Hate Thy Neighbor: The Rise of Hindutva in India

Wealth of Nations Podcast

On January 30th, Nathuram Godse assasinated Mohandas Gandhi, the founding father of India, as Mahatma Gandhi conducted a multi-faith prayer meeting because Godse saw him as too accommodating to Muslim interests. Nathuram Godse had long been a member of multiple Hindu nationalist organizations, although the most powerful the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) has disclaimed any assosciation with Godse. Hindu nationalism has deep roots in the politics and history of India stretching back to the 19th century. However, the salience of Hindutva has increased dramatically since the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, who has championed an aggressively Hindu nationalist political philosophy. Modi has succesfully asserted the Hindutva agenda by mass disenfranchisement of suspected undocumented people in the state of Assam, the construction of a temple to Ram in Ayodhya on the rubble of a mosque destroyed by Hindu mobs, and the stripping of the state of Kashmir its political autonomy. However, Hindu nationalism goes beyond just Modi. The purpose of today’s podcast episode is to discuss the historical roots, and deep consequences of discrimination against Muslims in India.
Riots between Hindus and Muslims, especially where the overwhelming majority of deaths are among Muslims are not a new phenomenon in India. The city of Ahmedabad alone has seen three major waves of communal violence in 1969, 1985 and 2002 where approximately 500, 300 and 2,000 people, the overwhelming majority Muslim lost their lives. India has seen major riots both before and after elections. In recent years, we have seen the disturbing rise of lynchings by groups of vigilantes accusing Muslim men of slaughtering cows. Perhaps most disturbingly, the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, was Chief Minister of Gujarat at the time of the 2002 riots. Although there is no proof that he planned or had foreknowledge of the violence, he has maintained a conspicuous silence about the atrocities committed while he governed Gujarat. While violence between Hindus against Muslims is often described as the natural anger of the majority community against the minority community, there are many organizations such as the RSS, the VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad) and Bajrang Dal organizing people for violence.
Underlying this violence between Hindus and Muslims are dangerous logics of communal political and economic competition. The Hindutva movement has long tried to make Hindu identity the most salient identity. For instance, from the 1960s to the 1980s, large numbers of textile workers in the city of Ahmedabad lost their jobs due to government economic mismanagement. Hindu textile workers in general fared worse than their Muslim counterparts as Muslim textile workers tended to be more experienced and were better positioned to set up powerloom businesses. Hindutva agitators worked hard to cast these economic struggles in a communal perspective, and blame Muslims for rising poverty. Moreover, participating in political violence often strengthens identification with the Hindutva movement. In the aftermath of the 2002 riots, the Hindu nationalist BJP gained more votes in areas hit hardest by communal violence, and those police officers who allowed violence to continue consistently saw promotion.
There are economic factors behind these of violence as well. Violence against Muslims increases by 5% for every 1% reduction in the growth of Hindu incomes, while violence against Muslims increases dramatically as the economic gap between Hindus and Muslim decreases. The incomplete nature of Indian housing markets is especially relevant, as competition over rent controlled housing units has emerged as one of the most important drivers of Hindu Muslim violence as Muslims are often loathe to move away from rent from rent controlled units, while Hindus wish to acquire this property for themselves and their families. In some towns, such as Surat and many other coastal cities, community leaders worked to keep communal tensions at bay to protect businesses from violence. In many other places the desire to assert political, cultural and social superiority gets tightly wound together with economic motives, in order to ensure all conflict is seen as conflict between Hindus and Muslims.
Discrimination against Muslims extends beyond the violence they face from Hindu mobs. India’s political and economic system allows for social mobility to those groups that are able to politically organize to grab them. Muslims have been at a disadvantage politically since the partition of India, when the majority of Muslim leadership supported Pakistan and emigrated to Pakistan. Between 1980 and 2019, the percent of India’s parliament that was Muslim declined from 10% to 4% despite the fact the Muslim share of the population increased from 11.8% to 14.8% during this same period. There has only been one Muslim Chief Minister of a non-Muslim state so far. The BJP, India’s primary Hindu nationalist party, rarely fields Muslim candidates for office due to their own Hindu nationalist ideology. Even secular give little political power. On one hand, secular parties fear being tarred as “appeasing” Muslim interests by Hindu nationalists if they are too closely associated with Muslims, while secular parties can be confident that Muslim voters have nowhere to go even if they largely ignore Muslim issues.
The lack of political power has real consequences for India’s Muslim community. For example, India runs one of the largest systems of affirmitive action, known as reservations, in the world. However, Muslims have only recently gained limited access to reservations in 2011, although some states offer affirmative action at the state level. The low level of Muslim reservations is striking given many well off communities such as the Jats and Marathas have gained access to quotas showing that political power is more important than group socio-economic status when it comes reservations. The importance of lack of access to government jobs quotas become visible when one looks at Muslim struggles to get government jobs. Only 4% of public sector workers are Muslims, even though Muslims make up 14% of the Muslim population. Lack of access to government jobs is especially important because public sector jobs consistently pay more than double private sector jobs even after taking education into account. Moreover, there is substantial disparities in access to public infrastructure. For example, over 45% of Muslim majority villages have a bus stop, compared to 60% of non-Muslim majority villages, with similar disparities visible in many measures of public investment. Muslims face discrimination in the private sector as well, with formal employers three times more likely to reject identical resumes with Muslim names than Hindu ones, although other studies find no discrimination.
