Being the Other: The Muslim in India

by Saeed Naqvi

The Muslim, in this circumstance, must demonstrate sensitivity to a people who do not convert but can be converted.

Ill-advised conversions must become a thing of the past. Conscientious objection, dissent and defection from a faith are individual decisions. Nothing worries the Hindu more than conversions. All proselytizing systems will have to be sensitive to the fact that Hindus seek to convert nobody.

The important fact is that Hindustan is the Hindu’s home as it is the home of Indian Muslims, and there must be mutual respect between the two. That said, nobody disputes the fact that some aspects of Hinduism need reform. If these reforms do take place there will be even less cause for ‘genuine...

Today, however, Hindu organizations seem more interested in reconverting those who have left the fold, and changing the very nature of Hinduism, rather than looking to any genuine reform of ills within the community. Many of the objectives of such organizations are overtly political and seem to have no interest in bettering the lot of Hindus.

The only way to put an end to the friction and divisions of this business of conversions and counter-conversions (the infamous ‘ghar-wapsi’ programmes) is to aggressively celebrate the syncretic culture that is endemic to this country of multiple, very old faiths.

In December 1991, a decade after the Meenakshipuram conversions, Dr Murli Manohar Joshi, who was the president of the BJP at the time, embarked on a high profile Ekta Yatra (or National Unity March) across the country. When Dr Joshi’s Ekta Yatra was announced, I teased him by coming up with an itinerary of my own. I said I would persuade friends to join his Ekta Yatra if he accepted alterations in his travel plan. I accepted his starting point—Kanyakumari, symbolically India’s southern tip, which neighbours Kerala, the first state he was to travel through for any length of time. And, after all, it was in Kerala that Adi Shankaracharya began his epic journey, and there is nothing wrong with political leaders imitating great men. I then suggested that Joshi should dwell a little longer in this marvellous stretch of land between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea because I cannot think of any place in the world which has accorded hospitality to more religions than Kerala. Christianity flourished here when our cousins in Europe were still rather behind by any measure. It was and continues to be Christianity in an Indian mould—marriages cannot be solemnized without the bride wearing the traditional thali. Why, even that new theology of our times—communism—was given entry into Kerala for the first time in the world through the ballot box, in 1957. The rest of my suggested itinerary for Dr Joshi went something like this: Once you have soaked in the Catholicism of this wonderfu...

The Babri Masjid demolition served as a shocking eyeopener for Indian Muslims. It destroyed whatever confidence the community had in the Indian political class and the political party which had governed the country for the greater part of the post-Independence era, namely the Congress. After the Babri Masjid was brought down, Muslims began to reflect deeply on all the injustices that had been done to the community, beginning with Partition in 1947. They discussed promises that had been made and broken.

Whenever riots were required to divide communities and consolidate British control that had been shaken after the joint Hindu–Muslim Revolt of 1857, they would revive the Mandir–Masjid dispute.

The communal picture changed after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The insecurity of the Muslim grew with every passing year. The mosque was demolished on 6 December 1992, but the planning for the event had gone on for three years.

Here was a Congress prime minister for whom a Congress revival in the north was a threat to his political future.

Rao was also paranoid about the Brahmins’ declining power nationally and within the Congress. This was another reason for him to instinctively checkmate Arjun Singh, a Thakur, from playing a larger role in north Indian politics. He was more comfortable playing the politics of accommodation with Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a Brahmin, even on the issue of Babri Masjid–Ram Janmabhoomi.

Vajpayee expressed anguish at the demolition but an intelligence video of his speech in Lucknow, given a day before the demolition (which surfaced in 2005 and was accessed by Outlook magazine), seems to suggest he was aware that it might happen. Speaking to kar sevaks, Vajpayee, in his trademark style, without any reference to the masjid, said, ‘The Supreme Court has allowed bhajan–kirtan. One man cannot perform bhajan alone. And kirtan cannot be performed standing up. How long can we stand? Sharp stones are emerging from the ground. No one can sit on them. The ground has to be levelled (Zameen ko barabar karna padega).’ The irony in his tone was unmistakable.

Vajpayee continued with his speech even as the crowd applauded: ‘If yagya begins tomorrow there will be some construction…It is winter. There are those who have come from the south who are not used to this weather. For them, a shamiana will have to be put up…I do not know what will happen tomorrow…I wanted to go to Ayodhya but I was told to go to Delhi.’ This footage of Vajpayee’s speech, recorded by intelligence, was surely available to Narasimha Rao. But the footage never saw the light of day for over twelve years. According to sources, it remained under wraps because someone at the highest level in the central government did not want it to be made public. Had the video been released, it would have been embarrassing for Vajpayee.

