There are indications that the communal violence that has continued to be more or less endemic to the cities and town of ‘western India’ (Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Meerut, Surat, Aurangabad, Baroda, Aligarh) has also begun to occur with increasing frequency in some of the main urban centres of the South and the Gangetic plains, for the same underlying causes, and in almost identical fashion. Continuing Language-Base Discrimination
The Urdu-Hindi language dispute is a persistent language-related problem in India to which devolution has not found an answer. Urdu, the language of the Muslim elite in several areas of pre-partition India, and one to which the British had accorded an official status similar or even superior to that of Hindi, still remains the preferred language of an estimated 50-60% of the Muslim segment of India’s population. This makes it one of the largest minority languages of India. Though Urdu was granted constitutional recognition as one of India’s official languages, for many years after independence there remained a strong resistance among the Hindus to the idea of placing Urdu at par with the other officially recognised languages of the country.
‘State re-organisation’ on the basis of language has also been criticised on the grounds of its shortfall in achieving the objective of reducing the numerical size of linguistic minorities at the level of the states. In this context, critics have presented various sets of data (such as those tabulated above) to show that in many States there are fairly large minority groups whose languages are not used in the affairs of government. Implicit in this is the idea that there persists in India considerable discrimination against the smaller linguistic minorities. The validity of this criticism, however, has necessarily to be gauged against the backdrop of the fact that such un-accommodated linguistic minorities constitute a lower population ratio than ever before – probably no more than about 17% of the country’s total.The Marginalised Muslim Minority
The Muslims, the largest religious minority of India, constitute about 12% of the country’s population. Though spread throughout the country, about 52% of the Indian Muslims live in the ‘Gangetic’ States of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal. Outside this area, fairly large Muslim concentrations are found in parts of Gujarat, Maharashtra and Kerala (western Deccan), Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh (especially in areas of the former princely states of Hyderabad and Mysore), Tamil Nadu, Jammu & Kashmir, and Assam. In many of the larger cities of the north the Muslim population ratio exceeds 20%. These include Sri Nagar (91.0%), Hyderabad (38.0%), Lucknow (29.6%), Varanasi (25.9%), Allahabad (23.9%), and Kanpur (20.2%). In metropolitan Calcutta, Mumbai and Delhi it approximates 15%. Aggravating Hindu-Muslim conflict, featured as it is by intensifying religious fanaticism on both sides of the great divide, is probably the biggest blot in the record of performance of the Indian political system. Neither devolution (in the case of the Muslim-majority State of J&K) nor other forms of consociational power-sharing have been effective in safeguarding the rights of the Muslims and reversing the escalating trend of Hindu-Muslim rivalry.
The Muslims see themselves as an economically disadvantaged and socially discriminated minority emphasising their relatively lower level of literacy and educational attainment and their under-representation in both public sector employment as well as high-income professional fields. It has also been pointed out that, of the 3,062 recruits to the elite Indian Administrative Services from 1948 to 1982, Muslims have accounted for only 1.7% (Beg, 1989:121); and, according to estimates furnished by the Minorities Commission of India, Muslims constitute only 4.4% of the total central government employees at all levels throughout the country. Information generated by surveys of more restricted scope provides further confirmation of the impression that, at least is some of the main Muslim population concentrations of north India, the average household incomes of the Muslims are lower than those of the Hindus, and that the large majority of Muslims are confined to low income occupations. According to Rudolph & Rudolph (1987: 43): “[i]n Maharashtra and Gujarat where there are large local concentrations of mostly poor Muslims, communal violence has become endemic as a result of struggles between Hindus and Muslims over reservations, employment, property and business opportunities” . Yet another facet of economic discrimination is found in the fact that the poorest among the Muslims have been denied many of the benefits of ‘affirmative action’ (the most widely acclaimed form of consociational power-sharing in India) made available in the form of “reservations” to the depressed segments of the Hindu population (‘Other Backward Castes’ and ‘Scheduled Castes’) and to the ‘Scheduled Tribes’.
There have been periodic oscillations in the incidence and intensity of violence associated with Hindu-Muslim rivalry in India. Following the great convulsions that accompanied the partition of British India in 1947, the trend throughout the 1950s was one of steady decline in the occurrence of these “communal” clashes. In the next decade there was, first, the sharp spurt of 1964 which coincided with the ‘Hazrat Bal’ incident, followed by a dip, and then another upsurge which lasted from 1969 until about 1972. Thereafter, the rate remained relatively low almost up to the end of that decade. In the 1980s, there was, once again, an increase which accelerated sharply from 1986 until about 1994. It was at this time (December 1992) that the infamous destruction of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya by the exponents of the ‘Ramjanmabhoomi’ Movement occurred. The number killed in communal confrontations of the 1980s, according to Hasan (1996), was almost four times higher than that of the 1970s. From the mid-1990s, with fundamentalist groups like the ‘Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’ (RSS) and the ‘Vishwa Hindu Parishad’ (VHP) emerging at the forefront of Indian politics, and with the spread of the concept of an all-Indian ‘Hinduthva’ even at its highest levels, there has been an oscillating but fairly distinct long-term trend towards further deterioration of Hindu-Muslim relations in areas where there are large agglomerations of the latter group.
There are indications that the communal violence that has continued to be more or less endemic to the cities and town of ‘western India’ (Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Meerut, Surat, Aurangabad, Baroda, Aligarh) has also begun to occur with increasing frequency in some of the main urban centres of the South and the Gangetic plains, for the same underlying causes, and in almost identical fashion. At the time of these convulsions formal law enforcement has often been perfunctory. More significantly, even in normal times, many aspects of daily ghetto life remain under the control of criminal syndicates with a multiplicity of interests including protection and extortion rackets, smuggling and drug trafficking, land grabbing and other shady transactions in the real estate market, and the control of trade union activities. In the larger cities, in particular, regimentation of daily life through the exercise of muscle-power is the norm among slum dwellers, as organised mob-violence is in electoral politics. Indeed, several Indian scholars (not the types that sermonise to adoring audiences in less enlightened countries like Sri Lanka) have exposed the links that exist between politicians, the police and the gangland bosses in the phenomenon frequently referred to as ‘criminalisation of politics’ in their country.
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Part 04
To be continued….
The writer is Professor Emeritus, University of Peradeniya .If you have any comments on this serious of articles please send editorazad@gmail.com.
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