Around two months ago the BJP-led government brought a flawed and ill-intended Bill to amend the Waqf Act 1995. It created a furore, and ever since, newspapers, news-portals, Youtube videos have been educating the masses through their “explainers”. Opinion pieces from experts and the theologians too have been published, interjections into the issue with their own position. All this while, the AMUTA, for whatever reasons, has not been able to call a general body meeting or hold discussion sessions. Eventually, on Sunday, September 22, 2024, they called a meeting. Given the general mood on the campus against the Bill, one assumed that there would have been a near consensus on finding ways of working out political tactics and strategies of rejecting and resisting the move. One expected there would be a discussion more on this specific aspect.

That was however not to be. Only two speakers spoke at a “sickening” length as if fellow academics sitting there were school students waiting to be educated, threadbare. This paternalism of these academics against their own colleagues made many among the audience uncomfortable. Speakers’ assumption that others had nothing significant to say, was irksome. The affair degenerated further when two of the longest speaking teachers sought yet another session to again speak on issues they claimed to have omitted to speak on! The presiding authority was generous enough to grant them a second session, again ignoring the fact that others were also competent enough to speak on the issue. These other speakers-in-waiting including this writer (who was the first among the serving AMU faculty to have intervened through his column on the Waqf Bill issue) had a right to speak at greater length: to propose preparing a draft (alternate) bill that could be put in the public domain to mobilise constructive public opinion and also to solicit support of cross-sections of people, including the opposition political parties apart from some of the allies in the ruling coalition. 

Treating the fellow academics as children

In some ways, the two longest speakers were probably right in treating their colleagues as infants or their inferiors. This has to be illustrated by a one instance. This writer used an expression to describe the Executive Council which is massively dominated by a select club of internal teachers. Hence I used the the expression, “Incestuous Club”. This expression was first used by a columnist on March 6, 2023. She then wrote, AMU’s “Executive Council, Academic Council, and the Court are incestuous clubs where everyone is everyone’s someone”.  On March 10, 2023, this piece was rebutted by a professor of law cum vice chancellor of a law university [he eventually made it to the panel for AMU-VC in October-November 2023]. His rebuttal was anything but a precise objection against any sexual connotation of the expression. The EC members aggrieved with my usage of the expression cannot claim to have been ignorant about the columns and rejoinders. The reason being, a long thread of debate on the issue has been carried on The Print.In and on Rediff.Com, besides other portals in 2023. Let it be added that a “synonymous” expression, “blind inbreeding” [in recruitments], was used by the AMU Official Enquiry Committee Report, 1961.

Ever since then (March 6, 2023), dozens of meetings of the AMU Executive Council (EC) have been held thus far. None of these four, or for that matter, other EC members, have raised any objection to the expression. Thus, their silence can be construed as their consent or endorsement of the expression. 

This writer used this expression on a Facebook (Meta) post. They didn’t object to the expression on Facebook or on Whatsapp group of the AMU teachers, called “AMU Faculty 1” where I could have helped them with Dictionary. They, in vengeance and to intimidate me, straight away silently/confidentially, submitted a complaint against this writer, to the Vice Chancellor, possibly to get me penalised or gagged. This is now admitted by at least two (in fact, three) of the four signatories that they have written to the VC to curb my academic freedom. 

The Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary clearly provides the meaning of the expression, “incestuous” club, “of a group of people that have close relationships with one another and do not include people outside their group”. The Dictionary, further illustrates it, in order to make it clearer, by using the expression in a sentence: “the incestuous atmosphere of media discourse”. 

We the teachers have elected four teachers to represent us inside the Executive Council, to safeguard our academic freedom, against the Vice Chancellor. Far from doing so, they are, instead, unfortunately, approaching the VC to penalize us and curb our academic freedom.  At least one of them came to me saying, he shouldn’t have signed on such a document. I said to him that of he regrets his act, he should consider withdrawing the complaint. He declined. 

The Vice Chancellor would, one expects, understand the dictionary meaning as well as the extended meaning of the expression in question, and she will treat the reported complaint accordingly.    

The founder admin of the abovementioned WhatsApp Group of the AMU teachers (almost all Muslims) is one of the four elected members of the EC-AMU. For long, a Pakistani member was added to the WhatsApp Group. Once I spotted it and objected strongly to this. His response was, “it happened inadvertently”. My response was, if they have got a habit of submitting complaint to the VC, why shouldn’t I bring it to the notice of the VC, the Government and also to the media? They had no response.  

Further, one of the four elected members to the EC advised me to refrain from consulting dictionaries; that I should concentrate on teaching history [whereas he indulge in campus (politics) through the EC; would carry out his Tablighi Jama’at activities and the Drama Club engagements, besides doing Mathematics!]. He further preached me not to teach/discuss/raise the issues of caste. Asserting his immodesty, he insisted on adding the prefix of “Honourable” for the AMU-EC (and by implication, for its members, including himself), regardless of no such protocol specified by the AMU. 

I look upon this argument with him as one with a person who holds a right wing ideology and is committed to depoliticising the electorate. Outraged, I argued with him referring to Juan Linz’s book (2000), Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes, which argues that, authoritarianism relies upon a “mentality” (“way of thinking and feeling more emotional than rational that provide non-codified ways of reacting to different situations”). Thus, by depoliticising common people and by trapping them into irrationalities they facilitate variants of authoritarianism and the personality cult (to which, let me add) of “honourables”.  Such people choose to forget that honour is commanded, not demanded. I wish there was a provision of right to recall such representatives!” He had no response to this on the WhatsApp Group.

Another elected representative, the Joint Secretary of the AMUTA, while inviting the teachers to attend the meeting on the Waqf issue, first circulated an “intimidating” message as to whosoever from among the AMU teachers is referring to the faults (retrogression on caste and gender) of India’s Muslims in the 1970s-1980s and asks the Qaum to self-introspect in order to find out the possible reasons of the rise of Neo Hindutva, according to him, amounts to “blaming the victim” and therefore s/he is a Qaum’s villain; therefore only he can command teachers to attend the meeting.  

In a Muslim majority campus like AMU, any academic with an independent (read “contrarian”) view, is already demonised as Qaum’s traitor, by the elected representative. Given the prevalence of competitive right wing radicalism, such intolerance and provocations might endanger the life of the insider-academics espousing “contrarian” views on such issues.  

Be that as it may, the point I am trying to make here is: (1) Either the two long, self-indulgent speakers on the Waqf issue were absolutely right in treating the fellow academics as school kids with spoon-feeding as pedagogy. Or, (2) The speakers are too self-obsessed and narcissistic to make way for listening to fellow colleagues and more importantly to concentrate more on working out the strategies of resistance. Or, (3) They harboured an intention to consume much of time and thereby not letting this session culminate into working out a strategy to resist in a comprehensive way, by a longer discussion on that specific aspect? (To be fair to them, this is less likely, though).

Anyway, on the intervention of fellow academics in the assembly, focus was brought back to working out a draft bill. This would eventually be endorsed by the academics attending the meeting (There was a thin presence in the meeting).   

Alienation of the Qaum, or disjunction between the Qaum and its self-serving elite    

Most interesting aspect is, these educated elites of the Qaum were then pledging to fight the BJP regime, whereas, the commoners of the Qaum have already been on the streets against the Waqf Bill for the last many weeks. Barring one or two exception, the collective of the AMU teachers seem to have risen to register their protest belatedly. This shows how yawning is the gap between the commoners of the Qaum and its educated, affluent elites!

Even more importantly, while these elites do persuade the commoners of the Qaum to keep waging wars against the ruling dispensation, they themselves behave with cunning opportunism. Consider the empanelment result of the AMU-VC in October-November 2023. Unlike other central universities, AMU empanels its VC through its own EC and Court (both the bodies excessively dominated by internal members), without advertising the position to invite application from across India. This select Club (EC & Court) eventually ended up empanelling all the three from the internal faculty members in November 2023. The predecessor VC too was not only internal faculty but also a resident of the town for the last few generations; he eventually became a legislator belonging to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in UP Council as well as vice president of the ruling party. This unprecedented inbreeding was so brazen that some of the internal teachers seeking to be empanelled as VC have approached the Allahabad High Court to challenge this. 

Insiders in the AMU know too well as to which of these (empanelled) candidates for VC-ship or their alleged patrons have been writing columns in favour of the BJP-RSS in the national English dailies, testifying further to their opportunism. AMU insiders also know it very well as to which of the AMU teachers (aligning with Muslim BJP legislator) canvassed for the BJP candidates in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Videos of such event(s) had circulated among the AMU teachers and on the social media. The AMU insiders also know with considerable clarity as to which of the EC members (from among the AMU teachers and teacher-administrators in the EC), and their clouts, were inclined towards which of these “pro-regime” candidates for VC-ship. 

The short point is: sections of these elite Clubs of AMU have already aligned with the ruling BJP and at the same time the Club has also been instigating the commoners to keep fighting the BJP and facing reprisals from the hate-filled vindictive regime. Understandably, this approach provides such opportunist elites with stronger bargaining power vis a vis the governing party.  

AMU’s Own “Anti-Waqf” (mis) deeds

The AMU itself is alleged to have indulged in erasing the names and identities of the Waaqif (the donor of land estates and assets who institutes/creates the Waqf or charitable endowment). For instance, it has been reliably learnt that the renowned physicist cum the last principal of the MAO College (when it became incorporated into AMU in 1920) and also the founder of the department of Physics in the Lucknow University, Prof. Wali Mohammad (1886-1968) had instituted the Waqf for AMU; one of these is the costly land on which a residential Hall of students is existing. The Hall is named after Nadim Tarin who bore the construction cost of the students’ residential Hall. Sadly, the name of the donor/waaqif of the land stands obliterated. We are told, there could be many such Waqf estates and assets dedicated to AMU, wherein the Waaqifs/donors remain unacknowledged and anonymized.  

In other words, with such state of affairs and the corruption of land-grabbing (by the influential people within the state administration, Waqf Boards and society), ordinary Muslims have become cynical. There is a huge deficit of the people’s connect with the Waqf estates and assets. This would dissuade the common people from adequately agitating and mobilising against the Waqf Bill 2024. This in turn, one apprehends, would fail to mount as much of pressure on the regime, as is required. 

I made similar arguments in my essay as to how and why the current dispensation succeeded in demonising the best of our universities. Questioning the relevance of India’s elite institutions to the social and economic challenges facing Indian societies, I argued that the lack of socially relevant research and teaching has contributed in part to society’s disaffection with “our respectable institutions.”   

The significant disconnect between the educated elites and the common Muslims pose a critical challenge. As highlighted by Omar Khalidi (2010) who records a damning indictment: “[research] publications on Indian Muslims since 1950 to 2010 reveals that the three AMU faculty combined [Political Science, Sociology, Economics] have contributed little to the burgeoning literature on Indian Muslims”. Of course, the Indian state didn’t stop them from carrying out such researches on the India’s Muslim communities.

 Moreover, as Daniele Struppa notes, “A university is a microcosm of our larger society that reflects different beliefs, ideologies, experiences, and backgrounds. While that is exactly what I love about a university community, it also comes with the reality that prejudice lives within our communities as well: we are not immune to the ills of our society”. 

Given this concern, the challenge before the academia in our times is to establish an effective and efficacious connect with the rest of the society, if the current democratic downslide has to be resisted and arrested with forging solidarities. Quite a number of teachers (with clout) in AMU, at the moment, seem to be missing this point, as they are the ones either falling into the trap of becoming practioners of Muslim communalism or aligning opportunistically with the Hindu Right, or both. Patronage-distribution and clientelism is embedded in the governance structures of AMU. So much so that some teachers have shamelessly been continuing in certain administrative offices of the AMU for the last 10 to 12 years, or even more! Some of them holding three administrative positions concurrently, compromising with their teaching; forget about their research. Their clout is so entrenched that successive VCs have failed to replace them with new faces in the University administration. 

Such a pathetic state of affairs needs to be addressed immediately by many reforms including change in composition of the EC, which defiantly adopts any kind of resolution, disregarding financial implications, sense of justice and the government’s or UGC’s inviolable norms. For instance, for recruitments in the AMU schools, they have outrageously reversed the norms of the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS, which has got only 30% component on interview and 70% component on written test-for admissions). In contrast, the requirement for AMU schools is reversed,  70% for the interview and only 30% for written test. This is obviously designed to favour their own candidates, already recruited on a temporary basis, in large numbers, over the last many years. Likewise, in certain cases, some influential employees have placed themselves in Old Pension Scheme despite having been recruited on regular basis after 2004 (even advertisement of the post was after 2004 making it even stronger case of New Pension Scheme). The Audit and Account of the government needs thoroughly probe this. The examination system is thoroughly compromised even at the level of question paper-setting and moderation. Yet, the Controller of Examinations has been continuing in his office for very long. The rules state that tenure-statutory administrative positions of the University are required to be advertised and filled every five years. There are many such irregularities, including financial chaos, which need probing by independent government agencies. The assets of such teacher-administrators need to be probed by such agencies too.

The question for the ordinary men and women of the Qaum is: if their educated and affluent elites can’t mount enough pressure upon the AMU-VC to replace these clouts and reshuffle the AMU administration then such a weak-kneed and helpless lot can’t be expected to muster enough strength to press the current dispensation in New Delhi to withdraw the Waqf Bill 2024.  

Most important of all, ordinary Muslims need to be alerted by the conscientious section of people, that a chunk of their educated and affluent elites have switched over to the saffron establishment, leaving them vulnerable, isolated and, above all, helpless to fend for themselves. Felix Pal (2020) has documented a section of western UP Muslim elites opportunistically joining saffron outfits.

The time has come for the AMU [Teachers’ Association] and the communities to rise to the occasion and unite their members. They must actively engage in strategies that not only resist the Waqf Amendment Bill but also address the broader implications of elite’s perfidious detachment from the community. Only by fostering a genuine dialogue and acknowledging the voices of all constituents can we hope to challenge the majoritarian regime effectively. The survival and dignity of the embattled Qaum of Indian Muslims and the country’s organic plurality depend on it. 

(The author is a Professor of History, Aligarh Muslim University)

Related:

The Waqf Bill 2024: An Open Letter to the Joint Committee of Parliament, the Opposition, and India’s Muslim Communities

Three Banes of India’s Muslims: Victimhood Syndrome, Power Theology, Obsession with Identity Politics

No Central Funds, Aligarh Muslim University’s Second Campus in West Bengal Faces Uncertain Future

The post The AMU Teachers’ Association (AMUTA) and Waqf Worries: Ordinary members of the Qaum are caught between a self-serving elite and a majoritarian Regime appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Universities, ‘transmit, interpret and develop the cultural tradition of the society’. They can either ‘continuously reproduce’ these traditions or ‘critically transform’ them, said Habermas. What did the two centrally funded ‘Muslim’ universities in India, viz., the Aligarh Muslim University and its “rebel sister”, the Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia, really do?

The Cambridge trained French scholar, Laurence Gautier, has made an immensely successful attempt at working out the abovementioned question by bringing in wide range of empirical details, embarking on a very deep analysis of a wide range of evidence and putting these in larger perspective. She has proceeded to examine as to how did these two denominational universities, and the Muslims associated with these universities, negotiate their place in India, their individual rights as citizens, and their group rights as a religious minority, and/or as descendants of ex-ruling class, one must say. (The work also explores Muslim-ness of Indians and Indian-ness of its Muslim communities).

The Role of AMU & JMI in shaping Muslim identity politics

Whether such negotiations were confined more to the domain of political articulations or whether they produced researches too? Such articulations remain and remained largely tilted towards a particular class within the community of particular region(s). This Urdu speaking Ashraaf elite was called “Kutcherry Milieu” by the best biographer of the MAO College (which became AMU in 1920), David Lelyveld (1978). This is a particularly more relevant question to be raised for the AMU, because, in the colonial period, the All India Mohammedan Educational Conference (AIMEC, founded in 1886) soon became the political organ of the Muslim League rather than keeping the promise of opening up a chain of residential schools/colleges across the subcontinent. Given this legacy,  worldview and outlook, did AMU, post-partition (for pre-partition days, introduction of the book does deal with these questions), ever raise self-introspective question against itself? Did the institution bother to question –in the republican-democratic era –why its enrolments, recruitments and governance-personnel suffer from an elite syndrome: the predominance of a select Club of a particular region-class of the Qaum?

The AMU, in the late 1940s had become epicentre of the Muslim League with the separatists enjoying a stronger presence on the campus. Various circles (not confined to the Hindu Right alone) memorialise AMU as a villain of Partition. The Pakistani intelligentsia also reinforces this idea. On the other hand, Muslims of various persuasions, look upon AMU not only as a platform aimed at their educational uplift but also as a fort safeguarding their identity. In fact, the latter aspect is arguably stronger than the former. This is perhaps congenitally associated with MAO/AMU. Look at Peter Hardy (1972: 103-104)’s assertion, “It is, however, important to recognise the limitations of Aligarh as an educational foundation. At no time did it educate a majority of the Muslim graduates even of the North-Western Provinces [UP]… Success in examinations and individual achievement were at a discount”.

Did the two universities question and address, even in their academic outputs, caste-based hierarchies and exploitation or did they deny or downplay these? Did they, through their research as well as through their political interventions and mobilizations, challenge regressive patriarchy, or, rather did they align with, or capitulate before the orthodoxy? Did they contribute towards secularisation-pluralisation of the state and society in general and the community (Qaum) in particular? Did they democratise the institutions and resources monopolised by the “Kutcherry Milieu”? Or, did they treat Indian Secularism more as a favour to Muslim conservatism and communalism and regressive patriarchy, thereby stoking and bolstering majoritarianism?

