People's Democracy

Barbara Harris-White On Religion And Economy

  Nalini Taneja

THE Hindutva forces have for long been shouting out loud about Muslim appeasement, and secular forces have been countering this false propaganda through figures of employment, ownership of corporate houses, educational data etc, all of which point towards the backwardness of Muslims in relation to Hindus and also other religious minorities. But there has been no systematic study of religion as a factor in economy, in the way that there have been studies on the caste/class factor and the need for positive discrimination in the case of dalits.

A recent book by Barbara Harriss-White (India Working: Esays on Society and Economy, Cambridge University Press, 2003) contains a detailed chapter on just this aspect. Although the figures concerning ownership of corporate houses, access to education, and employment data are similar to what secular activists have been familiar with --- there having been hardly any new data provided through government sources --- she goes into newer territories, sometimes on the basis of other studies on Muslims in different parts of the country, to argue that religious codes and beliefs have impinged on economy and in many ways determined differential accumulation of economic assets among religious communities and also effected employment patterns. In terms of population, even if one discounts the Scheduled Castes and Tribes who in any case cannot be seen as Hindus despite all claims by the Sangh Parivar, minorities constituted 17 per cent of the population in 1991. Therefore the matter is not one without some significance

This is, of course, not the main theme of Barbara Harris-White’s book India Working, which as the name signifies is about how India works. Her emphasis is on the intermediate economy and the small town India, which exists and functions as an economy within the framework of corporate capitalism concentrated in metropolitan India where just 12 per cent of the Indian people live. This is where religious and caste networks and patronage patterns have a greater determining role.

REINFORCING RELIGIOUS INEQUALITIES

The straightforward point that derives from her argument is that the domain in which obstructive religious ideas prevailed has not been reduced through the way economy has been managed in post independence India. Religion has not got pushed back into the ‘private sphere’, and in fact she shows that state policies have in fact reinforced religious inequalities, or to use her phrase, ‘religious pluralism’ in terms of asset distribution and creation among the different religious communities. The role of the market and the path of ‘planned development’ followed have been similar. Primarily all this is because of the manner in which religion is treated in the Constitution itself, and because of the manner in which secularism has been defined and taken to be equal accommodation and competitive patronage of social groups and cultural communities, including increasingly in terms of religious communities.

She states: “Paradoxically, it is because of—not despite—the secularist ambitions of the Constitution that distributive politics are organised in part around religions.”  It has meant essentially the acceptance of inequality between religions, and contestation of the idea of equal citizenship itself in class, caste and religious terms. A failure to desacralise the economy has also meant that competition, particularly in the intermediate economy in small towns, takes the form of rivalries that easily erupt into communal conflicts, as studies of anti minority pogroms would show.

UNEQUAL ECONOMIC POWER

A second major point made refers to the nature of unequal economic power. Although minorities constituted 17 per cent of the Indian population, the non-Parsi and non-Jain component, which forms the major chunk of this minority population, controlled only 2 per cent of the assets of the top business houses in 1996, while the Jains and Parsis controlled as much as 40 per cent. The economic significance of the Jains is of course much greater than their share in population.

Besides, although Muslims are twice as urbanised as their population share would suggest (12.6 per cent), most Muslims live in rural areas. Figures below the poverty line show the same preponderance for Muslims. Although disproportionately urban, they are also under-represented in the country’s capitalist elite. Out of 1365 member companies constituting the Indian Merchants’ Chamber of Bombay in the 1980s no Muslim owned company figured in the top 100, and only some 4 per cent were owned by Muslims. Only 1 per cent of the corporate executives are Muslim, and in the IAS they constitute 3 per cent, in the Police 2.8 per cent, the Railways 2.65 per cent, in the nationalised banks 2.5 per cent, and in parliament 5 to 8 per cent. Muslim illiteracy rate is 15 per cent higher for Muslims in relation to Hindus, and the proportion of Hindus who get secondary education is three times that of Muslims. They also have a smaller percentage among those self employed. The incidence of landlessness is much higher among them.

Other variations along religious lines are in terms of occupation. Many tasks considered ‘polluting’ by the norms of Hindu ritual practice are dominated by Muslims, such as those related to the leather industry (although the major trade is not in their hands today), bidi manufacture (where Muslims comprise 80 per cent of the workforce but own none of the dominant brands), and recycling of scrap etc. Muslims also predominate in many crafts that require skilled labour, such as brassware in Moradabad, glassware in Ferozabad, pottery in Khurja, stone and marble work in Rajasthan, and many other such skilled crafts, yet the trade networks are not owned by them. It is quite common therefore, as she points out, for the surplus in these industries to be appropriated from the Muslim workers by Hindu and Jain trading castes which proceed to invest it elsewhere.

Among the Christians there is a great difference in the position of Syrian Christians who have been Christians for a long time and benefited from educational and employment opportunities during the British rule and retain their status today, and the dalits who are recent or 19th century converts from lower castes, and who constitute like their Hindu counterparts the agricultural labour and as likely to be among those below the poverty line.

There is a similar disjunction within the lower caste Sikhs and the landowning Sikh Jat families, although as she shows there is another difference based on religion in Punjab, with Sikhs constituting the peasantry, and the Hindus the trading/shopkeeper castes. Production and exchange are thus neatly compartmentalised on religious and caste lines. Also while the Sikhs form the major rural population in the Punjab, the Hindus are concentrated in urban areas.

ECONOMIC IMPLICATIONS OF RELIGIOUS PLURALITY

In a sense, therefore, as she points out, religious unequality has some co relation with occupational status and class formation in much the same way as caste does, and has been a factor in much of the communal violence as well when it becomes an incidence of protecting or taking over of access to assets and surplus.

It is to be noted that what she is saying is much more in evidence in areas of economy of the intermediate kind in small towns and big towns outside the metropolis, although even these have been affected because of the dominance of and links of this economy as subsidiary to corporate capitalism. It is also important to consider that religious networks easily assume economic organisational forms when these organisations pose as charity or social welfare organisations. The Hindutva organisations receiving huge funds come to mind as do their role in calling for and successfully implementing economic boycott of the Muslims in Gujarat after first destroying their economic capabilities.

It must also be considered that personal laws of all religious communities in regulating and determining rights to property, inheritance etc also create imbalance in terms of appropriation of surplus and access to economic assets earned/ owned by families in terms of gender.

All this is not to say that unequal access between communities and genders should result in open and a more equal competition between them. The study done by Barbara Harriss-White is an indicator that it is only when religion, caste and gender cease to become a factor or cease to impinge on economy can we say that capitalism has shorn off its feudal remnants. To fight against them is also to fight for equal citizenship and for the creation of class solidarities among working people which are also the best guarantees for democracy.