Communalism in Secular India: Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer

Communalism in

Secular India

A Minority Perspective

A new book written by Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer

This is a collection of essay on various issues concerning communalism and challenges to secular India. The problems have been viewed here from a minority perspective, especially of the Muslims.

It is hoped that these essays will create proper consciousness among the readers and help us realize our constitutional ideas. Our politicians are obsessed with power, not with the people’s problems. In democracy only the peoples can force them to give attention to their burning problems and this can happen when the people become conscious of the games the political leaders play. We have been engaged in this struggle for the last several decades and it is an ongoing battle which will have to be carried out by both spoken and written words.

CONTENTS

SECTION ONE GENERAL

1. Our Independence and After: A Critical review

2. Future of Inter-Religious And Inter-Cultural Relations

3. On Theories of Peace and Conflict Resolution

4. Sufism: Its Origin and Impact on Indian Islam

5. Fatwas, their Acceptability and their Relevance

6. Danish Cartoons And Muslims

7. Premchand and Composite Culture

8. They Too Fought for Freedom: Role of Minorities in Freedom Struggle

SECTION TWO: RELIGION, IDENTITY, OTHER ISSUES

9. Other World is Possible: What Role Religion Can Play?

10. Identity in A Multi-religious Society

11. Identity and Development in Democracy

12. Indian Muslims: Problems and Paradoxes

13. Women’s Plight in Muslim Society

14. Communal Violence and Minority-Majority Relations

15. Indian Muslims: Reservation or No Reservation?

SECTION THREE: SECULARISM, COMMUNALISM

16. Secularism in India

17. Communal Politics: Climax and Down Fall

18. Future of Communal Relations in India

19. Psychology of Communalism and Communal Violence

20. Kashmiri Youth and Prospects of Peace

21. Jinnah: How much Secular, How much Communal

22. Aligarh Muslim University and The Court Judgment

23. National Integration Council: Is it a Useful Institution?

24. NCERT’s New History Syllabus

25. BJP’s Silver Jubilee: An Assessment

26. On the Cause of Terror Bombing

27. Muslims and Terrorism

28. London Bombings: Violence and Islam

29. Bomb Blasts in Mumbai: Crossing the Limits

30. Malegaon Blasts: Partisan Approach and Biased Police

31. And Now Terrorist Attack in Malegoan: What is the Way Out?

32. Shiv Sena’s Rioting on Black Sunday

33. Vajpayee and the Gujarat carnage

34. They Hate Us, We fear Them: The Situation in Gujarat

35. Gujarat on Fire Again

36. Communal Riots, 2005

37. Communal Riots, 2006

38. Police and Minorities: Will new Policies Help?

39. Representation of Muslims in Police Force And Communal Riots

Total Pages: 250

Price: INR.595/-

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Hope India Publications

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Communalism: Illustrated Primer: Ram Puniyani

Communalism: Illustrated Primer

Author: Ram Puniyani

This book deals with the phenomenon of sectarian violence and politics in a very lucid manner. The phenomenon of communalism has come as a major threat to our democracy in current times. This phenomenon is also breaking our plural values and inter - community amity.

Contents-
Babri Demolition, Post babri Violence, Godhra, Gujarat Carnage, Citizens Tribunal report, India's syncretic traditions, mixed heritage, Rise and growth of Communalism, Values of India's Freedom movement, Gandhi, Muslim and Hindu communalism, Doctoring mass consciousness, Hindutva, RSS and exploited sections of society, Tasks for Secular Movement, Vande Matram controvery, Ram Setu or Adams bridge, Terrorism, Civilizations, clash or alliance.

The book is in the form of brief answers to the prevalent myths in a very simple style. It is richly illustrated with pictures, cartoons and tables. It gives a comprehensive view of the problem of communalism as being faced by the nation. A must read for all concerned with defense of democratic and secular

Publisher: Mumbai Sarvodaya Friendship Center, Mulund, Mumbai

(Also available in Hindi & Marathi)

Pages 128, Contribution Rs. 60/-

Available from:

Ram Puniyani, 1102/5 MHADA Deluxe, Rambaug Powai, Mumbai 400076

Fighting Fascism in Gujarat: Yoginder Sikand

Title: Fighting Fascism in Gujarat: Social Activists Speak Out
By Yoginder Sikand
ISBN: 81-88869-19-8
Publisher: Global Media Publications (www.gmpublications.com)
Price Rs 300 (India), Elsewhere US$ 20/-

buy this book

About the Book
Much has been written about the state-sponsored carnage directed against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 that took a toll of several thousand lives and resulted in the destruction of property worth hundreds of crores of rupees. The victims of the carnage have not got justice as yet, inter-communal relations remain tense and the party that sponsored the violence still remains in power in the state. This speaks volumes about our pompous claims of being the world's `largest democracy'.

This book is a collection of interviews with activists from Gujarat who are presently working in their own ways to struggle for justice, democracy and communal harmony in the state. Their work is informed by their diverse ideological persuasions and they come from different backgrounds and communities. Yet, they are unanimous in their insistence that communalism, particularly Hindutva fascism, has to be seriously resisted and the struggle for social justice has to be sharpened, and they offer a range of different perspectives on the question of precisely how this must be done.

This book aims at exploring diverse perspectives on the struggle for social justice in Gujarat today in the context of the deeply entrenched Hindutva lobby.

These interviews provide valuable insights into the efforts that scattered groups and individuals in Gujarat today are making to promote inter-communal harmony and to struggle against communalism and fascism that are playing such havoc with peoples' lives, not just in Gujarat but in other parts of India as well.

People whose interviews are included in this list include

Meera and Rafi Shaikh , Mukul Sinha , Prasad Chacko, Zakia Jowher, Gagan Sethi , Sophia Khan, Hanif Lakdawala, Ahmad Shaikh, Afzal Memon, Shakeel Ahmad, Vithalbhai Pandya, Rajesh Solanki, Valjibhai Patel, Vinay Mahajan, Cedric Prakash

About the Author
Prof. Yoginder Sikand is a renowned author on Indian Muslims. His previous books include, Struggling to be Heard: South Asian Muslim Voice, Islam, Caste and Dalit-Muslim Relations in India, Bastions of the Believers: Madrasa and Islamic Education in India

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E-mail: info@gmpublications.com

Political Representation of Muslims in India : Iqbal A. Ansari

Title : Political Representation of Muslims in India (1952–2004)

Author : Iqbal A. Ansari

Publisher : Manak Publications Pvt. Ltd.

YOP : 2006

Pages : xxii + 418

ISBN : 81-7827-130-3

Price : Rs. 900

About The Book/Author :

Iqbal A. Ansari (b. 1935), former professor of English at the Aligarh Muslim University 1995, has been visiting professor at Jamia Hamdard (2001-2003) and Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi (2003-2004). Prof. Ansari has written extensively on issues related to human rights, minorities & prevention and resolution of inter-community conflicts. His publications include Readings on Minorities: Perspectives and Documents, Vol. I & II (1196), Vol. III (2002); Communal Riots: The State and Law in India (1997); Human Rights in India: Some Issue (1998); Muslim Situation in India (1989) and Uses of English (1978).

There is a worldwide concern today for democracies to become inclusive, for reasons of political justice, as well as for their better national integration, especially for religious and ethnic minorities.

The Indian freedom movement since 1920s showed awareness of the need of special measures to ensure due representation to religious minorities and Scheduled Castes and Tribes (SC & ST) in legislatures. In keeping with this consociational-affirmative model, the framers of the Constitution provided for population based quota of seats for minorities and SC& ST under joint electorate, in August 1947. However, lingering apprehensions about such provisions for religious minorities, caused by the Partition led to their scrapping in May 1949. While dispensing with the special provision for minorities, Nehru and Patel, among others, gave firm assurance to them, especially to Muslims, that even without Constitutional safeguard the majority community would not only be fair but generous of them, ensuring their due representation in legislatures.

Redefining Urdu Politics in India : Ather Farooqui

Name of the Book: Redefining Urdu Politics in India
Edited by: Ather Farooqui
Publisher: Oxford University Press, New Delhi
Year: 2006
Pages: 309
Price: Rs. 595
ISBN: 019567739-0
Reviewed by: Yoginder Sikand

Buy this book

That Urdu is in a sorry state of decline in the land of its birth is a well-known and often-lamented fact. What should be done to rescue it from eventual extinction is what this immensely useful book is all about. Bringing together essays by Urdu scholars, Indian and foreign, as well as activists working for the cause of Urdu, it book provides an in-depth insight into the myriad causes of Urdu’s rapid decline in post-Partition India while also arguing for various measures to revive the language.

Competitive communalism

In his preface, Salman Khurshid speaks about how the decline of Urdu owes, in large measure, to the politics of competitive communalism. Once the rich repository of a widely shared culture that brought together Hindu, Muslim and Sikh elites, Urdu became a victim of the Partition, being branded by Hindu communal forces as a ‘Muslim’ language. They saw it as somehow ‘anti-national’ and ‘foreign’ because it drew heavily on Arabic and Persian and also because it was declared the official language of Pakistan. North Indian Muslim elites who remained behind in India Urdu continued to insist on Urdu as an integral component of Indian Muslim identity. This owed largely to the fact of Urdu being the repository of much of the north Indian Islamic literary heritage.

