India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha
Saif Tyabji pointed out that the Congress was a democratic institution, with its national council made up of elected representatives sent from the states, these in turn chosen from district and taluk committees. All it cost to become a member of the Congress was a subscription fee of four annas (a quarter of a rupee). Spread out across India, the Muslims could enrol in numbers in all the districts, thus to influence the selection of Congress leaders at the higher levels of the organization. Such was Tyabji’s political strategy, but he also urged his co-religionists to engage more fully with the cultural life of the country. As a ‘patriotic Indian’, he wished that the ‘new Indian Culture’ that was arising ‘be as rich and varied and vigorous as possible, and this can only be so if it draws its nourishment from all possible sources’. Like other kinds of Indians, Muslims had to ‘take an active part in its formation’. But ‘if the Muslims sit back with folded arms, we can rest assured that the new Indian Culture will have little to do with the achievements in this country between the 11th century and the coming of the British. By this all Indians will suffer, but the responsibility for the loss will lie heavily on those Indians who are Muslims.’
Among Tyabji’s other suggestions were that Muslims ask for technical and commercial education, rather than merely study the humanities and join the ranks of the educated unemployed. Even as regards humanistic learning, he deplored the attempts to ‘keep our Islamic culture . . . in a state of fossilized purity’. Rather than mourn the decline of their language, Urdu, the Muslims should recognize that Hindi in the Devanagari script was here to stay. Urdu would be made more contemporary by making its literature available in Devanagari, and by suggesting appropriate words and idioms to enrich the new, emerging modern Hindi.16
Where the likes of Maulana Azad and Saif Tyabji sought to make Muslims into Congress Party MPs, there were others who argued that the community could better represent itself through its own organizations. In October 1953 a group of intellectuals and professionals met in Aligarh to discuss the founding of a political party to ‘protect the minority rights of Muslims, and to enable them to lead an honourable life in this country’. Among their concerns were the low proportion of Muslims in the legislatures, and in the higher civil service.17 Presiding over the convention was a former mayor of Calcutta, who claimed that, if present trends continued, the future held only ‘economic paralysis, cultural death or disintegration and political helotage for Muslims’.18 Six months later, in a speech at Delhi’s Jama Masjid, the secretary of the UP Jamiat attacked the government of India as anti-democratic and pro-Hindu. ‘It is high time’, he said, ‘for Muslims of India to unite and organise themselves under one leadership to face the eventualities in future’.19
Meanwhile, in southern India more concrete steps were being taken in this regard. In September 1951 the ‘Indian Union Muslim League’ (IUML) came into being in Madras, both its name and its charter marking it out from the pre-Partition party some might think it resembled. It sought to ‘secure, protect, and maintain’ the religious, cultural, economic and other ‘legitimate rights and interests of the Muslims and other minorities’, but also pledged itself to upholding and defending ‘the independence, freedom and honour’ of the Indian Union.20 Several years later, a party was formed in Hyderabad to represent the city’s Muslims the Majlis Ittihad-ul-Musilmin. The Majlis put up several candidates in the 1957 elections, but won only a single assembly seat. The IUML was more successful in its own bastion of Kerala, where it won ten seats in the mid-term election of 1960.21
VI
Writing in 1957, W. C. Smith observed that in the history of Islam, Indian Muslims were unique in that they were very numerous and yet did not live in a state of their own. Unlike the Muslims of Iran, Iraq, Pakistan or Turkey, they shared their citizenship in the new Indian republic ‘with an immense number of other people. They constitute the only sizable body of Muslims in the world of which this is, or ever has been, true.22
The Muslims of India were a large minority, as well as a vulnerable one. They were under threat from Hindu communalism, and from the provocation of Pakistan. The leaders of that nation tended to deride Indian secularism, and ‘to presume and encourage a disloyalty of Indian Muslims to their state’ Muslims were hostage to India—Pakistan relations in general, and to Pakistan’s treatment of its own minorities in particular. Thus ‘each new Hindu discontent fleeing from East Pakistan, and each new border incident or exacerbation of canal-water dispute or refugee-property question, has had repercussions on Muslim life within India.’23
Another problem, also linked to Partition, was the lack of a credible middle class. At or shortly after Partition, large numbers of Muslim civil servants, lawyers, scholars, doctors and entrepreneurs migrated to the new Islamic state, there to carve out careers unimpeded by Hindu competition. The Muslims who remained were the labouring poor, the peasants, labourers and artisans who were now seriously in want of an enlightened and liberal leadership. As one perceptive British official wrote, it was ‘one of the curses of Partition’ in Bengal that ‘the Muslim officers had all opted for Pakistan’, so that ‘the Muslim minorities in West Bengal will be without representation in the services or anywhere else where they could look for help or protection’.24 A partial exception was Kashmir, where under Sheikh Abdullah’s regime between 1947 and 1953 Muslims were encouraged to own land, take to the professions and, above all, to educate themselves. Among the more far-sighted reforms were the creation of schools and colleges for girls, with the Women’s College in Srinagar justly winning a countrywide reputation for excellence.25 Elsewhere, Muslims continued to labour in menial jobs while being under-represented in education, in the professions, in the legislatures and in the administration.26
On the other side, there was the effort of the Indian political leadership to create a secular state, and to instil a feeling of belonging among the minorities. Nehru was the key figure here, but he was aided by other Congress members who had studied in the school of Gandhi. When street clashes threatened to escalate into a major riot in Ahmedabad in 1956, the chief minister, Morarji Desai, went on an indefinite fast to bring back the peace.27 Such acts were prompted in part by genuine belief, and in part by diplomatic exigencies – the need to put one’s best face outwards while making the case for Kashmir. Attacks on Muslims would make India’s claim for the Valley more fragile.28 Still, it was ‘no small matter that the Hindu leaders of the nation, in the name of secularism and humanity, restrained the natural and potentially ferocious impetus of the Hindu majority to wreak vengeance on the Muslim group’.29
Immediately after Partition some had feared a conflagration that would destroy the Muslim minority in India. Instead, as Mushirul Hasan has noted, ‘the communal temperature in the 1950s remained relatively low. There was a lull after a violent storm, a clear and downward trend in communal incidents.’30 There was suspicion and tension on the ground, and occasional violent incidents, but no riots of the scale witnessed during the 1920s, 1930s or 1940s. The conflicts of the 1950s were rooted in language, ethnicity, class and caste, rather than in religion.