For Indian Muslims, their place in Indian society changed radically after the Babri Masjid demolition.

After the demolition and subsequent riots, covert dislike of Muslims in this country has become a lot more open and frequent.

All I wanted to know from him was the Muslim response to the Bombay blasts. He parked his taxi near the kerb, looked at me with piercing eyes. He then smiled and introduced himself as Hanif (name changed) and shared with me a truth as he would with a long lost-friend. ‘It had to be done,’ he said. Slowly, this calm man began to explode. ‘They pulled down the mosque—they began to beat Muslims, burnt their houses in Jhansi, Pratapgarh, Bhopal, Kanpur. As if that was not enough—they started it in Mumbai. Sharad Pawar was defence minister. Why didn’t he send in the troops? Because he wished to score points over Chief Minister Sudhakar Naik.’

I told Russi that if injustice becomes law, people like Hanif would be part of the resistance.

Those who blamed Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao for having donned soft saffron during the Masjid demolition forget that the pro-Hindu strategy, inaugurated by Indira Gandhi during the Jammu elections in 1983, was patented by the Congress. Her son, Rajiv Gandhi, was no exception. During the Bhagalpur riots in 1989, Bihar’s chief minister, Satyendra Narayan Singh, had removed the superintendent of police in Bhagalpur, Krishna Swaroop Dwivedi, because he had not been able to stop direct police involvement in the carnage that followed. When Rajiv Gandhi visited Bhagalpur he promptly reinstated Dwivedi. Since 1984 his cousin Arun Nehru had taught him a mantra: we must not allow our Hindu support to drift away. Even before the shilanyas, Rajiv Gandhi had done something equally damaging. He kicked off the party’s general election campaign in 1989 from Ayodhya promising ‘Ram Rajya’ in India. Rajiv Gandhi had actually promised to establish a ‘government based on the principles of Lord Ram’. He thought he was stealing the Sangh Parivar’s platform. It was within this framework that he allowed the temple’s bricklaying ceremony to take place. This encouraged Hindu organizations to raise the bar a little higher. ‘This is not the foundation of a temple; this is the foundation of Hindu Rashtra,’ said Ashok Singhal of the VHP.

‘They have cheated the Muslims.’ He then blurted out: ‘The deal with the VHP was struck at the very top.’ He knew what he was talking about. ‘In UP the Congress is finished,’ he declared. His words would prove prophetic.

Shockingly, none of the bhakts or their leaders make any mention of Ram, Ayodhya or a Hindu Rashtra; instead, there is a compulsive obsession with Pakistan. Here’s why. The incantations about Pakistan were designed to taunt Indian Muslims who were identified as the Other—the hate objects and against whom the general frenzy of the Ayodhya mob was directed.

One final impression of the lamentable incident of 6 December 1992. Not only was the incident itself condemnable but the manner in which it took place was reprehensible. Let me be clear: the demolition of the Babri Masjid was not a pious, solemn act of faith; it was an assault by a frenzied mob in a black mood. At home, my wife’s reaction was numbed horror. My mother hurriedly called a family meeting. There was a touch of déjà vu about this. I have gone through several such meetings in recent years: Ayodhya, after all, was the culmination of an extended process. But there was a major difference: this was no outpouring of religious fervour, it was a calculated political act.

Naqvi: Zahid e tang nazar ne mujhe kafir jaana/Aur kafir yeh samajhta hai Mussalman hoon main (The kafir thinks I am a Muslim and the mullah thinks I am a kafir).

I have reproduced almost my entire interview with Deoras because I think it is important to know that even a hardcore RSS leader was willing to accept that the Othering of India’s Muslims couldn’t go on indefinitely without turning the country into a war zone where no one, not the majority nor the minorities, especially the Muslims, would prosper.

It also broke the back of any residual faith in governments and political parties that the Muslim community might have retained after the twin shocks of the Babri Masjid demolition and the 1992–1993 Bombay riots that followed.

It was easy to whip up frenzy among Jats—the only rumour that needed to be broadcast was that a Jat woman had been seduced by a circumcized Muslim. Over the decades, circumcision has been built up as a challenge to Hindu virility. Acharya Giriraj Kishore warned women journalists to steer clear of Muslim men ‘who get themselves circumcised to give our girls greater pleasure as part of their love jihad’. This is demoralizing stuff, inducing great psychological anxieties. As it is Jat women are in short supply. Poaching by outsiders would lead to further depletion.

Whipping up anxiety about the ‘Muslim threat’ would be one way to weld together hugely diverse, and often antagonistic, castes into one community, erasing the structural divisions in a caste-ridden society.

