By
Najmul Hoda
21
December, 2020
Prime
Minister Narendra Modi is going to address the centenary celebrations of the
Aligarh Muslim University on 22 December. The event is online. If it wasn’t for
Covid, he would likely be on campus. This is the first time since 1964 that a
prime minister of India is going to address AMU. Fifty-six years is a long
time, and except for Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri, no other prime
minister thought of visiting the university, even though Aligarh is only 120 km
from the national capital, and AMU is a fully funded central university whose
Visitor is the President of India.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi
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The
proposed address by PM Modi is a well-thought gesture full of symbolism. As he
often emphasises, Modi is the prime minister of 130 crore Indians, which
includes about 20 crore Muslims. He belongs to an ideological stream whose
understanding of history is much different from how Muslims would look at
India’s past and their role in it. Therefore, their idea of the present and the
vision for the future remain equally contested.
Past
without a Closure
The Aligarh
Muslim University has been a part of that contentious history, and must face up
to its history in the spirit of truth and reconciliation. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan,
the founder of Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College, the institution which
became AMU in 1920, is alleged to have propounded the two-nation theory. It’s
another matter that if his successors had not totally buried his social and
political ideas, alongside his religious thought, there was much in his
speeches and writings to place him among the founders of composite nationalism.
It was the
Muhammadan Educational Conference, the vehicle of the Aligarh Movement, which
doubled up as the founding session of the Muslim League at Dhaka in 1906. MAO
College hosted the League till 1912 before its headquarters were shifted to
Lucknow. The politics of Muslim separatism was institutionalised in Aligarh,
which, by the 1940s, had become, in Jinnah’s words, “the arsenal of Muslim
India”. Later, poet Jaun Elia would quip that Pakistan was a prank played by
the juveniles of Aligarh (“Pakistan — ye sab Aligarh ke laundon ki shararat
thi”).
That this
practical joke, by its sheer thoughtless adventurism, turned out to be a monumental
tragedy, which sundered the country into two and the Muslim community into
three, is yet to be confronted by Aligarh. The inability to confront its past,
and the ruse of feigning amnesia in this regard, has also led to the collateral
forgetting of nationalist and progressive streams, which though not dominant,
were nonetheless quite robust strands.
File photo | People gather outside Aligarh Muslim University | Commons
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AMU’s
Slide to Backwardness
That this
could happen despite the fact that AMU is endowed with a Centre of Advanced
Study in History is even more surprising. History has to be written no matter
what be one’s methodology, analytical tools, philosophical inclination and
ideological orientation. Developing an Akbar-Aurangzeb centric school of
history may be a noble endeavour, and nobler may be the zeal to argue how
secular were the Muslim rulers — Aurangzeb being the most secular of them all —
but expatiating on secular nationalism of people like Zakir Hussain and
Mohammad Habib, in the face of frenzied communalism, would be much better if
one didn’t fight shy of calling the mainstream Muslim communalism on the campus
by its name.
This could
not happen because post-Partition, Aligarh was reassured and rehabilitated, but
not reformed. It reflects the high-mindedness of independent India’s
leadership, how they protected and preserved AMU even as most of its faculty
and students deserted it for the greener pasture of their conquest, Pakistan.
An un-critiqued and un-reformed Aligarh would continue to inhabit the same
narrative as earlier. Thus, despite its characteristic boast, Aligarh could not
chart a path for modernity and progress of Indian Muslims and their integration
and mainstreaming in the national life. The emotional chasm between the two
communities kept widening despite the increasing commingling of people. And so,
instead of giving intellectual leadership to the Muslim community, to which AMU
considered itself traditionally entitled, and for which it is statutorily
mandated by its founding Act, Aligarh chose the regressive path.
On such
politically momentous issues as Shah Bano and Triple Talaq, despite having the
material wherewithal to come up with its own progressive position, Aligarh’s
intellectual sterility made it toe the line of the ulema and the reactionary
Muslim Personal Law Board, the very people against whose thought the university
was founded. It became complicit in the cultural regression and political
alienation of the Muslim community, and could not intervene when a second
separatist movement got underway in the name of identity. On the question of
Babri Masjid, the Aligarh academia adopted the Leftist line of limited
technical correctness, oblivious of the fact that the issue had far deeper
implications for the Muslims than the Leftist arguments could see them through.
A Chance for
Reconciliation
Now that
Prime Minister Modi, staunch in his own ideological position, is going to
address AMU in a grand gesture of reaching out, its symbolism should not be
lost on anyone. More so, as this moment comes not very long after the physical
assaults and vicious propaganda against the university by Right-wing groups
that swear allegiance to the Modi government. Stigmatising AMU over Jinnah’s
portrait, which hung, among many others, in the student union’s building for he
was an honorary member of it, was malicious, even as the arguments against
removing it were too untenable to be sustained, too nuanced to be understood
and too disingenuous to be given any credence.
Be that as
it may, notwithstanding every imaginable criticism of AMU, the fact could not
be ignored that this campus has the highest concentration of modern, educated
Muslims anywhere in the world. So, even if it couldn’t realistically boast of
being the intellectual vanguard of Indian Muslims, in sheer quantitative terms,
and in view of its historical legacy, it has an unsurpassable symbolic value
for the Muslim community.
Now that
the prime minister is reaching out, should Aligarh, on behalf of the Muslims,
not grasp the extended hand of friendship and reconciliation? It is for Aligarh
to decide whether it would wean away Muslims from the path of confrontation,
which, if not shunned, is bound to bring an unimaginable catastrophe, or to put
them on the path of conciliation as Sir Syed did with the British.
An alumnus
of AMU, Mukhtar Masood, mentions an anecdote in his book Awaz-e Dost, wherein
sometime after Independence, while addressing the governor of Uttar Pradesh,
Sarojini Naidu, in the Union Hall, a student said, “Ya To Hum Aapke Bade
Dushman Hain Ya Chhote Bhai Hain (we are either your big enemy or little
brother).” The reality is simpler than this. Muslims are neither. They are
equal as Indians and citizens. Let this opportunity not be missed.
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Najmul Hoda
is an IPS officer. Views are personal.
Original
Headline: Modi is reaching out. AMU has a chance to take Muslims away from path
of confrontation
Source: The Print
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/despite-its-characteristic-boast,-aligarh/d/123841