Being the Other: The Muslim in India

by Saeed Naqvi

The emergence of Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, Lalu Prasad Yadav, and Nitish Kumar in Bihar frightened the Savarnas. Was the caste pyramid being upturned? But how had something that started out as caste conflict become communal? Because of the upper caste appraisal that Muslims were being mobilized by the Avarna or the lower castes to topple the ageold caste system and the privilege that went with it. This largely intra-Hindu tussle worked to the disadvantage of Muslims. A frightful thought germinated: target the Muslim as the ‘Other’ to affect greater Hindu consolidation.

The deepening of the Hindu–Muslim divide is now also being determined by external factors.

The tolerance and syncretism that had marked over a thousand years of Hindu–Muslim equations began to give way to bitterness and hostility.

what is being lost to communalism. Muslims aren’t the only ones who will lose, every Indian will.

It doesn’t matter if you are Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Christian, Jain or atheist—a country divided by sectarianism or shaped along communal lines will no longer be India. It will be a different country, a retrograde nation ruled by belief, superstition and authoritarian impulses, a replica of failed states and religious dictatorships around the world where tyranny has displaced democracy, human rights, justice and liberty for all.

What we saw in Ayodhya was not two belief systems in conflict, but rather the use of religion to expand territories.

My mother’s favourite Sohar was: Allah mian hamray bhaiyya ka diyo Nandlal (Oh my Allah, bestow on my brother a son like Lord Krishna.)

Yes, Hindu India, in that sense, was in the minds of everyone, even senior Congress leaders. A puerile simplicity was sought to be imposed on a subcontinent of great complexity.

Jinnah did not speak Urdu and those who used the English idiom were non-existent in our circle. Membership of the Muslim League was a bargaining tactic used by taluqdars and big landlords. They did not want to give up their palaces and their lifestyle. Pakistan was never the goal; it was a bargaining chip. I know it because I was privy to such discussions in my family in Mustafabad, Rae Bareli, Lucknow, Kanpur.

Jumman is a common name for a low-caste Julaha or weaver. It is also shorthand for the largest number of converts at the hands of proselytizing groups. At the heart of it all was the tension between the liberal Muslim, Persianized and broadminded and the majority of Indian Muslims, the newly converted ‘Jummans’, Arabized and focused on the mosque. A basic rule of thumb was: culture came from Persia, Islamism from Arabia.

course, there was a difference between the two. The varna or caste-based system was the social architecture designed by Brahmins. Muslim hierarchies evolved under the feudal system. When Sir Syed Ahmad Khan laid the foundation of Aligarh Muslim University (patterned on Cambridge) in the late nineteenth century, he was quite firm that it was a campus for the ‘Ashraf ’ or genteel, the well-bred elite. Below the Ashraf were ‘Ajlaf ’ or the Julahas (weavers) and ‘Arzal’, the menial class.

That Sunnis had the numbers began to matter.

Bad publicity given to the ‘Mussalman in India’ by Mahmud was made worse by Muhammad Ghori (1175), Timur (1398) and, about five hundred years later, by Nadir Shah (1739) and Ahmad Shah Abdali (1748).

It was indeed the first major pan-Indian uprising in which Hindus and Muslims, landlords and peasants, united in a war under one banner with Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar as their symbolic leader. This was the secularism of common aspirations, which mainstream Congress leaders in independent India chose to ignore. Perhaps they ought to have remembered Disraeli’s lament that the situation was brought about because Britain deviated from its time-honoured policy. To quote: ‘Our Empire in India was, indeed, founded upon the old principal of divide et impera (divide and rule).’

In fact, after the experience of 1857, Britain would, with redoubled vigour, promote its policy of divide and rule to consolidate its hold. This should have been expected and resisted. To the contrary, the Congress during 1940-47 appears to have found these divisions advantageous, considering the alacrity with which its leadership accepted partition. Did the nationalist leadership, right up to Partition in 1947, realize that communal tensions did not evolve naturally because of a divide between communities and faiths? It was what the British had made of Hindu–Muslim equations. Disraeli’s 1857 address to the House of Commons is only one proof of this reality.

