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December 7, 2003
Review: Rage and retribution
AN Indian Muslim reader of my weekly column in Dawn, who has become a friend after months of correspondence by email, is bitter about the assumption by Pakistanis that they are the only Muslims in the subcontinent. According to him, the words and actions of our leaders over the years have often adversely affected the position of Indian Muslims. This perception has been confirmed and reinforced by Rafiq Zakaria in his book Communal Rage in Secular India.
Hindu-Muslim relations in India have come under the international spotlight following last year’s terrible genocide in Gujarat. This pogrom, with its documented acts of barbarism that included immolation, rape and torture, went on for days under the nose of the state administration with no effort to check the slaughter. Over a year later, the courts have found nobody responsible for these acts that shamed India before the world, and severely compromised its secular standing. Reading the chapter dealing with these atrocities in Zakaria’s book is chilling work.
But what led up to this anti-Muslim frenzy beyond the immediate trigger of the burning of a railway carriage containing some 50 Hindutva activists? Zakaria, a well-known scholar, puts much of the blame at Pakistan’s and Jinnah’s door. After Partition, much of the educated, professional middle class migrated to Pakistan, leaving poor, uneducated Muslims to the mercy of backward mullahs who have led their followers into the most wretched backwaters of India to become a despised underclass. And the presence of a hostile and bellicose Pakistan has made the loyalty of these unfortunate people questionable in Indian eyes. Our aggressive Kashmir policy adds to the anti- Muslim feelings so prevalent in India today.
Jinnah’s two-nation theory has come back to haunt Indian Muslims: nationalist Hindus cite it when they say Muslims should go to Pakistan. “Ya qabristan jao, ya Pakistan jao!” (Go to the graveyard or go to Pakistan) has become a facile slogan to mock Muslims. Indeed, the two-nation theory as propounded by Jinnah stated clearly that Hindus and Muslims could not live together as they belonged to totally different cultures. While this xenophobic sentiment was the basis of the demand for Pakistan, it placed Indian Muslims in a very tenuous situation.
One indicator of the rising anti-Muslim sentiment in India is the fact that in the 55 years since Partition, there have been more communal riots than during the 150 years of British rule. Another statistic that has eroded the political position of Indian Muslims lies in the reduction of their share in the population from 33 per cent at Independence to the current 12 per cent. Had the subcontinent not been divided, argues Zakaria, Muslims would have been too large a minority to push around.
But despite their drastically reduced demographic (and hence political) presence, Indian Muslims have continued to stress their separateness, thereby incurring the wrath of the majority. An obscurantist leadership has demanded (and received) all kinds of constitutional exceptions, depriving Muslims of many civil rights enjoyed by other Indian citizens. This adherence to archaic traditions has deepened the divide between Hindus and Muslims. The first two post-Partition generations of Muslims tended to cling to Urdu as a badge of identity, depriving their children of a modern, secular education. This has made the whole community more backward.
Going back in history, Hindu extremists now openly talk of getting even for the centuries of Muslim invasions and dominance. The destruction of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya was an expression of this growing expression of Hindu nationalism. Zakaria says that Mahmood of Ghazni’s depredations into India a thousand years ago had little to do with Islam and were basically expeditions aimed at loot and plunder. However, Ferishta’s monumental History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, translated into English by John Briggs in 1829, tells a different story. According to Ferishta, on an expedition to India in 1011, Mahmood was informed about a Hindu holy city called Tahnesur and determined to conquer it. Raja Anundpal sent his brother with an offer of “fifty elephants and jewels of a considerable amount” apart from meeting the cost of the expedition if Mahmood would spare Tahnesur.
Mahmood is quoted as replying: “The religion of the faithful inculcates the following tenet: ‘That in proportion as the tenets of the Prophet (PBUH) are diffused, and his followers exert themselves in the subversion of idolatry, so shall be their reward in heaven; that, therefore, it behoved him, with the assistance of God, to root out the worship of idols from the face of all India. How then should he spare Tahnesur?”
Ferishta goes on to record that ‘the city was plundered, the idols broken, and the idol Jugsoma was sent to Ghazny to be trodden under foot’ This is not to imply that subsequent Hindu-Muslim relations were equally stained with religious prejudice. For the most part, Hindus and Muslims lived peacefully side by side for centuries, but in the Muslim ruling classes, there was a measure of arrogance: having governed much of India for most of the last millennium, they were not prepared to play second fiddle after the British left, and this led to the politics of separation in the last century.
In a moving foreword, the Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, adds his voice to Zakaria’s in a powerful plea for tolerance. The author has seen fit to publish a letter from Vajpayee on the back cover of his book. Although the Indian PM is eloquent on the subject of tolerance (“Claims of superiority or exclusivity in the interpretation of the Ultimate Truth are, therefore, alien to our culture, and so are intolerance, sectarianism and violence in the name of religion”), somehow his words ring a little hollow in the aftermath of the Gujarat genocide.
Communal Rage in Secular India
By Rafiq Zakaria
Popular Prakashan Pvt. Ltd, India Available in Pakistan with Mr Books, 10-D Super Market, Islamabad. Tel: 051-2278843-5
Email: mrbooks@isb.comsats.net.pk Website:
www.mrbooks.com.pk
ISBN 81-7991-070-9
248pp. Rs695
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