Minorities and their nationalism(s): the terms of a discourse in South Asia (original) (raw)

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South Asian History and Culture

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Minorities and their nationalism(s): the terms of a discourse in South Asia

Tanweer Fazal a{ }^{a}
a{ }^{a} Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

Available online: 23 Mar 2012

To cite this article: Tanweer Fazal (2012): Minorities and their nationalism(s): the terms of a discourse in South Asia, South Asian History and Culture, 3:2, 163-176

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2012.664420

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Minorities and their nationalism(s): the terms of a discourse in South Asia

Tanweer Fazal*

Nelson Mandela Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India

Abstract

South Asia is the theatre of myriad experimentations with the doctrine of nationalism: religious, linguistic, religio-linguistic, composite, plural or exclusive - the region stands witness to all. However, officially promulgated nationalism, presented as the finality of one’s affiliations and loyalties, comes to be fiercely contested by minority groups resolute on preserving what they see as the pristine purity of their cultural inheritance. A minority’s claim to selfhood is consistently called into question through a politics of nomenclature. The nationalism of the minority groups is frequently relegated to either sub-nationalism, proto-nationalism or a pre-modern appellation, ethnicity. This article examines the perspective of minority identities as they negotiate their terms of co-existence, accommodation and adaptation with several other competing identities within the framework of ‘nation state’.

Keywords: South Asia; nation state; minorities; minority nationalism

The polyethnic constitution of most South Asian states notwithstanding, the desire to fashion a state anchored in a homogenous people or a nation has proved irresistible to state functionaries and sections of national elites. Officially promulgated nationalism - state-led for Charles Tilly 1{ }^{1} - is the vehicle to realize this convergence of culture and polity: the ‘nation state’. In the given discourse, nationalism, defined as the finality of one’s affiliations and loyalties, comes to be fiercely contested by minority groups resolute on preserving what they see as the pristine purity of their cultural inheritance. Of the seven states (eight if Afghanistan is to be included) that comprise South Asia, at least six have adopted the faith of the majority as state religion. 2{ }^{2} Besides, official language policies, carefully crafted by the elite, have been deployed in almost all states of the region to define national culture. Nonetheless, the states of South Asia, caught between the contradictory pulls of tradition and modernity have, by and large, desisted from becoming theocracies. It should also be conceded that in most such states, minority groups do enjoy recognition and constitutional protection to varying degrees. This volume examines the perspective of minority identities as they negotiate their terms of coexistence, accommodation and adaptation with several other competing identities within the framework of the ‘nation state’.

In terms of its capacity to express and assert itself, minority nationalism is surely asymmetrical to project nationhood, the dominant nationalist discourse or the assimilatory programme unleashed through national ministries of education and culture. While the massive apparatus at the disposal of the state is harnessed to conjure up a national identity

[1]

  1. *Email: tfazal@jmi.ac.in ↩︎

consistent with the loyalty that the former demands, minority nationalist articulations, in the ethnically differentiated states of South Asia, draw their inspiration and support from the cultural community within which they are located. It is worth taking into account the very artificiality of this hegemonic nationalism and its persisting divergence from minority nationalisms. A minority’s claim to selfhood is consistently called into question through a politics of nomenclature. In a discourse with obvious political implications, social science scholarship - its claims of objectivity notwithstanding - has been distinctly partisan. The nationalism of the minority groups is frequently relegated to either sub-nationalism, proto-nationalism or a pre-modern appellation, ethnicity. Sub-nationalism or ethnicity, in the given formulation, is discussed merely as a residual category - a by-product of an inept exercise in nation-building. 3{ }^{3}

This is why the intellectual exercises involved in the forging of the nationalism of peripheral nations seek first to demolish the attempts at state/nation congruence. In Pakistan, while the official discourse tried to build ‘Pakistani nationhood’ on the edifice of Islam and the language, Urdu, G.M. Syed, the ‘grand old man of Sindhi nationalism’ refuted it in no uncertain terms 4{ }^{4} :

Sindh has always been there, Pakistan is a passing show. Sindh is a fact, Pakistan is a fiction. Sindhis are a nation, but Muslims are not a nation. Sindhi language is 2000 years old, Urdu is only 250 years old. Sindhi has 52 letters, Urdu has only 26. The enslavement of Sindh by the Punjab in the name of ‘Pakistan’ and ‘Islam’ is a fraud. . .The Sindhis have long been fooled in the name of Islam.

In South Asia, as elsewhere, the act of construing and constructing nations out of nowhere has not been the exclusive preserve of state enterprise or the entrenched groups aligned to the dominant majority alone. At the same time, nations propped up by minority groups too, despite claims of antiquity and authenticity, have had extremely brief histories of origin. Muslim nationalism, created in the phantasmagoria of territorializing South Asian Islam, collapsed like a house of cards when confronted with a resurgent Bangla nationalism. Mohajirs, the community that prided themselves on being the ideological bearers of Muslim nationalism were quick to disown it, in a changed context, by propelling themselves as the fifth nation of Pakistan along with the Punjabis, the Sindhis, the Balochs and the Pakhtuns. In Sri Lanka, for the Muslims or the Moors, caught in the crossfire between Tamils and the majority Sinhalese, the assertion to cultural distinctiveness is a survival strategy. This religion-centred identity not only sets them apart from the belligerent Tamils but also allowed the Moor elite to flirt with the Sinhala-dominated Sri Lankan state. 5 A{ }^{5} \mathrm{~A} similar artificiality can also be observed, for instance, in the case of Naga nationalism wherein the claim to nationhood rests on the endeavour of the Naga intelligentsia to merge disparate and even hostile tribes living in the designated area of ‘Naga Hills’ into a generic Naga identity.

