Economics of prejudice

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Economics of prejudice

Jawed Naqvi
MUGHAL emperor Aurangzeb and Maratha warrior Shivaji were arch foes, but why? Colonial historians followed by their Indian and Pakistani protégés have projected the rivalry as a religious one.

Consequently Muslim obscurantists on both sides of the border celebrate Aurangzeb as their hero, while right-wing Hindus in India see Shivaji as the 17th-century legend that laid low Muslim aggression in India.

Similar communal assumptions fuelled Partition. But the assumptions were false. In a landmark episode that defies bigoted stereotypes, Aurangzeb sent the Mughal army to protect the Hindu baniyas of Gujarat who were being plundered by Shivaji.

Facts as gleaned from history would reveal that Shivaji was indeed a great hero who represented the Maratha masses. And the masses in the Indian context mainly meant the peasantry, not their exploiters, which was usually the moneylenders and state.
The baniya or the moneylender — the Hindu, Muslim, Parsi and also Christian variant — has been historically patronised by the state whose ultimate quarry inevitably happened to be the peasant.

David Hardiman’s well-researched work Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India, which he published in 1996, etches the background of this class-based source of conflict in the western region of the agricultural country.

Aurangzeb’s job was to rule like any other ruler before him but his clergy had a different axe to grind with the subjects. The emperor had desperately leaned heavily on the religious orthodoxy to defeat his eclectic brother Dara Shikoh, and they now extracted a price that would eventually triggered his downfall.

The Mughals, as informed and unbiased historians know, were generally careful not to offend the religious sensibilities of powerful non-Muslim subjects. Jahangir banned the slaughter of bullocks and cows so as not to offend the Hindu rajas and baniyas. “If, however, rulers disregarded such accepted policies religious concerns could become political.”

This happened in the Surat city in 1669. Says Hardiman: “Aurangzeb appointed a reactionary theologian to act as a qazi, or civil judge, of Surat City. He began a campaign of converting merchants to Islam. Several baniya merchants were forced to become Muslims.”

Eight thousand baniyas left the city in protest in September 1669, and went to Bharuch. Defiant, they also went to the emperor.
“In the end the emperor dismissed the qazi and wrote a letter to the baniyas promising them security and greater religious freedom. They then returned to Surat.”

The emperor’s difficulties had, however, just begun. The Surat incident came at a time when the merchants’ confidence in Mughal rule had already been shaken. “In 1664,” recalls Hardiman from his research, “the Mughal army had failed to prevent Shivaji from raiding Surat and looting its merchants and bankers. Shivaji was to repeat the exploit in 1670. Surat lay at the heart of a great mercantile network stretching over the whole of India, and it is likely that these events had a profound impact on the imagination of many merchants.”

Hardiman quotes another historian, Karen Leonard, as suggesting that the Mughal failure to protect bankers and merchants of the empire in an adequate manner led them to gradually extend their support to rivals, such as the Marathas, and the emerging European powers.

In the absence of a Japan-like Meiji revolution in India, it was the merchants and moneylenders, not the feudal elite that led the field in industrialisation or whatever there is of it. In the absence of Aurangzeb today, Narendra Modi, Bal Thackeray, Manmohan Singh, and to an extent even the Marxist-led Left Front have become the guarantors of the business community’s interests.

(Failure was not an option as the Left Front discovered when irked peasants drove out a major Tata project from West Bengal and with it the three decades old Left Front government.)

As we can see there is nothing essentially communal about the baniya class, nor is there anything intrinsically secular about them. Whatever works for business is kosher. That’s the rule. If Narendra Modi can deliver on their business agenda and the only way to get him to power happens to be through communal strife, so be it. And if the Gujarat model of political mobilisation does not work elsewhere in India, Modi may have to be given a quasi-secular makeover. It will be 10 years since India’s Gujarat carnage this weekend. In December we will observe two decades since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. In the absence of a political movement that could tame the tide of right-wing aggression, supported for good measure by big business, both matters have landed in law courts, and that’s that. Ditto for other quasi-fascist nationwide outrages.

And yet there is a growing feeling that if the law courts could help at all M.F. Husain would not have died in exile, nor would Teesta Setalvad, who’s diligent legal work has given hope to many a victim of pogroms in Gujarat, spend much of her time defending herself against invented criminal charges slapped on her by the devious and powerful state. (My lesson from history is that it took a world war to oust the Third Reich. Law courts helped its rise.)

January-February next year will mark the 20th year of collusion between Maharashtra’s then Shiv Sena government and the Mumbai police when they jointly supervised the murder of thousands of terrified slum-dwellers, mostly Muslims. Ignore the irony that as claimants to Shivaji’s legacy, Shiv Sena has emerged as the most reliable political arm of big business, with an enormous projection of street power.

October-November 2014 will complete 30 years since the lynching of Sikhs evidently by state-backed mobs in Delhi and elsewhere. We can continue to conjure a grim, macabre calendar of India’s shady sociology and politics. Christians, Dalits, tribespeople are all targets of perpetual violence by police, the security forces and their mostly upper-caste collaborators.

What we fail to acknowledge so readily is that apart from the sociology and politics, which spurs sectarian turmoil in India, economic cause and effect has played a big hand.

From Kashmir to Tamil Nadu, from Gujarat to Nagaland communal and ethnic violence has emerged as an enterprise with a major stake in the country’s power structures. Rewriting history to get the result is a small price to pay.