An Aatmanirbhar Musalman Could Be the Pride of An Aatmanirbhar Bharat
By
Najmul Hoda
28 August,
2020
India’s
Muslims and liberals are withering in each other’s embrace. The liberal
discourse in India has come in for sharp criticism not only from the Right-wing
but also the non-partisan centrists for being unprincipled in its tacit
indulgence of minorityism, which might have widened the chasm between the
majority and minority communities where the former is always a bully and the
latter always has its back to the wall.
Representational image | Muslims offering prayers during Ramadan in
Srinagar | S Irfan | PTI
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It has been
often said that despite mouthing the platitude of mainstreaming the minority,
liberals helped in institutionalising minorityism. It cocooned liberals in a
paternalistic aura.
The
situation was further exacerbated when the middle caste’s electoral assertion
piggybacked on the Muslim vote. OBCs and minority politics were found cosying
up in the bed of secularism. This was a marriage of convenience.
How did
liberalism come to this when it had been the byword for everything progressive,
humanistic, secular, democratic, reformative and transformative; and a default
opposite of obscurantism, regression and totalitarianism? It is for these
reasons that Indian Muslims’ relationship with so-called liberals has started
yielding diminishing returns in politics today. Either liberalism gets a
makeover, or the relationship is re-invented, or the Muslim community begins to
invest in its own liberals.
Different
Trajectories
But how
could the ascendant Hindutva politics blame liberals of political opportunism
and cultural deracination? It’s another surprise that these accusations also
began to stick. To understand this, let’s trace its trajectory.
A dialectic
tussle between the agents of change and the votaries of status quo is the
hallmark of a living society. As the colonial impetus stirred India into a new
life, the first generation of Hindus in modern education devoted themselves to
religious and social reformation. This laid the foundation for a liberal
nationalist politics in India.
The Muslim
trajectory was different. They were latecomers to modern education which,
again, had come at the cost of abandoning religious critique and social reform.
A superficial modernity without its moral and intellectual values could be the
right instrument for revivalism. The two politics, Hindu and Muslim, because of
the different preparatory grounds they stood on, went in different directions.
While one aimed at forming India into a nation and winning independence for it,
the other wanted to make the Muslim community into a separate nation.
However,
the intrinsic sincerity of the liberal political class and the exigency to put
up a united front against colonialism made it accommodate the separatist
tendencies in order to forge a composite territorial nationalism. This template
endured for a century. It had some quaint tropes, which left no urge among
Muslims to liberalise.
Representational image | Why are they silent?/Quartz India
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Century-Old
Tropes
The first
instance of mollycoddling was to sanitise the history of Muslim rule. In the
history books, the testimony of contemporary chroniclers such as Ziauddin
Barani, Abdul Malik Isami and Ferishta, etc. was ignored in order to paint an
idyllic picture of cultural confluence. In a travesty of secularisation, acts
of temple destruction, Jizya tax imposition, and forced conversion would be
presented as inspired by political exigency, not religious fanaticism. It was
as if desecration for political reasons would be less obnoxious. It gave a
clean chit to the principle of statecraft that would permit such a sacrilege
even if it were actually a pretext.
Although
done with the good intention of not letting the bad blood of the past spill
onto the present, a total whitewashing didn’t let the people develop the
maturity to face up the past and recognise its wrongs. One is not answerable
for what their real or adopted ancestors did, but they shape their own attitude
towards the past. If one sees glories in the good of it, they would have to
partake of its bad too.
The second
trope was the romanticisation of Islam as an egalitarian religion and Muslims
as a casteless society. Conversion to Islam was credited to the equality in
Muslim society. The fact, however, was that people carried their caste into the
new religion and remained at the same level as earlier. The Muslim ruling class
adopted the caste system and placed itself at the apex. In fact, their emphasis
on foreign lineage as a mark of superiority infused a fresh racial element into
it.
Besides
caste, gender issue was the main area of social reform in Hindu society. True,
Muslims didn’t have a Sati system, but they had all other patriarchal
discriminations. In fact, purdah among the Hindu upper class was an influence
of Muslims.
It became
conventional wisdom that Muslims didn’t need to introspect, reform or
liberalise. And so, when independent India’s most ambitious social reform
programme was undertaken, and Hindu Code Bills were introduced, the Muslim
Personal Law was left untouched on the plea that the push for reform had to
come from within the community. It never came, and instead became the basis of
identitarian politics as was seen during the Shah Bano and triple talaq cases.
Representational image | Photo. Matters India
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Mere
Tactical Allies
The
sanitised history repeated itself first as a tragedy and next as a farce. The
tragedy was the liberal argument in the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi case that
there was no proof that the mosque in Ayodhya was built on a demolished temple.
Its implication for such mosques as were clearly built on demolished temples
was not weighed in. And, the farce was in the revisionist historiography of
Partition, which invisibilised the fact that, in the end, it was the Muslim
League that demanded Pakistan, and had it. Such historiography helped in
reviving the same old pernicious narrative.
The dictum
that minority communalism was a lesser evil was myopic inasmuch as it ignored
its ability to inflame majoritarian. The paternalistic minorityism of liberals
made them equivocate on burning issues. So, in one kind of bomb blast, terror
had no religion; but in another, it did. The discourse of ‘hurt sentiment’
became normalised as demands to ban now a book and now a movie became the norm.
The Right-wing learnt fast, and how.
In spite of
all this, no organic relationship could develop between liberals and Muslims.
Both treated each other as tactical allies rather than ideological kin. In the
Muslim repertoire of grievances against the present dispensation, there is
hardly one that has not been levelled against liberals since the late 19th
century (Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s speech at Meerut, 16 March 1888). The
Islam-in-danger rhetoric, paranoia of subjugation by Hindus, neglect of Urdu,
under-representation in services, bias in the behaviour of state machinery,
particularly that of police during riots, and myriad other complaints of
discriminations are century-old tropes.
Aatmanirbhar
Musalman
Muslims
love Hindu liberals conditionally, and together they hate the microscopic
Muslim liberals unconditionally. Muslims love liberals because the latter don’t
question their narratives, and liberals value Muslims because they are their
only support left. In an India where two kinds of Hindus are debating how to
engage with Muslims, the liberals represent them without questioning why
Muslims are unable to represent themselves, and whether the 200-year-long
liberal hegemony of public discourse has any responsibility for it.
There is no
redemption for Muslims unless they develop their own liberal intelligentsia,
and no comeback for liberals unless they become more scrupulous about their
avowed principles. True, Muslims are not represented in all sectors of the
national life in proportion to their population. It not only reflects their lag
in modern education but also the lack of drive and initiative in their
corporate life.
At about 20
crore, the Muslim population is so huge that even a minuscule percentage of its
educated and affluent would be humongous enough to constitute the critical mass
for a big social change. One reason why this has not happened is the
community’s utter dependence on the liberal establishment for representing
them. Muslims could represent themselves in the idiom of the modern nation
state only if they had crafted their own discourse and coined their own
vocabulary. It’s very much doable. An Aatmanirbhar Musalman could be the pride
of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat.
----
Najmul
Hoda is an IPS officer. Views are personal.
Original
Headline:
Source: The Print
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/an-aatmanirbhar-musalman-be-pride/d/122741
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