Indian Muslims and the ‘Muslim world’

ASIM ALI

THE protests of the ‘Islamic world’ to the recent blasphemy controversy brought to the fore a fear that has often lurked at the back of the postcolonial Indian mind – the fear of trans-Islamic consolidation. The country’s greater neighbourhood is composed largely of Muslim countries, an arc extending from the Persian Gulf to South East Asia, crisscrossing the rugged terrain of central Asia. On its western border lies Pakistan, a hostile state which has attempted, at crucial moments, to rally the ‘Islamic world’ against India. Finally, India is home to a large Muslim presence, numbering nearly 200 million; it represents the third largest Muslim population in the world.

The Hindu nationalist movement has never shied away from overtly expressing the nature of the potential threat arising from Indian Muslims acting in concert with forces emanating from across the broader Islamic neighbourhood. Post 9/11 and the global war on Islamic extremism, this perception has also been periodically fuelled by certain sections of the Indian media as well as the national security establishment. This pan Islamic threat is implicated in political discourses varying from separatism and terrorism to communal violence and demographic challenges.

The BJP has skilfully employed this image of Indian Muslims, as privileging their extraterritorial loyalties to the global Muslim community (‘umma’) to their loyalty to the Indian nation, to drive its project of Hindu consolidation. Its success draws partly from the fact that these concerns have a long history and are deeply rooted in the Indian psyche.

It is the contention of this essay that this globalized image of Indian Muslims is not sociologically rooted: a function of the lived reality of Indian Muslims. A rich strand of sociological literature on Indian Muslims has consistently highlighted the prevalence of a bewildering diversities of Muslim communities. Many scholars have argued that it is impossible to even discuss Indian Muslims or Indian Islam in the singular because of these remarkable divergences in both religious aspects (observances, sects, practices) as well as socio-cultural dimensions (caste, class, language, culture).1

There is also scant evidence of a widespread identification with the interests and concerns of a globalized ‘umma’. The argument of certain observers of Indian foreign policy that Indian Muslims exert an organized force in the formulation of foreign policy choices is at the very least unsubstantiated by hard evidence.2 The surveys of electoral behaviour of Indian Muslims do not furnish any indication of foreign policy priorities playing a distinct role in the electoral choices of Muslims as compared to other communities. Similarly, the voting record of Muslim legislators in Parliament have not been marked by any significant break with the foreign policy positions of their respective parties.

There have been occasional protests organized by sections of the religious elite on global issues such as the Iraq war or Arab-Isareali conflict, but that does not necessarily entail the existence of organized ethnic pressures on foreign policy. The easing of Indian relations with Israel, for example, began under a Congress regime that was dependent on the support of Muslim voters; further this policy shift was free of any domestic backlash associated with the existence of a well defined ethnic pressure. At any rate, even those scholars who posit the influence of domestic constituency of Indian Muslims as one element in the formulation of India’s Israel policy, only ascribe to it a marginal role, compared to the determining role assigned to India’s relations with the Arab world.3

In the model presented in this essay, the construction of a globalized identity of Muslims has been dependent on the foreign policy regime of the country, and the global environment which it operates. This is a complex and evolving relationship shaped by a number of variables: one, the relationship is structured by the antecedent variable of the historical evolution of Indian nationalism’s engagement with Muslims; and two, the relationship is mediated by three intervening variables – political parties, state institutions, and the media which define the contours of the globalized identity of Muslims.

The first major mobilization of Indian Muslims in the nationalist movement was during the Khilafat movement (1919-1924) The Gandhi-led Congress backed the Khilafat movement as part of the larger non-cooperation struggle because the pan-Islamic concerns of the Khilafat movement could be moulded into a popular anti-colonial discourse. Even if the religious practices of Muslims were divergent, there existed a shared emotional attachment for the ‘Holy Places’ of Islam. The frequent intersection of pan-Islamist with anti-colonialist streams was a feature seen in large parts of North Africa, Middle East and South Asia, inspired by the writings of political philosophers such as Jamaluddin al-Afghani. In fact, the primary target of Al Afghani in India was the modernist Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, criticizing him for political servitude to the British instead of joining hands with the Indian nationalists.4

Even for the Indian Khilafat movement leaders such as Muhammad Ali, Abul Kalam Azad, M.A. Ansari, the quietist reformism of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan was nothing less than behaving as the partisan of the British enemies which were destroying the beliefs of Indian Muslims and making them subservient to western political and cultural domination.

