How the Indian State Constructs 'Muslimness' through Law and Violence

Tanweer Fazal’s book, Practices of the State: Muslims, Law and Violence in India, is an investigation of how a singular discourse of ‘Muslimness’ has been produced in India in defiance of the fact that the Muslims are a heterogenous and internally variegated community with divergent religious practices and beliefs. This book asks what binds a Bengali Muslim in Assam, with a Qureshi meat-seller in Uttar Pradesh and a Muslim villager in Bhagalpur Bihar, to a Muslim worshipper in Ayodhya or an Arzal Muslim seeking to be recognised as a scheduled caste person, notwithstanding their varied lived contexts? According to Fazal, it is their experience of ‘state’, not only in times of crisis but at an everyday level. This experience, Fazal argues, is not internally generated but produced externally, as a result of state practices, law-making and law-enforcement.

This idea of one’s identity being externally determined is reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks. He articulates his experience of walking down the street where a little French kid sees Fanon and says, “Look a negro” with a tremor. Fanon explored how the white gaze constructed a black man as dangerous and savage and splattered his body with blackness. Fazal similarly demonstrates how, in India, the statist gaze produces and reproduces a discourse of the Muslim as an internal other who is violent and treacherous. According to him, this state-sponsored identity flattens the Muslims into a homogenous community and thereby generates a particular kind of lived experience.

Conceptual framing of the book 

Fazal’s book examines the inter-relationship of a triad – the State, the National Public, and the Margins. Fazal begins with setting aside the idea of the state as a concrete immovable system and instead finds the notion of ‘state-idea’ more productive to work with. The term ‘state idea’ implies that the state is most visible not in its policy declarations – the point that most political analysts focus on – but in the way its policies come to be framed, the way they are implemented; and in the way the state is experienced by social groups.

Fazal defines the Dominant or National Public as social groups that are “in constant interaction with the State” to the extent that each “structure the moral constitution of the other”. The Margins, according to Fazal, are the sites imagined (or ‘epistemologically produced’) by the State as “wild and uncontrolled” and “insufficiently socialised into law” and consequently bear the brunt of state power and violence. In this statist imagination, the Muslims find themselves located at the margins along with Dalits, tribals or the working poor with epithets such as criminal, fanatic, seditious and terrorist stuck on them. This semantic location of the ‘Muslim’ at the margin gives the state functionaries a free hand to use violence to tame, civilise and keep them in check. The experience of the Muslims nevertheless is a graded one as not all Muslims are evenly placed at the Margins and neither does this location elide the possibility of intra and inter community strife. For instance, the educated, upper caste Muslims occasionally escape the violence and have the possibility of being seen as the good or sarkari Muslims – what Fanon would call wearing a white mask.

A systemic structure of impunity

Fazal uses this conceptual framework to analyse five case studies that take the reader through the structure and practice of the modern Indian state in constituting Muslimness. These include essays on: the way the discourse of Bangladeshi (the greedy and feckless foreigner) is deployed to exclude local Muslims from the National Register of Citizens (NRC); the history of the cow slaughter ban legislation and the implication of Muslims as beefeaters; the manner in which two commission reports on Bhagalpur Riots in 1989 ended up impugning of Muslims as criminal and fanatic; the combined legal histories of dispute over religious structures – the Shahidganj Mosque (1940) and the Babri Masjid (1885-2020). Unlike the Shahidganj Mosque case, where the colonial courts erred in favour of non-interference and status quo, in the Babri masjid case the courts capitulated to majoritarian opinion despite evidence to the contrary, overlooking the procedure and precedence; and lastly, the promulgation of Scheduled Caste Order 1950 (and the later court cases involving this order) that left vast swathes of Muslims and Christians out of receiving benefits of reservation policy to prevent lower caste communities from converting (and receiving the SC status as a compensation for remaining Hindu). 

