there are three major forces at the center, represented by parties
that at least claim to be "national" in character. The Congress, under Prime
Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, rules as a minority government sustained by its
alliances with an array of minor and regional parties. The Congress draws
its support widely from across the country, from all classes and groups, but
a critical margin of support has traditionally come from religious
minorities, notably Muslims, and from untouchables. The leading opposition
party is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party of Hindu nationalism.
From its base in the Hindispeaking heartland of North India, it has
dramatically expanded its support by direct appeals to pan-Hindu religious
sentiment. Though its strength is still concentrated in the north, the BJP
has made inroads, especially among the urban middle classes, into other
parts of India. 1 The third force at the center is made up of
various Janata Dal (People's Party) factions that draw support principally
from the rural peasant classes, mainly in North India, and the Left Front,
led by the Communist Party (Marxist), the ruling party of West Bengal.
The Congress remains the only genuinely all-lndia party, for the other
claimants for power at the center have bases of support that are largely
confined to particular regions. Any party or coalition that wishes to rule
at the national level, however, must represent a range of cultural
identities. Even the BJP, in seeking to forge a Hindu nation, must cast its
net broadly--though in doing so, it excludes Muslims and other minorities
unwilling to subordinate their distinctive identities.
At the state level, national parties compete with those that are wholly
regional in their base of support, and in a number of states, regional
parties--identified with particular ethnic, linguistic, or religious
groups--are the major political forces. In the southern state of Tamil Nadu,
for instance, Tamil nationalist parties have ruled since 1967; in Andhra
Pradesh, the Telugu Desam party is the major rival to the Congress; in the
Punjab, it is the Sikh party, known as the Akali Dal; and in the Northeast,
ethnically based regional parties compete with Congress in various states.
Ethnically or religiously based parties serve as vehicles of regional
identity within a united India, but can also threaten cultural minorities by
wielding nativist appeals to local "sons of the soil" whose interests are
supposedly being endangered by migrants from other parts of India or
indigenous religious and linguistic minorities. Such appeals dramatically
expose the tensions that lie just under the multicultural surface of Indian
democracy.
Liberal democracy stands or falls according to its ability to elicit a dual
commitment to both majority rule and minority rights. The legitimacy of a
majority at any given time depends on the maintenance of an open marketplace
of ideas, free and periodic elections through which the majority can be
challenged, and guarantees of basic human rights for all. But how and in
what form are minority rights to be protected? Liberal democracy is
classically expressed in terms of individual rights, and the Preamble to the
Indian Constitution embodies a commitment to justice, liberty, equality, and
fraternity for the individual. Yet minority interests are typically
expressed in terms of group identity, and political demands may call for the
protection or promotion of language, religion, and culture, or of the
"group" more generally, in ways that conflict not only with "the will of the
majority," but with constitutional guarantees of individual rights and equal
protection. This tension, and the problems it causes, can be seen in India
in the contexts of: (1) ethnolinguistic regionalism and separatism; (2)
caste-based reservations; and (3) secularism and Hindu-Muslim communal
relations.2
Regionalism and Separatism
With independence, the old princely states were integrated into the Indian
union, but the newly created federal states were linguistically and
culturally heterogeneous. Long before independence, the Congress party had
organized its provincial branches along linguistic lines, and demands for
the reorganization of states on a linguistic basis brought the issue before
the Constituent Assembly. Nehru and the Congress leadership feared that
linguistic states would have a "subnational bias" that would retard national
integration and unleash "fissiparous tendencies." Moreover, they argued,
most states, however their boundaries might be drawn, would still have
linguistic minorities. But the democratic logic behind the call for
linguistic states--the notion that state administration and judicial
processes should be conducted in the language of the local majority--was
compelling. Political pressure for the reorganization of states ultimately
proved irresistible. Beginning in 1953 with the creation of Andhra Pradesh
as a Telugu-speaking state, and then in 1956, with a more general
reorganization on a linguistic basis, the principle of language as the basis
for state boundaries was broadly accepted.
