Aakar Patel: The obligation on India's Hindus

Pakistan honestly excludes its minorities from political agency through law

On the Indian subcontinent, political exclusion of religious minorities is the norm though the methods vary. The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is honest and excludes through law.

No Hindu is allowed to be Pakistan’s president [Article 41 (2)], and no Christian can become its prime minister [Article 91 (3)]. The country has not yet figured out how to handle minority participation in politics. Till 2002, it had separate electorates, meaning non-Muslim Pakistanis could not vote with the general population. That practice continues today, though it is specific to one apostatised community, the Ahmadiyyas. 

Separate electorates guaranteed Pakistan’s Hindus and Christians seats, however these minorities lobbied to become a part of the general electorate, even though they would apparently have a much smaller voice. The analyst Khaled Ahmed wrote that this was because elected representatives tend to take more seriously the views of all potential voters. What Pakistan’s Hindus wanted was inclusion. General Pervez Musharraf is seen by Pakistanis as a liberal on such matters and he reversed the separate electorate rule for Pakistan’s Hindus, though of course the law banning them from holding high office remains.

This Constitutional prejudice has become absorbed in Pakistani society. About 15 years or so ago, I was invited to speak at one of Lahore’s most famous educational institutions, the Kinnaird College for Women. At the dinner after the talk, I was chatting with some of their women professors about the discrimination brought about by the Islamisation of the state. To my surprise, some of them said it was only right that Ahmadiyyas be persecuted because they were deviant.

Today Pakistan has 342 members in its National Assembly (the equivalent of our Lok Sabha) and of these 10 are minorities. The Hindus, mostly in Sindh, are represented by Dr Ramesh Kumar Vankwani of Tharparkar, Bhawan Das of Sanghar, Dr Ramesh Lal of Larkana, Lal Chand Malhi of Umerkot, Sanjay Perwani of Mirpur Khas and Dr Darshan Pirbhu Mal of Kotki. The Christians, mostly in Punjab, are represented as also are Parsis.

Bangladesh is at the moment not an Islamic republic. A few years ago, their supreme court struck down some language that hinted at Islamism, but with a change in government that might again come up. Bangladesh has 350 members of Parliament of whom 16 are Hindu. Bangladesh has a 10 per cent population of Hindus, so proportionally that number should have been 35.

Pakistan is about 96 per cent or 97 per cent Muslim, depending on whom you ask (because the government does not legally consider Ahmadiyyas Muslim), so the reality is that it has better, much better, representation of minorities, particularly Hindus, in its Parliament, than does India.

India has 22 Muslims in a Lok Sabha of 543. With a population of 14.2 per cent of India, if they had been represented proportionally, that number would have been 77. In not a single Lok Sabha has this happened. The highest was 49 in 1980, giving them 9 per cent. Today it is 4 per cent.

Many states of India have no Muslim representation in Parliament. Uttar Pradesh (UP), Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh are large states with large Muslim populations and no Muslim MPs. The last time a Gujarati Muslim was chosen to represent his state in the Lok Sabha was 33 years ago (Ahmed Patel, in Rajiv Gandhi’s sweep). Muslims are increasingly finding themselves politically excluded across India even in state Assemblies. Gujarati Muslims are among our most successful and productive communities. Names like Premji and Khorakiwala are renowned across the world. Out of 182 Gujarati MLAs only two are Muslim, M A Pirzada from Wankaner and G S Shekh from Ahmedabad’s Dariyapur. Proportionally they should have got 18, but again this has never happened in history and it has only gotten worse. Today large cities like Surat (which is the headquarters of the Dawoodi Bohra community) and Baroda have no Muslim representation. In UP the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) did not want the Muslim’s vote and it communicated this to her unambiguously through exclusion in the distribution of tickets. In civilised democracies, this should have been totally unacceptable. But here it has produced a triumph.

The Hindutva refrain is: Muslims are being appeased in India. This charge does not stand scrutiny. In what meaningful space does the effect of Muslim appeasement show in India? Public sector and government hiring? Armed forces recruitment (where Muslims are down to 2 per cent)? The fact is that the bigotry the Muslim faces in trying to get housing and employment in the private sector she also faces with the state and in politics. Other kinds of “appeasement”, such as legislation on family law, are not something the community itself is united in favour of.

Illustration by Binay Sinha

The facts are clear but then the charge against them is based not on fact but on belief and resentment. And this cannot be argued with. I raised the issue with the prime minister some years ago. He understood where the question was going and he cut me short to say that unless I understood the entirety of Muslim-Hindu relations (which presumably he did) I could not really understand the reality today. Perhaps not, but I am not blind to numbers and those are absolutely clear. The rise of the BJP in India has come at the cost of Indian pluralism. It was never good even under other parties, and that must be accepted, but it has become awful and open in the reign of Hindutva.

It is incumbent on India’s Hindus in particular to make an issue of this. It is an obligation on them. A community demonstrates its secular and pluralistic credentials where it is a majority. As minorities, all communities make claims of tolerance because it’s in their self-interest. On the Indian subcontinent, no country is really pluralistic and the numbers and the laws we have seen above prove that. It’s just that Pakistan has done its exclusion institutionally and we have done it in more devious fashion, deluding ourselves with homilies and slogans removed from reality.

Sabka vikas is something which will ultimately need endorsement from Patidars and Jats, but sabka saath is a demonstrable lie.