Finding the Roots of Muslim Exclusion in Indian History

“(A)ll nations, all nationalisms and nationalist discourses, are made in exceptional historical circumstances”, notes historian Gyanendra Pandey as he poses the provocative question “Can a Muslim be an Indian?”¹ For India, it was in the particular context of the Partition in 1947 that nationalism was constructed, building upon “more than a century of colonial governance premised upon the division between Hindus and Muslims” and a depiction of medieval Indian history as the story of ‘Muslim’ domination of a ‘Hindu’ India. In this construction, the Hindu is Indian by default, while the Muslim stands under a question mark, a constant suspicion.²

Pandey locates the reasons for this distrust in 1947. A large section of Muslims who stayed back in India had voted for Pakistan, and their allegiance to India, in case of a then probable war against Pakistan, was suspect. Amid such tensions, Muslims were expected to pledge to defend India with their lives; this pledge was to be their “password of citizenship”. Pandey claims that such passwords, or proofs of loyalty, have been demanded of Muslims ever since. Hilal Ahmed in his book Siyasi Muslims has made a list of demands made of Muslims so they can be considered Indian. The list covers everything from the practice of their religion, to their dress, their family life, their eating habits and their politics. The list is never-ending because the demands are never sincere. As Ahmed notes,

Even if all Muslims start singing ‘Vande Mataram’ wholeheartedly, change their names, remove a few verses from the Quran, they won’t become a Hindu/Indian/patriot.³

Pandey’s idea of Indian nationhood takes for granted the construction of a monolithic identity, even though he views such a construction as “tyrannical”. This has been challenged by Yogendra Yadav’s idea of a ‘state nation’ which shows that multiple and complementary identities can and do exist within a single nation. Pandey also displays a historian’s bias of attaching excessive importance to certain historical events, in his case, the Partition. We have already seen how the anxieties relating to regionalism and ‘linguism’, also created by the Partition, abated with time, apparent by the fact that regional and linguistic identities were absorbed into the ‘state nation’. One must concede that it is not fair to compare these anxieties to the distrust of Muslims right after Partition; the latter, having been forged in destruction and bloodshed, was much stronger. However, looking at the process by which regional and linguistic were absorbed into the ‘state nation’ can give us better insight into the reasons for the exclusion of Muslims.

On this topic, Yadav, again, clues us in. He writes, ”The idea of India, closer to state nation than to nation state, was nurtured by the national independence movement and would eventually be enshrined in the constitution… and institutionalised in competitive politics thereafter.”⁴ These three — the national independence movement, the constitutional assembly debates and post-independence competitive politics — I call ’sites of absorption’, where diverse identities were integrated into the Indian ‘state nation’. Looking at any of these sites, we may uncover how a Muslim identity was kept out of the ‘state nation’, even as doors were opened to other identities. For the purposes of this essay, we will only consider the National Movement. What should interest us are not just the historical ‘events’ that make up the movement, but also the popular narratives that inform the contemporary understandings of these events.

Re-organisation of provinces on linguistic basis was among the fundamental demands of the national movement. It found a place in the 1928 Draft Constitution created by a Motilal Nehru-led committee. Years before this, in the 1920 Congress session, Gandhi had led a re-organisation of a centralised INC into Provincial Congress Committees based on the linguistic principle. Furthermore, it was promised that on attainment of Swaraj, the division of provinces would be on a linguistic basis. When initial Congress governments tried to walk back on this commitment, regionalists were bolstered by the fact that their demands had acquired public and political acceptance over time. In contrast to this, religion as a basis of political organisation was never legitimised.

