The last few days were all drenched with the bloody news from India. The Mumbai violence was brutal. Finally, the standoff is over, but the questions remain - Why did this happen? Who is to blame? Will it happen again?

Religion and State

I am tempted to say my usual thing – the world needs to become more secular, the organized religions are to grow more personal, less political. The state and religion must go separate ways. Islam must cool off, just as Christianity did. I am not a devout Christian, I am more of an agnostic. Oh, yeah, I would like to see more people like me. And not just among Christians, but also among Muslims. I don’t give a damn about blasphemous movies about Jesus, Black metal, and an officially registered Church of Satan that questions the beliefs of my parents. I don’t give a damn. I can live with that. And so should you, Muslims, be able to live with “Satanic Verses,” Prophet Muhammad’s caricatures, etc. within your grasp. It’s OK when someone questions your faith. It should not bother you, just as ridiculing Christianity does not bother me.

Oh, let me stop here. If I go on with my usual rant about secularism and religion, I won’t get to my next point which I deem to be pretty important.

Disfranchisement

The Guardian reported worrisome statistics on the status of Muslims in the Indian state. On socio-economics, comprising roughly 14% of India’s population of 1.1 billion, nearly half (43%) of all Muslims live below the official poverty line of $1.25 a day. This poverty rate corresponds with the Muslim workforce rate: less than 50% of the Muslim male population is employed (contrast this with Dalit male employment of 53%). Additionally, Muslims are less likely to have electricity and water than Dalits. Politically, Muslims remain unrepresented in the government (holding 5.7% of all state jobs), in the foreign, police and armed services (holding 2-3% of all jobs) and in politics (holding roughly 4-6% of all House parliamentary seats, or less than one-half of the Muslims’ population share).

Michael Shank of the Guardian notes that while the Dalits were previously devoid of the ideological and instrumental mechanisms to respond violently to the inequity in India’s democracy, the Muslim community is equipped via national and international sources (both ideological and instrumental). What is also noteworthy about these numbers is the correlation between poverty, political representation and peaks in violence. For example, studies show that spikes in unemployment are followed by spikes in homicides; the higher the percentage of families living in relative poverty, the higher the violent offenses; and finally, relevant to India, ethnic and religious dominance doubles the risk of violent conflict.

Lesson for the Baltics: Do not turn a minority into an underclass

I know any status comparisons of Muslims in India to a Russian minority in Latvia or Estonia would be more than far-fetched, nevertheless I can see how volatile a relationship between a majority and a large minority can become if the latter is openly and methodically disfranchised by the former. The Latvian government was close enough to that level of misguidance when it conducted a repressive policy against the country’s Russian-speaking population. The state must be inclusive by definition, the excluded are usually apt to turn against the state, the repressor. It is instructive to analyze the degree of dissatisfaction of those who leave comments at Delfi, a popular news network serving the Baltics with separate sites in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. All of those sites also have Russian versions. Oh, man, that’s where the Russian speaking readers nail the state for all the injustice they had to go through. Sometimes, the wording gets too tough. That’s also the place where ethnic Latvians, Estonians, and Lithuanians clash with Russian speakers. In Lithuania, Vilnius Poles and Belarusians join in those word fights, too.

I won’t go into details as to why the Russian minority has become disfranchised in early 1990s by the Latvian and Estonian states. The reasoning was controversial. Estonians and Latvians might argue that they wouldn’t have made it into the European Union unless they had kept Russians off the state politics. Now as the Baltic states are part of EU and NATO, it is time to think how to unite their nations. And here I mean not just the titular ethnic groups inside these nations, but all those who have citizenship and those who have not but have resided in those nations for years. Now it is time to think and to think hard how to bring the divided together, how to swap the ethnic identity with the citizenship identity, a more unifying concept. It is only then these nations can fully embrace Europeanness as we know it.