The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

NOT too long ago, as time is measured in history, foreign communists were barred from the United States while their home-grown American comrades, who lurked in camouflage in movie studios and on liberal campuses, were subjected to McCarthyism’s hateful scrutiny. Did anyone, including Muslims around the world, feel empathy, leave alone lift a finger against the profiling of an egalitarian idea?

It’s only now decades after his death that Americans have warmed up to Che Guevara’s iconic mystique, sporting sweatshirts with a range of his smiling photos. These enthusiasts are perhaps unaware that his CIA-sponsored captors severed their newfound hero’s hands for forensic evidence lest they had mowed down the wrong man. The sweatshirts remind one of pictures of maharajas and viceroys with majestic tigers they had shot with cowardly guns.

Why such brouhaha about Donald Trump’s plans to bar certain Muslims from the United States? The American voters, for better or worse, agreed to do without the communists yesterday. It was considered normal body temperature for the free world to curse them. Now should they choose to ban visas for Muslims after the November verdict, why must anybody care?

Or are we saying today that it was wrong to ban the comrades yesterday, if for no other reason than for the fact that even the Ku Klux Klan thrives as a favoured idea in swathes of the world’s most chest-thumping democracy after India? Or are we arguing that it was good to not have the godless subversives but it would be rank bad to ban Muslims anyway. The only places Muslims were required to travel to were Makkah and China, one to perform religious obligations and the other to gain knowledge.


For the young soldier’s father to make a political intervention using his son’s death should be seen as out of line.


If I remember correctly, Urdu poet Kaifi Azmi, a top apparatchik of the Communist Party’s cultural wing, the Indian Peoples Theatre Association (IPTA), had applied to go to the United States. He was asked in the visa form if he was ever a communist or a member of the party. Taking the easier route, he wrote ‘no’. A friendly diplomat from the US consulate in Bombay dropped by to show him a hard copy of an entire career profile of poems he wrote and meetings he attended against American imperialism. We don’t know how they both got around the issue, but apparently they did.

Who knows, perhaps in the foreseeable future people will deny their being Muslim in order to get past Trump’s visa scrutiny. Will a scrupulously detailed dossier not challenge the submissions? Will Trump be more indulgent towards Muslims who never went to the mosque, or didn’t pray? Will they be counted as good emigrants by a Republican presidency? What a Faustian bargain it would be for both. Imagine keeping away from the mosque to be eligible for a visa.

On the other hand, suppose a young Muslim lands on American shores under Trump’s watch, and expresses a wish to join the US army, and go to Iraq, would the application even be processed? Wouldn’t the leader break into a rash?

Which brings me to the much-televised hypocrisy I have just hinted at, one that is claimed to have enough charge in it to turn the tide in the American polls. Now poor Captain Humayun Khan laid down his life in Iraq as a loyal and professional soldier of the US Army. That is how good soldiers mostly are: fearlessly ready to follow any potentially fatal command of their superiors. When a roadside bomb killed the young man it was as tragic as the death of his many colleagues who paid the ultimate price as soldiers in Iraq and other regions of vicious wars. For Humayun’s father to make a political intervention using his son’s death should be seen as out of line.

When he flashed the pocket edition of the American constitution in response to Trump’s anti-Muslim remarks, he was applauded. The father’s argument was that his son’s martyrdom was proof that Muslims coming to the United States were loyal useful citizens. It was a strange way to argue a simple point. People, including Muslims, may want to escape to the United States from wars that America set off in their countries, not to go to one again. What about them?

In any case the American constitution was flashed in the face of Muhammad Ali too, not by a Muslim stricken by victimhood, but by the agencies of US law. What did Ali say when he was asked to board the flight to Vietnam to fight those who hadn’t harmed him. He preferred to say ‘no’ and accept the consequences. They were harsh consequences, which stripped a great boxer of his title as a boxer. Tell me honestly, who is a truer American icon, Muhammad Ali or Captain Humayun Khan?

Did Humayun’s father consider as an American citizen, just as no doubt Ali was, that his son was sent to fight a wrong war, where young Americans are sacrificed for conflicts that are based on lies? Does that register with him? There is still something he can do for Muslims coming to the United States or those that find it difficult going to Europe, over fears that a few of them could pose a threat to those that trusted them. The senior Mr Khan might take up the cudgels against the Daesh, not harass a politician with an uncertain future.

And if the Democratic Party that sponsored the victimhood speech is truly worried about the profiling of Muslims, they should consider other arenas. India, for example, plans to exclude battered Muslims and Christians from people who can seek refuge or citizenship from an ethnically troubled neighbourhood. Else, Julian Assange has a point. The American elections, he said, was a choice between cholera and gonorrhoea. He didn’t say which was which. Perhaps the communists have some idea about that. Mr Khan obviously doesn’t.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 16th, 2016

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