Indian nationalism of the militant nationalist variety, the first to be brought to the masses, had an anti-Muslim element from its very origin.⁵ This was a cultural nationalism where India was visualised as a “mighty Shakti” that was once asleep but had now awakened. This idea of nationalism, developed by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, and its accompanying slogan ‘Bande Mataram’, were forcefully Hindu. Bankim, a critic of social reformers like Rammohun Roy and Vidyasagar, believed that the only remedy for India’s cultural backwardness lay in “a total regeneration of national culture, or as he preferred to call it, the national religion”⁷. Though this ‘new national religion’ was to be rid of superstition and excessive rituals, or the “dross that had accumulated over the centuries”, it was to be based, necessarily, on Hinduism — the most superior of the world religions. The ‘Bande Mataram’ of Bankim’s Anandmath, which was ostensibly a devotional hymn, doubled up as a battle cry of the fictionalised rebel Hindu Sanyasis fighting against the tyrannical Muslim Nawab. This meaning was not lost on Hindu communalists who used the slogan as a rallying cry during the 1926 Pabna riots.⁸

The limited attempts at bringing Muslims into the nationalist fold, generally achieved in the manner of a compromise, are now regarded as massive blunders. The Lucknow Pact of 1916 allowed Hindus and Muslims to come together and make united demands for self-government and fiscal autonomy. Because of it, the Indian national movement could cease to be a purely “bourgeois Hindu movement”, as M.N. Roy had described it. Today, it is remembered for Congress’ act of appeasement — since, by accepting separate electorates for Muslims, it supposedly paved the way for the ‘two-nation theory’. In 1919, after the end of the War, Gandhi saw the decision to include the Khilafat demand⁹ under the nationalist umbrella as an “opportunity” to unite Hindus and Muslims, which, he noted, would be “no mean achievement”¹⁰. The resulting Non-Cooperation Movement was successful in demonstrating the popular character of the national demand, in large part due to the substantial participation of Muslims across the country. Thus, Bipan Chandra writes,

There is hardly any doubt that it was Muslim participation that gave the movement its truly mass character in many areas; at some places two-thirds of those arrested were Muslims.¹¹

However, the manner in which Muslims were included is now subject to criticism. Even Chandra, a Gandhi-apologist in his later works, identifies “certain weaknesses” in the Khilafat Movement, specifically that “the nationalist leadership failed to some extent in raising the religious political consciousness of the Muslims to the higher plane of secular political consciousness”. He also blames the movement for “strengthen(ing) the hold of orthodoxy and priesthood” over the minds of Muslim masses and for leaving “an opening for communal ideology and politics to grow at a later stage”¹². Critics of Gandhi have been much harsher — RSS ideologue J. Nandakumar refers to the movement as “the biggest Gandhian folly”, claiming that “contrary to Gandhiji’s expectation, the Movement ignited the spirit of Dar-ul-Islam among Muslims in India, and the brunt of the enthusiasm to turn India, a Dar-ul-Harb, into Dar-ul-Islam, and the attendant orgy of violence had to be borne by the hapless, innocent and unsuspecting Hindus all over Bharat”

Despite such innuendo-filled criticism of Gandhi, the Right has been rather eager to appropriate Gandhi’s ideas as its own. This was apparent at the first national convention of the BJP, in December 1980, where Gandhian socialism was adopted as one of the ‘five commitments’¹³, the founding principles of the party. Built within this process of appropriation are deliberate attempts towards emasculating Gandhi and divesting from his legacy “the most crucial element of his work”¹⁴ i.e. Hindu-Muslim harmony. In the right-wing re-evaluation of modern Indian history, Gandhi’s attempts to promote communal harmony are attributed to political naiveté, or worse, a misguided soft spot for the ‘treacherous’ Muslims.¹⁵

Recent projects for re-writing Indian history stem from the common Hindu complaint that the versions of history taught in our schools are overwhelmingly Marxist and anti-Hindu. It is ironic that the same textbooks fail to mention that Indian nationalism was, from its inception, a largely Hindu movement, and had symbols that were often plainly anti-Muslim. They fail to discuss how attempts at including Muslims within the nationalist fold were limited, and usually in the manner of a modus vivendi or a compromise — not bothering to resolve the underlying differences between the two communities. Or how even these meagre efforts were resisted by communalists within the Congress fold. The Muslim (and Dalit) assertions of self-hood outside the nationalist umbrella, and in collaboration with the colonial state, are explained away by the ‘divide and rule’ policy of the British — a notion that gives no agency to these communities, and accepts no fault of the Hindu leaders.

