Living on the Margins. Minorities in

202 Pages·2009·1.41 MB·English

Prepared in the frame of EURASIA­Net project,  
funded by the Seventh Framework Programme  

of the European Commission
“Living on the Margins. Minorities in South Asia”

Edited by

Rita Manchanda

South Asian Forum for Human Rights

EURASIA-Net Partners
Accademia Europea Bolzano/Europäische Akademie Bozen (EURAC) – Bolzano/Bozen,
(Italy), Brunel University – West London (UK), Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität –
Frankfurt am Main (Germany), Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (India), South
Asian Forum for Human Rights (Nepal), Democratic Commission of Human
Development (Pakistan), University of Dhaka (Bangladesh)

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community‘s
Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/2007-2013] under grant agreement n° 216072.

Kathmandu, September 2009
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Table of Contents

I - Introduction
Rita Manchanda

II - Religious & Social Minorities

A Long Term Contemporary View of the Muslim Situation in India
Javed Alam

Hindus in a Polarized Political Environment: Bangladesh’s Minority
Afsan Chowdhury

Religious Minorities in Pakistan: Mapping Sind & Baluchistan
Ishtiaq Hussain

Strangers in the House: Minorities in Pakistani Textbooks
Rubina Saigol

Muslims in Sri Lanka: Political Choices of a Minority
Farzana Haniffa

III - Ethno-Nationalist Assertion

Sri Lanka: Recent Shifts in the Minority Rights Debate
Jayadeva Uyangoda

Inclusion and Accountability in a ‘New’ Democratic Nepal
Mahendra Lawoti

The Challenge of National Minority Question in Pakistan
Shahid Fiaz

IV - Indigenous Peoples’ Rights

The Indigenous Peoples :Victims of the Politics of Denial
Tapan Kumar Bose

Tribal Land Alienation in Maharashtra: Legality, Illegality and Praxis
Pradip Prabhu

Legality and Pragmatism
Usha Ramanathan

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INTRODUCTION

Rita Manchanda

Majority-Minority Discourses in South Asia

The final solution- Partition 1947, did not resolve the subcontinent’s minority question. It
produced a South Asian state system of ethnic kin states where a majority in one state
was a minority across the border, entangling the minority question in the power
intricacies of inter state relations and even casting the constituent members of a minority
group as ‘proxy citizens’ of an enemy state. In the national imagination, the question of
minority rights conjured anxieties about the integrity of the nation state and true
‘belonging’- splintering into questions of nationalism vs separatism, of who is a true
citizen and who a ‘proxy citizen, of communalism vs secularism, of ‘special rights (read
‘appeasement’) vs equal rights (read ‘majority’ setting the norm) and ‘insider’ vs
‘outsider’ politics.

Some seven decades after independence, the states of South Asia are still grappling with
myriad sub-nationalities and religious communities, a profusion of linguistic, ethnic and
caste groups – all jostling for recognition and resources. The identities of such groups,
under colonial administrations, had been politicized, and during the process of
constitutional reforms in the transition to independence, such identities became more
entrenched. Democracy as practiced in these post colonial states has got articulated in the
official discourse of majority and minorities rather than transcending the politics of
numbers.

Post independence as these countries transformed themselves into modern states, the
challenge was to construct a state before the emergence of nation, of seeking to make a
‘people’ congruent with territorial borders. It produced the ‘modern’ minority
problematic. As Andreas Wimmer, coming from the domain of anthropology to political
science, argues “nationalist and ethnic politics are not just a by product of modern state
formation (built on democracy, citizenship and popular sovereignty) but that modern
principles and institutions of inclusion (of the ‘true nation’) are tied to ethnic and national
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forms of exclusion, producing the ‘the other’.” Such especially is so in multi ethnic,
multi religious and multi lingual societies.

In South Asia – a land of minorities, the challenge of pluralism is truly formidable. More
than 800 languages are spoken in the region and only 66% of the population have access
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to education in their mother tongue. “The Minority like everywhere is a fluid identity in
South Asia,” as Tapan Bose reminds us “Its markers are language, culture, religion and
ethnicity. But the most important marker is the position of ‘non-domination’ or
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‘powerlessness’. The history of the last seven decades of state or nation making in South
Asia proves the axiom - democracies create minorities. Nation and State are majoritarian
concepts. These are also repositories of power. Access and control over these institutions
of power and the distance from these sources of power or denial of access define the
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majority and the minority.”