A large number of Urdu memoirs of the Aligarh community (faculty, alumni) mostly indulge in self-praise, rather than being critical and self-introspective. [Of significant note in exception are critical essays of Kunwar M Ashraf (1903-1962), in the Aligarh Magazine (Urdu), “Aligarh Ki Siyasi Zindagi” (1953-1955) and “Aligarh aur Siyasiyat-e-Hind” (1960)]. Most of these  reproduce,  disseminate and celebrate a class culture (not the mass culture), often misrepresented as the “Ganga Jamuni Tehzeeb”, discounting core academic production for an ameliorative and empowering politics of pluralization and thereby strengthening of Indian democracy. Of course, the two English language memoirs brought out by the AMU-VCs (both were not AMU alumni), viz., Badruddin Tyabji (1907-1995 ) and Nasim Faruqi (d. 12012) in the 1960s and 1990s respectively, have certainly given us critical accounts of some of these aspects.

The two Universities produced two “intertwined yet distinctive political trajectories” (p. 11). By the early 1990s, as the Chapter Six in the book, “Bastions of Islam”, demonstrates, the two campuses were no longer distinctive of each other in terms of shaping and articulating Muslim identity politics. Both campuses had become strong centres of retrogressive forces of north Indian Muslims. According to the author, the JMI became so, more pronouncedly, in the 1990s. This is indeed the boldest and bravest chapter of the book.

Competitive religious radicalism since the 1970s

The AMU was never weak in terms of its right wing Muslim presence and influence, though in the 1970s and 1980s it became even more pronounced along those lines. Both Universities were now becoming even stronger bastions of Islamism and retrogression rather than enhancing the qualitative and quantitative output in terms of academic research and or prioritizing the educational uplift of the Qaum. They were rather more engaged in emotive, identitarian issues. Chapter Six, towards its concluding notes, brilliantly underlines the fact that the more the Qaum turned towards emotive symbolism and identitarianism, the more they (un)wittingly pushed down the agendas of educational and political empowerment of the Muslim communities within. Worse still, the more they stoked majoritarian forces through their own retrogression, the more they made themselves all the more vulnerable, as this partly contributed to pushing India towards Hindu supremacism. Laurence Gautier, in this significant chapter takes into account the sub-continental as well as global phenomenon of the rise of competitive religious radicalism. She has brilliantly benefitted from the essays of Anuj Nadaur (2006), Simon Wolfgang Fuchs (2022), Yoginder Sikand (2003), etc.

Chapter Six of the book under review is a greater eye-opener, particularly for those who are steeped into and subscribe to the victimhood narratives of the Muslim elite and also the Islamic Right Wing. This wonderful chapter also exposes as to how do the hasty, ambitious Muslims bolster their political career through advocating, championing and perpetuating conservatism within the Qaum and pushing them rightward? Very skillfully, they keep the commoners of the Qaum blinded by the fact that such approaches strengthen Hindu majoritarian forces and inflict ever greater vulnerability upon the Qaum. The more both campuses (AMU and JMI) pushed the Qaum towards “Islamisation of Knowledge (IoK) and society” (funded by some of the Islamic countries from the 1970s) the more they ignored the under-representation of India’s Muslims in education, in public employment and in other such sectors such as media and judiciary. The chapter underlines this Rightward shift of the educated segments of the Qaum that was prompted/inspired by and/or coincided with the Maududi’s worldview, the Iranian Revolution (1979), Afghan Jihad, Radicalization of Pakistan under Ziaul Haq, etc.. This is what makes the chapter even more insightful.

Interestingly, during the late 1980s and early 1990s [when the localised dispute of Ayodhya was nationalised through competitive communalism and around the time of the Hindu reaction against the legislative undoing (1986) of the Supreme Court verdict (1985) on Shah Bano and the Ayodhya campaign of the Hindu radicals], the cataloguing of the Muslim underrepresentation was articulated either through the pamphlets of the three major Communist parties, viz., CPI, CPI-M, CPI-ML Liberation, and in certain liberal media outlets such as the Illustrated Weekly of India. Besides, the cataloguing of Muslim under-representation in the Gopal Singh Report (1983). These core issues were being raised to some extent by the state appointed VCs and other functionaries of the two universities but, significantly, not, in any significant measure, by the Islamists on the two campuses. Gautier writes (p. 286), “in the 1980s, university authorities increasingly invoked the need to uplift backward Muslims to frame their actions in a consensual framework.” Though, Gautier has expressed ignorance of benefitting from such pamphlets.

The growing Islamic fundamentalism combined with the boom in Gulf economies added to the anxieties of the sections of Hindu population which feared that the oil money may fund mass conversions to Islam and ‘give to Islamism in India a new glow of self confidence in one sudden sweep’ (pp. 284-285). [A similar apprehension was raised by Lala Lajpat Rai (1865-1928) in the 1920s, after the Pan Islamist Khilafat Movement, best articulated by Intezar Husain, in his Urdu biography (1999), Ajmal-e-Azam]. This is a significant point which needs to be probed further by collecting some data from the ground. As of now, there are very limited explorations about the socio-economic status of the Muslim communities of different regions and sub-regions. Most of the better known University academics, working around such themes of India’s Muslim communities, shy away from collecting such data from the field. Another aspect, missing in this chapter, is to probe this question:  how, while Islamists were active on both campuses, engaged in and “advocating the purifying of Islam, promoting Islamic values and prioritizing the language of religion over the language of minority rights or social welfare”, their own children were –at the same time –pursuing all kinds of empowering education in professional courses as well as in the humanities. Also, how this project of Islamisation was, in itself, shaking overall secularisation and provoking a Hindu majoritarian reaction and thereby aggravating the vulnerability of the Qaum.

Another significant insight coming out of this volume is in the Chapter Four, “Resisting Minority Politics, Holding on to Composite Nationalism: Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) in the post-Nehruvian period”. The author underlines that “JMI’s atmosphere became more orthodox in the 1980s when the ‘influx’ of teachers from AMU increased significantly”, particularly in the Engineering department, and “‘the liberal [ethos of JMI] was slowly isolated’”; and that, “arrival of teachers trained at AMU led to the rise of ‘class consciousness’ on the campus, thereby jeopardising JMI’s vision of a ‘classless society’” (pp. 192-193). The JMI’s Department of Education excelled for as long as the AMU alumni weren’t recruited as JMI’s faculty. This is demonstrated here by the author’s well-tabulated data.

Laurence Gautier, while expounding on the student politics of AMU during 1965-1981, looks upon the minoritarian assertion as politics of pluralising the Indian democracy and that it was also the case with non-Muslim Indians, the Hindu OBCs, who were asserting their rights to a share in the structures and processes of power and were articulating their grievances against “Nehruvian Consensus”. To contain such assertions, Emergency was imposed, after which the Hindu Right gained legitimacy as well as registered rise and expansion, also funded by the Hindu diaspora.

Cunning craft of the Qaum’s elites: nationalizing local issues for self-perpetuation

This raises a question as to why and how the local AMU issue of reservation for “internal” students in AMU enrolments, a discrimination in favour of the privileged, was cunningly made into a larger  problem the Muslim communities across India, in 1965? This cunning craft of the descendants of the “Kutcherry Milieu” needs to be decoded minutely. This particular clique of the Qaum had kind of forced Sir Syed to shun progressive religious reformism as much as also to withdraw the welfaristic (charitable) Waqf Bill (1879). Yet, all such forces succeeded in taking over his College almost completely, soon after his death in 1898. Some of them, without subscribing to his modernist reformism, had opportunistically and tactically aligned with Sir Syed because he had access to the high echelons of the colonial administration up to the Viceroy and his legislative council.

Chapter Two is particularly more nuanced because it makes a very fine distinction between the visions of Nehru (the Prime Minister), Maulana Azad (the Education Minister) and Zakir (the Vice Chancellor) around the question of what kind of role should and would AMU play in the post-Partition period. In a polite and skillfully understated manner (English is anyway said to be a language of the under-statement), Gautier has articulated the tension between the liberal state, Muslim state actors (often derided as the Sarkari Musalman) and the Muslim Right Wing on and off the campus.

Interestingly, while the sarkar (state) and the Sarkari Musalmans attempted at combining the goals of educational uplift of the Muslims as well as helping Muslims acquire liberal-pluralist outlook, the Muslim Right Wing was geared towards preserving and promoting regressivism and emotive priorities than on any educational uplift. That minority regressivism remained a contributory factor towards strengthening Hindu majoritarianism, is still a less addressed aspect in academia and in the popular domain. Not without substance, the Liberal- Left academic and political forces are often charged of going silent or soft on Muslim regressivness.

Socio-political movements and silence on the campus on caste among Muslims

While discussing social justice movements and backward caste assertions, the relevant chapter of this book does not, it appears, adequately engage with the layered dynamics of the JP Movement and Anti-Emergency resistance. As to how much or less AMU and JMI identified with or stayed away from those movements? The student activists turned mainstream politicians of the era have been interviewed by the author. While bringing out polyphonic voices on these campuses on the question of caste, the dominant narratives on the campuses have almost denied existence of such a discriminatory practice. The AMU and JMI were almost equally aloof in 1990 when there were direct clashes across the country among the students on the implementation of the Mandal Commission Recommendations, despite the fact that as many as 82 communities of Muslims were to benefit from the implementation of the Mandal Report, in 1990.

The narratives within Muslim politics generated out of and sustained within AMU, needs further probing. It needs no particular mention that many Muslim leaders emerged on mainstream Indian electoral politics out of these agitations on AMU issues in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the names are: Arif M Khan, Azam Khan, Javed Habib (d. 2012), and of course leaders such as Abdul Jalil Faridi (1913-1974), Ilyas Azmi (1934-2023), and scores of Muslim leaders (including the theologians) across the country. Remember the lines of Lelyveld & Minault (1974) that the AMU was a “profoundly political enterprise”.

Laurence Gautier clearly demonstrates that before the Emergency (i.e., during 1972-1974) and after it (1977-1981), Muslims, around the AMU campus and related issues, emerged as the interlocutor between the Qaum and the Indian State. Soon after that, the Muslim bodies or pressure groups such as the AIMPLB (founded in April 1973), and BMAC/BMCC emerged on the scene. I repeat, the Muslim politics of nationalising the local issues, and secondly, the formation of pressure groups least for educational uplift and empowerment and more for emotive cultural politics, speak tellingly of the priorities of Muslim politics, among north Indian Muslim elites. This also reminds me of an assertion of Theodre P Wright Jr about the Muslim politics in India, raising the question of whether the Muslim minorities can actualise more of their goals through pressure groups rather than through electoral party politics. Paul Brass and Harry Blair, endorsing Wright, are inclined to suggest that the pressure groups yield better results.

Gender Issues: dominance of regressive patriarchy and retrogression

Chapter seven (on gender) is forthright in stating that “In the 1970s, Islamist groups gained increasing influence on campus as they sought to promote adherence to ‘Íslamic values’, including with regard to men-women relations’’ (p. 375) and “At JMI, the SIMI gained popularity among a part of the student body thanks to their firm stance against the state’s interference in Muslim Personal Law” (p. 379). A fairly distinct reactionary patriarchy prevailed on the campus, in which the Islamists having been dominant and hegemonic forces on the both campuses, neither pushed for reforms from within nor did they allow the state to intervene in favour of gender justice. Women, including the various shades of feminists (except among a miniscule sections of the Left) remained ‘guardians of tradition’ rather than ‘actors of change’.

The author candidly states that “The Shah Bano controversy had a deeply divisive impact both at JMI and at AMU” (p. 378). The author however avoids saying that the divisive impact was not confined within the two ‘Muslim’ campuses. Rather the stubbornness of the Muslim conservatives and reactionaries was going to change the whole grammar, syntax and vocabulary of politics across the country in the days to come. This eventually came to be confessed even by Ali Miyan Nadvi (1914-1999), one of the prominent villains of the Shah Bano dispute. The narratives of the vulnerability of the Muslims were falsified by their power to arm-twist the regime to legislate against the Supreme Court verdict of April 1985. The two campuses, in effect, stood by or capitulated before such reactionary forces, subsequently contributed, in whatever degree, by pushing India towards the grip of majoritarianism. The narrative-making elite (Kutcherry Milieu) of India’s Muslims is yet to persuade the Qaum to bring in reforms from within or let the state do the needful. Needless to add, many such reforms have already been carried out in most of Islamic countries. Yet, the reactions of the dominant Muslim elite to date, are as outrageous as were in the 1970s and 1980s. Most recently, one could see this in the S[h]ayera Bano Case (2017) as much as in the latest Supreme Court verdict of July 10, 2024. In this specific regard, it is difficult to share the optimism that the author has sanguinely articulated in the last two pages (pp. 388-389) of the chapter of the book.

Chapter seven appears to be implicitly rather kinder to Muslim conservatives in a very limited sense. The author seems to suggest (p. 380) that “the growing militancy of the Hindu right” and the BJP support to UCC, kind of forced some Muslim progressives to promote reform from within. To some extent, fair enough. However, please pay attention to these words of Saumya Saxena (2018, p. 424): “the first battle of Muslim personal law was fought in the 1970s rather than the 1980s”. The AIMPLB came into existence in April 1973. It was outcome of a series of Muslim protests in late 1972 against state interference in reforming the laws regarding adoption of child and maintenance to divorced women. The Muslim Right Wing was in the forefront of such protests and in formation of the AIMPLB. The academics of the Islamic Studies, Theology, Law, Gender Studies, of the two universities haven’t yet explained to the Qaum that Instant Triple Talaq (divorce; ITT) is Un-Quranic, that maintenance is not Un-Islamic, that adoption per se isn’t prohibited in Quran, it only prohibits concealing the biological paternity of the child adopted, that it won’t be anti-Islamic to give equal share to the daughters in inheriting parental assets. These highly paid academics benefitting from funds of the secular state haven’t come out in open against the reactionary theologians exposing them about their stances on these abovementioned issues. Thus, their silence or silent support to the reactionary theologians is undermining the secularization processes, which eventually provides fodder to majoritarianism.

On certain aspects, this book has preferred to spare the two denominational universities, in exposing their flip sides, such as their deficit (self-chosen?) in academic output on the most immediate concerns regarding caste, gender, Minority conservatism, communalism and isolationism-exceptionalism). Do they really deserve this much of empathy?

Muslims in their political articulation talk of their victimisation, and discrimination but in terms of academic output of the AMU, we have rightly been accused by Omar Khalidi that there is “absence of interest in Indian Muslim issues at the three departments”, viz., Economics, Sociology and Political Science.

Political priorities of the AMU-JMI elites have been to generate agitations more intensely about emotive and identitarian issues. Their narrative-making politics has prioritised emotive issues and of lack of criminal justice system in the anti-Muslim communal pogroms, besides underrepresentation in education, public employment, legislative and other institutions. But they have chosen largely not to conduct researches on such issues, in order to make stronger advocacy, as indicted by Omar Khalidi (2010), in his academic audit of the research production of AMU.

How do we explain this (mis)prioritization? Can we not see certain kind of politics played out by the elites of Muslims against its own wider community? This deficit among AMU-JMI elites (the narrative-makers) on those counts is contributing to the skewing of political priorities, fuelling of prejudices, fears and apprehensions. Arguably, our own forthright incompetence and mediocrity, that has harboured a less competitive, more cocooned spaces, in terms of enrolments, recruitments, promotions, etc., within these “Muslim” campuses is a cause?

Anti-democratic governance structure of AMU: An incestuous club

The governance structure within AMU is such that it has been helping it, through dangerous and malicious inbreeding, inside the Executive Council (has got almost 80% of its members from among its own faculty), up to the level of empanelling its VCs (without inviting application from outside through an advertisement), to protect, promote and perpetuate the interests of a small club of Muslim elites (Kutcherry Milieu). The narrative-generating elites of both universities as well as of the theological seminaries of these regions, increasingly confined mostly to western UP and Bhojpuri speaking districts of UP (such as Azamgarh), are also home to some of the noted Islamic seminaries. In contrast, the BHU has got all its EC members nominated by the Union government since the 1950s. AMU is the only University where certain teachers continue in certain administrative offices for far too long — even over a decade –with preposterously poor academic credentials. Successive internal VCs perpetuate and strengthen these cliques and clouts rather than launching a crackdown against these debilitative lobbies.

Record preservation in AMU leaves much to be desired. Had it been preserving the day-to-day resolutions and transactions of the AMU Students’ Union and of the AMU Teachers’ Associations and other such formal and informal pressure groups, lobbies and clouts (including the sub-regional ones) within AMU, the practice would have helped for academic researchers to bring out the layered details of the political-ideological character and Qaum’s misplaced priorities and the huge disjunction of aspirations between the elites and the people of the Qaum.

Taking forward from the insights provided by Laurence Gautier, a sequel volume along these lines on the two campuses, or even taking into account more of the “Muslim” campuses can well be a research project worth taking up. A hint (p. 236, Table 5.1) at tardy, slow, lackadaisical and reluctant efforts of the Muslim elites of western UP in establishing Muslim minority educational campuses and educational trusts, compared to the laudable efforts of their counterparts in southern and western India, is a question of deeper concern that requires consideration.

Sadly, Uttar Pradesh’s Muslim elites compare very unfavourably even with the Bihar Muslim elite which is otherwise identified as poorer and backward. In this specific table of educational initiatives of Muslims, post-partition, Kerala tops it all in terms of establishing total number of Muslim colleges until the early 1980s. Tamil Nadu is far ahead despite having the least percentage of Muslim population. They created quality Muslim educational institutions out of the secular laws of Trusts rather than the self-perpetuating “scam” called Waqf-e-Aulad. Thus, the already short share of the south Indian enrolments in AMU kept falling further.

With such tabulated data of the book under discussion, I propose before the academics, researchers and commentators that a precise gaze on, and scrutiny of, the roles of the Muslim elites of UP, and their dominance/hegemony in the narrative-making power/entitlements of Muslim politics is awaited.

