by Sudhir Kakar
‘We did not even have lathis in our house. The women started collecting stones and stacking them in piles near the men who took up positions at the two ends of our alley. First, the Hindus started throwing stones from their side of the road. The men retaliated from our side. The police arrived. They tried to disperse the Hindus but could do so only after firing tear gas shells. At night there was again a barrage of stones from the Hindu side. We did not go out. Then there were shouts of “Allah-u-Akbar” and screams of “Help! Help!” None of the men went out because we all know this trick. A truckload of young Hindus dressed all in black comes to a Muslim area, gives the Muslim rallying cry and there are screams for help. Anyone who ventures out to investigate is killed and the truck drives off into the darkness of the night.
‘Everything was quiet the next morning. The men went about their work. On Sunday night again there was heavy stone throwing by the Hindus. Two of my nephews received serious head injuries. I started crying, “Allah, how long must the Muslims bear this oppression!” The curfew was in force but when it was relaxed for a couple of hours more people were killed. An old woman and her grandson went out to buy vegetables. The bhois stabbed the boy. His name was Amjad. A rickshaw driver was killed in front of my eyes. They pulled him out of the rickshaw and knifed him repeatedly. The dust on which his body lay turned into mud from his blood.
‘The curfew is the worst. If a man earns 25 rupees a day and has to feed six children, then what will the children eat if he cannot work for four days? And a curfew can go on for weeks! Last time I had enough flour for four days and we ate rotis with chillies. After that, boiled rice was all we could get for days. In the beginning people try to share but later it is every family for itself—a man is no longer a brother, nor a woman a sister.’
For women who have lost a family member in the riot, their faith and its traditions of mourning give both succour and structure to their grief. The journalist Anees Jung gives us a sensitive description of one such woman, Mehdi Begum, whose daughter was sick for ten days while the curfew was on. Mehdi Begum could not get medicines or milk for the daughter because the husband was unable to go to work. She blames no one for her daughter’s death and attributes it to the will of Allah. ‘As my child was dying I was chanting the elegy my grandfather wrote about the death of the young daughter of Imam Husain, Sakeena, who after her father’s death was dragged to a prison and left alone to languish and die. My daughter’s death pales in comparison.’ ‘Azadari, mourning in the memory of martyred imams,’ Jung comments, ‘for generations has provided women like Mehdi Begum a release and lent their grief a focus.’1 Indeed, I generally have found that women, both Hindu and Muslim, with their better-established traditions and rituals of mourning, are less bitter and more reconciled to the violent deaths of their loved ones; those who weep and mourn their losses are no longer filled with warlike anger.
The men’s accounts differ from the women’s in that the riot is placed in a more historical perspective and conveys less immediacy. Although so far the worst in terms of the number of lost lives and damage to property, this riot is described as part of a series—16 in the last 20 years. When the city’s wholesale vegetable market was located here, Karwan was especially riot-prone as Muslims and Hindus jostled for a larger share of the business. Many Hyderabad riots began here before spreading to other parts of the city. The market has since been shifted and Karwan no longer takes the lead in communal rioting but is content to go along with the general ebb and flow of violence in the rest of the city.
The men’s reports emphasize tales of masculine heroics and martial prowess in contrast to the women’s anxiety about the safety of their families. With men, we hear much talk about how a small group of Muslims triumphed over a vastly superior force of attacking Hindus. Their riot stories resonate with echoes of Badr, the first battle of Islamic history, where heavily outnumbered Muslims trusting Allah and armed only with their faith succeeded against a vastly superior foe.
Another characteristic of the men’s narratives is the space given to the encounters with the police. After the start of a riot, the police may descend on Kulsumpura at any time of day or night in search of hidden weapons or to recover goods reported to have been looted from their homes by the Hindus. Men of all ages, from 15 to 50, are routinely taken away for questioning so that many of them do not sleep at home at night while the curfew is on. When the police arrive, there are tense confrontations, say between a young Hindu policeman intent on entering and searching a house and a Muslim youth defending what he believes is the honour of his family. Indeed, in many towns and cities of north India, such as Meerut, the confrontation between the police and the Muslims have led to violent explosions.