The lull was broken by the Jabalpur riots of early 1961, in which some fifty Indians, mostly Muslims, lost their lives. But this was a minor affray in comparison with what happened in the winter of 1963/ 4 when the theft of the Prophet’s hair from the Hazratbal mosque in Srinagar prompted a series of attacks on Hindus in distant East Pakistan. Thousands of refugees fled into India, their stories leading to a rise in the communal temperature and to retributory violence against Muslims. In and around Calcutta 400 people died in religious rioting, three-quarters of them Muslims. Some of the violence was motivated by speculators seizing the chance to obliterate squatter colonies and redevelop them for sale. There was also serious rioting in the steel towns of Jamshedpur and Rourkela, in which perhaps as many as 1,000 people perished, most of them Muslims.31
By this time Partition was almost two decades in the past, yet its residues remained. For, as a Muslim leader in M
VII
Like the Muslims, the Untouchables were spread all across India. Like them, they were also poor, stigmatized and often on the receiving end of upper-caste violence. They worked in the villages, in the lowliest professions, as farm servants, agricultural labourers, cobblers and scavengers. By the canons of Hindu orthodoxy their touch would defile the upper castes, and in some regions their very sight too. They were denied access to land and to water sources; even their homes were set apart from the main village.
Under British rule, opportunities had arisen for some Untouchables to escape the tyranny of the village. These gained employment in the army, or worked in factories and urban settlements. Here too they were usually assigned the most menial jobs, as well as the most degrading.
Gandhi had redesignated the Untouchables as ‘Harijans’, or children of God. The Constitution of India abolished untouchability and listed the erstwhile Untouchable communities in a separate schedule – hence their new, collective name, ‘Scheduled Castes’. However, village ethnographies of the 1950s confirmed that the practice of untouchability continued as before. The Scheduled Castes still owned little or no land, and were still subject to social and in some cases sexual abuse. But these ethnographies also revealed that at the bottom things were changing, albeit slowly. In some parts the low castes were refusing to perform tasks that they considered demeaning. No longer would they carry loads for free, or submissively allow upper-caste males to violate their women. More daringly, they were beginning to ask for higher wages and for land to cultivate, sometimes under the aegis of communist activists.33
In the cities, lower-caste assertion took amore organized form. Under the encouragement of the Communist Party of India, the municipal sweepers of Delhi who belonged to the Balmiki caste – formed a union of their own. In October 1953 this union presented a charter of eleven demands to the municipal corporation, focusing on better pay and work conditions. The sweepers held processions and public meetings, and marched to the town hall in a show of strength. There were also a series of hunger strikes, and at least one major confrontation with the police. The historian of these protests notes that they were ’not just about wages, but also about dignity and the value of the labour of the Balmikis’.34
VIII
The burgeoning genre of Untouchable autobiographies also shows the 1950s to be a time of flux. Caste prejudice and caste discrimination were rampant, but no longer were they accepted so passively. There was an incipient stirring which became manifest in social protest and was aided by the new avenues of social mobility.35
The first such avenue was education. After Independence there was a great expansion in school and college education. By law, a certain portion of seats were reserved for the Scheduled Castes. By policy, different state governments endowed scholarships for children from disadvantaged homes. Where they could they took advantage, spawning an entire generation of first-generation learners. According to one estimate, while the school population doubled in the first decade of Independence, the number of ex-Untouchables in schools swelled eight or tenfold. There were also many more Scheduled Caste students at university than ever before.36
A second avenue was government employment. By law, 15 per cent of all jobs in state and state-aided institutions were reserved for the Scheduled Castes. Again, there was a massive expansion after 1947, with new positions available in the Secretariat and in government-run schools, hospitals, factories and infrastructure projects. Although exact figures are hard to obtain, it is likely that several million jobs were created for Scheduled Castes in the state sector in the first two decades after Independence. These were permanent positions, to be retained until retirement, and with pension and health benefits. In theory, such reservation existed at all levels of government; in practice, it was the reserved posts at the lower levels that tended to be filled first and fastest. As late as 1966, while only 1.77 per cent of senior administrative posts were occupied by Indians of low-caste origin, 8.86 per cent of clerical jobs were, and as many as 17.94 per cent of posts of peons and attendants.37
