Muslims fear this assimilative tendency of Hinduism perhaps more than its aggressive attacks. The thrust of 20th century Muslim politics has been to stress the separate identity of the Muslim community and differences between Islamic and Hindu civilisation and culture. Their political demands are not simply for equal rights on the basis of common citizenship. An essential component is the recognition of their separate identity and concessions or special rights based on that separateness.

Muslim politics moved through distinct phases depending on the emphasis the leadership placed on separateness or commonality. It started with Sir Syed Ahmed Khan describing the Hindus and Muslims as the ‘two eyes of Bharat Mata’. From there it moved on to a recognition of certain power imbalances between the two but within the framework of a sibling relationship – the two being compared to elder and younger brother. It required the genius of Iqbal and Jinnah to convince themselves and their followers that ‘the two eyes of Bharat Mata’ were actually two distinct, separate and irreconcilable nationalities and therefore requiring a partition of the country so that each could claim a separate territory as homeland. Iqbal, the leading brain behind the idea of Pakistan, had in his early years composed many a beautiful verse to the composite culture of Hindustan. His famous poem, ‘Sare Jahan Se Acchha Hindustan Hamara (Hum bulbulein hain iski, yeh gulistan hamara)’, evokes the sentimental image of both Hindus and Muslims singing joyously together as bulbuls and belonging to the same gulistan (garden). However, he outgrew and rejected Indian nationalism after he returned from Europe in 1908 and became obsessed with safeguarding and strengthening Muslim solidarity because he felt they were a ‘distinct’ cultural community. His demand for Pakistan was based on the head counting majoritarian principle that he imbibed from Europe. He advised Jinnah to "ignore Muslims of minority provinces and concentrate on the North-west" where Muslims were in a majority.1

Jinnah’s idea of Pakistan had inbuilt contradictions because he was faced with a practical limitation. In the Muslim-majority provinces of the North-west, he found hardly any support for the idea of Pakistan because his phobias about Hindu domination did not evoke much response since Muslims felt they could wield power and hold their own through the democratic process. In the Muslim-majority areas, it was the Hindus who lived under the cultural hegemony of the Muslims. However, in the Muslim-minority provinces, notably among the educated Muslims of Uttar Pradesh, Jinnah found a responsive chord to his frenzied campaign that in independent India Muslims would end up having to live under Hindu domination.

As opposed to the majoritarian vision of Iqbal, Jinnah’s was a minoritarian campaign whereby he was not willing to settle for safeguards for the minority within the framework of democracy. If the one person-one vote principle was applied, the Hindus would be, at the all-India level, at a permanent advantage because they were the majority community. Therefore he came up with the idea of Pakistan as a homeland for all Muslims. His success in mobilising the Muslim masses at a critical point of time in favour of the demand for partition was not a triumph of religious appeal over secular politics, as is often believed, but because he could convince them that he alone could safeguard their economic, political and cultural interests and protect the Muslim community from the assimilative tendencies and domination of both the Congress party as well as Hindu culture.

The Muslim community’s emphasis on separateness, and on irreconcilable differences, kept growing as the Hindu leadership responded with emphasis on the essential oneness of the two. For instance, the more Gandhi harped on his Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai theme, the more he used the Ram-Rahim approach of the Bhakti-Sufi tradition to bring the two communities together, the more insistent Jinnah became that Muslims were irreconcilably different from the Hindus. The more Gandhi worked to include Muslims in the Congress, the more dead set Jinnah became on claiming that he was the ‘sole spokesman’ and his Muslim League the sole representative of all Indian Muslims and that no Hindu could claim to represent or include the political interests of the Muslims. It is noteworthy that this insistence on radical separateness and the idea of partition originated with Iqbal and Jinnah, both of whom were products of western education. Both their families were recent converts to Islam. Iqbal in fact boasted of his Brahmin ancestry and Kashmiri origin. Jinnah’s Gujarati family had also taken to Islam only a generation earlier.