Another significant question to be raised here is: why the newly independent liberal state of India was more favourably inclined towards the ex-Leaguers than towards the consistent Congressite Muslims? Were they greater vote-catchers for the ruling Congress than the consistent Congressites? If so, then what does it tell us about the Muslim politics and its elites? Such a proposition is prima facie provocative but the differential treatments in terms of supplying state fund to the JMI and AMU does testify this proposition. There are many more of such evidence in terms of scores of the overnight turncoats among the UP Muslim leaders, such as Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul (1908-2001), not to say of similar testimony in the Urdu novels of Abdus Samad, Do Gaz Zamin and Khwabon Ka Sawera.

In summing up, this wonderfully well-researched book offers profound and nuanced exploration of the socio-political dynamics of AMU and JMI (north Indian Muslim middle classes and elites) since 1947. It provides valuable insights into the evolving landscapes of the politics of Muslim communities in India. This is indeed an important resource for scholars to elaborate upon many aspects outlined in this book pertaining to the polyphonic voices on almost every important issue which the Muslim communities are grappling with. Thus, this engrossing read offers many promises to open up several unchartered layers of the politics of India’s Muslim communities, waiting to be opened up, with even more courage. The post-independence incarnates of the “Kutcherry Milieu” are waiting to be dissected, x-rayed and held accountable in order to make a new move in a menacingly majoritarian rightward shift of India. The increasingly atrophying Liberal-Left too needs to rethink their hitherto flawed treatment of Muslim regressivism. It is already too late.

[Note: This is an abridged version of the draft presented as a panel discussion on the book, in the India International Centre (IIC), New Delhi, on 28 August 2024].

(The author is a Professor of History, Aligarh Muslim University)

Related:

The Waqf Bill 2024: An Open Letter to the Joint Committee of Parliament, the Opposition, and India’s Muslim Communities

Three Banes of India’s Muslims: Victimhood Syndrome, Power Theology, Obsession with Identity Politics

No Central Funds, Aligarh Muslim University’s Second Campus in West Bengal Faces Uncertain Future

The post Political History of India’s Two Muslim Universities since 1947 appeared first on SabrangIndia.

This reaction necessitates an intervention to bring forth a broader perspective.

The scope of the flawed bill

The proposed Bill ostensibly addresses the management and mismanagement of Waqf properties, rather than delving into the theological or historical legitimacy of Waqf as an institution. It seeks to address concerns about the assets held under Waqf, the proceeds they generate, and the persistent corruption within the Waqf administration. However, some Opposition leaders seem to be treating the Waqf Bill in the same way as they have treated other religious matters, such as the Shariat Act of 1937 and the governance of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).

It is important to clarify that, regardless of the Supreme Court’s upcoming verdict on AMU’s minority status, structural reforms in the governance of AMU will remain unresolved. For instance, the AMU will still have a preponderance (over 80%) of membership of the internal teachers in the Executive Council. In all these cases, there exists a widely held belief within all Muslim communities that the state should not interfere, that no reforms should emerge from within the community, and that these matters are divinely ordained and therefore immutable. This belief perpetuates a sense of Muslim exceptionalism, exclusivity, and isolation from the state.

Both the government and the Opposition appear to be engaging in the usual “vote-bank politics”, addressing their respective constituencies based on identity. This approach has already caused significant harm to India’s Muslim communities, due to the bizarre stance of their own self-serving elites as well as the ruling and intellectual elites of the country. It is crucial for ordinary Muslims to be informed by their theological and secular institutions (such as Deoband, Nadwah, Aligarh Muslim University, Jamia Millia Islamia, and MANU Hyderabad) that Waqf, arguably, does not have explicit Quranic or Shariah mandates. Imam Abu Hanifa (699-767) also didn’t approve of it as an institution indisputably and explicitly sanctioned by Sharia. Waqf-e-Aam and Waqf-e-Aulad (types of Waqf) are often more about circumventing Quranic inheritance rules and preventing division among heirs than about altruism and charity and public welfare. They are not divinely ordained.

The historical context of Waqf

In the latter half of the 19th century, Waqf in India became a means to fund identity politics and secure representation in colonial governance institutions. Gregory Kozlowski’s 1985 book, Muslim Endowments and Society in British India, highlights that most Waqfs in India emerged during this period when the colonial state turned land into a commodity. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), a visionary pragmatist, was aware of both the British Indian judges’ concerns about Waqf-e-Aulad (Waqf for descendants) and the self-interests of the Muslim landed aristocracy. British judges rightly saw Waqf-e-Aulad as circumvention of Quranic inheritance laws and in their judgments invalidated many of these Waqfs, as they lacked charitable elements. This is why they kept invalidating such Awqaf, annoying the Muslim landed elites turning into Waqifs.

Sir Syed therefore, proposed a middle path. In 1879 –as member of the Viceroy’s Legislative council– he introduced a draft bill advocating that Waqf properties be used also for more meaningful and tangible charitable purposes such as education, healthcare, and social welfare, not just for mosques and madrasas. He argued that if managed properly, Waqf could be a powerful tool for social change and community development, brings out Prof. Shafey Kidwai’s column (India Today, August 13, 2024). Sir Syed’s proposal was also published in 1877 in his periodical Tehzibul Akhlaq, with the title, ‘A Proposal for Salvaging Muslim Families from Extinction and Destruction’. This was vehemently opposed by orthodox Muslims who saw the insistence on charity and public welfare as an innovation (bidat). As a result, Sir Syed succumbing to the conservatives and orthodoxy withdrew the bill.

In contrast, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the cunning politician, by the second decade of the 19th century, jumped in to protect the interests of the Muslim landed elites who needed the Waqf Validation Act of 1913. This act, supported by the colonial state, aimed to safeguard the landed assets of these elites, who were seen as potential allies against the growing anti-colonial movement. The Swadeshi Movement, which opposed the religious-communal partition of Bengal, had forced the colonial state to annul the (Bengal) partition in 1911-192, necessitating a political arrangement to secure Muslim support.

Such a political arrangement to safeguard the monopoly on landed assets is equally true for the Mahanths and their Mutths .Unfortunately this institution of Mahanths and Maths remains under-explored by the historians of peasant and agrarian relations. Prakash Jha’s film Mrityudand (1997) attempts to depict some of the degenerative aspects of the institution of Mahanth, but it eventually turned more into a melodramatic movie.

The BJP has got no intent of introducing a similar Bill to reform this Hindu institution of Mahanths’ Muths? This is therefore an additional reason why Muslim communities look upon the proposed Bill with alarming concern, as it creates an impression of targeting only Muslims with discriminatory treatment. One more apprehension is, turning the Bill into a tool to harass Muslims by local majoritarian forces and outfits in those smaller villages and mohallas where written deeds of a Waqf and mosques aren’t available.

The nature of Waqf: Neither divine nor immutable

Waqf is not the exact equivalent of charitable endowments in the “Christian” West. In many cases, as said earlier, it is a means of circumventing Quranic inheritance regulations. Just as the community’s elites have misled others into believing that Shariat is divinely ordained, Waqf has also been portrayed as an immutable, divinely sanctioned institution. This deception needs to be exposed for the greater common good.

Moreover, the looting and encroachment of Waqf assets have been a recurring issue across the Islamic world since the 7th century AD. This mismanagement occurred with the earliest prominent Waqfs, such as Khyber and Sawad (Iraq) during Caliph Umar’s time, and the Rumlah (Palestine) Waqf established in 912 AD by a person named Faíq (which has earliest surviving written record-stone inscription). All three “earliest” Waqf estates have since become non-existent, as their assets were looted by military and other elites!

Waqf mismanagement and loot

The looting of Waqf assets is almost as old as the institution itself. In India, there is a consensus that Waqf properties suffer from gross mismanagement and looting. Despite numerous legislations, the loot continues unabated. The existing laws, therefore, require a thorough re-examination. Unfortunately, neither the ruling party nor the Opposition has highlighted this consensus in the Lok Sabha, in media, or in academic debates. The near silence of academics from institutions like AMU and JMI on this matter is particularly notable.

The “Muslim-friendly” “secular” Opposition refrains from addressing Waqf loot because doing so would justify the need for the Bill. This also explains why their interventions in the Lok Sabha are superficial and merely rhetorical. The Opposition cannot afford to state frankly that Waqf is not divine and requires human intervention for reform in order to prevent its loot and redirect it for the welfare and empowerment of the Muslim communities.

Academics, theologians and other knowledge elites have been shallow in their interventions. They have not voiced the concerns and apprehensions they discuss privately about the implications of the proposed Bill. The Muslim community needs to see through this politics, not only of the politicians but also of their own knowledge elites. Why aren’t these academics helping legislators and the community understand the issue in a holistic manner?

The real threat posed by the Bill is to the elites within the Muslim community. The proposed Bill challenges the exclusive Muslim representation in Waqf Boards as mandated by Section/clause 14 of the Waqf Act of 1995. This section, which deals with the social composition of Board Executives, is being questioned in the new Bill. The provision for Muslim-exclusive privileges in Waqf representation is being removed, which is a significant point of concern, alarm and contention. Another alarming concern is the proposal to do away with the enabling provisions enshrined in section 40 of the Waqf Act, 1995. It gives powers to the Board to acquire, issue notices or hold an enquiry into the ownership of the property that it has reasons to believe belongs to the Waqf.

Proposed reforms

While the proposed Bill has its deep flaws, the lack of detailed articulation by its opponents hinders constructive debate. Historically, state intervention has sometimes yielded positive results, as seen in the Mohsin Waqf of Hooghly, where the British colonial state established the Mohsin Hooghly College in 1836, going beyond the original terms of the original Waqf. The Waqf Bill of 2024 should explicitly incorporate such progressive steps. Parliament should legislate to ensure Waqf Boards take similar rewarding actions.

Muslim communities must abandon their collective hypocrisy. For instance, the practices, such as Instant Triple Talaq (ITT), are un-Quranic yet they stubbornly refuse to reform themselves as much as they resist the state intervention. Despite, Ali Miyan Nadvi’s assurance to the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, the AIMPLB refuses to provide for maintenance to divorced Muslim women. They keep opposing the Supreme Court verdicts in this regard.  Likewise, adoption of a child is not prohibited by Quran (it only prohibits concealing the biological paternity of the child adopted) and custody is absolutely valid as was the case with Zayd the adopted son of the Prophet Muhammad, yet, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) refuses to reform it. Their stubbornness is immensely supported by most of the academics of the modern institutions such as the AMU and JMI. Political leaders like Akhilesh Yadav, Asaduddin Owaisi, and the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) must take a clear stand on this issue.

Some Tentative Recommendations for the Waqf Bill 2024

1. Creation of a Waqf Tribunal: Establish a tribunal consisting of judges of the rank of High Court judges as the exclusive body for resolving Waqf cases, with the Supreme Court as the appellate authority.
2. Enhanced Land Survey: A Land Survey Commissioner should be comprised of at least three officers in each Board.
3. Mandatory Gender and Caste Representation: The Waqf Board’s composition should be diversified and this should be made mandatory (with Muslims of all castes and women as members).
4. Digital Transparency: Waqf assets, deeds, and real estate records should be digitized and made publicly accessible online for transparency and vigilance.
5. Promotion of Charitable Activities: The Bill should mandate that Waqf properties be used aggressively for establishing modern educational and research institutions, especially quality residential schools under Article 30 of the Constitution.
6. Strict Penalties for Mismanagement: Penalties for those who grab, usurp or mismanage Waqf properties should not be diluted. Rigorous imprisonment should be enforced.
7. Memorialization of Waqf Creators: Waqf creators (Waqif) should be remembered in a befitting manner, be honored, and their deeds digitized and made publicly available.
8. Defined Roles for Mutawallis: The roles of Mutawallis (Waqf administrators) should be clearly defined, with fixed tenures of 3-5 years. Eligibility criteria should be established for their appointment.
9. Accountability Mechanisms: A robust check and balance mechanism should be implemented for both Mutawallis and Waqf Boards.
10. Mandatory annual auditing, and the income of the Waqf Boards should be made available for public vigilance.

Hope, the stakeholders would listen to the above words!

(The author is a Professor of History, Aligarh Muslim University)

The post The Waqf Bill 2024: An Open Letter to the Joint Committee of Parliament, the Opposition, and India’s Muslim Communities appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Rarely do voters believe the promises made in party manifestos, and even more unlikely is it that the detailed promises outlined in the manifesto ensure victory to a party. The absence of a level playing field in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections that the Congress faces should not have –normally –rattled the top brass of the BJP, leading their star campaigner to so sharply comment upon the manifesto of the Congress. Why has the BJP not been able to ignore it? Does the BJP –in any way– fear defeat?

The Congress manifesto is a bold and brave document, except on one count, Personal Laws of the Religious Minorities. The Personal Laws need significant reforms, and in their present un-reformed form militate against gender justice. Especially since majority Muslim countries have in fact implemented significantly some of these reforms (Pakistan, Bangladesh, Arab and African countries). Thus, by not committing to reform in the personal laws, the Congress manifesto 2024 appears to regress, even go back to the 1980s. The Congress must not forget that it was this moment which provided lot of fodder to the resurgence of Hindutva. (The Congress Manifesto does include the following: “The Congress will encourage reform of personal laws. Such reform must be undertaken with the participation and consent of the communities concerned.”-Editors)

It is also common knowledge that the Congress is at its weakest ever especially faced with a weak organization in most parts of the country. It is also extremely resource-starved both in terms of funds and workers. Besides, several promising leaders have deserted the party in recent times.

Given the degree of heightened communal polarisation, particularly in the Hindi belt, and the deep anti-Muslim hatred this polarization has generated, a party reiterating its Pluralist and Secular character and openly challenging the crony capitalism of the dispensation, signals a bold, refreshing stance. The Congress is in fact stoically and courageously assert its core historical ideology. Certain political scientists (Suhas Palshikar being one of these) often say that a political party in deep crisis reverts back to its core ideology to revive itself. May be, the Congress has learnt this lesson and has jettisoned its soft majoritarianism to a significant extent.

The Congress (in its manifesto) has defined its priorities quite clearly. Equity and Social Justice is on the top of its agenda in the manifesto. Youth Unemployment, Distress of Traders caused by the GST, Farmers’ Distress, Ruination of the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs)with sudden and total Demonetisation, Crimes against Women, Deprivation, Persecutio and Marginalization of the SCs, STs, Minorities, Hijacking of Institutions by the dispensation are some of the highlights emphasised right at the beginning of the manifesto. “Climate of Fear, Intimidation and Hatred” is a concern highlighted without hesitation. Democracy or Authoritarianism, Freedom or Fear, Prosperity for All or Wealth for a Few, Justice or Injustice, are the serious issues flagged before the electorate. [1]

An exclusive segment on the Religious and Linguistic Minorities in the Manifesto reminds us of the “resolution adopted in the 1906 Calcutta Congress that each province organise at its capital a Provincial Congress Committee in such manner as may be determined at a meeting of the Provincial Conference or at a special meeting held for the purpose, of representatives of different districts in the province”. Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920) is said to have insisted on this aspect. This was further reiterated at the Nagpur session (1920).[2]

The most clear and bold aspect of the manifesto is its’ promise to conduct a nation-wide Socio-Economic and Caste Census to Enumerate the Castes and Sub-Castes and their Socio-Economic conditions. Based on the data, the agenda for affirmative action will be strengthened. Significantly, the Congress has guaranteed that it will pass a constitutional amendment to raise the 50 per cent cap on reservations for SC, ST and OBC. The reservation of 10 per cent in jobs and educational institutions for Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) will be implemented for all castes and communities without discrimination. Importantly, all the backlog vacancies in posts reserved for SC, ST and OBC within a period of one year. The Congress will abolish the contractualisation of regular jobs in the government and public sector enterprises and ensure regularisation of such appointments.

Promises of legislating the Rohith Vemula Act to protect the SC students (ill enact a law with reference to Article 15(5) of the Constitution to provide for reservation in private educational institutions for SC, ST and OBC), of Establishment of a Diversity Commission to ensure representation of all segments in public spaces and employment, implementing the Renke Commission (The Manmohan Cabinet in its meeting held on 30 January 2014 had approved the establishment of a National Commission for De-notified, Nomadic and Semi-Nomadic Tribes-NCDNT- for a period of three years and framing of an appropriate scheme for grant of Pre and Post matric Scholarships and Construction of Hostels for DNT students), are some of the egalitarian and socialistic measures to empower the oppressed and marginalized segments, which might have seriously rattled the BJP. Theseit has dubbed the pro-poor provisions with Left influence (in the Congress manifesto). The promises of establishing Village Councils and Autonomous District Councils are the steps towards rectifying Regional Imbalance. Senior Citizens, Disabled and LGBTQ communities have got significant space. Right to Health, residential schools at Block/Tehsil levels, are also most appreciable promises.[3]

Removal of Economic Inequalities and Transition to a Socialist form of Society were stated as the two major objectives of Congress since at least 1929.

Defending the Constitution and Reversing the Damage

Two significant points of emphasis are contained in the two sections entitled “Defending the Constitution” and “Reversing the Damage.”

From de-criminalising the offence of defamation, to uphold the people’s right to assemble peacefully and without arms; to review and repeal laws that have affected free press and privacy the manifesto goes further. It assur4es its voters to repeal weaponised and unconstitutional laws. “All laws that interfere with personal freedoms will be repealed.”  The Msnifesto promises to strengthen the Election Commission of India and other statutory bodies and ensure that Parliament is accountable to the people.

But what is it that prompted the Prime Minister to malign this manifesto by likening it with an imprint of Muslim League?

One can only make an intelligent guess. This author is someone who has been teaching postgraduate courses in modern & contemporary Indian history for the last 25 years or so. Modesty apart, I have a keen understanding –more than the non-specialist Indian electorate–of why PM Modi has made this reference to the All India Muslim League (AIML).