Psychologically, what occurs between Hindu policemen and young Muslims is marked by the same dynamics as the encounter between white cops and black kids in the United States described by the psychoanalyst Rollo May.2 As they come face to face, the young policeman and the Muslim youth are very much alike in their pride and their fear, in their need to prove themselves and their demand for respect. For the Hindu policeman, who additionally incorporates the state’s authority and power, which he identifies with his own masculinity and self-esteem, it is essential he insist that the Muslim respect this authority. Laying hands on the other man’s body, violating its intactness by rough handling without retaliation or protest, is one way of having the power over the other person acknowledged. Another way is to enter his home without invitation or permission. The Muslim youth, on the other hand, equally impelled to protect his own masculinity and honour, must resist any violation of both his body and home. It becomes imperative that even when he must bow to the policeman’s superior might and tolerate the incursion into his most private space, he remain defiant. His submission should not be perceived as voluntary and under no circumstances be reflected in his eyes. This, of course, is the only kind of submission which will satisfy the Hindu policeman as the two young men proceed to become prisoners of an escalating conflict.
Babar’s Children
Both men and women agree that Hindu-Muslim relations have greatly deteriorated over the last two decades, especially after the Rameeza Bi incident in 1975. The earlier participation of Hindus and Muslims in each other’s festivals has all but disappeared, and ties of friendship reaching across the communities have snapped. Old Hindu friends are now only acquaintances, to be politely greeted when one passes them on the street, but one no longer stops to exchange further courtesies. The women, who meet at the public tap, are not yet as distant from each other as the men, perhaps also because they were never especially close earlier. Ghousia, Rashid’s younger sister, reports Hindu women telling her: ‘If you are cut the same amount of blood will come out as when we are cut. All religions are not the same but all human beings are. We wear the same clothes and it is difficult to make out who is a Hindu or Muslim if we did not wear a bindi.’ The killers often ask the name of their victim before they strike because they need this additional information to make sure of the victim’s religious affiliation. When there is no chance of making a certain identification by asking the man to strip and show his penis (Muslim if circumcised, Hindu if not), the marauding mobs have found other, bizarre ways of making sure of the victim’s identity. A man may be first hit on the head with a lathi. If while falling he takes the name of a Hindu god or goddess, he is then stabbed if the attackers are Muslim; if the involuntary cry is ‘Ya Allah!’ he is spared.
The Muslims are concerned about the children who, unlike their own generation do not even have memories of good relations with the Hindus. Whereas their own parents used to forbid them to talk in terms of, ‘He is a Hindu; he is a Muslim’, and instead stressed their shared humanity, today’s children are acutely aware of being either one or the other from an early age.
My general impression is that Hindus are disliked and looked down upon but not passionately hated, even after so many riots. In contrast to the self-image of the Muslim who is compassiona
te, the Hindu is seen as cruel and without a trace of pity. ‘If a Hindu woman or child walks through a Muslim street, the Muslim will let them go, thinking the fight is between men and should not involve women, children and the aged. A Hindu does not think like that. It is enough for him to see the other person is a Muslim before he strikes without regard for age or gender.
‘Hindus are also cowards who can fight only when they are in a large group. Muslims are not afraid even if they are few and unarmed and their opponents have swords. Allah gives them courage and they know if they die the death will not be in vain but a martyrdom which Allah will reward in paradise.
‘Hindus also have no control over their impulses and behaviour. There are no fixed times or formats to their prayers nor do their books give them instructions on how to lead a good life like the Qur’an does. They go to the temple any time of the day or night, ring the temple bell, and give their God instructions: “Do this for me, do that for me!” And, of course, having been slaves for thousands of years, they have no experience of governance like the Muslims. They may be more educated but they are illiterate as far as governing is concerned.’
