Sistema de suspensión

The statistical argument starts clearly with a correct premise: more than four-fifths of the Indian citizens are Hindus in terms of standard classification, even though the beliefs of Hindus, as already discussed, are often thoroughly diverse (the 'official' number of Hindus includes even agnostics and atheists of Hindu social background). This statis­ tical fact has appeared to many - not just the Hindutva enthusiasts ­ to be grounds enough for an immediate identification of India as a pre-eminently Hindu country. That summary reductionism appeals also to many international journalists - even of the leading news­ papers in Europe and America - who persistently describe India as a 'mainly Hindu country': it saves space in newspaper columns and seems accurate enough in some sense.

THE AR GUMENTATIVE INDIAN

It also attracts academics who can perhaps be described as 'intel­ lectual simplifiers'. For example, in his famous book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, n Samuel

Huntington places India firmly in the category of 'the Hindu civil­ ization'. In taking this peculiarly reductionist view, Huntington's perspective has to downplay the fact that India has many more Muslims (more than 140 million - larger than the entire British and French populations put together) than any other country in the world with the exception of Indonesia and, marginally, Pakistan, and that nearly every country in Huntington's definition of 'the Islamic civilization' has far fewer Muslims than India has. Something goes wrong here with the number-based assessment. But perhaps the difficulties in using the statistical argument lie in the nature of the argument itself.

The first difficulty is that a secular democracy which gives equal room to every citizen irrespective of religious background cannot be fairly defined in terms of the majority religion of the country. There is a difference between a constitutionally secular nation with a majority Hindu population and a theocratic Hindu state that might see Hinduism as its official religion (Nepal comes closer to the latter description than does India). Furthermore, no matter what the official standing of any community as a group may be, the status of individ­ ual citizens cannot be compromised by the smallness (if that is the case) of the group to which he or she belongs. :�

To make a comparison, when the United States declared independ­ ence in 1776 the different religious communities were quite diverse in size: the new polity could have been described as being a 'largely Christian country' in the way India is seen by some as a 'mainly Hindu country'. But this did not derail the need for the US constitution to take a neutral view of the specific beliefs of the members of the differ­ ent communities - non-Christian as well as Christian - irrespective of group dimensions. The respective sizes of the different religious

:�The insecurities to which some minorities (particularly Muslims) have recently been subj ected clearly violate the right to equal treatment that all Indian citizens have reason to expect. That basic human right was shamefully violated in the recent bar­

barities, in 200 2, in Guj arat. The underlying issues are insightfully discussed by Rafiq

Zakaria, Communal Rage in Secular India (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 2002).

INDIA : LARGE AND S MA L L

communities should not be allowed to disrupt the rights, including the sense of belonging, that every citizen should be able to enjoy.

The second difficulty is conceptually deeper. What is seen as a majority depends critically on what principle of classification is used. The people of India can be classified on the basis of different criteria, of which religion is only one. It is, for example, also possible to cate­ gorize Indians according to class, or language, or literature, or politi­ cal beliefs, to mention just a few. What counts as an 'Indian majority' depends therefore on the categories into which the nation is classified. There is no unique way of categorizing people.

For example, the status of being a majority in India can be attrib­ uted, among other groups, to

( r ) the category of low- or middle-income people (say, the bottom 6o per cent of the population);

( 2) the class of non-owners of much capital; ( 3 ) the group of rural Indians;

(4) the people who do not work in the organized industrial sector; and ( 5) Indians who are against religious persecution.

Each group thus identified is in fact a majority in its respective system of categorization, and their common characteristics can be taken to be important, depending on the context. In order to attach immense significance to the fact that Hindus constitute a majority group in Indian society in one particular system of classification, the priority of that religion-based categorization over other systems of classification would have to be established first.

It is possible to argue that the way a person is to be categorized must be, ultimately, for him or her to determine, rather than everyone being forced into a unique and pre-selected classification that ignores other principles of grouping. The fact that considerably less than a third of the Hindu population in India vote for the parties that belong to the Hindutva family would suggest that the religious identity of Hindutva is not seen as being of primary political importance by a large majority of Indian Hindus.

There is, in fact, nothing particularly odd in this dissociation. When, for example, people from what was then East Pakistan sought - and achieved - separation and independence as Bangladesh, they

THE ARG UMENTAT IVE IND IAN

were not arguing that their principal religious identity was different from what characterized the people of West Pakistan: the vast major­ ity of people in both East and West Pakistan shared the same religious identity. The Easterners wanted separation for reasons that linked firmly with language and literature (particularly the place of their mother tongue, Bengali) and also with political - including secular ­ priorities. While the statistics of Hindu majority are indeed correct, the use of the statistical argument for seeing India as a pre-eminently Hindu country is based on a conceptual confusion: our religion is not our only identity, nor necessarily the identity to which we attach the greatest importance. ��-