This forced association between Urdu and Muslims was further strengthened by efforts of north Indian Urdu-speaking elites to project Urdu as the language of all Indian Muslims, which was, and still is, not the case at all. And since in post-Partition India efforts by Muslims to assert even their legitimate rights are often quickly branded by Hindu communal forces as a manifestation of alleged ‘anti-national’ and ‘pro-Pakistan’ proclivities, it has proved difficult for Muslim Urdu-speakers to mobilise and lobby for the protection and preservation of Urdu and to protest the state’s discriminatory policies towards the language. In the process, Urdu has become increasingly marginalised, the issue being ‘communalised’ by the state and the language’s opponents and defenders.

Successive governments, following the Hindu communal line, have also worked to erase Urdu from schools in large parts of the country where it was once taught as the principal language, replacing it by a heavily Sanskritised and generally incomprehensible Hindi. This has not been a spontaneous effort. Rather, it is part of the agenda of the state and dominant and communalised Hindu elites and reflects a fierce opposition to the syncretistic or composite north Indian culture, of which Urdu has been an integral part. Careful efforts have been made to excise all words of Persian and Arabic origin from official Hindi, this reflecting a form of Indian nationalism that draws heavily from Brahminical Hinduism, denies the Muslim contribution and presence and seeks to impose a single homogenous culture on all Indians. The separate identities of local languages spoken in the so-called ‘Hindi belt’, such as Awadhi, Maithili, Magadhi and Rajasthani, each of which has its own rich literary heritage, have all been denied by the state and proponents of Hindi, being absorbed into ‘Hindi’ in order to artificially inflate the number and political clout of ‘Hindi speakers’.

At the same time, Khurshid says, in order to present themselves as ‘secular’ and to garner Muslim votes politicians have offered sops to Urdu-speakers in the form of Urdu academies, awards for Urdu literary works and sponsorship of literary functions. These populist measures are, of course, wholly inadequate as a means to sustain any language, whose survival and advancement depends on its links with public education and employment. But this indifference, indeed hostility, of the state towards Urdu is something that Urdu shares with various other minority languages, being deliberately effaced as the state and ruling elites project English-medium education as a ‘symbol of excellence’.

Urdu education

Owing to the hostility of the state as well as Hindu communal forces to Urdu, Muslim elites have sought to preserve the language by setting up madrasas, where the language is taught. This, Khurshid says, has only further strengthened the forced association of Urdu with Muslims and an over-identification with Islam, which it did not earlier possess. Because the state has effectively denied large numbers of Urdu-speakers the right to have their children learn Urdu, many Muslim families prefer to send their children to madrasas to study in order that they can learn their mother tongue. Not all of these want their children to be maulvis, their choice of madrasa education being forced on them for want of secular schools where their children could learn Urdu. Khurshid sees this as one factor for the rapid expansion of madrasas in the years after Partition. He argues that this is leading to the further marginalisation of Muslims because madrasas are largely exclusivist and hardly provide their students with any access to secular education, insulating them from the wider, plural society. Had state schools made provision for teaching Urdu, he says, many Muslim families would have preferred to send their children therein to study instead of madrasas. In order that Muslims might progress, and not be forced, for want of Urdu education in state schools, to send their children to madrasas to study Urdu as well as to prevent the further ghettoisation of Urdu as a result of it now being taught mainly in madrasas, Khurshid argues that the state must set up Urdu-medium schools or schools where Urdu is taught as a subject in areas with a sufficient Urdu-speaking population.

Khurshid recognises the need for the Urdu-speaking community to salvage its language by setting up Urdu-medium schools but argues that such voluntary effort cannot replace state initiative. No language can survive, he says, only on the basis of the voluntary sector. Private Muslim-run Urdu-medium schools do not attract non-Muslims and their students often grow up without interacting with children from other communities. Further, because they charge more than nominal fees, they are not affordable for the majority of the Urdu-speaking population, who are poor. Hence, he stresses, the state has the responsibility of establishing Urdu-medium schools as well as enabling the teaching of Urdu as a subject in state schools in localities where the population of Urdu-speakers warrants this. To deny this is to deny Urdu-speakers their Constitutional right to educate their children, at least till the primary level, in the medium of their mother tongue in state schools, and, beyond that, to learn their language at least as a subject in such schools. The state’s continued discrimination towards Urdu is a violation of the Constitution, which demands that the state treat all languages equally and provide facilities for children of different linguistic backgrounds to receive education in state schools in the medium of their mother tongue, at least till the primary level.

In most states, including Uttar Pradesh, considered to be the cradle of Urdu, the state’s official three-language formula effectively prohibits Urdu-speakers from enabling their children to learn Urdu, Khurshid writes. Thus, in most north Indian states, children have to learn English and Hindi, and Sanskrit, a language spoken by hardly anyone in India, is forced on them as the third language. Ironically, this archaic language is taught as a ‘modern Indian language’! Consequently, there are only a few state schools in north India where Urdu is the medium or is even taught as a third language, although the vast majority of Urdu-speakers live in this part of the country. Almost all these schools are of a very poor standard. The problem is exacerbated with lack of sufficient and good quality textbooks, almost all the available textbooks being translations from other languages. As a result, many Urdu-speaking parents prefer to send their children to Hindi-medium schools instead. As a remedy, Khurshid suggests that in localities with sufficient numbers of Urdu-speakers the state should establish schools Urdu-medium schools till the fifth grade, Hindi being taught therein from class three and English from class six. This would enable students to easily switch to Hindi-medium schools after passing out from primary school. In addition, Khurshid argues, Urdu should be offered as an optional subject in schools that use English, Hindi or a regional language as a medium of instruction.

In his chapter, Ather Farooqui raises several issues that Khurshid dwells on. He speaks of how Urdu, once the cradle of a rich composite elite culture, was consciously abandoned by north Indian Sikhs and Hindus after 1947, thus making it effectively a language associated with Muslims. Because of the state’s anti-Urdu policies, Urdu is not taught in the most state schools, even those located in areas with a high concentration of Urdu speakers, and now is restricted mainly to madrasas, where most students are from poor Muslim families. In effect, therefore, Urdu survives among the Muslim poor. Making the problem of preserving and promoting Urdu even more difficult is the fact that Urdu-speakers are a minority in every state in the country. In the only state where Urdu is the state language�Jammu and Kashmir�only a few people have as their mother-tongue. Despite the noises that they occasionally make on behalf of Urdu, Muslim elites and the middle classes prefer to provide their children an English-medium education because that is seen as the path to worldly ‘success’. Since Urdu has effectively lost its links with the economy and employment in the ‘mainstream’ economy, Urdu-medium education is now not a preferred option for children of most Urdu-speaking families, Farooqui observes.

Urdu cannot be saved, let alone promoted, if it continues to be denied a space in the school curriculum, from the primary to the high school level, Farooqui argues. For this, and to also encourage Muslims to send their children to regular schools instead of madrasas, which, he says, only further exacerbate Muslim marginalisation, Farooqui suggests that the state arrange for Urdu to be integrated with the public education system. This will, he contends, help attract Muslim students who might otherwise have studied in madrasas, enabling them to broaden their outlook. However, as things stand today, Farooqui laments, in most states in India government policies effectively deny children from Urdu-speaking families the right to study Urdu even as a third language. This conscious policy of destroying Urdu is, he says, not just a question of the possible extinction of a rich language in the near future but also one of gross violation of the rights of Urdu-speaking people. Farooqui proceeds to examine the fate of Urdu in India today by offering his findings from field observations in five states across the country. He reveals that in these states there is not a single non-Muslim student studying Urdu even as an optional subject at the primary or secondary level, so deeply ingrained has the notion of Urdu as a ‘Muslim’ subject become. Financial assistance provided by state governments ostensibly for promoting Urdu has done little or nothing for the language as such. Instead, it has only produced a small class of pro-establishment sycophants who do not dare to critique the state for its anti-Urdu policies. In some states Urdu is taught as an optional subject in a small number of schools, much less than the number warranted by the numerical strength of Urdu-speakers residing therein. In most Urdu-medium schools subjects like science and mathematics are taught not in Urdu but in English, Hindi or a regional language, because the anti-Urdu policies of the state and neglect by Urdu elites who appear to champion Urdu’s cause have put an effective halt to the development of adequate scientific vocabulary in Urdu. In some south Indian states, however, mercantile Muslim communities have set up good quality Urdu-medium institutions, in marked contrast to the north.

Anti-Urdu policies

Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s long and incisive essay looks at other dimensions of the issue of the decline of Urdu in post-Partition India. He, too, locates this primarily as a consequence of the anti-Urdu policies of successive governments, which stems from the Hindi-Urdu and the related Hindu-Muslim controversy. Because facilities for teaching Urdu are now almost non-existent in most state schools across the country, Urdu-speakers are fast being cut off from their linguistic and cultural heritage. Since, barring Jammu and Kashmir, no state has Urdu has its official language, Urdu lacks sufficient political patronage and clout. Consequently, even the reports of government-appointed commissions that have berated the state for its anti-Urdu policies and have made numerous suggestions to remedy the situation have gone ignored. Echoing a point made by Khurshid, Mehta argues that the state and the dominant elites’ hostility towards Urdu reflects a certain form of nationalism which seeks to deny all alternate identities that challenge their homogenising agenda. The identity of the highly Sanskritised Hindi that they seek to impose is dependent on a conscious distancing of itself from Urdu, with Urdu being somehow seen as associated with ‘national disloyalty’. Hence, Mehta argues, the denial of the rights of Urdu-speakers is a violation of their self-respect, an attack on their sense of citizenship, leading to their loss of faith in the system.