The federal reorganization of 1956, however, did not quell demands for the
creation of new states. In 1960, following widespread agitation and
violence, the state of Bombay was bifurcated to form the linguistic states
of Maharashtra and Gujarat; in 1966, the Sikhs secured a Punjab state; and
in the following years, several tribal states were carved out of the
Northeast. In 1987, India's twenty-fifth state was created as the former
Portuguese colonial enclave of Goa was elevated to statehood. The pressures
continue today. In the late 1980s, Nepalis in West Bengal's Darjeeling
district raised the demand for a separate "Gurkhaland" state within India.
After two years of violence, in which more than 300 people were killed, the
Gurkha National Liberation Front accepted a proposal for what would be, in
effect, an autonomous region within the state of West Bengal; lately,
however, it has renewed its demand for a separate Gurkha state. The Bodo
tribals of Assam have pursued a violent struggle--thus far
unsuccessfully--for the creation of a separate Bodoland. More formidable is
the demand by tribals in mineral-rich southern Bihar and the contiguous
districts of neighboring states for a Jharkhand state. This demand has been
voiced with varying intensity since 1947, but in 1992 it reemerged with new
militancy, as strikes and bombings were directed to an economic blockade of
the region.
The organization of states on a linguistic basis provides the framework for
expanded political participation. It permits people more effective access to
government--but with the drawback that their use of this access may all too
often reflect the parochialism of language and region. The creation of
linguistic states has reinforced regionalism and stimulated demands for
increased state autonomy. India's Constitution guarantees freedom of
movement with only a few qualifications, yet almost every state outside the
Hindi heartland of central India has spawned a militant nativist movement
directed against outsiders. The fundamental issue has been employment for
local people, and many state governments, either officially or unofficially,
have supported the protection of jobs for the "sons of the soil." Among the
most virulent is the Shiv Sena, a regional party in Maharashtra. Exploiting
local grievances and economic frustration, the Shiv Sena, under the banner
"Maharashtra for the Maharashtrians," has directed both verbal and physical
attacks at South Indian immigrants and Muslims.
In the Northeast, the issue for the Assamese is not only jobs, but the
preservation of the Assamese language and culture in the face of a
demographic shift that threatens to make the Assamese a minority in their
own state. Bengalis have been migrating into Assam for more than a century,
but since 1971, the influx of "foreigners" (Bengali Muslims from Bangladesh)
has deepened ethnic insecurity and served as the catalyst for a movement
that engulfed Assam in violence. In a six-yearlong agitation (1980-86), more
than five thousand people were killed in ethnic conflict. In 1986, the
government of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi reached a settlement with the
movement leaders. By the terms of the accord, the central government
promised--in addition to commitments for the deportation of illegal
immigrants and enhanced economic development--to provide "legislative and
administrative safeguards to protect the cultural, social, and linguistic
identity and heritage" of the Assamese people.
Assam's agony did not end with the accord, which is still largely
unfulfilled; like other states in the ethnically turbulent Northeast, it
continues to suffer from violent convulsions. In the tribal states of
Nagaland and Mizoram, India has fought against insurgency movements since
1947, and among the tribal peoples of the Northeast more generally, the
aspiration for independence from India has been met by a renewed Indian
determination to secure the territorial integrity of the union.
India is a federal system with a strong central government. The
Constitution also lists state and concurrent powers, but provides the center
with a capacity to intervene in state affairs and even to dismiss elected
state governments and impose its own authority through "President's Rule."
Under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (1966-77; 198084), centralization of
power increased dramatically, both within government and in the structure
and operation of the ruling Congress party. The results were an increasing,
almost pathological, imbalance in the relationship between the center and
the states and growing demands for autonomy voiced by non-Hindi states. In
Tamil Nadu, for example, anger at the status of Hindi as the national
language was the catalyst for the rise to power of ethnoregional parties;
similar discontent was seen in Andhra, resulting in the victory of the
Telugu Desam party; and in West Bengal, where the Communist Party (Marxist)
functions as a regional party. Most notable, however, is the Punjab, where
in 1982 the Sikh-dominated Akali Dal pushed demands for greater state
autonomy and Sikh militants launched a campaign of terrorism for an
independent nation of Khalistan.