For theorists of nationalism, therefore, South Asia provides a bewildering context. The French theorist Ernest Renan saw the ‘nation as an everyday plebiscite’ - today, this truism is appropriate to describe the state of affairs in the region. Overnight, it seems communities transform into nations and nations metamorphose into communities. In the case of minority groups particularly, the categories, ‘community’ and ‘nation’ more often than not have superfluous demarcations wherein a community’s graduation into the self-exalted status of nationhood is not so infrequent. In such an identity discourse, the claim of being a nation entails shedding the identity of a minority community along with the constitutional protection and safeguards that the category minority brings in. Jinnah, the architect of Muslim nationalism, was explicit in this regard; 'It does not require political wisdom to

realise that all safeguards and settlement would be a scrap of paper, unless they are backed up by power. 6{ }^{6} It was this quest for political power that marked the genesis of Muslim nationalism in British India. In the postcolonial situation, the Sikhs attempted a similar shift from community to nation 7{ }^{7} :
. . .the people who alone in India had developed all the distinct attributes of a nationhood, and had lived as a nation were. . .styled as a ‘community’. . .The Sikhs have, however, now emerged from the illusion of being a community, fostered by the lust for domination by Hindu majority and formed the true conception of their status.

In times of peace and quietude, on the other hand, the reversion to a community or minority label too has been remarkably smooth. Muslim leaders in post-Partition India characterized India as Dar al-aman (abode of peace), an innovation over the theological distinction between Dar al-Islam (abode of Islam) and Dar-al Harb (abode of war) while embracing the minority status and its attendant safeguards. Muslim nationalism was now a detested past. In a parallel account, national ambitions of the Sikhs, barring a small section, too seem to have waned having been replaced by the consciousness of being a minority group insistent on constitutional entitlements. This is to such an extent that the Sikhs, who in the state of Indian Punjab constitute a majority, are vying to acquire the status of a religious minority.

Sociologically speaking, the term minority refers to three different strains of cultural communities each specific in terms of their composition and the politics that follows. First, cultural enclaves with real or fictitious association with a homeland. Oommen terms them as nations akin to those of the European type. 8{ }^{8} Second, communities that are culturally distinct but have no exclusive claim over territories they populate - the dispersed minorities. Usually, they share most cultural artefacts with the coinhabitants of the region and differ from them on one or two counts, such as religion, that they follow. Third, the indigenous communities or tribes. They have all prerequisites of a nation - territory, language, religion - yet are dubbed in the South Asian literature as ‘ethnic groups’ referring thereby to their primordiality.

Nationalist expressions of minority nations look for congruity between power and culture by seeking either autonomy or secession. Cultural genocide coupled with state practices bordering on internal colonialism has impelled many minority nations in South Asia to seek the Westphalian solution, that is, national self-determination. The Kashmiris in Indian Kashmir, the Nagas, the Mizos and many other groups in India’s north-east, the Tamils in Sri Lanka or the Balochs in Pakistan took to armed rebellion against the might of the state to realize the objective. The claim to sovereignty of the people in all such cases rested on a supposed convergence of antiquity, homogeneity and territorial contiguity. Phizo, the author of Naga nationalism, thus made the case for plebiscite to achieve a separate Nagalim 9{ }^{9} :

[1]

  1. Whether we call a national state or a country, both concerns the same thing: it concerns the territory of a people. Nagaland is the land of the Nagas; it is Naga country and nobody else. We are not refugees or immigrants in this beautiful land. Our own language tells exactly what a country is. We call country ‘Ura’ which literally means ‘we are first’ (u, we; ra, ria, first). The root meaning of territory also developed from the same word; namely, ‘theria’ meaning ‘self first’. And our Naga language is certainly as old as human tradition and history cannot contradict us. No man can argue with fact and existence of Nagaland (Nagara) is a natural fact. ↩︎

However, except for the case of Bengalis of East Pakistan, such insurgencies to realize separate ethnic homelands have only ended up in the further enslavement of the ‘minority nation’. Claiming a monopoly over violence, the states of South Asia have unleashed counterterror to prevent the dismemberment of the ‘national territory’. On this, the states of South Asia display a remarkable identity of approach. The promulgation of Armed Forces Special Power Act in the ‘disturbed areas’ of India; the brutality unleashed by the state on tribal uprisings in Frontier Pakistan; or more recently, the Sri Lankan Army’s annihilation of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Tamils of the north-east region; the inviolability of the states’ territorial sovereignty has been ruthlessly established. In hindsight, insurgency in all such instances has only proved counterproductive. In the final analysis, the violence by the rebel groups has been dubbed as ‘terror seeking’ while that of the state as ‘law enforcing’ and legitimate.

Apart from the strategic naivety, calls to self-determination also suffer from epistemological doublespeak insofar as political morality is to be taken into account. In all such upsurges for separation and autonomy, the fundamental issue at stake is the construction of the ‘self’ itself. The normative argument that every ‘people’ have the right to exercise territorial sovereignty as and when they demand leaves minority cultures residing in such territories extremely vulnerable. The question to be asked is, whose ‘self’ and what about other ‘selves’ residing in the vicinity? 10{ }^{10} Since a perfect isomorphism between culture and geography is rare, contesting claims over territories regarded as ancestral and sacred obscure the issue further. For example, following a long spell of violence, the Indian state agreed to an ethnic homeland model to found a Mizo majority province, Mizoram, but in the process left the concerns of the Reangs, an ethnic minority in the region, unattended. The Reangs have therefore organized themselves under a militant outfit to demand a separate district council.

