Organizer: Sara Dickey, Bowdoin College
Chair: Michelle E. Maskiell, Montana State University
Rethinking Ethnic Politics: The Mohajirs of Pakistan
Omar Qureshi, University of Chicago
This paper will explore the nature of civil society in Pakistan by analyzing the political history of the formation of a "migrant" (Mohajir) identity among the urban population of Sindh province in southern Pakistan.
Postcolonial states such as Pakistan provide privileged sites to examine relationships among ethnicity, civil society and state. Their recent political history is usually marked by efforts at state-building within the context of ideological debates and ethno-national challenges. Social science writing has assessed Pakistan's political development by concentrating on state ideology and policy and slighting civil society. Because state and civil society are mutually constitutive, political processes within society provide a means to analyze ethnic nationalism.
In this paper I argue that ethnic politics can expand and strengthen civil society. I examine the ways in which state sovereignty and legitimacy is reworked by subnational movements. State structure, I argue, depends on discursive and institutional practices that mark a boundary between civil society and state. An ill-defined and porous boundary between civil society and the state can affect the extent of state sovereignty. Processes that legitimize state sovereignty go on within the complex public discourses of civil society. I view ethnic nationalism as the deployment of contesting institutional and discursive practices within civil society to interrogate and reformulate state legitimacy and sovereignty.
Mohajirs are an urban, largely literate minority group which dominates some of Pakistan's largest cities. They are descended from Muslims who migrated from Muslim-minority provinces in India to Pakistan after independence from colonial rule in 1947. "Indian" Muslims who led the movement for Muslim separatism in colonial India took a leading role in state-building in Pakistan. In the last two decades, Mohajirs have moved from staunch supporters of Muslim autonomy in India, to advocating official Pakistani nationalism, to pursuing a political identity based on ethnicity in the last two decades. As other ethnic groups in Pakistan become upwardly mobile, Mohajir nationalism has been driven by relative economic and political deprivation. More interesting is the Mohajir transition from mistrusting the prospect of a centralized state in India to supporting then challenging the Pakistani state they helped build. This shift in political objectives led Mohajirs to conceptualize a series of particularly subtle views on the relationship between state, society and ethnicity. My initial research indicates that Mohajirs have attempted to devise a political doctrine that links its post-independence contestation of state authority with a reformulation of the bases of state legitimacy and sovereignty
From Category to Group: Affirmative Action in India
Laura D. Jenkins, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Like race-based affirmative action in the United States and ethnic preferences in Malaysia, India's preferential policies in education and government employment for lower castes have been controversial since their inception. Debate continues to rage over the boundaries of the social categories used and whether the state should be engaged in drawing such official boundaries at all. Can policies based on categories like caste lead to the eventual eradication of such divisions, or do these state simplifications reinforce social distinctions? This paper is based on my current dissertation research as a Fulbright-Hays scholar in India, where I have been doing interviews and archival research.
India's experience with such policies is instructive for policymakers of other ethnically divided countries debating the efficacy of group based remedies, and related issues, such as which groups to count on the census to aid monitoring of those policies. In India there are debates over whether beneficiaries should be determined by class or caste, or some combination of the two. Another debate is over the potential inclusion of more castes in the next census, returning to a practice that was severely curtailed at independence. A third debate is whether benefits should be extended to more non-Hindu lower castes, highlighting the complex relationship between religious and caste identities.
These three policy debates allow me to address current theoretical debates over the fluidity or rigidity of group identity, particularly in relation to the identification-or even the "construction"-of groups by colonial and post-colonial states. Finally, examination of the history of caste-based policies in India provides an opportunity for self reflection as a social scientist. What is the role of social scientists, particularly ethnographers, in this identification process? The use of social science data by the state can be a tool for manipulation and control, but potentially can further justice and equality.
Concepts of Jat Identity Among the Tharus of Nepal
Arjun Guneratne, Macalester College
The term Tharu is an ethnonym applied to a number of culturally distinct ethnic groups living in the Tarai region of Nepal. In recent years these various groups have been forging a common identity, the better in part to press claims on the Nepalese state: Tharus have buried their ethnic differences and declared themselves to be all members of one jat, or caste. However, Tharus differ in their ideas concerning the fundamental nature of a jat. For some, the jat is relatively flexible, allowing outsiders to be incorporated as Tharu. For others, jat boundaries are in theory impermeable, at least for men. In this paper I discuss and compare the different ideas concerning the nature of jat identity held by members of three different Tharu groups, and analyze the role played by elites within the various Tharu communities in creating a new "pan-Tharu" identity that sidesteps concepts of jat held by ordinary Tharus. I argue that the difference in the nature of the concepts held by Tharus of different groups is explained by the degree to which these groups have been Hinduized: the greater the degree of Hinduization, the greater the inflexibility of the ethnic boundary. The modern concept of a pan-Tharu jat that is being popularized is, I argue, a Hinduized model, in that the unity of Tharus is posited not on the basis of marriage or adoption (the traditional ways in which outsiders could become Tharu) but as part of a primordial, dharmic order.
Failed Hegemony and the Crisis of Class Politics in Post-Colonial India
Michael McIntyre, DePaul University
Following Pranab Bardhan, I read post-colonial India as an unstable pact among "dominant proprietary classes." The formal democracy which allows this fractious coalition to fight for the division of the spoils can be distinguished from the colonial state by its universalization of voice. Elections provide a spectacle of hegemonic appearances in which India's "civil society" can demonstrate its vibrancy, even hounding a corrupt dynasty from office. Not only is voice used, it is fought for and regained. Meanwhile, the range of options to which voice may be given becomes circumscribed: shall we vote for the dominant party which covertly solicits RSS support or the coalition of opposition parties that overtly includes the BJP; shall foreign capital be invited to exploit the Indian market or shall the most corrupt elements of the dominant proprietary classes have guaranteed monopoly rents; shall our left parties opt for social democracy in one state or propaganda of the deed?
Faced with the crisis of class politics, "subalternity" emerges as a potentially fruitful decentering of the notion of class. Because almost everyone is someone else's subaltern, though, subalternity threatens to become a night in which all cats are gray. Class, while discursively articulated, creates the binding illusion of firm objective boundaries, identifying the enemy. In post-colonial India, only communal identities have approached the creation of similar binding illusions. If subalternity has a future as a political project, it must either learn to create its own binding illusions or theorize a politics of opposition in the absence of an oppositional bloc.