The prosperity of Gujarati Muslims has made them vulnerable to the attacks of rioters and added to their misery Inbox x Sankara Narayanan 24 Sep to IHRO-, bharat-chintan, focusorissa, bcc: me epw.in/commentary/muslims-gujarat-and-west-bengal.html Muslims in Gujarat and West Bengal Comparing Prosperity and Vulnerability Vol - XLIX No. 38, September 20, 2014 | Abhirup Sarkar While addressing a rally in West Bengal during the 2014 Lok Sabha campaign, Narendra Modi declared that Muslims in Gujarat are doing much better than their counterparts in West Bengal. The relative prosperity of Gujarati Muslims is historical and has got nothing to do with Modis tenure as chief minister in Gujarat. Moreover, the prosperity of Gujarati Muslims has made them vulnerable to the attacks of rioters and added to their misery. Abhirup Sarkar (abhirupsarkar.sarkar@gmail) is with the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata In an election rally in West Bengal during the Lok Sabha campaign, Narendra Modi declared that Muslims in Gujarat are doing much better than their counterparts in West Bengal. To substantiate his claim, he quoted extensively from the Sachar Committee report. Gujarati Muslims have higher incomes and higher savings, on average, than Bengali Muslims; they are better achievers in terms of primary education and their representation in government jobs is much higher than Bengali Muslims, though their proportion in the total population is much lower, asserted Modi. His intension was clear. He wanted to rebut the widely-held belief that religious minorities are discriminated against in Gujarat. To this end, he wanted to establish that West Bengal, generally accepted as a much more tolerant state towards Muslims than Gujarat, has done precious little for its Muslim subjects compared to the Gujarat government. The wary listener can pick up a few loose ends in Modi’s speech. For one thing, no dependable income-data exists in our country and therefore the usual practice is to depend on consumption expenditure to compare economic well-being of households and communities. When Modi contrasted Muslim income in Gujarat with that of West Bengal and referred to the Sachar Committee report as the basis of his figures, he probably meant to compare consumption expenditures. But even if we look at consumption expenditure instead of income, the picture does not change. National Sample Survey (NSS) figures tell us that the average monthly expenditure of Gujarati Muslims is indeed greater than that of their Bengali counterparts. Similarly, there are some arithmetical errors in the figures quoted by Modi on primary schooling or government employment of Muslims. But even if we correct those figures, the basis for Modi’s assertion that Muslims in Gujarat are economically more well off than Muslims in West Bengal, not only remains unaffected but is actually strengthened in some cases. We have to therefore accept Modi’s assertion, whether we like it or not. The Role of History The implications of the assertion need to be carefully examined though. There are, in particular, two simple things that we wish to straighten out. First, we wish to demonstrate that the prosperity of Gujarati Muslims is historical and has nothing to do with Modi’s rule in Gujarat. Second, we wish to argue that Gujarati Muslims are a pathetic example of the age-old wisdom that economic prosperity alone does not guarantee happiness. In fact, citing some recent research we argue that the prosperity of Gujarati Muslims has actually magnified their miseries by making them more prone to attacks by rioters. History can indeed explain the bulk of differences in living standards between Bengali and Gujarati Muslims. After partition, most of the middle- and upper-class Muslims of Bengal migrated to the newly-born East Pakistan. There were several reasons for this. For the migrants, there were the advantages of similarity of language, of food habits and of culture in general. There was also the advantage of geographical proximity of the country to which they were migrating. Moreover, as prosperous Hindus migrated in the reverse direction, leaving their professions and businesses behind, a big vacuum was created in the erstwhile East Pakistan. This vacuum gave rise to opportunities for those Muslims from West Bengal who had the required skills and the necessary financial capital to take the risk of starting a new life in a new land. Indeed, before partition, Muslims were somewhat competed away by Hindus from the coveted and respectable jobs and now, with most of the Hindus gone, the competitive pressure for the Muslim upper classes was removed. Well-off Muslims from West Bengal grabbed this opportunity and migrated to the East in big numbers. However, for the poor Muslims of West Bengal, migration to the East was not that rewarding. The less affluent did not have the money or the education to jump into the uncertainties of an unfamiliar terrain with an unknown neighbourhood. More important, the agricultural sector, which was the main source of livelihood for the prospective poor migrant, was already overcrowded. It was unable to take the pressure of fresh migration. For all these reasons, poor Muslims, at least a large part of them, decided to stay on. But as a consequence of this lopsided migration, the face of the Muslim community in West Bengal changed permanently; it looked predominantly impoverished and backward. One must add that over the years, there was further deterioration in the state of affairs as waves of destitute Muslims entered West Bengal in search of a better livelihood through the porous border of Bangladesh. Gujarat was different. For the affluent Muslim business communities of Gujarat, like the Bohras, Khojas and Memons, migration to Pakistan was not very lucrative. Though there was a small Muslim