The Victimhood Mindset of Indian Muslims: Is It Axiomatic That the Idea of Victimhood Demands A Victimiser?
_NewageIslam.jpg)
By A
Faizur Rahman
28-08-2020
The first
thing that hits the reader in the article Indian Muslims must rewrite their
victim mindset to be indispensable in India’s rise by Najmul Hoda that was
published in The Print on August 17, 2020, is its unrelenting censure of "ordinary
Muslims in the sub-continent" for having made victimhood their
"favourite dope" to get over the melancholic depression caused by the
historical disasters they endured.
There is a ruthless denial of the reality that in the recent past
Muslims in India have been demonised, abused, suspected and some even lynched
with impunity. (Photo: Reuters)
-----
This dopy
victimhood emerged, says the author, from what he rather flamboyantly calls
"power theology" (Islamist politics) which is so deeply entrenched in
the Muslim psyche that even an event as momentous as the Independence of India
did not invigorate them to overcome their persecutory delusions. Therefore, if
Muslims really want to redeem their indispensability to the nation, they must
stop thinking of politics in terms of religion and weave and inhabit another
narrative — a secular one which includes India's rise. That pretty much sums up
the author's unwarranted problematisation of Muslim victimhood and his
simplistic remedy.
Also
Read: Victimhood
Narrative, Paternalistic Sympathy and The Muslim Predicament
The rest of
the article lacks argumentative cohesiveness and evidentiary substantiation to
be even considered for a critical review. The author vaults, with amazing
swiftness, from one irrelevant issue to another. He quotes historians, talks
about the huge population of Muslims, their caste system, aversion to reform,
the preponderance of mosques, madrasas and maulvis in post-Independent India,
the Islamist concepts of Darul Harb and Darul Islam, and poet Iqbal's
de-contextualised lament for Islam's lack of freedom in India. But he fails
miserably to establish a meaningful concatenation between these overdramatised
facts and "Muslim victimhood."
It is
axiomatic that the idea of victimhood demands a victimiser. This means that it
is not possible for an entire community to feign victimhood without identifying
its victimisers. Yet this word is totally absent from the article's disjointed
narrative, thus proving not only its blatant one-sidedness but its ruthless
denial of the reality that in the recent past Muslims in India have been
demonised, abused, suspected and some even lynched with impunity.
A case in
point is the merciless killing of Pehlu Khan, a poor dairy farmer from Haryana
who was bludgeoned to death by a mob of about 200 cow vigilantes in April 2017
while legally transporting cows for his farm. On what basis can anyone dismiss
as unwarranted (or fake) the victimhood, trepidation and helplessness of Khan's
family?
Indeed,
institutional recognition of the victimhood of such Muslims who have been
psychologically affected by the fate of victims like Pehlu Khan came when the
Supreme Court condemned "horrendous acts of mobocracy" and asked
Parliament to enact an anti-lynching law against cow vigilantism and lynch
mobs.
And a few
days ago in a landmark ruling the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay High Court
called out the scapegoating of some Tablighi Jamat members and observed that it
was an “indirect warning to Indian Muslims.”
Obviously,
the court was aware that hate-incidents against Muslims saw a sharp rise after
it came to light that several participants in the Tablighi Jamaat's Delhi
conference held in March this year had tested positive for Covid-19. News
portals carried horrifying accounts of how Muslims were mercilessly assaulted
on suspicion of intentionally spreading the coronavirus. The brutalities
included the display of posters banning the entry of Muslims into towns and
villages and the circulation of anti-Muslim videos.
One of the
most brazen expressions of hate came encapsulated in a video which showed Aarti
Lalchandani, the principal of GSVM Medical College in Kanpur allegedly calling
the Tablighis "terrorists" who deserve to be “locked up in dungeons”
rather than treated in hospitals. How can all this be brushed under the carpet
of "morbid melancholia" and Muslims be asked to rewrite their victim
mindset to stay relevant in India?
Truth be
told, the distrust of Muslims goes back a long way to pre-Partition days when
the Pan-Islamic politics surrounding the Khilafat Movement was imputed to the
entire community and it was charged with harbouring extra-territorial
loyalties. Historian Neeti Nair's Changing Homelands provides deep insights
into this grim reality. It recounts how during a unity conference in 1925 Lala
Lajpat Rai felt that Muslim assertions about their love for India and their
“readiness to resist foreign invasions” were so hemmed in by “ifs” and “buts”
that they left an “atmosphere of distrust in many Hindu minds.”