Punjab and Kashmir
No "ethnic" conflict in India has been more traumatic than the one
involving the Punjab, "homeland" of the Sikhs, who make up some 55 to 60
percent of the local population. At least twenty thousand people have died
in political violence there since 1981. The state has been under President's
Rule for long periods marked by draconian methods of keeping order.3
This has nurtured mutual distrust between Hindus and Sikhs, and official
actions like the army's June 1984 incursion into Amritsar's Golden Temple,
the major Sikh shrine, alienated most Sikhs from the government, if not from
India itself. It was in revenge for the violation of the temple that two
Sikh members of her own bodyguard murdered Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in
October 1984. While tensions originally developed over nonsectarian demands
behind which all Punjabis, Hindu and Sikh, could rally, the Akali Dal set
these issues in the context of various demands for the protection of Sikh
religious interests that excluded Hindus and to which the central
government, affirming its commitment to secularism, would not yield. For the
militants challenging the Akali Dal for Sikh leadership, this refusal proved
that the Sikh religion could be protected only by an independent, theocratic
Sikh state. For the Akalis, the issue was political power; for the
militants, it was (or so they claimed) Sikh identity itself and the fear of
absorption into the Hindu majority.
Aggrieved though they were, most Sikhs in the Punjab opposed the idea of
Khalistan, and by the late 1980s, the original political and religious goals
of many terrorist gangs had been displaced by the routinization of
extortion, robbery, and murder as a way of life. The people, sickened by
both terrorism and police repression, were ready for a return of the
political process. After 56 months of direct rule from New Delhi,
state-assembly elections were held in February 1992. Under terrorist threat
and Akali Dal boycott, a low voter turnout brought a Sikh-led Congress
government to power. Initially enjoying little credibility, the government
won increasing popular confidence, and in the village-council elections of
January 1993, with terrorists quiescent, 82 percent of the electorate turned
out. With the restoration of self-government and the continued police
campaign against the militants, the Punjab crisis eased--though the specter
of terrorism remains to haunt any return to normalcy.
In the far-northern state of Kashmir, India faces an even more serious
problem. India and Pakistan have fought two wars over what was once the
princedom of Jammu and Kashmir, which remains the principal source of
antagonism between the two nations. For India, the state--now divided by a
"line of control"--is fully a part of the Indian union; with its 65-percent
Muslim population, it stands as a symbolic rebuttal to the "two nation"
theory that underlay the founding of Pakistan. Moreover, India asserts that
Kashmir's inclusion in India serves as a guarantor of the secular state.
Pakistan, on the other hand, continues to insist that the people of Kashmir
be allowed to decide by plebiscite whether to be a part of India or
Pakistan--a demand that rests on the assumption that the decision would be
for Pakistan. The largest number of the state's Muslims, however, would
likely choose an independent Kashmir, and this has been the goal of the
Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), albeit with comparatively little
popular support before 1988.
Hindus predominate in Jammu, and Tibetan Buddhists in the sparsely
populated region of Ladakh; it is only in Kashmir proper that Muslims form a
majority, but at 4 million they account for but a small portion of India's
more than 100 million Muslims. Under the National Conference, as the
regional Muslim party of Jammu and Kashmir is called, the state had been
comparatively quiet, but in the late 1980s more and more Kashmiri
Muslims--increasingly alienated by fraudulent elections, widespread
corruption, and the failure of the center to help their state develop
economically--responded to the nationalist call for the liberation of
Kashmir from "Hindu India." In 1988, the JKLF and an assortment of
separatist and fundamentalist groups initiated a wave of strikes, bombings,
and assassinations. Imposing President's Rule, the center responded with
what Pakistan, Kashmiri Muslims, and Indian human rights advocates decried
as an indiscriminate use of force, further alienating the people of Kashmir.