By contrast, Maulana Azad, who stood steadfast in his commitment to India, was born in Mecca where he spent his childhood in a very orthodox Muslim family. He traced his ancestry back to the 16th century Maulana Jamaluddin who had refused to sign Akbar’s Infallibility Decree. Even after the partition of India Azad, who was often hailed as ‘Imam ul-Hind’, remained firm in his commitment to Indian nationalism while remaining an orthodox Muslim to the end of his days.2 He carried a large number of Muslim ulema with him whereas the non-religious Muslim leadership and the western-educated elite among the Muslims came to be more enamoured with Jinnah and Iqbal. Thus the theory of Muslim separateness does not owe its inspiration as much to Islamic history and the traditions of the Muslim community as it does to the idea of national ethnic identity as it developed in Europe and came to play an important role in shaping the aspirations of many western-educated Muslims.

Gandhi’s bhai-bhai approach fails to work

There were indeed serious flaws in the Gandhian approach to Hindu-Muslim relations. Mahatma Gandhi tried to forge Hindu-Muslim unity by:

Ø Insisting on the oneness of all religions. His Ram-Rahim approach was drawn from the Bhakti-Sufi tradition;

Ø Insisting on the shared common heritage and bonds of community living;

Ø Expecting Hindus to play the role of indulgent large-hearted elder brothers willing to make unilateral gestures of generosity towards their Muslim ‘younger brothers’.

While Gandhi made numerous attempts to win over Jinnah through moral appeals and by unilaterally offering him the prime-ministership of free India, he did not try to arrive at a political settlement by working out a concrete formula for power-sharing among the Hindus and the Muslims. Nor did he confront Jinnah with the lack of logic inherent in the demand for partition. He stayed rooted in the Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai world view and expected the Hindus to play the patronising role of a generous elder brother dealing with a rather difficult younger brother. This patronising attitude became a major irritant for leaders whose goal was to acquire power. It continues to be an irritant in Indo-Pak relations even today. The Muslim elite of Pakistan feel that Indians treat them like errant brothers who will one day realise the ‘mistake’ they made in demanding the break-up of India.3

As the failure of the bhai-bhai approach became obvious, Gandhi and other Congress leaders moved from one pendulum swing to another – from ‘partition over my dead body’ and total refusal to make that the basis for negotiations to supinely accepting the partition as a fait accompli when the Muslim League leadership forced the transfer of population through riots and massacres. It is this image of a hapless Hindu majority meekly accepting the will of the minority, with millions being forcibly uprooted from their homes, which has given many Hindus a deep sense of fear of the supposed power of the Muslims and mistrust of the secular Hindu leadership. The memories of small armies of Muslim invaders coming and building their empires in India, along with the Muslim minority forcing its wishes down the unwilling throats of the Hindu majority, adds to the sinister image of the Muslim community in the minds of most educated Hindus.

After partition the Muslim leadership in India felt so rudderless that it quietly latched on to the Congress party, expecting it to provide the Muslims protection and security. As long as there were creditable leaders like Rafi Ahmed Kidwai and Maulana Azad representing the Muslims in the Congress, it gave the community hope and confidence. These leaders could also act as an effective communication bridge with the Hindu community because the latter respected them both for their leading role in the freedom movement and for standing steadfastly against the partition. Maulana Azad’s inspiring speech at the Delhi Muslim Convention on November 4, 1947, calling upon Indian Muslims "to take the pledge that this country is ours, that we belong to it and that fundamental decisions of its destiny will remain incomplete till we participate in them" (quoted in Balraj Puri, ‘Indian Muslims Since Partition’, Economic and Political Weekly, October 2, 1993) provided a beacon of light not only to the demoralised Muslims but acted as a balm on the hurt Hindu psyche.

However, after the death of these tall figures and the estrangement from Sheikh Abdullah the Congress party did not let any creditable leaders emerge among the Muslims in order to keep them a captive vote bank. Nehru in his lifetime ensured that there were no serious Hindu-Muslim riots so that memories of partition could slowly fade away. After his death Indira and Rajiv Gandhi kept the Muslims tied to the apron-strings of the Congress as a vote bank in the most cynical and manipulative fashion by encouraging them to get addicted to crumb-gathering in the name of special, mostly token, concessions to the community. The Nehruvian brand of secularism misled the Muslim community into believing that as long as they had some clout with the government, and the latter mouthed secular slogans, their interests were safe. Just as Jinnah had bargained on the British government providing for the safety of the Muslims against the Hindus, post-independence Muslim leadership focused exclusively on extracting ‘concessions’ from the government (mostly identity-based ones) while allowing themselves to be continually estranged from the Hindu majority and other communities.

