End of Appeasement

THE OUTCOME OF the 2024 Indian General Election gives us the occasion, once again, to revisit the Hindu-Muslim question in India. In fact, not just in India, but in the Indian subcontinent, where it continues to be a burning issue. Almost literally.

Outside India, Hindus in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, we know for a bitter fact, have almost been annihilated. Those of the so-called lowest of the low, the night soil removers, sweepers, and cleaners, who were persuaded to stay on in Pakistan upon Partition in 1947, with guarantees of protection, have all but converted, over a few generations, to Christianity.

Unfortunately, that has not spared them—or Christians in general—from repeated, even murderous attacks in Pakistan. The most recent of such deadly attacks happened in Sargodha, West Punjab, hardly over a week back. This time, those accused of blasphemy were a factory owner, Nazil Gill Masih, and his family. Both father and son were brutally beaten up. They had to be rushed to the hospital in critical condition. Luckily, 12 members of their family managed to escape.

The attack took place in the Gillwala Mujahid area of Sargodha. It was reported primarily in Catholic Christian outlets, while mainstream media, as usual, blocked and blacked out the news. Farther south, the kidnapping of Hindu girls in Sindh, Pakistan, followed by their forcible conversion, marriage, repeated rape, and the rare rescue or restoration, is a regular and recurring fact. So frequent that we are almost inured to it. But for how long? For, at this rate, there will soon be no Hindu mothers left in Sindh. The ethnic cleansing of Hindus will soon be complete and irreversible.

On our eastern borders, Hindus have fared only somewhat better in Bangladesh. With continued attacks, even lynchings, within that country, coupled with unvarying and uninterrupted migration across the borders to India or elsewhere, the Hindu population in Bangladesh is in a steep downturn and decline.

Afghanistan, very much a part of the erstwhile Hindu ecumene, has no Hindus or Sikhs left to speak of. The cruel logic of Hindu annihilation north of the Hindukush (or Hindu killer) mountains has now been followed to its logical “final solution”—the total extermination of Hindus in that geographical territory.

Now to Bharat that is India. The ethnic cleansing of Hindus, bordering on genocide, is a well-known and tragic truth in the erstwhile state, now Union Territory, of Jammu and Kashmir. This story has recently attracted worldwide attention thanks to its portrayal in Vivek Agnihotri and Pallavi Joshi’s award-winning feature film, The Kashmir Files.

But apart from fictional representations, just recently, a team of authors led by Shamika Ravi of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM), has published a paper on the asymmetric birth rates of Hindus and Muslims in independent India. The data shows what should be obvious. Despite the denialism and negationism of the so-called left-liberals, let alone the outright Islamists amongst us, Muslims in India have documented higher growth rates than Hindus.

It is another matter that these rates are generally in decline and that the higher the education and economic prosperity among the Muslims, the lower the gap between their growth rates and that of the Hindus. Nevertheless, the very real threat of what has been called the “demographic bomb” cannot be ruled out. This will become demonstrably, even alarmingly clear when the now overdue Census exercise is conducted in the country after a long gap of over 13 years.

The border districts of West Bengal and Assam have already shown the decline of Hindu population to be so significant that it has affected election outcomes. How else can we explain that a rank outsider, the Muslim candidate of All India Trinamool Congress (TMC), Yusuf Pathan, from distant Vadodara in Gujarat, defeated five-time Congress MP and senior Congress leader, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, from Baharampur? This is a constituency that not only borders Bangladesh but, by a steady increase, now has over 50 per cent Muslims. Of course, one might argue that Pathan won because he was a popular cricketer, in addition to being a Muslim.

But this line of research and rhetoric, that of the diminishing demographics of Hindus, is not new. It was well-documented over a century ago in a famous book, The Decline and Fall of the Hindus (1920) by SC Mookerjee. Even much earlier, during the Bengal renaissance, the Hindus are already referred to as a dying race. Luckily, the latter gloomy prediction has not fructified.

Hindus number easily over a billion worldwide, possibly closer to 1.2 billion. It would take much more than “ethnic cleansing” in neighbouring countries, illegal migration, or conversion within our borders to wipe them out entirely from the face of the earth. But that does not mean that we are anywhere closer to finding a lasting solution to the Hindu- Muslim question. I hesitate automatically to call the Hindu- Muslim problem, in contra-distinction to a new class of activists and influencers whom we might call “hyper Hindus”.

Clearly the “ralif, galif, ya chalif” (convert to Islam, leave, or perish) option offered to Hindus, whether in Pakistan, Kashmir or to a lesser extent, in Bangladesh, cannot be reworked or retooled in India against the Muslims. Why? Not only because they are numerically so large, over 200 million in fact, that it would be impossible even to consider it. But also because it goes against one of the core principles of Sanatana Dharma, which may be summed up as “live and let live”.

That is also why Vinayak Damodar “Veer” Savarkar’s version of the final solution to the Hindu-Muslim question— become culturally and civilisationally Hindu or accept second-class citizenship—is also equally untenable. Not only because it goes against the very grain of the Indian Constitution and is therefore impossible to implement, whether surreptitiously or overtly, whether by subterfuge or coercion, in the present republic. But also because there is no clear way, despite every possible attempt to homogenise and hegemonise it, of defining, let alone, enforcing, any one version of Hinduism itself.

Therefore, even if Muslims are to become culturally assimilated, the question remains—assimilate or conform to which brand or strand of Hinduism? Which is exactly the reason why some sort of uniform Hindutva was sought to be offered as the standard form of Hindu cultural nationalism to the whole nation. But can we really believe that political Hinduism by any other name has actually come to substitute the multiform and multiverse of Hinduism as it is practised on the ground?

The election results in the crucial “swing” state of Uttar Pradesh in India’s Hindi and Hindu heartland have clearly belied this belief. The Muslim-inclined Samajwadi Party, derisively referred to at one time as ‘Mulla’ Mulayam’s party, scored over the saffron-clad Yogi Adityanath-led ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India’s most populous and powerful state.

Furthermore, the irony is that BJP has lost in Faizabad, the very constituency in which it managed to pull off a cultural, religious, and political miracle—the reconstruction of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. Even in Meerut in Western UP, TV star Arun Govil, who once played Lord Rama himself, managed to muster just over 10,000 votes over his Samajwadi rival, Sunita Verma. He barely scraped through, by the slenderest sliver of an electoral margin, from a humiliating defeat.

If these elections are anything to go by, “hard” Hindutva is also not the answer to the Hindu-Muslim issue in India.

What do we have then? A return to “appeasement,” which continues, by all appearances, to be the Opposition Congress line? There is little doubt that a quiet but determined and concerted effort by Muslim voters against BJP must have contributed, in no small measure, to the latter’s lower numbers. We might await hard data to bear this hypothesis out. But any which way we look at it, the Muslim question cannot be ignored in India. The sheer size and numbers will disallow this.

We might safely argue that “appeasement” has been comprehensively rejected, not only by the Hindu majority but also by influential sections of the Muslims themselves. Therefore, neither appeasement nor domination, bordering on demonisation, even if the latter is supposedly “only” for political purposes, is the way forward.

The election results have shown that excessive polarisation does not necessarily result in Hindu vote consolidation. Both Hindus and Muslims want peaceful and equable relations on a day-to-day basis. Neither wishes to be instrumentalised or weaponised as election cannon fodder.

There is, indeed has to be, a third way other than appeasement or polarisation.

This, to my mind, is one of the important takeaways of the 2024 Indian General Election.

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