This was the key difference between the Congress and the Muslim League. Indeed Muslim landlords held up the Muslim League’s status quoist stance on land tenures as a model for the Congress to follow. The League did not touch the issue of land reforms. How could it, when its support base was the landed gentry, exactly the class which dominates the Pakistan National Assembly to this day?

We were groomed into believing that Islam was the most dynamic of religions but we found it equally easy to accept that it was Islam’s interaction with an older civilization that resulted in Dara Shikoh, Rahim, Kabir, Amir Khusro, Raskhan, Nazeer Akbarabadi, Ghalib and Anis. As I have pointed out, the merging of Urdu culture with Awadhi and Brajbhasha was something we learned very early in life and it is sad that this syncretism is now under siege.

With the decay of the feudal hierarchy, the lower middle class, always more religious in every society, gained upward mobility. It is around this class that religious groups like the Jamaat-e-Islami formed clusters. These clusters were 100 per cent Sunni. No Shia was ever a member of Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind of Deoband, Tableeghi Jamaat, Ahle Hadith, or what is known as the Bareli group. The various militant groups—Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Al Qaeda, Taliban, Jamat-ud-Dawa, Jabhat-ul-Nusra—are Sunni without exception. Sensible Sunnis will have their own take: jihadis are not proper Muslims at all.

The hypocritical silence adopted in the early years of Partition began to putrefy over the years and turned into closet communalism. And yet the conspiracy of silence about who was really responsible for the partition of India continued.

We have lived this fallacy from the day India was partitioned. The Congress leadership, and therefore the Congress party, which has ruled the country for most of the years since Partition, has never felt compelled to clarify its role in partitioning India.

History is the story of the victors.

The British establishment kept itself insulated from Hindu anger by allowing official underlings to point fingers at Muslim butchers who actually performed the physical act of slaughtering the cows. This led to numerous Hindu–Muslim riots.

the Raj deliberately provoked Hindus against Muslims, sowing the seeds of their divide and rule policy.

The British Origin of Cow Slaughter in India.

‘Though the Mohammedans’ cow-killing is made the pretext of the agitation, it is in fact directed against us, who kill far more cows for our army than the Mohammedans.’

The partition of the country in August 1947 led to the birth of two distinct states—India and Pakistan—from the same colonial womb, one cloaking its Hindu aspirations in multiculturalism (Nehru called it secular) and the other overtly committed to Muslim theocracy.

He was told to complete his assignment in five weeks.Why was Jawaharlal Nehru in such a hurry to have Sir Cyril Radcliffe demarcate the Indo–Pak boundaries?

That this complicated task was done in such a rush could be attributed to the fact that news had leaked that Jinnah was terminally ill. After Jinnah, no one knew with whom, and for how long, negotiations would have to be conducted. It is argued that Congress leaders like Nehru were getting on in years and were therefore impatient and accepted Partition in a hurry. But Nehru was only fifty-eight in 1947! A much more straightforward theory is that only in a partitioned India did Congress leaders see themselves coming to power, without having to share it with the Muslim League.

However, what is not widely known is that the theory about Hindus and Muslims being separate entities was actually first articulated by a colonial theorist James Mill who belonged to the Utilitarian School.

In fact, as senior Congress leader K. M. Munshi points out, ‘it was [Jinnah] who warned Gandhiji not to encourage the fanaticism of Muslim religious leaders’. And it was Jinnah who, in 1916, succeeded in allaying the fears of Hindu domination among League members, which resulted in the famous Lucknow Pact—a

…the Muslim League is an important communal organization and we [Congress] deal with it as such. But we have to deal with all organizations and individuals that come within our ken. We do not determine the measure of importance or distinction they possess. Jinnah replied: Your tone and language again display the same arrogance and militant spirit, as if the Congress is the sovereign power. I may add that, in my opinion, as I have publicly stated so often, that unless the Congress recognizes the Muslim League on a footing of complete equality and is prepared as such to negotiate for a Hindu–Muslim settlement…a settlement would not be possible. The Nehru–Jinnah personality clash was not a negligible factor when it came to events that led to Partition.

