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Why James Traub is wrong to say Muslims have no place in Modi's India

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Vamsee Juluri
Vamsee JuluriJul 07, 2015 | 15:58

Why James Traub is wrong to say Muslims have no place in Modi's India

The American journal Foreign Policy recently published an essay entitled “Is Modi’s India Safe for Muslims?” by James Traub. Here are some of its main points:

1) The Maharashtra government, an ally of Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government, has taken a “series of blatantly anti-Muslim measures”.

2) Narendra Modi is a product of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which is the “militant, trident-shaking wing of the BJP”. He was the chief minister of Gujarat when “Hindu mobs killed more than 1,000 Muslims”.

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3) India’s Muslims have “noted every straw in the wind”: Subramanian Swamy said mosques were not holy places and could be demolished, the BJP chief minister of Haryana said the Bhagavad Gita would be taught in schools, churches were vandalised, a 71-year-old nun was gang-raped, and the beef ban was spreading.

4) Modi has been circumspect, but he has not stopped state governments from pursuing a “nationalistic agenda” nor has he curbed “inflammatory rhetoric”. India’s Muslims who once wore “secular identity as a suit of armour in Hindu India” now feel vulnerable.

5) Aurangzeb, after whom Aurangabad is named, has been “defamed”. Though viewed as an icon-smasher, Aurangzeb “destroyed only a handful of temples, and those usually for plausible military reasons”.

6) Muslim conquerors by and large became a part of India, by “taking Hindu wives”, among other things. British rule too let this harmonious pluralism to remain, “doing little to meddle with this syncretic culture”. Then, when India’s independence movement began, it was led by “men committed to a secular India". India’s founding fathers stood up for the nation’s minorities.

7) However, the “binding force of secularism” began to weaken, as early as 1964. Indira Gandhi “began to cultivate the Hindu nationalist vote”. Then Rajiv Gandhi “played both sides”.

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8) Modi is very different from Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was a “polished member of the Indian elite”. He broke from the supremely sacred principles of secularism.

9) Muslims in Hindu-majority India are disadvantaged. They are often victims of ethnic violence. Like African-Americans, they are marginalised, though they have shaped the culture to a large extent.

10) “Hindu moderation is hardly taken for granted in India, but Muslim moderation is (except by Hindu extremists)”. Yet, (happily) Muslim fears that “at some point Modi will show his true colors... may well prove unfounded” – as “India has too much democracy for its own good”.

Since Traub concedes in the end what many in India might well believe anyway - that Muslims in India are in no danger from Hindus or from Modi - one has to wonder what exactly this argument accomplishes beyond reproducing a typical Hinduphobic narrative of denial and distortion.

Is Traub’s goal really to examine Muslim life in India or to paint a dark picture of some primordial Hindu savagery looming in the wings? He begins, after all, with a fairly ominous claim that there have been a “series of blatantly anti-Muslim measures” by the Maharashtra government. Yet, the only example he can offer is that of the beef ban, which hardly makes it a “series”, nor can it be seen as only being “blatantly anti-Muslim”, considering some others might see it as anti-animal violence too (there has, in fact, been a nearly total silencing of the animal rights aspect in the whole beef debate in Indian and Western news media).

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His next claim is equally shaky, if not outright wrong. He describes the RSS as the “militant, trident-shaking wing of the BJP". This sort of sloppiness in mixing up the various Hindu organisations, their histories, personalities, positions and ideologies, is a common journalistic and intellectual concession to the ideals of secularism, apparently. As if to magnify the “trident-shaking” image, Traub mentions the Muslim death toll in the 2002 Gujarat riots without a word about the Hindu casualties in the violence, a fact that does not mitigate moral failures on either side, but does disturb the monolithic characterisation of Hindus as aggressors in this tragedy.

In the next paragraph, Traub lists examples that he thinks ought to evoke concern for the Indian Muslim. He quotes Subramanian Swamy without explaining the context of a theological point he is making about temples and mosques, and presents a hypothetical statement as a grave danger to Muslims (and later justifies the real destruction of Hindu temples by the Muslim king Aurangzeb as “plausible” military action). He mentions the Bhagavad Gita in a chief minister’s speech without knowing perhaps of the generations of Indian school children in secular India who were forced to receive the Bible by school administrators, even in non-Christian schools (not saying it’s innately wrong, in my view, just don’t blame only one side for it). He mentions church vandalism, without probably having read the facts on its dramatic and calculated exaggerations by parts of the media. And he drops a reference to the rape of a nun in West Bengal, without mentioning that neither the alleged culprits (nor the state government) had anything to do with Hindu nationalism. It may be true as he says that Muslims have noted every “straw in the wind”, but he has once again missed the wheat for the chaff.