The early constitutional debates of the states of the region, had reflected an awareness of
the importance of democratizing the nation to such an extent that ‘minority’ as a category
of powerlessness disappears and numbers loose their political value. However driven by
the exigencies of state power consolidation and the paranoia of the Great Partition, the
founding elite did not anchor minority rights in an expanding democratic agenda that
would have paved the way for equal rights for all peoples. Instead, state ideology and
architecture, increasingly veered towards constituting a majoritarianism. The states of the
region showed up the inability of a hegemonic collectivity to deal equitably. Sukumar
Muralidharan in his essay Media Modernity and Minorities, takes us back to Ambedkar
who, he reminds us, was not worried about a “communal majority” in the numerical
sense. “Its dominance was a matter of social power rather than numbers. Far from being
something intrinsic to the social group, the status of “minorityism” arises from the
contingent features of the political power-sharing contract.”

No doubt, Nationalism and Democracy did expand the public sphere and gave
disadvantaged groups access. But nowhere is the state a neutral umpire holding the
balance between different groups. Moreover, modern structures of governance of these
states proved to be centralizing, coercive, hegemonic and exclusionary towards the non
dominant religious, ethnic, linguistic, regional and social (caste) minorities. Admittedly,
fundamental rights are promised in all the constitutions, and within some of the
constitutions are special community rights and autonomies, territorial and non territorial.
But alongside we have a public system that can be taken over by a dominant group,
which is determined to impose its values as the norm in the name of ‘public order’, thus
making the majority’s culture, values and opinions the norm. This is evident in not only
democratically fragile regimes as Pakistan and Bangladesh but also the robust
democracies of Sri Lanka and India. In this the role of the judiciary is crucial. Sahala Zia
in her study of constitution back discrimination in Pakistan notes the “growing emphasis
on ‘protecting the rights’ of the Muslim majority, rather than those of the minorities. The
judiciary’s inclination has been to prevent a breach of peace by placing restrictions on
minority groups so as to avert provoking the Muslim majority, rather than taking
preventive or punitive action against them”.

The everyday experience of persons belonging to minority communities and indigenous
peoples is - the banality of discrimination, violence, injustice and inequality. The status of
most minorities in the region is abject. In some cases as in Bangladesh, minority
communities are poor because of their minority status. Its corollary, the discriminatory
workings of laws like the Enemy Property Act (1965) morphed into Vested Property Act
(1971). According to one estimate 43% of all Hindu families have been ‘legally’ affected
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by virtue of this act. Sheikh Hasina’s government withdrew it in 2001. Regarding
Pakistan, Ishtiaq Hussian indicates that the number of people living below the poverty
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line states has deepened from 17 percent in 1990s to 34 per cent in 2000, and the
minorities make up a disproportionate majority. Similarly, in the case of India 13 percent
Muslim population, if rural landlessness is an indicator, Muslim landlessness is 51% as
compared to 40% for Hindus. However as Javeed Alam points out, there is no evidence
to suggest that the Indian state created poverty among the Muslims as in the case of tribal
and dispossession. “Muslim poverty is as much a result of the many intersections of
feudalism and the depredations and predatory practices of British colonial rule, as
poverty in general.” Nonetheless, the Sachar Committee Report has shown a very
disturbing congruence between Muslim habitation and deprivation of civic amenities,
public works and development infrastructure.