Mehta goes on to discuss the role of madrasas, which, in the absence of state provision of Urdu education, are an attractive option for large numbers of Muslims, particularly the poor. Many Muslim families, he says prefer to educate their children in madrasas not simply because they want them to become religious specialists but also because they represent the cheapest form of education available. Further, often other schools, including, sometimes, state schools, are socially unreceptive to Muslims. Were the state to provide Urdu-medium schools and/or the option of studying Urdu as a subject in schools in areas with a significant number of Urdu-speakers, Mehta opines, many Muslims would prefer to send their children there to study instead of to madrasas.

Because Urdu has been pushed out of the state education system, madrasas are now the major institutions where Urdu is studied. Yet, Mehta argues, madrasas are not the best means to promote Urdu. Madrasas may use Urdu as a medium of instruction for certain subjects, but they do not teach it as a language and generally do not make available to their students anything but religious literature in Urdu. Hence, madrasa students are often left unaware of the nuances and richness of the Urdu literary heritage, much of what is routinely condemned as ‘un-Islamic’ by the ulama.

What the state’s attitude towards madrasas should be is a vexed question. Mehta writes that the state should provide the freedom for communities to set up religious schools in the absence of ‘compelling evidence’ that they preach hatred of others. However, the matter is not so simple if such institutions seek financial assistance from the state or state recognition of its degrees. In such cases the state must ensure that the education imparted in these institutions equips their students with the ability to ‘navigate the modern world and understand the basic requirements of democratic citizenship’. However, Mehta says, given that religious schools are a reality in India, denying them state aid will not ensure that their students have other affordable and effective choices but, in fact, would mean that their fate might be worse than if these institutions received no government assistance. This does not mean that the state should not try to provide these institutions with incentives to move towards what Mehta leaves vaguely defined as a ‘modern education’, but if the parents of the students want only a ‘traditional’ education for the students they should bear the costs. But, since Muslim parents often send their children to madrasas simply because of poverty, for the state not to subsidise madrasas is tantamount to discrimination against the poor. This fact, Mehta suggests, points to the need for state provision of cheap and good quality schools for poor Muslims so that they have a genuine choice to send their children to these schools or to madrasas. Mehta argues that ‘It is possible to justify minimal interference in the affairs of religious schools; it is impossible to justify giving them state support, or accrediting them, if they do not fulfil some minimal requirements’.

Both Muslim elites as well as the state have a responsibility to seek to promote reforms in the madrasas, Mehta contends. The latter, he notes, have done little at all to promote ‘modernisation’ of the madrasas, at the same time as they insist that madrasas are integral to Muslim identity. Few Muslim elites send their own children to madrasas to study, preferring to educate them, if they can afford it, in English-medium schools. Hence, the burden of representing Islam through the training of ulama in madrasas has now been firmly placed of the shoulders of the Muslim poor. ‘Modern’-educated Muslims have, therefore a major role in consigning Urdu to the role of the language of the madrasas that cannot be detached from its religious moorings. It is no longer a ‘market language’ linked to employment outside a narrow Islamic religious or Muslim communitarian sector.

Talk of state intervention in or assistance to madrasas has gained particular currency in the wake of the emergence of militant groups, as in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are linked to certain radical madrasas. However, Mehta is quick to remark that ‘Despite the existence of madrasas, India has not produced any dominant strains of jihadi Islam’. He notes, too, that ‘secular schools can often produce militant Hinduism as well’. For its part, he says, the state has provided only a pittance for its much-touted ‘Madrasa Modernisation Programme’. Hence, the relevant issue here is, Mehta argues, not ‘militancy’ but ‘justice’. The state should offer students who, out of poverty, are forced to study in madrasas the affordable choice to study in good quality schools instead. It is also the duty of the state to ensure that madrasa students are ‘minimally equipped to navigate the demands of the modern world’. However, state assistance to any institution, Mehta says, must be conditional on it conforming to ‘the basic requirement of a modern education’, although what precisely he means by ‘modern’ is left unclear. This, he says, is not an argument for a hostile or confrontationist posture vis-à-vis madrasas but, rather, a plea to leave them alone and to strengthen the system of secular Urdu public education so that over time, and without coercion, madrasas appear as a less attractive option. In turn, this will help the cause of Urdu, bringing it out of the ghettoised existence that it now leads, being largely confined to the madrasas.

Optional subject

Mehta notes that the Urdu intelligentsia continue to demand that Urdu be allowed as an optional subject in government schools, a demand that he, too, appears to support. Yet, he also observes that a similar demand is rarely made in the case of schools where many Urdu-speaking elites send their own children to study. If Muslim elites (along with poorer Muslims) can help generously fund literally thousands of madrasas across the country, Mehta asks, why cannot they fund the setting up of regular, secular schools that teach Urdu as well? Although they have the right to demand this from the state, they, too, should take an active interest in doing so, Mehta rightly argues. It is not sufficient to have Urdu taught as a subject, whether optional or compulsory, in schools. Rather, good quality Urdu-medium state schools are needed and there is no reason why, Mehta says, to suppose that such schools would be incapable of equipping their students with other important skills, such as fluency in English. Mehta also suggests the possibility of dual-medium schools, with certain subjects taught in Urdu and others in Hindi, English or the regional language of the state.

Mehta argues, against those who see Urdu as somehow ‘anti-national’, that India’s unity critically depends on the different religious, cultural and linguistic groups inhabiting the country feeling genuinely at home. For the state to act on its Constitutional obligations vis-à-vis Urdu would, contrary to what some assert, not lead to the balkanisation of the country. On the contrary, it would promote true inclusivism so that Urdu-speakers, marginalised and denied their rights and cultural identity, would feel truly accepted. The struggle for Urdu should, therefore, not be based on ‘cultural nostalgia’ or a ‘misplaced sense of the sanctity of language’, but, rather, be seen as part of a broader struggle for genuine democracy.

Yogendra Singh’s article looks at the issue of Urdu from the perspective of identity politics. He looks at the ‘communalisation’ of Urdu, the reduction of the language in the eyes of many of its defenders and detractors to the status of a ‘Muslim’ language, which it never was. He locates this in the backdrop of the competitive politics of north Indian Hindu and Muslim elites and the machinations of the British colonial authorities, and, after 1947, of various Indian political parties and the state. In pre-Partition India, Urdu survived and thrived because it was the language of communication of most north Indian elites, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, and because it received official patronage and was a language of administration and commerce. This, however, is not the case today because of which the class base of the support for the language has shifted, with Urdu being associated with Muslim ghettos and taught mainly in madrasas, where mostly poor Muslims study. With their narrow ideological perspectives, madrasas may have helped preserve Urdu but can do little, if anything at all, to link it to the process of ‘modernisation’, which alone, Singh argues, can ensure the revival of the language beyond its presently limited role.

The hostile policies of the state vis-à-vis Urdu, the official patronage of Hindi in its place and the dominance of English have all made Urdu lose its public value. To add to this is what Singh sees as the absence of strong, well-networked alternate systems among Muslims for the promotion of Urdu on a voluntary basis. In turn, this is related to the indifference of many Muslim elites to the educational and other problems of the Muslim masses, widespread poverty and illiteracy among Muslims and the lack of political empowerment of the community as a whole.

Singh critiques what he sees as the Urdu-elites over-dependence on the state for hopes to promote Urdu at the same time as they do not display the same sort of enthusiasm to educate their own children in that language, preferring to send them to English-medium schools instead, in the hope of ‘better’ worldly prospects. Hopes for promoting Urdu today are further diminished because of its enforced ‘over-identification’ with Islam as a result of the language being taught mainly in the madrasas, as a consequence of which most Urdu literature being produced today, penned by madrasa graduates and maulvis, is on Islamic religious subjects. The Urdu-elite’s myopic approach to Urdu, that of preserving it as part of the Muslims’ religious and cultural heritage rather than as an instrument of ‘modernisation’, has, Singh believes, only further exacerbated the communally exclusivist character that Urdu’s supporters and opponents have sought to bestow it with. Hence, moves to promote Urdu must also take note of the possibility of re-linking the language to the market and the economy, a task doubly difficult today in the age of ‘globalisation’.

Urdu media

The Urdu media, Singh opines, has a critical role in promoting the language. He notes that the Urdu media is in a state of decline in large pats of India, owing partly to competition from English, Hindi and regional language media. Because of declining rates of literacy in Urdu, many Muslims themselves do not read Urdu newspapers. Furthermore, right-wing Hindu groups do not miss any opportunity to protest even against the most symbolic assistance provided by the state, often a vote-garnering gimmick, to the Urdu media, as exemplified, for instance, in the ‘riots’ in Karnataka some years ago following the government’s announcement of news programmes in Urdu on state television.