The principal groups involved in the Kashmir insurgency are the Jammu and
Kashmir Liberation Front, which supports an independent and secular Kashmir,
and the Islamic fundamentalist Hezb-ulMujahideen, which is closely linked to
Pakistan's Jammiat-i-lslami party and the presumed recipient of Pakistani
largess. The sources of the separatist movement are internal to Kashmir and
owe their origin to years of maladministration at home and political
interference from New Delhi, but the agitation has had support from within
Pakistan. Some 250,000 troops of the Indian Army and paramilitary forces are
deployed in Kashmir, but their inability to suppress the uprising
underscores the limits of force when, as here, it is unaccompanied by a
political process that effectively engages at least those few prepared to
enter into dialogue. But with Kashmiri moderates so often targeted for
assassination, and with a death toll of 12,000 and rising in all political
violence since 1989, prospects for a settlement are dim.
India's federal system once acted to compartmentalize social unrest, with
political crises often containable within a single state or region. But the
centralization of power also centralized problems, bringing to the desk of
the prime minister issues once resolved at the state level. The balance must
be restored through a devolution of power to the states, indeed, perhaps to
an increased number of states and possibly "autonomous regions" within
states. But this Evolution must be accompanied by the constitutional
guarantee of civil rights and liberties to ensure that all persons receive
the equal protection of the law. Among the many measures proposed for
redressing the balance between the center and the states, the most
compelling include an end to the arbitrary dismissal of state governments
and imposition of President's Rule; a more equitable sharing of revenues;
and a respect by the center for spheres of public policy that are properly
state concerns.4
Caste Reservations
Hindu society in India is divided by caste and subcaste in a complex
hierarchy that stretches down from Brahmins to untouchables. The 1950
Constitution abolished untouchability and specified that no citizen be
subject to any disability or restriction with regard to places of public use
or accommodation on the basis of caste. Political representation was
guaranteed for Scheduled Castes (untouchables) and Tribes through the
proportionate reservation of seats in elected legislative bodies, from
Parliament to village councils. But despite these various provisions and the
extended protections of the Untouchability (Offenses) Act, untouchables--who
today number more than 130 million--continue to suffer discrimination and
deprivation. To address this situation and to overcome the cumulative
results of past discrimination, the government instituted a program of
"compensatory discrimination"--an Indian version of affirmative action--that
reserved 22.5 percent of all central government jobs for members of
Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Comparable reservations were provided for
state-level employment, and reservations were extended to college and
university admissions.
The system has been controversial, and many higher-caste Hindus,
particularly Brahmins, who have been denied government employment or
entrance into universities, feel that they have been victims of reverse
discrimination. Far more controversial, however, has been the extension of
reservations to "Other Backward Classes"--specific castes chosen because of
their low levels of social and educational advancement. Predominantly rural,
they account for a substantial portion of India's population and in many
states command significant political power. In response to that power, a
number of states have extended reservations in university admissions and
government employment to them.
In 1980, the Backward Classes Commission, chaired by B.P. Mandal--a former
chief minister of Bihar state and himself a member of a backward
caste--recommended the reservation of 27 percent of all central government
jobs for the backward classes in addition to the 22.5 percent already
reserved for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. The 3,743 castes and subcastes
identified as beneficiaries make up 52 percent of the Indian population. The
report gathered dust for a decade, but in 1990, then-Prime Minister V.P.
Singh announced that his Janata Dal government would implement the Mandal
recommendations. The decision brought widespread criticism from the press
and strong opposition from higher castes, especially students. In New Delhi
and other cities in the north of India, violent protests (including
self-immolations) and shootings by police raised the specter of "caste war."
