propaganda, is unduly privileged - a charge even more
absurd here than it was in Germany, where the Jews had been fairly prominent in intellectual,
professional and business circles. In post-Independence India, Muslims in contrast
are grossly underrepresented at elite levels, however defined. The alleged privileges,
in the second place, are the product of ' appeasement' of Muslims by 'pseudo-secularist',
and so very quickly the communal target starts broadening itself, and Mulayam Singh
Yadav, to take one example among many, becomes a ' mulla'. The stock examples of
' appeasement' in recent days have been the destruction of temples in Kashmir, allegedly
never condemned by the 'pseudo-secularists', and Muslim personal law permitting polygamy.
Desecration must be condemned, whether by Muslims or by Hindus, but it is a strange
condemnation that sues it to justify or condone the wantonhe tried to counterbalance the opening of the locks
of Ayodhya by the Muslim Women's Bill. The Muslim fundamentalist side of the appeasement
(from which the only real and direct sufferers were Muslim women) is always mentioned,
never the simultaneous appeasement of Hindu communalism. The real importance of the
question, however, is in the light it can throw on the presuppositions, reminiscent
of racism, of the Hindutva ideology. The continuation of the legal right of polygamy
among Muslims is constantly linked up to assertions that Muslims consequently breed
faster: "hum panch hamare pachis", as the Delhi VHP leader (currently BJP
MP) B L Sharma elegantly described it in an interview he gave to a group of us in
April 1991. The Report on the Status of Women in India (1975), however, had found
the rate of polygamy actually