Bangladesh represents a similar case. The ‘Bangalee’ nationalism espoused by the 1972 Constitution of Bangladesh required Bengaliness to be the primary identity of the citizenry. In effect, it presupposed either the extermination of the cultural identity of the non-Bengalis or their submergence in the larger collectivity. This implicit coterminality between citizenship and nationhood is resisted by minority nationalists. For instance, Chakma leader Manabendra Narayan Larma refused to be identified with the Bengali nation. Arguing in 1972, soon after the promulgation of the Constitution (1972), he resisted insistence on Begaliness for Bangladeshi citizenship: 'I am a Chakma, not a Bengalee. I am a citizen of Bangladesh, a Bangladeshi. You are also a Bangladeshi, but your national identity is Bengalee. . .They (Chakmas) can never be Bengalee. 11{ }^{11} The Eighth Amendment (1988) to the Bangladeshi Constitution sought to shift from ethnic to territorial nationalism by replacing ‘Bangalee’ with ‘Bangladeshi’ as the primary identity of the citizens. The Fifteenth Amendment, however, has sought to revert back to the ethnic model by insisting on ‘Bangalee’ as national while reserving the term ‘Bangladeshis’ for citizens in general including non-Bengalis. 12{ }^{12}

For most minority nations of South Asia the ‘principle of nationality’ - that nations are destined to realize themselves into a sovereign state - is not a viable option. For one, the failure of most movements for self-determination does not project an encouraging scenario. The cost/benefit ratio seems to be unfavourable. Centralizing states of South Asia have been extremely sensitive towards the vivisection of their territories, and hence, quite frequently have deployed their military might to suppress secessionist voices. The plight of Tamil tigers in Sri Lanka is a case in point. Secondly, by and large, the states of South Asia, particularly India, the largest one, have been successful in co-opting the counter elites from minority groups in a variety of ways. Apart from co-option, this has also required structural rearrangement such as the distribution of linguistic provinces and adoption of

multi-language policies - measures that guarantee a limited federation in contrast to the unitary state structures in most countries of the region.

The absence of pluralist and accommodative structures elsewhere has had unmistakable fall-outs. After all, whereas the Pakistani state failed to contain a resurgent Bengali nationalism leading to its vivisection, in India, the Bengali cultural elite, the Bhadralok, came to be co-opted in the grand nationalist project to construct an ‘Indian nation’. Similarly, if not for the centralizing tendency of the Pakistani state, Baloch secessionist nationalism, in one opinion, could have been contained by facilitating and accommodating provincial nationalism centred around Balochi history and culture. 13{ }^{13}

South Asia, in this sense, offers yet another advance in the study of nationalism, and this pertains to the flawed assumption regarding conjugality between state and nation. The partisan nationalist and the distant theorist speak in unison insofar as a nation and its association with the state is judged. A nation realizes itself in a state or at the least, retains an ambition to do so. ‘Nations dream of being free’, says the nationalism theorist Benedict Anderson, and ‘a sovereign state’ is the ‘gage and emblem’ of its freedom. 14{ }^{14} Nationalism is then the ideology that aspires for state power. John Breuilly is emphatic; ’ . . nationalism is, above and beyond else, about politics and politics is about power. The central task is to relate nationalism to the objectives of obtaining and using state power’. 15{ }^{15} As cited earlier, Tilly’s historical survey of the nationalist upsurges in Europe identified two divergent processes, state-led and state-seeking nationalisms. Apparently at odds with each other, both reflected the nationalist resolve to try and merge political and cultural sovereignty. 16{ }^{16} There are sufficient number of instances mentioned above wherein such a convergence was sought in the subcontinent too, albeit with disastrous consequences.

The survival of multinational states in the region, on the other hand, perforce draws our attention towards a parallel but largely overlooked occurrence, what has been termed as ‘state-renouncing’ nationalism, a phenomenon whereby minority nations ‘insist on maintaining their cultural identity within a federal polity’. 17{ }^{17}

Thus, national self-determination as the avowed formula for the liberation of the people is abandoned in favour of certain forms of cultural autonomy and public recognition of these peripheral cultures. In many such cases of renunciation, nationalities forsake their separatist aspirations yet pitch hard for political and cultural autonomy. The Tamils of India are one such example who led by the legendary Periyar (E.V. Ramaswamy, 1879-1973) denounced Indian nationalism as essentially Hindi imperialism and set out to chart a separate Dravidasthan or Dravida Nadu for the Dravidian people. But following the linguistic reorganization of Indian states, Tamil nationalism felt content to coexist in conjunction with an all-encompassing Indian nationalism. Despite the accommodation, the claim of Tamils being a nation-in-themselves was never discarded. For C.N. Annadurai, the founder of the Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam (DMK) and one of the main architects of this new line, the problem pertained to adjusting the national aspirations of the Tamil people within the framework of Indian Constitution 18{ }^{18} :

We say we demand unqualified enforcement of the theory of self-government or the State’s sovereignty and autonomy. Our opponents have labeled this demand as aiming at secession. Our own comrades too have broadly understood this demand as meaning secession. The problem before us is: How are we to accommodate the theory of self-government within the framework of the anti-secession Constitutional amendment?

