Communalism Research Paper

Communalism then, signifies a politics of belonging that does not emphasize the nation in all its diversity, but the homogeneous, religious community. It resembles the current notion of communitarianism in that it refers to a political agenda of communicative interaction within a particular community on the basis of shared ‘habits of the heart,’ but rather than emphasizing the defense of a ‘common way of life,’ it is much more aggressively antagonistic towards other, similar communities. It should be clear that the term communalism comes up as an alternative to national- ism, both in theories which explain the failure of the nation-state to emerge in certain parts of the world and in theories which explain the demise of the nation-state under conditions of globalization.

Like the use of the concept of ‘tribalism’ in the study of African politics, ‘communalism’ is primarily used in the analysis of Indian society and politics and is seldom encountered in theoretical arguments of a more general nature. It refers to the articulation of religious communities into mutually antagonistic, social, political, and economic groups in India. Again, like ‘tribalism’ in Africa, communalism in India has a history as colonial theory with great social and political consequences. It emerges in the context of the colonial modernization of Indian society. The Indian population was classified, counted, and measured in terms of community. Notions of caste and religion were crucial in the census operations which took place on a regular basis from the 1870s. British colonial policies were strongly influenced by essentialist assumptions about the nature of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. In their system of governance the British sought alliances with the ‘natural leaders’ of com-munities and, ultimately, this created a system of representation in which membership of a community took precedence over place of residence. Recruitment for jobs both in civil administration and in the military was also organized around notions of race, caste, and religious community. The notion of ‘martial races’ was specifically applied to the Sikhs, a religious community in the Punjab, North India. The British recruited only ‘pure’ Sikhs who were following the strict norms of what the British considered to be the proper Sikh faith. In this way the Sikhs became a dominant section in the Indian military until today, and a particular ‘or-thodox’ form of Sikhism was promoted with great social and political consequences for the region.

The extent to which language politics was influenced by colonial ideologies of communal difference was also important. The medium of communication was supposedly related to communal identity. A major issue was the question of whether Hindi or Urdu should be the language of instruction and the language of government besides English. In the debates about it, Hindi came to be conceptualized as the language of the Hindu community while Urdu came to be conceptualized as the language of the Muslim community. In the later part of the nineteenth century Hindu leaders increased their attacks on Urdu and Indo-Persian culture by emphasizing the communal basis of the differences in script and vocabulary between Hindi and Urdu. A new vernacular literature emerged which attacked the joint Hindu-Muslim culture, as expressed in Urdu or the spoken vernacular, Hindustani. The principal arenas for the Hindi-Urdu controversy were schools and entry exams for government service. After the Partition of 1947 Urdu became the national language of Pakistan and Hindi, besides English, the main administrative language of India. The identification of language with religious community was also the ground on which the Sikh community after Independence started to demand a special status for the language of their sacred scriptures.

The legal structure of both colonial and postcolonial India has been greatly influenced by the notion of communal difference. Colonial law was grafted on Hindu and Muslim legal traditions which were interpreted and codified in a joint effort of British legal scholars and native religious specialists. Ancient Sanskrit texts, for instance, became foundational for the creation of Hindu civil law. Personal law in India until the present day is based upon communal difference. The contradictions between the claim that India is a secular state and the existence of communal laws can be briefly illustrated by the Shah Banu conflict of 1985. Shah Banu had been divorced by her husband according to Muslim customary law in 1978, but obtained alimony on the basis of a general criminal law against vagrancy. Her husband appealed to the Supreme Court arguing that Muslim law did not require him to pay alimony, but the court rejected that argument in 1985 with the further comment that the government should draw up a uniform civil code. Muslim organizations quickly responded to this judgment with country-wide agitations, claiming that Muslim personal law was in danger. The then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi (1944–1991), gave in to their demands and overturned the Supreme Court decision by making a law which would no longer require a Muslim husband to pay alimony. This in turn was taken up by Hindu communal organizations which objected against the government’s pro-Muslim stance, as well as by secular feminists who saw the government action as male chauvinism.