This was before Partition—jockeying had begun to weld Hindu society into a unified India. Caste politics in post-Partition India made Hindu consolidation an imperative: targeting Muslims became an electoral expedient.

Martha Nussbaum, noted US commentator and thinker, has pointed out that ‘the creation of virulent masculinities is perhaps a part of the project of nationalisms of the European variety.’ Emulating this project other communities, are also creating masculinities of the European sort. She notes that Israel and India are both seats of construction of this notion of virulent masculinities, both directed at Muslims, classified in colonial discourse as ‘martial races’.

Historian and scholar Tanika Sarkar notes that ‘there is a dark sexual obsession about the ultra-virile Muslim male bodies and over-fertile Muslim female ones.’ Recounting the unspeakable horrors perpetrated on Muslim women and children in the Gujarat carnage, she offers the following explanation: ‘In readings of community violence, rape is taken to be a sign of collective dishonouring of a community. The same patriarchal order that designates the female body as the symbol of lineage and community purity, would designate the entire collectivity as impure and polluted, once their woman is raped by an outsider.’ Sarkar goes on to describe the environment at shakhas where boys are fed legends of the rape of Hindu women during Partition and the abduction of Hindu women all through history by Muslim men, creating a perpetual fear of virile Muslim men luring away Hindu girls, ‘a kind of penis envy and anxiety about emasculation that can only be overcome by doing violent deeds’. And finally, there are the anxieties whipped up over generations about ‘Muslim fertility rates’, of their uncontrolled breeding and ‘the drying up of future [Hindu] progeny’. These attacks engender fear and anxiety about the future. Such attempts to saffronize the minds and outlook of Indians make common people, you and me, complicit in morally offensive steps, which of course is their purpose.

Despite Vajpayee’s RSS lineage, he never came across to me in grim, communal light—in fact, I found him much less divisive than Congress prime ministers like P V. Narasimha Rao, for instance. I base this observation on years of reporting and interacting with a procession of Indian prime ministers. No one can lay blame at Vajpayee’s door for patently anti-Muslim policies. I say this even though it has always been believed that the Congress is comparatively more sympathetic to Muslims and despite the fact that Jawaharlal Nehru (who was prime minister from August 1947 to May 1964) was revered by the Muslim community. Vajpayee belonged to a party which regarded Indian Muslims as the Other. But he recognized that if the country was to come together and move forward, the Muslims would have to be reassured and integrated into the idea of India and Bharat.

He remained the undisputed leader of Indian Muslims to the very end despite the many ways in which he let them down. The trauma of Partition, the disappointment over the abolition of zamindari, the pogroms against Muslims in Hyderabad and Kashmir, all of which took place on Nehru’s watch, were enough to shake the faith of Muslims in ‘Pandit Nehru’, as we affectionately addressed him. But the community did not desert him.

Jap raha hai aaj maala ek Hindu ki Arab. Baraham-zaadey mein shaan-e-dilbari aisi to ho! (The Arab world is chanting the name of a Hindu! A Brahmin with such an incredible ability to win hearts and minds!) Hikmat-e-Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru ki qasam! Mar mitey Islam jis pe, kaafiri aisi to ho! (Look at the vision of Pandit Nehru! A non-believer and yet the world of Islam lies at his feet!)

In a sense, two sets of Indians were orphaned after Nehru: Indian Muslims and Macaulay’s children—creatures of Western enlightenment—who looked upon Nehru as a model. Nehru was never a traditionalist but he could abide by traditions to protect his political interests.

What took my breath away was her response to my first question. She placed her chin on the palms of her hands like a yoga asana, and looked into the far distance. I repeated the question. ‘Why did you declare a state of Emergency?’ It was not rocket science to anticipate that, under the circumstances, this would have to be the first question. But Yunus cut in. ‘Ask the next question.’ All that I had heard about Mrs Gandhi being the ‘Iron Lady’ and ‘Durga’ vanished in that instant. I have seldom seen anybody look more petrified.

Without any goodbyes, Yunus dragged me away to his room. With a virtual gun to my head, Yunus asked me to write out the questions and dictated answers which made no sense.

I still remember Romesh Thapar, the editor of Seminar, grasping Arun Shourie by the hand and trooping into Ramnath Goenka’s house. ‘Please don’t compromise with Mrs Gandhi,’ Thapar pleaded. ‘You and Arun are the only opposition we have.’ Newspapers were being invited to abandon their classical adversarial role vis-à-vis the establishment.