Another means for promoting Urdu is to expand the range of Urdu publishing, Singh says. Today, most Urdu publishing houses remain limited to bringing out literary, historical (often hagiographical) and religious works. If they were also to publish social science texts, he says, they would increase the market for Urdu graduates and provide the community with much-needed information and insights on social, political, cultural and political issues, which are crucial for the empowerment of the community as a whole.

In her paper, Barbara Metcalf raises some of the same issues as Singh does, seeing the fate of Urdu in the context of the history of Hindu-Muslim communal strife from the late nineteenth century and colonial machinations, leading to the development of what their protagonists saw as two separate languages out of a single language, Hindustani. Metcalf laments the pitiable state of Urdu in India. She talks of numerous libraries in the country with rich Urdu collections but without a librarian who can read or even catalogue them. She notes the desperate shortage of Urdu teachers, owing to lack of state-funded Urdu-teachers’ training facilities. She mentions, too, the fact that that few Urdu publishing houses produce anything but Islamic literature. She suggests that the cause of Urdu could be popularised by publishing Urdu works in the Devanagari or ‘Hindi’ script so that those who cannot read the Urdu script may have access to some of the gems of Urdu literature. She also raises the possibility of ‘biscript’ publications, texts using both the Urdu and Devanagari scripts, in order to reach a wider readership.

Voluntary action, Theodore Wright insists in his paper, is crucial for the preservation and promotion of Urdu in the absence of serious state initiatives. In order to stave off possible attacks from Hindutva forces who might see efforts for promoting Urdu as ‘anti-national’, Wright suggests that advocates of Urdu highlight the ‘Indian nationalist roots’ of the language and the benefits that reviving Urdu could have for India, including promoting knowledge of the Arabic script that could help Indians doing business with the Middle East.

The greatest threat to Urdu and the cultural heritage that it represents, Wright opines, comes not from Hindi, as its protagonists sometimes argue, but from English. In challenging the growing hegemony of English, he says, Urdu-speaking Muslims and Hindi-speaking Hindus have a common interest. There is, he argues, no need to exclude English, for that would isolate India from the rest of the world. Instead, what he pleads for is the ‘protection of Indian culture […] from the invasion of pornographic and violent American popular culture via satellite television, cinema and radio’, and in this, he says, advocates of the various Indian languages, including Urdu, can have a common cause to join hands for.

Muslim identity

Madrasas are today the main institutions for the teaching of Urdu. In her paper, Arjumand Ara looks at the role of madrasas in the shaping of contemporary Muslim identity and what this means for the fate of Urdu. Several of the points she raises are indeed valid, although on the whole her essay is distinctly polemical, makes too broad generalizations, lacks sufficient depth and sensitivity that comes from sustained fieldwork and is uncritically laudatory of the project of ‘modernity’ and of the Indian state’s claims to secularism and democracy. It also reflects a certain intellectual and elitist arrogance in its diatribes against the madrasas, seeing things, as indeed the ulama it argues against themselves often do, in black and white, without taking cognizance of the fine shades of grey in between.

Ara rightly argues against the claim that Indian madrasas are ‘dens of terror’. She opines that Hindutva propaganda against madrasas is linked to the right-wing Hindu forces’ quest for the ‘creation of a ghettoised majority’ (Hindus), which, in turn, ‘requires the creation of a ghettoised minority’ (Muslims). The Hindutva agenda of ‘Hinduising the Hindus’ is, she points out, crucially dependent on the ‘minoritising the minorities’, and the Hindutva discourse on madrasas reflects this. To equate the Indian madrasas with a few radical madrasas in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as many Indian and Western observers do, is quite misleading, she correctly says.

Yet, at the same time, Ara is critical of several aspects of the madrasa system. She opines that madrasas are the ‘greatest obstruction in the path of progress of the Muslim community’. She claims that ‘the general view that madrasas have a narrow outlook and oppose everything modern is not far [sic.] wrong’. ‘Educated Muslims’ (a term she leaves undefined, but which probably reflects the elitist notion that an ‘educated’ person is one who has received a ‘secular’ or ‘modern’ education, preferably in English), she says, ‘feel uneasy when they see swarms of young madrasa pupils in kurta-pyjama and sporting small beards and skull-caps emerging from a mosque or heading toward the home of a Muslim brother for a charity meal’.

Ara opines that Muslim elites have done little or nothing for the education of the Muslim masses, the vast majority of whom continue to wallow in poverty and illiteracy. In fact, she says, they have been ‘indifferent, almost hostile’ to the education of poor Muslims, most of who come from the ‘low’ castes. She refers in this regard to Sayyed Ahmad Khan, founder of the Aligarh movement, who saw his educational initiatives as aimed only at the so-called ashraf, Muslim elites who claimed foreign descent. He argued, she points out, that if ‘modern’ education were provided to Muslims of ‘low’ caste it would cause ‘resentment’ among the ashraf. Since ‘low’ caste Muslims were generally denied ‘modern’ education (both by the state as well as Muslim elites), they took recourse to madrasas. For their part, the madrasas, so Ara says, have only ‘further strengthened’ the caste system among the Muslims, with many ulama, following the lead of the Hindu Brahmins, seeking to legitimise caste through various means.

While in medieval and even early modern times, madrasas catered essentially to the ashraf, in recent years they have become the bastion of the ‘low’ caste Muslims, Ara says. This is because of the free education that they provide as well as the channel of upward social mobility through ashrafisation, emulation of the mores of associated with the ashraf, that they open up to upwardly aspiring ‘low’ caste Muslims. As Muslim elites went in for ‘modern’ education, they continued to support madrasas, although few of them chose to educate their children therein. Muslim elites, in colonial times and today, used madrasas, or so Ara claims, in an instrumental fashion, as a means to assert and strengthen a separate Muslim community identity based on religion, a task that they left to poor Muslims to bear. This further reinforced the association between madrasas and ‘low’ caste and poor Muslims. This changing class composition of madrasa students, added to the fact that madrasas later emerged as what Ara terms a ‘symbol of resistance to imperial rule’, meant that they became ‘more specific in [their] objectives and rigid in [their] worldview’, because of which they ‘gradually lost their relevance to contemporary society’. Children from poor families were made to study abstruse books in Arabic, which few of them could properly understand, leading to a rapid decline in madrasa scholarship.

And so, Ara goes on, a system was born that was ‘a by-product of a feudal society’ and one that, in her opinion, ‘should have died out with the introduction of a democratic and liberal social order’. The fact that such an order hardly exists in India and is still a far from finished project appears of no consequence to Ara, whose hostility to the madrasas is amply evident, and is reflected in her uncritical and simplistic approach to ‘modernity’ and ‘democracy’. But she is on firmer ground when she argues, without, however, explaining why, that in post-Partition India, Muslim religious organisations, many associated with the ulama of madrasas, sought to arrogate to themselves the status of leaders of all Indian Muslims. In effect, however they represented and protected what Ara terms ‘the interests of the feudal lords’ and ‘blatantly protected the autocratic system in the garb of religion’. The point about the ‘feudal lords’ is certainly arguable. Are there indeed many Muslim ‘feudal lords’ left after zamindari abolition, one wonders, but Ara’s argument about the narrow interpretations of religion emanating from most madrasas is certainly less contestable. But then, the same could be said of most Hindu religious schools, particularly those run by Hindutva organisations, for that matter. Surely, the problem of reactionary interpretations of religion is a more general one, which needs to be looked at in a broader context.

Ara does not conceal her antipathy for the madrasas, and here, as elsewhere in her essay, she refuses to recognise the positive contributions that many madrasas are indeed making. Although several of her observations seem valid enough, some of these are somewhat exaggerated. In post-Partition India, she says, madrasas and various Islamic religio-political organisations helped shaped Muslim identity as ‘traditional, fundamentalist, exclusivist and escapist'. ‘Madrasas, in fact’, she claims, ‘became the most effective tool in the hands of people with vested interests’, preaching those tenets of Islam ‘that suited them most’. They insisted that Muslims must never question the authority of the ulama and must not apply reason in religious matters. They focussed on rituals and duties, for which they promised rewards (sawab) in the life after death. They argued that if only the Muslims were to blindly follow the ulama they would receive a place in heaven. They were taught to cheerfully bear their poverty as a test from God and as a matter of fate. Poor Muslims studying in madrasas gained some sort of respectability and self-satisfaction in the belief that God loved them more because of the ‘righteousness in poverty’. In this way, she says, religion was deployed as a ‘powerful tool to keep people ignorant and exploited by the privileged’. Rather than empowering Muslims to improve their lot by adapting to the ‘modern’ world, madrasas, in effect, helped ‘push them to the margins’.