Following this, the DMK purged its constitution of all references to the goal of independent Dravidasthan. In the course of time, the issue of separate statehood receded as a feasible option even amongst the most nationalistic of Tamils. The radical faction that deserted

the DMK on its betrayal of the ‘Tamil cause’ failed to attract any mass support. In DMK politics, Tamil nationalism is preserved in a new vocabulary - through the symbols of common Tamil culture, glorification of the Dravidian past and agitations against the imposition of Hindi. 19{ }^{19}

The Mizos provide another such instance. In the early years of post-British period, the Mizo middle classes, while conscious of their distinct identity, advocated an integrationist approach unlike the other ethnic groups such as the Nagas and the Meitees. However, in the early 1960s, led by the old aristocracy, Mizos, a conglomeration of various tribes started demonstrating secessionist inclination. The Mizo National Front initiated an armed revolution to seek independence from the Indian Union inviting brutal repression, including the use of air power. However a constitutional solution that paved the way for the unification of Mizo-inhabited areas and the emergence of the state of Mizoram ultimately settled the issue. The Mizo Accord signed in 1986 between the Government of India and the Mizo National Front promised sufficient political and cultural autonomy on the following grounds 20{ }^{20} :

Notwithstanding anything contained in the Constitution, no act of Parliament in respect of
(a) Religion or Social practices of the Mizos, (b) Mizo customary Law or procedure, © Administration of Civil and Criminal Justice involving decisions according to Mizo customary Law, (d) Ownership and transfer of land, shall apply to the State of Mizoram unless the Legislative Assembly of Mizoram by a resolution so decides.

In renouncing aspiration for separate statehood, are we to conclude that the minority nations of South Asia are analogous to the stateless nations of contemporary Western Europe? For both, in Europe and in South Asia, the scope of the action for these minority nations is not confined to the state alone. For ethnic nationalists, civil society provides a parallel space for cultures to thrive in. In India, the Tamil film industry has been effectively used by the DMK and other Dravidian parties to keep the anti-Hindi linguistic nationalism of the Tamil people alive. Similarly, the proliferating Bhojpuri cinema, television channels, music and literary works have given a new thrust to a speech community that feared extinction following the assimilation of Bhojpuri as a dialect of rashtrabhasha Hindi.

The parallel with the European case, though, ends here for the new stateless nationalism of the European type seeks to abjure state power, or a desire for it, in the context of the emergence of new supra-state institutions, such as the European Union or the Council of Europe. This surge for a non-state loci of power is also impacted by the erosion of state capacity in the era of globalization. In the European scenario, for example, sub-state nationalism is seen to be operating at three different planes: (1) at the regional plane where civil society is penetrated; (2) at the level of ‘nation state’ in pursuit of recognition and representation; and (3) at the European plane through institutional mechanisms such as the European Union’s Committee of Regions or Council of Europe. Michael Keating sees such developments leading to a ‘reterritorialization of politics’ that does not ‘necessarily correspond to the nation state’. 21{ }^{21} Few people would want to exactly replicate the European solution today, given its financial troubles, but can the powerful idea behind it be replicated in South Asia? This requires enormous political will that allows for the abdication of centralizing tendencies on the part of states and in reciprocation, the relinquishing of separatist dreams by minority cultures. Eventually, this might require new multilateral institutions at the regional plane where membership is not restricted to the states, rather is extended to the nations, nationalities and ethnicities of South Asia. Stateless minority nations, having found representation and reciprocal assurance by such institutions, could then rest content.

In its scope and content, the subject of minority nationalism for the purpose of this collection is not only restricted to comprehending the aspirations of territorially concentrated cultures or nations. The presence of dispersed minority groups, generally defined by the property of religion, adds to the complexity of the minority question in the region. Be it the Ahmediyas of Pakistan, Muslims and Christians of India or Hindus in Bangladesh, such communities, distributed as they are across the ‘national’ landscape, do not pose any territorial threat to the ‘nation states’ as such. At the same time, their discreteness makes them most vulnerable and often places them at the receiving end of the violence perpetrated by a triumphalist majority. Fearing obliteration of their cultural practices and countenancing a gradual waning of political influence, such groups insist on recognition of their way of life in the public domain. They question the skewed construction of the national ‘public’ where minority cultures are left unrepresented. More often than not, this is followed by demands of an adequate share in government recruitments and public life. Culture and power, as per this argument, invariably go hand in hand.

This instrumentality of cultural rights discourse is distinctly South Asian, a significant departure from the Western debate on the subject. In India, the Sachar Committee instituted to study the status of its Muslim citizens, after having quantified their material deprivation, also took note of the power differentials that existed between Muslims and the rest. 22{ }^{22} In Pakistan, separate electorate system was introduced on the insistence of the minority elites to ensure their representation. This separateness, however, has only served to further their remoteness.

How do such minority groups respond to the nationalism of the state? Living within the national territory, being daily consumers of national education policy, nationalist reconstruction of history and memory and an intrusive mass media, do the minority group members internalize officially fed nationalism in a similar fashion as do the majority? How is the identity consciousness of such minority groups reflected in politics? In this context, statistics have a bearing on political consciousness, although being a minority per se is more a state of material deprivation than of enumeration.

In multiparty democracies, territorially dispersed, yet numerically substantial minority groups become strategically significant for electoral politics. This perceived indispensability in politics also enhances identity-tempered minority politics producing what can be termed as ‘minorityism’. Minorityism privileges culturalisms of various kinds and seeks succour in the reification of communities and groups through demands for ‘cultural autonomy’ and privileges for the elites. A statecraft informed by minorityism, instead of deepening citizenship amongst minority groups, negotiates and speaks through deliberately created and pampered ‘cultural spokesmen’ who thrive on perpetuating cultural boundaries and claiming to be the sole and authentic interlocutors of community consciousness. Inherent in minorityism is the tendency to even out internal differentiation and persisting hierarchies within minority cultures thus abdicating the moral obligation to address the concerns of ‘minorities within minority’.

