Majorities, Minorities and Separatist Movements in India

Source: Sanjib Baruah October 2007

Once a paper with this title could have started with a summary of India’s linguistic and religious diversity backed up by a table or two of official population statistics showing various majority-minority configurations. Today many readers would find that unsatisfactory. Most contemporary students of the subject subscribe to some kind of a constructivist position vis-à-vis identities: that they are ‘ultimately fluid, chosen, instrumentalizable, responsive to change in relevant incentive structures, and susceptible to manipulation by cultural or political entrepreneurs’ (Lustick et al. 2004: 213). Accounts that do not ask how particular ethnic or national categories come into being and, why and how at certain times and places, people from being indifferent to nationality or ethnicity are suddenly ‘overcome by nationhood’ (Slavenka Drakulic cited in Brubaker, 1996: 20) or by some form of identity-centric politics are no longer convincing. Since Bernard Cohn’s influential work (Cohn 1987), historians of India have come to see the importance of the census in shaping understandings of caste, tribe, language and religion at a time when the modern politics of numbers began in the subcontinent. Thus when the census of 1881 revealed that Muslims constituted a majority in Bengal, it came as a surprise to British colonial officials as well as to the inhabitants of Bengal. This had momentous consequences for the future politics of Bengal: East Bengal eventually became East Pakistan and subsequently, the independent country of Bangladesh. This new understanding of Bengal consisting of majority and minority communities was the product of what Benedict Anderson calls the ‘the fiction of the census’ that ‘everyone is in it, and that everyone has one—and only one—extremely clear place. No fractions’ (Anderson 1991) Some scholars now see the notion of a majority not as an objective ground reality, but as the invention of a majoritarian discourse that might involve stigmatizing those that are constructed as minorities (Gladney, 1998). Keeping these theoretical caveats in mind, it is fair to say that India has many politically salient majority-minority configurations – that is groups divided along lines of language, religion, caste and ‘tribe,’ pitted against each other as majorities and minorities. Many of these configurations are region-specific. It would be impossible to include them all within the scope of a single paper. Let me therefore take a cue from the latter part of the title assigned to me – separatist movements – and try to limit the focus of the paper. Perhaps independentist would be a more neutral term than separatist, given the latter’s explicit bias in favor of official state nationalism.1 Such movements are part of a general category

2of movements that are best described as ethnonational: they may be independentist or separatist in some cases, and not in others. The major cases of India’s ethnonational movements are well-known – Kashmir, Punjab, those in Northeast India and the Tamil/Dravidian case of an earlier era. Since non-dominant status is part of the standard meaning associated with the term minority, there is perhaps a connection between that and the political urge for separatism. But it is hard to neatly label all ‘separatist’ movements as confrontations between a minority and a majority. In the context of contemporary India, a focus on ‘separatist’ movements creates another serious difficulty: it would leave out the most important case of majority-minority relations, that between India’s Hindu majority and the largest religious minority – the Muslims. There has not been a ‘separatist’ movement among Muslims in India since the blood-soaked separation of 1947 – i.e., the Partition of the subcontinent. But Hindu-Muslim relations remain the most potent majority-minority issue in the politics of postcolonial India, as it was in the undivided India of colonial times. Indeed when the words majority and minority are used in India without any qualifier, they invariably refer to these ascribed religious solidarities. An important aspect of the politics of majorities and minorities in South Asia is that religion and language compete with each other for primacy as the principal cleavage making claims on the hearts and minds of people. In that sense the Indian material suggests that language is ‘not necessarily the primary form of ethnic affiliation or . . . is not necessarily the central affiliation, symbol, or basis for the expression of political demands’ (Brass, 2004: 354). This challenges the ‘glotto-centric’ (Conversi 2002: 7) view of nations and nationalism associated in particular with the work of Ernest Gellner (1983). Nationalism that appeals to religion-based solidarities has played a powerful role in the modern history of the subcontinent. Rather than theories that privilege the connection between language and nationalism, the South Asian experience illustrates that the politics of nationalism is the struggle – impossible to achieve completely – of establishing multi-symbol congruence within a constructed community. The nation-constructing process . . . begins with a single central symbol, which may be either language or religion or colour or any other cultural or ethnic marker, whichever serves simultaneously to separate one group from another and is at the same time politically convenient (Brass, 2004: 354). Whether language or religion is salient has also varied across regions: in north India ‘religiopolitical identification overrode language identification’ and a multiplicity of language/dialects/mother tongues were absorbed by either Hindi or Urdu as the two languages began to iconicize two different constructions of the nation. (Brass, 2004: 366). When religion has been the primary line of cleavage, political elites while seeking to ‘advance the interests of their religious communities,’ have made language into a ‘symbolic barrier’ even when it was not really a barrier to communication (Brass 1974: 22, 27). In south India on the other hand, the Tamil movement absorbed Hindus, Muslims and Christians, as long as Tamil was acknowledged as mother tongue (Brass, 2004: 366). In the rest of this paper I shall first deal with the question of religious minorities in post-partition India. I shall then move on to an analysis of the Indian record of dealing with