What all the case studies reveal is a ‘systemic structure of impunity’, where the post-colonial state and its functionaries time and again indulge in legally sanctified exclusions (especially of Dalit Muslims), abet persecutory violence at an everyday level and generate a discourse that flattens the Muslims into a homogenous community. The case studies depict how Muslims become the bearers of the epistemic and physical violence that accompanies nation building. This leaves the most vulnerable in the community – children, women and Muslim Dalits even more susceptible to violence and social exclusion.

Muslims in state’s gaze

Fazal shows how the use of the word Bangladeshi as an umbrella term for all Muslims in Assam and Bengal becomes a way to erase the social existence of local Muslims. According to the government, the increase in Muslim population in the region owes itself to the continuous influx of ‘Bangladeshis’, however, Fazal provides demographic statistics that show that the increase is because of higher fertility rates, specifically in the poorest districts; and this spike is there not only amongst Muslims but also amongst the Adivasi communities. The discourse around the Muslim community calls to mind Sankaran Krishna’s idea on ‘cartographic anxiety’ – the way the state and its functionaries produce the inside and the outside by raising the spectre of foreign infiltration to discipline and produce the “domestic(ated) self”. The “citizen” identity is expected to revoke and nullify all other identities, especially religious ones which are seen as primitive and a carry-over of an outmoded past.

Likewise, the history of the cow slaughter ban shows how Muslims have come to be vilified as perverted ‘beef-eaters’. At the heart of this accusation is the deep-seated fear of ‘miscegenation’, which is the fear of racial or caste purity being ruined because of intermixing through a sexual relationship. This fear, coddled and anchored in India’s caste system, imagined as rigorously endogamous with strict rules regarding who you can procreate with, in turn, carries over into the Hindu-Muslim divide. The maintenance of Hindu purity mandates a vilification of Muslims and use of violence to maintain the order of things. This violence is not simply episodic (a riot, a killing, a chance encounter) or physical or an aberration that needs to be accounted for, but an structural and epistemological phenomenon that is a constant state-of-being for the majority of Muslims in India. 

Taking a leaf from Jean Paul Sartre’s Nothingness of Being, where he reflects on the Jewish identity being fixed by the anti-semite gaze, in India the state’s gaze fixes the Muslim as Muslim with no freedom to be anything but Muslim. There is an ‘overdetermination’ of a Muslim’s identity from the outside with the person having little or no power to constitute it for oneself. As if their essence lies in the Muslimness and not in being a human. And once denuded of their essence as a human being, a Muslim becomes an easy target for violence. The irony is that although a recipient of persecutory violence, the Muslim is constructed as a violent and treacherous being. 

Challenging foundational myths

Fazal’s book is part of a growing stream of literature that is challenging two foundational myths of the Indian republic.

First, the belief that all Indians were Hindu to begin with. This idea is present not only in V.D. Savarkar’s Hindutva but also in Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India and is used to uphold the claim of unity of Indian culture and nationhood. This myth fundamentally posits the Muslims as outsiders or late entrants. Although Nehru’s was an inclusive reading, the notion of Muslims as passive recipients of Hindu tolerance and largesse (because they are guests, poor cousins, saturated by their cultural and religious identity, and so on) nevertheless remains. The precondition of a Hindu’s tolerance is that a Muslim must remain silent and grateful; and a Muslim asserting their Indianness – by upholding a copy of the constitution at anti-CAA/NRC protests and the like – is welcome, but not their ‘Muslimness’.

Second is the notion that India is a tolerant country. Fazal’s case studies clearly show that it is a highly violent country with instances of exclusion written into the Constitution and the legal fabric of the country. If anything, India is a country highly tolerant of violence. In a country where exclusion – the feeling like one is not being allowed to belong fully, not feeling protected by law or the state, being unable to participate fully in the public life, living with a sense alienation – is something that haunts the Muslims, one wonders if the Indian state ever had the capacity to be neutral?

Aparna Vaidik is a professor of history at Ashoka University.