There was also reservation in Parliament and state assemblies, where 15 per cent of all seats were filled by Scheduled Caste candidates. Besides, universal franchise meant that they could influence the outcome of elections in the ’unreserved category as well. In many parts, Scheduled Castes were quick to seize the opportunities the vote presented them. As one low-caste politician in Agra observed, his constituents ‘may not understand the intricacies of politics’, but they did ‘understand the power of the vote and want to use it’.38 And they understood it in all contexts – national, provincial and local. Already in the early 1950s, cases were reported of Scheduled Castes forging alliances to prevent upper-caste landlords from winning elections to village panchayats (councils).39 The vote was quickly perceived as a bargaining tool; for instance, in a UP village, the shoemakers told an upper-caste candidate they would support him if he agreed to shift the yard for the disposal of dead animals from their compound to a site outside the village.40
For a fair number of Scheduled Castes, affirmative action did bring genuine benefits. Now, children of farm labourers could (and did) become members of Parliament. Those who joined the government as lowly ‘class IV’ employees could see their children become members of the elite Indian Administrative Service. But affirmative action also brought with it a new kind of stigma. Intended to end caste discrimination, it fixed the beneficiaries ever more firmly in their own, original caste. There was suspicion and resentment among the upper castes, and sometimes a tendency among the beneficiaries to look down upon, or even forget, their fellows. As one scholar somewhat cynically wrote, reservation had created ‘a mass of self-engrossed people who are quickly and easily satisfied with the small gains they can win for themselves’.41
A final avenue of mobility was economic development in general. Industrialization and urbanization meant new opportunities away from the village, even if – as in the state sector – the Scheduled Castes came to occupy only the less skilled and less lucrative positions. Living away from home helped expand the mind, as in the case of a farm labourer from UP who became a factory worker in Bombay and learnt to love the city’s museums, its collections of Gandhara art especially.42 And sometimes there were economic gains to be made. Consider the Jatavs of Agra, a caste of cobblers and shoemakers whose world changed with the growth of a market for their products in the Middle East and the Soviet Union. The Jatavs became an ‘urban yeomanry’, now able to build and buy their own houses. While many continued as self-employed shoemakers, some Jatavs were able to open factories of their own, where the wages paid to their workers were considerably in excess of what they themselves had once hoped to earn. In 1960 a master craftsman took home about Rs250 a month, a factory worker about Rs100 – even the lesser figure was many times what an unskilled labourer earned. Although the distribution of gains was by no means even, the market had helped enhance their economic as well as social status. The present state of affairs was ‘a far cry from the pre-1900 days, when most Jatavs were little more than labourers and city servants’.43
IX
As with the Muslims, the Scheduled Castes formed an important ‘vote bank’ for the Congress. They too tended to trust the party of Mahatma Gandhi more than its rivals. In the 1957 election, for example, the Congress won 64 out of the 76 seats reserved for Scheduled Castes in Parliament, and as many as 361 out of the 469 reserved for them in the legislative assemblies.
When the seats reserved for Scheduled Tribe members were added, nearly one in four MPs came from underprivileged backgrounds. Yet the ministers in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Cabinet were overwhelmingly upper caste. This worried him. ‘One of my greatest diffic
The ranking Scheduled Caste minister in the Union Cabinet was Jagjivan Ram from Bihar. Born into a Chamar (cobbler) home, he became the first such boy from his village to go to high school, and from there to the Banaras Hindu University. On graduation he joined the Gandhian movement, his steady work rewarded after 1947 by a series of Cabinet appointments. Among the Ministries he ran were those of Labour, Communications, Mines, and Railways. Jagjivan Ram had the reputation of being a first-class administrator, although he did not live the kind of squeaky-clean life his Gandhian background perhaps demanded of him.45
The most charismatic Scheduled Caste leader, however, remained outside the Congress. This was B. R. Ambedkar, who had joined Nehru’s Cabinet as an Independent, leaving the government in 1951 to restart his Scheduled Caste Federation. His party fared disastrously in the 1952 election, although Ambedkar himself was later elected to the Upper House. By now this longtime foe of Hinduism was seeking to find a way of leaving the ancestral fold. He had contemplated converting to Sikhism, then to Islam, then to Christianity. Ambedkar finally settled on Buddhism, a faith of Indian origin that seemed best suited to his own rationalist and egalitarian temperament.