Let’s look at the problem slightly differently. Let’s assume that the ruling elite everywhere is the only minority, and the rest of the people are what they are — people, or what Faiz called Khalq-i-Khuda. –AP/ File photo

We worry far too much about our minorities. The gamut includes cultural minorities, religious minorities, ethnic minorities and so forth.

Let’s look at the problem slightly differently. Let’s assume that the ruling elite everywhere is the only minority, and the rest of the people are what they are — people, or what Faiz called Khalq-i-Khuda.

How would such a framework play out in South Asia? As I recently reminded discussants at a seminar on how it feels to be a Muslim in the country, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s economic policies have made it easier to accept the definition of the only minority that matters — India’s microscopic but all-pervasive ruling elite.

India is roughly divided between 200 million people who buy and sell things in the expansive yet not quite bustling malls, and the remaining 800 million that do nothing of the sort. They eke out a hand-to-mouth living, many millions not even that. Some data analysts suggest that the buying-and-selling urban middle class is 300 million strong, not 200 million.

Whatever it is, 70 per cent or 80 per cent have-nots, an overwhelming majority of Muslims will be among them, say almost 90 per cent if not more. What the secular seminarists and their religious patrons would not readily see is that an overwhelming majority of Dalits and tribespeople would also be in the same corner with the have-nots. A good share should be reserved also for the less endowed caste Hindus and for what are known as OBCs (Other Backward Castes).

That’s where India’s Muslims stand today — with the dispossessed majority, which includes more than 90 per cent of its Dalits and tribespeople. It is, therefore, only a self-absorbed or self-obsessed Muslim who complains, and he complains too much. It doesn’t make sense to hear from well-heeled film stars or other prosperous urban Muslims that have not found a house in Mumbai, Delhi or elsewhere that they are discriminated against. Of course there is discrimination, but it is not against Muslims alone.

At the seminar I attended, a highly popular, secular and now part-time social activist who would hardly pass muster as a Muslim was protesting how he had faced difficulty in renting a house in a ‘proper’ locality of Delhi. ‘They want me to live in a ghetto, and I refuse to do that,’ he told the audience tearfully, which incidentally included a handful of the ghettoised victims of Gujarat violence.

Of course there are people, mostly prejudiced Hindus, who want to ghettoise the Muslims in India, as there are Muslim zealots who have ghettoised the Christians and Hindus in Pakistan, not to speak of the Sinhalese doing it to the Tamils in Colombo. There can be no dispute about that. The question is: have the Indian Muslims ever asked why should anyone at all live in a ghetto, including the Dalits and others who do?

A quick survey of Nizamuddin district, once a predominantly Muslim locality but now heavily occupied by post-partition Hindus, would show not a single Dalit has got a ‘proper’ house there, even though Muslims and Sikhs abound.

Two or three years ago they joined hands — Hindu, Muslim and Sikh residents of Nizamuddin — to get rows of shanty dwellings near the neighbouring railway tracks uprooted and their impoverished residents thrown out to goodness knows which corner of the city. Those evicted included Dalits, Muslims and impoverished Hindus, all accused of encouraging theft of car mirrors and break-ins. The prejudice is palpable.

I asked the seminar wallahs if the Muslims of India ever felt attacked by the army and strafed by the air force. Did they ever speak up for the Kashmiris — the Hindu Kashmiris driven by Muslim zealots from their homes and for the Muslim residents who were easy prey for India’s unbridled security forces occupying their state?

Muslims have been killed en masse across India. True. What happened in Mumbai in 1993 and in Gujarat 2002 was carnage. Did the Muslims squirm though when the Sikhs were lynched in thousands in 1984? Do they wince in sympathy when Dalits are murdered and raped at will? I have yet to see evidence of solidarity among these perpetually aloof have-nots.

There is an exemplary book of record of violence lying for years in my library — the Justice Srikrishna Commission Report. It is replete with citations including police wireless transcripts of how the Shiv Sena and the police colluded to kill Muslims in Mumbai in 1993. Then the Justice Sachar Committee reported on the hapless state of Muslims. In some respects they were worse off than the Dalits, the report revealed. If Muslims became better than the Dalits would the problem be solved?

The ruling elite of India, for that matter of Pakistan and Sri Lanka too, are the only minority community that need to be dealt with. How come the Muslims never felt like a minority during the Mughal period or when the Turko-Afghan sultans were ruling Delhi even though they were numerically smaller even then? That’s at least partly because they were empowered and not dispossessed. Yet to say that all Muslims under the Mughals were a happy lot is tantamount to suggesting that all Muslims in Pakistan are happy. Likewise with the Hindus in India, or Sinhalese in Sri Lanka.

In Pakistan, the breakdown of the people into untenable units assumes ridiculous proportions. The impoverished Punjabi Christian Dalit of Yuhanabad becomes an exploiter of Sindh’s water share by virtue of being perceived as Punjabi. He has been robbed of his natural solidarity and affinity with a Muslim bonded peasant in Sindh. The entire notion of jostling classes and castes, the real struggle, has been put on its head by a deft division of the ordinary people into groups of this or that minority.

In fact this is the real achievement of Narendra Modi’s ilk. He may have killed 2,000 Muslims. Bal Thackeray may have been responsible for a higher inventory of the dead. But they are able to carry out their agenda by splitting the natural solidarity of the have-nots, by turning them into Hindus, Marathas, Muslims, South Indians, Patels, Dalits, Christians and so forth. What is their agenda anyway?

These men have tackled the ‘troublesome’ trade unions in one fell swoop. Similarly, when the helicopters go up to hunt the Maoists there would be countless other minorities counting their own woes without a care for the ‘collateral damage’ being inflicted on their fellow citizens. The people invariably stand divided before the only minority that counts.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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