Indian syncretism has survived despite the odds because it is based upon an easy acceptance of diversity. In the mosaic that is India Tamils, Bengalis, Mizos, Nagas, Manipuris, Odias, Punjabis, Parsis, Bohras, Memons, Christians, everyone feels different. We are comfortable with being different and demonstrate it by unselfconsciously wearing different headgear, different cuts of beard and moustache, different lengths of hair, even different lengths of pyjamas. We wear different clothes, build little temples, mosques, and shrines to Jesus or one of the Sikh gurus, wherever we wish. We spread prayer mats on a busy road at midday in order to pray, and some of us even walk down the street wearing no clothes at all.
This comfort with diversity makes India the envy of European nation states, which were created through enforced cultural homogeneity. But this is what the RSS mistakes as weakness, and is bent upon erasing. The Muslim community has responded to their Muslim baiting by consolidating its vote and building closer ties with the opposition. But it is defenceless against the economic impact that programmes like beef-ban, and liberalisation of economy are having upon its future in a period of unending jobless growth.
There are 3,600 legal and 30,000 illegal slaughterhouses in India that export 2.4 million tonnes of beef and buffalo meat valued at 4.8 billion dollars. The ban on cow slaughter is threatening the livelihood of anything up to half a million families, the majority of whom are Muslims. While the ban on beef exports has received a great deal of attention all over the world, its even more deadly impact on the leather industry has been all but ignored. Maharashtra’s ban on the slaughter of all cattle and its spread to several other states has starved the industry of hides. According to the industry, by June 2015, 98 tanneries had shut down in Kanpur alone and 150,000 workers had lost their jobs. Here too most were Muslims.
The ban has also affected farmers and cattle herders — Dalits, and OBCs — to whom aged cattle and male calves rendered surplus by the spread of tractors and automotive transport have been an important hedge against sudden financial need or drought. Today, as large parts of the Deccan are reeling under one of the worst droughts they have ever experienced, the price of cattle has crashed and this source of succour has been cut off.
Perhaps the most serious and least noticed setback has come from the ‘scissors’ effect on the profitability of the power loom industry from falling tariffs on imports after economic liberalisation, and the simultaneous, relentless annual increases in the minimum sale price of cotton decreed by state governments. While this is killing the power loom industry all over the country, in Maharashtra whose two centres, Bhiwandi and Malegaon, account for three quarters of the power loom industry, the vast majority of the workers are Muslims.
These are three exemplars of an even more terrifying crisis that Muslims in particular face. This is the assault upon the entire artisanal sector of industry: fine textiles, embroidery and handicrafts by cheap imports from China. From Kashmiri carpets, Pashmina and Jamawar shawls, to Lucknowi Chikan, Hyderabadi Bidriware and Kancheepuram and Banarasi saris, all are facing shrinking markets as mill-made alternatives, domestic and foreign, push their products out.
Muslims are the prime sufferers in every case because only 23 percent of them have salaried jobs against 34 percent of the Indian work force. Three-quarters are therefore self-employed, as against two-thirds of all Indian workers. What is worse, while many of the Hindu workers, both salaried and self employed, own small pieces of land in their villages, very few of the Muslims do. They have, therefore, nothing to fall back upon when their traditional skills become redundant.
So let us see what future a typical 18-year-old, 12th pass Muslim boy faces. He finds it difficult to get into the army; he will almost certainly not get taken into the police. He is unlikely to qualify for a lower grade government clerical post, given that 52 percent of these are already reserved for OBCs and Dalits; his schooling has not equipped him for any of the traditional skills his family excelled in, and, in any case, these skills are being made redundant. So how long will he be able to hold out when a recruiter offers him 400 dollars a month to join a jihad somewhere in the world, even India, to ‘save Islam’? The RSS is stirring this cauldron of despair at the nation’s peril.
(A version of this op-ed appeared in print in The Wire (India) on March 26, 2016)
(Concluded)
The writer is a Delhi-based author and commentator