Madrasas and the way in which they interpret Islam admirably suit the interests of the Muslim ‘feudal’ elites, Ara contends, because it helps keep the Muslim masses under their sway, even as they send their own children to ‘modern’ schools and not to madrasas. The ‘mass base’ that madrasas create among the Muslim poor serves, she says, as a means for elite Muslims to exploit for their own quest for power and domination in the name of protecting Islam. Madrasas are projected as ‘forts of Islam’ and the slogan of ‘Islam in danger’ is routinely raised by Muslim elites and the ulama in order to keep the Muslim masses under their subjugation, she adds. At the same time, many ulama who insist that Muslims must send their children to study in madrasas send their own children to ‘modern’ schools and even abroad for education, so Ara contends. Such ulama are said to lead ‘modern’ lives while preaching obscurantism to their flock. Consequently, Ara alleges, madrasa students are ‘prone to becoming tools for vested interests’, further marginalizing and ghettoizing Muslims. ‘Youth with madrasa background are especially prone to brainwashing in the name of religious revivalism, Muslim nationhood and pan-Islamism and organized [sic.)] in jihadi camps’, she goes on, appearing to misleadingly equate the vast majority of the Indian madrasas with radical madrasas in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Yet, she says, Muslim elites and political parties are reluctant to intervene, as they are not genuinely interested in improving the living conditions of the Muslim masses. Ara opines that the state and Muslim organizations must help set up Urdu-medium schools catering to the Muslim poor to replace the madrasas, empower Muslims and counter the appeal of Hindu and Islamist communal and fascist forces.

Communalisation of Urdu

Amina Yaqin’s paper, like several others included in this volume, examines what the author terms as the progressive ‘communalisation’ of Urdu. Trapped in its ‘aristocratic lineage’, Urdu is now considered as a ‘Muslim’ language by many Hindus and Muslims as well as the state. While Congress politicians, including Gandhi and Nehru, had declared that neither Hindi nor Urdu but Hindustani would be India’s national language, they did not live up to their promise. Instead, heavily Sanskritised Hindi was foisted upon the country, leading to Hindi and Urdu becoming more distant from each other. Speakers of various dialects and languages in the ‘Hindi belt’ have been officially declared as ‘Hindi-speakers’ in order to back the ruling elites’ agenda of forcing Sanskritised Hindi on the rest of the country.

This point is further elaborated upon by Daniela Bredi, who argues that the notion of spoken Hindi and Urdu as two separate languages is misleading. Rather, she says, they ought to be seen as shades of what she calls a ‘unitary language’, drawing upon Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic vocabularies to different extents. She then proceeds to examine the role of an emerging Hindi middle-class in late nineteenth century colonial north India that sought to counter Muslim and Kayasth domination in government services in the United Provinces by championing the cause of ‘Hindi’, which they consciously developed as a language that was shorn of its Persian and Arabic heritage. In reaction, Muslim elites began stressing what they saw as the ‘Islamic’ identity of Urdu. Today, she says, Urdu is seen as integral to north Indian Muslim identity, with Muslim elites defending it, fearing the complete erasure of Muslim identity or what Bredi terms ‘cultural genocide’ in the face of a homogenizing Indian nationalism that is heavily influenced by Brahminical Hinduism. Since Urdu as a taught language is now largely limited to madrasas and since the standard of the few Urdu-medium schools leaves much to be desired, madrasa Urdu, heavily Arabised, has now become to official standard of ‘correct’ Urdu, threatening to wipe out Urdu’s rich secular and composite cultural heritage.

The Urdu press can play an important role in preserving and promoting the language, Bredi argues, but she adds that Urdu schools lack the standards needed to produce a readership that demands high standards of the press. Consequently, the low overall standard of the Urdu press has meant that it has largely failed to play a constructive role in shaping Muslim sensibilities to adjust to contemporary challenges facing the Indian Muslims. Instead, Urdu journalism has, so Bredi argues, a tendency to reinforce a ‘sectarian’ and ‘emotional’ outlook. Since in north India few middle-class Muslims can read Urdu, the Urdu press there caters mainly to the lower-middle classes and the poor. Often, she writes, Urdu papers are linked to Muslim politicians who have a vested interest in reinforcing a ‘ghetto mentality’ among Muslims. This problem is further compounded by the fact that many Urdu journalists are madrasa graduates and are not exposed to other forms of education and ways of thinking.

Urdu intellectuals and Muslim politicians who seek to protect and promote Urdu must prove, Bredi says, that Urdu does indeed have a vital role to play in India today. They should desist from ‘self-pity’ and blaming others for Urdu’s plight. She suggests that the thousands of maktabs in the country could incorporate the teaching of Urdu, in addition to the Qur’an, and that in their efforts to secure the rights of Urdu, its champions should not project it as a ‘Muslim’ issue, but, rather, as one to do with a language that is an integral part of India’s rich and diverse cultural heritage.

Syed Shahabuddin’s well-argued article offers constructive suggestions for the promotion of Urdu through voluntary efforts and state initiatives. Shahabuddin insists that voluntary efforts to protect Urdu are not enough in themselves. Rather, the state must play a key role in this regard since it is obliged to do so. He notes that while Urdu-speakers in large parts of the country are effectively denied the right to study their mother-tongue in schools, scores of colleges and universities teach the language, making Urdu-education ‘top-heavy’. He argues that it is the Constitutional obligation of the state to enable Urdu-speakers have their children educated in Urdu till at least the primary level and to learn the language as an optional subject at higher levels, and he notes the various means through which the state has consciously sought to relieve itself of this duty. For their part, he adds, many Muslim educational institutions do not give particular support to Urdu, since their primary objective is either commercial or else the promotion of education in general, and not of Urdu as such.

Shahabuddin believes that it is not now possible to make Urdu the medium of instruction at the secondary level, except in what he says are ‘exceptional conditions’. However, he argues for the state or the Urdu-speaking community to establish one or more Urdu-medium high school in each district to feed the few Urdu-medium higher secondary and degree-level institutions that remain, which, in turn, can produce better teachers for Urdu-medium schools. It is only when the state is forced to act on its Constitutional obligation of enabling Urdu-speakers to learn their language in schools that Urdu can survive, and Muslim elites should raise this demand rather than remaining restricted to demands for more Urdu universities, Shahabuddin stresses. The latter demand, he says, is actually welcomed by the state as it enables it to proceed with undermining and marginalizing Urdu while at the same time providing sops to Urdu-speakers and paying verbal tributes to the language by setting up Urdu academies and sponsoring Urdu mushairas and seminars, thus diverting attention from the fundamental question of teaching Urdu as a subject or employing it as a medium of instruction in schools.

Several other essays included in this volume make roughly the same points as those mentioned above. This remarkable book is a must for anyone concerned with the unenviable fate that Urdu faces in India today. Someone ought to undertake the laborious task of summarizing its contents and translating and publishing it in Urdu for the benefit of Urdu-speakers. The fact that this book is in English and that there is, as far as this reviewer is aware, nothing comparable on this subject available in Urdu, itself shows the depths to which Urdu has sunk, or, rather, forced to sink, in post-Partition India.

Terrorism: Facts versus Myths : Ram Puniyani

Book: Terrorism: Facts versus Myths

Author: Ram Puniyani

Pages 96 p/b

Price: Rs 40 / Euro 4
ISBN 81-7221-033-7; ISBN-13: 978-81-7221-033-5
Year: 2007
Publishers: Pharos Media Publishing Pvt Ltd p/b

The phenomenon of terrorism has many dimensions to it and it has been the major bane of current times. The propaganda by the dominant power and section of media has succeeded in associating this menace to a particular religion and religious community. This booklet takes up these popular notions and myths and tries to unravel the truth of this phenomenon through facts, photographs and cartoons. Hindi, Marathi and Urdu editions of this book are expected shortly.

Table of Contents
1. Terrorism and Muslims.
2. Islamic Tag
3. Terrorist violence and Religion
4. Clash of Civilizations
5. War on terror
6. Islam and Violence
7. Democracy and Islam
8. Islam and Fundamentalism
9. RSS and Terrorism
10. RSS fights against Terror!
Bibliography

US military Intervention
References
Further Reading

Appendices:
A. A Moment of silence
B. War Crimes Tribunal in Afghanistan
C. International Tribunal on War Crimes in Iraq
D. Civilizations Clash or Alliance
E. Al Qaeda or Al Fayda
F. ABC of Jihad in Afghanistan Roots of Global Terror

Buy it from here: http://pharosmedia.com/india-books-bookstore/Book_Terrorism_Facts_versus_Myths_By_Ram_Puniyani.htm

The Clash Within: Martha C. Nussbaum

The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future
by Martha C. Nussbaum

Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 403 pp., $29.95

Book Review:
Impasse in India
By Pankaj Mishra

Last summer Foreign Affairs, Time, Newsweek, and The Economist highlighted a major shift in American perceptions of India when, in cover stories that appeared almost simultaneously, they described the country as a rising economic power and a likely "strategic ally" of the United States. In 1991, India partly opened its protectionist economy to foreign trade and investment. Since then agriculture, which employs more than 60 percent of the country's population, has stagnated, but the services sector has grown as corporate demand has increased in Europe and America for India's software engineers and English-speaking back-office workers.[1] In 2006, India's economy grew at a remarkable 9.2 percent.

Dominated by modern office buildings, cafés, and gyms, and swarming with Blackberry-wielding executives of financial and software companies, parts of Indian cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Gurgaon resemble European and American downtowns. Regular elections and increasingly free markets make India appear to be a more convincing exemplar of economic globalization than China, which has adopted capitalism without embracing liberal democracy.

