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Rethinking the Muslim Question in Post-Colonial India
Abstract
This paper seeks to answer whether ‘community identity’ of Muslims in contemporary India can be politically articulated in a struggle to transform ‘group identity’/‘communal identity’ to a secular identification of the Muslims along the lines of ‘socio-economic deprivation’ and ‘progressive politics’. The neglect of class issues involved in ‘communal’ questions is a serious weakness in current scholarship. This paper tries to venture out a theoretical possibility of making a link between ‘class issues’ and ‘community identity’ particularly with relation to Indian Muslims. First, the paper asks a couple of questions: can the Muslim identity be also seen from the perspective of (under)class identity? And if one can argue a case for an overlap of Muslim identity with an identity of one of India’s poorest sections, or if the Indian Muslims can be empirically identified as a deprived socio-economic group, then why the class dimensions or the issues of socio-economic deprivation of Indian Muslims has not been prominently articulated in the post-colonial political discourses?
... Imam (1975) laid emphasis on the fact that "Muslim problem be viewed not as generalized monolith one but in terms of classes among the Muslim community" (Imam, 1975, p. xiii). Similarly, Islam (2012) raised the question whether exclusion among Muslims should be seen as exclusion based on their religious identity or they should simply be considered as poor. He emphasized on the need for a class perspective. ...
The objective of this study is to examine the impact of human resource management practices on employees’ job performance. Questionnaires were employed to collect the data. The research participants were 464 state officials from 10 city municipalities in Chonburi, Thailand. The data was analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM). Findings showed that (1) recruitment and selection, internal communication, and job satisfaction had a positive direct impact on an employee’s job performance; (2) pays and benefits, performance appraisal, and internal communication had a positive direct impact on job satisfaction; and (3) pays and benefits and performance appraisal showed no direct impact on an employee’s job performance but had indirect impact on an employee’s job performance through job satisfaction. The study notes several theoretical and practical implications of the findings that may extend our knowledge of the various impacts of human resource management practices on an employee’s job performance.
How do protests and security regimes engage each other on the question of difference? This question frames this essay's ethnographic portrayal of the expression of dissent and political claims in a borderland site of national security and the Indian security state's management of such dissent to reinforce its legitimacy as a liberal democracy. Border residents in eastern India, predominantly Muslim or depressed caste, are minority citizens. By closely reading the terms through which they articulate their claims and humiliations and how they are rendered suspect, subordinated, and othered from fulsome democratic rights and citizenship, this essay offers a portrait of the slow violence of affective rule in a place of “no conflict.” Turning away from spectacular instances of militarism and state violence, this essay illuminates the affective force of militarization whose goal is to disable critique and segment minority citizens into subordinated inclusion. It asks how collective political action might be heard and endure in such constrained conditions. This specific locus is instructive for the logic of contradistinction as a mode of security rule more widely. It demonstrates that the intersection of gender and religious identity is not a “dimension” of contemporary national security regimes but must be seen as foundational to their constitution and legitimacy.
The many Muslim women who make up India’s burgeoning informal economy, challenge any attempt to reduce them to homemakers whose lives are delimited by culture and religion. An examination of their lives reveals the complex forces that shape their worlds, and illuminates how they variously negotiate landscapes of inequality in contemporary India. Here I focus on the biography of one Muslim widow to illustrate how she labours to live and dream in contemporary India as various social forces intersect to create precarity in her life. While neoliberal priorities and a shrinking social safety-net affect underprivileged women across religious lines, the intersection of gender, class, and religion in Hindu majoritarian India has made it even more challenging for low-income Muslim women like her to make ends meet. However, dominant forces are not totalising, and the biographical method reveals how one woman negotiates precarity, employing various skills as she adapts to changing conditions, juggling multiple jobs to meet expenses, and envisioning a better future. We see not just the deep inequalities that create precarity for some, but also how dreams can be a material force in the world.
In 2002, barbaric communal violence broke out all over the western state of Gujarat in India. Over 2000 Muslims were killed and more than 96,000 displaced through violent attacks by Hindus in retaliation for the burning of a train carrying 59 Hindu pilgrims. After 2002, the Gujarat government implemented the Gujarat Development Model (GDM), an economic development model based on neoliberal politics and late-capitalistic policies. Using a rhetorical lens, I argue that the GDM performs memory work to forget the minority Muslim identity after the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. GDM is a rhetorical move that uses sectarian-neutral language circulated via newspapers to perform a simultaneous forgetting of the pogrom and the atrocities against the Muslims but remembering the moment of Godhra valorizing the majoritarian Hindu identity.
Tatars in Russia and Mappilas in India, two imagined communities of dif- ferent socio-cultural, ethno-national and geo-political identities, have more contrasts than commonalities. Their similarity lies in the constructed otherness of Tatars and Mappilas regarding the origin, spread, and survival of these two communities. Orientalist historiography, literary imageries, and ideological intrusions have constructed a common ‘other’ whose stereotyped media images and biased narratives are now part of everyday discursive practice. Rejecting these age-old intellectual narratives and media images, a new wave of intelligentsia among the Tatar and Mappila communities brings counter-narratives on the history, tradition, and everyday life of these communities. Media, especially cinema, have become a major tool for reinterpreting Tatar and Mappila identity and culture and challenging the distorted images of these subaltern communities.
This article critically argues that Hindi cinema originating from Mumbai, popularly known as Bollywood cinema, has more often than not misrepresented the Indian Muslims in terms of characters and protagonists. Hindi films have wrongfully portrayed the Muslims either as non-modern feudal characters or as anti-national, terrorist, villain, or anti-social characters, among others, with their own mythical constructions. Moreover, the problem of an increasingly ‘missing Muslim’ can be found in an era of liberalization and globalization where we find very few films with Muslim protagonists despite the fact that a large number of Muslims perform both on and off-screen. Although there have been limited attempts by some film-makers to uphold secular principles and champion the message of communal harmony, only a handful of films have actually tried to show the everyday livelihood issues and the problems of poverty, deprivation, exclusion, unemployment and illiteracy of Indian Muslims as noted by several empirical studies. Therefore, this article, while engaging with a number of films and by making a brief survey of the contemporary film history of India, tries to grasp the nature of stereotypical notions and image constructions of Bollywood cinema in relation to Indian Muslims.
This paper will locate some critical reflections on the Sachar Committee report besides arguing against the rhetoric of ‘Muslim appeasement’ and other myths. In the context of overall socio-economic backwardness of the Indian Muslims that largely defeats the rightwing argument of ‘Muslim appeasement,’ the Sachar Committee made some recommendations and policy suggestions and a call for affirmative action, which this paper is not discussing at length but on the contrary, will make some critical observations that the Sachar Committee did not take into account.
This paper attempts to define the common people of India in terms of levels of consumption and examines their socio-economic profile in different periods of time since the early 1990s with a view to assessing how the economic growth process has impacted on their lives. The findings should worry everyone. Despite high growth, more than three-fourths of Indians are poor and vulnerable with a level of consumption not more than twice the official poverty line. This proportion of the population which can be categorised as the "common people" is much higher among certain social groups, especially for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. There is also evidence to suggest that inequality is widening between the common people and the better-off sections of society.
The Constitution of India excludes religious minorities from the purview of group-preference provisions because the dominant nationalist opinion in the Constituent Assembly held that resort to such safeguards was legitimate only for enabling backward sections of the population to overcome their disabilities, not for facilitating the preservation of distinct cultural identities.
Globalization, Nationalism and Economic Reform The Fundamental Issues Planning for Autarky and State Hegemony Nationalist Development Strategy under Nehru Between Mercantilist Sociolaism and Liberalism The Changing Fortunes of the Nehru-Mahalanobis Strategy, 1956-1990 Changing the Balance, 1991-98 Political Structure and Economic Reform Business and Economic Policy Reform The United Front and Economic Reforms, 1996-98 Policy and Performance under Democratic Coalitions The Limits of Economic Nationalism Economic Reforms under the BJP-led Government, 1998-99 Summary and Conclusions
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