For inclusive politics

The resolutions adopted at the 30th general session of the Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind (JUH) reflect the contentious relationship between forms of modernity and such religious bodies. That problematic relationship, of course, extends to such bodies across communities as they attempt to negotiate a political position on certain issues while yet retaining a strongly conservative social agenda.

Thus, the JUH���s resolutions did mention issues like implementation of the Sachar Committee report and backwardness of Muslims, but they also opposed madrasa reform and endorsed patriarchal control of women. Union home minister P Chidambaram���s welcoming of the Deoband Dar-ul-Uloom���s 2008 fatwa against terrorism, while addressing the JUH meet, is thus also a somewhat tricky issue.

First, there could well be a case for representatives of an avowedly secular state to maintain a distance from overtly religious institutions. But that could be termed a peculiarly unworkable idea across the world, and certainly in India. For, religion has a deep and complex role in many spheres of our life, and some religious bodies could claim to represent sections of their respective communities.

It would, thus, per se be a positive development ��� not least due to the difficult, often xenophobic climate Muslims face ��� that Deoband issued such a fatwa. But a political endorsement of that not only runs the danger of officially enshrining the claim of a religious body to speak for an entire community, but also of giving legitimacy to religious edicts and, perversely, implicates the whole community by transferring a certain onus to condemn extremism onto it.

Embedded in the whole issue is also a critique of the failure of the modern nationalist project which has reduced the minority to an acknowledged state of marginalisation. Combating that is a task of aiding assimilation into mainstream ideas of democracy and development. Of, say, gradually assisting madrasa reform while yet envisaging minorities as part of civil society and polity as a whole ��� not just embodied by a few religious bodies. But that would also entail refashioning democracy as being genuinely inclusive, and not based on a politics of competitive identity management. And that calls for real leadership.