India After Gandhi (65 page)

The acknowledged political leader of the Muslims left behind in the Indian Union was Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Unlike his great rival Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Azad believed that non-Hindus could live with peace and honour in a united India. In Nehru’s characteristically eloquent formulation, Maulana Azad was ‘a peculiar and very special representative in a high degree of that great composite culture which has gradually grown in India’. He embodied that ‘synthesis of various cultures which have come one after another to India, rivers that have flowed in and lost themselves in the ocean of Indian life’.
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Azad was deeply damaged by Partition. Seeing it as the failure of his life’s mission, he retreated from the world of party politics (though in any case his orientation was always more of the scholar than that of the mass leader). He served as education minister in the Union Cabinet, and in that capacity helped promote new academies for the nurturing of Indian literature, dance, music and art. His age and temperament, however, confined him for the most part to Delhi.

A younger member of the Congress Party seeking amore active political role was Saif Tyabji, scion of a famous nationalist family. Grandson of an early president of the Congress, and himself an engineer educated at Cambridge, Tyabji was well placed to be a modernist bridge between the Congress and the Muslim masses. In 1955 he wrote a series of essays in the influential Urdu newspaper
Inqilab
, these later published in English translation under the title
The Future of Muslims in India
. In the 1952 election Muslims had voted in large numbers for the Congress, a party which, under Nehru’s leadership, they felt they could trust more than its rivals.
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Tyabji, however, felt that the Muslims should do more
than vote for India’s dominant party – they should join it, and influence its policies.

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.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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’.
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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.
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Elsewhere, Muslims continued to labour in menial jobs while being under-represented in education, in the professions, in the legislatures and in the administration.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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.’
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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.
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By this time Partition was almost two decades in the past, yet its residues remained. For, as a Muslim leader in Madras bitterly remarked, the violence of 1963–4 only reinforced the ‘fear that anything happening in Pakistan will have its repercussions on Muslims in India, particularly when exaggerated reports appear in the Indian Press, and people and parties inimical to Muslims are ready to seize the opportunity’.
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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