The anti-imperialist tenor of the Khilafat movement was expressed in the proposal for an Asiatic federation by M.A. Ansari, at the All-India Khilafat Conference of 1922, for more solidarity among the people of Asia so that they can be rescued from the bondage of Europe.5

The tensions between Indian nationalism and pan Islamism were not quite as developed in the 1920s as some retrospective evaluations might suggest. Indeed, there was a creative thrust on the part of quite a few Khilafat leaders to conjure up a synthesis of the imperatives of Islam and Indian nationalism, and to demonstrate that they were not incompatible to each other. Muhammad Ali offered a revealing description in 1930 of the nature of this synthesis:

‘Where God commands ... I am a Muslim first, a Muslim second and a Muslim last and nothing but a Muslim…But where India is concerned, where India’s freedom is concerned, where the welfare of India is concerned, I am an Indian first, an Indian second, an Indian last and nothing but an Indian... I belong to two circles of equal size but which are not concentric. One is India and the other is Muslim... We belong to these circles... and we can leave neither.’6

Even for Al Afghani, religious links did not preclude national links between people of different faiths, and he advocated to his Indian Muslim audience to join hands with the Hindus in the shared national cause.7 The ideological coherence to this project of reconciling religious belief to the ideal of a unified Indian nationalism was also provided by leaders such as Maulana Azad, who anchored a Hindu-Muslim alliance to the historical precedent of the Prophet’s covenant with the Jews. He asserted that inter-communal harmony in the shared struggle against the British was an obligatory religious duty for Muslims.8

It must be mentioned here, though, that attachment to pan-Islamic symbols (such as Holy Mosques) were just one element of a gamut of symbolic resources that defined the worldview of Muslim communities of the early 20th century. Thus, it was the choice of the religious and nationalist elite to strongly evoke that symbol that caused it to transform from an emotional attachment to the ideological basis of community mobilization. In the instrumentalist approach of political sociology, elites select from a range of cultural symbols of a given ethnic group those symbols that serve to politically mobilise the group towards a certain set of political objectives.9 If the Khilafat movement succeeded in integrating the Muslim masses into the nationalist struggle, it also set a template for the political engagement of Muslims as a monolithic religious community.

A different process of symbol selection was to later form the basis of the Pakistan struggle. As Paul Brass has argued, the Muslim elites of the minority provinces, landlords, government servants and politicians, whose material interests were tied to separatism, nurtured a process of identity formation where they emphasized the significance of non-shared cultural markers, customs, attributes and institutional forms, while playing down the importance of shared cultural symbols. The Pakistan movement was thus rooted not in an exclusive ‘Islamic tradition’ but in the instrumentalization of ‘symbol selection and symbol manipulation’ through which Muslim elites leveraged political advantage in a colonial context.10

The post-colonial elite has taken from the experience of Partition an aversion to institutional forms that might incubate distinct political interests. Thus, the demands for proportional representation and inclusion of minorities in the constitutional scheme of reservation was denied as it was reminiscent of separate electorates and colonial era quotas of Muslims in minority provinces. However, the discomfort with a separate political identity did not extend to a separate religious identity.11 In the treatment of Muslims as primarily a religious community, the template of the Khilafat movement has cast a long and worrying shadow. The Constitutional protections accorded to Muslims were of a cultural-religious dimension as reflected in Article 30 of the Constitution.