The kind of egalitarian pursuit as promised or envisaged in the INC Manifesto 2024, is at complete odds or in opposition to what a reactionary force like the AIML could ever have envisaged. Every student of Indian history and every Indian with a common sense (or understanding) of history knows this well. Since the Congress envisaged its socialist goals from the Karachi Session (1931) onwards, culminating into the Faizpur Agrarian Programme (1936), the Muslim League got seriously alarmed. Having been routed in the 1937 elections, the landlords of the respective religious denominations started running towards the AIML and AIHMS (All India Hindu Maha Sabha). From 1938 onwards, the two organisations grew strong and hysterical. During the Quit India Movement (1942), after the Congress leaders were jailed, both these reactionary organisations had a field day and were shamelessly encouraged by the British colonial state pushing India fast towards Partition. Jinnah and Savarkar gained unprecedented strength. Savarkar was no longer confined to Ratnagiri by the colonial state.

The Interim government of 1946 (formed in September), had its finance minister from the AIML. He was Liaqat Ali Khan (1895-1951), succeeding John Mathai (1886-1959) in November 1946.

Hence, this author finds no such similarity between the All India Muslim League (AIML) of pre-1947 and the Indian National Congress (INC) Manifesto 2024. Moreover, even in the 1940s, it was AIHMS which had formed coalition govt with AIML in Bengal, NWFP, and Sindh.

Raghabendra Chattopadhyay’s essay (1998), (the author is not a huge sympathiser of the Congress, writes:

“The leaders of the Congress now came out in public to denounce the Budget as a ‘clever device’ for discrediting the party by giving a ‘most unpractical turn to both the Congress demands; that is, those for Governmental action against profiteering and tax evasion’. Liaquat’s taxation measures, they argued, ‘would have impoverished all rich men and done permanent damage to Commerce and Industry’. Congress leaders like Patel and Rajagopalachari were violently opposed to the Budget and felt that Liaquat was ‘more concerned to harass industrialists and businessmen than to serve the interests of the country’. They even charged that the Budget was based on communal considerations motivated to harm the members of the business community, the majority of whom were Hindus”.

This quotation makes it amply clear that the Congress was critical of the 1946 Budget of the AIML. Nehru, notwithstanding his socialist convictions, was particularly critical of it in the FICCI meeting that followed soon after.

So why then did the PM Modi liken the Congress manifesto 2024 with the AIML? Liaquat’s new taxes were directed against big business and other excessively wealthy people. “The [1946] Budget [had] really stirred up the entire business community, Indian and British, who were soon up in arms against Liaquat. Stock exchanges in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were indefinitely in protest against the tax proposals. The big houses, and the Press under their control, denounced the Budget ‘murderous one’ intended to destroy the economy by choking business activities in the country”.

Likening the Congress with the AIML is strange because it is the AIHMS had formed coalition governments with the Muslim League in Bengal, NWFP and Sindh in the early 1940s.

Thus, in all probability, PM Modi appears seriously worried of the Congress attack against crony capitalism which has been wreaking havoc against the poor and middle class Indians since 2014. That is only reason, why PM appears so rattled. Why otherwise does the BJP simply not ignore the Congress manifesto, if the BJP is really so very confident of achieving its target of over 400 seats in the Lok Sabha?

Of course, a lot will depend upon how the common electorates would respond to the debate on this particular remark. Afflicted with communal polarisation, particularly the north Indian electorates are less likely to devote a cool-headed look into the Congress manifesto and the PM’s odious comparison of it with the Muslim League. Let’s watch to see if the ordinary voter will have the last laugh or the Adanis and the Ambanis will emerge victorious at the cost of the Indian? The Electoral Bond Scam, or extortion, has already exposed the deep nexus nexus. Will a 400 plus Lok Sabha of BJP ensure India a pluralist democracy? Or, we shall have moved over to the electoral autocracy (Putin’s Russia style, or the Israel model of bi-national state system with graded citizenship)?

Both the voters (electorates) and institutions (Election Commission) are under watch. What do they have in store for the future of India!

[1] From the Manifesto: “Our greatest concern was the prevailing ‘climate of fear, intimidation and hatred’. In the last five years, every section of the people has lived in fear; laws and investigating agencies have been weaponised to intimidate people; and through its words and actions the BJP and its affiliates have spread hatred among people belonging to different religious, language and caste groups.”

[2] On Religious and Linguistic Minorities: “The Party will respect and uphold the fundamental right to practice one’s faith and the rights guaranteed to religious minorities under Articles 15, 16, 25, 26, 28, 29 and 30 of the Constitution. The Party will also respect and uphold the rights of linguis- tic minorities guaranteed under Articles 15, 16, 29 and 30 of the Constitution. ..”The Party e will encourage and assist students and youth belonging to the minorities to take full advantage of the growing opportunities in education, employment, business, services, sports, arts and other fields. The economic empowerment of minorities is a necessary step for India to realise its full potential. We will ensure that banks will provide institutional credit to minorities without discrimination. The Congress Party will ensure that the minorities receive their fair share of opportunities in education, healthcare, public employment, public works contracts, skill development, sports and cultural activities without discrimination. Congress will ensure that, like every citizen, minorities have the freedom of choice of dress, food, language and personal laws. The Congress will encourage reform of personal laws. Such reform must be undertaken with the participation and consent of the communities concerned.

[3] Other aspects in the Congress Manifesto released on April “The Congress will include in the curriculum of schools the life and work of social reformers to spread the message of social justice. The Congress will establish Ambedkar Bhavans-cum-Libraries in every district to promote the habit of reading and discussion. The Party will pass a law authorising allocation of resourc- es for the Scheduled Caste Sub Plan and Tribal Sub Plan within the annual budget and monitoring the execution of the plans. 15. Congress will end the evil of manual scavenging. Every manual scavenger will be rehabilitated, re-skilled, provided a job and assured a life of dignity and safety. The Prohibition of Manual Scavenging Act, 2013, will be strictly implemented and any person employing anyone for manual scavenging shall be punished. We will provide compensation of 30 lakh to families of sanita- tion workers.”(safai karamcharis) deceased while at work. We will allocate sufficient funds to enable the procurement of machines that will clean sewers and septic tanks, and remove human waste. Free insurance will be provided to all sanitation worker

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The post Why is the BJP calling the Congress Manifesto 2024 to be an “Imprint of the Muslim League”? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

I am someone who has been teaching postgraduate courses in post-independence history for decades. My mind goes back to the stirring speech of Feroze Gandhi (1912-1960) in the Lok Sabha on December 16, 1957 [Incidentally, December 16 is also the birthday of my daughter whom we adopted and lost at the hands of a hasty and therefore botched up juridical pronouncement, arguably succumbing to the regressive Muslim Personal Law].

The then Prime Minister, Jawahar Lal Nehru was a quintessential democrat, save some debatable blemishes. Feroze was on the treasury benches, acting more ferocious than any qualified opposition leader could have acted. As we look around today, when parts of world are moving rapidly towards electoral autocracy combined with ethnic hatred, we note with great regret that rather than strengthening and deepening our democracy, we have been eroding it significantly.

Feroze Gandhi had (1957) exposed the officials of the State Bank of India (SBI) and of Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) of India involved in (or subjected to) the scam; he was unsparing about the Finance Minister as well. The shady and corrupt transactions of Mr. Mundhra were exposed. Nehru didn’t raise the bogey of the foreign-hand in order to silence Feroze. I therefore strongly recommend — to postgraduate students taking my course—that they read the wonderfully written text of the speech that was delivered with great passion in the Lok Sabha on December 16, 1957. One remembers Feroze today, precisely because of this unwavering speech. Rajni Patel wrote in the Foreword to one famous biography, (Shashi Bhushan, 1977) of Feroze, “At a time we are once again concerned with refashioning our democratic values and revitalizing our public institutions, it is good to recapitulate the work and ideals of a pioneer” that Feroze was.

Had it been today, the Parliamentarian (Feroze Gandhi) could have been chastised as a seditious religious minority out to wreck “Bharat Mata”. Those were the days of a fledgling, proud, strong and emergent democracy; not the sham period we live through today. The then PM was not scared, not insecure and frightened to be losing his office. The regime of that time allowed the debate to take place and it was also widely reported widely in the media. Incidentally, the very same parliamentarian had fought successfully to legislate a law permitting press-coverage of Parliamentary proceedings. Contrast this with the current scenario when our Prime Minister has not had the moral courage to address a single press conference in two terms, that is the last 10 years, and this fact does not appear to disturb the electorate.

Subsequently, in August 1965, there were food riots in India, student upsurges in the Bihar and Hindi belt against corruption, inflation and unemployment. On August 9, 1965, students, employees and the opposition had gheraoed the Bihar Assembly in Patna. They had battled with the police. Herbert Heidenreich (1968), in his research-essay, The Anatomy of a Riot, notes,

“The police resorted to firing in eighteen places throughout the state as railway stations were sacked, government offices and homes of Cabinet members burned, and warehouses looted. Order was finally restored after five days; in many places only when army units were deployed. Journalists and other observers tend to attach adjectives to their descriptions of political violence in India. Thus there are ‘communal’ riots, ‘food’ riots, or ‘language’ riots”

This is how the 1967 elections came to be held against the incumbent regime. We don’t yet witness any such phenomenon in India today after the expose of the Electoral Bond Scam in 2024! Though, we live through, otherwise, an “age of mob fury”, era of lynching, an age of easy provocations and most brutal violence. One reason of course is that we have too many non-state actors, of course, in complicity with the regime, enjoying an impunity from the state, who resort to group violence. Is that why the expose of the biggest scam in the history of independent ever doesn’t provoke the nationalist commitment of the vigilante groups?

Another reason is obvious. “Mainstream newspapers” (Hindi and English and many other regional languages as also the commercial TV news channels) have gone mostly silent. At best, they are reluctantly informing us about these scandals with least possible quantum of information. The best known anchors, shrill when it comes to promoting stigma against vulnerable sections or brazenly promoting one leader and his party, have also been rendered voiceless.

The anti-Emergency campaign and the run up to the 1977 elections are too well known to be re-counted here in detail. Ironically, some of the anti-Emergency crusaders of the 1970s have turned into the practitioners of undeclared Emergency today.

The 1989 elections were held on the back of a campaign against the Bofors Scandal (1987). The then Finance Minister, V P Singh,  resigned from government and led the oppositional coalition to victory and formed a short-lived government, supported by both the left and right. Over decades, VP Singh’s allegations have turned out to be either exaggerated or baseless. There were other mistakes too, that Rajiv Gandhi had committed. He had surrendered “to the forces of prejudice, illiberalism and fundamentalism” in the case of Shahbano Judgment of 23 April 1985, which was upturned through a parliamentary legislation in 1986. This immensely contributed to the rise of majoritarian forces, candidly confessed even by its chief villains, the Muslim clergy, who also nationalized the local dispute of Ayodhya. (See Abulhasan Ali Miyan Nadvi’s Urdu memoir, Karwaan-e-Zindagi. 1988, vol. 3, chapter 4). Rajiv Gandhi, however, had enough grace to have later confessed to the journalist Vir Sanghvi (A Rude Life, 2021) “I was young. I made mistakes”. V P Singh-Arun Nehru combine targeted Rajiv Gandhi like anything. Their partner-in-crime, so to say, was the English daily Indian Express (IE). This is a newspaper, which has today given space to several right wing ideologues and official spokespersons. Ajaz Ashraf writes (Mid Day, April 3, 2023),

“Since May 2014, when the BJP swept into power, its members have altogether written 640 opinion pieces over approximately 3,000 days. This means a piece from the RSS-BJP stable was being published in one of the three newspapers every fifth day. Of the 640 pieces, IE accounted for 337, HT 97 and TOI 206. IE’s figures are high partly because its archive is the best among the three. Its opinion pages are vibrant—proprietors and editors fear a backlash only when they speak out against the government.

I found that 399 of the 640 pieces, or 62.34 per cent, mention Prime Minister Narendra Modi or his government at least once. In one piece, RSS leader Ram Madhav mentions Modi 20 times, in another 18 times. Former President Ram Nath Kovind referred to Modi 22 times in just one piece written, thankfully, after he demitted office. Union Minister Bhupender Yadav did so 21 times in an article. Most BJP spokespersons possess a sycophantic inclination to needlessly repeat Modi’s name in their pieces.

Guess they owe it to Modi for turning them into writers. Since May 2014, Madhav has written 101 pieces for IE, 25 for HT and six for TOI. The IE index of authors shows he began writing only in May 2014. Former Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu has written 68 pieces across the three newspapers, Bhupender Yadav 34, MP Dr Rakesh Sinha 31 for IE, for which former minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has penned 22. Spokesperson Anil Baluni has 26 bylines for IE and his colleague Shehzad Poonawalla 20 for TOI.

The 2014 elections were held in the background of the “India Against Corruption” (IAC) campaign of 2011, led by a non-descript “non-ideological” old man Anna Hazare and thereafter, Arvind Kejriwal. Soon, it became pretty clear that majoritarian right wing forces were surreptitiously supporting and sustaining the anti-corruption movement. Very few academics and public intellectuals had the foresight to warn us against such a dangerous anti-ideological movement of the majoritarian forces. By the 2014 elections, India underwent a change almost beyond recognition. What India and the regime stands for today, repudiates almost everything that the freedom movement and the Constitution envisions and commits itself to.

In most of the milestone moments of the electoral history of independent India, the “progressive” forces (Socialists and parts of the Leftists) have aligned with the right wing majoritarian forces. With every of such moment, the majoritarian forces gained greater political strength, social base and institutional penetrations. By now, they have become the hegemons, aided by crony capital and the state institutions at the service of their partisan politics to hound and harass the opposition with. Rahul Gandhi is almost a lone crusader to be going into the masses through his Yatras amidst acute resource-crunch and state-hounding.

As yet there is no biography of Rahul Gandhi. Though, there are not less than two, unflattering, accounts (viz., Sugata Srinivasaraju’s, Strange Burdens and Dayashankar Mishra’s Hindi book) cataloguing the viciously hostile political atmosphere in which he is operating.

Besides the anti-Muslim communal hatred, what else is/are the factor(s) which could possibly explain why we don’t we see a popular outrage on the ground against the Electoral Bond Scam which financially not only cripples but also asphyxiates the opposition to death? This is no longer a concern of a specific oppositional political party alone. It is a question of democracy itself. Why 85% of Indians wish to have autocratic regime?

I am really puzzled about this “indifference” of the people towards the expose of the electoral Bond Scam (corruption). I ask myself, are we no longer thinking humans? Have we, as a nation, become machines controlled by our vicious political leaders? Has the governing party semitized the majority like some religions, where we refuse to evaluate our faith (our politics) with reason? We remain faithful followers of our preferred political party and leader round the clock all the time when, in a vibrant democracy, we are expected to be voters of a specific party only for the polling day, and for the rest, become vigilant and critical citizens. Or, have we, all or most of us, turned into card-holding cadres? We react to the political party we have voted for, in a manner as if we are afraid of committing a heresy against our faith, that is, the wrong acts of the political party of our choice? Why have we become a prisoner, a fanatic supporter of messianic, cult politics, hence a retrogressive, backward looking nation?

After all, way back in November 1937 (The Modern Review, Calcutta), a pseudonym Chanakya, had written against this attitude which “potentially paves the path to Caesarism and dictatorship”. We later got to know that he was none other than Nehru writing against himself. It was his way of training Indians against cult worship. This phenomenon of cult politics was a sad truth for provincial politics in the latter half of the last century, when caste-based, corrupt, nepotist, dynastic parties have had turned into a faith-like creed or sect, in the name of social justice. By the second decade of the current century we magnified this tendency to an alarming level? Why are we in love with electoral autocracy, authoritarianism? Why are we endorsing institutional meltdown? Have we become a psychopathic case? Are we suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome-having fallen in love with our oppressors and tormentors?

The present phenomenon cannot be explained away by just faith-based hatred of one group of citizens against another! True, minority conservatism and communalism has contributed immensely to the strengthening of the majoritarian forces, particularly in the 1980s. True also that the liberal-left forces have often supported (or gone silent on) minority regressivism. This resulted into their gradual but inevitable erosion of the credibility of the liberal-left. So much so that today, increasingly larger number of Muslim narrative-making groups, influencers, columnists and academics are falling into the lap of the dispensation to extract small favours such as vice chancellorship of a few selected “Muslim” institutions. This is amply demonstrated by Felix Pal (2020). Quite a few of these Muslim “notables” do have antecedence of affiliation with the Muslim Right Wing as well as having extracted favour from the ruling Congress (in the pre-NaMo era).

Nonetheless, there is certainly more to the majoritarian resurgence in India (and beyond) in the recent times, in a phase of late-capital crisis and crony capitalism. Identity politics and competitive communalisms constitute only a part of the current crisis in India. Today, in the social media, saffron narratives are most prevalent. Anti-communal narrative- making stuff is less visible than the pro-establishment propaganda. “Neoliberal psychopolitics is a technology of domination that stabilizes and perpetuates the prevailing system by means of psychological programming and steering”, says, Byung-Chul Han, in his 2017 booklet, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. But how to get out of this is not something coming out as lucidly from this philosopher, Han. Have we, as a collective, been turned into “unintelligent”, or “stupid” or “idiot”? We are into the era of mass stupidity? If so, what is the possible answer, being offered by Han? He says,

“The idiot is a modern-day heretic. Etymologically, heresy means ‘choice’. Thus, the heretic is one who commands free choice: the courage to deviate from orthodoxy. As a heretic, the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider. Today, in light of increasingly coercive conformism, it is more urgent than ever to heighten heretical consciousness”.

