Muslim Political Discourse in Postcolonial India

Monuments, Memory, Contestation

Hilal Ahmed

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317559542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The book examines the postcolonial Muslim political discourse through monuments. It establishes a link between the process by which historic buildings become monuments and the gradual transformation of these historic/legal entities into political objects. The author studies the multiple interpretations of Indo-Islamic historical buildings as 'political sites' as well as emerging Muslim religiosities and the internal configurations of Muslim politics in India. He also looks at the modes by which a memory of a royal Muslim past is articulated for political mobilisation.

Raising critical questions such as whether Muslim responses to political questions are homogenous, the book will greatly interest researchers and students of political science, modern Indian history, sociology, as well as the general reader interested in contemporary India.

1

Introduction

The academic literature on Indian Muslim communities discusses the term ‘Muslim politics’ in a number of ways. Popular demands such as the protection of Urdu or Muslim Personal Law, the programmes, policies and activities of Muslim organisations or pressure groups, sermons, speeches and statements of influential Muslim personalities and the Muslim voting pattern in elections are often studied as the constituents of Muslim politics in postcolonial India. A few illuminating studies have already made attempts to conceptualise the political power structure among Muslims by employing a Marxist and/or elitist framework of analysis. However, despite such a variety of academic writings, our knowledge of different forms and trajectories of post-1947 Indian Muslim politics is rather limited. A strong conviction that there is only one form of Muslim politics in India, which eventually characterises an indispensable dichotomy between Western modernity and Islam, seems to dominate academic discourses. It is believed that Muslim politics as a manifestation of minority communalism could either be juxtaposed with secular politics or completely ignored as a kind of reaction to assertive Hindu nationalism also known as Hindutva.¹ There is an underlying assumption that an upper-class, upper-caste, male Muslim elite divert common Muslims from secular/national issues for the sake of their vested interests. This assumption is often accepted uncritically. As a result, the internal complexities of Muslim politics and the ways in which Muslim political actors function become less important and intellectual energies are devoted to reproducing the existing intellectual and political divide between secularism and communalism.

The present study is a modest endeavour to go beyond this dominant and all-inclusive view of Muslim politics. Instead of examining wide-ranging issues such as the acceptable role of Muslims in a secular environment or the strategies for their political empowerment, this study narrows down its focus. It identifies the political reception of Indo-Islamic historic architecture as a vantage point to enter into the contemporary Muslim political discourse in north India.² Concentrating on the multiple ways in which Indo-Islamic historic buildings are interpreted as ‘political sites’, this study explores the political construction of a collective memory of a royal Muslim past.

This work deals with three different kinds of contestations. The first contestation is characterised by the clash between the modern concept of a secular monument, which looks at historic sites as dead entities, and various Islamic traditions, which commemorate these buildings as living sites. This study examines how these two very different approaches to the past overlap each other and shape the idea of an Indian Muslim architectural heritage in colonial and postcolonial India. The placing of Indo-Islamic buildings in the official discourse on national heritage is the second kind of contestation. I try to examine a few popular images of such buildings such as dead historical monuments, symbols of Islamic conquests, emblem of Indian’s shared heritage and so on to find out why an additional explanation is always attached to describe these sites. The appropriation of Indo-Islamic buildings by Muslim leaders as political symbols, illustrates the third kind of contestation. The study looks at the ways by which historic sites are used as political symbols for fashioning appropriate mobilisation strategies. Reconsidering the secularism versus communalism debate and the Muslim homogeneity versus Muslim plurality debate, this study tries to understand how the contested images of Indo-Islamic buildings are re-invented by the Muslim political groups in postcolonial India. In this sense, instead of arguing for or against the notion of a single Muslim community in India, the purpose of this endeavour is to look at how the collective political existence of India’s Muslims is conceptualised as a ‘political community’ in variety of ways. In other words, I intend to study the structure of postcolonial Muslim political discourse — an intellectual process by which specific notions of Muslim identity are produced and meanings of political acts are determined.³

The study of Indo-Islamic historic buildings as political sites is also very relevant to understand the shifting nature of Muslim politics in postcolonial India. In fact, if we look at the Muslim political demands in the post-1947 period, the proper management of the wakf properties including the non-functional historic mosques had always been recognised as an important issue.⁴ Although, the demands such as freedom to offer Namaz inside the declared and protected historical monuments and the right to manage and control all functional and non-functional Islamic religious places of worship were not portrayed as crucial political issues before 1970s, their significant presence in the dominant Muslim political discourse cannot be ignored.

