Reduction, Second Attempt: Playing Doctor

Begin with history, which is perhaps the greatest predictor of such things. Though it’s tempting to view India through the gloss of that famous epithet “World’s Biggest Democracy”, its sixty years of nationhood have been more notable for their tumult than stability: three wars with Pakistan, and the conflict over Kashmir still simmering; war with China; the assassinations of two prime ministers; two years of emergency rule; battles with Punjabi separatists; and throughout, periodic flarings of civil unrest. Given such a history, it’s remarkable that democracy should have endured at all—many post-colonial nations have collapsed into authoritarianism or calcified as one-party states beneath far less wrenching pressures. Despite thirty years of relative political stability, however, India remains a nation wracked by forces that try the mettle of its democracy: Naxalite (Maoist) rebels in the South and Northeast; wrangling with Pakistan over borders and territory and the concomitant threat of terrorism on Indian soil (although it should be noted that terrorism in India has many faces and many objects); agitation over political and other reservations by Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), and Other Backward Classes (OBCs); and the omnipresent specter of “communalism”—euphemism in polite society—the press, political circles—for Hindu-Muslim violence.

With Pakistan absorbed in a struggle for the preservation of its historically (more or less) secular and democratic state, it is communalism that is perhaps the clearest present threat to Indian peace and prosperity (although some would argue, and not without merit, that in its instability Pakistan represents an even graver threat to India than it does when at peace). The danger of communal violence seems especially keen now that the Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) is resurgent following important victories in state elections in December (including a volatile contest in the key state of Gujarat). Historically, BJP leaders have had little compunction about exploiting and even instigating Hindu-Muslim tensions for political gain. Indian politicians are, if anything, even more prone than their American counterparts to foist blame on their enemies for any national misfortune or disgrace—accusation and recrimination being a sort of double reflex in politics here—and the BJP is almost as fond of blaming Muslims and other non-Hindus for the country’s ills as it is the nationally ruling Congress Party. It’s no coincidence that the BJP played an incendiary role in India’s two most recent large-scale incidents of communal violence, each of which resulted in thousands of deaths, primarily of Muslims.

And yet, given the overwhelmingly Hindu character of the nation—82% of the populace, as opposed to only 13% Muslim—it seems unlikely that communalism itself poses an existential threat to India (unless, that is, it should manage to precipitate nuclear war on the subcontinent)—although not insignificant, the Muslim minority could not endure a protracted skirmish with Hindu nationalists. Though perhaps the most profound schism in Indian society, the Hindu-Muslim divide is not one so wide as to cause permanent rupture. In fact, no single divide in India is broad enough to threaten a lasting division of the nation; it is the aggregate fracturing of hundreds of minute divisions among its people that, given a single seismic event, one shaking the entire country, could cause the entire edifice of the state to crumble.

It is a terrible irony that some of the nation’s greatest strengths—its diversity, its commitment to political, educational, and economic inclusion of traditionally marginalized populations, and its strongly federal system of governance, among others—are also fundamental sources of division. In the U.S. we tend to think of diversity as an unalloyed good, a desideratum, something to be striven for as a just end in itself rather than as a means to some other goal, forgetting that diversity, however desirable and beneficial, is also very often a catalyst for conflict (which isn’t to say that it should ever be forsworn as a social goal or otherwise). India is a state comprised of thousands of ethnic groups, castes, sub-castes, jatis, and other distinct populations. It is the birthplace of three major world religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism), and with the exception of Indonesia and Pakistan, it is home to more Muslims than any other nation on the planet. The last census found that more than 1,600 languages are spoken within its borders. Indians joke that India is not a single large country, but thousands of tiny ones: travel only fifty kilometers from wherever you are, they say, and you will encounter a new language, a new culture. This is said with pride and a bit of astonishment; even Indians can’t believe how disparate the nation’s population is.

This grand diversity, so different from our conception of the term, one which defines diversity most readily in racial and national terms—diversity is the New York melting pot—isn’t inherently dangerous, especially so long as all of its constituents share some common identity or sustaining narrative of unity. This isn’t necessarily true of India, where, despite a visible patriotism among its people, significant segments of the population tend not to identify with their country of birth and residence (one old man in a village I visited in September didn’t even understand that he was a citizen of a broader political entity called India). The nation’s extensive system of political, educational, and employment reservations for SCs, STs, and OBCs—an impressive and commendable program of affirmative action—has often exacerbated this disassociation from nation in favor of narrower allegiances to caste or tribe.

