On Muslims, UPA has bad answers

Moreover since Independence, there has not been any form of genuine Muslim politics. The space for creating such a politics has been closed. Externally, the terms of Muslim inclusion in Indian politics have been circumscribed by the dominant political configuration of the moment. Initially, this took the form of Congress’ desire that Muslims remain a supplicant minority, dependent upon Congress’ benevolence. So it was always necessary for Congress to create circumstances that emphasised their separation rather than integration: witness what Congress did to ensure that Muslims were not educated in common institutions. For years the state would rather fund religious madarsas than secular Urdu-medium schools. Then, Hindutva forces effectively closed off space for a meaningful Muslim politics. Internally, few Muslim political leaders have had the imagination to create a space to do justice to the diverse needs of the community without succumbing to extremism or a politics of tokenism.

What is it that has led Muslims to be less than full participants in India’s common political life? What is it that allowed Hindutva to gather such political fervor? What has led them down a path where they remain deprived in many respects? This is a complex question, but one central element of an answer is this. The state’s approach to the development of Muslims has been premised on one fallacious assumption: that the best way of serving the interests of Muslims is to target them as Muslims. Almost six decades after Independence, after the impoverishment of Muslims these policies have produced, after the blood strewn politics this approach spawned, it is time to question this assumption. Muslims in India will be far safer and more empowered, not when we, at every step, heighten the consciousness of majorities and minorities as separate groups, to whom flows of funds be audited and represented separately. Rather, Muslims will be better served when the distinction between majority and minority becomes irrelevant to participation in public life and institutions.

Of course, Hindus and Muslims will have different vestments in their identities; but the whole point of our constitutional project is to make these vestments less salient for participation in the modern economy and politics. Everything that the UPA is proposing with respect to Muslims, from reservations to separate auditing, is retrograde with respect to this ambition. Of course, Muslims need to be given access to greater opportunities, but both moral principle and political prudence suggest that there is no reason to structure these opportunities for them qua Muslims. The politics of token representation will do nothing to address the well-being of those Muslims whose needs are urgent. If we figure out a way of creating an education revolution in UP and Bihar, if we can address the problems of public services in urban slums, poor Muslims will automatically benefit. Reservation has never been an effective anti-poverty measure. Genuine opportunities for Muslims will not come from ghettoising them into third-rate institutions we designate as minority; it will come from preparing them for participating in general institutions of excellence.

A Congress government, with merely 145 seats, is threatening to undo a wise constitutional consensus that marked Indian politics by introducing reservations along religious lines. This will only heighten competition within religious groups for concessions from the state. Neither the majority nor minority will be secure if religious competition intensifies. Rather, this competition has to be defused and the only way to do so is to refuse to make religion an axis along which rights, privileges and public provision is allocated. Gujarat may have created a revulsion against aspects of Hindutva politics, but the Congress is gambling too much with history, too much with the lives of innocent people, if it is complacent about the backlash its own brand of political division will generate.

The prime minister has many virtues. But he is letting the insidious poison of reservation politics, and division along religious lines, dominate the political agenda, as if it were an inconsequential technicality. What will remain of the PM’s authority if extremists like Arjun Singh are allowed to sacrifice the long-term interests of the nation for some warped notion of expedience? It would be hugely disappointing if his premiership was judged by history to create the very conditions for the revival of Hindutva that Congress politics in the ’80s did.