The excessive emphasis that Muslim leaders have placed on their special rights as Muslims, even while consistently failing to claim many of their more important rights as citizens, has contributed a great deal to the growing divide between the two communities. Riot after riot, the Muslim leadership has focused its ire on the government for failure to provide it protection but has paid scant attention to the growing communication gap between the Muslim community and the rest of the people so that its demands, such as proportional representation in Parliament or in the police, are viewed with mistrust and hostility.

Just as the sangh parivar ideology poses a great danger to the well-being of the Hindus because of its desire to destroy the internal heterogeneity of the Hindu community, the Muslim leadership’s frequent attempts to make the equally heterogeneous Muslim communities of India behave like a mindless monolith pose a great danger to the well-being of the Muslims themselves as well as to the rest of society. The unscrupulous politics of the Congress party, especially after Indira Gandhi’s rise to power, has played a very important role in encouraging the irresponsible among Muslim leaders to gain ascendancy and increased the appeal of the sangh parivar. The cynical manner in which the Congress leadership cultivated Muslims as a vote bank by controlling some of those Muslim leaders who were willing to barter away their community’s interests for personal crumbs has left the Muslim community rudderless and consequently easy to manipulate.

Thus in post-partition India the question of majority-minority relations was never seriously addressed nor were there any clear rules laid out for determining what Muslims could count on as their legitimate due. Instead, Muslim political leaders ended up being forced to petition each time an issue arose in the hope of receiving occasional favours for cooperating with the dominant political and administrative forces in the new nation. The ease with which Nehru was able to electorally marginalise parties like the Jan Sangh and the Hindu Mahasabha made him overlook the fact that substantial sections of the Hindu community, especially the educated groups and those who were victims of partition, had not fully reached any new way of coming to terms with living within the same polity with their Muslim neighbours, especially in the north, where the trauma of partition remained severe.

Nehruvian politics produced a serious backlash because most Hindus could not understand why millions of Muslims were continuing to stay on in India even after the Muslim League claimed that Muslims were a separate nationality and on that basis had driven out millions of Hindus from Muslim-majority areas. This question was never explained adequately in political terms. The appeal was always at the level of pious, goody-goody slogans: ‘Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai’ even after partition had effectively destroyed the bhaichara (brotherhood) of centuries old bonds in large parts of India.

But the real damage to Hindu-Muslim relations occurred after Indira Gandhi assumed leadership. Repeated use of the trump card of nationalist rhetoric to put down democratic demands during Indira Gandhi’s regime resulted in the Congress party veering more and more towards chauvinist nationalism. This was especially true in its dealings with movements in border regions such as Kashmir, Nagaland and Punjab, where a majority of the population is not Hindu and their demands could easily be targeted as being anti-Indian. As the nationalism of the Congress party became increasingly divorced from social justice and democracy and came to rely more and more on ‘nation in danger’ gimmicks, it has provided tremendous legitimacy to the chauvinist nationalism of the sangh parivar whose politics relies on cultivating a siege mentality among the Hindus.

The Nehruvian approach at its idealistic best attempted to solve the problem by desacralising ethno-religious identities on the assumption that if the state professed neutrality in religious matters but left a little space for religious and cultural identity assertion by the minorities in the political and public realm a whole new generation of ‘modern’ citizens would emerge, rising above religious divides and united by secular nationalism. Hindus and Muslims were thus expected to become ‘Indians’ first and foremost, with other identities playing an increasingly insignificant role in public affairs.

There were many flaws in this framework. But the tragic form that Hindu-Muslim relations have assumed in recent decades (as the Gujarat massacre in 2002 and similar events in the 1980s and 1990s demonstrate) is largely due to the gap between the pious platitudes mouthed by the post-independence Congress leadership and the cynical political games it actually played. Even in Gujarat, Congress workers are alleged to have actively participated in the killing of Muslims hand in hand with members of the sangh parivar. So also during the Bombay riots of 1993 Shiv Sena cadres received full cooperation from Congress workers in attacking Muslims.