To undo the exclusion of the Muslim from public and political spaces in India, we must first look at the construction of the body politic through the national movement and the constituent assembly debates.¹⁶ Our current historical understanding helps us very little in this examination. One can only imagine what further harm a Hindutva rewriting of history might do.

1. Pandey, G. (1999). Can a Muslim Be an Indian? Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41(4), 608–629. http://www.jstor.org/stable/179423
2. This is based on the idea that India, as the only Hindu majority state, is the only ‘national home’ for Hindus while Muslims have other ‘homes’.
3. Ahmed, Hilal. Siyasi Muslims: A Story of Political Islams in India. , 2019. epub. p.97
4. Yadav, Yogendra. Making Sense of Indian Democracy: Theory in Practice. , 2020. p.131–132
5. Early Nationalists, now known as the Moderates, believed in the ‘modernisation’ theory of nationhood which was based on European history. They viewed ‘national feeling’ as a product of modernisation. Given that India was in the early stages of modernisation, Moderates like Pherozshah Mehta called it a nation-in-making.
   Moreover, since the Moderates believed that colonial rule was advantageous for India’s modernisation, they did not seek to overthrow it. This is why M.N.Roy argues that they should “be called constitutional democrats or reformists”, rather than nationalists.
6. The best illustration of this quasi-religious idea of nationalism is found in Sri Aurobindo’s political pamphlet Bhawani Mandir. Through the pamphlet Aurobindo called for the establishment of a temple of Bhawani, representing Indian nationhood, and an order of monks that would dedicate itself to service in her name.
7. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. London, 1993. p.74
8. Sarkar, T. (1994). Imagining a Hindu Nation: Hindu and Muslim in Bankimchandra’s Later Writings. Economic and Political Weekly, 29(39)
9. The loyalty of Muslim subjects had been purchased during the War by assurances of generous treatment of Turkey after the War — a promise British statesmen had no intention of fulfilling. Khilafat protesters demanded that the Turkish Caliph retain possession of Muslim holy sites, and be left with sufficient territory so as to preserve the integrity of the Ottoman empire.
10. “To bring about unity between Hindus and Muslims will be no mean achievement. That eight crores of people live in genuine amity with 22 crores of another community is a consummation greatly to be desired. It is certain, too, that for either to live suppressed by the other will do no good. We have, therefor, to promote mutual affection by living in equality and independence. The Khilafat movement alone provides the opportunity for this.”
    The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume XVI, p.323
11. Chandra, Bipan, Mridula Mukherjee, Aditya Mukherjee, Sucheta Mahajan, and K N. Panikkar. India’s Struggle for Independence. , 2016. Print. p.196
12. ibid. p.421
13. The Commitments are part of Article IV of the BJP Constitution which was published in 2012. The Article curiously makes no mention of Hindutva. “The Party shall be committed to nationalism and national integration, democracy, ‘Gandhian approach to socio-economic issues, leading to the establishment of an egalitarian society free from exploitation’, positive secularism, that is ‘sarv dharm sambhav’, and value-based politics”
14. Ramachandra Guha, as quoted in a New York Times article
15. As the part of the same re-evaluation project, the Moplah rebellion and the Wahabi revolt of Titu Mir have been painted as acts of communal violence targeting Hindus. These inaccurate depictions obscure the class contradiction and anti-colonial feelings that actually drove these movements.
16. Aditya Nigam in his essay A Text without Author points out that several communities like the Muslims, Dalits and tribals, as well as the inhabitants of the 570 princely states, remained largely outside the national movement. It could thus be argued that the constituent assembly debates, rather than the national movement, was the _event_ through which a diverse nation was first forged.