Rai's
antagonistic attitude may have been the result of his close association with
Arya Samaj which had already come into conflict with the Muslims in the late
1800s when it tried, as Nehru put it in The Discovery of India, "to become
a defender of everything Hindu, against what it considered as the encroachments
of other faiths."
According to historian N Gerald Barrier, Arya
Samaj's systematic attack on Islam amplified Hindu-Muslim rivalry and produced
a regularised pattern of conflict. In an article in the May 1968 issue of the
Journal of Asian Studies, Barrier mentions fifteen major riots between 1883 and
1891 over 'kine-slaughter', 'kine' being another word for cow.
Hate-incidents against Muslims saw a sharp rise after it came to light
that several participants in the Tablighi Jamaat's Delhi conference held in
March this year had tested positive for Covid-19. (Photo: Reuters)
-----
Nair writes
that as early as 1901, Lajpat Rai had warned the Congress that it was “futile
to attempt a chimerical and premature union of the various religious
nationalities” in India and lamented that the Congress had diluted its
resolutions on orphan relief and the shuddhi movement because of the presence
of Muslims and Christians, and that “Hindu interests… have been sacrificed for
a false ideal of nationality.” Muslims have also been made to distrust the
Hindus by religious supremacists within their community who have for centuries
unIslamically otherised them as "Kafirs".
But the
historical Muslimophobia, as the citations suggest, has more to do with the
political insecurities of Hindus than any fear of the Muslim religion except
perhaps in the case of the Arya Samaj whose raison d'être was to protect Vedic
Hinduism from not just the "alien" faiths of Islam and Christianity
but also the idolatrous beliefs within Hinduism. At the same time, distorted
historical accounts added to the problem by portraying Muslims as products of
Islamic intrusions into India.
Representative Image
-----
In India's
Islamic Traditions, 711-1750 renowned historian Richard M Eaton writes that
modern textbooks routinely characterise the advent of Persianised Turks in
India as a 'Muslim conquest', and the entire period from the 13th to the 18th
century as India's 'Muslim Era'. "That is to say, the agent of conquest is
not a people as defined by their ethnic heritage or place of origin, but
rather, a religion, the Islamic religion", he laments.
In
comparison, even when the 16th century Spaniards justified their conquest of
Mexico in religious terms modern texts never speak of a 'Christian conquest' of
America, nor is the post-1492 period ever called America's "Christian
Era." It is always the 'Spanish conquest' of Central and South America and
'European settlement' in North America.
Eaton
blames medieval Indo-Persian chroniclers for promoting the notion of 'Islamic
conquest' of India and identifying Islam with the fortunes of their royal
patrons. However, Sanskrit sources claim that from the 8th to 14th centuries,
Rajput, Brahman and other contemporary Indian elites referred to the invaders
not by their religion but by their linguistic identity — most typically as
Turks or Turuska. "These findings,” says Eaton, "permit dramatically
new ways of conceptualising the character of cultural encounters at the dawn of
the appearance of Muslims in north India."
The
challenge for those genuinely interested in India's rise lies in correcting the
skewed annals of Muslims in South Asian historiography and de-linking religion
from their imperial past. They must also be part of efforts to mitigate the
mutual distrust between Hindus and Muslims by legally neutralising the
purveyors of hate who polarise society for their narrow ends through the
fabrication and spread of fake news. Advising any one community to rewrite its
victim mindset will only deepen the misgivings.
-----
A Faizur
Rahman is an independent researcher and Secretary General of Islamic Forum for
the Promotion of Moderate Thought.
Related
Articles:
Related Article:
Victimhood
Narrative, Paternalistic Sympathy and The Muslim Predicament
An Aatmanirbhar Musalman Could Be the Pride of An
Aatmanirbhar Bharat
It is Wrong and Unfair
to Blame Muslims Themselves for their Trials and Tribulations
Original Headline: Are Indian Muslims victims of their "victim mindset"?
Source: The Daily O
URL: https://newageislam.com/islam-politics/the-victimhood-mindset-indian-muslims/d/122773
New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism