Indian Instincts

to West and East Pakistan (the latter is now known as Bangladesh), and the Hindu inhabitants of those regions were forced to move to India. In the process, more than fifteen million people were uprooted, and between one and two million died.³⁴ Most Muslims who live in India today—making up 14.23 per cent of India’s population³⁵—are those remaining from that great migration to Pakistan. Either out of choice or compulsion, they did not leave. Ever since, they have had to bear the consequences of history.

Hindus can never seem to forget the million-odd Hindus who were killed during Partition, but they do forget that a nearly equal number of Muslims were also killed by Hindus.³⁶ They also hold against Muslims the earlier military invasions and conquests of the Mughals from the north, which took place hundreds of years ago.

Even today, it is only to a certain extent that Indian Muslims have benefited from democracy. For instance, there is not a single state government till date that employs Muslims in proportion to their share in the state’s population. The number of Muslims in government jobs has indeed risen from 5 per cent a decade ago to 8.5 per cent in 2014–15,³⁷ but this is still abysmally below their proportion in India’s population.

There are, however, Muslims who have risen to become prominent political leaders, including Dr Zakir Hussain and Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, former Presidents of India. The presence of Muslim leaders in high-level politics dates back to the Indian National Congress. As Guha wrote in his book Democrats and Dissenters: ‘Even before Gandhi assumed its leadership, the Congress had to face the charge that it was essentially an upper-caste Hindu party. To combat this criticism it had to reach out to Muslims and lower castes.’ This practice of presenting a pro-Muslim image and agenda and putting up Muslim political representatives continues in most national and regional political parties. Since Muslims represent a large percentage of the population in India, politicians have indeed needed to be attentive to their votes, but much of that may be mere lip service. In Muslim-dominated parts of Delhi, the local politicians are often Muslims as well, yet the areas they are responsible for often remain underdeveloped. In most other parts of our country too, the economically depressed condition of Indian Muslims is testimony to the fact that democracy has not helped the community much.

The rate of Muslim literacy is far less than that of other sections of society. The current gross enrolment rate of Muslims in higher education is 13.8 per cent, much lower than the pan-Indian figure of 23.6 per cent.³⁸ The literacy rate among Muslim adult males is 81 per cent, compared to 91 per cent among Hindus, 94 per cent among Christians and 84 per cent among Sikhs, according to a report of the National Sample Survey Organization.³⁹ The literacy rate of Muslims has, however, risen from 59.1 per cent in 2001 to 68.5 per cent in 2011, even though the rate of their work participation continues to be the lowest among all minorities.⁴⁰

Muslims have, at times, even sought low-quality but free education in government schools as well as in religious schools or madrasas. Some of India’s greatest historians and educationists have been Muslims. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the founder of the Aligarh Muslim University, and the historian Irfan Habib are just a few examples. They are not only learned but also resilient, succeeding despite the extraordinary forces pulling them down, and they have helped the members of their community to learn, earn and rise.

I first met Bano and Adnan Farooqui⁴¹ in 1998 at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, where Adnan was a professor at the Centre for the Study of Regional Development (CSRD). Bano and Adnan had been married thirty years, and they had a daughter and two sons. I first met the family because of the younger son, with whom I would go on to live as a domestic partner across seven countries over a span of eight years—more on that some other time. But this is how I joined him in calling his mother Bano ‘Ammi’ (mother) and father Adnan ‘Abbu’ (father). A large part of my understanding of the Muslim population in India comes from this experience.

Living in India’s capital city, New Delhi, my educated and otherwise rational parents had prohibited me from interacting with the son of the Farooquis. At age nineteen, I was grounded and prohibited from attending university for several days until it was confirmed that I would have nothing more to do with a Muslim boy.

My family’s is a point of view from among the educated lot in India’s capital city. The condition is more sinister in small towns and rural India, where people may be more strongly bound to historical animosity. In cities as well as villages, many cases of murder over religious animosity go unreported.

On the other hand, I remember Ammi as smashing every stereotype. She was a soft-spoken, graceful, traditionally dressed Muslim woman, but more modern in the mind than anyone else I knew. She fiercely supported me all along, recognizing the societal challenges that any educated, independent-minded girl would face. Abbu was more involved in my academic research than my parents, perhaps because he too had struggled for an education.

Abbu hailed from Kanpur in central India, and he was brought up in a low-income Muslim family of seven siblings. Born a few years before India’s independence, he was the only one among the seven to get a basic education. He moved to New Delhi in his early twenties, initially to work as a laboratory assistant for statistics under the guidance of Professor Moonis Raza, the founding chairman of CSRD at JNU. Raza was also Muslim. Alongside his job, under Raza’s mentorship, Abbu went on to pursue a PhD on the statistical methods deployed in geographical studies.

Raza himself was a luminary. During the course of his academic career, he was chairman of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, president and