Most of all, the Muslims feel baffled and hurt at the thought of being unwanted in the country of their birth. They seem to be struggling against a growing conviction that, irrespective of its formal Constitution, India is a Hindu country and they may be living here on Hindu sufferance. Ghousia says: ‘We hear they are saying all over the country, “Go to Pakistan. Pakistan is your country, Hindustan is ours. Not a single Muslim should be seen here.” They think if they harass us enough, we will leave for Pakistan. They have trains ready for our departure. We feel if we have to die, we will die here; if we have to live, we will live here.’
‘Babar ki santan, jao Pakistan (Children of Babar, go to Pakistan)’ is today one of the most popular slogans of Hindu mobs during a riot or in the preceding period of rising tension between the two communities. The crudity of the slogan should not blind us to its significance in the shaping of contemporary Hindu-Muslim relations. It reflects the Hindu nationalist’s deep-seated distrust of Muslim loyalty to the Indian state and a doubt regarding Muslim patriotism if the community is faced with a choice between the country of its birth and that of its coreligionists. The slogan contains the accusation that Muslims may prove potential traitors in any conflict between their loyalty to the state and their loyalty to Islam.
Though repressed in elite political discourse, this accusation is perceived to have enough substance to arouse a sense of unease among many other Hindus who are not sympathizers of Hindu nationalism and yet subscribe to the notion of the nation-state as a definer of their political identity. The importance of this accusation as a prime irritant in Hindu-Muslim relations is also recognized by a large section of Muslims, and, as we shall later see, it evokes an emotionally charged response from the community’s religious-political leadership.
Currently fuelled by events in Kashmir where a large section of the Muslim population is demanding independence or accession to Pakistan, the suspicion of Muslim loyalty to the Indian state has two main sources. First, there has been a historical tendency among upper-class Muslims (or those aspiring to higher status in the community) to stress or invent Persian, Arab, or Turkish ancestry rather than rest content with their more humble Indian origins. The tendency, more pronounced among Muslim fundamentalists, is to see themselves as superior beings from outside India who share Indian history only as the country’s erstwhile rulers.
Second, as we shall again see in the next chapter, the specific Muslim history the community’s conservative spokesmen would like to construct and exalt is the one shared with Muslims of the Middle East, especially the sacred history of early Islam and of the Dar al-Islam between the seventh and 15th centuries, when Islamic civilization was at its zenith and Muslims had conquered half the world. Hindu nationalists believe that only a minority of Muslims accept the Indian nation-state as a definer of their political identity and container of their loyalty. They are inclined to believe that Bernard Lewis’s thesis on Muslims of the Middle East is equally applicable to the Indian context, namely, that ‘there is a recurring tendency in times of crisis, in times of emergency, when the deeper loyalties take over, for Muslims to find their basic identity in the religious community; that is to say, in an entity defined by Islam rather than by ethnic origin, language, or country of habitation.’3 The nature of the vicious circle is immediately apparent: the anchoring of Muslim identity in Islam spurs Hindu suspicion of Muslim loyalty to the nation, which makes the Muslims draw closer in the religious community for security, which further fuels Hindu distrust of Muslim patriotism, and so on.