Democracy Deficit
In South Asia follow the tracks of the minority rights question and it will lead us back to
the “democracy deficit”, says Ranabir Samaddar, a prescient observer of the Minority
question. Recognition that minority (ethnic) groups are deficient as rights holders is
unfortunately itself, a minority perspective. More commonly, scholarly analysis and
practitioners understanding, is oriented towards interpreting even socio economic
tensions through the official categories of majority –minority identities or worked
through the discourse of ethnicity and ‘ethno-nationalism’. Social scientist Yash Ghai
succinctly captures the political continuum of an ethnically differentiated group
becoming a political category. An “ethnicity” is consolidated “when these (cultural,
religious, linguistic) markers cease to be mere means of social distinction and become the
basis of political identity and claims to a specific role in the political process or power,
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ethnic distinction are transformed into ethnicity.” Ethnic movements often have at their
core hardcore issues of social and economic justice and of public participation – but as in
the case of the case of Sri Lanka, not only do the protagonists of the ethnic conflict
articulate it in terms of essentialist ethnicity and identity, but the other minority Muslims,
too, have come to put themselves forward as an ethnicity.

Indeed the histories of the struggle of the Tamil, Naga and Chittagong Hill Tracts
peoples, map narratives of how and when a group refuses to accept at a historical moment
the identity of a minority and claims the status of a people, a nation. In the constitution of
majority - minority identities is the discourse of power. Redistribution of power lies at the
vertex of the relation between the state and ‘national’ minorities.

However, as Uyangoda in his analaysis of the changing terms of the minority rights
discourse towards privileging group rights points out, “the entrenchment of group rights
through regional autonomy would place at great risk individual civil and political rights
within the community.” Autonomous arrangements are not necessarily enhancing of
democracy. Particularly at risk are women as we have seen in the workings of the
autonomy of community personal law regimes. In addition the logic of homelands is
exclusion of the ‘other’ i.e. the non dominant minorities.

Complicating the minority question is the media mediated constitution of the public
discourse on security in which select minorities are constructed as ‘suspect’ communities.
In particular, on the march these days are cultural and military doctrines rooted in the
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theory of the ‘clash of civilizations’ and the ‘war on terror’ which have been extremely
detrimental to the rights of minorities. It is members of minority groups who are
predominantly targeted by Prevention of Terrorism and other Emergency Regulations
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whether it is in India or in Sri Lanka. Moreover, the positioning of ‘militarized’
struggles for minority rights /ethno-nationalist assertion as ‘terrorism’, has de-legitimized
the struggles, hollowing out the socio-economic and political grievances driving them.
Fara Haniffa draws our attention to this aspect.

Also, by locating the state’s all out military action against the civilian embedded
insurgents, as part of the ‘war on terror’, as in the case of Sri Lanka’s military offensive
against the Tamil insurgent group the LTTE, the state’s brutal violations of the human
and humanitarian rights of its citizens, comes to be largely condoned by the international
community. Even more insidious is the demonstration effect of Sri Lanka’s military
victory in resolving ethno-nationalist conflicts. Why negotiate, politically? It is a model
that is being studied in India and Pakistan and does not augur well for the prospects of the
rights of minorities.

The minority question in South Asia gets constructed as a foreign policy question. As
Afsan Chowdhury states “Minorities of today’s South Asia have become proxy citizen of
the country where they are a majority rather than full citizens of their own country of
origin. So Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the madhesis in Nepal and the Tamils in
Sri Lanka are not just minorities but are looked upon as proxy Indians and imagined as a
threat or an enemy, and this is based on that state’s relationship with India.
Discrimination against them gets justified as part of the caretaking exercise against a
nationalist threat.” The founding fathers of the kin state system of South Asia aware of
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the cross border minority –majority implications, mooted the ‘hostage theory’, i.e. ill
treatment of minority in one state would ricochet on the cross border minority. The ripple
effect is there, and in the case of Tamils in Sri Lanka, Indian state has acted. As regards
the Muslim minority or Hindu minority, Pakistan or India’s interference would more
likely to harm than benefit. Nonetheless, the state level relationships among South Asians
does influence how the minorities are treated by the state power holders.

South Asia’s majoritarian states

Recognition of a minority group is a crucial precondition for protecting minority Rights.
International Conventions, Declarations and Institutional mechanisms – provide
frameworks identifying minority rights and entitlements. But there is no consensual
international definition of who is or which group is the bearer of these rights.
Consequently, states have interpreted what constitutes a minority to suit their own
politics. Pakistan recognizes only religious minorities and not its Sind, Baluch or Pushto
nationalities and has created a new religious minority- Ahmadis. Bangladesh,
constitutionally, does not recognise that it has linguistic, religious or ethnic minorities. Its
ideological and structural orientation is as a mono-ethnic, mono-linguistic and mono
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religious state, thus making minorities of its Hindu, non Bangla speaking and adivasi
populations.