However, many other aspects of India today make Foreign Affairs' description of the country—"a roaring capitalist success-story"—appear a bit optimistic. More than half of the children under the age of five in India are malnourished; failed crops and debt drove more than a hundred thousand farmers to suicide in the past decade.[2] Uneven economic growth and resulting inequalities have thrown up formidable new challenges to India's democracy and political stability. A recent report in the International Herald Tribune warned:

Crime rates are rising in the major cities, a band of Maoist-inspired rebels is bombing and pillaging its way across a wide swath of central India, and violent protests against industrialization projects are popping up from coast to coast.[3]

Militant Communist movements are only the most recent instance of the political extremism that has been on the rise since the early Nineties when India began to integrate into the global economy. Until 2004 the central government as well as many state governments in India were, as the philosopher Martha Nussbaum puts it in her new book,

increasingly controlled by right-wing Hindu extremists who condone and in some cases actively support violence against minorities, especially the Muslim minority. Many seek fundamental changes in India's pluralistic democracy.

In 1992, the Hindu nationalist BJP (Indian People's Party) gave early warning of its intentions when its members demolished the sixteenth-century Babri Mosque in North India, leading to the deaths of thousands in Hindu–Muslim riots across the country. In May 1998, just two months after it came to power, the BJP broke India's self-imposed moratorium on nuclear testing by exploding five atomic bombs in the desert of Rajasthan. Pakistan responded with five nuclear tests of its own.
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The starkest evidence of Hindu extremism came in late February and March 2002 in the prosperous western Indian state of Gujarat. In a region internationally famous for its business communities, Hindu mobs lynched over two thousand Muslims and left more than two hundred thousand homeless. The violence was ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged Muslim attack on a train carrying Hindu pilgrims in which a car was set on fire, killing fifty-eight people. Nussbaum, who is engaged in a passionate attempt to end "American ignorance of India's history and current situation," makes the "genocidal violence" against Muslims in Gujarat the "focal point" of her troubled reflections on democracy in India. She points to forensic evidence which indicates that the fire in the train was most likely caused by a kerosene cooking stove carried by one of the Hindu pilgrims. In any case, as Nussbaum points out, there is "copious evidence that the violent retaliation was planned by Hindu extremist organizations before the precipitating event."

Low-caste Dalits joined affluent upper-caste Hindus in killing Muslims, who in Gujarat as well as in the rest of India tend to be poor. "Approximately half of the victims," Nussbaum writes, "were women, many of whom were raped and tortured before being killed and burned. Children were killed with their parents; fetuses were ripped from the bellies of pregnant women to be tossed into the fire."

Gujarat's pro-business chief minister, Narendra Modi, an important leader of the BJP, rationalized and even encouraged the murders. The police were explicitly ordered not to stop the violence. The prime minister of India at the time, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, seemed to condone the killings when he declared that "wherever Muslims are, they don't want to live in peace." In public statements Hindu nationalists tried to make their campaign against Muslims seem part of the US-led war on terror, and, as Nussbaum writes, "the current world atmosphere, and especially the indiscriminate use of the terrorism card by the United States, have made it easier for them to use this ploy."

A widespread fear and distrust of Muslims among Gujarat's middle-class Hindus helped the BJP win the state elections held in December 2002 by a landslide. Tens of thousands of Muslims displaced by the riots still live in conditions of extreme squalor in refugee camps. Meanwhile, the Hindu extremists involved in the killings of Muslims move freely. Though denied a visa to the US by the State Department, Narendra Modi continues to be courted by India's biggest businessmen, who are attracted by the low taxes, high profits, and flexible labor laws offered by Gujarat.[4]

Describing the BJP's quest for a culturally homogeneous Hindu nation-state, Nussbaum wishes to introduce her Western readers to "a complex and chilling case of religious violence that does not fit some common stereotypes about the sources of religious violence in today's world." Nussbaum claims that "most Americans are still inclined to believe that religious extremism in the developing world is entirely a Muslim matter." She hints that at least part of this myopia must be blamed on Samuel Huntington's hugely influential "clash of civilizations" argument, which led many to believe that the world is "currently polarized between a Muslim monolith, bent on violence, and the democratic cultures of Europe and North America."

Nussbaum points out that India, a democracy with the third-largest Muslim population in the world, doesn't fit Huntington's theory of a clash between civilizations. The real clash exists

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 seek the... domination of a single religious and ethnic tradition.

She describes how Indian voters angered by the BJP's pro-rich economic policies and anti-Muslim violence voted it out of power in general elections in 2004. Detailing the general Indian revulsion against the violence in Gujarat and the search for justice by its victims, she highlights the "ability of well-informed citizens to turn against religious nationalism and to rally behind the values of pluralism and equality." Insisting on the practical utility of philosophy, Nussbaum has often attacked the theory-driven feminism of American academia. "India's women's movement," she claims, "has a great deal to teach America's rather academicized women's movement." She is convinced that from India "we Americans can learn a good deal about democracy and its future as we try to act responsibly in a dangerous world."

Nussbaum thus casts India's experience of democracy in an unfamiliar role: as a source of important lessons for Americans. Such brisk overturning of conventional perspective has distinguished Nussbaum's varied writings, which move easily from the ideas of Stoic philosophers to international development. Few contemporary philosophers in the West have reckoned with India's complex experience of democracy; and even fewer have engaged with it as vigorously as she does in The Clash Within.

Nussbaum, who has frequently visited India to research how gender relations shape social justice, is particularly concerned about the situation of women in contemporary India. She sensitively explores the colonial-era laws that, upheld by the Indian constitution, discriminate against Muslim women. She describes how Gujarat, which has had economic growth but has made little progress in education and health care, became a hospitable home to Hindu nationalists. She details, too, tensions within the Indian diaspora, many of whom are Gujarati, whose richest members support the BJP. She reveals how the BJP initiated India's own culture wars by revising history textbooks, inserting in them, among other things, praise for the "achievements" of Nazism.

Her interviews with prominent right-wing Hindus yield some shrewd psychological insights, particularly into Arun Shourie, an economist and investigative journalist who, famous initially for his intrepid exposés of corruption, became a cabinet minister and close adviser to BJP prime minister Vajpayee. She suggests that the anti-Muslim views of Shourie, who is otherwise capable of intelligent commentary, may owe to "something volatile and emotionally violent in his character...something that lashes out at a perceived threat and refuses to take seriously the evidence that it might not be a threat."

In a chapter that forms the core of the book, she examines the ideas and legacies of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Rabindranath Tagore, founding fathers of India's democracy. Her admiration for Tagore and Gandhi is deep. However, she offers only qualified praise for Nehru, India's resolutely rationalist first prime minister. Nussbaum laments that Nehru neglected "the cultivation of liberal religion and the emotional bases of a respectful pluralistic society"—a failure that she thinks left the opportunity wide open for the BJP's "public culture of exclusion and hate."

According to Nussbaum, Nehru may have been good at building formal institutions, but it was Gandhi who gave a spiritual and philosophical basis to democracy in India by calling "all Indians to a higher vision of themselves, getting people to perceive the dignity of each human being." She approves of Gandhi's view that only individuals who are critically conscious of their own conflicts and passions can build a real democracy. In fact, much of Nussbaum's own rather unconventional view of democracy in this book derives from the Gandhian idea of Swaraj (self-rule), in which control of one's inner life and respect for other people create self-aware and engaged rather than passive citizens. The "thesis of this book," she writes in her preface, is

the Gandhian claim that the real struggle that democracy must wage is a struggle within the individual self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other and a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality.

However, Nussbaum's strongly felt and stimulating book deepens rather than answers the question: How did India's democracy, commonly described as the biggest in the world, become so vulnerable to religious extremism?

Ideological fanaticism stemming from personal inadequacies, such as the one Nussbaum identifies in Arun Shourie, is certainly to blame. But as Nussbaum herself outlines in her chapter on Gujarat, religious violence in India today cannot be separated from the recent dramatic changes in the country's economy and politics. The individual defects of Indian politicians only partly explain the great and probably insuperable social and economic conflicts that give India's democracy its particular momentum and anarchic vitality.

Richard Nixon once said that those who think that India is governed badly should marvel at the fact that it is governed at all. In a similar vein, the Indian historian Ramachandra Guha asks in his forthcoming book India After Gandhi, "Why is there an India at all?"[5] For centuries India was not a nation in any conventional sense of the word. Not only did it not possess the shared language, culture, and national identity that have defined many nations; it had more social and cultural variety than even the continent of Europe. At the time of independence in 1950, much of its population was very poor and largely illiterate. India's multiple languages—the Indian constitution recognizes twenty-two—and religions, together with great inequalities of caste and class, ensured a wide potential for conflict.

Given this intractable complexity, democracy in India was an extraordinarily ambitious political experiment. By declaring India a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic, the makers of the Indian constitution seemed to take the idea of liberty, equality, and fraternity more seriously than even their European and American counterparts. African-Americans got voting rights only in 1870, almost a century after the framing of the American Constitution, and American women only in 1920. But all Indian adults, irrespective of their class, sex, and caste, enjoyed the right to vote from 1950, when India formally became a republic.