It may be one thing to exaggerate concern for a minority community because of good intentions, but quite another to paint the majority as innately dangerous for no reason at all. Traub’s comment about Muslims wearing secularism like a suit of armour in Hindu India is especially offensive. Apart from the nasty insinuation that there is something innately dangerous from “Hindu India” to Muslims, it is a travesty of how secularism has been played out in this unhappy equation as well. Traub seems unaware of even the basics of some of the grievances Hindus have had with the Congress' brand of secularism. One would think from Traub’s comment that Muslims in India were secular in the sense of keeping their religion quietly at home, while Hindus weren’t.

On the contrary, many Hindus feel that secularism in the Indian intellectual culture has meant the opposite; often the retrograde and misogynistic aspects of one religion are deemed to be secular, while even agreeing with the existence of the other religion is anti-secular. Furthermore, Traub doesn’t seem to have thought through what might have kept Muslims safe from “Hindu India” during the entire millennium that preceded the modern Indian secular constitution!It is telling that Traub uses the word “metaphysics” in his article to describe the RSS world view. Whatever the faults and intellectual deficiencies of loudmouths on the Hindu right, the fact remains that there are many, many unchecked “metaphysical” assumptions in the secular Hinduphobic worldview that has come to dominate reportage and academia when it comes to Hindus and Muslims. The most absurd of these is the deeply entrenched position that the academia has taken against the common-sense world view of Hindus today; its fantasy that somehow Hindus are some ancient Caucasian conquerors of India, and worthy of the worst disdain which, if offered to any other group of people who happen to have the complexion most Indians have, would be deemed brazenly and most evilly racist.

After all, what else but a convoluted racial calculus might have led Traub to somehow compare the situation of Muslims in India with African-Americans, and by implication, the position of Hindus in India with the whites in America? Did Hindus go out and conquer Muslim lands and bring them to India as slaves? On the contrary, even the slightest mention of the history of Islamic imperialism in India gets naturalised as somehow just normal, just different groups of people “getting along”. No one today might want to blame people in the present for some trauma in the past that they were victims of as well, but the truth remains. Only a master of military euphemism could go so far as to somehow make Aurangzeb’s destruction of temples seem okay because it was for “plausible military reasons”.

And on the point on metaphysics, neither the RSS nor even its fringe fellow travellers today employ the idea of Muslims being “strangers” in India. Traub seems to have completely missed the news for the last few months about the way Hindu nationalism is very publicly readjusting its understanding of identities in India. While some fringe elements may express their suspicion of the Muslims crudely, though for the most part harmlessly, the fact remains that Hindutva today sounds more like a civilisational discourse rather than a strictly religiously-nationalistic one. Simply put, Hindutva leaders are viewing Indian Muslims as people who are as much a part of the Indian civilisation as anyone, as the descendants of Hindus who converted to Islam, rather than as “foreigners” or as “strangers”.

The biggest problem with liberal-secular commentary on India today is that it vehemently denies a place for a Hindu point of view. It is telling that for Traub, Hindus don’t really figure on their own terms. Indians are basically either secularists or Hindu nationalists, with Muslims neatly falling into the former category for the most part. Traub, like a spate of writers and documentary film-makers before him, sets up the fears that 150 million Muslims in India have as somehow more important and urgent than the fears that Hindus in India have about being the only large Hindu-majority country in a world with many, many Christian and Muslim majority countries and with some of them supporting transnational religious forces hostile to Hinduism. In an age when globalisation has made national borders less impermeable, it is an amazing conceit that many concerned commentators on India’s secularism have in ignoring state-sponsored terrorism, as well as large-scale commercial operations by some religious organisations to win converts to their faith. It is a rather convenient intellectual short-cut, to say the least.

What Traub doesn’t realise perhaps in this whole “will Modi show his true colours” paranoid conspiracy theory is that India has been living under the flag of its true colours all along. It is only the jaundiced eye of too many untrained critics poking at reality with a flimsy array of arguably good intentions and unmitigated bad homework that has painted us into something we are not.

Last updated: July 07, 2015 | 16:05
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