However, in the 1970s and 1980s, the right to worship and control over the Indo-Islamic historic sites emerged as one of the main Muslim political issues. For instance, the Delhi riots of February 1975 transformed the Jama Masjid of Delhi and its Shahi Imam into a symbolic Muslim political authority. In the same manner, in 1979, an organisation, the Masjid Basao Committee (Rehabilitate the Mosques Committee), was formed in old Delhi to restore the religious status of abandoned historic non-functional mosques. These efforts were given an organised form in 1984, when the All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat (AIMMM) submitted a memorandum to the government and demanded that all protected historical mosques, which had been under the control of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) as protected monuments, should be opened for regular prayers. Even, after the emergence of the Babri Masjid issue in 1986, a private bill was introduced in the Parliament to amend the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act (1958) for expanding the scope of right to worship inside the protected historical monuments. All these developments clearly demonstrate the fact that the ‘right to heritage’ had been recognised as a point of reference to redefine Muslim claims in this period.

This interesting shift in Muslim demands has not been studied so far. In fact, in the last 20 years, especially before and after the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992, Hindutva has acquired a central place in the academic research on religious revivalism, fundamentalism and communalism. However, the response of the Muslim political groups, their political strategies and the emerging configurations of power relations among the Muslims of north India are not adequately analysed. The present research is an attempt to understand these issues.

I

WHAT IS MUSLIM POLITICS?

What is postcolonial Muslim politics? This question is directly related to different approaches to Muslim politics and the manner, attitude and perceptions by which this term has been conceptualised. In fact, this kind of exploration is useful in two senses. First, it would help us in situating the research agenda of the present study in the existing literature on this subject. Second, such a review will also help in highlighting the strengths, problems and weaknesses of these ‘positions’ in detail.

I identify two dominant perspectives on Muslim politics — the Muslim homogeneity perspective and the secular heterogeneity perspective. The vast literature that conceptualises Muslim community as a single political unit and concentrates on the Indian legal-constitutional discourse of minority rights could be called the Muslim homogeneity perspective. The writings of Iqbal Ansari and Syed Shahabuddin are examples of this trend. In contrast, the secular heterogeneity perspective rejects the idea of oneness of Muslim community and asserts that Muslim politics represents a kind of communal politics. I discuss four versions of this thesis: (a) social assimilation and Muslim politics, (b) class analysis of Muslim politics, (c) the instrumentalist approach to Muslim politics, and (d) the modern-liberal explanation of Muslim politic.⁵

Muslim Homogeneity and the Legal-Constitutionalist Explanation of Muslim Politics

Let us begin with the legal-constitutionalist position which conceptualises Muslim politics as politics of minority rights. This position is based on two general premises. First, there is only one homogeneous Muslim community in India, which has some particular collective interests. Second, these interests are legitimate because the Constitution of India recognises the Muslim community as a legally identifiable religious minority and Muslim demands are nothing more than a claim for the proper implementation of given minority rights. These two premises are linked to make a general argument that the Muslims in India are socially and economically backward and in order to tackle this multidimensional backwardness, there is a need for a Muslim politics of rights. I discuss the writings of Syed Shahabuddin to elaborate this position.

According to Syed Shahabuddin, the religion and caste determine the basic logic of Indian identities. He writes: ‘[w]ithin the territorial framework of the Indian state … our primary identity is still defined by religion; our secondary identity by caste; our tertiary identity by our social function’ (1987: 435–36). The basic framework of the Indian state, he says, was established to accommodate these identities and to ensure plurality of Indian social life. In his opinion, the state in India adopted an India-specific secularism that on the one hand respects all religious traditions, but at the same time, maintains equidistance from all religious groups. It has created a federal structure and re-organised states on linguistic bases, identified rights of distinct ethnic and social groups and granted religious freedom to minorities, and applied the concept of protective discrimination to provide reservation to backwards classes. In Shahabuddin’s view these examples show that the Indian constitution established a system for the specific needs of Indian social life. He argues that the Indian legal constitutional framework is capable of producing and sustaining the social equilibrium of Indian civil society.

Now the question arises: if the system is well-equipped for dealing with any kind of social disruption, what is the significance of mass politics? For Shahabuddin, the centralisation of power is the most important problem of the Indian political system, because of which the established institutions are not performing the required functions. Shahabuddin identifies two aspects of this centralisation. First, there is a lack of adequate representation of different groups in the democratic institutions and therefore power gets centralised. Second, the dominant group is not only using the state apparatus for its own vested interests but also trying to demolish the fundamental structure of Indian state (ibid.: 437).