The reservation system, conceived of to speed the integration of all segments of the population—specifically those historically repressed—into broader Indian society and to redress past injustice, has, in some cases, resulted in the hardening of traditional distinctions. Ethnic identity often becomes more important than national identity, because it affords advancement; resentment builds among the non-SC, ST, or OBC population, particularly its impoverished elements; unrecognized marginalized groups agitate, often violently, for legal recognition of SC, ST, or OBC status; and recognized SC, ST, and OBC groups stridently oppose the efforts of these groups because their recognition will result in a reduction in the reservations of the already recognized groups. In Rajasthan, the Gujjar people currently seek ST status and are employing large-scale demonstrations and blocking roads in pursuit of that end; their fiercest opponent hasn’t been the police but the Meenas, one of Rajasthan’s ST groups.

Given India’s history, diversity, and vastness, both of area and population, the nation’s federalism is both strategic and concessionary—it seems the best way to govern an enormous, far-flung, and multifarious population as well as a necessary acknowledgement of the country’s heritage of fragmentary administration—even the British failed to bring the nation under a single, central government. India is nearly as much colonial fabrication as any African state, and perhaps the only thing in which Indians have ever been united was their detestation of colonial rule; thus the reliance on a system of governance in which Indians states have been given an autonomy of which the American Federalist Society would heartily approve. Yet federalism has also perpetuated the historical geographic and cultural divisions of the subcontinent and highlighted the inequalities between populations—the development of southern states such as Kerala and Tamil Nadu is several generations advanced beyond that of others like Bihar, Orissa, and Assam, where the quality of life of inhabitants is more typical of sub-Saharan Africa and the world’s least developed countries than what one would expect of an emerging economic power like India.

In the minds of Indians, state lines are too often more than imaginary boundaries; they are tangible demarcations of different peoples. In a nation where everyone is an “other” to everyone else, state affiliation is just another way of defining the “otherhood” of another person. And the fracturing of state identity is not yet complete: three new states were born in 2000 out of old ones—Uttaranchal from Uttar Pradesh, Jharkand from Bihar, and Chhattisgarh from Madhya Pradesh—and it seems likely that another state, to be called Bundelkhand, will emerge from Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh by the end of the decade. Tribal regions in several other states, following the lead of Jharkand and Chhattisgarh, are also working toward independence. The further atomization of the Indian state, with all of its ramifying social implications, seems inevitable.

On January 27, Raj Thackeray, the leader of the Maharashtra Navnirman Shena (a Hindu nationalist party and affiliate of the BJP), publicly denounced the presence of North Indians in Mumbai, specifically citing emigrants from the states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (incidentally two of the poorest states in the country), claiming that they were taking South Indian jobs and insulting South Indian culture with their adherence to native practices. Mumbai is India’s most cosmopolitan city; Thackeray’s outburst was roughly equivalent to Al Sharpton telling all of the Mississippians and Alabamans in New York City to get the hell out. Thackeray’s xenophobia (if it can even be called that) seems absurd, and yet it inspired a wave of violence that left at least one man dead; on Saturday Thackeray warned against public celebrations of Uttar Pradesh Day in Maharashstra, suggesting that Shiv Sena members would put down by force all who disobeyed his extralegal proscription. The hullabaloo surrounding Thackeray is a morbid outgrowth of an endemic prejudice: in private conversation I have been told by educated South Indians that North Indians are generally unfriendly, arrogant, and disdainful toward those who don’t speak Hindi, and many North Indians' opinions of Southerners are equally derogatory.

Hindu vs. Muslim (and other non-Hindus), caste vs. caste, tribe vs. tribe, state vs. state, tribal vs. non-tribal, North vs. South: all are divisions daily in evidence in India’s newspapers. The largely invisible divisions and resentments of class, education, and rural vs. urban populations are no less profound for their latency. In a nation of a billion ruptures--some tiny cracks, others daunting crevasses, but none so large as to alone be capable of collapsing the idea of the Indian state--what sort of force is then capable of convulsing the entire nation at once, thereby acting on multiple ruptures concurrently?