The community is said to be undergoing an identity crisis which has become more profound recently Howard Barrell Indian South Africans feel more deeply alienated from the government and the country’s political institutions than any other racially or ethnically defined community, according to a recent opinion survey. The surprise is that they have a significantly lower regard for the country’s representative institutions than whites, who are often thought to be the most estranged of South Africa’s racial groups. Most political leaders of the Indian community interviewed by the Mail & Guardian found the suggestion of Indian disaffection and withdrawal credible, although some doubted the extreme picture painted by the figures. One said he did not recognise the picture at all. The evidence is contained in the latest survey by the Institute of Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) – the same survey that found that the standing of President Thabo Mbeki in the eyes of South Africans had dropped dramatically over the four months to August. The Idasa survey found that one in 28 Indians (3,6%) believes that Mbeki or their provincial government can be trusted; only one in 19 trusts the criminal justice system; one in 14 (7,3%) believes Parliament is trustworthy; and one in seven (14,3%) thinks they can trust their local government. In all cases, bar on their attitude to local government, Indians revealed markedly less confidence than whites or coloureds. Likewise, a smaller proportion of Indians than any other South African racial group feels that the president, Parliament and their provincial government are responsive to them. The survey shows also that, over the past two years, there has been a sharp fall in Indians’ trust in government institutions (for example, from 26% to 7% in the case of Parliament); a similar drop in Indians’ approval of the government’s performance (for example, from 45% to 9% in the case of the president); and a comparable decline in the proportion of Indians who feel government institutions are responsive to their needs (for example, from 23% to 8% in the case of their provincial governments). Sandy Kalyan, a Democratic Party MP and psychologist from KwaZulu-Natal, said the Indian community was undergoing a form of “identity crisis which has become more profound in recent years”. Indians found themselves between the wider South African community and a deep “ethno-cultural identity”. Apartheid, she added, had been a deeply patriarchal system. The Indian family tended also to be patriarchal, and so the end of apartheid had meant the end of a familiar, even if hated, order. This had increased uncertainty in the community. “There is, also, a sense of betrayal and disappointment in some sections of the community – that it is contributing enormously to the economy, to the professions, to academia, but that it is getting no recognition at all.” Mohammed Bhabha, an African National Congress MP from Mpumalanga who maintains linkages into Gauteng, agreed with Kalyan that the community’s mood was one of uncertainty. He said, however, that he could see no objective basis for the Indian community to feel alienated. Since 1994 they had enjoyed greater freedom of religious, cultural and educational expression than ever before. And the proportion of Indian MPs in Parliament was several times higher than the Indian community’s share of the population.
The uncertainty resulted from a mixture of political change and profound changes within Gauteng’s increasingly affluent, significantly Muslim community. Young Indians – open to influences of the Internet and conscious of living in an era of globalisation – were challenging cultural and ethical values.
“Dinner-time conversation between adults these days is about crime and the loss of values among young people and sometimes within the community as a whole,” Bhabha said. These changes in the social fabric sometimes get blamed on the government – unjustifiably, in his view – because of its tolerance of practices like abortion and a perception that it is socially permissive. “But there is a young, theological class that is emerging in the Indian community that is trying to deal with the social problems,” he says. Two Indian former ANC operatives in the underground and in exile, who are now senior state officials, say the mood in the community is not one of hostility to the new order or to the ruling party. Instead, it is characterised by passive withdrawal. They explain it partly in terms of the ANC’s failure to develop two sides to its policies and programmes – a general position applicable to the entire country, and a set of particular positions answering to the needs of particular groups or parts of the country. They believe the ANC needs to address the Indian community directly about its particular problems, and has not done so. This failure, combined with the deployment of ANC-aligned political activists to jobs taking them far from their communities for much of the year, has also contributed to the depressed mood. They believe the situation is not, however, irreversible. Cassim Saloojee, another ANC MP, who has been involved for decades in welfare work in Gauteng, does not recognise at all the picture of an alienated, withdrawn, rather depressed community. “I don’t detect the level of anxiety that the figures seem to indicate. There is still a lot of support for the ANC in the community. I think it has majority support.”