What is termed Muslim politics in India has been, by and large, plagued with such culturalisms. In Bangladesh, the Hindus constituting nearly 9%9 \% of the population are widely perceived as the vote bank of Awami League. This is to such an extent that political violence against League cadres usually ends up with violence against the Bengali Hindus.

The politicization of dispersed minority groups takes a completely different route when they are numerically miniscule. The propensity of such groups towards collaboration and retreat from politics is observable insofar as the South Asian situation is concerned. Both in Pakistan and in India, Parsees or Zoroastrians are a small and diminishing minority and self-consciously stay away from politics. They have been second to none in expressing their

adherence to the state. 23{ }^{23} Conversely, the loyalty of the Parsees is never called into question, neither by votaries of Indian patriotism nor Pakistani. Similar proclivity is demonstrated by the Burghers in Sri Lanka, a microscopic minority that draws its lineage from the Dutch settlers. The enactment of the ‘Sinhala Only’ Act, restrictions on Christian missionaries and an imminent economic downfall failed to politicize the community. The route adopted was that of defeatism and retreat. 24{ }^{24}

Given the common colonial past, the minority question in South Asia is rarely an internal subject. In the states of India and Pakistan, the partition of the subcontinent, the subsequent violence between communities and an unrelenting spell of political hostility between the two countries impair the minority situation to a significant extent. Indeed, at the time of Partition, the issues concerning the identity and security of religious minorities appeared as important elements in the drafting of the foreign policy of the two states. The minority question was felt to be irresolvable without a pact between the two hostile states on the issue.

Decades later, the demolition of the Babri mosque by the shenanigans of Hindutva organizations spelt doom for the Hindu minorities in Bangladesh. The Tamil assertion in Sri Lanka frequently spills over across the Indian Ocean too, to the extent that it ended up with the assassination of a former prime minister of India. Sovereignty issues are frequently raised to deny cross-border interventions. However, in conditions of cultural boundaries transgressing international borders, such expressions of outrage have had little impact.

This follows that the ‘other’ in the nationalist discourse is both internal as much as external. In fact, external is only an extension of the internal and vice versa. In such a situation, the loyalty of minority groups is forever suspect. The Hindus of Pakistan and Bangladesh are perpetually suspected of retaining allegiance towards neighbouring ‘Hindu’ India. Similarly, many right-wingers believe that the extraterritorial identity of Indian Muslims connects them with the Pakistani state and its people. This leads to an erosion in the citizenship of minority groups leading to the birth of the term, ‘second class citizen’. In Pakistan the chorus for declaring Ahmediyas as second class citizen refuses to die. In Bangladesh, the ‘Biharis’ assumed to be collaborators of the Pakistani army during the war of liberation are denied full citizenship. And in the slums of the cosmopolitan cities of India, Bengali-speaking Muslims hide their religious identity to gain employment and ward off the threat of being declared an ‘infiltrator’ from Bangladesh. The universality of citizenship comes to be tempered by the particularities of culture and religion. Very often such nationalist constructions attempt a hierarchy of loyalties and thereby citizenship.

The third dimension in the conceptualization of minority identities is the question of indigenous people or tribes. As practitioners of various forms of animism, speakers of distinct languages and with a spiritual association with land and its ecology, the tribes display all the symbolisms of a nation. However, over the years, the distinctiveness of their way of life has come under threat from a variety of sources. Epistemologically, colonial categorization into scheduled tribe rendered them as primitive or ‘people without history’ and therefore lacking the wherewithal of being a nationality. Their cultural expressions such as the specificities of religion and language are gradually lost owing to the onslaught of missionaries from organized religions such as Christianity, Islam and the forces of Hindutva as well as the state-induced homogenization bid. Consequently, tribes as a religious community do not enjoy the status and recognition abrogated to the religious minorities in South Asia. Capitalist development alongside population influx from the mainland has further ravaged traditions, ecology and livelihoods of the indigenous people. The typicality of their situation necessitates a nuanced handling. In India, the tribal question for long is caught between two divergent approaches; that between the integrationist or assimilationists and

the isolationist or the protectionists. Quite obviously, policy orientation, wedded with the ideology of ‘official nationalism’, has been distinctly skewed towards the latter. Tribal participation in the national life has been sought through the instruments of protective discrimination, various schemes of tribal upliftment and retention of laws against land alienation. At the same time, capitalist exploitation of the forests for timber, minerals and other resources has pushed the tribals into an alien economic order. 25{ }^{25}

