THE invocation of minority rights is often linked to some experience, or apprehension of victimhood – of marginalization, exclusion, silencing, loss of culture, which can be countervailed through the protective sheath of guarantees accruing to minorities. The relationship of Jains – numerically a mere .4% of the population, but admittedly one of the wealthiest communities in India – to minority status has been fraught from the beginning.

‘To be or not to be’, prominent Shvetambar Jainmuni Ajay Sagar quotes Shakespeare to elucidate the dilemma that the community has faced in seeking, or renouncing the label of minority. Declared to be a national minority in 2014 by the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) at the fag end of its term, though many states had already declared them to be so, it allowed them to access benefits flowing from Articles 29 and 30 to run their educational institutions – their numerous schools and colleges, as well as to take advantage of the various schemes including stipends, scholarships and easy loans for entrepreneurs. Prior to this, cases of Jains seeking minority status to avail these benefits would often reach various high courts.

Though one may quibble that following the 2014 declaration, which enumerates Jains in the list of national minorities, the issue is only of academic interest, it does, however, go to the heart of how groups designate and portray themselves – as powerless in need of protection, as once powerful but now enfeebled, or even resentful of labels that signal weakness; how they view through the prism of this self-portrayal their relationship to the state, and most importantly to other groups, whether it be one of intimacy and cooperation, or conflict, competition, even repulsion. This then is the field par excellence of ‘victimhood work’.¹

The demand for minority status has had a long career with many Jain associations petitioning the Constituent Assembly’s Advisory Committee on Fundamental Rights and Minorities to ensure that their interests were protected when the Constitution was drawn up. This reached its apogee in the movement that was launched in the immediate aftermath of the introduction of the Harijan Temple Entry Act in Bombay in 1947, which by including Jains under the rubric of ‘Hindu’ threw open Jain temples to groups hitherto excluded, namely the formerly untouchables.² Both the drafting of the Constitution, and the law which sought to reform temple practices of exclusion, became the key moments in which the differing positions on minority status were forged. Recognition of the Jains’ distinctiveness as a faith, philosophy and protection of their system of practices, especially of their ascetics, was the cornerstone of the appeals made to the Advisory Committee. But even so, at least some petitions and representations sought more than just cultural recognition.

 

Since at this time, political representation and share in public employment for minorities was still on the table, at least one section demanded that the ‘Jains be treated as a minority and given all rights and privileges which may be given to other communities.’ They argued that notwithstanding their apparent domination in industry and commerce, ‘as a community the Jains are backward.’ Another memorandum, submitted a few months later, by the All India Shvetambar Sthanakwasi Jain Conference, however stated that Jains were ‘racially Hindus’ and ‘in the interest of the unity of the country’ forsake any claim to separate representation in the legislative, executive, or administrative institutions of the country or indeed any separate political rights.³

Around the same time, the anti-temple entry movement insisted on Jainism’s separateness from Hinduism, by virtue of which a law designed to reform the Hindu community, could not be applied to it. It sought protection from the state’s reformism as a distinctive religious minority. The chief protagonist of the movement was the Digambar muni Shantisagar whose stature in modern Digambar history is unequalled as he is said to have revived the ‘lost’ tradition of naked monk-hood. Seeing the legislation as an attempt to destroy Jain dharma, he undertook partial fasting, which further triggered a series of public actions by his followers, including physically resisting attempts at forced entry.

The law was portrayed as a culmination of a long, unbroken history of persecution and plunder whereby hundreds of historical Jain temples in Phaltan, Kolhapur, Mysore, and indeed all over southern India, had slipped out of the control of Jains into Hindu hands and how Jain scriptures had been systematically destroyed. They pointed to the popularity of expressions, each more obnoxious than the other – ‘even if you leave the snake alive, make sure to kill the Jains’, and ‘one should not enter a Jain temple even when defeated and pushed by an elephant’ – that betrayed feelings of prejudice and ill will against the community.

 

What however complicates this neat public narrative of victimhood is the proliferation of the familiar horrors of caste pollution in the debates that circulated internally. Tracts offering full-fledged scriptural defence of the caste system and hierarchy were published. One tract, Jain Mandir aur Harijan, attributed insidious motives to the ‘Harijan’ demand for temple entry. The author charged that they would not stop at temple entry, but next demand the ‘right’ to marry Jain women, and that the real intention of the leaders of formerly untouchable groups in entering Jain temples was to assess the wealth and treasures secreted away in their temples.⁴

Shantisagar’s Jain opponents sought to open the gates of Jain temples to formerly untouchable groups, rejecting the contention that Jain scriptures supported caste distinctions, insisting instead that the terms ‘jati’ and ‘varna’ indicated individual qualities rather than group attributes. But while doing so, the Jain reformers ridiculed Shantisagar as ‘Mian Jinnah’, accusing him of precipitating ‘separatism’. They emphasized the perils of casting one’s lot with ‘minorities’ rather than Hindus with whom Jains shared close social (and ‘racial’) ties, and their overriding concern in attacking the refrain of ‘Jains are not Hindus’ was principally to distance Jains from Muslims, whose loyalty in the immediate aftermath of the partition was deemed to be suspect.

