Review of the Book "The Majoritarian
Myth" by Kausik Gangopadhyay
Shrikant G. Talageri
I have repeatedly announced my decision not to
write on political or religious or even historical topics any more, but found
myself seeming to flout that decision time and again. So let me clarify: I will
be writing primarily on music and the Konkani language, but occasionally, on a
special point (or, in the unlikely contingency of my finding some completely new category of
evidence in the OIT field which requires my attention), I could still write an
article or articles.
In this particular case, I was asked by the
writer himself to write a review of the book. And although I initially
suspected a political-party perspective to the book (although assured by the
writer that it was a purely academic work), I find that the book is indeed a
brilliant academic work, and therefore am not only writing a review but
emphatically asserting that this is a brilliant book which must be read by
one and all, and in fact this is a book which will leave opponents nonplused as
to how to respond to it. And very honestly, the book is such an extremely
erudite book which will enrich the knowledge of any reader, that I find myself
totally at a loss as to which aspect of the book should be highlighted here.
When I feel a book is worth recommending, I usually feel that the writer has
expressed everything so well that the reader should read the book for himself
to experience it, and that any attempt by me to summarize the contents will be
superfluous, especially in this case when truly brilliant scholars and writers
like Dr. Anand Ranganathan, Sanjeev Sanyal, Jaithirth (Jerry) Rao, Raghavan
Jagannathan, Dr. Gautam Sen and Abhinav Agarwal have done this job very
effectively in the inner front pages of the book (with an additional foreword
by Dr. Anand Ranganathan).
Among many other things, the book itself points out the need for
the book in a nutshell: "In a survey into the global media reports for
three years 2020-22, we can find 8806 articles mentioning the word majoritarian
or majoritarianism [….] in more than 80 percent of the
cases, the Hindus of India are the guilty majority. Given the
population of India being less than 18 percent of the world population, it
takes an amazing amount of audacity to blame Hindu majoritarianism so
disproportionately" (p.xxiii); "The puzzle emerges: Why is the
global media so sharp on the majoritarianism of the Hindus when the Hindus
effectively enjoy less rights by the Indian constitution, judiciary and
politics compared to the minorities? Let us explore why" (p.xxv), and
the book proceeds to explore why in pitiless detail, as the reader should find
out on his own.
[Incidentally, a table on p.59 shows that
"in more than 80 percent of the cases, the Hindus of
India are the guilty majority" is an understatement: The
Hindus of India are 80%, The Hindi Speakers of India are 1.3%, the Hindus/Buddhists
of South Asia are 0.7%. Total 82%. If the Buddhists/Sinhalese of Sri Lanka,
7.8%, are added, these alone apparently cover 89.8% of the cases of
majoritarianism in the world! The total, in the table, for Muslim
majoritarianism in the 49 countries where they form the majority is just 3.1%!
While the Jews in tiny Israel account for 0.3 %, the Han Chinese in China
account for only 0.2%!]
Also, in respect of my initial wrong suspicion
that the book could represent a BJP propaganda piece, the book appropriately
gives due credit to bête noires of the BJP like Arun Shourie (once
in contrast to a central minister of the present BJP regime, p.93) and M
Nageswara Rao, and even to Syed Shahabuddin (p.61). Also, see, for example, p.160 on
the appeasement policies of the BJP..
But a review cannot be as short and sweet as
the above paragraphs would make it. It must contain more. So I will leave the
readers to go through the full book, with its various positive aspects and
nuances, for themselves, and will only highlight certain minor things which
caught my attention and which I feel it necessary to comment on. Yes, even in a
book which I appreciated and liked a lot, certain things did strike me as
requiring comments from my side. I will only deal with the "minor
things", and not with one major aspect of the book with which I do
not agree: the dislike of the name "Hindu" and of the use of the word
"religion" (when applied to Hinduism, Buddhism, etc.) which many from
the Hindu side seem to have and which does permeate certain chapters in this
book. What the writer writes on these points is not wholly wrong, but what he
classifies as "religions" and (though not precisely with this term)
"non-religions" would be better classified as "Abrahamic
religions" and "non-Abrahamic (or even Pagan) religions". But I
do not want to waste time on this here as it is not a small topic.
As I said this book contains many brilliant
sentences which impressed me (and many interesting pieces of information such
as that the Greek constitution prohibits Proselytism, p.62, or that the
political left in the USA gets more election funding from Corporate America and
white collar workers while the political right primarily gets donations from workers,
p.92), but they are too many to be detailed here.
