“……while we must seek legal, political, and societal solutions to the issue of the precarity and vulnerability of Muslim religious spaces, we must also open routes of communication between minorities as well as historically oppressed groups to find a way to establish the safety of all religious spaces, symbols, and presence in the Indian public sphere, not just a select few,” suggests Shayma S.
NEW DELHI—The Indian Constitution, like all constitutional documents, is a promise. During the anti-CAA protests, poet and activist Aamir Aziz, in an interview to a news outlet, called the idea of India a ‘khwaab’ – a dream, a refrain, he said, was repeatedly invoked by his grandfather. Dreams are strange things, where unlikely and disjointed groups of people can come together, much like India. At the time of the framing of the Constitution, India was both promise and dream – albeit mired in a murky socio-political reality, what Dr. Ambedkar in his last speeches to the Constituent Assembly called “a great delusion”, even. He continued, quoting Abraham Lincoln that “a House divided against itself cannot stand for very long.” Like the many other foresighted leaders of his generation, Dr. Ambedkar knew that the Indian promise, as enshrined in the Constitution, was on very shaky ground if not addressed quickly at the most basic, social level. And true to his words, the successive generations of governments and leaders, self-interested and even destructive, have led the nation to a point where the Constitution has been moulded and bent into nothing more than a mild suggestion (oft-ignored), a paper fluttering in the stormy reality of the present.
From Babri to CAA
The anniversary of the Babri Masjid demolition came again this year and went. Two years ago, the Supreme Court simultaneously recognized the demolition to be in violation of law and also decided the title suit in favour of a trust to be set up to create a temple on the erstwhile disputed site. The response was muted from two scarred generations having witnessed and borne the worst consequences of the demolition and a generation coming to life on the cusp of it, growing up in the shadow of the Gujarat pogrom, increased surveillance in the era of UAPA, and widespread hate crime. But soon after, CAA and NRC opened the floodgates of denied justice and actively silenced claims to equal citizenship. A community seen as indifferent and self-victimizing, blamed for its own woes, demonized for its ghettoes, and being steadily pushed into second-class citizenship offered a blossoming perspective on the concept of citizenship that could put the ivory tower theorizations of it to shame. All it took for the old women of many Muslim localities to put their vulnerable bodies on the line in front of the famed ‘Dil ki Police’ was the disturbing vision of seeing young students attacked and beaten in their libraries, forced to walk with their hands in the air as the men of Hashimpura were forced to do in 1987. Historical memory does not fade, even if judgments try their best to erase it.
Who Makes the Ghettoes?
Cities and spaces are shaped by many factors – migration, movement, displacement, etc. Delhi, for instance, has localities and mohallas that were first emptied of its Muslim residents during the Partition, then of its Sikh residents during 1984, and now are being made increasingly inaccessible by eviction, lynching, and economic boycotts of the marginalized sections as well as the working-class poor. As the academic Ghazala Jamil has noted in her study Accumulation by Segregation, precarity and vulnerability of communities and the exclusion on behalf of the state create ‘ghettoes’, but Muslims are accused of insisting on living in them because they wish to do no better. Similarly, Muslim students (and their parents) are often accused of having no ‘interest’ in education or being bound by ‘orthodoxy’ not to study further. Muslim girls are assumed to drop out because of ‘ulema’ and their apparent stranglehold over the community. None of these claims require any backup or evidence.
Gurgaon and Public Order
Structural realities and harsh truths are forgotten in a rush to blame the already marginalized for their own exclusion. If the Muslims of Gurgaon wish not to be attacked and have cow-dung thrown at their namaz spot, well, they just ought to not pray in parks. The absent questions – where are the masjids? Who occupied the waqf lands? (Out of the 22 mosque sites in Gurgaon, the 19 under waqf control are either in shambles or are encroached) Why would someone choose to pray in a park if they could have a roof over their heads? If they do pray in a park, how does it disturb ‘public order, morality, and health’, the three constitutional conditions laid down on the right to freely profess, propagate and practice religion? If the local administration has granted permission for an activity once a week, how is it permitted for vigilante groups to take action? But Gurgaon is no exception. This rolling juggernaut of physical exclusion and targeting has seen an uptick in violence across the country. Even as attacks on individuals for their religion continue, there has been an increase in the targeting of physical spaces that symbolize minority presence, distinctly marked out as ‘Others’ in the fantasy of geographical sameness.
The Indian Constitution promises the right to religious freedom and mandates this right as fundamental in every sense. The restrictions regarding public order, morality, and health are apparent. But they have been misused wilfully in many cases. Religious conversion is a prime example. So it has been argued, such as in the case of Hadiya. A homeopathy student in Kerala who embraced Islam of her free will, Hadiya married a Muslim man of her choice. The argument was that such conversion is coerced and affects public order. When more than half of Meenakshipuram, a village in Tamil Nadu, embraced Islam in 1981, it was seen as an issue of national public order, not just an event in a remote village. Dargahs, long seen by the liberal intelligentsia and civil society as the avenues of ‘syncretism’ and well-populated places even by Hindu devotees, are now being attacked, such as in Neemuch, Madhya Pradesh. Right-wing elements sung bhajans at Sunday church in Hubbali, Karnataka, and in Belgaum, police has explicitly told Christians to avoid mass if they wish to avoid attacks (yet again, you are responsible for all ill that befalls you).