 

Not surprisingly, the first tendency represented by Shantisagar and his followers later congealed in the legal and public campaign to demand minority status, and the second into those who have shunned the moniker, and felt repelled by the associations it conjures. Though seemingly opposite, both tendencies in fact share a family resemblance, as we shall see.

The aversion that many Jains opposed to minority status feel for the term itself is not a uniquely Jain dilemma. As Liebich has shown, the world over, minority has been seen as indicative of inferiority. The Yugoslavs for instance objected to the use of the expression ‘because the status of a minority can never be fully equal to that of the majority.’⁵ While Liebich argues that this very identification of being a minority with both numerical and substantive inferiority necessitates strengthening of the minority rights regimes, this does not foreclose the possibility of some groups distancing themselves from and stigmatizing the very idea of minority.

 

This is precisely what has happened with Jain opponents of minority status. Albeit, the definition of minority has been kept secret by the government, they say it is commonly understood to be the equivalent of downtrodden, helpless, pathetic, pitiful, and abjectly weak. Such stigmatization also flows from a sense that Jains are socially superior and spiritually advanced. Their scrupulous adherence to vegetarianism is presented as a key symbol of their social-spiritual excellence. The antithesis of Jain values is the minority other – the meat eating Muslim. What the government declaration of Jains in the national list of minorities does in the eyes of critics, is that it lumps the ‘ahimsak’ non-violent Jains with ‘militant’ Muslims. ‘Could an exporter of diamonds be treated at par with a meat exporter’, asked a pamphlet rhetorically. So, there is first a putative moral objection.

Second, it is argued that Muslims by virtue of being the largest minority would dominate the ‘club’ of minorities. It is argued that those who think that the minority status will bring benefits to the Jains fail to understand that Muslims are able to wrest gains for themselves because of their ‘dhauns’ (browbeating). The Jains, clearly lacking their stridency and their numbers, would be left to fend for themselves. Besides, given their share in the population, a Muslim would head the National Commission for Minorities. Recalling his meeting many years back with the proponent of minority status, Rajendra Joshi, who runs Viniyog Parivar that has been at the forefront of the campaign for banning cow slaughter, says he tried to arouse his self-respect by asking if it would be acceptable for Jains who have always been in leadership roles, to be followers, that too of a Muslim?

Third, the critics feel that minority status is otiose for Jains who are wealthy enough to offer care and aid to their needy fellow adherents. It is the allusion to dependence on government aid that minority status instantly invokes that is most resented by this group. ‘The samaj is now reduced to the situation of bheekhmange (beggars)’, says Ajay Sagar muni. Whereas, the fundamental characteristics of Jains were self-respect, compassion and charity, he argues, which also created an ethic whereby the Jains would work hard to earn wealth and once prosperous, would support charity, the minority status encourages the view that ‘the government is obliged to support me.’ It is rendering Jains lazy, dishonest and dependent. This is not genuine welfarism, the monk concludes.

 

These traits, which now threaten Jains – being irresponsible, with a poor work ethic, reliance on government aid, nikammapan or indolence, as the monk says, are seen as hallmarks of minorities. By entering the fold of minorities, Jains’ traditional propensity for hard work would be vitiated. The ‘lollypop’ of minority quota in government employment has been dangled before the community,⁶ it is charged, to seduce a section (the ‘chota varg’ or lower class) of the Jains to seek minority status. It may be noted here that while the wealthy merchants who are also predominantly Shvetambar have pointed to their affluence, their tax paying capacity, and their ostentatious charitable and welfare activities to rebuff the label of minority, it is the southern Digambar Jain communities that are relatively poorer and traditionally in the services, who have rallied behind the cause.⁷

 

Among those who criticize the minority status for the community, there appears to be unanimity that the whole business of minority is a trap, or rather a conspiracy of global proportions, stretching back to an alleged Papal Bull of 1413 – which called for the triumph of World Christianity and the elimination of all other religions and peoples – to the formation of the National Commission for Minorities in India in 1992. They see themselves as ‘victims’ of this gigantic conspiracy, which seeks to breed feelings of deprivation and insecurity among Jains, to create an emotional and mental gulf between Jains and Hindus who have shared ties of business, marriage and festivals for centuries, and thereby fashion and consolidate vote bank politics to weaken Hinduism (of which Jains are a part) and India.