Thus, the political mobilization of Muslims through the manipulation of cultural/religious symbols was not delegitimized by Partition, as long as such mobilization was carried out by mainstream parties. In fact, from the 1960s, a category of ‘Muslim issues’ was established in the political discourse – official patronage of Urdu, minority status of Aligarh Muslim University, a Uniform Civil Code, Babri Masjid – and secular parties fashioned themselves as the guardians of these special protections. Alongside, the Muslim religious elite were propped up as the favoured intercessors in the political process, and came to be recognized as the representatives of the community. Hence, a separate Muslim religious identity has been sustained in the political sphere as a convenient instrument of electoral mobilization by mainstream parties such as the Congress.12

This historical context is thus offered here as kind of an antecedent variable that structures the relationship between the globalized image of Muslim community and the foreign policy regimes of the Indian state.

The Indian establishment’s conception of Muslims as a distinct, monolithic community was refracted through the imagination of a global Islamic world, thus fostering the illusion of Indian Muslims as part of a globalized community. The particular form this illusion of a globalized identity depended on India’s foreign policy regimes and the external environment it operated within. Thus, whether this trans-Islamic identity of Indian Muslims was viewed as a benign influence and even an asset to be leveraged, or was in fact conceived as a malignant influence and a threat to be contained, depended on the broader grand strategy of India in a changing world.

For the purposes of analysis, we shall roughly divide Indian foreign policy regimes into three eras: the Nehruvian era of non-alignment, the pro-Soviet era, and the post-Cold War era to see how India’s grand strategy towards the Islamic world influenced the conception of the Indian Muslim community.

Ever since the Mughals, Indian rulers have been preoccupied with securing ties with the predominantly Muslim West and North-West. Nehru understood the importance of this region to India’s security and its ambitions of great power status. However, India did not have (and still does not have) a large military presence in the Indian Ocean littoral. Hence, the post-colonial Indian state immediate recognized the central importance of the ‘soft power’ legacy of the Indo-Islamic culture that blossomed under medieval Muslim rulers as a bridge towards cultural and economic ties with the region.13

Nehru built close ties with the Muslim leaders of Egypt, Turkey and Indonesia, and reached out to Arab and Persian politicians and intellectuals as part of the Non-Aligned movement. India was also a key organizer of the Bandung conference (1955) that became a symbol of Afro-Asian solidarity. Indeed, the ten-point declaration adopted at Bandung was influenced by Nehru’s five principles of peaceful coexistence (Panchsheel). Thus, anti-colonialism and ‘Third World’ solidarity grounded India’s ties to the Muslim countries of Asia and Africa. According to one estimate, the twenty-nine countries represented at the Bandung Conference represented more than half of the global Muslim population.14

Thus, the Islamic world was seen in this era as the resisting force to colonialism which the Indian foreign Minister V.K. Krishna Menon famously characterized as ‘permanent aggression’.15 This establishment’s benign view of the Islamic world was reflected in its accommodating stance towards a domestic Muslim community which was dependent on the patronage of the Congress party. This accommodation was primarily manifested in the cultural domain as protection of the distinctive religious character of Muslims, as evident by the exclusion of Muslims from the Hindu code bills passed in the 1950s. This differential treatment across religions has been celebrated as a distinctive form of Indian secularism which permits an enlightened differentiation on the grounds that it promotes freedom, equality, or any other value integral to secularism.16

The Indian polity started drifting towards the Soviet camp under Indira Gandhi. The Sino-Soviet split and the later Sino-US détente had changed the calculations of the Indian foreign policy establishment. The key position of Pakistan in the US-led anti-communist alliance, whose implications became manifest during the 1971 war, also pushed India further into the Soviet embrace.

However, India’s world view of the Islamic world changed little during this time, and India was still confident of the effectiveness of its strategy to thwart Pakistan’s objectives of rallying the Islamic world against its interests. A significant break in this world view came around the start of the 1980s as Islamic extremism came to being viewed as a ‘subversive’ or ‘destabilizing’ force. This was the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when the Indira Gandhi regime broke ranks with the non-communist world and effectively endorsed the invasion, denouncing the ‘outside powers’ that had backed ‘subversive elements’ in Afghanistan.17

The United States became a close military partner of Pakistan post the invasion, as Pakistan became a critical frontline state in the anti-Soviet alliance. For this anti-communist axis, Islam became an invaluable resource for resisting Soviet expansionism. This excited India’s discomfort for various reasons, not least being the threat of spillover of Islamist militancy within India’s borders. Alongside this burst of Sunni/Wahabbi militancy, the Iranian revolution of 1979 not only destabilized a friendly regime but also surcharged this spectre of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ at the doorstep.