Within this broad framework, Shahabuddin explores the contentious issue of religion and politics. He argues that: ‘[r]eligion stands for eternal and universal values … provides ethical foundation of human existence … gives a Man a permanent value system … a permanent set of principles to determine our conduct and behaviour in changing situations and circumstances’. On the other hand, he notes, ‘politics is the management of human society. Management means dealing with problems and situations as they arise and with demands of consumption with available resources and technologies’. For him: ‘[t]here is no logical basis for comparing or contrasting religion and politics. People and societies go on changing; religion remains changeless. Religion is constant, politics is variable’. In this sense, ‘politics without the anchor sheet of religious values can only be tyrannical and oppressive’. Therefore, Shahabuddin seems to assert that there should be a principled separation between the boundaries of the state and religion. He says: ‘[a] secular state in a multi-religious society must not only guarantee freedom of religion and of conscience but act as an umpire in the case of conflict between one religious group and another and lay down norms for the reconciliation of conflicting claims’. In this framework, the state should not interfere with the internal religious issues of religious communities. These groups should be given freedom to define the essentials of their own religions.⁶ At the same time, Shahabuddin suggests, ‘we should begin by stopping religious penetrations in the state affairs’ (1987: 435–37)

According to Shahabuddin, the ‘Muslim community’ is a political community in India because all the basic characteristics of a political community apply to Indian Muslims. He notes ‘it is a pan-Indian community which sometimes reacts uniformly to a given stimulus but it is by no means a monolithic or homogeneous community, linguistically, ethnically or culturally’ (ibid.: 435). He further argues that religion provides a basic logical unity to the Indian Muslim community; however, the external push such as anti-Muslim violence gives it the momentum to speak the language of a political community. He writes that, ‘no doubt Muslim Indians see themselves, above all as a religious community, but they have to realise that they can protect their religious status or religious rights flowing from the constitution only through political action. Once they are conscious of this imperative, they become a political community’ (Shahabuddin 1988: 146–47).

Shahabuddin highlights an important sociological aspect of the Indian Muslim community. He draws attention to the fact that the Muslim community in India is highly diversified. In his opinion there are different social and linguistic communities in India that follow Islam as a religion. In fact, the understanding of Islam among these communities is also not at all homogeneous and there are several Muslim sects and sub-sects. However, at the same time, he forcefully argues for the common concerns of this plural Muslim community. In his opinion, it does not mean that these Muslim communities do not recognise Islam as the primary marker of their identity. He notes, however: ‘[ c]ommon concerns and priorities are more often overshadowed by local preoccupations and problems’ (ibid.). In his opinion, the question of being a political community and becoming a political community is contingent upon the ways by which Indian Muslim communities react to the ‘external pushes’ and internal self-perceptions. Thus, for Shahabuddin ‘being a religious community and becoming a political community, in larger and in national sense, are indeed, only two faces of the same coin-inseparable from each other’ (ibid.).

Thus, Muslim politics could have four possible aspects from this perspective:

(a) There is one collective Muslim politics, which represents the collective interest of Indian Muslims.

(b) The Indian Constitutional framework is capable of protecting the plural character of Indian social life.

(c) Collective Muslim politics functions as the first push to the political systems so that they can work effectively without any failure. The active participation of Muslims in free, fair and regular elections at every level of the political system could be an example of this kind of democratic politics.

(d) Collective Muslim politics also ensures that the broad objectives of India-specific plurality are achieved. This is the kind of mass participation that Shahabuddin calls mass politics for social justice.

This position on the collective existence of the Muslims in India as a political community can be criticised on two counts. First, it is true that despite several kinds of differences, there can be a few common issues that could affect the entire Muslim community in India. It is also true that the community does/can respond and behave collectively as well as politically at certain points of time. But these momentary and short-lived ‘political’ reactions cannot be taken as evidence to justify the homogeneity and oneness of Muslim political behaviour.

Second, this position does not accord much importance to the ideological stands of different Muslim organisations and political leaders. It assumes that an Islamic content in the ideologies of Muslim organisations or political leaders always influences their political actions. However, it would be inappropriate to assume that universally-accepted Islamic religious practices and ideals such as performing Namaz or paying Zakat as prescribed by the Quran could be taken as salient features to assess the Islamicness of any organisation or individual. On the contrary, we find a variety of political interpretations of these ideals at different levels. The Islamic content in the activities of Muslim organisations or the politics of Muslim leaders swings like a pendulum. The ideal-textual-high Islam which evokes the Quranic logic of umma and the conception of a single Muslim community in India is one extreme end of this swing, and the immediate cultural-local political considerations are at the other end.

Social Assimilation and Muslim Politics

In the early 1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Monumentalisation in Colonial India: Discovery of ‘Indian Muslim Architectural Heritage’
• 3. Monumentalisation in Postcolonial India: Conservation, Law and Muslim Politics
• 4. Jama Masjid and the Political Memory of a Royal Muslim Past
• 5. Babri Masjid and the Muslim Politics of Right to Heritage
• 6. Conclusion
• Appendices
• Select Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index