Maratha Kranti Morcha, a rallye for Marathi castes demanding respect of their rights in Mumbai last year. Mhidanesh/Wikimedia, CC BY-NC-SA

Yet Narendra Modi’s ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) is making a dramatic effort to woo such lower castes. Three of these are especially important: reviewing social justice schemes, revisiting job reservations, and the sub-categorisation of lower castes.
These measures will eventually deepen India’s caste politics and strengthen the caste system – the world’s oldest surviving social hierarchy.

In India, society is divided among higher castes, lower castes (known as Other Backward Castes or OBCs, among the socially and “educationally backward” sections of Indian society), Scheduled Castes (known as Dalits, formerly “Untouchables”), and Scheduled Tribes (known as Adivasis).

Today, the BJP is strategically working to win the heart and the vote of millions of lower castes, who make up 41% of the Indian population. However, the BJP’s outreach initiatives are not born out of a concern for social justice; they are part of an electoral agenda.
 

Changing the BJP’s image

The BJP’s defeat in the 2009 general election proved a turning point for its engagement with lower castes. While still playing the Hindu nationalism card with dominant upper castes, the BJP is now deploying multiple strategies to win over lower castes too.
For example, Amit Shah, now the party’s president, first highlighted Modi’s own lower-caste background in the 2014 election in Uttar Pradesh. Later on, as prime minister, Modi was projected as the champion of lower caste groups. The party’s support for a Dalit presidential candidate was internationally hyped. Similarly, a recent cabinet reshuffle brought in more lower-caste leaders to appropriate the “numerical demographic” of OBCs for political gain.

The BJP is also making lower caste-friendly gestures in assembly elections campaigns in Gujarat and Karnataka. It highlights its commitment to provide constitutional status to the National Commission for Backward Classes (NCBC), a statutory body that works for the welfare of lower castes.

Interestingly, the BJP is also pushing the idea of revisiting the existing system of reservation, which allocates 27% of governmental jobs and seats in educational institutions to lower castes. This the party proposes to do by setting up a committee to sub-categorise these groups into “backward”, “extremely backward” and “most backward” classes.
 

Lower caste identity through history

These are big developments. For decades, most political parties – including the Jana Sangh, which morphed into the BJP in 1980 – played their politics in the usual framework, excluding the lower-caste categories from the power structure of the state.
The notion of “affirmative action through reservation” only appeared in the mid-1970s when socialist parties led by politicians Ram Manohar Lohia and Chaudhary Charan Singh started using it to mobilise and consolidate the lower castes as a separate political identity.

The identity of lower castes only began to coalesce in 1955, when the first Backward Classes Commission under Kaka Kalelkar recommended various reservation quotas in technical, professional and government institutions.

Lower castes in India have been associated with menial work and high rates of poverty. Sharada Prasad CS/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Then in 1990, lower-caste mobilisation was galvanised when the Second Backward Classes Commission – popularly known as the Mandal Commission – recommended that 27% of positions in educational institutions and public employment be reserved for OBCs.

This was violently opposed by non-political bodies, including conservative student organisations. Many of these were close to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an ultra-nationalist ideological group that supports the BJP. In 2006, these student wings fiercely opposed the Congress-led government’s decision to implement 27% lower caste job reservations in premier higher educational institutions.
 

Towards a universal Hindu identity

But now, India’s right-wing organisations have made peace with lower-caste aspirations. This has proved electorally rewarding, with the BJP successfully winning a greater share of the OBC vote. A third of the OBCs shifted to the BJP in the 2014 election, and in subsequent state elections.

Strategically, the BJP has focused on dismantling the caste-based parties’ monopoly over lower-caste votes. The tactic of painting other parties as corrupt bastions of single-caste politics worked wonders, as did an effort to compress the existing 2,479 lower castes into a smaller unit of individualised caste identity to diminish their collective heft.

The BJP also supported the aspirations of lower castes’ leaders through either finance or political alliance, accommodating OBC leaders in the party or ministerial portfolios at local, state and national level.

At the same time, the party is building a network of lower castes cadres in both rural and urban areas, as well as among young people and women. To penetrate the lower castes’ social base, the BJP formed an OBC Morcha or “special wing” in July 2015.

Religious ceremonies are organised to include lower castes back into the folds of Hinduism. Asim Chaudury/Flickr, CC BY-SA

On the one hand, right-wing Hindu organisations are engaged in the radical Hinduisation of lower castes and Dalits through programmes such as “Ghar Wapsi” or “Home Coming”, rituals of conversion to Hinduism, and running religious, spiritual and service programmes in lower caste areas.

On the other hand, the BJP’s core clientele of higher castes are satisfied thanks to the works of its right-wing support organisations. They continue spreading messages they want to hear, such as tactically portraying Muslims as a common enemy.

With many of its much-acclaimed policies failing to deliver, the BJP knows it has to sustain the charisma of Narendra Modi long enough to fight the 2019 legislative elections.