ethnonational movements. I discuss the constitutional tools available to deal with them, and the model of de facto linguistic states—the major element in India’s institutional response to ethnonational movements. I then offer a critique of the argument that India’s particular form of federalism has been good for managing the challenge of separatism, and that India should be seen as a success story. In the conclusion I discuss the relevance of post-sovereignist ideas to the challenges of separatism. II. After Partition: Religion-based Majority and Minorities Recent historians of South Asia have struggled with the remarkable fact that ‘the single most important event in the history of the twentieth century’ – the Partition — gets marginalized in a historiography where either ‘the story of the British Empire in India’ or ‘the career of the Indian nation-state’ dominates (Gyan Pandey, cited in Jalal, 1996). One of its consequences is that ‘explanations of why the subcontinent came to be partitioned had long remained trapped within the rival paradigms of the “two-nation” theory lauded on the Pakistani side of the divide and the “secular/composite nationalist” world view hailed in India.’ And historians continue to present ‘the political differences between the Congress and the Muslim League as a simple battle between the noble ideal of “secularism” and the nefarious construct of “communalism”’ (Jalal, 1996). That in the everyday politics of postcolonial India the word ‘communalism’ – with its highly negative connotations – has such resonance is hardly accidental. It refers to any overt attempt at political mobilization along religious lines. Yet the religion-politics mix is the daily fare of Indian politics, and hardly the exclusive domain of ‘communal’ political forces. That along with the ‘communal’ riots that flare up from time to time is probably the most important majority-minority story of postcolonial India. Two of postcolonial India’s major ethonational challenges – Kashmir and Punjab – bear the burden of the Partition. Pakistan’s support for the Kashmiri rebellion flows from its foundational national ideology of Hindus and Muslims of the subcontinent constituting separate nations. Just as powerful is the ideological imperative for India to hold on to Kashmir. Given its historical roots on the partition of 1947, the future of India’s only Muslim-majority state is the ultimate test of the success of India’s secular nationalist project (Varshney 1992). The Partition is implicated in the Punjab crisis as well because of the way linguistic self-identifications changed in the region as religion-based solidarities became more important. Of the three religions communities of pre-partition Punjab, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, more than half the total population were Muslims. But in postcolonial South Asia they rarely represent themselves as Punjabis. Instead they identify themselves as Pakistanis and as speakers of Urdu — Pakistan’s national language. Punjabi Hindus too deserted the cause of Punjabiyat (Jodhka 2006: 13) and today they mostly identify as Hindi speakers and are on the forefront of Indian nationalism — both in its secular and Hindu variants. Thus in a diminished post-Partition Punjab, it was left to the Sikhs to carry the mantle of Punjabiyat. Like Kashmir, Indian attitudes toward this conflation between Punjabi and Sikh ethnonationalism cannot be separated from the history of the Partition and the historically constituted identity of the postcolonial Indian state.