The Congress professed belief in separating religion from politics but in actual fact it injected party politics into all religious institutions in its bid to become politically hegemonic. Neither gurdwaras nor mosques nor Hindu temples were spared. A large part of the conflict in Punjab owes its origin to the Congress party trying to wrest control of the vast gurdwara network with its money-power and influence from the Akali Dal. Similarly, its takeover of Wakf boards and its moves to convert the imams into employees of the government by offering them monthly salaries, all in an attempt to use these religious functionaries as vote mobilisers for the party during elections, goes against its claims to be the leading secular force in India. Many prominent Hindu temples like the shrine of Vaishno Devi in Jammu, the Meenakshi temple in Madurai and the shrine at Tirupati have been taken over directly by the government to be run by bureaucrats and their nominees.

It is the same story with the supposed autonomy of religiously controlled educational and cultural institutions. The Congress party subverted the whole idea of minorities having the freedom to run their own institutions by making them dependent on government grants. Be it the Aligarh Muslim University or the Urdu Academy in Delhi, they all survive on government patronage. From there it is a small step to assuming control over appointments and other administrative functions whether it is done directly through legislation, as in the case of Aligarh Muslim University, or through other bureaucratic strings attached to government grants. Thus it is not religion intruding into the political sphere which is causing communal tensions in India; it is the takeover of religious spaces and minority institutions by political parties for secular ends which has pitched different religious communities into hostility and even murderous clashes. Therefore when parties like the BJP accuse the Congress of pseudo-secularism and try to do overtly what the Congress did covertly they receive genuine endorsement from a growing section of the people.

Ironically, the failure of Nehruvian secularism in creating harmonious relations between the Hindus and the Muslims is bringing about a revival of the Gandhian bhai-bhai approach to sorting out Hindu-Muslim relations even though Gandhi’s Ram-Rahim approach was a tragic failure. Even the Marxists, who once called Gandhi derogatory names and condemned, among other things, the religious overtones in his politics, have taken to organising festivals of Sufi-Bhakti songs to combat the Hindu-Muslim divide following the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Similarly, an important thrust of the BJP-RSS campaign is that the Muslims ought not to consider themselves different from the Hindus. The late RSS leader, KR Malkani’s thesis, for all his anti-Muslim prejudice, essentially argues that the Hindus and Muslims were inseparable until the British came and divided them. Another RSS leader, KS Sudarshan, takes this view to its logical conclusion by asserting that Indian Muslims and Christians (unlike Parsis and Baha’is who came from outside India) cannot be considered different from the Hindus and ought not to be treated as minorities because they are all of local origin and were converted from various Hindu sects.

It is time we recognised that this emphasis on ‘oneness’ cannot be the basis for resolving the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India. Even to the extent that Gandhi succeeded in his lifelong endeavour to forge emotional and political unity among the Hindus and Muslims, we would do well to remember that the Bhakti-Sufi approach works only if those who preach it are genuinely inspired by the love of humanity emanating from their love of god – rather than by political considerations as is the case with today’s politicians who use this issue to expand their own base among the Muslim ‘vote bank’. Gandhi could inspire millions of Hindus and Muslims to resist divisive politics because his life was his message and he sacrificed his all, including his very life, for this cause. For him it was an article of faith, not a political convenience or tactic as it is for many of today’s secularists.

The Ram-Rahim approach evolved historically in the process of resolving theological conflicts between Islam and Hindu faiths in medieval times. It is not appropriate for resolving political conflicts today. We have wasted too much time insisting on oneness. Moreover, when a group has reached a point when its primary urge is recognition of its ‘separate’ identity with a view to demanding a share in political and economic power as a distinct cultural entity the emphasis on oneness can only act as an irritant. In fact, the more similarities there are between two groups and the greater their emotional bond, the more violent is their assertion of separate identities when differences arise over sharing of power and resources as the recent experience of ethnic genocide in eastern Europe shows. The failure of a polity to provide a legitimate space for identity assertion of various types along with well worked-out norms of power-sharing between different groups can lead to deadly breakdowns of a social compact and a civil war-like situation, or give rise to strong secessionist movements, as has already happened in many regions of India. The Hindu-Sikh conflict of the 1980s and early 1990s provides a good example of how over-insistence on ‘oneness’ on the one hand and the absence of institutions for conflict resolution can tear asunder even those who were essentially inseparable.

