INDIA'S DOMESTIC POLITICS AND ITS IMPACT ON THE REGIONAL INTEGRATION PROCESS IN SOUTH ASIA; A STUDY INTO THE STATUS OF MUSLIMS IN INDIA (original) (raw)
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2000
(1837-1914) in his inimitable way captures the dilemma of Muslim identity as perceived by segments of the ashraf classes in nineteenth century northern India. Steeped in nostalgia for Islam's past glories and a wry sense of the Muslim predicament, Hali's Shikwa-e-Hind, or complaint to India, cannot be dismissed as simply the bigoted laments of a man who has accepted social closure on grounds of religious difference and antipathy towards non-Muslims. To challenge Hali's questionable reading of the history of Islam in the subcontinent or his spurious representations of Indian Muslims in undifferentiated terms as descendants of foreign immigrants is to concentrate on the obvious and miss out the richness of the poetic nuances. What is instructive about the poem is how a committed Muslim with more than a surfeit of airs was hard pressed to deny the decisive and irreversible impact of India on his co-religionists. As the metaphor of fire to ashes makes clear, this is an assertion of a cultural identity, once distinctive but now all too faded. Hali's grievance is precisely the loss of distinctiveness which he believes had given Muslims a measure of dignity and humanity. Bereft of any qualities of friendship or fellowship, Muslims had become selfish, inward looking, indolent and illiterate. None of this is the fault of India. Hali instead blames qismat which brought Islam to the subcontinent and made certain that unlike the Greeks the Muslims did not turn away from its frontiers in failure. India without Islam is an ingenious idea. It would certainly have obviated the need for endless scholarly outpourings on communalism. But however much Muslims may take Hali's lead in blaming qismat, Islam in India, united or divided, is a fact of history and an intrinsic feature of the subcontinent's future. What is less clear is whether communalism should continue to serve as a descriptive or analytical clincher in representations of the Muslim past, present and future in the South Asian subcontinent. In the 1990s it has once again taken center stage in academic and political debates, a consequence of the resort to what has been called Hindu majoritarian communalism seeking to preserve or capture centralized state power. Successive Congress regimes in the 1980s surreptitiously invoked a nebulous form of Hindu majoritarianism which has been crafted into a more potent political ideology by the forces of Hindutva. Neither the Congress nor the RSS, BJP and VHP combination would plead guilty to the charge of communalism. Not only the self-professedly secular Indian state and the Congress regimes at its helm, but also their challengers claim the appellation of nationalist. The original sin of being communalist for the most part has been reserved for the subcontinent's Muslims. Notwithstanding the compromises of secular nationalism with Hindu communalism, the burden of this negative term in the history of late colonial India has fallen on the Muslim minority. The establishment of a Muslim state at the moment of the British withdrawal added immeasurably to the weight of the burden. In the post-colonial scenario in general, and the conjuncture created by the Ayodhya controversy in particular, the Indian secularist response has been to tar both Hindu majoritarianism and Muslim minoritarianism with the brush of communalism. This asymmetry has expressed itself not only in state policy but also in secular academic discourse. Muslim minority 'communalism' has occupied a critical location in academic texts organized around the binary opposition between secular nationalism and religious communalism. If this neat but
India: Conflict with Minorities in the Conventional Political System. The Status of Muslims
Conflict Studies Quarterly
Hindu-Muslim conflict and riots in India are enduring intergroup conflicts in south Asia, destabilizing the region for a long time. Despite having federal democracy and secular nationalism in the political system of India, the state and its various technology of power take sides with religious groups abetting the persecution of minority Muslims as religious or ethnic groups. Among the various ethnic groups and communities living in India, Muslims are among the most deprived communities in contemporary times. In the issue of minority conflict, a permanent solution in the federal system of government has become a dream. This paper analyses India’s divergent political systems and state ideology and its failure and success in respective cases to counter communal and ethnic violence. We argue that, rather than focusing on the weakness of the existing political systems of India, the common failure to adequate power sharing can better explain these conflicts and successive persecution of m...
