Review of the Book "The Majoritarian Myth" by Kausik Gangopadhyay

 

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.