As a final point, it is argued that the binary framework of minority and majority is an offshoot of the colonial obsession with quantifying social categories. Once produced and mobilized, such consciousness played havoc in the lives of communities of the region. Given the scale of hybridity amongst communities inhabiting the cultural landscape of South Asia, such imageries connoting neat compartmentalization appear mythical. Boundaries are transgressed at will and majorities and minorities, almost habitually, exchange roles. Minoritization is a process that produces context-specific minority groups out of communities without any history of possessing awareness of kind. In the Muslim majority Pakistan, there are still Pashtun, Balochi, Sindhi and Saraikispeaking Muslims who would not desire to be clubbed together as a majority in Pakistan. Hindus are a majority in India, but when analytically examined, assigning such a status to all Hindus is ridden with self-doubt. Thus, the question, do Hindus in their entirety Dalits and backward, speakers of Dravidian languages, the ‘Hinduized’ tribes of Central India or the Meitees of Manipur - have similar access to power and privileges to constitute a majority that suits the definition? The minoritization of Sikhs does not have a long history, and more recently Jains too have shown restlessness about their inclusion in the Hindu fold. Referring to the ‘vertical and horizontal divisions of the Indian social structure’, Moin Shakir affirmed that the terms ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ were ‘imprecise’. ‘There is no homogeneous oppressor “majority” which exploits other “minorities”’, he argued. 26{ }^{26} Stretching the argument a little too far, a single judge bench of an Indian Court declared in 2007 that Hindus were a true minority if caste and sectarian divisions were to be taken into account. 27{ }^{27} However, for scholarship on the subject, an acknowledgement of the ephemeral nature of such categorization is to realize its dynamism, its historicity, its contingent flexibility and yet not negate its persistence. Most essays in this collection remain sensitive to this end while staying clear of the nihilism that such a comprehension usually entails.

In his essay on the formation of Naga national identity, Sajal Nag describes the Naga identity as an expansive one that is ceaselessly reinventing itself. In doing so, it belies the modernist as much as the primordialist schools of nationalism theorists, both of whom converge on assuming that a nation is fixed and limited. This elasticity in the Naga national identity betrays instrumentalist imperatives taking precedence over matters of group identity and authenticity of cultural markers. The Naga example shows up a flaw in the conventional theorizing of nationalism; the theorist blunders again for having overlooked the possibility and capacity of the minority nations to act as local hegemons while in the process of resisting the hegemonic impulses of the ‘nation state’. Nag discerns four different phases in the evolution of Naga nationalism each marked out for its distinct method of co-option and assimilation. In the initial stage, the Naga intellectual elite construed a generic Naga consciousness for all the dispersed and even hostile tribes. In the second phase, a liberal one according to Nag, the neighbouring non-Naga tribes such as the Dimasas, Karbis and also the Kukis, their rivals, were brought into the fold. The third phase saw further expansion when Naga nationality was no longer confined to the Naga Hills, but sought to subsume tribes in neighbouring Assam, Manipur, North-East Frontier Agency and even Burma. This seemingly accommodative face of the entire exercise was

abandoned in the final phase when the Naga nation-making process adopted an aggressive posture as a number of unaffiliated tribes were included with the agency of the church.

In the given situation, how is a corporate Naga identity, despite its disparateness, sustained? A corporate will to form a nation distinct from the overwhelming Indian identity, according to Nag, does exist amongst various tribes in the fold. In a way, and Nag might agree, this is also a reflection of the desperation amongst groups labelled as ‘ethnic’ or ‘tribal’ to shed their ascriptive primordiality for a newfound modernity of nationness - a transition from memory to history, from mythical association with land and language to real and recorded. To numerically small and marginal groups such as the Lotha, Rengma, Chakru, Chang or Konyak, condemned to be ahistoric ‘tribes’ of the secluded and excluded areas, the Naga national movement provided one such moment to assert their nationality. The process is not as smooth as it sounds. Several forces intervene and intersperse to add to the complexity - a written language, an organized religion, modern political institutions, new political vocabulary - in this transition from ‘tribality’ to ‘nationality’.

Similarly, Rubina Saigol delineates the contested nature of Pashtun nationalism welded not merely in the articulation of its votaries but also in the speech of its opponents. Its fluid nature does not, however, render it simply into a discursive phenomenon, bereft of a material basis and political repercussions. Divided by the Durand Line, Pashtuns live in considerable competition with rival ethnic communities of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras (in Afghanistan) and Punjabis (in Pakistan). It is this rivalry which is said to fuel their support for the Taliban, with which Pashtun nationalism is being increasingly seen as synonymous. This conflation is indulged in as much by those raising the horrific spectre of an Islamic Pashtunistan as by left-wing commentators who celebrate the Taliban as an embodiment of anti-imperialist Pashtun nationalism. Saigol, however, cautions against such neat elisions. The image of the martial Pathan is a product, in the first place, of colonial ethnography. The code of the Pukhtoonwali, for her, is a more nuanced category than a simple system of tribal sanctions for retributive violence, as is imagined popularly. She reminds us that this code, which is the kernel of Pashtun nationalism, predates the arrival of Islam by some accounts.

Pashtun nationalism, prior to 1979, was largely secular, cemented by a moderate version of Islam and the Persian language. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the military rulers of Pakistan in their search for legitimacy turned towards Islamic fundamentalism. It was used to crush the ground for regional aspirations under the rubric of Punjabi domination of the Pakistani state. As the economy of the North-West Frontier Province integrated with Pakistan’s, it left Pashtun nationalism devoid of much of its material basis, leaving only Islam to peg its nationalism on. ‘It was a part of this strategy, coupled with imperial ventures that produced the monstrosity today known as the Taliban. To conflate the Taliban’ warms Saigol, ‘with Pashtun nationalism is to weaken, and ultimately erase, the secular and democratic well-springs of secular Pashtun nationalism.’

