Religion-Based Inequality in India

More Hindus reside in India than in any other nation of the world. Similarly, India is also home to the third largest Muslim population in the world. Yet, demographically, 80.5% of Indians are Hindu while only 13.4% of the population is Muslim. Christianity is next on the list, composing 2.2% of the country’s population, followed by other religions which, combined, account for the remaining 3.9% of Indians.

In January, 1950, the Constitution of the Republic of India was ratified. The constitution acknowledges these demographics and India’s past of religious-centered violence with distinct descriptions of the republic’s features, such as: “secular” and promises of “Equality of status and of opportunity” (Nussbaum, 2007: 122) . However, this provision of equality within a secular society has become rather symbolic due to the provision for personal law and the quota system.

The fact that India’s Constitution provides for every religion to practice its own personal law, which includes property and family law, seems to undermine the government’s secular intent (Nussbaum, 2007: 141). With each religious population legally exercising its own practice of law in these areas, the Republic of India essentially commits itself to the enforcement of these religious standards. Also, with a separate legal code, religious populations are formally distinct and judicially unequal. Additionally, once born into a particular religion, it is nearly impossible to separate one’s self from it because religion entails both a spiritual and legal identity. While it is possible for religious parents to claim a secular identity for their child, since property law is included within the provision of religious personal law, the child will suffer disinheritance from any familial property.

To battle the country’s high rates of economic inequality, India has instigated a system of affirmative action. However, while this system of affirmative action claims to provide job assistance for Dalits (or Untouchables) and women, the quotas created by this policy distinctly omit Muslims and Christians (Nussbaum, 2007: 137). Demographically, the Islamic and Christian sectors of society fall below the poverty line and suffer high rates of unemployment. By excluding them in this affirmative action policy, the government is structurally denying these two subgroups equal opportunity of employment.

So while India espouses the ideals of a secular and liberal democracy, institutionally it discriminates against its religious minorities. A reflection of this is seen in incidents of religious violence. A relatively recent example of religious violence is the Gujarat Genocide in 2002. In the state of Gujarat, India, a massacre broke out in response to a fire, allegedly started by Muslims, which killed fifty-eight people. While nearly all these victims were Hindu, there is no evidence of foul play on the part of Muslim extremists. Despite the lack of evidence, over the course of the next few weeks two thousand Muslims were brutally massacred. Surprisingly, the local authorities were ordered to do nothing in response (Nussbaum, 2007: 2). At this time, the government was under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which espouses Hindu nationalism. In response to the genocide, many of India’s high-ranking government official actually rationalized the atrocities. In fact, the Chief Minister of the BJP, Narenda Modi, stated that the acts of genocide in Gujara were “natural” and that those living in Gujara have “criminal tendencies" (Nussbaum, 2007: 26). This validation of violence against the innocent within a religious population displays the discontinuity between the ideals within India’s Constitution and reality.

The BJP party lost the 2004 elections and, since then, religious inequality in India has improved. While it may be easy to optimistically associate the country’s rising GDP and global integration with a decrease in disparity along religious lines, the reality is that religious minorities are still endure discrimination and persecution. The 2007 incident in Orissa, India and the attacks on Muslim villages in 2005 are both evidences of the continued state of persecution in India. Even more disconcerting is that, through legal provisions, historic precedent, and Hindu extremist groups, this persecution has a certain amount of structural provision in Indian society. If India is to continue along its path of global success, it must address its institutional framework that permits religious inequality.

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Bibliography:

Nussbaum, Martha C. (2007). The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.