Socio-Political Status of Muslims in India: Post Partition
Ever since India got independence, the Muslims who opted to make India as their homeland have to witness numerous problems in terms of their economy, education, politics and culture. Rather their miseries and deprivations even farther multiplied as compared to colonial period of sway. As Gopal Singh committee Report 1983, the Sachar Report 2006 and lastly, the Ranganath Report 2007 manifest the other side of the story against the Indian government's claim that the Muslims are progressing and prospering alike other communities. Indian governments have constituted several commissions to probe into Muslims' plight, but have showed reluctance to implement the findings or recommendations of the said committees on the one hand while the Hindu extremists always blame the Indian government's policy of "Muslims' appeasement" on the other. Since independence the Muslims have been made sandwich between the two variations... the duplicity of Indian governments and the adverse attitude of the Hindu fundamentalists. However, it is the need of the hour to take certain affirmative measures to curtail the Muslims' deprivations in the areas of education, economics and politics.
Muslim Marginalization in India: From Ethnic Conflict Perspective
Global Foreign Policy Review, 2021
With BJP arrival to power, secular face of India has received severe criticism in international community. Latest report of the American. Nationalistic patriotism with some other factors like relative development differences, discrimination at social and economic level, continuous discrimination by the ruling elite, lack of political representation and voicing out grievances have become the root cause of ethnic violence in India which can push to the generation of parochialism. Cultural genocide and deliberate unequal economic development have caused major loss of Muslim lives and property and generate issues including demographic reshaping and political disenfranchisement which has further severe implications for Muslims. This paper will try to highlight the ethnic violence on Muslims in India, analyze the reasons behind the ethnic conflict and its manifestation through primordial and instrumental theoretical framework and finally provide road maps to solution.
REGIONAL INTEGRATION OR DISINTEGRATION: AN APPRAISAL OF THE CURRENT TRENDS IN SOUTH ASIA
The paper explores the possibility of regional integration in South Asia on the pattern of European Union by examining the prevailing socio-economic and religio-cultural conditions, and political trends in the region. South Asian, once formed a single administrative, economic and political unit, had to be divided into several independent states on communal lines. The factors and forces that had caused partition of India in 1947 did not recede in the post-independence era and continued throughout to challenge the territorial integrity of regional states. The conditions that existed before launching of integration process in Europe did not appear before or after initiation of regionalism in South Asia. The most of SAARC members are faced with serious challenges of national integration and centrifugal forces are quite strong both at national and regional level. The region lacks significant centripetal forces which can help unite it. The disintegrative forces are prone to grow stronger in future making regional integration on European pattern less likely in South Asia.
India and South Asia: exploring regional perceptions
Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, 2015
Vishal Chandra (ed.), India and South Asia: Exploring Regional Perceptions, (New Delhi, IDSA / Pentagon Press, 2015), Pages 319, Price: Rs. 995.00Regionalism in South Asia remains at best work- in- progress but it continues to be haunted by the old question as to whether it is possible and feasible to peacefully manage the socioeconomic fragmentation bred by the conflicts and violent events since independence from the British. Regional economic integration could be one of the effective means to this end. How that has progressed so far, and its likely praxis are matters for review and scenario building. The IDSA devoted its Annual South Asia Conference in 2013 to the theme of Exploring Regional Perceptions in South Asia, keeping India in the principal focus. This was a two-day conference with invited participants from all South Asian countries whose contributions covered narratives and perceptions ranging from the historical to present-day, national and sub-national to regional, intra-regional as well as trans-regional in relation to the contemporary socio-economic and political milieu. These contributions and analyses thereof form the metier of the book edited by Vishal Chandra bearing the theme in its title.Even as one realises the daunting nature of the tasks inherent to integrating a region grown fourfold since, it requires dogged optimism to even contemplate likely evolution in the coming decades. The project that underlies this book is indeed ambitious in that it takes on board the diverse and varying perceptions of scholars from South Asia's eight countries and attempts to conclude with a way forward. It might seem easier to many to dismiss the South Asian vision as unrealistic while others would prefer to explore what alternative may be in sight. As things stand today, even the plight of the exemplary success story in regionalism, the European