The party’s central challenge is to retain its support base while simultaneously supplementing it enough to ensure electoral victories. To do this, it must mobilise the emerging middle-class OBC vote – and it’s clearly prepared to do almost whatever it takes.

Afroz Alam, Associate Professor and Head, Department of Political Science, Maulana Azad National Urdu University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post The caste politics curse that India just can’t shake off appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Be careful! In Uttar Pradesh, the cow trade is now almost wholly criminalised. Jitendra Prakash/Reuters

“Even the third generation of Muslim brothers, whom I have seen since my young days, are continuing with their cycle-repairing job,” he said, referring to one of the many menial jobs to which Indian Muslims are often relegated. “Why does such misfortune continue?”

But instead of “bring[ing] about change in their lives,” as Modi promised, his government has made life harder for India’s Muslims by cracking down on the leather and beef industries.
 

Impact on Muslim and Dalit livelihoods

Muslims and Dalits (the marginalised group once known as “untouchables” in the Hindu caste system) are among the poorest in India, and they have very little access to property. By tradition and due to a lack of other opportunities, many work in the leather sector, which employs 2.5 million people nationwide.

Over the past three years, this trade has increasingly made Muslims and Dalits the targets of so-called cow vigilantism – attacks perpetrated by Hindus on cow traders in the name of religion. And legislation adopted in May, which amends the 1960 Prevention of Cruelty on Animals Act, is set to victimise these populations economically.

Among other changes, the new rules mandate that cows, camels and buffalo may be sold to farmers only for agricultural purposes, not for slaughter.

In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, one out of every 1000 work in cow-related industries, including slaughterhouses and the leather industry. The town of Kanpur recently saw several slaughterhouses close down, putting out of work over “400,000 employees linked to leather industries”, according to a Reuters report.
 

The supply of local hides has declined precipitously, leading to a decrease in Indian sales of leather and leather products. From April 2016 to March 2017, total leather exports dropped 3.23% from the previous year, to US$5.67 billion from US$5.9 billion.
India also does enormous trade in meat. In 2015, the main market for its buffalo meat was Vietnam, which buys up US$1.97 million worth of it, followed by Malaysia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Last financial year, annual production was estimated at 6.3 million tonnes and exports totalled US$3.32 billion, according to a report in the Economic Times. That’s down from US$4.15 billion the year before. In Uttar Pradesh alone, attacks on cow related-businesses have already triggered losses of US$601 million on the state’s export business.
 

Coercive measures

States have also introduced several coercive measures aimed at people in the cow businesses. Uttar Pradesh, whose chief minister is a right-wing Hindu fundamentalist, leads the measures.

Illegal slaughterhouses have been at the core of the debate in recent months following a government crackdown in March 2017, as non-compliant facilities struggle to adapt to complex regulations, including locating shops at specific distances from religious places, getting appropriate documents from several administrations or particular freezers.

On June 6 2017, the state issued a new directive to punish cow slaughter and illegal transport of dairy animals under the National Security Act and Gangsters Act, effectively criminalising traders.

This has encouraged harassment of Muslims and Dalits in Uttar Pradesh. Even in the Muslim-majority village of Madora, residents are encouraged to denounce those who engage in slaughtering cows by the promise of a INR50,000 (US$1000) reward.
On the west coast state of Gujarat, cow slaughter is now a non-bailable offence, punishable with life imprisonment, meaning that people who kill a cow will serve the same time as a murderer.

Central Jharkhand and other states ruled by Modi’s BJP party have begun applying similar laws. The national government is also currently considering a petition to give cows an Indian identity card similar to those issued to its citizens.
 

In the name of the cow

These new rules have reinforced the impunity of criminal groups that burn down Muslim and Dalit businesses, terrorise cow traders and brutally beat or kill people. Rebranding themselves as animal activists, cow vigilantes exploit the sanctity of this animal in Hinduism to commit violence, with the tacit endorsement of state and national governments.

The violence has impacted both legal and illegal traders (bulls and buffalo are not included in new regulations), generating panic among flayers, contractors, truck drivers, traders, daily wage earners, who are now abandoning their posts out of fear. The majority are Dalit or Muslim.
 

Hindu slaughterhouse owners, on the other hand, have been largely spared by the wrath of cow vigilantes and onerous regulations. Of the country’s 11 largest meat-exporting companies, eight are Hindu-run.

Flourishing and paradoxical beef trade

None of this will help already-tense Hindu-Muslim relations in India, nor does it seem to bode well for Modi’s “Make in India” initiative to boost the country’s economic production.

According to the campaign website, the government hopes to increase leather exports to US$9 billion by 2020, from its present level of US$5.85 billion, and bring the domestic market to US$18 billion, doubling its current value.
 

To do so, the government says it will focus on maintaining India’s comparative advantages in production and labour costs and ensure the availability of skilled manpower for new or existing production units. But that may be hard when Muslim and Dalit workers are being systematically singled out and harassed.

Can Modi’s government really afford a crackdown on cow economics?
 

