Author: T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan
Publication: The Business
Standard
Date: September 4, 2000
By an extraordinary coincidence,
just when Bangaru Laxman, the new president of the BJP, was inviting his
partymen to take a less jaundiced view of Muslims, I was reading about
the way Akbar ran his government and empire. It seems that that great
worthy ran into the same problem in the 16th century as the BJP has done
now.
The main political dilemma,
according to John Richards, author of the volume on the Mughal empire in
the New Cambridge History of India, was that if the Empire "restricted
the higher level of political and military service to Muslims, it drew
from a very narrow base of support. But if it opened recruitment
to all persons of talent and substance, there would be a strong reaction
from the orthodox Muslim establishment."
Professor Richards goes
on to say that "Akbar made a strong attempt to break out of that dilemma
by creating a new dynastic ideology that would appeal to his subjects of
all religions and statuses." The details and consequences of this effort
are, of course, well known.
What is less well known,
however, is the way in which Akbar overcame resistance from the Ulema.
In 1579, he simply issued an edict which made him the supreme arbiter of
all religious affairs.
It took some doing by
way of both gentle persuasion and outright arm-twisting. But when
the deed was done, the result was a stunning victory for Akbar over the
orthodox religious hierarchy of the Empire. Can Atalji do the same
now?
Akbar is not the only
one to have faced the 'to include or not to include' dilemma. The
British faced the same problem after 1857 and they, too, came to the same
conclusion, namely, that it had become necessary to become inclusivist
rather than remain exclusivist. So they began to take in Indians
into the higher levels of Imperial service.
The BJP, it appears,
has drawn the same lesson. As Bangaru Laxman said, if the party wants
to grow, it needs to expand its voter base -- never mind if it must romance
the Muslims in the process or if it angers the orthodox Hindus in the party
by doing so.
But here, sadly, the
parallel stops. This is because there are three critical differences
that will come in the way of the strategy succeeding. One is simply
the fact that whereas the non-Muslims in Akbar's time and the non-whites
in the colonial era were quite open to the ruling establishment's overtures,
it is doubtful if the Muslims of 21st century India would show the same
enthusiasm to vote for the BJP. This is because their eternal fear
of loss of identity will then become true.
The other difference
lies on the supply side. As the Mughal and the British empires expanded,
they ran into a shortage of competent Muslim and British persons to man
the posts three or four rungs down from the top. No such supply problem
exists for the BJP or, for that matter, any other political party.
So when it comes to actually
distributing the rewards, the BJP will be severely constrained. The
Muslims surely know this, as also the fact that within the BJP they will
always be second class members, rather as the Hindus were in the Mughal
empire and the Indians were in the British.
In 1648, for example,
according to the Badshah Nama (that is, 10 years before Shah Jehan's death
and about 100 years after Akbar had started his policy of recruiting Hindus
to the empire) 80 per cent of the nobility was Muslim.
Only 20 per cent were
Hindu (of which an overwhelming 17 per cent were Rajputs). Almost
the same overall percentages emerged for the early 20th century as well
where British efforts to co-opt Indians are concerned.
This brings up the third
critical difference. This is that when the Mughals and the British
decided to co-opt the Hindus and the Indians, respectively, it was seen
as great favour by both sides. So the Hindus in the Mughal empire
and the Indians in the British were happy with this division.
But this is not the case
any longer. The Muslim community is not going to see the move as
a favour. And the BJP will simply regard it as cynical device, perhaps
for achieving something as banal as wooing the Hindu liberal vote which
dislikes the BJP for its anti-Muslim postures.
The question that the
BJP should now ask itself is: will it, over time, allocate between 15 and
20 per cent of its tickets to Muslims and an equal percentage of its senior
ministerial posts to Muslims?
Likewise, the Muslims
also need clarify if they will be happy with just 20 per cent or if they
will want a greater share in power. I do not have statistics for
how the Congress handled the problem but I rather suspect that it came
nowhere close to even 10 per cent where tickets and ministerial posts for
Muslims were concerned. Instead, it fobbed off the Muslims -- a la
Mani Shankar Aiyar whose constituency has a large Muslim population --
with "secularism". In course of time that fraud alienated the Muslims
who began to waste their votes.
Overall, therefore, this
initiative by the BJP is a completely pointless one. It will do more
harm than good to the party.
