Chanakya's New Manifesto: To Resolve the Crisis Within India by Pavan K. Varma Read Free Book Online

it to endemic religious strife. Muslims in India are not confined to one geographical area. They number about 120 million—about 13 per cent of the population—and live in all parts of the country. Jammu and Kashmir is the only state where they are in the majority (65 per cent), but they constitute a significant proportion of the population in West Bengal and Kerala, and even more (about 30 per cent) in Assam. In Uttar Pradesh (U.P.) they number over 30 million and in Bihar about half of that, which is still more than the entire population of Hungary or Greece. They also have an important presence in the states of Karnataka (11 per cent), Andhra Pradesh (8 per cent) and Tamil Nadu (5 per cent). Nowhere are they isolated or cut off from the majority community.
    Coexistence between people of every faith was, therefore, an imperative and not an option for our young nation, and credit must be given to the nation’s first leaders for having grasped this truth. It is not sufficiently appreciated that although communal conflicts have occurred in the past, and will probably occur in the future, the project of the peaceful and progressive integration of all communities has genuinely succeeded in India.
    In a paper prepared in 1996 for the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies in New Delhi, two distinguished scholars from Harvard, Ashutosh Varshney and Steven Wilkinson, made an in-depth study of Hindu-Muslim riots during the period 1960-93. According to them, even in Gujarat, which has one of the worst records of communal violence, ‘twenty out of thirty-three years between 1960-93 had no or very few incidents of communal violence’. Hindu-Muslim violence, they concluded, is neither chronic nor pervasive but town-specific, with 24 towns nationally accounting for 62 per cent of the total deaths and 50 per cent of the total number of incidents. Even in the states of U.P., Maharashtra and Gujarat, which have most of the riot-prone areas, there are numerous towns that have remained peaceful. There were a total of 554 ‘communal’ incidents across India during 1960-93. Provided the close proximity in which Indians live, the historical memory of the terrible violence of Partition, and the role of criminals, manipulative politicians and other vested interests in fomenting disharmony, as also the contribution made by scarcity and poverty to exacerbate any cause of strife, this is not a catastrophic record by any standards.
    Given the pro-secular bias of the State, particularly in the nation’s formative years, Muslims became an increasingly important factor in the political arena. This was especially so because the increasing acceptance of a secular polity by Indians everywhere, prevented the Hindu vote from ever consolidating and enlarging any anti-Muslim bloc of voters. In such a milieu, the road to power lay through collaborative structures and alliances, and the Muslims, as the nation’s largest minority, could not be ignored. For instance, in the 400 constituencies of the U.P. state assembly, the results in a hundred are determined by how the Muslims vote. Similarly, nationwide, Muslims have significant population density in as many as 125 parliamentary constituencies, which constitute almost one-fourth of the house. All politicians, both at the local level and in New Delhi, have no option, therefore, but to be sensitive to such an important electoral factor. The working of democracy has, thus, become in India the biggest bulwark against religious extremism.
    Undoubtedly, political parties in the past have benefitted from manipulating religious sentiments. But, the strength of the secular argument has repeatedly shown the diminishing returns from fundamentalist politics. The Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) did profit electorally from the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992 but not for too long. In the 1993 assembly elections the BJP formed the government, but the issue of the building of a Ram temple at Ayodhya