Singh declared the reservations a matter of social justice, but to his
political opponents, it was seen as a cynical political move to shore up his
threatened base of support among the backward peasant castes. Given the
numbers involved, however, no political party could oppose the reservations
outright, although the left argued for reservations based on income and
educational criteria rather than upon caste. Implementation was stayed by
the Supreme Court, pending a ruling on the constitutionality of the measure.
Returned to power in 1991, the Congress party under Prime Minister P.V.
Narasimha Rao sought to mollify opposition to the reservations by adding a
10-percent reservation for the poor of the higher castes. In November 1992,
the Supreme Court upheld the reservation for backward castes, with the
provision that it be need-based, but struck down the additional 10 percent
as constitutionally impermissible. The complexities of the court decision
effectively preclude implementation of the reservation, but the controversy
has sharpened caste enmities.
Rather than leading India toward a "casteless" society, the policy of
reservation has reinforced caste identities. Reservations for untouchables
may indeed be compelling because it is precisely their caste identity that
has been the source of stigma and discrimination, but in using caste rather
than individual need as the criterion for benefits, their identity as
untouchables is officially sanctioned. Moreover, the dilemma is manifest in
that all untouchables do not benefit equally. Reservations go
disproportionately to the more "advanced" among the untouchables, while
those most in need remain effectively excluded.
The "backward" castes share with the untouchables a comparatively low level
of educational and social advancement, but their position is not the result
of discrimination based on caste, nor do they suffer the stigma and
disabilities associated with untouchability. And for all their
"backwardness" as a group, they command considerable political power and, as
peasants, many among them enjoy increasing prosperity. It is thus very hard
to justify reservations for the backward castes: the appropriate response is
to individual need and merit, not group identity.
Hindu-Muslim Conflict
India may be an officially secular state, but Indian society is defined by
religious identities and riven by communal mistrust and hatreds. In India,
the term "communal" refers principally to Hindu-Muslim conflict, and with
memories of partition still bitterly nurtured, Hindu-Muslim tensions are
sustained by jealousy and fear. Each year several hundred incidents of
communal violence and rioting are officially reported, and their number and
intensity have grown in recent years. In December 1992, following the
destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya by Hindu fanatics, rioting across the
country left some 1,200 persons dead. In January 1993, Bombay witnessed a
nine-day anti-Muslim pogrom that left more than six hundred people dead.
Since the early 1980s, the rise of Muslim fundamentalism in India has
spurred a heightened Hindu consciousness and led Hindu nationalists to
project India's 83-percent Hindu majority as threatened. Hindu nationalism
has its roots in the late nineteenth century and is today represented by an
increasingly formidable range of organizations and parties--the powerful
paramilitary Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), its revivalist affiliate
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the
leading opposition political party with ambitions to take control of the
central government. With visions of a revitalized Hindu India, they portray
India's secularism as no more than a pretext for the "pampering" of
religious minorities.
Secularism in India does not erect a "wall of separation" between church
and state, but rather seeks to recognize and foster all religious
communities. The Constitution guarantees freedom of worship and the right of
each religious group to establish and administer its own schools and to
maintain its distinct traditions. But in India, as in the United States, the
form and degree of state accommodation of religious practice have been
matters of controversy. At issue is the appropriate democratic balance
between majority preference and minority protection.
In the wake of partition and the heightened insecurity of India's remaining
Muslim population, the Congress government under Nehru permitted Muslims to
retain their personal law (governing such matters as marriage, divorce, and
inheritance) while amalgamating other Indians under a uniform civil code.
For Hindu nationalists, who would recognize no exceptions, this smacked of a
"pseudosecularism" that privileged Muslims over Hindus. The issue was
dramatically confronted in the 1985 Shah Bano case. The Supreme Court had
ruled in favor of a 73-year-old woman, Shah Bano, divorced after 43 years of
marriage by her husband in the traditional Muslim manner, and awarded her a
monthly maintenance from her husband, where Muslim personal law would have
required none. Muslim clerics, with the cry of "Islam in danger," rallied
Muslims to the cause and warned that imposition of a uniform civil code
would deny them the right to follow the injunctions of their faith.