In my very limited understanding, Rahul Gandhi, much maligned as the so called Pappu, and everyone engaged in the epic resistance, can be said to be pursuing the noble act and mission of raising the heretical consciousness of the masses who have sadly been turned into unquestioning faithful (bhakts) of the semitized and oppressive political establishment. May this tribe of “idiots” rise in this era of despondency and desperation! We need larger number of “idiots” to take away the elements of bhakti from us and to shake us to realize how badly we are being looted by a handful of the capitalists. These crony capitalists have snatched away employment from our educated and skilled youth. This band of select two dozen or so capitalists are busy destroying all the wealth of the nation including minerals, water, forests, environment, the very essence of being humans. Has allegience to them overtaken all the state institutions.

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The post Corruption as an issue in Indian Election Campaigns: the 2024 story appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In a Muslim exclusive WhatsApp group of my extended family, kinship and village neighbourhood, a young man proposed to boycott the Republic Day 2024. The reason he put forward was, the current dispensation has victimised and marginalised the Muslims in various many ways. The young man proposing this boycott has obtained his diploma from a centrally funded Polytechnic affiliated to the Muslim minority university (Jamia Millia Islami, JMI, New Delhi). The JMI, being a centrally funded public university, offers considerably subsidised and economical fee structure. He also got a job in the union government, soon after he obtained the diploma. Subsequently, he quit this job as he found employment in Saudi Arabia.

His “fantastic proposal” of boycotting 2024 Republic Day celebrations is then confronted with an argument that the core support-base of, and organisations affiliated with the current dispensation, anyway subscribe to a kind of ideology that considers Republican Constitutional values an impediment to actualizing their majoritarian goals. Though, they are in ascendance and the forces resisting them appear to be weaker, are not the southern states still beyond them? Meaning that a majority of Hindus are still against Hindu majoritarianism. True, the share of Muslim communities in the structures and processes of power, in education and trade and employment are pathetically dissatisfactory. This has been the situation for decades however, much before this regime acquired its dominance. This also holds true more for northern India. The difference between north and south is due to a variety of factors, external as well as internal, he is told.

With these arguments, he was further reminded of the social composition of the structures and processes of power in the country he works in. He informed also that in that country where Islam was born, only a specific clan can be the ruler, through inheritance, not through any mechanism of popular will, nor through any form of democracy—consociational[1] or consensus democracy–ensuring maximum participation and representation from across the sects, regions, and ethnicities of the country he works in. He is counselled, a consociational democracy differs from consensus democracy (e.g. in Switzerland), in that consociational democracy represents a consensus of representatives with minority veto, while consensus democracy requires consensus across the electorate.

Thereafter this young man, rather cunningly feigns ignorance about such state of affairs of exclusion, discrimination and disenfranchisement in the Islamic country that he now works in. Also, in terms of his sectarian affiliations, he is supposed to be sympathetic to the Salafi ideology. He raises the issue of the egregious act of the demolition (1992) of Babri Masjid with no punishment meted out to those who have been pronounced criminals by the Supreme Court. Some of these criminals are shamelessly being rewarded with votes and are successful elected representatives.

He is then reminded of an episode of the demolition of a historic mosque in Mecca.

… [in 2005], King Fahd, obsessed with building palaces, could look down on the Kaaba from the bedroom of his new residence in Mecca. The palace was located on the eastern side and overshadowed the whole of the Sacred Mosque… [T]he historic Bilal Mosque, dating back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad, adjacent to the palace, was demolished. The development took care to ensure that the king had a full view of the worshippers in the compound of the Haram; hence no minarets were built facing the palace…. [Ziauddin Sardar (2014), Meccah: The Sacred City, p. 338].

This young man was then asked if the ruling aristocracies and civil society (if any exist) of the KSA, UAE and other such countries ever bothered about the kind of discriminations and marginalisation India’s Muslims have been subjected to in India; he was asked if these Arab countries allowed civic protests against Zionist and other persecutions across the globe; did Indian Muslims ever stage a protest demonstration in front of their Embassies in India for their silence on Zionist persecution of Palestinians?

He was also asked to ponder why KSA provides fund only for theological seminaries in India, and not institutes for modern education, whereas under the provisions of the Articles 29, 30 of the Indian Constitution, our Indian state provides fund for our schools and colleges of modern education established and administered by us across the country. These arrangements do feel threatened by the current dispensation but from among the Hindu majority itself, resistance against such threats continue. These forces of resistance need more of solidarity, rather than the opium of alienation and even radicalization of India’s Muslims, from certain “Islamic” countries.

This young man was then reminded that he should be a grateful participant in Indian democracy that grants him and us minority rights; a Constitution and democracy which has equipped him with a diploma to earn his livelihood and to attain socio-economic mobility. He was counselled to work towards strengthening the India’s secular democracy, resisting majoritarianism rather than harbouring only a sense of victimhood above all else. He was also reminded of the fact that in some ways, Muslim conservatism, their own communalism and separatist mind-set, and a disproportionate or exaggerated sense of victimhood are the additional factors contributing to greater ascendance of majoritarianism, particularly since the mid-1980s. He found himself silenced because he was disarmed with this barrage and litany of arguments. In other words, he goes silent not because he is convinced with the counter-arguments. His grudge and reluctance persists. He refuses to be convinced.

One of the greatest failures, and wilful one, has been in letting off the perpetrators and plotters of intermittent communal violence. India’s criminal justice system has been awful on this count. The collective grievance of India’s Muslims has more to do with this aspect than to any other aspect of exclusion, discrimination and victimisation.

There are debates between sections of the liberal-secular population and those who ascribe to majoritarianism. The debate always veers around the agent provocateurs of such communal strife, Who cast the first stone? A concise reply to such a polarised debate is: whosoever may have been the plotters and perpetrators (including the security forces who wilfully fail to prevent and control such violence; often acting as complicit with rioters, and also fail to produce evidence of investigations before the law courts) must be punished. Wilful failure to punish them is explained by only one factor–the majoritarian character of the state, and also of society, which doesn’t have even have post facto remorse for and outrage against such identity-based bloodshed and pogroms.

However, how do most Muslims look at the Great Calcutta Killings of August 1946 and of Noakhali in subsequent months, carried out under the Muslim League administration led by H S Suhrawardy, and Sheikh Mujibur Rehman (1920-1975) was in the forefront?

How do the Muslim elites of the subcontinent look at the politics of the partitions (1947 and 1971)?

Do they look at this aspect of the history and politics of violence?

Do they realize that a large section of the Muslim elites (mostly of western Uttar Pradesh) demanded Partition and they got a separate state of Pakistan, hence, those actors (and subscribers of that ideology) and collaborators of the Raj have to share the greater blame of the violence and brutalities?

This certainly doesn’t mean that one is putting blame on one party and absolving the other. One has invested a lot into reading partition literature, both historical and fictional works. India could have been divided only in the British presence; it was divided because of competitive communalism. This has been a repeated theme in my extensive academic work and writings. Still, certain questions pertaining to a selectivity in the Muslim politics of narrative needs to be raised more urgently than ever before!

Does this Muslim elite realise that the very same ideological forces and classes of Pakistan denied power to Sheikh Mujibur Rehman in 1970, despite the mandate?

Do they feel about the kind of brutalities, violence, plunder, etc., they perpetuated in 1971 against their Bengali citizens on the eastern flank of their Islamic Republic of Pakistan? In May 2014, a film, directed by Mrityunjay Devvrat was released, “The Children of War”, also known as “The Bastard Child”, played by Raima Sen, Farooq Shaikh, Rucha Inamdar, among others, depicting the brutalities of 1971?

How many Muslims of the subcontinent really bother to inform themselves about, and remember this movie, in other words, the human brutality against humans, their own co-religionists? Subsequently, on 15 August 1975, even Sheikh Mujibur Rehman with all the members of his family present in his house were done to death.

So far as the erasure and perpetuation of the narratives of histories are concerned, who decides and determines the politics of narrative-making? Has there been an honest and comprehensive introspection about all such issues, besides seeking justice based on caste (Biradri) and gender? Joya Chatterji, in her latest book, Shadows at Noon identifies amnesia and strategic forgetting as “one crucial aspect of nation-building project”. She adds, with each wave of nation-making the fate of internal minorities have become more precarious, across the subcontinent. Despite this, on April 4, 1979 when “judicial” hanging of Zulfiqar Bhutoo happened, his massacre of Bengali Muslims in 1971 was forgotten by sections of India’s Muslims. A popular Bollywood song of the film Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978) was parodied with emotions, “O Bhutto re …. Terey bina bhi kya jeena”. That summer, this was hummed by the Muslim boys running around India’s mango orchards, more so when our half yearly exams of the primary schools were over, and we had ample time for leisure. In our homes, among the elders, Bhutto’s misdeeds, in 1970-1971, were chosen to be forgotten. Subsequently, General Ziaul Haq resorted to prodding the Islamic extremists, which would kind of cover up his misdeeds against Bhutto.

That most of us loved Pakistani cricket more than Indian cricket, and we loved the football of the Calcutta’s Mohammedan Sporting Club more than we loved the Mohan Bagan and East Bengal, is yet another open secret. Such “secrets” or narratives within the community do tell something about the community’s socio-political attitudes and worldviews.

Each election, a lot of India’s Muslim youth raise issues of Muslim representation in legislature. Wherever, Muslims have 20% or more share of population they claim it almost as a matter of entitlement that the seat must get Muslim representation. There is nothing wrong with such aspirations. But why do they choose to forget that in an era of more rabid majoritarianism and majoritarian electoral consolidation menacingly aided by capital and media, even a 45% of the demographic share of a religious minority will be insufficient to ensure their victory? Why do they fail to understand that communalism cannot be fought with communalism? And that, if the battle is on communal lines, majority will always be a winner; more so when majoritarianism is a frenzy! This has been put more aptly in a novel, Guerrillas (1975), by V S Naipaul (1932-2018): “When everybody wants to fight there is nothing to fight for. Everybody wants to fight his own little war. Everybody is Guerrillas. …Those who have won will win every war”.

This helplessness of the minorities becomes greater in a first-past-the-post system. A greater section of the Muslim elites, during the popular phase of the national movement, fought more for separate electorates, and less for minority rights in a consociational democracy.  Even during the Constituent Assembly Debates (CAD, 1946-1949), this issue was hardly brought about. We need to remind ourselves that during the course of the CAD, the bargaining capacity of the Muslims and Liberal Hindus didn’t remain as strong after July 1947 as it was before that. It got considerably diminished after that, which is yet another major factor why minority rights are on shaky grounds in India (Pratinav Anil’s recent book, Another India: The Making of the World’s Largest Muslim Minority, 1947–77, demonstrates this more clearly). One of my insightful mentors reminds me, “If there could be an arrangement where, polling of at least 51% of votes cast (through first or second choice), this would be more conducive to social justice and an attenuation of vote banks. This is something even much admired B. R. Ambedkar lost sight of. He, having secured reserved seats, took the path of least resistance and forgot to put up demands such as this, in the CAD/Constitution”. The Justice M. N. Venkatachaliah Commission (set up in 2000 AD), to review the working of the Constitution, had made the following recommendation:

“The [Review] Commission while recognising the beneficial potential of the system of runoff contest electing the representative winning on the basis of 50% plus one vote polled, as against the first-past-the-post system, for a more representative democracy, recommends that the Government and the Election Commission of India should examine this issue of prescribing a minimum of 50% plus one vote for election in all its aspects … The review commission also said this did not need a major Constitutional amendment but ‘necessary correctives’ could be achieved by ordinary legislation, by modifying existing laws or rules or by executive action”.

After 1986, the Muslim conservatives and bigots made Indian Secularism even more shaky to the extent that this is one of the reasons (major or minor) why we have reached a situation now when, as put by Joya Chatterji’s book, Shadows at Noon (p. 203), “Hindutva’s moral code may not yet have become part of the constitution, but it is a part of India’s everyday life”.

 The moot question still remains un-addressed, as to how have the common Muslims been fed with (or upon) the opium of victimhood? For an answer to this, we need to look into Gopal Krishna’s review (IESHR, Sage, 1973) of Peter Hardy’s two books (1971-1972), The Muslims of British India, and the other booklet, Partners in Freedom and the True Muslims: The Political thought of Some Muslim Scholars in British India 1912-1947). The reviewer, Gopal Krishna, deserves to be quoted at length as he asks us to re-examine and,

“to question and subject to careful investigation several ill-established assertions  of a rather general character originating mostly with the work of  W. W. Hunter [Indian Musalmans, 1871], such as, “Muslims were oppressed by the British after the Mutiny [of 1857]”; “Muslims were educationally comparatively  backward”; “Muslims lost lands to Hindus in Bengal as a result  of British policy”; “Muslims did not get a fair share in the administration”; along with other similar ones, for it is as much on these  as on the notion of the divinely-assigned mission of Muslims in India, and the fear of a threat to Islam from revived Hinduism,  that the separatist movement was nurtured by the Muslim elite. A mythology of relative deprivation and communal excellence provided the foundation of this movement, which by stages came to claim Muslims to be a separate nationality and to demand a homeland for them. In his study, The Muslims of British India, Dr. Hardy has performed an important service by examining the available evidence on several of these propositions. He writes, “For the Muslim elite in northern India, British conquest meant the destruction of a way of life more than the destruction of a livelihood and education” (p. 34). “In judicial employ, except in the highest posts, i.e. judgeships and collectorships, Muslims held their own, in Bengal until the middle of the  nineteenth century, in the region of modern Uttar Pradesh for a  generation thereafter” (p. 36). With regard to the effect of the resumption proceedings on Muslims in Bengal, Dr. Hardy writes, “Muslims did suffer, but whether they suffered disproportionately  to Hindus remains a matter of opinion, not knowledge” (p. 40), and he quotes the Education Commission Report of 1882 to say  that ‘the result of even the harshest resumption case, was, not the dispossession of the holder but the assessment of revenue on his  holding, and even that in no case at more than half the prevailing rate’ (p. 41).”.

With these revelations or exposes, we need to ask, who, quite misleadingly, popularised the narratives of Muslim victimhood? And another question one needs to ask is, in post-independence period, has there been any big mass movement of India’s Muslims for education, employment, trading facilities (loans, and other administrative enabling)? The biggest of pan India mass movements of Muslims have been for subjugation of Muslim women by opposing reforms in Muslim Personal Laws, the reforms which Pakistan, Bangladesh and most Arab countries have undertaken much earlier. This was in 1972-1973, and in 1985-1986 (India Today, January 31, 1986). The first wave of Muslim protests resulted into the formation of All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) in 1973, even though the amendment in the relevant laws had to do more with the Hindus. The second one resulted into self-confessedly trading off of the Babri Masjid to be given away to the Saffronites, and in its exchange, legislating a law [Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986] against the Supreme Court verdict of April 23, 1985 in favour of Shah Bano (1916-1992). The confession is made in the Urdu memoir (Kaarwaan-e-Zindagi, 1988, vol. 3, chapter 4) of the then chief of AIMPLB, Abul Hasan Ali Miyan Nadvi (1914-1999), yet, the confession continues to be ignored. The self-confession doesn’t shock or surprise most of the Muslims of India.

For the sake of clarity, in this context, let a few things be said here:

In the 1980s, the AIMPLB brand of forces among Indian Muslims made their own contribution to, were fodder to in a sense, rising majoritarianism. On January 15, 1986, in a session of the Momin Conference at the Siri Fort Auditorium in Delhi, the then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi announced his intention to amend the law to nullify the Supreme Court’s April 1985 verdict in favour of Shah Bano. A legislative bill was introduced in March and it became the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act in May 1986. In January 1986, as said, there were strident Muslim protests against the progressive verdict, which had granted Shah Bano (1916-1992), a Muslim woman, alimony after her divorce. [For the separatist politics of Jinnah in the 1930s, around the theologically non sustainable provisions of the Shariat, and the afterlife of that politics, see these three books: Saumya Saxena, Divorce and Democracy, 2022; Julia Stephens, Governing Islam, 2019; Rina Verma Williams, Postcolonial Politics and Personal Laws, 2006].

The approach of the conservative Muslims became pretty clear from the Urdu memoir, Karwan-e-Zindagi, published in 1988 by Maulana Abul Hasan Ali Miyan Nadvi (1914-1999). In volume 3, chapter 4, page 134, Nadvi clearly narrates that it is he who had persuaded Gandhi not to accept the proposition that many Islamic countries have already reformed their personal laws. Nadvi’s narration is triumphant; he rejoices in the successful accomplishment of his effort to stymie a similar reform in India. He says his persuasion had a particular psychological impact on Rajiv Gandhi and that his “arrow precisely hit the target— woh teer apney nishaaney par baitha”. On page 157 comes Nadvi’s candid “confession”: “Our mobilisation for protecting the Shariat in 1986 resulted into complicating the issue of Babri Masjid and vitiated the atmosphere in a big way— is ne fiza mein ishte’aal wa izteraab paida karney mein bahut bara hissa liya,” he writes.

For further substantiation, one must read Ali Miyan Nadvi’s memoir, Nicholas Nugent’s book, Rajiv Gandhi: Son of a Dynasty (BBC Books, 1990, p.187), reveals:

“…a decision had been taken by the Congress High Command in the early 1986 to ‘play the Hindu card’ in the same way that the Muslim Women’s bill had been an attempt to ‘play the Muslim card’… Ayodhya was supposed to be a package deal… a tit for tat for the Muslim women’s bill… Rajiv played a key role in carrying out the Hindu side of the package deal by such actions as arranging that pictures of Hindus worshipping at the newly unlocked shrine be shown on television.”

The lock (Babri Mosque) was opened within an hour of the judgment being delivered by the district court of Faizabad on February 1, 1986. As said earlier, the deal between the Prime Minister, the Muslim clergy and the Momin Conference’s Ziaur Rahman Ansari (Union Minister of State for Environment in the Rajiv Gandhi led government, who died in 1992) had already been struck in January 1986. There is a reference to this in his biography, Wings of Destiny, 2018, written by his son Fasihur Rahman.

