Majoritarianism is futile: India must remain a plural, tolerant and diverse society

A simple tweet I sent out recently drew unexpected ire. “Just as Muslim majoritarian Kashmir is unacceptable, so is Hindu majoritarian India,” I wrote. The criticism was sharp. The Kashmir Valley should of course be plural, I was told. But India, being a naturally Hindu majority country, should be majoritarian. 

Pray why? Because, the tweeple said, Hindus are tolerant and can be trusted to look after minorities. As evidence they pointed to the (relative) peace in which 180 million Muslims live in India. They comprise the largest Muslim minority in the world. Only Indonesia has more Muslims (Pakistan comes a close third).

Muslims in India retain their personal laws, their festivals and their minority educational institutions. But Kashmir, the argument goes, is different. After centuries of pluralism in the Valley where Muslims and Hindus lived side by side in harmony, Pakistan has tried to spread a dangerous strain of Salafi Islam.

Hindus have been driven out of the Valley. At the time of Independence, Hindus made up around 10 per cent of the total population in the Kashmir Valley. Muslims comprised 90 per cent. Today Hindus comprise just one per cent of the population in the Valley and Muslims 99 per cent.  Meanwhile, as the deluge of tweets on my timeline affirmed, the population of Muslims in India has increased from 9.80 per cent of the total population in the 1951 census to 14.23 per cent in the 2011 census. 

These statistics, the argument goes, underscore how tolerant Hindu majoritarianism is — and how intolerant Muslim majoritarianism in the Valley has proved to be.

Regressive

Globally Islam has been hijacked by medieval thinking. The repository of Islam’s holiest shrines, Saudi Arabia, instead of being a progressive leader of Islam worldwide, has set the worst possible example. Its Wahhabi version of Islam forbids women to drive or vote. It outsources jihad to terror outfits like the Islamic State (ISIS), which it initially funded, and al Qaeda. 

Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia, three large non-Arab Muslim-majority countries, have all regressed into semi-autocracies. Apart from Tunisia, where the Arab Spring brought some reform, the entire Arab world and non-Arab Iran have descended into sectarian conflict, civil strife or religious obscurantism. What is wrong with contemporary Islam? The answer lies partly in its rigid theological interpretation by Islamic clergy and partly in the shadow of history. 

Islam began violently. The Sunni-Shia conflict is over 1,300 years old. The sword rather than the book has been used to settle internal differences as well as proselytise.  Despite the violence, Islam was civilisationally advanced till the 13th century. But just when medieval Christianity in Europe was reforming itself by setting up universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Heidelberg and the Sorbonne) in the 13th century, Islam took the wrong fork in the road.

For the next five hundred years, till the 18th century, it leant on the sword. Its all-conquering armies reached the gates of Venice in Austria before being driven back in 1716 in the Battle of Petrovaradin. 

Islam had previously conquered vast swathes of south-eastern Europe (today’s Albania and Bosnia), southern Spain and the Central Asian Republics. The Indian subcontinent was an afterthought, invaded by the Mughals led by the failed Turko-Mongol warlord Babur. The death-knell of global Islam came in 1918 when it was defeated by the Allies in World War I. Its lands were taken away. Pliable Arab dictators, remote controlled by the United States, Britain and France, were installed. The centuries-old Ottoman caliphate was dissolved on March 3, 1924. 

A century later, the rise of ISIS and its self-declared Caliphate in Syria and Iraq is the result of a hundred years of resentment and anger in the Middle East. America’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, the thousands of innocent civilians killed in US air strikes and the millennium-old Sunni-Shia conflict forms a deadly, combustible mix. From it emerged, first, al Qaeda and then ISIS. 

Terror Threat

Radical Islam poses a global threat. It is fungible and exportable. Pakistan is already its epicentre, a predicament brought about by Islamabad’s abetment of terrorism in India, especially Kashmir. 

The terror group Hizbul Mujahideen is a Pakistani proxy to spread Salafi Islam in the Valley. The violence in Kashmir is instigated by Islamabad. It can only be defeated if the Narendra Modi government stops being soft on the Hurriyat terrorists, removes their perks, allowances and security and reads them the riot act. Syed Ali Shah Geelani and his cohorts, like all paid agents, have neither courage nor a mind of their own. The more you indulge them, the more trouble they will foment. Indian politicians like Sitaram Yechuri, D.Raja, Asaduddin Owaisi and others are not a part of Kashmir’s solution. They are a part of the problem with their desire to appease separatists for their own shrinking political constituencies. 

Hindus though must not assume that because Muslims have made Kashmir a majoritarian state, India should follow that example. Hinduism is a tolerant and absorbtive religion that embraces other faiths. 

I have long admired Hinduism’s many subtleties. As I once wrote: “India is secular because Hindus are innately secular. Of the world’s major religions, Hinduism is the only one without a prophet. No one ‘founded’ Hinduism — unlike Christ, Mohammad, Zoroaster, Abraham, Confucius, Mahavira, Buddha and Guru Nanak. Hinduism, or Sanatana Dharma, evolved organically. The Vedas (circa 1800 BC) predate the second oldest religious text, Judaism’s Torah (circa 1300 BC), by several hundred years. Sanatana Dharma is the world’s oldest organised religious philosophy.”

India must remain the plural, tolerant and diverse society it is and has historically been. We should be proud that we are not a majoritarian Hindu country despite 80 per cent of Indians being Hindus.  We should, of course, never make the mistake of drawing a false equivalence between Islamist terrorism and fringe Hindu groups. Both are unacceptable but the difference lies in scale: as wide as between a tsunami and a ripple.  Hinduism, despite its evolved philosophy, needs to reform too. It has too many superstitions. The caste system is cruel. It must go. And the ethos of Hindu fatalism must be set aside. But in the end, every Indian — Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Jew — is, first, a Hindustani civilisationally and everything else second. That should be the guiding principle of India, not majoritarianism.
 
The writer is author of The New Clash of Civilizations: How The Contest Between America, China, India and Islam Will Shape Our Century (Rupa, 2014)