In an attempt to stem the loss of Muslim support from the Congress party,
Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi (initially favorable to the judgment) announced
support for the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Bill that
would remove Muslim divorce from provisions of law and, in effect, scuttle
the Supreme Court decision. Though welcomed by traditional Muslims, the bill
came under immediate attack by progressive Muslims, women, secularists, and
Hindu chauvinists. Hindus are not disadvantaged by the application of Muslim
personal law, although Muslim women may surely enjoy fewer rights than their
Hindu sisters. But this was not a human rights issue for Hindu nationalists,
to whom the government's response to the Shah Bano case simply demonstrated
the appeasement of minorities they had long denounced. In pandering to
Muslims, Hindu nationalists declared, the Congress party had sold out the
Hindus and their birthright as rulers of India.
Hindu nationalists project a mythic Hindu majority that denies the
diversity that makes Hinduism--and India--what it is. They have invented a
muscular Hinduism that would, through the state, impose a conformity as
oppressive to the individual Hindu as to the recalcitrant minority.
Religion, for the Hindu nationalists, is the vehicle by which they seek to
achieve political power and restore Ram-rajya, the ideal rule of the mythic
age of Lord Ram. The conceptual catalyst is Hindutva ("Hinduness") a term
that embodies the notion that all Indians--including Muslims--are part of a
Hindu nation and that Ram and the gods and heroes of Hindu mythology are
part of their patrimony. Those unwilling to accept Hindutva are thus not
just apostates but traitors.
The god Ram is the potent symbol that Hindu nationalists have chosen to
weld Hindus, disparate in their profusion of sects and traditions, into a
self-conscious community. The city of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh is the
presumed birthplace of Lord Ram, and devotees assert that in the sixteenth
century the Mogul emperor Babur destroyed the temple marking the birthplace
and in its place constructed a mosque, the Babri Masjid. In 1989, efforts by
the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other Hindu revivalist groups to demolish the
Babri Masjid and "to recapture injured Hindu pride" through the construction
of a new temple of Ram precipitated what was up to that time probably the
most serious Hindu-Muslim rioting since partition in 1947. In 1990, to
galvanize Hindu sentiment behind the BJP, party president L.K. Advani
launched his rath yatra (chariot pilgrimage), a 10,000-kilometer journey in
a van fashioned to look like a mythological chariot across the heart of
North India to Ayodhya to launch the construction of the new temple. Prime
Minister V.P. Singh, invoking the principles of secularism, warned that the
mosque would be protected "at all costs." As Advani and other BJP leaders
approached Ayodhya, they were arrested. The BJP, in turn, withdrew its
parliamentary support from the minority Singh government, and after an
unprecedented 346-to-142 vote of no-confidence on November 5, the prime
minister submitted his resignation.
In the fall of 1992, the VHP and BJP vowed that on December 6, they would
begin building a new temple at the sacred site. More than 200,000 Hindu
militants converged on Ayodhya and at the appointed hour stormed through the
police barricades and demolished the Muslim shrine. The police and
paramilitary guarding the mosque offered little resistance. In face of the
action and subsequent rioting, the Congress government of P.V. Narasimha Rao
seemed paralyzed; when the prime minister finally did act, he dismissed the
BJP government of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, and imposed
President's Rule. A week later, the governments of the remaining three
BJP-ruled states were dismissed. Advani and other Hindu-nationalist leaders
were arrested and charged with inciting the militants. The central
government also announced two-year bans on three Hindu communal
organizations--the RSS, VHP, and the fascistic Bajrang Dal--as well as two
Muslim fundamentalist groups. The president of the VHP vowed that any
government efforts to impede the construction of the new Ram temple would
result in "a confrontation of unimaginable magnitude."
