August 18, 2008	Monday	Sha'aban 15, 1429

Archives Write to Mr. Jawed Naqvi

FOR a brief while in his otherwise turbulent rule, Rajiv Gandhi had everyone’s blessings, which is not ultimately a good situation to be in. He had set out to project a liberal 21st century face for the country. So he had the backing of liberal Indians. But he also flirted with religious obscurantism, partly under the influence of the coterie of advisers, a relic from his mother’s kitchen cabinet, and partly because the whole world was turning religious anyway.

Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran followed Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan. In India, around the same time, a major event that masked the arrival of full-blooded religious obscurantism was the coming together of Hindu and Muslim revivalists, supported by a wing of communists, in an experimental coalition called the Janata Party. The coalition was formed in Indian prisons where members of rightwing Jamaat-i-Islami and the Hindu revivalist RSS cooled their heels under Mrs Gandhi’s emergency rule.

The short-lived Janata Party administration saw Messrs Atal Behari Vajpayee and Lal Kishan Advani ably assisted in their revivalist agenda by Pratap Chander Chunder, a little-known politician from Bengal whose first job as education minister was to ban history school textbooks written by renowned scholars like Romila Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Bipan Chandra. The books apparently questioned the axioms of India’s religious piety and purity. They also blew away the myth of India’s golden past that revivalists everywhere use to conjure images for a future construct. Mr Advani did the same job as information minister. He showed inflammatory films like Swayam Siddh on TV, which targeted Christian missionaries, among others, as enemies of India.

Such was the force of newly-unleashed religious upsurge that upon her return to power in 1980, Indira Gandhi sought unconditional friendship with both main groups of obscurantism. In doing so her advisers invented a third community to demonise. Her tragic relationship with the Sikhs is all to well recorded, and her son, despite big efforts, was unable to seriously woo the community. But this was not the end of the matter as far as Rajiv’s misplaced proclivity to jump into a bitter-sweet relationship with religious entities went.

I remember going to meet him with some of the most open-minded Muslims the country could boast of. Liberal artists like Habib Tanvir, Saeed Mirza and perhaps Shabana Azmi together with senior Muslim academics pleaded with Rajiv not to overrule the Supreme Court’s verdict in what came to be known as the Shahbano case. The apex court had handed the Muslim divorcee maintenance allowance from her former husband, which the Muslim clergy objected to, saying it was interference in their religious laws. Gandhi gave us tea and biscuits, but excused himself from the responsibility of taking on the clergy.

He said he was happy to meet liberal Muslims, which made all of us squirm. But, he insisted, the main issue of our discussion was really something for the community to decide. So please could we influence the Muslim Personal Law Board and get them to change their approach to the case. It was another matter that the board was set up by a government fiat, which could be changed. He pleaded helplessness in the matter and then he used his brute majority to pass a regressive law that overturned the Supreme Court’s secular verdict on behalf of a Muslim destitute. Shahbano died in penury. To balance this political foolishness, Rajiv Gandhi embarked on a mission to appease the Hindus. He got the locks removed from the Babri mosque in Ayodhya paving the way for Hindus to pray there. A dormant issue suddenly became the keystone of resurgent nationalism.

The rise of Students’ Islamic Movement of India, or SIMI, is an offshoot of this compulsive indulgence of religious obscurantism by India’s liberal politicians. Following a clutch of disturbing bomb attacks, in which the intelligence agencies in their wisdom pointed at SIMI’s culpability, the group was shunned as a terrorist organisation. It was back in the spotlight last week after it was named in recent attacks in Gujarat, Karnataka and Rajasthan, among other states. But the factors that gave rise to its growth still continue to flourish under the benign care of the Indian state. (The bias for religion became even more pronounced after the country’s law courts banned workers’ rallies as a nuisance to the middle classes, but went out of their way to accommodate religious processions, which inevitably mutated into naked street power. The irony is that quasi-religious groups like the Shiv Sena and VHP today lead wildcat strikes, not communists any longer, or social democrats, if there are any left. Move over the Jamaat-i-Islami nourished by Gen Zia-ul-Haq).

Is religion used in India in a similar way that it was exploited to beat back communism in other parts of the world? And did it then turn upon its former mentors here as has happened elsewhere? Anyway, SIMI is an offshoot of the Jamaat-i-Islami and is now believed to work independently. The Jamaat is a leading member of the Muslim Personal Law Board created by Indira Gandhi. The board’s other component is the Jamiat-ul-Islami. If SIMI is indeed behind the blasts in Ahmedabad as the Gujarat police chief has claimed then its other name should be Indian Mujahideen, the group that sent the email warning about the attacks.

That email is in fact a 14-page document and extremely well written and highly incendiary at that. The sender has a grouse against everyone that crosses its path, most notably Gujarati Hindus and lawyers who are opposed to giving Muslim terror suspects legal protection. The email spits venom on Muslims too, targeting those among them who it says are informers and hypocrites. The brimming poison of the email should not detract from some valid criticism it makes of the system and the way it has approached India’s minorities. This is a point someone like Shabana Azmi, who is otherwise perpetually in the cross hair of Muslim clergy, would not entirely disagree with.

There is also apprehension on the other hand that SIMI leaders arrested from different parts of the country last week may not get a fair chance to present their side of the story. The Supreme Court had to intervene to order some of the cases of communal frenzy unleashed there in 2002 to be heard outside Gujarat. That is credibility with the apex court. On the other hand, the Indian media’s tendency to swallow any old story on terrorism handed by the system is a major disappointment. This is a recurring feature of the way terrorism is reported in India. The stories are too easily constructed, almost like a kindergarten jigsaw. And it is not as though the media, like the investigating sleuths, does not cook up their own stories.

Who can forget the trauma of Iftikhar Gilani who was arrested for alleged espionage six years ago. Two days later, on June 11, 2002, the Hindustan Times quoted Gilani, who worked with the Kashmir Times, as admitting that he was an ISI agent. For that fictitious report Gilani had to rot in Tihar jail for seven gruelling months. The reporter got a plum posting with a leading TV new channel. And that was that. We don’t know what the facts about SIMI’s role in the blasts are and we are not confident the truth will be known because of the peculiar politics of the government in Gujarat. For so many of us, however, it is bad enough that the group was nurtured by the state, as are other religious groups under its care, to pre-empt a stable secular democracy from striking roots in the country. Groups like SIMI are helping the Indian state become more militarist. Is that the subplot?

jawednaqvi@gmail.com