What was also remarkable about the Indian Republic was that it came about with a minimum of political agitation. The Indian political philosopher Pratap Bhanu Mehta points out that democracy in India came as a gift to the Indian masses from the largely middle-class and upper-caste leaders of the anti-colonial movement led by the Congress Party. It was a byproduct rather than the natural consequence of the anti-colonial movement.[6]

Modern India's founding fathers, who preferred a secular democratic system, appear to have been great political idealists and visionaries. However, they were also pragmatists, and they couldn't have failed to see how democracy, which was viewed in India as inseparable from the promise of social and economic justice, and the official ideology of secular nationalism were necessary means to contain the country's many sectarian divisions. A former prime minister of India once defined his job as "managing contradictions"; this onerous task, as much moral as political, has remained the responsibility of ruling elites in democratic India.

From the very beginning, India's leaders faced the problem of instituting a secular and democratic state before the conditions for it—an adequately large secular and egalitarian-minded citizenry, and impartial legal institutions—had been met. A secular political culture couldn't be created overnight, and in the meantime citizens with political demands could only organize themselves in overtly religious, linguistic, and ethnic communities. As the experience of Iraq most recently shows, when citizens have few opportunities of participation in political life, a concept of democracy based on elections and the rule of the majority can deepen preexisting ethnic and religious divisions.

Sectarian tensions had opened up even in the anti-colonial movement led by the Congress Party. Muslims suspicious that the secular nationalism of the Congress was a disguise for Hindu majoritarian rule demanded and eventually received a separate state, Pakistan. The promise of democracy also didn't prove sufficient in Kashmir, which has a Muslim majority and where one of Nehru's closest friends, Sheikh Abdullah, grew disillusioned with what he perceived as Hindu dominance over the province. On the whole, however, the Congress, helped greatly by the moral prestige of Gandhi and Nehru, succeeded in becoming a truly pan-Indian party in the first two decades after independence, able to appease the potentially conflicting interests of Muslims and low-caste Dalits as well as upper-caste Brahmins.

Nehru's suspicion of businessmen— shaped as much by the European distrust of capitalism between the wars as by India's forced deindustrialization by the British East India Company— committed him to state control of prices, wages, and production, and to strict limits on foreign investment and trade. These measures, which were aimed at both protecting the Indian poor from exploitation and creating India's industrial infrastructure, checked economic inequality, even if, as Nehru's critics allege, they distributed poverty more than they shared wealth.

As democratic ideals and beliefs took root among the Indian masses, the extraordinary consensus Nehru had created around his own charismatic figure and the Congress Party was always likely to fracture. Nehru's successor, Indira Gandhi, veered between populist and authoritarian measures, such as the "Emergency" she declared in 1975; but she failed to stem the decline of the Congress as a pan-Indian party. Powerful regional and caste-based politicians were no longer content to broker votes for an upper-class elite within the Congress, and wanted their own share of state power; during the Eighties many hitherto imperceptible political assertions became louder, turning into what V.S. Naipaul in a book published in 1990 termed "a million mutinies now."

The decade saw the rise of new caste- and region-based political coalitions. Fundamentally unstable, they emerged and collapsed just as quickly. In 1989, the attempt by one of these coalition governments to placate low-caste discontent through affirmative action—for example, reserving a portion of government jobs for members of these castes—angered and alienated many upper-caste and middle-class Hindus. Already disillusioned by the Congress, they turned to supporting the upper-caste-dominated BJP, which until the late Eighties had been a negligible force in Indian politics.

Hoping to replace the discredited Congress as India's ruling elite, the BJP realized that it would have to create another kind of moral and ideological authority. And so, claiming that secular nationalism was a failure, it offered Hindu nationalism, arguing that just as Europe and America, though officially secular, were rooted in Christian culture, so India should revive its traditional Hindu ethos that Muslim invaders had allegedly defiled.

Remarkably, the BJP, while doing away with one plank of Indian democracy, couldn't abandon the rhetoric of political equality. Aware that the party couldn't achieve a parliamentary majority without low-caste votes, its leaders were at pains throughout their anti-Muslim campaigns to present Hindu nationalism to low-caste Hindus as an egalitarian ideology. (The presence of Dalits in Gujarat's lynch mobs attests to their success.)

The liberalization of the economy under Congress's leadership in 1991— through such measures as eliminating tariffs and restrictions on private business—created a new constituency for the traditionally pro-business BJP: the rising middle class in urban centers. Declaring that it would restore India to its long-lost international eminence, the BJP also acquired what Nussbaum calls "a powerful and wealthy US arm": a generation of rich Indians who while living abroad seek to affirm their identities through the achievements of their ancestral land. It was largely owing to the support of the Hindu middle class—the BJP has rarely done well in rural areas—that Hindu nationalists managed, after a string of successes throughout the Nineties in provincial elections, to gain power within a coalition government in New Delhi in 1998.

Six years of the BJP's rule brought about deep shifts in Indian politics and the economy. There was accelerated economic growth, especially in information technology and business-processing services such as call centers. It was also around this time that the faith—first popularized in America and Britain during the Reagan and Thatcher years—that free markets can take over the functions of the state spread among many Indian journalists and intellectuals.

Ideology-driven globalization of the kind the BJP supported, which reduced even the government's basic responsibility for health care and education, further complicated the promise of political equality in India. The world economy had its own particular demands—for example for software engineers and back-office workers—that India could fulfill. And while the country's comparative advantage in technically adept manpower has benefited a small minority, it has excluded hundreds of millions of Indians who neither have nor can easily acquire the special skills needed to enter the country's booming services sector. Many of these Indians live in India's poorest and most populous states—Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh in the north, Orissa in the East, and Andhra Pradesh in the south. Their poor infrastructure—bad roads and erratic power supply—as well as high crime levels make them a daunting investment prospect.

Thus, even as the economy grew in urban areas, preexisting inequalities of resources, access to information, skills, and status came to be further entrenched within India. The country's prestigious engineering and management colleges now seek to set up branches outside India, but, according to a survey in 2004, only half of the paid teachers in Indian primary schools were actually teaching during official hours.[7] Europeans and Americans head to India for high-quality and inexpensive medical care while the Indian poor struggle with the most privatized health system in the world.

Nevertheless, the BJP campaigned in the 2004 elections on the slogan "India Shining." Its success was predicted by almost all of the English-language press and television. As expected, urban middle-class Hindus, who had been best-placed to embrace new opportunities in business and trade, preferred the BJP. However, the majority of Indians, who had been left behind by recent economic growth, voted against incumbent governments, unseating, among others, many strongly pro-business ruling politicians in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka (of which Bangalore is the capital city).

In the elections of 2004, Indian Communist parties performed better than ever before. The Congress, led by Sonia Gandhi, had built its election campaign around the travails of the ordinary Indian in the age of globalization. Much to its own surprise, the party found itself in power, with Manmohan Singh, an Oxford-educated economist, as prime minister.

Singh and his Harvard-educated finance minister P. Chidambaram were among the technocrats who initiated India's economic reforms in 1991. Their second stint in power has disappointed international business periodicals such as The Economist and the Financial Times as well as much of the English-language press in India, which complains periodically that economic reform in India has more or less stalled since 2004. But given the mandate it received from the electorate, Singh's government has little choice but to appear cautious. The rise in inflation that accompanies high economic growth proved fatal for many governments in India in the previous decade, most recently in the state of Punjab where the ruling Congress lost to a coalition, prompting Sonia Gandhi to publicly ask the central government to show greater sensitivity to the plight of poor Indians.

The government's hands are already tied by rules of free trade inspired by such international institutions as the World Trade Organization (WTO). Thousands of cotton farmers in central India have killed themselves, escaping a plight that Oxfam in a report last year claimed had been worsened by their "indiscriminate and forced integration" into an "unfair global system" in which the agricultural products of heavily subsidized farmers in the US and Europe depress prices globally. Unable to persuade the United States to cut its subsidies to American farmers, the Indian commerce minister spent much of his time at the WTO's Doha Round of talks in July 2006 watching the soccer World Cup.

Unlike China, India can only go so far in creating a "business-friendly climate"—the very limited ambition of many politicians today. In China, lack of democratic accountability has helped the nominally Communist regime to give generous subsidies and tax breaks to exporters and foreign investors. The swift and largely unpublicized suppression of protesting peasants has also made it easier for real estate speculators acting in tandem with corrupt Party bosses to seize agricultural land.[8]

In India, however, the government's efforts to court businessmen are provoking a highly visible backlash from poorer Indians who feel themselves excluded from the benefits of globalization. Plans to relax India's labor laws —in other words, to import the hire-and-fire practices of American companies—have provoked strong protests from trade unions. In recent weeks, the government has been forced to reconsider its plan to set up Chinese-style Special Economic Zones for foreign companies after the project ran into violent opposition from farmers facing eviction from their lands.[9]

Such intense mass agitations in India have helped magnify the growing contradictions of economic globalization: how by fostering rapid growth in some sectors of the economy it raises expectations everywhere, but by distributing its benefits narrowly, it expands the population of the disenchanted and the frustrated, often making them vulnerable to populist politicians. At the same time the biggest beneficiaries of globalization find shelter in such aggressive ideologies as Hindu nationalism.

The feeling of hopelessness and despair, especially among landless peasants, is what has led to militant Communist movements of unprecedented vigor and scale—Prime Minister Singh recently described them as the greatest internal security threat faced by India since independence in 1947.[10] These Mao-inspired Communists, who have their own systems of tax collection and justice, now dominate large parts of central and northern India, particularly in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, and Orissa.