As Hindu-Muslim antipathies intensify, India's secularism finds itself
increasingly challenged at every level of society, from the drawing rooms of
New Delhi intellectuals and the rising urban "consumer" middle class to the
ranks of saffron-clad VHP militants and the armed thugs of the Bajrang Dal
and the Shiv Sena. The challenge is to India as a secular state and to its
capacity to secure democracy, justice, and equality in a multicultural
society.
Majority Rule and Minority Rights
India's experience enables us to draw some conclusions about the democratic
management of ethnic and religious conflict:
* Democratic conflict management requires a substantive distribution of
power between the center and the periphery and among the various groups
within the country. A balance must be maintained between steps taken to
check tendencies toward the over centralization of political power and steps
taken to contain the centrifugal forces that can rip apart a multicultural
state.
* There is also a tension between the liberal emphasis on individual rights
and the assertion of group rights and identity, and the democratic polity
must find its way toward balance here as well.
* Historically, problems of ethnic and religious conflict in India have
eased when political and group leaders have sought to deal with them through
accommodation, bargaining, and the political process, and particularly when
the center has sought accommodation with minority groups. Problems tend to
get worse when the center intervenes directly to impose an outcome on a
group or region asserting its independent interests and identity. Force
alone has been unable to overcome separatist tendencies; if it is to be
successfully applied, it must be accompanied by political dialogue and
accommodation.
In every democracy, there is necessarily a tension between majority rule
and minority rights, yet the two are by the same token inextricably bound
together. Indeed, democracy is sustained because there is no single,
monolithic, and permanent majority, but rather a shifting series of ruling
coalitions made up of minorities. The minorities may reflect the
cross-cutting social cleavages and overlapping memberships that characterize
the idealized model of democratic pluralism, or else may form a mosaic of
distinct groups that define their identity in terms of one or more
attributes like religion, language, or caste. In either event, there must be
an underlying political culture of mutual respect and trust or, at a
minimum, a basic agreement on the rules of the political game among the
various groups themselves. Lacking such a consensus, one group, or perhaps a
coalition, may seek power and domination over others; if the center cannot
hold, the society may find itself torn apart by war and secession.
In India, in a political culture of mutual distrust and increasing
violence, the dangers are legion. India's democracy is challenged by
communalism, excessive caste consciousness, and separatism. But in the state
response to these challenges, India confronts yet another dilemma--weakening
the very values of individual liberty that are at the core of its democratic
commitment. In its attempts to quell endemic unrest and the challenge of
terrorism, India has enacted a plethora of laws that have become instruments
of repression; police and paramilitary abuses seem to get worse while all
sorts of other violations of human rights are reported with numbing
frequency. But for all the challenges, pressures, and dilemmas to which
India is exposed by virtue of its plight as a multicultural state, Indian
democracy, sustained through ten elections, still shows remarkable strength
and resilience.
NOTES
1. The growth of the BJP is reflected in its increase in seats in the Lok
Sabha, India's lower house of Parliament--from 2 seats won in 1984 (7.4
percent of the vote) to 85 seats (11.4 percent) in 1989, and, contesting
twice as many seats as in earlier elections, 119 seats (21 percent) in 1991.
2. For an extended discussion of these issue areas, with extensive
bibliographic references, see Robert L. Hardgrave, Jr. and Stanley A.
Kochanek, India: Government and Politics in a Developing Nation, 5th ed.
(Fort Worth, Texas: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), especially ch. 4, "The
Challenge of Federalism," 125-66, and ch. 5, "Arenas of Conflict: Groups in
Indian Politics," 167-215.
3. Provisions for designated "disturbed areas X permit arrest and detention
without trial for as long as two years; secret trials by special tribunals;
and wide powers of censorship. For a discussion of the array of such laws,
see ibid., 209-12.
4. The 1988 Sarkaria Commission Report on Center-State Relations made a
number of recommendations that would enhance "cooperative federalism," but
its measured proposals have been largely ignored.