Gujarati-speaking community in Karachi, the culture in West Pakistan was predominantly different and so was the language. More important, these traditional business communities were doing quite well in their own land and did not have any incentive to migrate. As a consequence, unlike Bengal, the economic structure of the Muslim community in Gujarat did not change much after partition. We claim that it is this difference in the history of migration of the two regions which still shows up in the relative prosperity of Gujarati and Bengali Muslims. Modi had very little to do with this disparity. If what we are claiming is true, we should observe similar differences in the living standards of Bengali Muslims with those of Muslims in other states where migration was not very profitable. An appropriate comparison would be with Muslims in the southern states where migration was not attractive because of cultural, linguistic and geographical distances. Let us look at per capita consumption as the yardstick of comparison. According to the Sachar Committee report, in 2004-05, in urban areas of West Bengal, Muslim consumption expenditure was 62% of Hindu consumption. Comparable figures for the southern states were higher – 87% in Tamil Nadu, 79% in Kerala, 71% in Andhra Pradesh and 70% in Karnataka. It may also be mentioned that in Gujarat this proportion was around 71%. Moreover, in all these states rural inequality in consumption expenditure between Hindus and Muslims was negligible, which is consistent with the hypothesis that in all the states poor people living in the rural areas did not have any incentive or opportunity to migrate on a large scale. In short, the data do not seem to contradict our argument. Per capita consumption expenditure, however, is not the only possible yardstick of comparison. What Modi did not discuss but the Sachar Committee did at great length was infrastructure. Indeed, discrimination in infrastructure available to Hindu and Muslim localities would automatically speak up for itself. It would directly imply bad governance and here Gujarat is clearly in a better position than West Bengal as Table 1 would indicate. The figures in Table 1 are taken from the Sachar Committee report, but the source, as indicated in the table, is Census 2001. The figures, once more, confirm Modi’s assertions about the physical well-being of Gujarati Muslims as compared with Bengali Muslims. But Modi’s government can hardly take credit for this. It may be recalled that Narendra Modi became the chief minister of Gujarat in October 2001 and continued right up to the month of May this year. Therefore, the comparative condition of Gujarati Muslims implied by the figures in the table was pre-existing and was inherited by Modi when he came to power. The differences in infrastructural facilities among the two Muslim communities possibly had some historical roots. In Bengal, the British came to power by conquering a Muslim Nawab and therefore, in general, Muslims were identified as the previous ruling class. This made them less trustworthy in the eyes of the British than the Hindus. Consequently, in Bengal the British developed the predominantly Hindu Zamindari system for collecting land revenue, the most important source of revenue at that time. This was a system of land revenue collection through landlords, who were mostly Hindus. The Hindu landlords had property rights to land, collected the revenue from the peasants and were free to keep a part of it for themselves; the remaining had to be handed over to the British government. In return, they were responsible for the development of infrastructure of the village. Through the Zamindari system Hindu landlords decided the fates of Muslim peasants and Muslim villages. It is quite likely that the Hindu landlords neglected the development of infrastructure of Muslim villages. In contrast, Gujarat was won by the British by defeating Hindu kings, mostly the Marathas. Consequently, in Gujarat Hindus were not trusted. As a result, the Ryotwari system, an individual-based land revenue collection system, was developed in Gujarat. In the individual-based system, revenue was directly collected from the individual cultivators without any intermediary and the individual cultivator could keep the residual output after paying for the revenue. The individual cultivators of a village were jointly responsible for building up infrastructure for their village. Therefore, in this system, property rights were given to individual cultivators who had better incentive to build infrastructure and, more important, there was no scope for discrimination between Hindus and Muslims. In West Bengal, all 11 districts were under the landlord-based system while in Gujarat seven out of eight districts were under the individual-based system. Is it plausible that the lopsided infrastructural development in Bengal, which was biased against Muslim villages, and the even development of infrastructure in Gujarat may have an effect at present when both the Zamindari and the Ryotwari systems have long been abolished? In a 2005 paper, Banerjee and Iyer have demonstrated that areas in which property rights to land were given to the individual cultivators through the Ryotwari system systematically exhibited higher agricultural investment and productivity than areas where property rights were given to the landlords through the Zamindari system. Strikingly enough, the effect persists even in post-Independence India, that is, long after both systems were abolished. If the two systems could have such an enduring effect on investment and productivity, there are ample reasons to believe that they could have similar effects on differential infrastructural development in Indian villages, in the present context, in West Bengal and Gujarat. Prosperity and Riots Narendra Modi