Sri Lanka’s minority rights discourse does not include recognition of social (depressed
caste) minorities India does not list its Dalit population as a minority and state institutions
(e.g. judiciary) legitimize a homogenous Hindu identity excluding multiple sects from the
religious minority category. Constitutionally, there is the construction of religious and
linguistic minorities as a cultural category, sidestepping the issue of power and public
participation. Nepal (under the 1990 constitutional system) denied its multi-religious
character and institutionalizes exclusion of its linguistic and ethnic minorities. Bhutan in
the pursuit of a ‘One Nation, One People’ – Drupkaization’ policy pushed out a 120,000
ethnic Nepali Lhotsampas, and rejects their claims to citizenship.

A key criterion is self identification as a minority (and the group’s right to determine who
is a member of the minority). Several groups, as for example the Tamil community or the
Naga peoples of north east India, indigenous peoples of the CHT, Bangladesh - have
repudiated identity as a minority (a subordinate group) and claimed for themselves
identity (and rights) as a ‘nation’, e.g. peoples of the ‘Jumma’ nation CHT, and the
Mohajir as an ethno-nationality. None of these peoples see themselves as ‘ethnic
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communities’. Each claims to be a nation.

South Asian states in the political organization of their plural societies have experimented
with different models from republic to constitutional monarchy, from federal
arrangements with special autonomies to unitary state structures; from multi-party
democracy to party less authoritarian and military governments; from secular to a
theocratic orientation, and from a multicultural public sphere to a hegemonic mono-
cultural mono ethnic one.

Whereas some polities like India, have articulated an elaborate framework of
constitutional guarantees for minority rights protection and degrees of federalism
including asymmetric autonomous structures for devolving power; in the case of others
like Pakistan and Bangladesh, the constitution itself is the source of discrimination and
victimization. In the ‘old’ Nepal. Mahendra Lawoti argues that democracy as practiced
by the upper caste hill elite (CHEM) that monopolized power in the Cabinet, the
government and political parties, institutionalized the exclusion of the ‘majority’ of the
population comprising janajatis, backward castes and women. Overlaying this was
regional disadvantage and deprivation in a highly centralized - Kathmandu centric –
polity. The ‘new’ Nepal’s constitution, it is expected, will provide for greater inclusion
and federal restructuring.

Sri Lanka’s unitary state had pursued a constitutional path of accommodating minority
rights –equal rights, some language rights and a limited degree of decentralization –
against the backdrop of the military conflict. It challenged the terms of the liberal
minority rights discourse effectively displaced the minority question with the national
question, bringing to the fore claims to ‘group rights’ as Uyangoda emphasises. The final
solution in the end was a military resolution. That can only reinforce the Sri Lanka state’s
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unitary ideology, centralized structure and Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony. Forebodings
about the likely status of minorities in the post LTTE Sri Lanka are not likely to be
allayed by Sri Lanka President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s statement immediately after the
physical elimination of the LTTE. “There are no minority communities in this country.
There are only two communities, one that loves the country and one that does not”
(Rajapaksa May 19, 2009) It presumes that the ‘national’ question / minority question
can be decreed out of existence. Without a fundamental de-ethnicization or for that
decommunalization of the state and power sharing arrangements, the politics of numbers
will continue to haunt the states of south Asia.

South Asian states, on the whole, have been extremely wary if not hostile to devolving
power and most have evolved into unitary states with at best administrative
decentralization. Even India which has evolved a quasi federal polity with a complex
structure of special autonomies, uses the nomenclature –centre: state relations. Whereas
the constitutional debates presage wide ranging devolution of power, post partition,
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federalism came to be viewed as carrying the seeds of secession and disintegration.
Moreover, the Nehruvian economic model under girded by centralized planning, was
predicated central control. The Indian constitution carries that unitary bias, e.g. after
distributing legislative powers in three lists, not only are residual subjects left with the
Union, its will prevails on subjects in the concurrent list. Also, the Indian parliament
keeps the right to change the boundaries of the states. India. The Indian Union is not
founded on federating units choosing to constitute a federal union.