Union, seems to issue utterly confusing messages as the EU grapples with serious challenges; challenges that call in to question the very premise of the EU venture. While Europe can possibly go beyond the challenges one way or the other, would it be wise for South Asian countries to let the regional option run aground?The papers compiled in this book are organised under three sectional headings to address the difficult task of systematic exploration of perceptions. The first section concerns Shaping of Perceptions, the second spans Mutual Perceptions and Expectations and the third zooms into Regional Cooperation. Papers in the first section deal with how Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka see the region from their particular national perspectives. Pratyoush Onta from Nepal explores the role of academic community and the reasons the regional studies fall short in various academic institutions in different countries, including India, which in turn influences young scholars' (mis)perceptions about neighbours. Dinesh Bhattarai examines the bilateral relations between India and Nepal in an exhaustive essay.An engaging piece by Yaqoob Khan Bangash from Pakistan delves into the preoccupation with identity that figures prominently in the entire context of India-Pakistan relations, and with Pakistan's narrative of itself and what the author calls, "...eternal comparison - more so in Pakistan than in India perhaps". He perceives a changing trend within Pakistan in the recent years as introspection about "increasing tide of militancy and extremism" within the country is pointing to a fledgling sense of flexibility in the hardened anti-Indian core. However, he is quick to acknowledge at the same time that the LeT, Harkat-ul-Mujahidin and the Defence of Pakistan Council keep the flame of anti-India sentiment burning. He holds that the perception of India cannot improve in Pakistan unless and until the latter becomes a stable and secure nation.Humayun Kabir from Bangladesh situates perception formation within the rubric of social construction and unfurls an unending chain of social, political, economic and psychological factors interplaying in a complex web. …
Various religions, cultures, faiths, languages and social milieu of India reflect a very fine aspect of Indian multiculturalism. The Indian multiculturalism is not defined by any particular, community, religion or region rather it is a matrix of different values, traditions, cultures, languages, religions, sects etc. The historical reality of India and the civilizational contours of Indian nation state are quite different from the Western forms of multicultural society. The idea of nation has emerged out of the conflict in the whole of the modern world whereas; it has emerged as a result of pressure exerted by the social reality of India. This is a synergy of its diverse cultures, religions, traditions, languages, societies etc. The present study tries to explore, how the claims made by the Muslim minority in India are best accommodated by the Indian nation state. The spontaneous cultural intermixing of the Muslim community has not been facilitated, aroused and encouraged by the overall polity. The more articulate, dominant and visible sections of society and state in India have consciously refrained from such kind of inter-community fusion. In fact, the process of " othering " has always at work whenever the issue of Muslim minority is raised. This paper portrays the salience of Indian multiculturalism and issues of marginalisation of the Muslim minority in the liberal democratic polity. The objective of this study is to inquire into the accommodation of the Muslim minority rights in public sphere by the Indian democracy. It will elaborate the essential features of the current politics of Muslim identity.
State and Society in South Asia: An Overview
South Asia is a region of rich diversities and complexities in which ethnicity, religion, caste, language etc., play a decisive role. The configuration of these complexities and diversities in the region most often precipitates political polarisations and mobilisations which quite often lead to violent conflicts among different communities that cut across state borders. Generally speaking, these conflicts are a modern phenomenon and are intertwined with the logic of nation-building and interest articulation within the competitive capitalist system. 1 As far as South Asia is concerned the cartographical setting of the present state system is a product of late colonialism and in the post-colonial period the old political practices got transformed into more sophisticated kind of mobilizations and maneuverings. The issue of Kashmir is the best example. The 'divide and rule' policy of the Britishers caused communal animosities among the Hindus and Muslims. The insecurity complex emanated out of the situation among these communities led to the partition of British India into two states viz., India and Pakistan. However, the dispute over Kashmir remained and in both the countries, the ruling class has been using the 'issue' for regime legitimacy. There is no one word answer to these historical problems and the positive attempts to resolve the issue can only be channelized through democratic engagements. This is not a mere engagement with the pakka western political models, but re-inventing the cultural roots of the region and remodeling those models within that frame of reference.