So – a diversity of issues (a person, an event, or a place) are seen to provoke ‘public order’ and attacked in various ways. What connects these places & events? A few years ago, a video of a Christian woman in Karnataka doing missionary work – the simple act of handing out pamphlets on a corner of the road, disturbing no one – went viral for all the ‘wrong’ reasons. A single woman with a bunch of pamphlets in physical terms occupies very little physical space, but she was harassed and sent away. The question arises – does the mere invocation of alternate religious paradigms and their beliefs in the public sphere create disturbance? Does it demand the need for a law to enable the ‘government surveys of missionaries’ (as has been recently proposed in Karnataka) and, at the same time, to permit extra-legal violence on minority spaces (of which it is too much to keep count)? What disturbs public order? Does targeting young children going to church or blocking access to prayer spots not disturb public order? When provocative, even violent speeches during the CAA protests, inciting mobs to attack Muslims did not provoke public order, how does the mere existence of minority religious spaces disturb a nation’s allegedly secular social fabric?
Contradictions in History and Present
More curiously – how does such blatant aversion to certain religiosity co-exist with protecting religious freedom in a constitutional republic? The Indian constitution does not disavow or reject the space of religion. Rejecting the European secularism model, the Indian Constitutions affirmed a unique experiment that would treat all religion and their constituents equally, adjusting for the prominent place of religion in Indian society. The Constituent Assembly also debates revealing deep-seated anxieties over issues such as religious conversion, cow protection, and the rights of minorities, that were not addressed by a sense of justice or attempts to understand the needs of minorities, but more from a benevolent allowing of practices that were nevertheless deemed problematic. Many Muslim and Christian leaders tried to elucidate their needs and anxieties. Still, the overarching sentiments of the time were unity in crisis and a strong national identity, which would eventually prevail over any true sense of federalism or religious representation. As Pritam Singh in his study of the Constitution and subsequent major laws’ ‘Hindu bias’ argues, the genesis of an overarching Hindu identity at the cost of others seeped into the Constitution despite the struggles of Muslim and Christian leaders as well as stalwarts like Dr. Ambedkar – whether it is the use of Bharat in ‘India, that is Bharat’, the use of Union over federation (the latter would have allowed for many of the demands of Muslim groups to be addressed), the lumping together of Sikhism and Jainism into Hinduism under Article 25 against the will of the communities. Despite constant protest, the emphasis on cow protection and Hindi, and the subsequent Hindu Code Bills, which explicitly treat Islam and Christianity as ‘non-Indic’ religions, with conversion to these religions by one’s spouse declared as fairgrounds for divorce or loss of inheritance in some cases.
Nevertheless, the Constitution is a bulwark of minority rights in India. But violating the spirit of the Constitution, lawmakers and political outfits have seized upon some of the cracks that are in-built in the framing of the Constitution and the many judgements that proceeded. The most visible manifestation of this is being seen today in the spread of vigilante action against minorities, particularly Muslims, who are seen as eternally disloyal and invaders to a land that can never be their own. Simultaneously, the exclusion is being legalized in the form of laws that reshape the concepts of citizenship, spread the bogeys of love jihad and population growth, and deny rightful citizens their most basic economic, social and political rights.
Reclaiming Space and Rebuilding a Better Future
Recently, many gurudwaras of Gurgaon offered their space for Muslims to offer namaz. There were two reactions to this, primarily – one of appreciation and gratitude, and the other, to reject this as something that was not a real or long-term solution because Muslims ought to focus on securing mosques and waqf land of their own. However, despite the undeniable validity of the latter argument and despite the fact that under pressure, the offer was rescinded, the offer itself marks a moment of solidarity. The repurposing of the colonial divide and rule policy in today’s terms has meant that while minorities are lumped together for the purpose of government schemes and fellowships (with little attention to their different needs), they are being actively turned against each other. Moreover, rising cases of miscommunication and outright violence and the active spread of Islamophobia among non-Muslim minorities have meant that despite widespread movements, there is little solidarity or true comprehension of each other’s needs on the ground level. Producing ‘good’ minorities and ‘bad’ minorities is an undeniable skill of the current dispensation and those preceding them. So, while we must seek legal, political, and societal solutions to the issue of the precarity and vulnerability of Muslim religious spaces, we must also open routes of communication between minorities as well as historically oppressed groups to find a way to establish the safety of all religious spaces, symbols, and presence in the Indian public sphere, not just a select few. For the Constitution to truly mean something again, that work must be done.
(The author is a Research Scholar, Center for Studies in Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)