The Transfer of Power papers constitute a comprehensive record of all that passed between Indian leaders and the British government during the crucial period between 1942 and 1947. Its unveiling should have excited subcontinental scholars. It did not. The truth is that the establishments in India and Pakistan had made their adjustments with the reality handed to them in 1947. Upsetting this status quo would expose leaders of the freedom struggle as men with feet of clay. The Economist of April 1990, reviewing H. M. Seervai’s book based on the Transfer of Power documents, recommended that ‘there must be a reappraisal of reputations’. This ‘reappraisal’ has never taken place. Two years after the Transfer of Power papers were published, Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal was able to establish in her Cambridge dissertation, The Sole Spokesman, that ‘it was the Congress which insisted on Partition. It was Jinnah who was against Partition.’ It has been widely accepted that the call for partition was a bargaining ploy whereby Jinnah hoped to strike a better deal for Muslims in a united India. But partnership with Muslims would have made it impossible for the Congress to achieve what Maulana Azad described as ‘unadulterated Hindu Raj’. Partition, in a way, was the gift the Congress gave to the Hindu right, which in the fullness of time, is today’s Hindutva.

VVI

In his book, India Wins Freedom, Maulana Azad,

He argues that, until the very end, Jinnah was merely using Pakistan as a ‘bargaining counter’. The Maulana was vocal and vehement in his opposition to partition and tried to persuade Nehru and Patel to stop it. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a barrister and statesman, was convinced that there were two separate nations within India and rather than be like brothers bickering every day, they should have ‘one clean fight’ instead. The Maulana was pained that Patel had now become an even greater supporter of the two-nation theory than Jinnah. ‘Jinnah may have raised the flag of Partition but now the real flag bearer was Patel’, he notes in his book.

A multicultural India had been a passionate article of faith with Maulana Azad, of course, and he thought this was true of Nehru, too. The Maulana was understandably disappointed at seeing his friend Nehru, whom he considered a man of principle, abandon the idea of a united India. He notes in his book that one of the factors responsible for Nehru being won over was the personality of Lady Edwina Mountbatten who ‘is not only extremely intelligent but has a most attractive and friendly temperament’. He adds that Lady Mountbatten admired her husband deeply and tried to ‘interpret his thoughts to those who would not at first agree with him’. Whatever the case, by now it was clear that despite Nehru’s initial repugnance and resistance to the idea of partition, he was growing used to the idea that there was no other alternative. The Maulana told historian K. M. Ashraf that Nehru was impatient and wanted to become prime minister while Mountbatten was still in India. For Nehru, one sequence of events was non-negotiable—British rule must be replaced by Congress rule in Delhi. If that entailed partition, so be it. And thus it was that the British Raj was replaced in this country by a Raj that was less than satisfactory—one that was billed as being secular was, in fact, what the Maulana described as, ‘undiluted Hindu Raj’. Partition would cast a long shadow upon independent India.

The distressing truth is that in all these exchanges between Mountbatten, Gandhiji, Nehru, Patel and Azad, there is no evidence that there was much thought given to Indian Muslims and their plight. Today’s population of 180 million Muslims have to cope almost daily with a biased state. How could Nehru not have foreseen this state of affairs? Maulana Azad certainly had.

In his book Guilty Men of India’s Partition, socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia wrote: [Congress leaders] paid no heed to Gandhiji’s wish to let the Muslim League govern the country by itself, because they were far too eager to do the business of governing themselves. In fact, they were shamelessly eager. They could have been somewhat more patient, for their own personal advantage. They might not have needed to be patient for too long. Mr Jinnah would either have called them back to keep him company or they would have known how to make him go, if he acted too hurtfully. Congress leaders did not have at this time even that little patience, which is necessary for all selfish interest of a somewhat big size. Not only did they put their personal interest before the national interest, but they had also become incapable of striving for some big-size selfishness, if that meant sacrificing an immediate personal interest, however small it may be.

Lord Mountbatten said to me more in sorrow than in anger that Indian members of the army wanted to take part in [the] killing [of] Muslims in East Punjab, but the British officers restrained them with great difficulty. This, however, I know from personal knowledge that members of the former undivided Indian army killed Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan and Muslims in India.

Not only were Congress leaders eager to wield power in Delhi, they very quickly lost interest in keeping up the pretence that partition had been imposed on them.