Their informal secessionism has its counterpart among the Indian rich. Gated communities grow in Indian cities and suburbs. The elite itself seems to have mutinied, its members retreating into exclusive enclaves where they can withdraw from the social and political complications of the country they live in. Affluent Indians are helped in this relocation—as much psychological as geographical—by the English-language press and television, which, as a report in the International Herald Tribune put it, "has concocted a world —all statistical evidence to the contrary—in which you are a minority if not fabulously rich."[11]

Nussbaum is right to say that the "level of debate and reporting in the major newspapers and at least some of the television networks is impressively high." In fact, India is one of the few countries where print newspapers and magazines, especially in regional languages, continue to flourish. But the most influential part of the Indian press not only makes little use of its freedom; it helps diminish the space for public discussion, which partly accounts for what the philosopher Pratap Mehta calls the "extraordinary non-deliberative nature of Indian politics."

On any given day, the front pages of such mainstream Indian newspapers as The Hindustan Times and the Times of India veer between celebrity-mongering—Britney Spears's new hair-style—and what appears to be "consumer nationalism"—reports on Indian tycoons, beauty queens, fashion designers, filmmakers, and other achievers in the West. Excited accounts of Tata, India's biggest private-sector company, buying the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus make it seem that something like what The Economic Times, India's leading business paper, calls "The Global Indian Take-over" is underway. Largely reduced to an echo chamber, where an elite minority seems increasingly to hear mainly its own voice, the urban press is partly responsible for a new privileged generation of Indians lacking, as Nussbaum points out, any "identification with the poor."

The stultification of large parts of the Indian mass media is accompanied by the growing presence of a new kind of special interest in Indian politics: that of large corporations. Close links between businessmen and politicians have existed for a long time. But unlike in the United States, the electoral process in India was not primarily shaped by the candidates' ability to raise corporate money. Compared to the US Congress, the Indian parliament was relatively free of lobbyists for large companies. This began to change during the rule of the Hindu nationalists, who proved themselves as adept in working with big businessmen as in holding on to its older constituency of small merchants and traders. A recent opinion poll in the newsmagazine Outlook reveals that growing public distaste for politics feeds on the intimacy between politicians and businessmen.

Nussbaum terms "surreal" the "mixture of probusiness politics and violence that characterizes the BJP." But this doesn't seem so surreal if, briefly reversing Nussbaum's gaze, we look at "democracy and its future" in the United States. Many of Nussbaum's American readers would be familiar with the alliance between right-wing politics and religion, or with how powerful business elites advance their interests under the cover of ultranationalism and religious faith.

Unlike the situation in India, democracy in America has not been largely perceived as a means to social and economic egalitarianism. Nevertheless, the Democratic Party's victory in midterm elections in November 2006 suggests widespread disquiet over inequality in America, which has grown rapidly against a backdrop of corporate scandals, such as Enron and WorldCom, extravagant executive pay, dwindling pensions and health insurance, and increased outsourcing of jobs—including to India—by American companies looking for cheap labor and high profits.[12]

Examining the state of American democracy in his new book, Is Democracy Possible Here?, Ronald Dworkin asserts that "the level of indifference the nation now shows to the fate of its poor calls into question not only the justice of its fiscal policies but also their legitimacy."[13] The challenge before India's political system is not much different: how to ensure a minimum of equality in an age of globalization as international business and financial institutions deprive governments of some of their old sovereignty, empower elites with transnational loyalties, and cause ordinary citizens to grow indifferent to politics.

In a recent book, the distinguished American political scientist Robert A. Dahl offers an optimistic vision in which "an increasing awareness that the dominant culture of competitive consumerism does not lead to greater happiness gives way to a culture of citizenship that strongly encourages movement toward greater political equality among American citizens." Dahl points out that "once people have achieved a rather modest level of consumption, further increases in income and consumption no longer produce an increase in their sense of well-being or happiness."[14]

This awareness is not easily achieved in a culture of capitalism that thrives on ceaselessly promoting and multiplying desire. But it may be imperative for Indians, who, arriving late in the modern world, are confronted with the possibility that economic growth on the model of Western consumer capitalism is no longer environmentally sustainable. One billion Indians, not to mention another billion Chinese, embracing Western modes of work and consumption will cause irrevocable damage to the global environment, which is strained enough at having to provide resources for the lifestyles of a few hundred million Americans and Europeans.

Fortunately, a large majority of poor and religious Indians do not live within the modern culture of materialism; they are invulnerable to the glamour of the CEO, the investment banker, the PR executive, the copywriter, and other gurus of the West's fully organized consumer societies. Traditional attitudes toward the natural environment make Indians, like the Japanese, more disposed than Americans to pursue happiness modestly.[15] And almost six decades after his assassination, Gandhi's traditionalist emphasis on austerity and self-abnegation remains a powerful part of Indian identity.

Gandhi saw clearly how organizing human societies around endless economic growth would promote inequality and conflict within as well as between nations. He knew that for democracy to flourish, it "must learn," as Martha Nussbaum puts it, "to cultivate the inner world of human beings, equipping each citizen to contend against the passion for domination and to accept the reality, and the equality, of others."

Gandhi's ethical vision of democracy seems more persuasive as the social costs of the obsession with economic growth become intolerable. Responding to another wave of mass suicides of farmers in July 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made it clear that only a small minority in India can and will enjoy "Western standards of living and high consumption." Singh exhorted his countrymen to abandon the "wasteful" Western model of consumerism and learn from the frugal ways of Gandhi, which he claimed were a "necessity" in India.[16] The invocation of Gandhi by a Western-style technocrat sounds rhetorical. But it may also be an acknowledgment that there are no easy ways out of the impasse—the danger of intensified violence and environmental destruction —to which globalization has brought the biggest democracy in the world.
Notes

[1] Though the service sector employs only 23 percent of the population, it accounts for 54 percent of India's GDP.

[2] Somini Sengupta, "On India's Despairing Farms, a Plague of Suicide," The New York Times, September 19, 2006.

[3] Anand Giridharadas, "Rising Prosperity Brings New Fears to India," International Herald Tribune, January 26, 2007.

[4] See Saba Naqvi Bhaumik, "Gujarat's Guru," Outlook, January 29, 2007.

[5] Ramachandra Guha, India After Gan-dhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy (to be published by Ecco in August 2007), p. 15.

[6] Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Burden of Democracy (Delhi: Penguin, 2003), p. 5.

[7] Jo Johnson, "Poor Turn to Private Schools," Financial Times, January 13, 2007.

[8] Dramatically increasing investment in education and health care and withdrawing tax breaks to foreign businessmen in their latest budget proposals, China's new leaders seem to be trying to check growing inequalities and social unrest in their country. See "Getting Rich," London Review of Books, November 30, 2006.

[9] Somini Sengupta, "Indian Police Kill 11 at Protest Over Economic Zone" The New York Times, March 15, 2007.

[10] Jo Johnson, "Leftist Insurgents Kill 50 Indian Policemen," Financial Times, March 15, 2007.

[11] See also Siddhartha Deb, "The 'Feel-Good': Letter from Delhi," Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 2005.

[12] For a vigorous assertion of growing economic populism in America, see James Webb, "Class Struggle: American Workers Have a Chance to Be Heard," The Wall Street Journal, November 15, 2006.

[13] Ronald Dworkin, Is Democracy Possible Here? (Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 118.

[14] Robert A. Dahl, On Political Equality (Yale University Press, 2006), pp. x, 106.

[15] Renée Loth, "Japan's Energy Wisdom," International Herald Tribune, March 26, 2007.

[16] "Refarmer Manmohan," The Economic Times, July 3, 2006.

The State in Islam; Nature & Scope : Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer

Name of the Book: The State in Islam: Nature & Scope
Author: Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer
Total pages: 287
Price: Rs.550/-
Publisher: Hope India Publications, India.

Islam basically is religion of peace, compassion and justice. There are enough verses in the Qura'n to prove this. Violence is allowed only for defence, never for aggression. Moreover, it is incidental, not ideological. In principle, it is peace and it is duty of all Muslims to promote and establish peace.

This book, it is hoped, would help generate a fresh debate on this sensitive subject in a much more informed manner. Also those Muslims who desire to establish Islamic state should know that the Qur'an does not refer to any such concept. It only desires to establish a just society free of injustices, exploitation and oppression whatever form the state takes. What is called khilafat-e-rashidah was also based on historical context. The form today Islamic state takes will depend on today's context. There is no standard from available to emulate. This is precisely what this book says.

CONTENTS

Preface

1. Introduction

2. Islamic State: Its Origin and Evolution

3. The Theory and Practice of Islamic State after the Prophet

4. Islamic State through Medieval Ages

5. Islamic State in the Modern Era

6. Jama'at-e-Islami and Islamic State

7. The Resurgence of Islamic and Islamic State

8. The Post-1980 Development

9. On the Causes of Violence in Early Islamic Society-I

10. On the Causes of Violence in Early Islamic Society-II

Conclusion

For copies contact:
Hope India Publications, 85, Sector 23, Gurgaon - 122017, Haryana, India.

Tel: - (0124) 2367308
E-mail: info@hopeindiapublications.com;
Website: www.hopeindiapublications.com