Following the Partition, the Indian Constitution adopted universal suffrage and rejected the colonial-era ‘communal’ electorates, making the constitution fundamentally majoritarian (Adeney 2003). The debates in the Indian Constituent Assembly on the question of religious minorities were ‘filled with anxieties’ (Mohapatra 2002: 189). To independent India’s pre-eminent leader Jawaharal Nehru, India ‘was an historic unity, based on traditions of toleration, incorporation and assimilation.’ While this view is consistent with some mechanisms for protecting minority rights, it does not accommodate institutional mechanisms of power sharing (Adeney 2003). The primary means by which the Indian Constitution protects the rights of religious minorities therefore are the principles of non-discrimination and the equal treatment of all citizens. Article 15 (1) says that, ‘the State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them.’ Another article specifies that the principle of non-discrimination applies to employment or office under state. ‘All minorities’ – i.e. including those based on religion – also have the right to establish and run educational institutions of their choice (Mohapatra 2002: 173-75). The Indian Constitution’s ethos is unmistakably secular, though rather than being premised on the separation of religion from public life, Indian secularism emphasizes equal distance from, and equal respect to, all religions. However, the word secular was formally inserted into the preamble of the Constitution through a Constitutional amendment only in 1976. India’s equal-respect, equal-distance form of secularism, far from being anything like a civic religion, is an embattled idea in Indian politics, as illustrated by the Hindu right charge that the Congress party and its left-liberal allies are ‘pseudo-secularists’ – a reference to their alleged ‘appeasement’ of religious minorities in order to secure electoral advantage. Whatever the promise of the Constitution, Indians can hardy take pride in the actual condition of religion minorities in postcolonial India. ‘Even the track record of the Indian State’s responsibility for protecting the lives of the minorities,’ writes Bishnu Mohapatra, ‘is, to put it mildly, not satisfactory. The increasing amount of communal violence in the last decades in India in which minority groups suffer the most cannot be explained away in terms of the rise of general violence in the country.’ For religious minorities in India, security concerns, he writes, have ‘remained and continues to be at the top of the agenda’ (Mohapatra 2002: 188-89). One does not need to go beyond some of the major recent episodes of ‘communal’ violence to understand the sources of insecurity of Indian Muslims. In 1992, right-wing Hindu extremists demolished the sixteenth-century Babri Mosque; thousands died in the Hindu–Muslim riots that followed. More recently in 2002 Hindu mobs killed over two thousand Muslims and left nearly two hundred thousand people homeless in Gujarat. The ‘genocidal violence’ of Gujarat in 2002 is at the core of philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s recent book on Indian democracy. Contrary to the standard beliefs about the sources of religious extremism in the world today, attributable largely to the influence of Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilization thesis, what the Gujarat story brings home, she warns, is that the real clash is ‘within virtually all modern nations —between people who are prepared to live with others who are different, on terms of equal respect, and those who

5seek the… domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition’ (Nussbaum 2007). In my conclusion I shall return to Nussbaum’s reflections on the violence in Gujarat and on the health of Indian democracy. Muslims are not the only religious minority to suffer insecurity. The violence against Sikhs following the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, and the failure of the legal-political system to bring the perpetrators to justice till now speak volumes about the failures of the Indian political system on this front. This despite Indian secularism’s other notable successes as reflected in having a Sikh as prime minister and Muslims in various important positions, including currently as the country’s Vice President. III. Dealing with ethonational movements: The Indian Record India is often praised for accommodating through its democratic institutions, the political challenge of separatism. However, ethnonational movements in India have from time to time turned into violent confrontations between militants and the state for extended periods, which has led, in turn to giving Indian democracy certain authoritarian trappings, albeit localized, and resulting in major blots on India’s human rights record. Ethnonational movements in India, says Atul Kohli, have followed an inverse ‘U’ curve. Heightened mobilization of group identities are followed by negotiations, and eventually such movements decline ‘as exhaustion sets in, some leaders are repressed, others are co-opted, and a modicum of genuine power sharing and mutual accommodation between the movement and the central state authorities is reached.’ Whether particular movements have gone through this inverse ‘U’ curve, according to him, has been a function of the level of institutionalization of the authority of the state and whether leaders have been secure enough to seek accommodation and compromise. The different trajectories of the Tamil, Sikh and Kashmiri movements — the first one being accommodated, and the latter two turning into violent confrontations –says Kohli, is the result of changes in the level of institutionalization of the Indian state, and the sense of security that leaders at the helm have felt (Kohli 1997: 326-29). The accommodation of the potentially independentist Tamil or rather the Dravidian movement — Kohli’s first case – continues to inspire writings that portray India as a success story in managing the challenge of separatism. Indeed its achievement becomes particularly striking today when contrasted with the fate of Tamil separatism in neighboring Sri Lanka. As Alfred Stepan and his colleagues remind us, Tamil separatism was a non-issue in Sri Lanka in the 1940s, yet today it is one of the world’s most violent and intractable conflicts. In India, by contrast, while Tamil aspiration for independence was a serious challenge in 1960s, it became a non-issue by the 1970s. They explain the difference as follows: Virtually all the strategic decisions facing multinational India, the rejection of a unitary state, the acceptance of multiple but complementary political identities, the upgrading of regional languages and the maintenance of English as a link language, the maintenance of polity-wide careers, the constitutional espousal of ‘equal distance and respect’ for all religions, and

