The India Cable:Rajeev Bhargava- ‘Majority-minority syndrome: A diseased network of neurotic relations’
Razi Raziuddin
Book Extract
‘Majority-minority syndrome: A diseased network of neurotic relations’
Rajeev Bhargava
Gandhi’s communal harmony model tries its very best to reinvent the ancient pluralist imaginary for contemporary India. This model recognises that the history of the subcontinent is littered with millions of individuals and groups having taken steps to form multiple religious ethics, sometimes with fluid and at other times with more rigid and exclusive attachments. But a full-blooded idea of a bounded community of a tightly knit system of ethics and social norms, seeking exclusive allegiance, was at best marginal, not centre stage. Fuzzy communities, multiple allegiances and fluid, hybrid and composite identities were possibly the norm.
Although the introduction of the idea of fully-grown comprehensive religion had a dramatic, somewhat disastrous, impact on existing religious formations, they continue to persist in India. The model presupposes this background. Its distinctive features are that it
focuses on communities, rather than on individuals abstracted from their communities, and the primary value to which it is committed is a certain quality of relations between communities for which the term used by Gandhi is ‘harmony’. Harmony presupposes the presence of differences. But these differences are never allowed to cross a threshold of conflict beyond which lies a world of permanent enmity. Instead, the encounter of differences is arranged in a manner that encourages mutual respect and mutual enrichment.
For Gandhi, quite like in the ancient plural imaginary, all religions help people to dig deeper and go higher. They are equally in pursuit of truth, though none is able to grasp the whole of it. Each gets it right to some extent, but is equally prone to errors. Some of these errors can be removed by mutual learning, which is why it is imperative for groups to live with one another non-antagonistically. This state of non-antagonistic sociability between groups is called communal harmony.
Despite this new discourse of communal harmony, the condition in the subcontinent worsened. From the late 1920s, sections of Hindu and Muslim elites were sucked into what can be called a majority-minority syndrome, a diseased network of neurotic relations, so completely poisoned and accompanied by such a vertiginous assortment of negative emotions (envy, malice, jealousy, spite and hatred) that collective delirium and cold-blooded acts of revenge, sending groups on a downward path of deeper and still deeper estrangement were mindlessly, alternately, cyclically, generated. BR Ambedkar dispassionately noted this development:
“Hindus and Muslims make preparations against each other”… reminding one of a “race in armaments between two hostile nations. If the Hindus have the Banaras University, the Musalmans must have the Aligarh University. If the Hindu start Shuddhi movement, the Muslims must launch the Tabligh movement.”
A group of Muslims went into a state of paranoia, initially grounded in only partially legitimate fear of inter-religious domination (domination by members of one religion or members of another religious community). Later it had a better rationale, when the very real conflict between the two newly imagined nations led to the Partition of India.
The majority-minority syndrome had another consequence. In the 19th century, a number of freedom and equality-centred reform movements had been initiated within Hindus and Muslims. But the syndrome set off by inter-communal rivalry forestalled these reforms, intensifying anti-reformist tendencies. Once again, Ambedkar grasped this point well:
“When people regard each other as a menace, all energies are spent on meeting this menace. The exigencies of a common front against one another generates a conspiracy of silence over social evils. Internal dissent and conflict are squashed in favour of the idea that everyone must close ranks or the community would weaken.”
In other words, prospects of intra-religious domination (domination by members of a religious community of members of their own community) had also grown by the time of India’s independence.
It was in such a context replete with continuing inter- and intra-religious domination that both nations had to decide the character of their newly instituted state and its relationship with religion. While Pakistan, despite its early pronouncements to have a secular state, soon became Islamic, the leaders of India’s anti-colonial movement rejected a Hindu state.
(Rajeev Bhargava is Director, Parekh Institute of Indian Thought, CSDS, New Delhi. Extracted with permission from IIC Quarterly, Winter 2021 & Spring 2022)