Even those groups and organizations that have embraced the minority status, and led the legal and public campaign through many decades, are not immune to the discomfort that the term minority, especially its close association with Muslims, arouses. While the anti-minority critics willy-nilly characterize the very category of minority negatively, the minority campaigners emphasize their own distinctive cultural values as a community that differentiates them from Muslims. They present themselves as a ‘model minority’ in contrast to a ‘troublesome minority’.

Sociologist William Pettersen was the first to use the term ‘model minority’ to explain the success story of the Japanese Americans who flourished in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, including prejudice and discrimination institutionalized in law.⁸ They were distinguished from problem minorities, whose experience of cumulative degradation had made them bitter and apathetic, and prevented them from taking advantage of ameliorative government programmes.

 

Though this framework has been thoroughly critiqued for entrenching stereotypes and shaming those minority groups who could not achieve the same degree of success, and for discrediting measures of positive discrimination, it finds a remarkable echo in some Jain circles. The Jain minority advocates do not turn away from government aid, which they consider to be important for advancement of its poorer sections. Instead, they portray themselves as rightful and virtuous recipients of government munificence.

At a meeting to propagate the benefits of minority schemes that Jains could avail of, a leader of the All-India Jain Minority Federation (an organization dedicated to bringing minority schemes to the community) thundered that the government does well to grant loans to Jain entrepreneurs, because unlike other minorities, they can be relied upon to return the loan. In this rhetoric there is the repeated insinuation that government aid would be better invested on the Jains given their business sense, strong ethics, and law-abiding nature. There is an underlying assumption that these are qualities that Muslims lack.

This minority politics, while it makes demands on the government, imagines the relationship very differently. For example, at the time of demonetization, JMF (whose Facebook page has the visage of Amit Shah staring down at the reader) called upon Jains to spread awareness about the policy, to help the bank employees as well as those standing in long queues, and thereby to contribute to ‘national development’.

 

The BJP’s slogan encapsulating its stance on minorities, ‘sabka saath, sabka vikas’, appeared prominently in the appeal. No doubt, this move cleverly allows the organization to wear the mantle of good, obedient citizens. At another level, the use of the slogan also signals the organization’s closeness to the accusation made for long by the BJP, or more generally the right wing, that secularism has been an alibi for ‘Muslim appeasement’. In fact, minority rights campaigners often complain that all minority benefits are cornered by the Muslims, with the Akhil Bharatiya Jain Mahasabha even filing a petition in the Supreme Court in 2014, demanding rotation of the chairmanship of NCM among different minorities.

While there are differences between the two positions – those who oppose the granting of minority status to Jains, and those who had sought its inclusion – both centre on the figure of the Muslim to elaborate their discourse on the minority. Both sides mobilize victimhood though in rather surprising ways: the first sees the portends of a dark conspiracy in the secularist attempt to create minorities, and then to corral such ‘naturally opposed’ groups as the Jains and Muslims together such that the majority, as well as the state, begin to see the two as no different. The very labelling as a minority is anathema to them. The latter sees itself as a victim of Muslim appropriation of minority funds, and makes a moral claim on the category of minority in such a way that it can still seek accommodation within the politics of Hindutva.

 

Footnotes:

1. Laura Jeffery and Matti Candea, ‘The Politics of Victimhood’, History and Anthropology 17(4), 2006, pp. 287-296.

2. This law was successor to a plethora of legislative reforms in the late colonial period enacted to facilitate temple entry for social groups traditionally excluded from entry and worship in temples. The act defined Hindus to include Jains. A similar legislation in Central Provinces and Berar on the other hand, expressly stated that the law would not apply to Jain temples.

3. Iqbal Ansari, Readings on Minorities: Perspectives and Documents, Vol. II. Institute of Objective Studies, Delhi, 1996, pp. 232-37 and pp. 229-31.

4. Indralal Shastri cited in Vidyarthi ‘Narendra’, Harijan Mandir Pravesh, ek Addhyan: Indralal ji Shastri ke Tract ka Yuktipoorna Uttar. Pragatisheel Jain Yuvak Samaj, Sagar, n.d., p. 62 and p. 73.

5. Andre Leibich, ‘Minority as Inferiority: Minority Rights in Historical Perspective’, Review of International Studies34, 2008, pp. 243-263.

6. There is of course no reservation for minorities in public employment but this myth has a life of its own.

7. In the famous writ, Bal Patil vs Union of India, which sought minority status for Jains, Bal Patil, himself a southern Digambar, moved the court on behalf of the Dakshin Bharat Digambar Jain Sabha.

8. William Pettersen, ‘Success Story, Japanese-American Style’, New York Times, 9 January 1966.