Until a few decades ago Punjabi Hindus and Sikhs were indeed indistinguishable in most respects, especially since having a beard and long hair was not an integral part of Sikh identity as it has come to be in recent decades. The Sikhs in fact projected themselves as brave defenders of the Hindu faith from the onslaughts of Muslim rulers. The first assertion of their identity came in response to the gratuitous attack by the overzealous 19th century Hindu reformer, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, who responded to Christian proselytisation of Hindus by introducing shuddhi campaigns to reconvert and purify not just the Christian converts but also those who had converted to Islam or become Sikhs. He also attacked the Sikh gurus, emulating the Christian missionary attacks on the Hindu religion. The more the Arya Samajis argued that Sikhs were essentially ‘impure’ or ‘corrupted’ Hindus and tried to bring them back to the Hindu fold, the more vehemently the Sikh leadership responded with counter-attacks through tracts such as ‘Hum Hindu Nahin Hain (We are not Hindus)’. The Singh Sabha worked to consolidate this sentiment of Sikhs being distinct from the Hindus, claiming to purify Sikhs of Hindu influences, even though in many Punjabi families it was common to find one son ‘given’ to the guru (Nanak) while others remained Hindu. Many Hindu Punjabis prayed in gurdwaras and considered these institutions to be their own at the turn of the century.

The next major wave of Sikh assertion came in the 1950s, with the demand for a ‘Punjabi Suba’. The Sikhs claimed that they were being discriminated against as a linguistic group since the principle of carving out states around linguistic boundaries was not applied to Punjabi-speaking regions. They demanded a separate state for Punjabi-speaking people. In most other parts of the country, linguistic reorganisation of states strengthened regional identities, which proved to be an effective safety valve for ethnic identities. In Punjab, the Arya Samaj influence had weakened the regional and linguistic identity of the urban educated Hindus who began to identify more with Hindi and with ‘nationalist’ politics as against regional politics. This left the field open for the Akalis who saw themselves as the sole guardians of Punjab and the Punjabi language.

The Punjabi Hindus, egged on by the Congress and the Jan Sangh, felt threatened by the Akali demand for a Punjabi Suba – for if the Hindu-majority areas of Himachal and Haryana (which were until then a part of Punjab) were cut off from the state this would reduce the Punjabi Hindus to a permanent minority in Punjab. Believing that a Punjabi Suba would result in a Sikh-majority state, they went so far as to disown their own linguistic identity and declared Hindi as their mother tongue so as to contain the Sikhs. The Akali Dal, being gurdwara-based, could not provide a space for the political aspirations of non-Sikhs and thus could not mobilise them in favour of a regional linguistic demand. As a result, the Sikhs were given a truncated state of Punjab, with several Punjabi-speaking areas going to Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. And in the process the Hindu community was permanently marginalised in Punjab politics despite the fact that they constitute nearly 40 per cent of the population.

The Hindus in Punjab began to look more and more towards ‘national’ parties like the Jan Sangh (now the BJP) and the Congress to safeguard their political interests. This has further eroded the regional identity of Punjabi Hindus who are among the most chauvinist nationalists of all groups in India because they suffered greatly during partition. However, for the purpose of power-sharing the BJP (Jan Sangh), representing the Hindus, and the Akalis, representing the Sikhs, ran effective coalition governments in Punjab in the 1960s. In its bid to capture power in Punjab the Congress party successfully crushed this coalition not just by dismissing state governments but also by instigating Hindu-Sikh estrangement.

In response to the repeated dismissal of duly elected state governments by the centre the Akalis launched a movement in the early 1970s demanding reorganisation of centre-state relations and providing for decentralisation of political and economic power. This was an assertion of their regional identity as Punjabis. They were articulating the economic interests of Jat farmers who constituted their political base. The Jat peasantry provided the thrust for decentralisation because from the 1960s the central government had begun to force the Punjab peasantry to sell its wheat at artificially depressed government-controlled prices by imposing draconian restrictions on the movement or sale of foodgrain to curb private trade. The freedom to trade across Punjab’s borders, including the export of farm produce, was the key demand of the Bharatiya Kisan Union movement as well as the Anandpur Sahib resolution of the Akali Dal.

