September 26, 2004

WHEN she visited Pakistan recently with her scholar husband Prof Mushirul Hasan, Dr Zoya Hasan was projected as the co-author of Unequal Citizens (OUP). A sociological study of Muslim women in India, this book would give one the impression that Zoya’s field of study is exclusively the gender issue and feminism. True, every thinking woman explores these questions at one point or another. Zoya is no exception. But her first and foremost academic love is politics. In fact it was her interest in the political role of minorities which drew her into studying the Muslim women’s question.

A professor of political science at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, she has studied India’s political processes, constitution and democracy closely. Coming from a highly politicized family with a strong academic tradition — her father was an economist who taught at the Jamia Millia and her paternal grandfather, a lawyer, was the deputy speaker of the constituent assembly before independence, while her mother’s family was deeply involved in the nationalist movement — it was not unusual that from an early age Zoya got interested in political issues. The left-leaning ideas of her family, especially her father’s, had a powerful influence on her and she was drawn towards studying larger social and political questions.

Her interest in politics and in the condition of women and the minorities got closely intertwined when she was appointed founder-director of the Women’s Studies programme at the JNU in 2000-2002. All this came very naturally to her as she had been an activist in the campaign which was launched in the ‘80s by women’s organizations in support of the Shahbano judgment when she had experienced the link between gender and politics. Similarly, she found Unequal Citizens as no departure from mainstream political science. The book involved a lot of empirical research and surveys which are the most commonly employed tools of political scientists.

And how does she articulate her findings? She has written/edited a number of serious academic books on issues of politics. When asked if she has ever done or thought about dabbling in creative writing, she is quite unequivocal in her response, “No I don’t think I have any talent for creative writing. I have an extremely academic style; at the most I can do some journalistic writing.”

In a wide-ranging interview she spoke succinctly about a number of issues in the Indian context. Given the similar socio-cultural background of the South Asian countries, India’s political experience has profound relevance for state and society in Pakistan. She touched on the status of the Muslims in India, the Muslim women’s question, democracy and the factors that have made the Indian democratic experiment such a success. Here are some of her observations.

Muslims in India

There are many misconceptions about the Muslim minority in India mainly because there is very little community information available in the form of data, analysis and studies. India’s Muslim population is around 140 million. The problem is that it is generally viewed as a monolithic, unified community organized around religion with no internal differences within it. But that is not a fact.

In many respects Muslims in India are a picture of diversity. We have been able to show in our study that Muslims in some ways are not very different from the majority community in terms of variations in status — economic, social and cultural. In some parts of India, Muslims, including the women, are not as badly off as is believed, for example in south India and the western regions of the country. They have greater access to education.

Thus the Muslims in south and western India are urban communities and have been so for a very long time. The situation is different in north India where the Muslims constitute a mix of the urban and the rural with a bigger rural presence. Besides the Muslims in north India are not so well off largely because of the effects of partition. The bulk of the migration to Pakistan came from UP and Bihar. Thus the Muslim community came to be virtually denuded of a middle class which migrated to Pakistan. Only a miniscule middle class and professionals stayed behind. North India has also been the site of Hindu-Muslim riots because there has been a great deal of hostility against “Muslim communalism” which is held responsible by the majority community for the partition of the country. This has affected the status of Muslims in north India. Hence it is very difficult to talk of an all India Muslim community.

Muslim women

In the same vein there is the tendency to look at Muslim women as a homogenous section of society. Although there are nearly 60 million Muslim women in India today, they are politically invisible. Moreover we tend to look at Muslim women only in terms of personal law as though that is the only problem they face while their other difficulties are lost sight of. We need to really break out of that approach and try and understand the lived reality of everyday life for the Muslim women of India. which is linked not to their faith alone, but also to their social and economic status.

All the work on Muslim women focuses on personal laws. We felt that some primary research was needed on other issues as well. In Unequal Citizens — A Study of Muslim Women in India which was a part of a larger project titled “Diversity of Muslim Women’s Lives in India”, the idea was to actually collect some baseline data on the status of Muslim women through a joint survey that Ritu Menon and I conducted. About 10,000 households (80 per cent of them Muslim) were interviewed. Though India has a very rich tradition of gender studies, there has been a reluctance to undertake community disaggregated studies. Hence our aim was also to shift the terms of the discourse from personal law in the context of women to the lived reality and diversity of Muslim women’s lives. We hoped to challenge some of the myths about Muslim women propagated by the majoratarian and the communal sections in the Hindutva movement as well as the conservative sections of the Muslim leadership.

Our finding was that indeed Muslim women are disadvantaged — as members of a minority, as women and on account of poverty. But we have also been able to show that there is a great deal of diversity and variation in the status of Muslim women in India in respect of their education, work participation, assets, mobility, share in decision making and vulnerability to domestic violence. At times they are better off than women of the Hindu lower castes.

Democracy

Indian democracy is certainly a success story which is widely recognized by political scientists. The first factor which accounts for this success is the anti-colonial national movement that helped develop a national consensus on a large number of issues. The Congress Party which led the freedom struggle was in many ways different in character from the Muslim League. The Congress movement before 1947 drew in its fold all sections of society — the bourgeous and the landed elements and also the peasantry which gave it a large base.

Secondly, the Congress movement was also associated with social reform movements, which sought changes in Hindu society with the focus being on untouchablity, suttee, and women’s rights. True, the Muslim League also drew a lot of women but they were of a different class altogether.

Thirdly, India was lucky in respect of its constitution. It is a remarkable document that provided the institutional structure for the establishment of democracy. Thus from the start the military was kept out of politics and it has been made absolutely clear that the army is subordinate to the civil government. Now in most Third World countries the military elite has been central to political rule and that has been a major stumbling block in the way of democracy.

In India the post-1947 government forged a consensus of sorts on a number of issues such as democracy, secularism, federalism, equal rights, and so on.

Admittedly, the Indian constituent assembly was dominated by the elite, yet it represented the aspirations of the people. More importantly, the elite was not feudal. It was a western educated leadership which had land reforms and structural changes on its agenda. Thus India managed to break the back of feudalism.

Fourthly, the presence of a party system at the time of independence, provided the structure and organization to the new government. It was not only the Congress which was a stabilizing force. There were the left parties like the socialist parties, the Communist Party and a variety of regional parties that helped Indian democracy to be competitive. Such competition is the essence of a representative political system.

Finally and very very importantly what accounts for the great success of Indian democracy compared with other Third World countries is the existence of a fairly large middle class which has grown, and grown hugely. Now we are talking of a middle class which is 150 to 200 million in size. This is only 15 per cent of the population, but numerically it is large enough. Until recently it was fairly enlightened as well. Now I think the Indian middle class has become fairly conservative and somewhat quite right wing. But this middle class is committed to a national project, which we call the Indian project which has for its guiding principle national development, democracy, secularism and so on. That would account for the defeat of the BJP in the last election.

There was a general understanding that no Third World country can develop without a powerful state and without active state intervention in the economy, in society and social reforms. India has also established a strong state, and has undertaken affirmative action programmes which give a voice to the people. This sense of participation has allowed people with a feeling of alienation who felt excluded from the Congress party to establish their own political parties and operate within the system.

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