TO put the focus on 61 years of our independence being observed this week, the Times of India carried an article on Phulpur, the rural constituency of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. The region once nurtured by Nehru “appears to be in a time warp”, the Times lamented.

“The mobile phone network is about the only thing that functions in Phulpur; the SDM’s office doesn’t even have a landline. It was disconnected after unpaid bills ran into tens of thousands of rupees. The SDM keeps in touch with his district on cellphone, but keeping it charged is a challenge. Electricity, assured for 18 to 20 hours in Allahabad, is never available for more than five hours a day here. But its people can’t even complain: their voice in the Lok Sabha, don-turned-politician Ateeq Ahmed, is cooling his heels in Naini jail nearby.”

To compound the irony, Ateeq Ahmed came out of jail recently to take part in a trust vote moved by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. He was part of the big picture involving similar jailbirds who voted on the motion, who all derived political legitimacy from their arithmetical importance. That is one irony the journey from Nehru to Ahmed as a reflection of the decaying state and of what passes for normal democracy in India today. The reaction of the establishment to Omar Abdullah’s impassioned speech in defence of Kashmiri protests in the ongoing Amarnath shrine imbroglio presented a totally different approach.

“You people (BJP) talk of Amarnath.... Show me one place where any Kashmiri has spoken against the yatra...where they have attacked Amarnath yatris. It was an issue concerning our land. We fought for our land, and will continue to fight for our land till our dying breath,” he bluntly told parliament during the trust vote. It would not be wrong to compare the hostile reaction that greeted Abdullah’s intellectually earnest speech, to the cynicism that greeted Mohammed Ali Jinnah in the Congress party in the 1920s. People don’t seem to like liberal Muslims, quite possibly because they are often the ones who question the inherent mendacity of hegemonic politics. One has to be a potential jailbird or a rabid rabble-rouser to be better accepted. These approaches are not just determined by god-given prejudices. Very often there is a material purpose behind the stance.

Without seeking to double-guess the current state of politics in this region, we can still glean faint patterns from history, as it played out in different regions and in a different era, similar to what we are witnessing now. The administration of President Truman initially had been sympathetic to Iran’s nationalist aspirations represented by the Middle East’s first and only secular democracy ever.

Prime Minister Mossadeq’s popularity and his marked nationalism towards Iran’s oil resources, however, created friction between him and the shah. In the summer of 1952, the shah refused the prime minister’s demand for the power to appoint the minister of war (and, by implication, to control the armed forces).

President Eisenhower, however, came to accept the view of the British government that no reasonable compromise with Mossadeq was possible and that, by working with the Tudeh, Mossadeq was making probable a communist-inspired takeover. Mossadeq’s intransigence and inclination to accept Tudeh support shaped US thinking. In June 1953, the Eisenhower administration approved a British proposal for a joint Anglo-American operation, code-named Operation Ajax, to overthrow Mossadeq.

And that may well have been the time when a firm decision was taken by the powers that be never again to tolerate secular and liberal ideals in the Middle East or in any other part of the world, which affected their supply of oil and other assorted strategic interests. There was an ideological worry too. Israel and, therefore, the American establishment have been compulsively uncomfortable with secularism just as Gen Ziaul Haq was allergic to the word or the BJP in India sees it as a serious challenge to its quest for power. Israel must be terrified by the liberal secular view that gives no room to a religious state founded on biblical promise. That is partly why a more palpable threat to it came from Gamal Nasser, Hafez Assad, Yasser Arafat or even Saddam Hussein, but not from Saudi rulers. Israel’s tormentors were secular leaders (even if they were not necessarily democratic) who were prepared to embrace the Jews while rejecting their Zionism.

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Derwish, who passed away in a Houston hospital on Saturday, was lifelong thorn in the side of Israel, decrying its occupation of Palestinian territories. A member of the Israeli Communist Party, he was exiled in 1970 but came back to Ramallah in 1996.

No wonder he bitterly criticised the religiously inspired Hamas’ takeover of Gaza and in 2007. Addressing an audience of over 2,000 in the Israeli city of Haifa, he had said: “We woke up from a coma to see a mono-coloured flag (of Hamas) do away with the four-colour flag (of Palestine). We have triumphed. Gaza won its independence from the West Bank. One people now have two states, two prisons that don’t greet each other. We are victims dressed in executioners’ clothing.”

The pattern is obvious. Religious identities are assiduously cultivated because they help weaken the liberal challenge. It is not widely accepted but it remains a fact nevertheless that when it came to the crunch the Islamic revolution was preferred to a Tudeh takeover in Iran. I met communist leader Nuruddin Kianouri in Tehran’s Evin prison, where he sat writing copies of the Quran. Remember Oliver North landing in Tehran with the Bible, and the Iran-Contra affair that fortified the regime? Derwish’s warning applies equally to the tragic events we are witnessing in Iraq, Afghanistan and Algeria, to name just a few countries where secular politics was dismantled bit by bit over a period of time and religious bigots given legitimacy.

Gen Zia was a rare twin blessing for this strategy. He was a religious bigot and a dictator to boot. To that end Mahmoud Derwish’s warning is equally valid for India, where Nehru’s vision has given way to the murky alleys that nurture Ateeq Ahmed and berate Omar Abdullah.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com