BOOKS: LI VI NG DANGEROUSLY
Living as a Muslim in postcolonial India has been, and remains, a tough business. Two new books suggest that the burgeoning fears—caused in no small part by New Delhi’s latest rulers—of the Republic’s largest minority appear to be well-founded. One attempts to suss out the causes of riots, and the other, the responses of civil society in their aftermath.
In Everyday Communalism, the authors make the case for a new kind of religious mobilisation. As witnessed in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP and RSS are no longer interested in firing up major riots as they once did in the ’80s and ’90s, they contend. In its place, the Hindu nationalists have evolved a new formula that is equally potent at the hustings: low-key antagonism between Hindus and Muslims that keeps the ‘pot boiling’—which sometimes spills into bigger riots with the complicity of the Samajwadi Party, whose chief ministers have presided over the worst riots in the state since 2000; their Machiavellian hopes rested on the understanding that Muslims, scared witless post-riot, would return to the fold of their ‘secular’ party—and the promise of economic development. The first third of the book convincingly presents its reworking of Paul Brass’s ‘institutionalised riot system’—the idea that sleeper cells exist in towns, which, when activated, commence riots—not without some ahistorical romanticisation: the Nehru years are depicted as a golden age in which bloomed a ‘syncretic’, ‘composite social culture’ ignoring the killing fields of Hyderabad that left 27,000 Muslims dead and the Congress hegemony that put Muslim parties in extremis. Another risible claim is that before the rise of the BJP, ‘religious identity’ was left out of elections because of the ‘essentially democratic and secular method of mobilisation by political parties’.
The next two sections deal with eastern and western UP, respectively. Here, the authors discern variations on the theme of ‘everyday communalism’: in eastern UP, its roots lie primarily in the activities of the rabble-rouser cleric, Yogi Adityanath, and his stormtroopers, the Hindu Yuva Vahini, with the collapse of a number of industries and its attendant miseries playing an ancillary role. At the other end of the state, the accent is on economic factors. Discontented Jats, faced with ‘agrarian decline’, look upon their prosperous Muslim neighbours in non-agricultural jobs with jealousy, we are told. All that is required for a riot to begin is a little push, which, often enough, local BJP leaders deftly provide. Sudha Pai and Sajjan Kumar lend a lot of explanatory weight to ‘jealousies’ and ‘frustrations’, often in contradictory ways: Muslim wealth causes feelings of the former among Hindus, who lash out at the minority; Muslim poverty breeds the latter making them resent the majority. Not only do these loose terms make for poor political science, they often allow the authors to slip into essentialism: the very presence of ‘Muslims and madrasas’ is sometimes seen as reason enough to set in motion a chain of events that culminate in riots. The authors are far more convincing when they look for the origins of everyday communalism in Hindu mobilisation, the decline of ‘secular’ kulak politics and the retrenchment of the state.
These notions form the premise of Working with Muslims. Identifying the roots of Muslim poverty in the failure of the redistributive state allows author Farah Naqvi to cut to the chase. Thus, ‘inequality’ and ‘sexual harassment’ are broached in no uncertain terms—in contrast, Pai and Kumar prevaricate with ‘the process of differentiation’ and ‘eve teasing’. In her study of 373 NGOs that work with Muslims across 105 districts in 10 states, Naqvi sees as Muslim interests not ascriptive concerns such as personal law, triple talaq or the burqa, but instead the ones flagged by the Sachar Report of 2006: access to jobs, education and capital. The profiles of the 30 NGOs that make up the bulk of the book highlight the improving conditions on the ground, but when one steps back from Naqvi’s pointillism, what remains is a bleak picture of a minority community trying to push back the surging waves of majoritarianism armed with little more than a diminishing supply of civil society bodies, legal guarantees and pietistic sympathies.