8/6/2017 Minding the Minorities | Politics and Development in India

Minding the Minorities

Posted on May 31, 2010

In this post I summarize the chapter Minding the Minorities in the book India after Gandhi by
Ramachandra Guha.

(1) The two minorities that Guha talks about are Muslims and Scheduled Castes.

(2) There is immense praise for Nehrus efforts to make India a secular and egalitarian state.

(3) A guy named Granville Austin from Vermont has written two books on the Indian
constitution: http://www.granvilleaustin.com/books.htm. The reference to Granville Austin is
because of an entry in his diary on the death of Nehru in which he writes about Jagjivan Ram, a
congressman who was a Scheduled Caste helping an old Muslim friend of Nehru, Dr. Syed Mahmud
into Nehrus home.

(4) Muslims who were well-off went to Pakistan (East and West). The majority of Muslims who stayed
in India were the working poor peasants, labourers and artisans.

(5) B R Ambedkar championed the cause of Scheduled Castes. There was 15% reservation for them in
colleges, government jobs and in the Parliament. There was no such influential leader for the Muslims.

(6) Attacks by caste Hindus on lower castes continued well after independence. Guha cites several
examples of violence directed against lower castes.

(7) Early after independence, many Muslim employees of the Government of India were asked by their
department heads to prove their allegiance to India by swearing oaths and bringing their families to
India from Pakistan. The Archaelogical Survey of India is especially cited in this regard. This was done
at the orders of the home minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

(8) A direct quote from the book (p. 379): For a fair number of Scheduled Castes, affirmative action
did bring genuine benefits. Now, children of farm labourers could (and did) become members of
Parliament. Those who joined the government as lowly Class IV employees could see their children
become members of the elite Indian Administrative Service. But affirmative action also brought a new
kind of stigma. Intended to end caste discrimination, it fixed the beneficiaries ever more firmly in
their own, original caste. Suspicion and resentment arose against the upper castes; and there was
sometimes a tendency, among the beneficiaries, to look down on, or even forget, their fellows. As one
scholar somewhat cynically wrote, reservation had created a mass of self-engrossed people who are
quickly and easily satisfied with the small gains they can win for themselves.

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