The fifty year old struggle of the Naga peoples for self rule in the north east; Jammu
Kashmir’s erosion of constitutionally sanctioned special autonomy and the people’s
alienation and the Punjab insurgency that was rooted in issues of autonomy and power
sharing -- are but three of the most significant conflicts that testify to the Indian elite’s
centralizing and majoritarian impulse. However, the linguistic reorganization of the
Indian state system is a testimony to its capacity for accommodating plural demands.

All our states have a fundamental rights chapter in their constitution that provides for
human freedoms that apply to all citizens, irrespective of race, place of birth, religion,
caste, creed, color or sex - subject to restrictions of ‘public order’. Fundamental Rights, it
needs to be recalled, primarily protect individuals from arbitrary state policies.
International discourses on human rights and minority rights have been braided on the
‘nation state’ building process of our post colonial states. However, historical
circumstances, the contextual specificity of ruling class ideology, and the overall
exigencies of creating a coherent ‘nation state’ in highly plural societies, has produced a
region rife with ‘minorities at risk’.

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Three National Models: Minority Rights Protection

India: Limits of Constitutionalism
“Minority Rights discourse is monopolised by Muslims. This may explain why questions about minorities are
necessarily linked in the mind with the minority problem during the British days, which gave rise to
‘communal politics’, separatism and finally partition. The Indian discourse on ‘minorities’ as concept well as
groups of people therefore gets defined and delimited by communalism versus secularism and nationalism
versus separatism. It is hardly ever placed in the perspective of mainstream human rights movement which
wants to ensure all rights for all people .”
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Iqbal Ansari, Readings on Minorities (1996)

India’s constitutional guaranteed regime of equal rights based on common citizenship and
non discrimination is mediated by a complex web of special rights and protections. There
is statutory backed creation of special territorial autonomies providing for ‘self rule’
(Jammu & Kashmir Art 370-371H); for social minorities affirmative action provision of
reservations for notified scheduled castes, hill tribes and backward classes (Part XVI,
Article 15, 16, 330 & 332); for the linguistic minorities protection of language rights
(Articles 29,347 & 350) and statehood for major linguistic groups; and for the religious
minorities a system of legal pluralism with differentiated personal law regimes, rights to
public management of religious and educational institutions.

However, such prescriptive policies of protection and ‘affirmative action’ have delivered
not equality, but the demand for more and more groups seeking the dividends that accrue
to ethnic (and caste) politics by claiming official recognition of ‘minority’ status e.g. the
OBC Gujjars in Rajasthan and Rajbhansis in Assam claiming Scheduled Tribe status to
tap designated special rights. Meanwhile, an unsympathetic majority castigates such
policies as “appeasement politics”.

Also, India’s innovative experiments in evolving a range of ethnically delimited
autonomous ‘homelands’ (even experimenting with shared sovereignty) have subsumed
secessionist demands. But without any fundamental expansion of democratic value in the
institutions at the Centre or in the autonomous unit, it inevitably has led to exclusion of
non dominant ethnic groups, and the relentless reproduction of more ethnicities and the
demand for other homelands. These autonomy institutions are more likely to reinforce
‘insider outsider politics. The result is the North East scarred in a welter of conflict lines.

As regards the schema of protection and special rights of religious minorities, Gurpreet
Mahajan, a scholar of minority rights, evaluating the impact of these provisions,
succinctly observed, that it has assured the protection of cultural identity by
“safeguarding cultural autonomy and promoting cultural diversity”; where “it has failed
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is in promoting equality, non-discrimination and vitally, equity”. Such emphasis on
cultural identity has fostered a distortion in the community’s politics. For example, the
elite of the Muslim community has got tied up in the pursuit of identity politics, raising
with the state demands centering on issues concerning religio-cultural orthodoxy, (i.e.
religious holidays, personal law, banning books, etc.) rather than leveraging equal
opportunities in political representation, access to development, education etc. That,
argues Javeed Alam is giving way to the emergence of a ‘citizen politics’ that is
participation in democratic politics for realizing an egalitarian social ethos.
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