A nagging question yet remains: who wanted to open the locks, and why?  Was it because, in some the bye-elections, the Congress had experienced Muslim opposition? The above revealing accounts of Ali Miyan and Ziaur Rehman Ansari and substantiated by Nicholas Nugent should have created some resentment in a majority of Muslims. They have now. There is, instead, a hypocritical silence, rather than an outrage against the deal struck by the Muslim leaders with the Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.  [There is a need to bring out a comprehensive biographical account on the life and times of Shah Bano].

This reveals to us that India’s Muslims didn’t launch any mass movement of minority rights, neither in the colonial period nor after Independence. In the colonial period, in the name of and beginning with securing minority rights, the Muslim League, eventually claimed the Muslims to be nation which eventually required a state too (Jinnah himself didn’t recognise Pakistan’s minorities to be a nation and therefore  they deserving state). Gyan Prakash, the author of Emergency Chronicles, in his interview with Manik Sharma, Firstpost, December 4, 2018), said:

[Muslim] Minorities received equal rights in the Indian Constitution as a result of the nationalist struggle against the British, not due to a specific struggle for minority civil rights. Perhaps only the Dalit movement can claim a history as a civil rights movement. The Muslims never quite developed a civil rights movement, and became torn between the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan and the Congress Party’s nationalist politics. When the BJP seized the mantle of nationalism and gave it a Hindu majoritarian twist, the Muslims were left with no historical struggles and memories of a civil rights movement to summon. Today, unless a movement develops to combine minority rights with a civil rights struggle, the Muslims will remain vulnerable to the swings of electoral politics.

As someone like me who has been teaching postgraduate courses in modern and contemporary Indian history close to the last two and a half decades, it is a matter of deep concern and question, that, my students (majority of them Muslims) do know that the majoritarian forces are appropriating the likes of Sardar Patel (1875-1950). Neither do any of my students know the fact that the anti-Muslim image of Sardar Patel has been rebutted by Rafiq Zakaria (1920-2005) way back in 1996, Sardar Patel and Indian Muslims. This kind of ignorance among the Muslim literati persists despite the fact that its Urdu rendering is also available. Let’s not forget the fact that Zakaria was also someone who has left behind a legacy of a chain of educational institutions. Yet, his academic interventions are so inadequately known to the Muslim literati.

Some of my intellectually accomplished friends in academia are able to find instances of anti-Muslim thoughts and practices even of a leader like Jawaharlal Nehru. Fair enough. But the question is, do they take time out to find instances of Muslim aspirations to establish Islamic State/Hukumat-e-Ilahiya/Nizam-e-Mustafa? Also, the Indian Secularism, as against the western secularism, as well as against the Pakistani experiences, even the Islamist forces such as the Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Hind, have got enough space in India to publish their periodicals, books, to run their madrasas and even their politics. In fact, Muslims speaking against Muslim conservatism and Muslim communalism, are often quite unpopular within their own community.

I am often also intrigued by the Muslim politics of narrative-building, in which victimhood of Muslims is their staple food. It intrigues me, why someone like, Hamid Dalwai (1932-1977), the “Angry Young Secularist” [called so by Dilip Chitre (1938-2009), as well as by, Mehrunnisa (1930-2017), Dalwai’s wife; see Hamid Dalwai, Muslim Politics in India, ed &tr. Dilip Chitre 2023 reprint] an intellectual-activist and novelist must remain much maligned and much derided by most of the Muslims? Compare such instances with those who keep articulating victimhood narratives. Such publicists are so very popular among the Muslims. These state of affairs need to be re-assessed, called into question.

I have followed certain Facebook posts and columns: someone questioning the authenticity of Hadis and doing much radical re-interpretation of certain Quranic verses is not chastised as much as he is condemned if he writes something which exposes Muslim communalism and bigotry and writes more towards de-opiating the Qaum for their obsession with victimhood narratives and questioning their power theology and those who critique their disproportionate obsession with identity politics. They would either deny Muslims being reactionaries, or would argue that minority communalism is of no consequence or if they are eventually persuaded to concede, they would suggest this is not the right time to raise such issues.  Unfortunately many Liberal-Left also endorse such a cunning argument. This s where the Liberal-Left lose their credibility and their fight for secular progressivism becomes weak and the Hindutva forces get fodder to grow. The Hindutva constituency and support-base has been consistently increasing as they say that the India’s Muslim minority are not as weak as they are made out to be by the Liberal-Left. They argue that:

The Muslims rose against the British only after they lost the Mughal power in 1857; most of them joined the national movement in 1920, only to save the institution of Khilafat (Caliphate) in Turkey, through their Pan Islamism; they got Pakistan in 1947; they subverted the Supreme Court and forced the Parliament to legislate against its verdict in 1986. They have got around five dozens of Muslim states and their Pan Islamic solidarity renders India’s Hindus a vulnerable minority, despite being a majority in their own homeland, India, etc. Lala Lajpat Rai had expressed his apprehensions around this with C R Das and Madan Mohan Malaviya (Intezar Husain, Ajmal-e-Azam, 1999). More and more Hindus look upon Indian Secularism as a favour to the Muslims and their regressivism and less as a modernising project of rationalist-progressive foundations of nationalism. This is what Mushirul Haq (1933-1990) said in his essay, “Secularism? No, Secular State? Well-Yes”, included in Haq’s 1972 book, Islam in Secular India. Haq asserted that most Muslims and their Ulema “seem to believe that the state must remain secular but the Muslims must be saved from secularism”.

Haq further argues that the tiny sections among India’s Muslims who have conviction in secularism are referred to by the Muslims with contempt. The book is rendered into Urdu.  I keep adding in this essay about the availability of the Urdu renderings of certain writings. It is to indicate that one must not plead ignorance on the part of the Urdu speaking Muslims as a factor. Rather, one must admit that it is not about ignorance, it is rather about the fact that this is the way narratives of Muslim politics are made and circulated within the community.

Consider another example. Allama Iqbal, the poet, is almost like an “unofficial prophet” for the Muslims of the Indo-Pak subcontinent. Iqbal’s views on politics of nationalism are something which makes India’s Muslims’ cohabitation with the fellow Hindu countrymen quite difficult. His debate with Nehru in the 1930s, resulted into expose’ of Iqbal’s “civility-deficit”.

This civility-deficit persisted in Iqbal’s rebuttal against Husain Ahmad Madani’s “Muttahidah Qaumiyat” (1938) as well, when he called Husain Madani to be “mischievous” (and even almost a kafir?). Iqbal wrote [Ehsan, Urdu daily, Lahore, March 9, 1938], “in the mind of Maulana Husain Ahmad and others who think like him, the conception of nationalism in a way has the same place which the rejection of the Finality of the Holy Prophet has in the minds of Qadianis” (Shamloo, ed, 1944, p. 219; rendered into Urdu as well; available on Rekhta. Shamloo, the pseudonym was of Lateef Ahmad Sharvani). This was just weeks before Iqbal passed away [on April 21, 1938]. Iqbal [replying to Nehru’s essay, “Orthodox of all Religions, Unite!” (Modern Review, vol. 58, Issue 5, 1935)] Confessed to his exclusionary-separatist nationalism:

“It becomes a problem for Muslims only in countries where they happen to be in a minority, and nationalism demands their complete self-effacement. In majority countries Islam accommodates nationalism; for their Islam and nationalism are practically identical; in minority countries it is justified in seeking self-determination as a cultural unit”. (Shamloo, ed., Speeches and Statements of Iqbal, 1944, p. 130).

Iqbal even went to the extent of accusing Nehru to having “no acquaintance with Islam or its religious history during the nineteenth century”. Nehru, however, didn’t counter-accuse Iqbal of “no great acquaintance of Hinduism”. Iqbal keeps addressing Nehru as “the Pandit”. I am still looking for Iqbal’s essay (or poetry) in sympathy with the pre-Islamic Spain. No luck, as yet!

While presiding over the Muslim League’s annual session in Allahabad (December 29, 1930), he said, “Ï lead no party. I follow no leader”. In other words while delivering a political address of and for a political party he claimed for himself no to be a politician. And prior to arguing with Nehru (1935), Iqbal had written as many as nine letters to E J Thompson (Oxford University) in 1933-34. These were exchanges on political questions. A comprehensive analysis of Iqbal’s political writings and many self-contradictions therein, reveals him more as a separatist and less as someone who advocated inter-faith cooperation and mutual co-existence in economy, administration and mutual co-existence (S. Hasan Ahmad, The Idea of Pakistan and Iqbal: A Disclaimer. KBL, Patna, 2003/1979).

In other words, Muslim thinkers of the Indian subcontinent have all along been on the path of avoidance, unconcerned with understanding Hindu culture the way they should. The Sangh Parivar in our era has been approaching “power through culture” and the new, educationally and economically “arrived” Hindu articulates majoritarian victimhood accordingly, argues Sugata Srinivasa Raju, in his recent book, Strange Burdens: The Politics and Predicaments of Rahul Gandhi. Sugata Raju adds, “In India after Gandhi, Nehruvian Secularists appear to have mistaken cultural memory for religious memory” (p. 139). The same can be said about the Muslim thinkers of India. Most of them have failed to make sense of the Hindu culture and therefore they have failed to negotiate with them for more creatively meaningful living in harmony. They have looked upon the Hindu cultures more as victors and rulers and less as someone with a shared heritage and ancestry of the era prior to the Muslim rulers.

Such a corrective (of Muslims reclaiming their past prior to Muslim rulers) has begun to come out only recently, now.

For instance, a young Pakistani historian of the Columbia University, Manan Ahmed Asif, in his book, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (2020) and in his previous volume, A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (2017) has approached the historical past from this perspective. For harmonious and dignified living, such exercises of reclaiming this shared ancestry need to be made into a popular narrative across the subcontinent. India’s Muslims as much as the majoritarian Hindus of India need to be told that it is religious frenzy that has ruined Pakistan. This has been demonstrated in a recent book, Pakistan: Origins, Identity and Future by the nuclear Physicist and public intellectual, Pervez Hoodbhoy. This book examines longstanding complex themes and issues – such as religious fundamentalism, identity formation, democracy, and military rule – as well as their impact on the future of the state of Pakistan. We, Indians, need to learn from the self-destructive mistakes of our neighbours and others.

By way of conclusion, what comes out of the foregoing discussion that the India’s Muslims need to take themselves out of the three banes, viz, Victimhood Syndrome, Power Theology, and obsession with Identity Politics?

Conversely put, more and more Muslims have to make their own contribution to invest in secularising India. They must realise –and work to actualize-that communalism is no antidote to communalism, and in competitive communalism, majoritarianism would always be victorious; minority communalism will be an eternal loser.

Are Muslims prepared to realize and introspect about this in order to take up the challenge of the rising majoritarianism?

Are the Liberal-Left forces prepared to tell the Muslims that their conservatism and communalism can no longer be tolerated with silence and by hiding behind an oft-repeated weak argument that “this is not the right time to ask the beleaguered religious minorities to ask for internal reforms”? There has always been less favourable time to ask the minorities for internal reforms and all the time this has consistently been contributing to further strengthening majoritarianism.

India’s Muslims must join the ongoing battles of reclaiming rationality and pluralist co-existence to fight out bigotry and fanaticism.

It is already too late. Yet, it is never too late.

(The author is a professor of History at Aligarh Muslim University)

[1] relating to or denoting a political system formed by the cooperation of different social groups on the basis of shared power, “consociational democracy”

Related:

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Majoritarian agenda & Indian Muslims 

Mohan Bhagwat and Indian Muslims

The post Three Banes of India’s Muslims: Victimhood Syndrome, Power Theology, Obsession with Identity Politics appeared first on SabrangIndia.

How does the novel Zeherkhurani stand out?

One may ask what is so novel about the theme and treatment in this novel Zeherkhurani when there are many fictional books available, written by the tallest names in the Indian literary arena in different languages – particularly in Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi.

In the existing, better known powerful stories (of Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi), we hardly find the plight of Sindhi Hindu migrants who reside on our side of the border. And of course, the contemporary resurgence of hatred, violence and identity-politics, exacerbated much by the media and all pervasive social media is a novelty about the novel, in terms of theme.

At the same time, the treatment of the theme is dexterous. The story has been woven brilliantly. The pains inflicted upon the many tragic characters, mostly women and some men, are something that the readers are bound to feel so very deeply and strongly.

On the communal hatred and violence of our times, some more Hindi novels have been published, such as Gouri Nath’s Karbala Dar Karbala (on the Bhagalpur targeted violence of the 1980s; the making of the pogrom of 1989-1990 and its horrific short-term and long-term fallout), Chandan Pandey’s Hindi novels, Vaidhanik Gulp or Legal Fiction (on the politics of Love Jihad) and Keertigaan (on mob lynching and degenerated media), Yogendra Ahuja’s wonderfully powerful short story, Laffaaz (on a wilful loan defaulter and the political economy of communalisation), a Malyalam novel, Qabr, etc.

But Zeherkhurani still stands out as it provides a narrative in continuity since the 1940s and brings this right up to 2022. The novel, in its later sections, also attempts to suggest possible solutions as to how to resist the contemporary onslaught of communal hatred aided by capital and state power. In this pursuit, creativity might have (or not?) slipped into to propaganda literature. 

The territory of Sindh and its Hindu minorities caught in the vortex of Partition 

In the notable historical studies on the partition of the subcontinent, Sindh is a provincial territory which remained wholly with Pakistan unlike Punjab and Bengal. The Hindus of Sindh had to suffer either from the subjugation of Muslim majoritarianism or had to migrate to parts which were to fall in India after August 14-15, 1947.

As the garm hawa (hot air) of hatred, violence, rape and plunder blew, they were uprooted. Their journey from Karachi to Bombay and other parts of India, including Central India (Madhya Pradesh) turned out to be quite horrific. They were hardly familiar with places beyond their birthplace Sindh until then, most of them hardly knew the parts of India beyond Sindh.

Their settlement within post 1947 India made them realise that even among their own co-religionists they were mocked, marginalised, discriminated, and they were looked upon with contempt for their distinct language/dialect, accents, culture, appearance, sartorial styles, etc. Their children studying in schools had to suffer from various kinds of segregation and ostracisation. Yet, they rebuilt their lives in trade and education, with hard work, grit and with dignity. The novel could possibly be, in part, autobiographical fiction. It therefore pulls the readers into the emotions articulated in the novel. 

Sarah F.D. Ansari’s books on late colonial and post-colonial Sindh

A significant historical study on Sindh is highlighted by Sarah F.D. Ansari in her works. She wrote two books consecutively on late colonial and then on post-colonial period. These are, however, mostly on the Muslims who were (and are) anyway majority in the province.

Ansari’s 1992 book Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sind, 1843–1947, examines the system of political control constructed by the British in Sind between 1843 and 1947. She throws light on the local Muslim religious elites cum big landlords, the pirs or hereditary sufi saints, whose participation in the system ensured the politics of vivisecting the Indian subcontinent, in particular.

In her 2005 book, Life After Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh 1947–1962, she examines the historical background – studying the years following partition – as ethnic politics had come to dominate Sindh by the 1990s with calls for Karachi to become a fifth province in its right. [This is partly depicted in Intezar Husain’s Urdu novel (1998), Aagey Samundar Hai, though confined mainly on the Muslim muhajirin, mostly from Uttar Pradesh]. 

Zeherkhurani stands out since it attempts to fill specific gaps of fictional articulation while historical exploration of the plight of the Sindhi Hindus among the Hindu majority of India is perhaps still awaited.

A look into the Zeherkhurani story

The central protagonist of the story is an inquisitive and interrogative girl Minali alias Minni, born in 1960, who grows up as a fiercely rational and a believer in pluralist coexistence. She chooses journalism as a profession which gets depressingly sullied by the time Minni and her husband reach their 50s (by the year 2022). Theirs is an almost lonely battle against a highly polarised society. The polarisation is because of many stereotypes against religious communities, fed mostly by a communalised media owned by greedy corporates. Nirmala Bhuradia’s creative oeuvres seem to be particularly fond of the characters with a questioning spirit just as Nachiketa in Hindu mythology. Thus, Minni is a lady Nachiketa for Nirmala.

Minni’s cousin, Manohar, a hoodlum, lumpen, and eve-teaser grows up to become an important cadre of a communalised political party which eventually gets elected to power, riding on the wave of communal polarisation, hatred and violence.

Manufacturing rumours, distorting history, spreading falsehood and concoctions are something his politics thrives on. Remarkably, Nirmala’s handling of the causation of partition is very good. This is one of the rare novels in which the British culpability in India’s partition has been brought out most clearly.

For instance, when the British Governor of Punjab E. M. Jenkins (1896-1985) was frustrated by Khizr Hayat Khan Tiwana’s opposition to the partition, Tiwana’s government was toppled and the League’s was installed under the leadership of Iftikhar Husain Khan (1906-1969), Nawab of Mamdot (Punjab). Surprisingly, Allah Bukhsh Sumro (1900-1943) doesn’t come under any focus or conversation in the novel, possibly because 1946-1947 is the major concern of the novel? Allah Bukhsh, the crusader against partition was killed by a fanatic and the colonial state provided all impunity to the killer. Nirmala Bhuradia’s comprehension and articulation of the historiographic nuances of Partition is commendable. The craft of story-telling is, in itself, praiseworthy.   