Here I will only deal with those few
aspects or sentences which seemed to me to require comment:
1. The only practical shortcomings of the book
(for the student, researcher and citer) are the absence of a word-index and an
alphabetical bibliography (although, as to the latter, the endnotes on
pp.302-329 partly make up for it).
2. "Liberals definitely not having more
scientific aptitude with most of the social sciences goes diagonally against
scientific thinking" (p.xxxvii).
I think this is a typo inadvertently overlooked
in editing, and the first word should actually be "Conservatives"
rather than "Liberals".
3. "The major role in this project of
the creation of Pakistan was played by Muslim scholars and preachers of the
Deobandi school, who made the general populace subscribe to the idea of a
separate nation for the Muslim community in India" (p.143).
This is wrong. In fact, the main proponents of
the Pakistan idea were mostly Muslim scholars other than those from the Sunni
Deobandi school: the bulk of the proponents of Pakistan were Muslim scholars of
the rival Sunni Barelvi school (including Sufi sects) and even Shia Khoja
scholars and leaders like the Aga Khan and Jinnah himself. Only a small
minority of Deobandi leaders supported the idea of Pakistan: the bulk of the
Deobandi school as a whole opposed it and joined hands with Gandhi. Note also
that Maulana Azad was a Deobandi.
[This was not due to patriotic or secular reasons,
as Sita Ram Goel has shown in detail, but because the Deobandi school believed,
and repeatedly proclaimed, that the creation of a Muslim Pakistan in only a part
of India would lead to compromising the goal of ultimately turning the whole
of India into a Dar-ul-Islam].
4. "Max Müller
accepted (rather innocently for a celebrated Indologist) that people in Sri
Lanka had no language"
(p.277).
I do not claim to be a living encyclopaedia of
everything written by Müller but I find this extremely hard to swallow.
If it is true − and I certainly want to know the source or citation for this claim from
his own writings − it is indeed a sign of extreme imbecility rather than
"innocence". I doubt if even a reasonably educated and rational
person could believe that any race or tribe of people in the world could be
having "no language": that a scholar like Müller could possibly believe it (and
that too in the case of Sri Lanka) seems to me an item for a
"Ripley's Believe It Or Not" kind of article.
5. The writer examines the question of the various
(generally accepted) major genocides in the world (pp.170-180). The analysis is
brilliant and very effectively makes the point that the genocides of the world
have been based on what he effectively describes as LTSE(Linear Theory of Social
Evolution)-driven ideologies (religious or political) rather than being based
on the results of majoritarianism. He points out that none of them are based on
majoritarianism (or involvement of the majority) and, in his final table on
p.180, excepts only the Rwandan genocide (where the majority Hutu extremists,
and with the general participation of the common Hutu populace, massacred the
minority Tutsis).
The analysis is brilliant. My difference of
opinion is that he spoils his own brilliant exposition by introducing an
exception to the rule (the rule that it is "LTSE" and not "majoritarianism"
which leads to massacres) in the form of the Rwandan genocide. He classifies it
as a "maybe" for involvement of the majority, while all others are
classified "no" ("The Conquests of Genghis Khan" has
"unknown" for both "LTSE" and "involvement of the
majority").
My point is that it is true that massacres,
genocides and violent conflicts are not based on majoritarianism. But they are
not exclusively based on LTSE either. They are either based on
LTSE (i.e. religious or political ideologies where non-believers are
"otherized" and sub-humanized or demonized to an extreme) or
they are simply based on conflicts between two groups: those groups may be
countries, tribes or communities, opposing social groups, even opposing teams
in normal circumstances like sports events, or even two groups of people
related to each other and similar to each other in every ethnic and ideological
viewpoint but whose mercenary interests in the particular case are in conflict.
The Rwandan conflict between Hutus and Tutsis was not based on any kind of LTSE
(even if allegations of oppression or, alternately, superiority and inferiority,
were bandied around), it was purely a mercenary conflict between two ethnic groups
− and, regardless of who started it or what led to the
conflict, whenever both sides are geared up for battle, the bigger side has
greater chances of succeeding (unless, as the writer brilliantly points out,
the bigger side has no LTSE and the smaller side does). In the case of the
other LTSE-based genocides listed, the perpetrators were definitely the ones with LTSE. But in this one
case in the list, no LTSE was involved anywhere: it was only conflict between
two groups.
As I wrote earlier, this book is a gem and
should be read by everyone. So I will end my review here.