Communalist ideologies emerged in India in a variety of forms during the twentieth century. In the 1920s, V D Savarkar (1883–1966) published a book which connected Indian territory with Hindu identity and thus formulated a communalist ideology that made Muslims, Christians, and others into outsiders, at best second-rate citizens. His thoughts continue to play a significant role in the ideology of the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the leading Hindu communalist organization founded in 1925. This organization and its many branches are active in trade unions, political parties, and religious organizations, but it primarily tries to train young men in a military fashion to ‘defend the Hindu nation.’ The RSS has often been at the forefront of political violence against Muslims and Christians, before and after Partition. It was the driving force behind actions to demolish a sixteenth-century mosque in the Hindu pilgrimage centre Ayodhya in 1992, an event which made the political party with which it is connected into the leading party of the country.

On the Muslim side it is the Muslim League and the Jama’at-i-Islami which are, historically, the major communalist organizations. The Muslim League’s demand for a separate homeland for Muslims in the early 1940s began the political process which led to the Partition in 1947. The poet Muhammad Iqbal had formulated the wish for separation in his writings, but his main influence had been on Muslim students both in India and abroad. It only received political significance in the 1940s when Jinnah (1875–1948), the leader of the Muslim League, took it up. The speed with which the separationist movement gained support demonstrates the extent to which the political and social system in India was conducive to the communalist articulation of religious difference in India, with immense political consequences until the twenty-first century. The complexity of Muslim communalism can be demonstrated by the fact that the founder of the most militant Muslim organization in South Asia, the Jama’at-i-Islami—and as such the counterpart of the Hindu RSS—Maulana Maududi (1903–1979), was in principle against the formation of Pakistan. Partition, however, forced Maududi to move to Pakistan, where his organization became a redoubtable political force in campaigns for an Islamic constitution and laws against un-Islamic practices. His revolutionary ideology had a great influence on the Muslim brother-hoods in Egypt and the Sudan.

Another major communalist development in India is the emergence of the Khalistan movement among Sikhs. Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale (1947–1984), a young religious leader, created a large movement, popular largely among the urban youth, demanding a separate state for the Sikhs, Khalistan. It was repressed by the Indian army in 1984. The movement can be partly explained in terms of an identity politics in which Sikhs try to maintain the symbolic boundaries which divide them and the surrounding Hindu majority. These symbolic boundaries, such as the wearing of uncut hair and turbans for men, are only maintained if they are supported by the fact that Sikhs derive material gains from their membership, as they clearly did in the colonial period. The political and economic aspects of membership are intrinsic to the religious ones and it is therefore not useful to under-stand the Khalistan movement as either a religious or a political movement. It is like the Muslim and Hindu movements, a communalist movement which articulates the religious community in a political and economic way.

In the twenty-first century era theories of the decline of the nation-state emphasize the possibility of trans-national, virtual communities which depend on new communication technologies. The extent to which these communities articulate politics of communal belonging that is not territorially bound is striking. This form of transnational communalism enables a politics which simultaneously connects very diverse issues in very different politics. The best example of this has been the so-called Rushdie affair, which started with the banning of the novel The Satanic Verses by the Indian government in 1988 under pressure from Muslim communalist leaders. This was quickly followed up by demonstrations, organized by leaders of ‘the’ Muslim community (mostly Indian and Pakistani) in the UK, and then followed by a call for the execution of the author by the self-proclaimed leader of the Muslims, the Sh’ite cleric and leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Khomeiny. The use of the notion of community in these political actions is widely varied, but simultaneously it allows some sense of unity across the globe. It is strongly tied up with migration to the North by members of religious communtities and thus with minority politics and secularism in the countries of immigration. At the same time it is engaged in communalist projects in the countries of origin, where these communities might constitute the majority, as indeed Sri Lankan Buddhists, Indian Hindus, and Pakistani Muslims do. It is this kind of transnational communalism, strongly supported by new media, which will become more important in the era of globalization. This should not be understood as the defense of primordial attachments in the face of modernization and globalization, but as completely new forms of community and identity politics.

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