Empirically, there is some evidence in a 25-year-old study that a situation of actual conflict between India and Pakistan is a stressful affair for Indian Muslims which makes them emotionally close ranks. Yet, in spite of increased Hindu hostility toward Muslims during the actual period of warfare, Indian Muslims do not feel any closer to their Pakistani coreligionists but in fact feel more distant toward them than in the period preceding the outbreak of hostilities.4
The Victim Response
Among the poorer Muslims, I was acutely aware of a weary resignation in their dislike of the Hindus. Their diatribes were often mechanical, lacking energy and that fire in the belly which leaves some hope for the transformation of various states of withdrawal into an active advocacy on one’s own behalf. I wondered if there was not a repression of anger, even hate, operating here—the maintenance of repression imposing a drain on energy and depleting the aggression available for assertive action. The psychological portrait I repeatedly drew when the talk shifted from the private to the public, from the familial to collective realms, with respect to the current situation of Indian Muslims, was of the Muslim as a helpless victim of changed historical circumstances and the demands of the modern world. One of the main refrains was that since the hukumat—used in the sense of rule, political authority, regime—was now of the Hindus, discrimination against the Muslims was to be expected. However galling to the individual and collective sensibility of the Muslims, this was a fact of life with which one had to come to terms. A few women even took a melancholy (and I thought, masochistic) satisfaction from this turn of the historical wheel which had reversed the position of subjects and rulers and of the accustomed directions of inequality and injustice. Most, though, bemoaned the discrimination against Muslims without expressing much hope for a foreseeable change in the situation.
‘The Hindu likes the Hindu and not the Mussulman,’ says one woman. ‘The hukumat is Hindu. They can now oppress us, take revenge for the thousand years of our hukumat.’
‘They are doing hukumat since 40 years and will try their best to make the Mussulman weak and insignificant,’ says another woman.
‘Jinnah was right,’ says a man who works part time for the Majlis. ‘Living in a Muslim nation is the only protection from oppression by the Hindus.’
Another woman, echoing the old mai-baap attitude toward the state, is more plaintive: ‘The hukumat should treat both Hindus and Muslims equally. When a mother has borne more than one child she looks at each child with equal favour.’
Rashid tries to make the abstraction of ‘discrimination’ more concrete by describing his own experiences. ‘For 15 years I worked in the vegetable market. Then I applied for a job in the Road Transport Corporation. When I went in with my application, the clerk said, “Don’t even bother to register your name. Muslims can’t get a job here.” I applied to at least ten other government department but the moment they heard my name they told me to go away. I finally got a job in the railways by hiding my identity and changing my name to Babu Rao. After two years when the time for promotion came they found out Babu Rao was not my real name and that I was a Muslim. I gave up after that and started working with the Majlis. I said to myself, “How can you work with the Hindus when even your name is unacceptable to them!”
‘It is difficult for the Muslims to
be self-employed. The Hindus control most businesses. If we ask for credit, they refuse and extend it only to members of their community. If I buy goods from them I have to pay ten rupees, but a Hindu pays only eight. Because of our poverty we cannot send our children to school. If there is only one man who earns 25 to 30 rupees a day and has eight mouths to feed, where is the money for the extra expense of school to come from?’ Rashid, however, does not completely blame the modern external world for the Muslim’s plight. ‘Hindus are better off not only because they are favoured by the hukumat but also because their mothers, sisters, daughters, all work. We do not educate our women or make them work because of purdah,’ he says, not in a spirit of criticism of the tenets or the loss of faith but as a pure statement of fact. Indeed, it is the loss of faith which he holds ultimately responsible for what has happened to the Indian Muslim: ‘If we had unshakeable faith, then our hukumat would not have gone. When faith went, everything went.’
This, then, is the striking difference between the Hindu and Muslim poor: the former feel less like victims and have a greater sense of agency and mastery over the circumstances of their lives than the latter. In the victim response of the Muslims, the loss of collective self-idealization which sharply reduces self-esteem is perceived as the result of overwhelming outside forces of which they are hapless victims. The Muslim poor convey an impression of following a purposeless course, buffeted by the impact of others in a kind of social Brownian motion.5 There seems to be a kind of institutionalized fatalism at work which makes them act as ready victims of circumstances and leaves them little ability to defend themselves against exploitation. This is not to maintain that the victim response of the Muslims in only ‘in the head’, without a basis in reality. Like the notion of the ‘enemy’, discrimination too is neither merely real nor merely psychological but a blend of the two.