Afroz Alam, Associate Professor and Head, Department of Political Science, Maulana Azad National Urdu University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post “Can Modi’s government really afford a crackdown on cow economics?” appeared first on SabrangIndia.

This “instant divorce” is called “triple talaq”. It is legal and allowed under the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937, which states that husbands can separate from their wives by simply uttering the word “talaq” three times.

But when a Muslim woman seeks to divorce, she needs to go through a longer, different procedure.

The practice of instant divorce, which is prevalent among Sunni Muslims, has been already abolished in 22 countries including Pakistan and Indonesia where Sunnis are the majority. But it remains in Saudi Arabia and in India. For now.
 

The end of a discriminatory practice

For over a month now, the Supreme Court of India has been reviewing the practice. On May 10, it called it the “worst and undesirable form” of dissolution of marriage.
 

The Supreme Court undertook the review after Muslim women activists campaigned for an end to the practice, calling for reform of Muslim personal law. They also demanded better living conditions, more facilities, and fairer rights overall, on par with women from other communities in the country’s vast multicultural society.

In India, religious freedom is a fundamental constitutional right. In accordance with your faith, personal laws can apply and decide upon your marriage, divorce and inheritance matters, among other things. When spouses are of different religions, they rely on the Special Marriage Act.

But is “triple talaq” a religious or legal question? Scholars Faizan Mustafa and women’s rights activist Flavia Agnes have invoked constitutional provisions regarding freedom of religion, minority rights and cultural preservation to justify noninterference by the judiciary in existing personal laws.

The court has examined both the legal and religious aspects of “triple talaq” and is currently reserving its verdict, which is expected to come in the next few weeks.
 

Used by far-right groups

The conservative All India Muslim Personal Law Board, an influential organisation for Indian Muslims, initially supported the practice. But on May 22, it stated that those who use talaq should face a social boycott.

It did not, however, call for reforming Muslim law. And other Muslim organisations support it too.

These divisions among Muslim communities have fuelled the discourse of Hindu right-wing groups, including that of the ruling Bharata Janata Party (BJP). They appear to have turned progressive overnight by emphasising the need to abolish the practice in the name of women’s rights.

In the process, they publicly portrayed Muslims as anti-progress, anti-women and finally as anti-India. But the track record of these groups on gender justice is actually abysmal.

These organisations aggressively seek to impose dress codes on women and ban them from wearing western clothing. They thrash people celebrating Valentine’s Day and forbid Hindu women to have male friends.

Some even advise that wife-beating may be well-deserved, and should be borne in silence.
 

But why are Muslim women not allowed to speak for themselves?

Both Hindu and Muslim right-wing groups work in a form of consensus to keep this issue simmering to serve their existential needs.

There also attempt to marginalise moderate and rational voices within the Muslim community on the abolition of instant divorce and project the community as a monolith block.
 

The diversity of Indian Muslims

But Indian Muslims are not homogeneous. Besides the main Shia and Sunni sects, they are also divided along many cross-cutting lines of identities, which prevents the community from having a uniform view on “triple talaq”.
 

There are also nuanced differences in the principle and practices of Shia and the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence, which include Hanafi, Malikiand Hanbali and their sub-sects such as Wahabi, Ahl-e-Hadith, Deoband, Barelvi. Then there’s the minuscule presence of Ahmadiyas and Sufi sects.

None of these categories follow similar patterns in term of social or cultural practices. Muslims, like other Indians, clash over class or income, and have mutually exclusive interests and deprivations. Their diversity runs along linguistic and regional variations from Kashmir (Himalayan northern India) to Kanyakumari (south).

Most significantly, they are divisions based on caste and a strong hierarchy exists despite claims of Islam not acknowledging the caste system in the way it is among Hindus.

Due to intense disagreements within and between these social groups, it is difficult to develop consensus on something called an Uniform Islamic Code that may deal with marriage, divorce, inheritance, maintenance, adoption and polygamy.
 

Need for a unique civil code

Given their diversity, it’s important to preserve the cultural autonomy of Muslim groups. Reform of existing Muslim personal laws must take place and could use some of the egalitarian principles found in the Quran.

Second, the Special Marriage Act should be reformed on broader lines to work as a uniform civil code as there must be a choice available for all, especially for those who disagree with the religious personal laws governing them.

We need to deconstruct the claims of those stating that “triple talaq” is legal and Islamic. In many cases, disadvantaged and uneducated groups among Muslims are unaware of what is called Islamic and are easily influenced by self-proclaimed clerics and scholars.

Does a Muslim cease to be one if he or she does not follow the so-called religious sanctity of “triple talaq”?

The Muslim community must show its progressive side by proposing and accepting the reform of personal laws to reconcile with gender justice norms. It should work on a civil code that challenges not only the un-Islamic “patriarchal bias” but also the unquestioned privileges of conservative forces among Muslims.

Afroz Alam, Associate Professor and Head, Department of Political Science, Maulana Azad National Urdu University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post Muslim ‘instant divorce’ law divides India appeared first on SabrangIndia.