Important aspects highlighted

The story doesn’t shy away from highlighting the radicalisation of Pakistan in the 1970s and 1980s, internecine sectarian violence and absolute derailment of the economic progress, social fabric in tatters, as much as India is also increasingly becoming its mirror-image, transforming its republic into a theocracy. The fictional depiction acts as a reminder of the research essay by V.S. Kalra and Waqas Butt, ‘If I Speak, They Will Kill Me, to Remain Silent Is to Die’: Poetry of resistance in General Zia’s Pakistan (1977–88) (2019). It is like the famous Urdu couplet: kuchh nahīñ bolā to mar jā.egā andar se ‘shujā.a’/ aur agar bolā to phir bāhar se maarā jā.egā [if silent I remain I will suffocate inside / and if I speak I will surely be crucified]. A brief comparison of Zia’s Pakistan and current dispensation of India was made by this writer in a column for the Sabrang India (February 17, 2020).

Incidentally, during the very same decades, India too has been witnessing a consistent rise and expansion of identitarian forces. The resurgence happened, initially, in the name of crusading against the authoritarianism called Emergency. Some of these forces of resistance preferred to call themselves “Smugglers of Truth”, who found lots of support and funds from expatriates.

About the regressiveness and bigotry of the affluent Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), the scholar-journalist Arvind N Das (1949-2000) had once written a column, “Long Distance Nationalism” (Frontline, November 4, 1994). The expression is borrowed from Benedict Anderson’s 1983 book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. The roles of the “Smugglers of Truth” have been exposed in recent research (MAS, 2018). The rapid communalisation culminated into the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and ever since then, bigotry, hatred, strife and pogroms have become close regular occurrences, part of the socio-political mainstream rather than a margin.

The novel Zeherkhurani possibly attempts to pin hope of a good future on the rationalist-pluralist women (and men) intelligentsia and journalists. This optimism, though not misplaced, needs some quantum of reservation.

The educated middle classes and the affluent ones are not necessarily committed to humanitarianism and justice. Greed for name, fame, pelf and power of these classes across the globe has pushed the world into the vortex of bigotry, fanaticism, hatred and violence. This has aggravated in recent decades even more.

For instance, Byung-Chul Han’s recent book(let), Psychopolitics, “is a fascinating and well-written treatise on subjects that feels beaten to death, and is situated within a radical culture seemingly damned to futility by capitalist realism and one incapable of generating productive, useful strategy or platforms” of resistance and solidarity.

Fiction writers may derive creative insights from such works capturing the harsh realities of our times. Bhuradia is one such fiction writer of our times who is engaged in the pursuit of fictional articulation of contemporary horrors of humans against fellow humans. The patriarchy prevailing among the Hindus and Muslims has been brought out quite clearly. The story somehow appears to be located in Indore, the home-base of the novelist. This raises an expectation from the novelist to have exposed Muslim patriarchy not only through a Bohra Muslim prism but also among the Sunni Hanafi majority of Muslims. The case of Indore’s Shahbano Begum (1916-1992) offers quite an opportunity to bring this out. The biography of Shah Bano is essentially the biography of the nation state of late colonial and post-Independence India. The politically motivated, pa`triarchic and divisive and patently erroneous even from Islamic point of view, Shariat Act of 1937 and 1939 stood exposed when a daughter of the Punjab’s Tiwana family was denied her right to inherit parental landed assets. The storm of the 1980s around the Shah Bano issue is a milestone of India’s shift towards majoritarianism, aggravating menacingly by the second decade of the 21^st century. This historical backdrop possibly provided enough context for the novelist to bring the whole episode into the storyline. That however remains absent in Zeherkhurani.    

Some critical observations

The last seven chapters of the novel, depicting recent decades, have become a little less creative in terms of artistic finesse. Nonetheless, the novel does hold a mirror before all of us about the way we are, as of now, and what we are likely to become in the near future, if we don’t work towards actively rescuing the pluralist India.

The novel seems to be concerned with depicting only minorities, including the minorities within the minorities. Thus, Sindhi Hindu families on the margins of Hindu majority society, Bohras among the Muslims, with their own regressive cultural practices and subjugation of women, all in the name of a particular version of religion, and the Sikhs find their stories of suffering in this novel. Dalits left in Pakistan, too have found a mention, though quite briefly and inadequately.

The eventual disintegration of the once vivacious Mangal Bhawan and the Fatima Manzil, find a brilliant creative articulation. Intra-community oppressions (and horrific patriarchy perpetuating with growing superstitions) against both rationalists and pluralists are the running themes in the novel.

The state-(and religion-corporate) driven media-aided feeding of communal poison (zehensaazi or brainwash) is a running theme throughout the story and stories within the story of the novel. The administrative apathy and even complicity of the colonial state in the violence in 1946-1947 is exposed too well. The prose uses lots of Urdu words, which needs proper editing in terms of adding points (bindi) to the epiglottal letters of the Urdu words. 

The emotional aspect of the novel 

The book highlights how polarisation, madness, violence and tremendous brutalities make victims mentally sick. For instance, the character of the child Banta is written in such a manner that it will make readers cry on multiple occasions.

Banta, separated from his parents, is subjected to mutilations and torture several times. Each time the boy is made to change his religious identity, he is face to face with the rioters of a rival identity. Even his part pretension and part reality of having become dumb, or resorting to become luminal, in identitarian terms, (such as chanting Bulley Shah’s poetry: Bulleyh Kih Jaana Main Kaun) doesn’t ensure his safety at the hands of the violent religious orthodoxy of various hues.

Eventually, despite having been circumcised, his Sikh identity gets revealed and he ends up losing even the circumcised organ altogether. With this horrific loss, he does get re-united with his father, who has already abandoned his mother, as she was abducted. The characters of Banta and his mother come out as the most tragic ones, deeply affecting the reader multiple times.

Mental illness has been inflicted upon such victims by the society. With such characters in the story, one is reminded of Michel Focault’s 1961 edition of the book, Madness and Civilization, wherein he says, “Modern man no longer communicates with the madman … There is no common language, or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the 18th century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange, between madness and reason, was carried out.”

Yet, the novel on zehensaazi (brainwashing) is not only about the darker aspects of times, immediate past and present. It doesn’t fail to capture the anecdotes of people rising against the violence and hatred and helping their neighbours and neighbourhood defying the politically foisted religious divides and polarisation. Such characters and anecdotes give a little respite from the horrific sufferings of all the humans that runs through the story. They also offer some hope that such dark phases as those that we are living through shall pass away sooner than later.

Overall, the novel is a diagnosis of and a very damning charge-sheet against the crime of hatred and violence being committed by humans against humans in our times. It exposes the horrific truth of human debasement quite mercilessly. It’s therefore definitely a must-read. 

(The author teaches Modern and Contemporary History at Aligarh Muslim University and is the author of Muslim Politics in Bihar: Changing Contours.)

Related:

Muslims Against Partition

Majoritarian Politics via Ram Navami Processions and Opportunist Muslim Elites

The post Communal brainwashing to hate and kill: Zeherkhurani, a Hindi novel by Nirmala Bhuradia appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The title suggests something profound.

The plural, co-existence between India’s two major religious communities of the country is receiving heavy blows, kind of dying, has reached an all-time low, is on the verge of a tragic fading away, a death, this plural co-existence is being brought to its end the way dawn reaches dusk. And then the lighting of lamps is required to fight the evil of darkness.

While reading this powerful, gripping story, I recalled a passage from Qurratulain Hyder’s Urdu language family saga (autobiographical novel), Kaar-e-Jahaan Daraaz Hai (1977, p. 76). The excerpt depicts north Indian society after 1857. Discerning people may comment upon it and expand.  An interplay of caste, religious communities and colonialism can be seen here.

“Sporadic Hindu-Muslim strife has begun to happen, which was almost completely absent during Mughal rule. But, despite new politics and policy (the two words are quite comprehensive), thankfully, the two communities are living in harmony as usual. Our Hindu brethren, despite close friendships do observe some kinds of social distancing and segregation, untouchability, chhut chhaat. Yet, inherent prejudice is certainly not to be found in them. We too respect their custom of segregation. It is not considered as bad and offensive. Since centuries, in my own family this is a tradition that when we invite Hindu friends at lunch or dinner, we call a Brahman to cook for them. Tolerance and mutual love is an outstanding Indian tradition. All this however may not survive the colonial onslaught”.

Apparently, if at all I have adequately comprehended the import of the story, Diya Baati Ki Bela, the responsibility (onus) is put more on the young bahu Ambika to overcome the darkness and spread light. The story is woven and embellished with all kinds of conversations, deriving much from histories and various representations of histories.

Despite different culinary practices and dietary habits, previous generations did exchange food and dine together, notwithstanding the culture of certain inhibitions and restraints. The mutually observed restraints cemented the co-existence rather than pulling the two communities apart. Some of the conversations in the story hint at the need for the Muslims to rethink their own ways of looking at the pre-colonial histories of Muslim rule in India and everyday exchanges, attitudes and conducts.

The story is very forthright about Hindu liberals having helped Muslim communalists in retaining their communal-divisive ways. Ambika’s husband, Atul, is depicted as that kind of liberal. Atul has been brought up in a liberal, tolerant, conservative, religious, yet a largely secularist family. Their pluralism derives much from their superstition too, so to say.

On the contrary, his wife, Ambika has grown up in a family insulated from Muslim culture. She therefore harbours many anti-Muslim stereotypes. She is pursuing her PhD on Kabir. Yet, she is unable to internalise the pluralistic thoughts and teachings of Kabir. Despite pursuing PhD on Kabir, she is unable to look into many social evils of Hindu society. But she is quick in finding out flaws in Muslim lives; most of the stereotypes are unreasonably fabricated and perpetuated. She assumes, no Muslim litterateur, except, Ali Sardar Jafri, ever claimed Kabir. She does not approve of widow remarriage nor does she stand against child marriage of Hindu girls. Her question against superstition among Hindu society is concerned only when this has to do with an intermingling with Muslim culture. Atul’s foster mother (a virgin widow; a victim of child marriage, a lifelong sufferer) deep regard for the tazia of Muharram is unwelcome for Ambika, even though, the five years old baby Atul could begin to speak only after he was passed under a Duldul horse.

A Hindu exclusive superstition (not associated with Muslim culture) is acceptable for Ambika.

Ambika is enlightened on Kabir by a liberal Muslim professor of Botany, fond of Cactus plants, Mannan, a retired academic, whose personal library contains every kind of creative literature, in various Indian and European languages (Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, Urdu, English, German), besides the books on life sciences. Mannan’s and Atul’s remote ancestry converge. One of the three Kayastha brothers (engaged in legal battle for land disputes) happened to have been ostracised for having saved his life with water & food (dry gram) from a Muslim. The ostracised brother was therefore left with no choice but to convert and become Muslim. The ostracisation had also to do with a litigation battle among the three brothers for landed property. The conversion was not out of coercion or lure by Muslim society or a Muslim ruler/aristocrat. It had rather to do with the politics of real estate disputes among the three Kayastha brothers. Thus, Shamsher Jung Bahadur had to become Sheikh Shamsher Ali.  Professor Mannan is a descendent of Shamsher.

Both (Atul and his Mannaan Chacha) are descendants of the said Kayastha family, having worked for the Muslim aristocracy of Magadh, who was fiercely against the Muslim League. Yet, he eventually migrated to Pakistan, in the wake of the communal violence. Before leaving for Pakistan, an issue-less  widow of the Muslim family bequeathed her part of (proprietary share in) the haweli almost free of cost to Atul’s ancestors, where Atul, his father, uncles, grandfather, all were born/brought up. The haweli has an imambara. This had to be preserved, as per the will of the Muslim widow. Two generations of the women of the Kayastha inheritors do honour their promise tenaciously. Now, Ambika (the third generation inheritor of the haweli) sees no worth in preserving a Muslim heritage. She thinks, her mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law are unwise and un-Hindu to be committed to the cause of preserving this symbol Muslim heritage.

The conversations in the story are crafted with intellectual depth with the best of creative skills. Muslim rulers (the Lodis) having demolished mandirs as well as masjids (of Sharqi Sultans, Jaunpur) has been brought out in objective and dispassionate ways.

Jinnah’s hostage (yarghamaal) theory to justify his idea of Pakistan has been rebuked in a brilliant manner. The greed of grabbing assets of any issueless couples, by their kith and kin –being a deep-rooted problem in both communities – has also been brought out very well. “Yeh log giddhon ki tarah hamaarey marney ka intezaar kar rahey hain; like vultures they are waiting for my death to prey upon” (p. 29).

Pride of place and authority to the foster mother over a biological mother and the psychological dilemmas and conflicts running in the minds of an adopted child,  Atul (even after having grown up) has also been depicted and articulated quite beautifully. Atul lost his mother when he was just six days old; was brought up by her aunt who was widowed the day she was married as a pre-puberty girl, whose interaction with Muslim neighbourhoods, while growing up, was quite substantive.

The Patna-based creative genius, Zakiya Mashhadi got her Masters in Psychology from Lucknow University. This specific academic training and skill finds a deft and creative application in weaving and telling her stories. This is something rare in most of the contemporary story writers.

I recall Premchand (d. 1936):

“…No single event constitutes a story unless it gives expression to some psychological truth….It is not necessary that the basis of a story should be its readability only. If a story has the psychological climax, the nature of the event to which it relates is immaterial….Of course, one does sometimes hear of events that provide an easy basis for a short story. But no event can become a story, only because of literary embellishment or a gripping narration. Events exist and so do characters, but it is difficult to find a psychological basis; once it comes up it does not take long to write a short story…”.

[My Life and Times: Premchand, An Autobiographical Narrative, Recreated by Madan Gopal (2006; pp. 212-215)].

The everyday and standardised vocabularies, idioms, sentence-framing, deep insights from cultural and historical events, metaphors, symbolism, picturesque descriptions, articulation of emotions, and every other craft of a great story-telling are plentiful in the story, Diya Baati Ki Bela.

This is a must-read story to comprehend and diagnose the current problems (of Hindu- Muslim fratricide and politically manufactured and exacerbated divisiveness) as much as the story is quite helpful in finding out workable solutions.

There are many powerful sentences in the story.

Sample these: “people throng around faqir to obtain blessings of female calf from Cow, but male baby from daughters-in-law”; “the water is as sacred and useful whether it comes out of the Lord Shiva’s long hair-locks or as Zamzam out of the fountain emerging out of the friction of the foot-soles of the Prophet Ismael”.

A story-writer like Zakiya has been kept waiting for the Sahitya Akadmi Award in Urdu. The reason may be easy to guess, fathom. Is it the rot in the institution’s jury? If the jury’s decision has to do with the politics of frustrating any messages of everyday, lived fraternity and stoking fratricide today sanctioned by the politically powerful, then this is a psychopathic reaction for an institution of art and letters. Though, great stories and story writers are hardly dependent upon an award, such awards need to honour themselves by being conferred on creative genius’ engaged in the depiction and pursuit of a plural India, something that is being aggressively eroded from public memory, and reality.

 (The author is Professor of History, Aligarh Muslim University)

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The post Light a Lamp to rescue Plural India: An Urdu Story, “Diya Baati Ki Bela”, by Zakiya Mashhadi appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In our personal interaction, I somehow felt that Muzaffar Ali was here in Aligarh to know about and feel the pulse of Muslim youth, given the dark and harsh times that India is passing through.

Discussing Zikr was, I think, just his pretext to turn into an event — so that he could have a direct interaction with young boys and girls. His self-effacing, un-assuming person, humility and modesty personified, having shed all the airs of his feudal ancestry and the celebrity-status was hardly interested in discussing his book. Rather, he was keener to get an insight into and reading the young minds. So, he was with us, first (on January 25) when he went to the Women’s College Auditorium.

The following day, the same event was held in the Kennedy Auditorium. The AMU’s Kennedy Complex is known for its extra-curricular activities; for its Drama Club, Film Club, Music Club, Literary Club, Bait-Baazi (poetry) Club, etc.

The AMU of the 1960s was one of the finest eras of AMU’s political and academic stirrings, records the historian and AMU alumnus, Mushirul Haan (1949-2018) in one of his academic essays published in the India International Quarterly (2003), “Recalling Radical Days in Aligarh”. Besides other essays for preceding decades, such as Nationalist and Separatist Trends in Aligarh, 1915-47; and  Majid Hayat Siddiqui’s 1987 essay on AMU, 1904-45.

Too many of Aligarh’s Urdu memoirs paint a very rosy, romantic picture of AMU life. The only exception is the Hindi novel, Topi Shukla (1969), of Rahi Masoom Raza (1927-1992), which depicts the darker sides of the campus life at AMU.. Muzaffar Ali also avoids discussing the academics of the campus in the 1960s. May be that is because, he doesn’t have good words to say about the academics?

Muzaffar Ali did his B.Sc. (Geology, Chemistry and Botany) in 1964. He paints a rosy picture of the creative world of the Kennedy Complex of AMU. Unlike Naseeruddin Shah’s wonderfully written memoir, And Then One Day, who almost avoids painting such a picture. The memoir (1999) of the actor Saeed Jaffery (1929-2015) offers an equally romantic picture of the art, theatre and sports world of AMU, but that was long before the enviable Kennedy Complex of the 1960s. Jaffery owed it to the school teacher (later, headmaster), Syed Mohd Tonki (1898-1974).

Though, both Muzaffar and Naseeruddin acknowledge the contribution of Zahida Zaidi (1930-2011) in their creative lives. She was, “our window to art”, who inspired him “to think from a feminine viewpoint”; where “theatre and painting came together”, and that “this was an Anglicized group and made Aligarh a little more acceptable to a Westernised world”. Urdu poetry and literature were a world unto itself”; “a small cauldron of artists and one had to dive into it”; “Aligarh had the pace, leisure and culture to make people become what they wanted to be… they existed in a dream world and could read meaning into their dreams with the aid of the poetic world around”. “Rahi sahib”, who gave to us so many novels and films including the tele-serial Mahabaharata, “was indeed a mentor and inspiration”, was a “colossus of poetry”. Muzaffar Ali’s “passion for painting went back to Aligarh”, a “backbone of his creative journey” and which offered a “gift of zamana shanasi (understanding the world)”.

