The Congress has been the biggest beneficiary of minority politics. As the nation’s trust gained by being at the frontline of the Independence struggle began to erode, the party started relying heavily on using minorities, mainly Muslims, as a vote bank.
Indira Gandhi inserted the word ‘secular’ into the preamble of the Constitution during Emergency through the backdoor. Rajiv Gandhi overturned the Supreme Court’s decision to grant divorced Shah Bano alimony to appease violence Islamist mobs who came down on the streets. PV Narasimha Rao created the National Commission for Minorities (NCM) to recompense for the demolition of the Babri Masjid under his watch, and UPA government under Manmohan Singh with Sonia and Rahul Gandhi as his para-constitutional superbosses declared that minorities have the first right on the nation’s resources, besides floating fraudulent ideas like ‘saffron terror’ and brazenly biased legislation like the Communal Violence Bill (2011).
But in the midst of all this, in one lucidly honest moment, Congress-led UPA’s minister of state for minority affairs Ninong Ering submitted a surprising written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha.
“The Constitution of India used the word ‘minorities’ or its plural form in Articles 29 to 30 and 350(a) to 350(b). But does not define it anywhere,” Ering wrote in August 2013.
He was right.
Article 29(1), which talks about the protection of rights of minorities, says: “Any section of the citizens residing in the territory of India or any part thereof having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right to conserve the same.”
Articles 350A and 350B talks about the rights of linguistic minorities but does not define these minorities.
The Indian Constitution does not define the term minority. Its founders did not mention ‘religious’ minorities, a plank that would nevertheless go on to form the hard flooring of Indian politics till today. Perhaps they had seen the horrors of Partition from too close to hand the nation of their dreams a tool to recreate the same, ugly divisiveness.
The founders, however, created a recourse for small, vulnerable groups to get affirmative action. They left it to the future generations of leaders to define such ‘minorities’ with honesty and the wisdom of that time. Today, they would be disappointed.
Today, the term minority has been perverted to mean just Muslims — even if unstated — who are an over 200 crore population in India besides having a two billion-strong ummah globally.
In 2014, Narendra Modi government’s newly sworn-in minority affairs minister Najma Heptulla said, “This is not the ministry for Muslim affairs, this is the ministry of minority affairs…Muslims are not minorities.”
So, who made ‘minorities’ in the Constitution come to mean Muslims?
Stung by Muslim wrath after the Babri Masjid demolition, the Congress brought the National Commission for Minorities Act (1992). But even this law did not define the term ‘religious minority’.
The Congress put an end to this ambiguity, only to heavily tilt benefits towards Muslims. In October 1993, the Congress government notified five religious communities: Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Zoroastrians as national religious minorities.
“The NCM did not find any contradiction between the constitutional meaning of a minority and the 1993 notification of the government. In an official note to the ministry of home affairs (dated 30 July 1997), it clarified: A national-level minority shall have the status of a minority in the entire country irrespective of its local population. A national level minority shall have the status of a minority in the entire country irrespective of its local population,” Hilal Ahmed wrote in The Print in 2008.
While LK Advani spoke out against it and the BJP’s 1996 and 1998 manifestoes opposed it, when in power, the party did nothing about it.
The US Supreme Court recently ended positive discrimination or affirmative action by ruling that race can no longer be considered a factor in university admissions. Clarence Thomas, the second black person to join the US Supreme Court, scathingly criticised positive discrimination, describing it as “rudderless, race-based preferences designed to ensure a particular racial mix in their entering classes”.
India can still not go the US way in entirety, given the social complexities and economic inequities. But it is time the Indian State drops the term ‘minority’. It could list only those who are truly numerically tiny and socially and economically vulnerable under ‘special catergories’. Here is why the current political opportunism and legislative ambiguity must end.
First, it denies real minorities their due. An endangered tribe cannot be equated with or even relegated in the backstage by communities that are numerically in crores, politically vociferous, and part of the world’s most influential religious formations. It is the weak and vulnerable who deserve minority privileges.
Second, like Article 370 was to Kashmiri separatism, it provides constitutional oxygen to appeasement politics.
Third, it widens the trust gap between Hindus and Muslims. You redraw the definition of minorities by dropping the two or three dominant groups currently enjoying it, much of the polarisation and bitterness between Hindus and Muslims or Hindus and Christians will ebb. It would also dramatically lessen victim-playing among minorities that aren’t.
Fourth, political minoritism for votes drains out precious resources to shady institutions like madrassas, which denies the Muslim child the Right to Education and instead radicalises them.
Incentivising puissant and predatory religious minorities actively promotes conversions and triggers demographic shifts. The Indian State is literally encouraging disadvantaged Hindus to join a different religion fattened by its minority benefits. After having lost Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, one hoped our policymakers would know better.
The Indian Parliament needs to scrap the term ‘minority’ and, after assessing numbers and vulnerabilities, clearly define special categories who need the State’s handholding. It also needs to strictly spoon off the creamy layer in cases of positive discrimination and reservation so that only those who need it can avail it.
It would be a politically explosive step, but the Modi government has not shied from taking such strides.
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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