This demand served the economic interests of the Hindu trading class as well because government procurement drives were accompanied by a ban on private trade and all manner of restrictions on inter-district and interstate movement of grain. Undermining their own economic interests as a trading community and also their regional identity as Punjabis, the Hindus of Punjab however opposed the demand for regional autonomy because they felt the Akali Dal would gain more political power in Punjab. The inability of the gurdwara-based Akali Dal to carry along the Hindus, who constitute 40 per cent of the Punjab population, in their struggle for the much needed decentralisation of power made it easy for Indira Gandhi to dub the whole movement as ‘communal’ and ‘anti-national’. She could then easily take the path of repression in dealing with the Punjab peasantry and the Akali Dal, which culminated in Operation Blue Star.

Punjabi Hindus who had held the Granth Sahib and the Golden Temple in high reverence ended up supporting and legitimising the desecration of the Golden Temple because by then the Congress party had succeeded in convincing large sections among the Hindus that the Akali movement was anti-Hindu. The assassination of Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh guards was also interpreted in communal terms even though this was basically an act of revenge against her for having ordered the attack on the Golden Temple. Consequently, when Congress supporters and leaders in connivance with the police massacred thousands of Sikhs after she was assassinated most Hindus justified this criminality on the ground that Sikhs needed to be ‘taught a lesson’. This caused an unprecedented schism between Hindus and Sikhs all over the country.

Sikh militants steered the movement for decentralisation of power towards a demand for Khalistan with the help of the Congress which had propped up Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to quash the influence of the Sant Longowal Akali Dal. The Congress party instigated and encouraged Bhindranwale to raise the slogan of Khalistan to discredit the movement for regional autonomy. Even though it was well known that Bhindranwale began as a Congress party agent, many Sikhs began to identify with his demand for Khalistan after they were targeted as a community following Operation Blue Star. They began to declare themselves to be a separate qaum or nation in the same way that some Muslim leaders had done in the 1930s and the 1940s, leading to the disastrous partition of India in 1947. Fortunately, after coalition governments began to be formed at the centre with the help of regional parties, leading to far greater devolution of power to the states, the Khalistani movement has died a natural death.

Communal differences or conflicts can be easily resolved by the communities concerned at the local level on the basis of their many shared interests as cohabitants of a common region. However, the moment one or the other community decides to purify itself and declares itself to be a separate nationality their interests appear almost irreconcilable and the conflict assumes the shape of a civil war. In the 1950s and the 1960s the Jan Sangh, the party representing urban Hindu interests, had no difficulty in forming coalition governments with the Akali Dal, political, religious and other differences notwithstanding. But the moment a section of the Sikhs began purifying the Sikh religion of Hindu influences and declared Sikhs to be a separate nationality Hindus, even in Punjab, not to mention those more distantly situated, became willing to condone the worst atrocities against the Sikhs even though culturally and ethnically the Sikhs are inseparable from the Punjabi Hindus. Similarly, militant Khalistanis had no compunction about selectively killing Hindus in order to force them to move out of Punjab so that Punjab would become a Sikh state.

As long as the Sikh urge for identity took the form of asserting regional identity, with linguistic, economic and political dimensions included therein, it had the potential of uniting the Sikhs with Punjabi Hindus. But once this urge sought majoritarian assertion – that is, demand for a Sikh homeland – it became a recipe for ethnic cleansing. Similarly, Hindus harmed their own interests by disowning their regional and linguistic identity in their attempt to identify with an all-India Hindu majority rather than accept their role as a substantial minority in Punjab, working out concrete arrangements for power-sharing with fellow Sikhs.

If the Sikhs – who have played the role of defenders of Hinduism in history and who, despite being a minority at an all-India level, displayed the natural confidence and assertiveness typical of self-assured majorities – could begin to feel they were a persecuted minority and declare themselves to be inherently different from the Hindus, then we need to understand that old historical ties and bhaichara can easily break down if new consensual compacts are not arrived at for power-sharing within the framework of electoral democracy.

The logic of majoritarianism, of identifying a group by certain objective characteristics and then claiming the right to drive them out of an area because they are a hated minority, is inherently arbitrary. It can easily move its focus from group to group depending on the advantages that leaders of the majority perceive will accrue from such an act, balanced against the perceived risk of undertaking such a campaign. For instance, during the terrorist campaign in Punjab the absence of a turban and beard became a marker for targeting Hindus even though these are recent symbols of Sikh identity. Similarly, during the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 in North India, anyone wearing a turban or beard became the target of murderous attacks. The demand for Khalistan arose from a section of the Jat Sikh peasantry of Punjab but most of those killed in Delhi were non-Jat urban Sikhs, many of them lower castes such as Labhanas from areas other than Punjab. They had no interest in Punjab politics but were targeted simply because of some external markers and because they were vulnerable as a minority in Delhi. Congress party workers would not have dared to carry out such a massacre in Punjab where Sikhs are in a majority.