has, however, carefully avoided mentioning the real malady of Gujarati Muslims, namely, their exposure to riots and violence. He has not told us that the Muslim community in Gujarat may be more prosperous than their counterparts in West Bengal, but they suffer from acute insecurity because in Gujarat riots are frequent and in those riots it is the minority Muslims who suffer more than the majority Hindus. Mitra and Ray (2014) have recorded that during 1984-98, there were 15,224 casualties in Hindu-Muslim communal riots all over the country, out of which 4,499, that is almost 30%, were from Gujarat and 4,033, that is about 26%, were from Maharashtra. Therefore, taken together, Gujarat and Maharashtra accounted for 56% of the riot casualties during this period. Here casualties include both deaths and injuries. Mitra and Ray point out that the main economic reason behind riots is simply loot and plunder. Since Muslims are in a minority and lag behind in muscle power, it is they who are the major victims of riots. Mitra and Ray show that during the period 1984-98, increases in per capita Muslim expenditure have systematically generated large and significant increases in Hindu-Muslim conflicts as a consequence of which the Muslims have suffered more than the Hindus. On the contrary, increases in Hindu expenditure have negative or insignificant effects on future riots. The analysis is very carefully carried out and it leads us to believe that the prosperity of Muslims in Gujarat has made them vulnerable to riots. In other words, there is little reason for Modi to be proud of this prosperity. The real problem, however, is too deep to be entirely captured within the narrow confines of economic motives. To see why, let us look at the number of casualties in the four southern states of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. During the period under study, that is, during 1984-98, the total number of casualties in these four states was 1,924 (about 12.6% of the total casualties in the country). Of this, Karnataka alone accounted for 50% of the casualties and we shall see below that this state continues to be somewhat riot prone even today. On the other hand, Tamil Nadu and Kerala accounted for 213 (1.4%) and 59 (0.39%), respectively, of total riot casualties in the country. We have already seen that Muslim per capita consumption relative to Hindu consumption were quite high in the southern states and especially in Tamil Nadu and Kerala. If loot and plunder are the driving forces of riots, why were riots not so frequent in the southern states in general and in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, in particular? The truth is that, quite apart from economic motives, each riot carries with it a long history of communal discord. Such a history was not so much present in the south as in Gujarat and Maharashtra. Mitra and Ray have recognised the importance of such history in generating riots and have called it primordial hatred. In Gujarat and Maharashtra, Muslim prosperity has certainly tempted rioters towards violence, but actual riots could not have materialised without an all-around atmosphere of communal hatred and mistrust. We may recall that Gujarat has been witnessing riots continuously from at least the first part of the 18th century and the riots of 1969 or 2002 are pitiable instances of that continuity. This breeding ground of hatred has given birth to Hindu fundamentalism which goes hand in hand with terrorist activities. It is meaningless to ask if Hindu fundamentalism has ignited terrorist reactions or has it been the other way round. What is important is the net result of innocent people getting killed, robbed and uprooted. Narendra Modi does not seem to address this important issue. It must be mentioned that even after the ghastly riots of 2002, Gujarat has remained prone to communal conflicts. According to data released by the Central Ministry of Home Affairs, during 2010-13, in Gujarat, for every one million population, 13 persons have become victims of communal riots. This is the second highest in the country; only Karnataka has exhibited a slightly higher figure of 14.3 riot victims per million during this period. It cannot be a coincidence that like Gujarat, Karnataka was also ruled by a Bharatiya Janata Party government during the period in question. Conclusion According to Narendra Modi, Muslims in Gujarat are doing better than those in West Bengal where, by popular perception, attitudes towards minorities have been more accommodating. We have responded to this view. First, we have argued that the material well-being of Gujarati Muslims is historical and has got nothing to do with Narendra Modi’s rule in Gujarat. Second, drawing on recent research by Mitra and Ray, we have argued that the prosperity of Muslims in Gujarat has been a major cause of their vulnerability. We believe that hatred breeds hatred and one act of violence gives rise to another. Therefore, in the ultimate analysis it is not prosperity but peace and harmony that matters; and if we go by the criterion of peace and harmony, Muslims in Gujarat are certainly not doing so well. References Banerjee, Abhijit and Laksmi Iyer (2005): “History, Institutions and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India”, American Economic Review, Vol 95(4), pp 1190-1213. Mitra, Anirban and Debraj Ray (2014): “Implications of an Economic Theory of Conflict: Hindu Muslim Violence in India”,The Journal of Political Economy, Vol 122, No 4, August, pp 719-65. Sachar Committee Report (2006): Social, Economic and Educational Status of the Muslim Community of India, Report of Prime Minister’s High Level Committee chaired by Rajinder Sachar, November.
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 17:50:01 +0000
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