I do not want to exagerrate the extent to which Muslims face discrimination in India. Muslims on average have incomes only around 6% lower than the national average. Muslims tend to be better off than Hindus in much of the south and west of India, and in many rural areas. Muslims are in particular disproportionately successful as small and medium size business owners. However, looking in the aggregate it is clear that Muslims have faced consistent downward mobility, with this mobility more evident in education rather than income. At independence, Indian Muslims were similar to Hindus in their level of education. Today, their levels of education are below that of the average Dalit , with declining educational mobility especially concentrated among the children of poor Muslims.
The combination of deliberate discrimination, and downward socioeconomic mobility have had disastrous consequences for the Muslim community through the COVID-19 pandemic. India does not collect data on deaths by religion from COVID-19. Muslims make up a vastly disproportionate share of the urban poor, and it is the slums of India’s megacities that have been hit hardest by COVID-19. For example, in Mumbai, one study of seroprevalence found that 57% of Mumbai slum dwellers had contracted COVID-19, compared to just 19% of non-slum population, with similar trends in other cities. Much of the Muslim concentration in slums can be explained by the systematic discrimination Muslims face in getting access to housing.
On top of this, Muslims have disproportionately faced the burden of Islamophobia through COVID-19. One of the first major superspreading occurred at a convention of the Tablighi Jamaat, a conservative Islamic missionary organization. While it is likely that the Tablighi Jamaat behaved irresponsibly, many Hindutva populations have made not just the Tablighi Jamaat, but the broader Muslim community, a scapegoat for the rise of COVID-19. Prominent politicians have accused Muslims of launching a Corona-Jihad, and misleading videos of Muslim street vendors deliberately spitting on fruit have gone viral. Hospitals have rejected Muslim patients, and many Muslims have faced abuse while getting treatment. Unsurprisingly, resentment has grown in the Muslim community, with public health workers in Juhapura, a ghetto created by Muslims fleeing the Ahmedabad riots of 2002, pelted with stones as they tried to enforce curfew laws.
The COVID-19 virus does not differentiate between Hindu and Muslim. Failure to contain COVID-19 in one community will inevitably lead to the spread of COVID-19 to other communities. Similarly, discrimination against Muslims will in the long run rebound against all Indians. Hindu nationalist political parties have gained substantial ground in Indian elections in recent years. If the dominance of parties not committed to secular ideals continues, it is likely structural discrimination against Muslims will be further entrenched.
Selected Sources:
Communal Riots in Gujarat: Report of a Preliminary Investigation, Ghanshyam Shah
From Gandhi to Violence: Ahmedabad’s 1985 Riots in Historical Perspective, Howard Spodek
The Political Logic of Ethnic Violence: The Anti-Muslim Pogrom in Gujarat, 2002 Raheel Dhattiwala and Michael Biggs
The Rise of Hindu Nationalism in India: The Case Study ofAhmedabad in the 1980s, Ornit Shani
Economic growth and ethnic violence: An empirical investigation of Hindu–Muslim riots in India , Anjali Bohlen, Ernest Sergenti
IMPLICATIONS OF AN ECONOMIC THEORY OF CONFLICT: Hindu-Muslim Violence in India , ANIRBAN MITRA AND DEBRAJ RAY
Segregation, Rent Control, and Riots: The Economics of Religious Conflict in an Indian City, Erica Field, Matthew Levinson, Rohini Pande, and Sujata Visaria
Unfinished Business, Sumitra Jha
Adjustment and Accommodation: Indian Muslims after Partition, Mushirul Hasan
Political Economy of Demand for Quotas by Jats, Patels, and Marathas Dominant or Backward? , Ashwin Deshpande
WAGE DIFFERENTIALS BETWEEN THE PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTORS IN INDIA, Elena Glinskaya and Michael Lokshin
The Legacy of Social Exclusion A Correspondence Study of Job Discrimination in India, Sukhadeo Thorat
Labor market discrimination in Delhi: Evidence from a field experiment, Abhijit Banerjee , Marianne Bertrandy , Saugato Dattaz , Sendhil Mullainathan
Wealth Inequality, Class and Caste in India, 1951-2012, Nitin Kumar Bharti
Sachar Commission Report, Sachar Commission
Intergenerational Mobility in India: Estimates from New Methods and Administrative Data, Sam Asher Paul Novosas
Vidya, Veda, and Varna: The Influence of Religion and Caste on Education in Rural India, Vani Boorah, Sriya Iyer
For whom does the phone (not) ring? Discrimination in the rental housing market in Delhi, India, Saugatta Datta