Majoritarianism is never inclusive
The post-colonial tradition of the Indian subcontinent has been one of religious and ethnic majorities ganging up against the minorities.
In Sri Lanka, the mostly Buddhist Sinhala speakers fought Lanka’s Tamils over religion and language. In India we wonder how Buddhists and Hindus can hate each other but that is the nature of majoritarianism. It always finds an enemy. The Lanka civil war lasted over a quarter century and killed one lakh people, including several Lankan leaders and former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. It ended with a horrific attack on camps that included civilians. In Bangladesh, the initial nationalism was based on language and unified Bengali Muslims and Hindus against West Pakistan’s militarism and imposition of Urdu.
The violence the resistance produced expelled the West Pakistan Army with the help of India in 1971. Unfortunately, one aspect of Bangladeshi nationalism then became religious. Attempts were made and continue to be made to Islamise the Constitution. The division of the polity has become “secular” versus “communal”. Secular in this case means the Muslim party that wants to accommodate Hindus and communal is the Muslim party that sides with the religious extremists like the Jamaat e Islami. In Pakistan, the initial majoritarianism was sought to be curbed by Jinnah. With the Punjabi Muslims of Lahore refusing to accept North Indian Muslim refugees coming from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, these families settled in Karachi. Violence began against the urban and welloff Hindu population of that city, whom we know today as our Sindhis. Jinnah made a few speeches that first attempted to stop the Hindus from leaving, because he wanted minorities to remain. But he was overwhelmed by the violence and gave up trying to stop the Sindhis from migrating, blaming India for his problems.
Jinnah had made a famous speech a few days before Independence in which he indicated that he wanted a secular Constitution. Jinnah said that the State should not recognise the citizen based on religion and stressed equality under the law.
Under Ayub Khan in the 1960s it was written that no non-Muslim could be Pakistan’s president. Under Z.A. Bhutto in the 1970s, a law came that banned nonMuslims from the post of Prime Minister.
Under Zia ul Haq in the 1980s came a flurry of Islamic laws, including whipping people for drinking alcohol, putting rape victims in jail if they could not prove the crime, and allowing murderers to escape if they paid the victim’s family blood money. In the 1990s the then Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif attempted to pass an Islamic law, the infamous 15th amendment that would make him a permanent ruler. Such fervour also touched the rest of the polity.
A little later, Pakistan’s Supreme Court banned banks from charging interest saying it was unIslamic. Mr Sharif was removed from office recently and banned permanently from politics by the Supreme Court. It used a law that specifies that leaders should be “good Muslims”. India was fortunate to be led for the first few decades by a party, Nehru’s Congress, that was inclusive. Our Constitution has some upper caste Hindu majoritarian aspects, particularly in its Part IV, the directive principles.
Today India’s Prime Minister tells the world that he has given more respect to Ambedkar than Congress. But the fact is that it was the Congress that gave Ambedkar the position in the Constituent Assembly and the Cabinet, despite his losing elections. Despite having a two-thirds majority, Nehru also accommodated S.P. Mookerjee, the Jana Sangh leader.
The first few decades of Congress rule hid the fact that we Indians are also like our brothers in Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan. We have a majoritarian instinct that is powerful and that is today asserting itself against the minority.
I don’t have to demonstrate what I mean. One look at any day’s newspapers will produce the evidence. The claim of the Hindutva leaders and intellectuals is that our majoritarianism is reactive and not proactive. The claim is that what we are doing is justified and it is not the same thing as was being done and is being done in the rest of South Asia. But of course there is no difference. The writer is a columnist and executive director of Amnesty International (India)