Quite withdrawn from state politics and its dynamics, the forging of Sylheti identity, on the other hand, is an example of how the civil society is the new ‘loci of power’ for dispersed identities to proliferate. Sylhet, a Bengali-speaking Muslim majority district in Assam was partitioned by a referendum held in July 1947. Much of the erstwhile district now lies in Bangladesh, although the Sylhetis are spread across both sides of the international border. Despite this geographical dissociation, the Sylheti identity has sustained and proliferated through a vibrant civil society. The non-state civil space allows the Sylheti people to privilege the cultural over the political as Sylhetis on both sides of the border retain strong bonds of togetherness. This exercise of preserving Sylheti exclusivity involves the production of a voluminous literature to inform the young members of the

community of the glorious history and culture. Tracing their religious and cultural heritage from Hazrat Shahjalal and Sri Chaitanya, middle-class Sylhetis across the world uphold the ‘unique’ syncretic tradition of the community. ‘Such collaborative effort’, argues Nabanipa Bhatacharjee in this volume, ‘results in the forging of a sense of cultural togetherness amongst members of the community located both within and outside the sub-continent’. It is argued that the bonds of extraterritorial affinity are so strong that for an ordinary Sylheti ‘only two countries exist namely, Sylhet and Bilet (foreign country)’.

The crucial factor in the sustenance of a unique Sylheti identity, however, is its negation of politics. This non-political and hence non-conflictual engagement with culture is emphasized by all Sylheti networks. Identities, Bhattacharjee agrees, are rarely fixed and given. When observed over a period of time, the community displays sufficient fluidity and also contestation. Multiple indices of Sylheti community came to the forth in moments of crisis and high politics. The referendum of 1947 was one such instance when religious differences threatened the forging of a homogenous Sylheti identity. While the Bengali Hindus voted against any truncation, the Muslim Sylhetis cherished a desire to retain their homeland and live amidst their co-religionists. Post-partition, having been substantially reduced in number, the Sylheti identity is in a retreatist mode.

Zarin Ahmed shows how the political context of Sri Lanka, ravaged by tensions between the dominant Sinhalas and the minority Tamils and the bloody and protracted civil war that ensued, moulded a distinctly Sri Lankan Muslim nationalism. Forged out of a culturally, historically, racially disparate and geographically dispersed community, Muslim nationalism was hinged on Islam which invoked a common Arab past as the binding factor. However, no element of Pan-Islamism could be detected here - for this was yoked firmly to the political dynamics of the island.

Interestingly, Ahmed demonstrates that the question of identity remained buried through the period of ‘official persecution’ of the Muslims under the Portuguese and Dutch rule, emerging only much later when the discrimination had long concluded. The earliest contours of an Islamic identity began to take shape in response to, on the one hand, a muscular Sinhala Buddhist identity, and on the other a Tamil Hindu identity. The founders and carriers of the corporate identity were a tiny elite who gradually realized that pragmatism demanded an alliance, rather than a confrontation, with the Sinhalas, a policy which continued well into the post-Independence period. This move distanced them from the Tamils even though Muslims were predominantly Tamil speakers, with even the Quran having been translated into Tamil. Although such links briefly led the Tamil leadership to claim an intimacy with the Muslims, ultimately the Muslims rejected the Tamil demands for federalism. Muslim leaders argued that such Tamil demands would render the Muslims a minority within a minority. The rise of Sri Lanka Muslim Congress led by M.H.M. Ashraf in 1988 politically articulated the distinctiveness of the Muslim nation and indeed homeland, reiterated as late as 2003 in the famous Oluvil Declaration which emphasized the Muslims’ right to a separate territory.

Ahmed raises the important question as to why Muslim nationalism in Sri Lanka did not take the militant route as did other nationalist movements on the island and finds the answer in the dispersed nature of the community’s habitation, which has denied it numerical preponderance in any region and forced it to live amidst the two contending communities. Second, unlike the Tamils who sought and received material and moral support from their conationals in India, the Muslims of Sri Lanka did not build any such cross-border linkages.

A politically mobilized minority is the alter ego of a ‘nation state’ desperate to make a sense of its self. Muslims typically fit the bill so far as Indian nationalism is concerned. My own essay traces the evolution of minority rights discourse in the country, its various

contours, nuances and upshots. In particular, I interrogate the theorists’ jubilation over the constitutional guarantee of certain exclusive rights to minority groups. Such readings, I argue, dodge the distrust and hostility discernible in the nationalist engagement with the subject. The essay has two entwined objectives: first, to expose the vacuousness of the concept of minority rights, as it revels in reducing minorities to solely cultural entities; and second, the process underneath that shaped the discourse in its present form. To uncover the latter, it is important that the researcher’s attention is drawn beyond the confines of the debate in the Constituent Assembly in the formative moments of the discourse and into the everyday world of public opinion as it unfolded. The state’s take on the subject was informed greatly by a prejudiced public sphere structured along existing caste and religious boundaries. This interface between the state and the ‘non-state’ domain belied Habermasian expectations of the autonomy of the two and produced exceptionally chauvinistic wisdom regarding minority groups. Put simply, it created a mainstream construct that questioned the loyalty of Muslim minorities; propagated the idea of holding minorities as hostages as a counter guarantee for a reciprocal treatment for the Hindus in Pakistan; and created the duality between Indic and non-Indic religions. Interestingly, when frequently called upon to take the litmus test, the response amongst Muslims has been varied ranging from outright rejection to demonstrated expressions of loyalty and devotion.

