Has rising turmoil really destroyed India’s growth story?
The short-term narrative, of doom and disaster staring India in the face, is of course sheer nonsense.
“Is the India story over?” asked an anxious foreign investment banker. “No,” I replied, “It’s just getting started.”
He shook his head disbelievingly. “The New York Times and The Washington Post are full of reports on the surge in violence against women, lynchings of Muslims and Dalits, ATMs running dry and rising protests everywhere.”
I asked him why he was visiting India. He looked sheepish. “Well, we’re investing in a bunch of start-ups. India has great long-term potential.”
That’s the rub. Long-term potential but short-term turmoil. Between these two narratives of contemporary India, is there a more nuanced middle ground?
The short-term narrative, of doom and disaster staring India in the face, is of course sheer nonsense. Violent protests and riots have been a part of the “India story” since 1947. In fact, before Independence, Hindu-Muslim riots were endemic. Those who grew up in Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh or Maharashtra know that communal riots were the rule, not the exception.
As Meena Menon writes in her book Riots and After in Mumbai (Sage Publishing): “For a while, Muharram became an annual excuse for riots between the Shias and the Sunnis and later cow slaughter, which was the background of the 1893 riots, continued to be the bane of law and order not only in Bombay city but in other parts of the presidency.
Riots broke out over seemingly trivial issues. Coming to the year 1927-28, the following facts stare us in the face. Between the beginning of April and the end of September 1927, no fewer than 25 riots were reported. Of these 10 occurred in the United Provinces, six in the Bombay Presidency, two each in the Punjab, the Central Provinces, Bengal and Bihar and one in Delhi. The number of riots during the 12 months ending March 31, 1929, was 22. The causalities, swelled heavily by the Bombay riots, were very serious, no fewer than 204 persons having been killed and nearly 1,000 injured.”
When a polarising leader like Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014, reports sprang up in India’s polarised media – and several in America’s and Britain’s equally polarised media – predicting riot after riot.
After four years, have these doomsayers been proved right? According to IndiaSpend’s analysis of data sourced from the home ministry, communal violence did increase (by 28 per cent) between 2014 and 2017 with 822 recorded incidents. However, it was less than the decade’s high, recorded in 2008 under the UPA government, of 943 incidents of communal violence.
There is a larger point though. While communal violence has been a fabric of Indian life through the years, before and after Independence, as Meena Menon points out, the party in power after 1947 was mostly the Congress. Some of the worst communal riots took place on its watch, as Salman Khurshid’s recent mea culpa has underscored. And yet the Congress has nurtured a narrative that it is a “secular” party. In the Indian context that doesn’t mean – as it does, for example, in France or Britain, where church and state are strictly separate – that all religions are treated equally.
When Hindu personal law, for example, was codified in the 1950s by the Jawahalal Nehru government, Muslim personal law was left untouched. The secular Congress calls this being respectful of a community’s sensitivities. Others call it appeasement. Whatever the nomenclature, it hasn’t helped Muslims prosper even after seven decades.
In an oped in The Indian Express on April 20, 2018 titled “The Myth of Appeasement”, Christophe Jaffrelot and Kalayarasan advance a parallel secular narrative: “In the current debate on the place of the Muslims in India, one variable has not been factored in – their socio-economic situation – as if the dominant repertoire had shifted for good towards the politics of symbols and identity. In socio-economic terms, Muslims are losing ground rapidly, even if their situation is deteriorating more in northern and western India than in the south.”
The authors attribute this to majoritarianism and argue with statistics from the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) of 2004-05 and 2011-12 that the “socio-economic situation of Indian Muslims was less critical in 2004-05.” Since the two reference points are 2004-05 and 2011-12, the deterioration in Indian Muslims’ well-being took place during UPA1 and UPA2, which rather defeats Jaffrelot’s and Kalayarasan’s central argument.
The truth is that the socio-economic status of Indian Muslims has been falling for several decades. But, declares the “secular”Congress, that proves we haven’t appeased Muslims. If we had, they’d have been better off since we’ve been in government for 55 of India’s 71 years.
Like Jaffrelot and Kalayarasan, the Congress misses the point. Appeasement by definition cannot improve the status of Muslims because it amounts to tokenism. Only empowerment can improve lives. “Secular” parties have appeased, not empowered Muslims for decades, bringing them to the sorry state they find themselves in.
Is the majoritarian BJP any better for Muslims? Probably not. In any case, reversing over half-a-century of tokenism that has sequestered Muslims in socio-economic silos will take an age.
The doomsday narrative then hardens: under the BJP, violence against Muslims and Dalits, lynchings and rapes are rising uncontrollably. Even judges fall for this narrative. Last week, two Bombay High Court judges, Justices SC Dharmadhikari and Bharat Dangre, said during a hearing: “Secular people are not safe in the country. It is unfortunate that today the image of the country is such that those living abroad feel only crimes and rapes happen in India.”
It is a narrative that The New York Times has clutched with both grubby hands. An article by an Indian journalist recently warned the newspaper’s befuddled readers that India was descending into a “violent abyss”. Despite this atavistic narrative of “short-term turmoil” ruining India’s “long-term potential”, and despite the Modi government’s self-inflicted wounds like the ham-handed implementation of demonetisation and GST, India is the growth story, warts and all, that every global corporation wants to be a part of: short-term and long-term.