Being the Other: The Muslim in India

by Saeed Naqvi

Vajpayee had a combination of assets which qualified him to take initiatives on Pakistan that no prime minister in post 1947 India could have taken. He had national stature. More important, he was the tallest leader of the Sangh Parivar—especially the RSS and the BJP. Being the senior-most leader of the Parivar, he could, with a wave of the hand, silence dissent. Prime Minister Modi is also from the RSS stable. But he would never transgress red lines on Pakistan, Kashmir or Hindu–Muslim issues drawn by the Parivar. Vajpayee could think out of the box because he had evolved. Above all, he was a Brahmin. Modi is not—he is a Ghanchi. This will continue to matter so long as caste remains a determinant in India’s social and political life.

Vajpayee did not have to look over his shoulder, Manmohan Singh did.

In 2007, the National Commission for Religious and Linguistic Minorities, also known as the Ranganath Mishra Commission, spelt out how the problems listed by the Sachar Committee Report could be addressed. At this point the government’s attention was quite undividedly focused on the Indo–US civil nuclear deal. It took interest in little else, least of all the upliftment of Indian Muslims. The report gathers dust to this day.

The draft of a communal violence bill on these lines was shot down by Congress leaders for exactly the reasons that such a bill would have been frowned upon by all Congress home ministers beginning with Sardar Patel—it was seen as anti-majority.

two terms under Manmohan Singh for a variety of reasons. Scams completely overshadowed his second term—2009 to 2014. Manmohan Singh looked indecisive and powerless. One incident, more than any other, underlined his helplessness. The prime minister proposed certain conditions under which tainted politicians could contest elections. Crown Prince Rahul Gandhi turned up at the party spokesman’s press conference and said, ‘my opinion on the ordinance is that it is complete nonsense and that it should be torn up and thrown out.’ The incident underlined the fact that Singh could not move a step in any direction without the approval of Sonia or Rahul. He allegedly lamented to his press adviser, Sanjaya Baru: ‘I have come to terms with this. There cannot be two centres of power.’

Modi is perhaps the first Indian prime minister to take advantage of the global mood, which post 9/11, turned angrily upon Muslims as the ‘Other’.

There is a silver lining though. One of the reasons the BJP was trounced in the subsequent Bihar elections was because of the electorate’s deep disgust with the atrocity. Here is a signal that heightened communalism is no longer a guarantee of positive election results.

The trophy for intemperate speech, however, goes to the RSS-trained Tripura governor, Tathagata Roy, who tweeted on 4 January 2016 about the Muslim terrorists killed in the Pathankot attack: ‘Wrap them in pigskin, bury them face down in pig excreta.’ A serving governor employs this kind of speech only when he has the state’s support.

The history of Western conflict is largely the story of conflict between the three Semitic or Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Islam and Judaism. In the West, this conflict reached its peak with the Crusades in the eleventh century. But in India the story was different. Since the advent of Islam in India 1,200 years ago, the dominant narrative has been one of social and cultural accommodation, and occasionally, even mutual admiration.

A much more benign arrival, one that initiated great cultural commerce, was that of the Sufi saint Shahbaz Qalandar, in the early twelfth century, also in Sindh. To this day people across the subcontinent go into a trance listening to ‘Dama dum mast Qalandar’.

With the coming of the Sufis, the tone of Islam’s interaction with Hinduism became softer.

By contrast, Islam’s experience with the Hindu civilization was wholesome and led to the greatest multicultural edifice the world has known. The pity is that today this great edifice is being chipped away by electoral politics. The war on terror is aggravating an already dismal situation. Partition and what it brought in its train has been a body blow to this history of cultural enmeshing. Also harmful has been organized Christian and Muslim proselytization. Whatever the iniquities of the caste system, conversions should not have had official sanction in a society where conversion is taboo.

The war on terror resulted in loss of life, of course. But it has done much worse; it has separated people who have lived together for centuries. This Hindu–Muslim separation of the mind is deeper than anything preceding it. Muslims and non-Muslims have been parcelled into hostile camps. And the control on the levers of this war is America’s which, alas, has no experience of Muslims. We should be guiding them; we have known Muslims since Islam’s founding. After a thousand years of living together, a people are being separated to fight a war initiated by the West for its own reasons.

American strategists like Zbigniew Brzezinski searched for a new role for NATO now that the principal target of the alliance, the Soviet Union, was gone. The German and Japanese economies were booming. Would they come up trumps in the new global power distribution? The word ‘Axis’ reared its head in the minds of the allies. To forestall such outcomes, a coalition of the willing was forged after Saddam Hussein’s dubious occupation of Kuwait. There was a view that US Ambassador April Gillespie in her last meeting with Saddam Hussein had virtually set him up—she signalled that the US would not react. Operation Desert Storm was launched in January 1991. The entire build-up to the first war on Iraq was swallowed by the Indian media hook line and sinker. What provoked Saddam Hussein to occupy Kuwait? No questions were asked in India.

CNN’s live coverage of the war was seen by Western audiences as an enormous triumph coming as it did on the heels of the Soviet collapse. In Arab, indeed all Muslim, societies, the images represented the humiliation of a Muslim country. Instantly, the world was divided into two sets of audiences. For the West, it was victory; for the Muslim world, humiliation.

After 9/11, US-India coordination deepened. Hindu–Muslim differences coincidentally became wider.

When President George W. Bush visited New Delhi in March 2006, he was billed to address a joint session of Parliament. A massive protest by Muslims at Delhi’s Ram Lila grounds forced the government to cancel the event. The Bush-led war on terror cast the US President as the enemy in the minds of Indian Muslims. With the rest of India he was among the most popular US presidents ever. This contradiction became one more fault line in the deepening communal divide. Since the post 9/11 war on terror, every fake encounter or atrocity committed by militant groups has been laid at the doorstep of the country’s Muslim community. This, despite the fact that most Muslims have no association with groups like the Indian Mujahideen (IM).

