Anger Management
by Krishnadev Calamur
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=dispatch&s=calamur030804
Bombay, India
Whenever I visit Bombay, I meet up with some of my closest friends there. Several of them are Indian Muslims. Earlier this year, when I traveled to Bombay to attend a meeting of nongovernmental organizations, my friends were angrier than they’d ever been, and spent long periods of time complaining to me about the situation of Muslims in India.
Their complaints are hardly surprising. Two years ago, Hindu mobs in the west Indian state of Gujarat battled with Muslims; nearly 2,000 people were killed–most of them Muslims. In one of the worst incidents, a group of Hindus surrounded a Muslim-owned bakery in the town of Baroda and set it ablaze. Eleven Muslims, including most of the family of the bakery owner, were killed. The pattern of violence was repeated elsewhere in Gujarat state–Hindu mobs attacking Muslim neighborhoods while law enforcement agencies looked the other way. Muslim-owned businesses were looted and burned, homes were destroyed, women were raped, and scores were killed. And despite clear evidence of who the perpetrators were, Gujarat’s courts acquitted everyone connected to the Baroda violence. Worse, after the rioting in Gujarat, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) made little effort to condemn the perpetrators. In fact, shortly thereafter, the BJP ran on an anti-Muslim platform in the state election, and swept to victory.
The Gujarat riots were only part of a depressing pattern. Over the past decade, anti-Islamic sentiment has grown in India, stirred in part by activists from the BJP, who came to power in 1999 on an explicitly Hindu nationalist agenda. Muslim temples have been razed, and Muslims’ rights targeted. Yet despite this oppression, and the growing Muslim anger in other parts of South Asia, India’s large Muslim minority, some 140 million people, has not turned to militancy. In fact, though India’s Muslim population is the second largest in the world, almost no Indians have been uncovered in Al Qaeda or any of its affiliated terrorist organizations. “Indian Muslims are by and large peace-loving,” says Sayed Hasan, head of social-welfare programs for the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, one of the country’s oldest Islamic politico-religious organizations. The group aims to set up an Islamic society in India through peaceful means and spreads its message through books, publications, and fieldwork.
In part, Indian Muslims have not become radicalized because the state, even under the BJP, has managed not to encourage Islamic fundamentalism. “The state doesn’t support any structure where the individual can take up arms or express that anger in any way but intellectually,” says Aakar Patel, editor-in-chief of Mid-Day Multimedia Ltd., which publishes Inquilab (Revolution), one of Bombay’s most-widely read Urdu newspapers. Indeed, the Indian state has devolved significant rights to Muslims, allowing them to follow the Islamic civil code in matters governing matrimony, divorce, inheritance, and property rights–and thereby undercutting the call for sharia law.
The national government also helps fund the country’s roughly 30,000 madrassas, or schools of Islamic learning. Using its leverage as a funder of madrassas, since September 11, the government has called on religious schools to teach students more modern subjects such as science, math, and computers, as well as religious topics. By contrast, in neighboring Pakistan, the state supported madrassas but never pushed them to expand their curricula beyond Islamic studies.
What’s more, Indian Muslims believe they can advance economically, a sharp contrast from many Muslim communities in Europe and Russia, which are among the poorest groups in their countries. It is not uncommon to see Muslims occupying top positions in politics, sports, business, and Bollywood, India’s film industry. Indeed, there is no shortage of Muslim role models. Two of the country’s most popular movie actors, Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan, are Muslim; Muslims own and edit top newspapers; and the country’s richest man, Aziz Premji, who heads the IT firm Wipro, is Muslim. Overall, a fair indicator of an improvement in Muslims’ economic status over the past decade, since the start on India’s economic liberalization program, is the number performing the Haj–an expensive proposition. The number of Indian Muslim pilgrims rose four-fold between 1990 and 2003. Meanwhile, Muslims are actively utilizing government economic programs. In West Bengal, the state government provides low-interest loans for the self-employed. Nearly 95 percent of these loans go to Muslims.
As a result, most Indian Muslims do not use violence to express their anger over their minority status or their disgust with U.S. policies. “If you … talk to [Indian] Muslims or see what their newspapers … say, they would not be very different from newspapers in the Arab world. There was a sense of jubilation when the Twin Towers came down,” says Patel. “There is … anger toward … the U.S. and its policies.” But at the same time, Patel says, Indian Muslims also recognize that they can advance economically in India, and that violence will only preclude their opportunities.
Unfortunately, in the long term more Indian Muslims may embrace militant tactics. The BJP is expected to retain power in national elections to be held in April, and to extend its mandate, giving it more power to potentially push hard-line Hindu policies. Meanwhile, recent polls have shown that a majority of Indians want the state to revoke Muslims’ right to have their own civil code; an overwhelming majority of Indian Muslims is against a change in the law. And after the Gujarat riots, at least 44 people were killed in Bombay in August 2003, when two powerful explosions ripped through the city. Indian police have blamed a new militant Muslim group for the attack, which supposedly was revenge for the Gujarat killings. Next time I see my Muslim friends in Bombay, I suspect that their list of complaints will only have grown.
Krishnadev Calamur is deputy international editor at United Press International.