Meghna Guhathakurta outlines a somewhat identical process of minoritization in Bangladesh where Hindus along with others have come to be constituted as a minority. The reversal to Islam in the post-Mujib era was a setback to the secular foundations of the fledgling Bengali nation and its religious minorities. The Bengali Hindus, having been at the forefront of Bengali nationalism, were abruptly abandoned in the newly construed national identity on account of their religious affiliation. In absolute terms, this has meant material dispossession, physical elimination, suspicion and stigmatization. The cumulative impact of such a policy, Guhathakurta notes, was a phenomenal rise in emigration of the Hindu Bengalis to neighbouring India. For the nationalist commonsense, this outmigration into ‘enemy land’ was a proof of their disloyalty, even though the emigration of Bengali Muslim elites to the West was never illustrated as an act of treachery. However, in contemporary times Guhathakurta notices ‘winds of change’ sweeping across minority populations. With the end of military dictatorship, minority politics finds itself located in the emerging civic spaces. The silent escapism of the past has come to be abandoned in favour of a growing assertion of Bengaliness and demands for secularizing state practices. The state of exceptions that the Muslim elite sought to fashion is being constrained by expressions of universal citizenship and minority rights.

Insofar as minorities are concerned, constitutional protections and safeguards have proved to be inconsequential in much of South Asia. Tariq Rahman brings home this point succinctly with his survey of the Pakistani policies and practices towards its minorities. Despite the constitutional guarantee of ‘equality before law’, religious minorities have increasingly found themselves to be on the receiving end of state-enacted regulations such as blasphemy laws that disproportionately target minorities. Pakistan’s religious minorities are miniscule in numbers (a ‘feat’ attributed to the post-Partition forced exodus); they now face the spectre of losing their identity and culture owing to the Islamization of the state and radicalization of sections of Pakistani society.

Nationalism demands unflinching commitment from its adherents; and Islam, on the other, stands second to none in calling for a similar obligation from its followers. The concept of umma or nation, for the Muslim minorities in India as elsewhere, is a question laden with perplexity. The interface between nationalism and the Islamic weltanschauung

produced variegated response amongst the Muslims in India. While the poet Iqbal, in his later years, turned full circle to uphold the transnational Islamic identity, there were others who saw no contradiction between the two. Raisur Rahman seeks to comprehend the Indian Muslim’s attempts at reconciling his/her religious identity with the pressing demands of Indian nationalism through the life history of Maulana Mohammad Ali (1878-1931), his ideas and politics. In his political initiatives, the Maulana was able to combine the concerns of a wounded global self under the onslaught of colonialism; the angst of a nationalist waging struggle against British hegemony; and the particularism of an Indian Muslim distressed by the plight of his co-religionists. It is this intricacy of multiple subjectivities that the Maulana sought to unwind. His famous declaration at the height of the Khilafat movement that he belonged to ‘two circles of equal size, one India and the other, the Muslim world’ cautioned against hierarchizing identities. Although the proponents of Pakistan paid little heed to the Maulana’s formulation, the Muslims in India seem to have resolved the divergences between Islam and nationalism by treading the path outlined by him.

Notes

  1. Tilly, ‘States and Nationalism in Europe’.

  2. South Asia here comprises India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Maldives and Nepal. Of these, with the exception of India and Nepal, all other states have adopted the religion of the majority as the state religion. Yet, the constitutions of almost all these states guarantee freedom of religion to all their citizens.

  3. See, for instance, Mitra and Lewis, Subnational Movements in South Asia. Sub-national movements are those, according to the authors, which ‘claim control over parts of existing national states’. The terms ethnicity and sub-nationalism are used interchangeably by the contributors in this volume. Also see, Phadnis, Ethinicity and Nation-Building in South Asia.

  4. Cited in Malkani, Sindh Story, 134.

  5. Bastiapillai, ‘Minority, Nation and Identity Question’.

  6. Jinnah, Presidential Address at the Lucknow Session of the AIML, 29-30.

  7. Singh and Gyani, Idea of the Sikh State, 16-20.

  8. Oommen, ‘New Nationalisms and Collective Rights’, 125.

  9. Phizo, Plebiscite Speech.

  10. Samaddar, ‘South Asia’.

  11. Cited in Abul Fazl Huq, ‘Problem of National Identity in Bangladesh’, 51.

  12. Salient Features of 15th Amendment to Constitution, The Daily Star.

  13. Hewitt, ‘Ethnic Construction, Provincial Identity and Nationalism in Pakistan’. Hewitt argues that the Pakistani state’s strategy of dealing with Baloch separatism remained short of success owing to its failure in patronizing the emergence of a reformist Baloch ethnic identity that could be contained within the provincial framework.

  14. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7.

  15. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 1.

  16. Tilly, ‘States and Nationalism’.

  17. Oommen, ‘New Nationalisms and Collective Rights’, 126.

  18. Cited in Hardgrave, ‘DMK and the Politics of Tamil Nationalism’, 397.

  19. Hardgrave, op. cit., 401.

  20. GOI, Memorandum of Settlement, 1986.

  21. Keating, ‘Asymmetrical Government’, 74.

  22. Sachar Committee is the popular name of the Prime Minister’s High Level Committee instituted in India to look into the economic, educational and social status of Muslims of India. The Committee submitted its report in 2006.

  23. In Pakistan, for example, the Parsee representative in the first Constituent Assembly of Pakistan vociferously supported the Islamic elements in the proposed Constitution of Pakistan. See Ghufran, ‘Parsis’. Similarly, the Parsee representative in the Indian Constituent Assembly declined the offer to have one permanent representative in the parliament on the plea that the community would rather like to be part of the national mainstream.

  24. Peacock, ‘Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka’, 170-6.

  25. Sundar, Subalterns and Sovereigns.

  26. Shakir, ‘On National Integration’.

  27. Committee of Management, Anjuman Madarsa Noorul Islam vs the State of Uttar Pradesh.

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