Following close upon the golden
jubilee celebrations of ‘victory’ in the 1965 war against Pakistan, with its
imbedded celebration of the Anglo-Indian hero Alfred Cooke, has come another
moment of remembrance in the history of the Indian state: the passing of
J.F.R. Jacob. Jacob was, more or less famously, the only ‘Jewish general’ in
the Indian Army and one of the architects of the Pakistani surrender in the
Bangladesh War. His visage graces the iconic photograph of the
surrender ceremony in Dhaka in 1971. (Jacob stands towards the right of the frame, above, with a young Air Force officer gripping his arm.) By his own admission, Jacob was not a religious man and may
not have been entirely comfortable with the tendency of his admirers – mainly
Indian and Israeli – to underline his Jewishness. Nevertheless, every obituary
has led with some version of ‘Jake the Jew.’
How extraordinary
this treatment is must be emphasized. When Sam Maneckshaw, the most celebrated soldier in Indian
history, died not long ago, few headline-writers in the mainstream press thought
to describe him as ‘the Parsi general,’ and no eulogist gloated about the fact
that a Zoroastrian had led the Indian Army. Likewise, when Air Chief Marshall Idris
Latif, the only Muslim to head an Indian military service, passes away, his
religion will be mentioned politely in the small print, as is only right. Denis La Fontaine will not be 'India's Christian air chief'; Christians are too prosaic. Clearly,
being a ‘minority,’ in and of itself, is not all that noteworthy. When it is
noteworthy, it is unevenly so: Alfred
Cooke was embraced in spite of his
Anglo-Indian ancestry (and even then, nobody mentioned his religion), but Jacob was celebrated because he was an Indian Jew. Coming at a time when minorities are
not especially popular in India, this invites us to think about the conditions
under which a national majority becomes generous towards the impurities it
contains.
The concept of a ‘minority’ is
something of a novelty. It became meaningful only in the nineteenth century, as
a corollary of the new institutions of popular sovereignty and the democratic
nation-state. In India, the term was most firmly associated with Muslims,
beginning with colonial historiography, proceeding through Aligarh’s
foundational debates and the nationalist polemics of the 1880s and 1890s, and
becoming concretized in the Minto-Morley reforms of 1909. Partition reinforced
the concrete, but also added a new complication by making policy (management) rather
than politics (accommodation) the normative idiom of relations between the
majority and the minorities. Throughout this trajectory, the concept secreted
layers of negative connotations: not only was it a calamity to be a minority,
it was a misfortune to have minorities.
In much of this, the Indian experience was consistent with trends in political
demography elsewhere in the world that emerged from the Great War.
Yet models exist in that world for
‘good minorities’ and even happy minorities. The best known such model is,
conveniently, known in America as the ‘model minority.’ That term has been used
since the 1970s to refer explicitly to ‘Asian immigrants,’ who do well at
school, do not trouble the police, and appear to affirm the ‘American’ values
of hard work, self-reliance (not relying upon government assistance), single-minded
acquisitiveness and ‘family,’ at a time (the aftermath of the Counterculture
and the Civil Rights Movement) when ‘Americans’ themselves had evidently wavered
in their faith in those things. The deconstruction of the model minority,
coming in the first instance from Asian American scholars like Ronald Takaki,
has been very thorough. Its critics have noted that while the notion
compensated somewhat for the virulence of the Asian Exclusion Acts, the lynch
mobs in the Pacific Northwest, the wartime internment of people of Japanese ancestry,
and seventy years of murder and dehumanization of ‘gooks’ and ‘slopes’ (who can
breathe easier now that attention has turned to ‘ragheads’ and ‘Art Malik’), it
has been more pernicious than generous. It has highlighted the success of some
Asians (mainly Japanese, Chinese, Koreans and Indians from middle-class backgrounds),
blacked out the less advantaged and successful, and trapped all Asian Americans within the exotic
category of ‘immigrant,’ to be contrasted with real Americans, whose realness
is reified by their imperiled virtues. The model minority is a handy stick
with which to beat other minorities (including Asians, but always and primarily
blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans) for their apparent fecklessness. Beyond
that, it has imposed on all minorities – the successful and the feckless – a
constricting model of citizenship that emphasizes docility: not challenging the
prerogatives of the majority, not questioning the meanings of success, not
taking over the ‘good schools’ and ‘excellent neighborhoods,’ not making waves.
The model minority is, in the final analysis, a model of apolitical citizenship
as the subjectivity of a ‘good’ minority, which allows the majority to bury its
history and politics of racism.
The notion of a ‘good minority’ is
not alien to India, where linguistic minorities have been a fact of political life
since the 1920s. In the Presidency capitals, an expanded political pie and massive
in-migration made it necessary for regional politicians to work out a language
that could accommodate – or isolate – the misfits. But who was a good minority
at the national level? For a long time, the answer was obvious: the model
minority in India were the Sikhs. Not only did they fit easily into the
anti-Muslim thrust of nationalist historiography, they were endowed with qualities
that Hindus were often unsure they possessed: Sikhs were industrious, ‘martial’
and hyper-patriotic. It was a nationalist redemption of the colonial trope of
the simple, loyal peasant-soldier. Sikhs themselves seemed to embrace their
role as semi-detached Hindus, and happily referred to themselves as the ‘sword
arm of the nation.’