he creation of mutually beneficial alliances between polity-wide and regional parties, India, unlike Sri Lanka, made choices and alliances, especially in South India, that . . . increased the chances of peaceful democracy in a potentially conflictual setting (Stepan et al, 2007: 93-94). This particular reading that a number of strategic decisions that India made has enabled it to manage its ‘multinational’ polity relatively well, rests on a selective reading of the record. Is Indian federalism really able to accommodate ‘multiple and complementary political identities’? I have already referred to the troubles of Indian secularism, and the insecurities of religious minorities. That the casual outside observer would be impressed by India’s numerous official languages is not surprising, especially since in large parts of the globe the nation-state with a single official language is still the norm. However, the critical question is whether these policies meet the actual challenges that India faces. These are all highly contested issues not just among academics — these differences are played out in the political realm in India almost every day. Scholars do not all agree on how the accommodation of the Dravidian movement was achieved. For Narendra Subramanian the reasons have less to do with the system-wide properties of the Indian polity than to factors specific to the movement (Subramanian 1999) – a persuasive alternative explanation of how Dravidian ethnonationalism ceased to be separatist. The best one can say about India’s record of dealing with ethonational movements, as with the protection of the rights of religious minorities, is that it is highly uneven. A particularly damning assessment is made by Gurharpal Singh in his study of Sikh separatism. ‘India’s accomplishments, he writes, are often ‘articulated in metaphors and clichés such as ‘unity-in-diversity,’ ‘nation-in the making’; sometimes it is even elevated to the level of civilizational uniqueness.’ This picture, he says, is a-historical. For, to start with, it ignores the foundational event of the modern Indian state: the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 that created ‘an overwhelmingly Hindu India.’ Post-partition India, argues Singh, is best described as an ‘ethnic democracy’—a concept originally used to describe Israel–where Hinduism functions as a ‘meta-ethnicity’ and a ‘civic religion.’ While there are political and civil rights for individual citizens and collective rights for minority groups, there is at the same time ‘institutionalized dominance over the state’ by one group. The persistence of ethnonational movements in certain ‘peripheral states’ and the fact that efforts to manage them ‘have cost tens of thousands of lives and have tied down almost half of India’s security forces,’ writes Singh, bears testimony to the ‘hegemonic control over ethnic minorities’ (Singh, 2000, 2003). Some parts of Singh’s argument, notably his concept of peripheral states, are open to criticism (Chadda 2003). On the other hand, that a study focused on Sikh ethnonationalism would produce such a negative assessment of the Indian experience is not surprising. The movement for an independent Khalistan ended not with a political settlement, but a successful counter-insurgency campaign that killed thousands of Sikh rebels–-actual and suspected–and their sympathizers. Between 35,000 and 70,000 people were victims of the troubles in Punjab. Human Rights groups have documented political killings, enforced disappearances, torture, arbitrary arrests, unlawful detentions and secret cremations of victims (Kumar 2003). An Indian activist describes the

condition in post-Sikh militancy Punjab not as peace, but as the silence of the graveyard (T. Bose 2003). Nor is the Sikh movement alone among ethnonational movements in India to suffer state violence on such a scale. In Kashmir an independentist insurgency has been raging on for seventeen years and it has claimed more than 40,000 lives. Earlier this year the government owned up to some cases of ‘fake encounters’— the execution of alleged militants by security forces and then passing them of as deaths as the result of an armed encounter. While ‘the government’s acquisition of a conscience’ about such abuses, as the Economist reported in February 2007, is ‘progress of a sort,’ yet ‘justice has yet to be done, and a culture of impunity among the 600,000 Indian soldiers and police in Kashmir lingers’ (Economist 2007). Human rights groups accuse Indian security forces of such behavior in India’s other ethonational trouble-spots as well. Arguably, in terms of citizen’s rights, conditions in those areas are often worse than what India as a whole experienced for eighteen months during the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi in the 1970s, which receives much attention among political scientists studying India. In Northeast India, for instance, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) that provides the legal framework for counter-insurgency operations against independentist rebels include provisions such as: the power of the security forces to make preventive arrests and search premises without warrant, to shoot and kill civilians; and effective legal immunity of soldiers implicated in such actions –court proceedings being made contingent on the central government’s prior approval (Government of India, 1958). The Human Rights Committee established under the International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR] of which India is a signatory, is critical of AFSPA for India does not submit its use of emergency powers, to the international monitoring procedures spelt out by the ICCPR (United Nations 1997). India rejects this interpretation of the AFSPA regime: the Indian Supreme Court takes the position that AFSPA “does not displace the civil power of the state by armed forces” and does not make use of the Emergency powers of the Indian Constitution (cited in Amnesty International 2005). India has steadfastly resisted any international attempt at monitoring the AFSPA regime. It is about to enter its sixth decade – making it almost as old as Indian democracy