In a sense it was her ‘Hindu’ card which caused her to build up Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale as the Sikh Other. Bhindranwale’s excesses caused her to send the army in to get him, although it would mean damaging the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. She wrote the script for her own end, however unwittingly.

The massive mandate was interpreted differently by Congressmen. That there was a huge sympathy wave after Mrs Gandhi’s brutal killing was recognized. But many saw the victory as Hindu consolidation against a decade-old Sikh extremism. This dangerous appraisal gave birth to a more lasting one vis-à-vis the biggest minority in the country, namely Muslims.

Obviously the ‘appeasement’ talk scared Congressmen. Subsequent steps taken by the party were based on this fear—the opening of the Ayodhya temple locks, for instance. Even after the Ranganath Mishra Commission spelt out unambiguously what needed to be done to redress the condition of Muslims, Congress leaders refused to act.

The Congress’s entire approach to Muslims during this period should be seen through the prism of electoral politics. Any overture to help Muslims would, in this appraisal, lead to a haemorrhaging of the Hindu vote. As we have noted, Congress leaders like Sitaram Kesri felt that one of the reasons for Rajiv’s massive victory in 1984 was Hindu appreciation for strong action against Sikh communalism. An extension of this argument was that no minority community should be ‘appeased’ because that would precipitate a Hindu backlash.

Congress had not given up on the Muslims quite yet, but it became ambiguous in its position vis-à-vis them—on...

While the Congress under Rajiv wavered, the BJP had its eyes focused on Ayodhya and the Congress’s growing ambivalence on its traditional secular platform.

The Congress tried to devise a strategy of ‘soft Hindutva’ to win the Hindu vote. Naturally, the real Hindutva of the BJP was preferred.

Nevertheless, as we have seen, Rajiv made a last-ditch effort to attract Hindu votes. In 1989, he turned up in the holy city of Ayodhya and inaugurated the election campaign by promising Ram Rajya. This was quite extraordinary because Rajiv was a very unlikely devotee of Lord Ram. He was not in the least religious, like the majority of Doon School boys. Also, as he had surrounded himself with a coterie of these boys, his promise of Ram Rajya was not convincing. It only served to advance the BJP’s prospects.

As I’ve pointed out, Rao saw the Congress revival in the north as inimical to his political interests.

During the parliamentary elections in 1991, the Congress did poorly in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan and to a lesser extent, Madhya Pradesh. Worse still, the Congress was trounced in the state assemblies. The situation was custom-made for Rao’s real political inclinations. He could now evolve a policy of live and let live with the BJP. This meant: do not disturb the Congress at the centre and the centre will extend a helping hand to the four BJP states.

As I have mentioned earlier in the book, Rao’s role during the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 was dubious. On 4 December, upon his return from Lucknow, Arjun Singh, Rao’s bête noire and Union Minister for Human Resource Development, told me there was every chance of the Babri Masjid being demolished by the 200,000 kar sevaks who had assembled at Ayodhya for the temple agitation. The leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and chief minister of West Bengal, Jyoti Basu, telephoned Rao and said that he should impose President’s Rule on UP because the BJP chief minister, Kalyan Singh, could not be trusted to protect the Babri Masjid and maintain law and order. This was the ‘field’ information Basu had obtained. The Babri Masjid was demolished exactly two days after Jyoti Basu made this phone call alerting the prime minister. In my view, by not taking strong action to save the mosque, Rao remained on the right side of the BJP. With the destruction of the mosque, Muslims who stayed with the Congress despite serious misgivings since 1947 came face-to-face with the stark reality: the Congress had short-changed them from the very beginning.

Rao was going through a phase when his interests as a Brahmin superseded his interests as a Congressman. It can be said without fear of being contradicted that if Rao were given the power to choose between Arjun Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee as prime minister, he would have, without any hesitation, cast his vote for Vajpayee. He was politically the most ‘Hindu’ of all Congress prime ministers.

When Congress president Sitaram Kesri pulled down the Gowda government by withdrawing Congress support, fear gripped senior Congress leaders that the low-caste Kesri would throw his hat in the ring for the top job of Congress president. Overnight a coup was organized and Sonia Gandhi was made Congress president. Kesri had been Congress treasurer for eighteen years with never the hint of a scandal. His son rode a rickety bicycle in Patna. What law of nature would have been violated if he had become prime minister?

Vajpayee did make a real bid for improved ties with Pakistan. His visit to Minar-e-Pakistan in Lahore (which marks the site where the Lahore Resolution—the first call for the creation of Pakistan—was passed) put to rest any doubts the Pakistani establishment may have had about the long-term Indian perspective. Vajpayee was confirming the finality of Pakistan.