The fragility of this model of
minority citizenship became inescapable in the 1980s, with the onset of Sikh
terrorism, the Delhi pogrom, and the years of profiling and ‘encounter’
killings. When Shabeg Singh, another icon of the 1971 war, used his military
expertise against the Indian Army in
Operation Blue Star, the hero became the traitor in shockingly literal terms.
The wounds healed with Manmohan Singh’s stint as prime minister, but not
completely. The romance was gone, and the good minority is nothing if not a
romantic concept: a specter of the majority’s love affair with its own national
mythology.
What went wrong with the Sikhs? It
was not simply the demands for autonomy or secession. It was the revelation of
a reluctance to accept the status of quasi-Hindus, which fully-credentialed
Hindus could neither understand nor forgive. (Nothing is as embarrassing as
interrupted self-love.) Just as pertinently, Sikhs asserting their separateness
– whether from Hindus or from India – were able to mobilize politically. Even a
two-percent minority can do that when two percent is more than fifteen million
people, concentrated geographically and already equipped with political
organizations and useful histories. The otherwise useful Sikhs, therefore,
failed that crucial test of a lovable minority: docility.
If we return to the photograph of the
Pakistani surrender in 1971, in which the romance of Indian cosmopolitanism is fully
on display, we see immediately that Sikhs are well represented, notably by
General Arora, the senior Indian commander in the eastern theater. They are
not, however, performing as a minority. Being politically alive and viable,
Sikhs are not exotic. They are not in the frame as curiosities. General Jacob
is. Some three decades ago, a relative of mine – a retired group captain in the
Indian Air Force – told me that Jacob’s presence at the ceremony was intended
to compound the Pakistani humiliation by forcing them to surrender to a Jew. It
is difficult to imagine Indira Gandhi and Jagjivan Ram plotting such a detail,
but it is significant that it was the perception of Indian officers with some
awareness of world politics. Jacob in 1971 was already a symbolic Jew.
He was also the most perfect kind of minority:
a man with a race but without a racial community. The number of Jews in India
is so small (barely five thousand) that mobilizing as a community – coming together
with an agenda and a means of applying pressure – would seem to be out of the
question. Indian Jews can, at most, express their dismay when some fool in
Ahmedabad opens a boutique called ‘Hitler.’ They are, in that sense, a docile
minority, and can be placed on the shelf of the nation's trophies. The same can be
said for Parsis. They too are a model minority, running gracefully out of
bodies and vultures. The Tatas have put to rest the old Parsi reputation of being ‘bum-lickers
of the English’: a stigma that Anglo-Indians could not fully escape. In Bapsi
Sidhwa’s novel Cracking India, a
Parsi woman in newly independent Pakistan explains to her child that they
are, and must remain, like sugar in a cup of tea: sweetening and invisible. But
the Parsi predicament is also different from that of Indian Jews. Jews are more
useful. Being Parsi has no global significance. Jewishess does, and that meaning
dovetails with specific Indian agendas, historical and contemporary.
The post-1945 Zionist tendency to
deploy an exceptional and existential victimhood – ‘everybody hates us, so
everything is justified’ – has made it possible for Indian nationalist
discourse to claim an exception of its own. In India, the narrative goes, Jews
were never persecuted. This may very well be true, give or take the Inquisition in Goa. But the assertion has not only allowed the spokesmen of the Indian
majority to proclaim their own ‘tolerance’ and inherent cosmopolitanism (which,
it turns out, is compatible with fascist imaginings of nationhood), it has also
aligned them with a strand within contemporary Zionism, which is its anti-Muslim
animus. This promises to take Hindutva politics out of the backwater, connecting it to another national narrative and a global concern (articulated in terms of ‘terror,’ ‘security' and 'Islam'). It also cements the
relationship between India and Israel at a time when both states have reached a
majoritarian nadir.
It may be, of course, that eulogists casually invoking 'Jake the Jew' are merely drawing attention to a harmless bit of trivia, without political 'intentions' or 'agendas.' When they do that, however, they reduce race and the racialized individual to trivia: the harmless fluff that is the essence of a model minority. The harmlessless is tied up with utility and the comfort of the majority; for that reason, it is political. The celebration of General Jacob’s
Jewishness then feeds (and feeds upon) majoritarian self-congratulation and tokenism, and simultaneously
sharpens the distinction between good and bad minorities in India. The more or
less solitary Jew, identified with national victory and
globally aligned with power and civilization, is good. The Muslim, with his
numbers and birthrate and place in history, is not. He is the trouble the Jew
does not give the nation. He is unser Unglück.
Sikhs have proved to be manageable; they can be either pogrom victims or prime
ministers.
Jacob was not an innocent observer in
the politics of his identity. He may have been ambivalent about his faith, but
he took racial identity seriously enough to work hard for closer ties between the Indian and Israeli states. That effort, while understandable,
highlights an important dynamic of being a model minority. It shows where, and
with whom, one chooses to stand, and how one is willing to be used. When a
minority lacks the demographic means of political self-assertion, there still
remains the option of self-assertion on behalf of other minorities, within the
larger community with which it identifies. Jacob liked to say he was ‘Indian
through and through.’ I would like to think that that means standing in
solidarity with those Indians who are excluded from ‘model’ status. Such solidarity,
however, might mean that when you die, you would not be a national icon, but
merely a troublemaker.
January 18, 2016