Did Nehru not know that there was not a single member in the senior echelons of the party (who later served in his Cabinet) who had any sympathy for the 90 million Muslims (at the time of Independence) who were to be left behind in India? Take the home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, for instance. Lord Archibald Wavell made the following entry about him on 17 March 1947 in his book The Viceroy’s Journal: ‘He is entirely communal and has no sense of compromise or generosity towards Muslims, but he is more of a man than most of the Hindu politicians.’

Michael Brecher in his biography of Nehru is equally blunt: ‘Patel was a staunch Hindu by upbringing and conviction. He never really trusted the Muslims and supported the extremist Hindu Mahasabha view of the ‘natural right of the Hindus to rule India.’ How did Nehru ever imagine that an India partitioned on Hindu–Muslim lines would, somehow, remain secular? Because that is what would make him feel good about himself? Such self delusion.

‘What is the use of my staying?’ he said when he realized Gandhiji was not prepared to listen. ‘He [Gandhiji] seems determined to blacken the name of the Hindus before the whole world.’ Patel was emphatic: he was concerned about the image of ‘Hindus’ not ‘Indians’.

In fact, to explain police inaction to protect Muslims, Patel put out a story that ‘deadly weapons’ had been discovered in the Muslim quarters of Delhi. Azad describes this in his book. Patel’s insinuation was that ‘if the Hindus and the Sikhs had not taken the first offensive, the Muslims would have destroyed them.’ Muslims were very well armed.

Patel, it turns out, may well have established the pattern for the future. In all Hindu–Muslim conflicts, it would be put out that Muslims were well armed. Subsequently, in cases of communal violence, ‘arms’ would inevitably be found with the Muslims. These were the earliest signals given out to the police force of independent India. Today, this is usually the knee-jerk response of the country’s police force towards the Indian Muslim. In cases of alleged terrorism and communal violence, ready-made evidence will be found heaped upon him.

Dear Jawaharlal, I did not say anything yesterday about the Maulana Saheb. But my objection stands. His retiring from the cabinet should not affect our connection with him. There are many positions which he can occupy in public life without any harm to any cause. Sardar is decidedly against his membership in the cabinet and so is Rajkumari. Your cabinet must be strong and effective at the present juncture. It should not be difficult to name another Muslim for the cabinet. I have destroyed the two copies you sent me yesterday. Blessings from Bapu This is a startling letter. Gandhiji had always shown considerable respect for the Maulana. Despite the austerities Gandhiji imposed on living conditions at the Sewagram Ashram, he made exceptions for Maulana Azad. To the surprise of many ashramites, Gandhiji allowed an ashtray—the Maulana was a chain smoker—in his cottage during Congress meetings. Even so, the devaluation of the Maulana in national affairs was sharp once partition had been achieved. Note Gandhiji’s tone in his letter to Nehru—‘it should not be difficult to name another Muslim’ for India’s first cabinet. Gandhiji is quite clear. All that Nehru needs to keep up the secular pretence is to have a token Muslim in his cabinet. How different is this tokenism from the one in vogue all the years since 1947?

He was not a creature of the Hindu–Muslim composite culture we were most comfortable with. No leader other than Nehru was. Our anguish has to do with the fact that Nehru must have known how Congress leaders felt about Muslims who would be in India after partition.

Once again, Nehru demonstrated his helplessness, or was it acquiescence?

This was the esteem in which Nehru was held by Indian Muslims all these years. Imagine then the disillusionment that began to set in over time with the growing realization that even for Nehru, like all the other leaders, including the Mahatma, the secular project was negotiable.

Vajpayee was candid in his speech at Meenakshipuram about the caste prejudices that exist in Hindu society. ‘There is no doubt,’ he said, ‘that our Hindu society suffers from many ills. Distinctions on the basis of birth and caste practised for centuries have not been wiped off. Social ills continue to accumulate. The momentum of reform was not carried forward. But our religion does not approve of such discrimination. Untouchability has no place in our religion… The temples must be open to all; wells must be used by all our brothers and sisters.’

What was disconcerting about all this was that there wasn’t enough soul-searching within the Hindu community on the real reasons that had led to conversions.

But communalization does not take place unthinkingly. It is a deliberate means towards an end of saffronized nation building. Of course, incendiary material has been lying around for such exploitation since 1857. It became more commonplace after 1947.