The former Union Minister for Minority Affairs in the UPA government, Rehman Khan, was categorical. ‘Most Mus...

After 9/11 and 26/11 there is declining sympathy among the majority population for Muslim youth who are falsely picked up as terrorists. It is presumed that they are guilty even if there is no evidence. There is no public outcry when innocents are charged with trumped-up cases. With every such arrest more members of the community turn against the state and may even be persuaded to join militant groups or take to arms. It is a vicious circle. If injustice becomes the law, resistance becomes duty.

If the country were to keep up the pretence of secularism, and equality, it needed the ‘Other’, although those of us who ‘belonged’ to this category seemed to be in short supply.

The thought never occurred to me then, as it does now—that there were larger implications to the way I lived my life and thrived in my chosen career. Jayaprakash Narayan, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Inder Gujral, Pran Chopra, Inder Malhotra, Kuldip Nayar and scores of others—all extended patronage to me and quite rejoiced in it. The environments in which these worthies operated had very few Muslims. After Partition, there was a dearth of enlightened Muslims. Secularism was still invoked even though it was a declining ideal, having been much profaned.

Another reality dawned on me. In a fifty-year career no Muslim had ever helped me strategically and for a good reason: after Partition Muslims seldom reached positions from which they could dispense favours. One or two who did were cautious, averse to helping members of their community. That would open them to the charge of nepotism or communal bias.

A country emerging from layers of feudalism had necessarily developed a system of networks. For a time, caste networks ruled. Everyone was affected. The poorest Brahmin in Mustafabad or Rae Bareli was secure so long as Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant was UP’s chief minister. That powerful network began to collapse as a huge churning overtook Indian society that will continue well into the twenty-first century. Groups and castes will find new levels. But given the current socio-economic condition of the Muslim, as spelt out by Sachar Committee, he is likely to be kept below the churning b...

If enough people in power had decided to take a different path, things would have been radically different. Of that I am convinced, after decades of being an observer and citizen of the subcontinent.

eyes. We have lived in a state of uninstitutionalized apartheid for decades, even centuries. The segregation between people belonging to different religions has been complicated by the restrictions of caste.

As we know, caste in this country is further stratified by the clan you belong to. At the very top of society, with a few exceptions, you are segregated by class and not necessarily by caste. But, at other levels, it becomes progressively oriented towards caste.

Ek hi saf mein khare ho gaye Mahmud-o-Ayaz (Mahmud of Ghazni and his slave stood shoulder to shoulder in prayer.) The mosque, madrasa and the marketplace became centres for social mobility. But even this apparently egalitarian system could not escape stratification—albeit, larger ones: Ashraf, Ajlaf and Arzal. (Elite, weavers and middle craftsmen and the menials.) As we have seen, Sir Syed Ahmad’s Aligarh Muslim University was meant only for the Ashraf, consisting of Sayyids, Pathans and Shaikhs or converts from Hindu upper castes among the Hindus.

In India, separation is enforced by ancient custom and social habit.

Wherever Muslims have embraced the spectacle of India the result has been a flowering of composite culture. Austerities imposed by Muslim reform schools lead to cultural ghettoization.

reality of India–Pakistan, Hindu–Muslim, New Delhi–Srinagar must be grasped. Tinker with any one axis and it will have an immediate impact on the other two. And yet no concerted effort is being made to take a holistic view of the triangle, understand it, and order our behaviour according to its imperatives. Never before have we had it so bad—not a day passes without someone questioning the legitimacy of the Indian Muslim, a call for us to be ‘super patriots’, to prove our patriotism.

Alarm bells are ringing—India needs to affirm its commitment to pluralism, diversity and religious harmony and not pander to politicians—whether from the left-of-centre Congress or the right-of-centre BJP.

Mistakes were made—Partition was one of them. It cannot be undone. The three entities that have grown out of it have to be nurtured, embraced and helped to flourish. Each entity must pull itself out of a negative-identity syndrome—‘We are because we could not live with them.’ This is an endless spiral, leading nowhere. Indo–Pak hostility generates communal hatred, leaves Kashmir unsettled. Revert to the triangle—that is the objective reality.

Towards this end, temperatures on the Indo–Pak, Hindu–Muslim, New Delhi–Srinagar axes have to be lowered.

At the same time Pakistan will need to be reminded, in no uncertain terms, that the export of terror will not be permitted. The ‘global war on terror’ cannot be allowed to exploit existing fault lines in this country. As to Kashmir, we will need to negotiate carefully and sensitively to build on whatever positive trends exist to find a lasting solution to the problem of India’s most sensitive state.

Of course, Indian Muslims must be freed from the clutches of their clerics just as Hindus need to turn away from communal politicians.

The real maha yudh is for the soul of India. Two visions are in epic contest—a vision of a mythical communally-charged past glory versus an India of rational enlightenment that is gentler and more egalitarian. This is the basic tussle in which Muslims are being squeezed. Obviously, it is the latter f...

strategies have to be devised to defeat the hardliners on both sides who will always impede that agenda. We have heard enough of these homilies.

The consequences of Partition are three uneasy nations. They cannot be undone. If they are to thrive and prosper, they have to progress together.

Turfatar yeh hai, ki apna bhi na jaana, aur yun hee Apna, apna kehke humko sabse beygaana kiya (The irony is that you never considered me your own; You only claimed me, until I was a stranger to everybody.)