Thus majoritarianism has an inevitable tendency towards fascism and ethnic cleansing just as minoritarianism can lead to endless splits and secessions.

The simmering conflicts between the Hindus and Muslims are essentially due to our failure to work out decent workable norms for power-sharing between the majority and minorities. All over the world, majorities tend to turn tyrannical in the absence of decent procedures for resolving conflicts. So far we have relied only on pious sermons on communal harmony, on evoking our common heritage and bonds, on the oneness of all religions and the virtue of religious tolerance. The Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai approach has long outlived its utility not only because the modern economy and politics has in basic ways destroyed the old bhaichara bonds but also because modern states demand a new kind of pact. A workable pact would be one in which the basic ground rules remain the same and are implemented with a measure of integrity on both sides no matter which party comes to power.

For instance, in Malaysia, following prolonged instability and riots against the Chinese minority the majority Muslim leadership worked out a deal with the Chinese minority, including their prosperous business leaders, whereby the Chinese are allowed to do business and provided security from violence or confiscation of property. In return the Chinese keep away from involvement with Malaysian power politics, including the distribution of government largesse and offices. This compact may not put citizenship rights of the two communities at par but has major advantages towards averting ethnic pogroms as long as the terms are mutually acceptable and lead to a more stable society.

As long as the dominant Christian group and the various Muslim and other groups in Lebanon worked according to the norms established in their pre-World War II political pact about power-sharing in the offices of the state, Lebanon was a thriving country with a world-class economy. However, it exploded into unimaginable violence as soon as the deal broke down due to the perception among Muslim groups that they had through population growth become a majority although they were formerly a minority within Lebanon.

In India, we do not need to have such unfair pacts between different communities because of some advantages inherent in our society. Given India’s heterogeneity, it is actually a country of numerous minorities and not exactly a Hindu-majority country as some politicians would like us to believe. For example, Hindus are a minority in Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Mizoram and Nagaland. Muslims are a minority everywhere but in Kashmir. The Sikhs are a minority everywhere but in Punjab. The Christians are a tiny minority everywhere but in Nagaland where they are a majority. The list doesn’t stop there. The Yadavs as a caste may be a majority in certain rural pockets of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar but they are an overall minority in the state. Jat Sikhs may be a majority in Punjab’s villages but they are a minority in most of Punjab’s cities and if Mazhabi Sikhs and other non-Jat Sikhs in Punjab were added to the non-Jat figures, Jat Sikhs would be a minority even within Punjab. Kannadigas living in Tamil Nadu, Gujaratis in Maharashtra and Marwaris in Kolkata are minorities outside their own states.

If India has escaped going the way of Hitler’s Germany or becoming another Yugoslavia, even though some politicians are trying hard to take that route, it is because India’s heterogeneity makes it far more difficult for Hitlerian attempts to unify all the people at the same time for a murderous purpose. Our rich civilisation’s diversity is our best guarantee against a tyrannical dictatorship. If we allow politicians to destroy it, this would amount to destroying the very soul of India. Excessive homogenisation of meaningful group identities in favour of an all-powerful national state requiring sacrifices from all and benefiting only a small elite will inevitably promote more civil strife as has happened in the erstwhile communist bloc. Chanting the mantra of national unity will have no effect if the nation state is viewed as incapable of providing security of life for diverse groups of its citizens.

Given that most communities in India are a minority in some places but a majority elsewhere, it is in everyone’s interest to work out some agreements; not to do so is in no one’s interest. This essentially means defining workable principles for power-sharing that apply to every group consistently in areas where a mechanical use of majority rule would make minorities feel marginalised or endangered – be it the Hindu minority in Kashmir or Punjab, the Muslims in Uttar Pradesh, the Christians in Kerala or the Brahmins in Tamil Nadu.

(Madhu Purnima Kishwar is founder editor of Manushi – a journal about women and society; www.manushi-india.org.)