While interacting directly with the students in the Kennedy Auditorium, he was responding to the difficult times they were living in. He suggested they seek solace from and resilience in the “Aligarian sense of humour” and wit and poetry and literature. He devotes a long chapter in his book on his life in AMU,

“The Imli Tree”; the tree is supposed to be a symbol of faithfulness and forbearance, in the Budhist tradition. When I spoke of this to him, Muzaffar feigned ignorance and evaded my query as to why did he refer to Imli (tamarind) tree for the sweet [and sour?] memories of his AMU life. His plan to make a film on the trauma of pre-Partition Aligarh remains unfulfilled. In Aligarh, he identifies, Asghar Wajahat to be his closest friend. Referring to a line of Majaz’s poem, the AMU’s anthem (taraana), he complains, there is “too much of barrenness for the clouds [abr] that rise from Aliagrh to irrigate the parched world”. Throughout his memoir, he comes out as a brilliant translator of both prose and poetry of Persian and Urdu into English; just as he has organised the autobiography in well-integrated, logically interconnected chapters, having creative profiles of many characters of his life.

The initial chapters of his memoir talk about his ancestry. He quotes from an unpublished PhD dissertation of his father submitted to the Lucknow University. He claims to belong to the Chauras of Gujarat, who claimed their descent from the Lord Rama of Ayodhya, the name, “signified that no human blood would be shed on its soil, no war would be fought on its ground”.

His father has been a strong influence on him, who “lived his life as a humanist, a life true to his country and its ideals of harmony, opposing anything that divided man”. Enamoured with the Brahmo Samaj, his father wrote on similarities between Advaita and Sufism, to find commonalities in faiths. His Abba, “specially gifted in the art of storytelling” told him stories at mealtimes; “stories and more stories made up the lessons of life”. Tilism-e-Hoshruba’s and Dastan-e-Amir Hamza’s characters such as magician Afrasiyab, the intelligent trickster Amr Ayyar were the usual stuff, in the Kotwara world of “simple innocence”, a holy town of Gola Gokaran Nath, with its Shiv Temple, built by his ancestors, which also had once the largest sugar mill in Asia, “a melting pot of ideas, of the coming together of beauty and humanity; seeing and living Sufism on the soil of Awadh”.

A fierce nationalist, vehemently opposed to and betrayed by the Muslim League; his father’s uncle having assured his father help in the elections, called him to a mosque on a Friday prayer, and told the assembled devotees that voting for him, against the League, would throw all them straight into hell. Muzaffar’s father was shocked and predictably lost the election in 1946. In return, after partition, his father would keep reminding, “a raven may not take a single bone from my body across to Pakistan”. His Abba loved someone in the kinship who “was often asked why he eulogized India, a country where cows are worshipped. He would retort that in Pakistan, donkeys are worshipped”.

For the students of modern Indian history to get such deep, unusual insights about the hazards of the politics of Khilafat and Partition, Muzaffar Ali’s memoir, and his father’s portrait into it, offers great wisdom.

Next to Intizar Husain’s Urdu biography of Hakim Ajmal Khan, Ajmal-e-Azam (1999), Muzaffar Ali’s memoir is perhaps one of the rarest pieces of writing to have some candid and forthright details about the futile and hazardous politics of Khilafat. This Pan-Islamist mobilisation gets a subtle disapproval from Muzaffar Ali. The Muslim leadership of India had misled the Muslim masses mobilising them for restoration of a corrupt and degenerated institution far away in Turkey. The Indian leadership, too, kept the masses in dark as to how much unpopular had it become. The dethroned fugitive Ottoman Caliph had her princesses married off to the Indian princes (aristocrats) in Awadh and Hyderabad. One such prince was Muzaffar’s father, educated in Britain. The princess however soon deserted his father, ran away to Paris with the baby-girl, Kaniz, who was recovered with great difficulties, in 1962. His father knew, by the 1930s, “that the Muslim League would result in an ugly India”. He remarks, “Undivided India was torn politically between its vast Muslim population and its struggle for independence. The British played a major role in shaping minds and loyalties. Fifteen million Indians fought a war that was not theirs”. In the World Wars the British used Indian armies, “one million of Indian soldiers died. The leadership working on fanning anti-British sentiments used this emotionally”.

Muzaffar Ali claims his father, as elected member of the legislature, helped “minimizing the impact of migration in 1947 leading to the rehabilitation of the Sikh population in large numbers in the Terai region”.

Muzaffar is also fascinated with “fearless (Be-Khauf) and self-reliant (Khud-Aitamaad) women, such as his father’s sister. Though, her migration to Pakistan had shattered his father; another blow to his father came in February 1964, when Muzaffar’s mother passed away. So was Muzaffar too; his brother and mother both were suffering from incurable ailments: “But my days in Aligarh had a deep undercurrent of turmoil… I would go back to Aligarh with more pain than I could rise above”. His project of making a film on the fearless, self-reliant Mughal Empress Nur Jahan however remains unfulfilled, as yet.

At the age of 22, in 1966, he went to Calcutta passing through, “poverty-stricken, jobless” regions of eastern India. “Calcutta was a city fluent in the language of money”, “a weapon of subjugation, of tyranny and exploitation”. It “opened a world I could not have imagined in the wildest of dreams”. He met there his extended kinship such as the novelist Attia Hossein, who “appeared as a character in Gone with the Wind but could represent the modern Lucknow of the 1930s”. He was introduced to the “English theatre world of Calcutta”, the film maker Mrinal Sen, and of course Satyajit Ray, with whom he worked. In Calcutta Muzaffar got his first wife Geeti Sen, an art historian, a PhD on the paintings of Akbarnama from Philadelphia.

Having discussed each of his great films in separate, exclusive chapters, the pursuit of film-making revealed to him “the ugliness of film politics; camps and groups, rumours and espionage”.

Describing his indulgence in electoral politics, he found out that the world was increasingly “becoming crueler”; he “could see the ugliness of politics, smell the stench of power”. While going for door-to-door campaign, he found that it was a “mug’s game” at his level, whereas at higher level it was “game for mugs”; it was “all about ego”; “simplicity was lost in the politics of caste and communalism”; “demented leadership misleading the simple minds”. His description of Amar Singh kind of character in politics is extremely perceptive; where “strange characters show up, holding our future to ransom”.

About Lucknow of the 1990s:

“[He] discovered that an invisible layer of the RSS had taken over the cultural fabric of Lucknow and the entire Awadh region, a reaction to the Muslim League. The erstwhile Muslim taluqdars had shattered the Ganga-Jamuni myth by affiliating with the Muslim League around the time of Partition. They were secular to the core but stood by the communal forces of the League”…. “There was a tacit understanding with Amar Singh that I had to lose”. “While we dreamt of a future for Awadh that evolved out of its heritage of interdependence between craft and culture, the venom of communalism was spreading fast [and furious]”.

Muzaffar Ali turned, again, to art and poetry. An art commentator identified Muzaffar, the painter, as an Abstract Expressionist. For the answer to the problems of fratricide in India, Muzaffar turns towards the poets, Rumi (man to lead humanity into the twenty first century) and Amir Khusrau, the two “will forever continue to water my art, and make miracles happen to soften hearts and refresh human souls. We salute their invisible sawaar (rider) on the horse [rakhsh] of ishq [love]”.

In the lap of the two sufi poets, he wraps up his memoir, Zikr (a Sufi terminology, with many layers of meanings): This reminds us of Ghalib’s couplet:

rau meñ hai raḳhsh-e-umr kahāñ dekhiye thame

ne haath baag par hai na pā hai rikāb meñ

May Muzaffar Ali live longer and healthier to give us a sequel of his memoir as well as to give us the films he has been contemplating to make!

(The author is a Professor of History, Aligarh Muslim University)

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The post Muzaffar Ali and his English language autobiography, Zikr:  hope for a beleaguered India? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The current dispensation led by the BJP, before the upcoming parliamentary elections, has proposed to go ahead with legislating and implementing the UCC. The 22^nd Law Commission of India (LCI) has been constituted, and it has solicited proposals from the citizens, to be emailed to the Member Secretary of the LCI. Certain political-ideological forces have always been insisting upon the UCC.

Many segments of Muslims have been reacting to it in a manner as if the UCC is simply and exclusively an attack on their personal laws. As a result, responding to the 22^nd LCI, many Muslim leaders and theologians looked upon it as referendum or plebiscite on the UCC. These theologians and leaders appealed to the community to reject the UCC.

Thus, both sides (the political proponents of the UCC, as well as the opponents belonging to various ideological persuasions) have pushed ahead the politics of communal polarisation.

The Muslim side is claiming that they have submitted several lakhs of emails to the LCI rejecting UCC. Announcements from masjids in the Friday prayers were made to facilitate this, besides using social media. Though, many of such speeches from Masjids also said that in the absence of any draft proposal from the government there is really no need to panic. Also, noteworthy fact is, in 2018, against the reform in the Instant Triple Talaq (ITT), they (ie the Muslim Personal Law Board-MLPB and allied organisations) did gather around 2 crores of signatures against the proposed reform. This time it confined only to several lakhs (the figures are unverified). This may indicate a declining support for the theologians among the Muslim populace.

Collective hypocrisy of both sides of the communal divide is apparent.

It is a relatively lesser known fact (despite Reba Som’s research, MAS, 1994) that in the 1950s, the UCC was brought to the fore by the Hindu Right across political parties, just to forestall the Nehruvian reforms in Hindu Personal Law. They didn’t have the conviction to support a UCC.

Just like the Muslim regressive forces, who oppose UCC not because they hate homogeneity and love heterogeneity within the religious communities, rather, they oppose UCC just to forestall any reform in Muslim Personal Law.  These brand of Muslims think only Muslim rulers can interfere into Islam. Non-Muslim rulers cannot.

Nehru had excluded Muslims while legislating reforms in Hindu Laws using an argument that the reforms among the religious minorities would come from within themselves. That moment is yet to come, even after over seven decades. This is what has come to become one of the foremost components of allegations of Muslim appeasement by the Indian state.

In 1973, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) was established. The immediate reason was to oppose the law of child adoption amended in 1972. This amended law didn’t directly affect Muslims. Yet, they went ahead with a fierce street-level opposition. This was to demonstrate Muslim strength through identity politics and to warn the government of the day.

Let it be made clear that there is a sharp distinction between adoption and custody. In Indian secular law (Guardians and Wards Act 1890), the custody of the baby disputed between the biological and foster parents is determined keeping in mind the welfare of the baby and also the wish of the baby.

This is quite consistent with what Prophet Muhammad had done in the case of his adopted son, Zayd. The custody of Zayd continued with the Prophet as per the wishes of Zayd, despite his biological father, Harisa having come to claim him back. So far as adoption is concerned, the Quran instructs believers not to conceal the biological parentage of the adopted baby. This is often popularised as summary prohibition against adoption.

The AIMPLB refuses to issue any clarification. As a result, even the higher judiciary almost invariably adjudicates against Muslim foster parents, invoking this misinterpretation. There is no law to punish the biological parents, as to, if they, as afterthought, invoke Islamic prohibition against adoption, why did they give away their baby in adoption, to begin with?

Thus, in the case of Hindus, any signed document is accepted by the judiciary as proof of adoption, whereas, in the case of Muslims and Christians, adoption is invalidated despite such documents. Needless to say, upsetting the custody of the babies in this manner leads to psychological and overall ruination of the child’s life and career.

Fortunately, since January 2016, the Juvenile Justice Act has come into force which is of some assistance to Muslims as well. All adoptions prior to 2016 continue to be treated by the higher judiciary as per the misinterpreted Muslim law.  Recently, the Supreme Court of Pakistan even went on to validate the concealing of biological paternity. Is the Indian judiciary then, more shariat-abiding than the Islamic countries, not just Pakistan?

Likewise, on the question of Un-Quranic Instant Triple Talaq (ITT; divorce), the AIMPLB refuses to institute or initiate necessary reforms. Most of the Islamic countries have reformed this practice. Even during the infamous the Shah Bano issue, in early 1986, the AIMPLB leader Ali Miyan Nadvi (1914-1999) misleadingly persuaded the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi to ignore the reforms carried out in the Islamic countries. This is admitted by Nadvi in his memoir (1988).

This fact is known to very few people that Mohammad Ahmad Khan (a rich and influential advocate of Indore), had married a cousin of his wife Shah Bano (1916-1992). After that he threw Shah Bano out of their residence when she was 62 years old. Shah Bano went to the lower court in April 1978 for maintenance. The lower court issued an interim order for maintenance. Just to avoid paying maintenance, on November 6, 1978, inside the trial court, Mr Khan pronounced ITT. Subsequently, the issue reached High Court and eventually to the Supreme Court. It was the maintenance awarded by the Supreme Court, in 1985, which was upturned by the Parliament in 1986. In its exchange, the AIMPLB delegation to the PM had agreed to go ahead with unlocking the Ayodhya Masjid.

Now coming to the law related to inheritance of parent’s assets.

In the 1930s, when the Shariat law was being codified, a daughter of the landed, powerful family of Sikandar Hayat Khan Tiwana, the Premier of the undivided Punjab asked for her right in landed properties as per the Sharia law. Tiwana, in order to find ways of denying this demand to the woman, approached Jinnah to shelve the Shariat codification. Jinnah came out with outrageously manipulative and dishonest arguments: Firstly, the local customs are laws, hence, the custom of not letting daughters inherit the landed property would continue, despite the Shariat law; Secondly, agriculture and land are provincial subjects whereas the Shariat Act would be a subject of central legislature.

In 1937, M A Jinnah piloted the Shariat Act, seeing in this an opportunity to forge an all India Muslim political constituency to pursue his separatist politics. We are yet to know, if Maulana Azad, Maulana Husain Madani of the Muttahidah Qaumiyat fame, and even Maulana Maududi really said anything on the Shariat Act 1937.

In 1962, Jinnah’s Pakistan introduced some reforms in the family laws, such as: ITT was prohibited; justifiable and proportionate to the economic status of the husband, amount of alimony had to be paid to the divorced woman; polygamy was restricted to the extent of almost prohibition. Without a written consent of the existing wife, another wife cannot be brought into marriage; minimum marriageable age was also raised, etc. Yet, in 1986, in India, the Ulema and other leaders went on to ruin the likes of Shah Bano. They still continue to do so quite shamelessly.

The latest criminalisation of the ITT by the current dispensation, in 2019, is acting as very good deterrence against ITT. But, the issue of maintenance to the separated woman, and adequate or proportionate alimony to the divorced women still remain unresolved.

The Union government should therefore make it explicit and categorical that the Cr PC Section 125 shall remain enforceable for the divorced Muslim women while seeking maintenance and alimony. Let it be known that, in early 1986, while negotiating with the Prime Minister, the delegation led by Ali Miyan Nadvi had promised that they will make some institutional arrangement to extend financial help to the divorced women having been denied maintenance ad alimony. This promise is recorded very clearly in the Urdu memoir (1988), Karwan-e-Zindagi, vol. three, chapter four. This promise has been chosen to be forgotten by the Ulema, intelligentsia and the community. Already, Muslim men have found a way around the restriction on ITT —torture wife to give khula.

In 2018, the spokesperson of the AIMPLB issued a statement that they will issue a model nikahnama inserting a column for pledge from the bridegroom not to go for ITT (Times of India, Lucknow, February 3, 2018). Within a week’s time, in the 26^th Plenary Session of the AIMPLB (in Hyderabad, 9-11 February, 2018), the AIMPLB conveniently chose to shelve the idea. Both the governments and intelligentsia need to expose the abovementioned duplicities of the segments of Muslim leadership.

It is distressing that even the modern institutions funded by the secular state of India, such as the AMU, Jamia Millia Islamia (New Delhi), MANU University (Hyderabad), and their departments of studies such gender and women studies, Islamic studies, theology, law, social sciences, etc., have not been able to pursue a reformist agenda. Quite a lot of them have either maintained a dishonest silence or have endorsed the regressive positions. Both ways, they are on the regressive side. This is extremely disgusting, to say the least.

There has to be a compulsory registration of marriages, divorces, besides the registration of birth and death.

While the grandfather is alive, if someone loses his/her father, then s/he forfeits his/her right to inherit the grandfather’s assets. This law also needs to be done away with by the Indian legislature.

Muslim parents who have only daughters — if don’t transfer their assets while they are alive—stand to pass down only a portion of the father’s assets to the daughter/s. Even a will registered in a court of law to the contrary will not enable this inheritance, as per existing Indian Muslim personal law. Owing to this discriminatory law, some Muslims have begun to re-register their marriages under the Special Marriages Act.

Also, some Muslim daughters have begun to challenge this discrimination in the Supreme Court.

Muslim parents having no kids, cannot even register a will in the court of law bequeathing all their assets. As per the Muslim law, they can bequeath only a third of their own assets to anyone.

The Supreme Court, despite Hindu Law having contrarian provisions, has given verdicts ensuring equal rights to inherit parental assets by daughters and sons. This right to gender justice must be made to prevail in the case of Muslims as well.

By way of conclusion, historically speaking, without the state’s backing, hardly has any reform taken place or allowed to prevail. During colonial period as well, reforms on abolition of Sati (1829), Widow Remarriage (1856), law against child marriage, etc., happened only with state-backing.

People need to tell the current dispensation that it needs to go beyond electoral gimmicks, and implement the abovementioned seven aspects of family law reforms (including gender-just laws). Meanwhile, a draft UCC should be prepared for wider debate. (Sadly, at the moment, they too, are shelving family law reforms, in the name of opposing the UCC). The personal law reforms cannot wait. The UCC can and should await proper and participative deliberations. This is something even the Liberal-Left should also try to understand. That is the way ahead and the only way to avoid competitive communal polarization.

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