The increasingly majoritarian politics of the country, reflected both in the rise of the BJP as well as the right wing turn of Indira Gandhi in her final term, was fuelled further by this ferment in the Islamic world. As Islam was no more a benign anti-colonial force but as a subversive and fundamentalist force, the Indian Muslim community began to be viewed with ill-concealed suspicion. The issue of ‘influx of Gulf money’ became a substantial factor in Hindu nationalist mobilization, and caused a spate of riots in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat.18 The upward mobility of Muslims in towns of western Uttar Pradesh owing to commercialization of agriculture was conflated entirely with ‘petrodollars’ and trading ties of Muslim businessmen with Gulf countries, and constructed as a trans-Islamic security threat to the majority community.

Similarly, the Meenakshipuram conversions of Dalits to Islam were also framed as a conspiracy fuelled by Gulf money, including by the ruling Congress and the national media.19 The critical role of the intervening variable of political parties becomes apparent here. As Wilkinson demonstrated, the petrodollars bogey could not create a similar Hindu nationalist mobilization in Kerala (which had much closer ties to Gulf countries) because of the bargaining power of IUML (Indian Union Muslim League) in the consociationalist framework of Kerala.

The inflated threat perception of this global Islamic resurgence, fuelled by majoritarian political mobilization, also perhaps explains the depth of backlash to the Shah Bano controversy, which was seen as not just a defence of orthodoxy, but also the expression of a malignant fundamentalism that was part of a global Islamic upsurge.20

The critical paradigm shifts of the post-Cold war era in India’s complicated relationship with its Muslim community came with the participation of India the post-9/11 global war on terror. As India constructed a sophisticated anti-terror state machinery, underpinned by draconian laws such as POTA, the engagement of the Indian state with Muslims became increasing security-centred and anchored to the objective of managing extremism. The human rights violations committed by security agencies in the ‘crackdown’ on terror have been exhaustively documented by civil society associations, such as The Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association (JTSA), which published a chilling report in 2012, detailing sixteen cases involving more than forty Muslim men who were framed and condemned to long stints in prison before being acquitted.21

The political vocabulary of using strong-arm measures or even violence to combat terror has been employed by Hindu nationalist forces to drive religious polarization in states such as Gujarat, which saw an anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002 after the ruling party alleged a Pakistan backed terror attack in the town of Godhra. The role of the media in propagating the stereotypes of ‘extremist Muslims’ is backed by a colossal body of evidence.22

The rise of the BJP in national politics is driven in no small part by its ownership of the national security issues through its uncompromising rhetoric on Pakistan and Islamic extremism, which are viewed as the main security threats in the popular imagination. When asked about India’s biggest threats in a 2014 Pew survey, 90 per cent respondents included Pakistan, 85 per cent included Naxalites and 80 per cent included Lashkar-e-Taiba. Both Pakistan and terrorism, by design, seamlessly align with its domestic politics of Hindutva and anti-Muslim prejudice.23

The post 9/11 engagement of the Indian establishment with the Muslim community has also been marked by the high point of a phenomenon the scholar Hilal Ahmad has termed as ‘Muslim politicophobia’.24 This Muslim politicophobia denotes a new political consensus emerging from the fusion of global anti-Islamism and anti-Muslim communalism in India. According to Ahmad, Muslim politicophobia is defined by three features: one, the ‘transformation’ of the Indian Muslim identity into a ‘reference point for global Islamic terrorism’; two, ‘the fear of active Muslim political engagement’; and three, the intensification of popular representation of Muslims ‘as a politically conscious community’.

