Ramadan Fast for Swami Agnivesh, Lord Meghnad Desai

A youth and children ride a scooter near the Jama Masjid during Iftar on the first day of the holy month of Ramadan in New Delhi last week.

It was an extraordinary group of five that turned up at Delhi's Jama Masjid at 3.30 a.m. last week for saheri, or the last meal before the day's fasting during the holy month of Ramadan. Saheri derives from saher, which means dawn.

Only those in the vicinity of mosques make it a congregational affair. And when the mosque happens to be one of the world's great monuments, Jama Masjid, people sometimes travel long distances to participate in this remarkable confluence of faith and aesthetics. The incentive to visit the area multiplies because of several well known restaurants, particularly Karim's, renowned for a special fare during Ramadan — nihari, mutton cooked all night on slow fire, and paya, or goat's trotters, with khamiri roti or leavened bread.

These may sound like mouth watering delicacies, but not when one of us happens to be an Arya Samaji, acute vegetarian Swami Agnivesh, from head to toe in his elegant saffron outfit. (I carried home cooked vegetables for him.) Others in the group were Lord Meghnad Desai, a Nagar Brahmin from Gujarat, now member of the House of Lords, who was in the reckoning to be the Speaker, plus a Distinguished Professor at the London School of Economics. His wife, Kishwar Ahluwalia a Sikh by origin, a writer and their daughter, Mallika, who has just completed her Masters in Politics at Harvard and wishes to plunge headlong into Indian politics — an eclectic group, you would say.

My qualifications as a Ramadan guide would be quite as suspect as Ghalib's would have been. Asked by a magistrate to declare his religion, Ghalib said, "I am half a Muslim." The puzzled law officer asked him to clarify. "I drink but I do not eat pork." In his letters, he is frank about his attitude to fasts. "I keep the fast mollified — a piece of bread here, a gulp of water there."

Let me place on record the fact the each one of the group, except Meghnad (he had to travel), actually fasted that day in exactly the sort of spirit that many of us participate in Deepawali, Holi or Christmas. The simple compact is: your religion exudes a culture which decorates my spaces too and the other way around.

This annual Ramadan ritual was triggered by an incident in Allahabad. I was jolted out of my shoes during a lecture to a group of youth during communal tensions in Allahabad soon after Babri Masjid was demolished. I asked for the Hindus in the group to raise their hands. Half the hands went up. I asked how many had Muslim friends. Not one. I asked the remainder, all Muslims, if anyone of them had ever seen a Tulsi (holy basil) plant in a traditional Hindu courtyard. Not one had.

Does it not resemble apartheid? In fact, it appears to me to be even more pernicious because here separation has not been imposed. It has evolved voluntarily.

Living in separate compartments, it is so easy for popular imagination to conjure up ogres, one about the other, during periods of stress. Worse than a negative image, however, is total disinterest in each other. This disinterest, at the level of governance, becomes benign neglect of the disadvantaged group, in this case Muslims.

What was the profit from this group's visit to Jama Masjid? Well, we saw warm, smiling, hospitable people. Declining quality of cuisine. Total lack of any civic contribution to a sense of décor or cleanliness.

It were not just the grimy streets, but even the wide stairs leading up to an ill kept gate opening onto a jewel of a monument, one of the very best in the world. History is being lost as the number of visitors, both Indian and foreign, decline in direct proportion to the squalor on the pavements.

There clearly has to be a muscular "Jama Masjid-in-Ramadan-Committee" to take responsibility for lights, cleanliness, and general ambience. The Lt. Governor and Chief Minister must at least visit the area to see what they can do.

As for corroding the apartheid system, Swami Agnivesh and others were quick to latch onto a social engineering idea the late Basheer Hussain Zaidi spelt out. "Let every Muslim family in the country find a corresponding Hindu one (and vice versa) as a friend to be visited every month — not just for a meal but even such serious consultation as fixing the date for the daughter's wedding."

I know this language is syrupy nonsense to most today, but not to Swami Agnivesh.

Saeed Naqvi is a Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation and a senior journalist.

Source: The Sunday Guardian

URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-culture/ramadan-fast-swami-agnivesh,-lord/d/5308