The globalized image of Indian Muslims thus does not emanate organically from the sociological characteristics or religious beliefs of Indian Muslims, nor is it an inevitable outcome of the developments of the global Islamic world. As we have sought to demonstrate, this globalized image of Indian Muslim emerges from a complex relationship between Indian Muslims and Indian foreign policy regimes, structured by a historical context, and mediated by the critical role of political parties, state agencies and the media.

Footnotes:

1. P. Gottschalk, I. Ahmad, & H. Reifeld, ‘Mapping Muslims: Categories of Evolutionary Difference and Interaction in South Asia’, in Imtiaz Ahmad and Helmut Reifeld (eds.), Lived Islam in South Asia: Adaptation, Accommodation, and Conflict. Routledge, London, 2017, pp. 3-17.

2. T. P. Wright Jr, ‘Ethnic Group Pressures in Foreign Policy: Indian Muslims and American Jews’, Economic and Political Weekly 17(41), 1982, pp. 1655-1660.

3. P.R. Kumaraswamy, India’s Israel Policy. Columbia University Press, New York, 2010.

4. S.J. Ali, Sayyid Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani and the West. Adam Publishers & Distributors, Delhi, 2002.

5. A. Engineer, They Too Fought for India’s Freedom: The Role of Minorities. Hope India Publications, Delhi, 2006.

6. S.J. Burki, Pakistan: Fifty Years Of Nationhood (Third Edition). Taylor & Francis, New York, 2018.

7. M. Hasan, ‘Pan-Islamism versus Indian Nationalism? A Reappraisal’, Economic and Political Weekly 21(24), 1986, pp. 1074-1079.

8. Ibid.

9. A. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism. Routledge, London/NY, 1998.

10. P.R. Brass, ‘Elite Groups, Symbol Manipulation and Ethnic Identity Among the Muslims of S. Asia’, in J. Hutchinson and A.D. Smith (eds.), Nationalism: Critical Concepts in Political Science (Vol 3). Routledge, London/NY, 2000, p. 879.

11. P.R. deSouza, H. Ahmed, M.S. Alam, Democratic Accommodations: Minorities in Contemporary India. Bloomsbury Publishing, India, 2021.

12. H. Ahmed, Siyasi Muslims: A Story of Political Islams in India. Penguin Random House India, 2019.

13. A. Pande, R. Dhage, & O. Jain, ‘Foreign Policy in South Asia: Promise and Peril’, in A. Pande (ed.), Routledge Handbook on South Asian Foreign Policy. Routledge, London/NY, 2021, pp. 1-16.

14. A.A. Mazrui, T. Uthup, R. Badran, Resurgent Islam and the Politics of Identity. Cambridge Scholars Publisher, UK, 2014.

15. Ibid.

16. R. Bhargava, ‘Political Secularism: Why it is Needed and What Can Be Learnt from Its Distinctive Indian Version’, in G.B. Levey and T. Modood (eds.), Secularism, Religion and Multicultural Citizenship. Cambridge University Press, UK, 2009, pp. 82-109.

17. R.K. Singh, Relations of NDA and UPA with Neighbours. Gyan Publishing House, Delhi, 2010.

18. S. Wilkinson, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006.

19. B. Puri, Muslims of India Since Partition. India: Gyan Publishing House, Delhi, 2007.

20. M. Hasan, Indian Muslims Since independence: In Search of Integration and Identity’, Third World Quarterly, 10(2), 1988, pp. 818-842.

21. H. Mander, Partitions of the Heart: Unmaking the Idea of India. Penguin Random House India, 2018.

22. A. Kumar, ‘Mass Media and Muslims in India: Representation or Subversion’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 31(1), 2011, pp. 59-77.

23. A. Ali and A. Barthwal, ‘How BJP Has Owned the National Security Issue and Why China Won’t Change That’, The Print, 24 June 2020. https://theprint.in/opinion/bjp-owned-national-security-issue-china-wont-change-that/447554/

24. H. Ahmad, ‘The Emergence of Muslim ‘Politicophobia’ After 9/11’, The Indian Express, 11 September 2021. https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the-emergence-of-muslim-politicophobia-after-9-11-7501708/