Saba Naqvi re-visits the famous
“moth-eaten” word, to describe the parlous state of Indian secularism. She particularly focuses on the
dangers of polarization. It is nobody’s case that BJP has anything to offer towards a unifying agenda.
But what have the secularists ever done for India (and Indian muslims)?
the only area
where Muslims are over-represented is in Indian jails
Naqvi points out the effect of the poison pus from partition I (partition II is not mentioned, even though she talks about Axom and Bengal) but she should have also pointed out that ideologies are more poisonous than events.
The biggest and most powerful poison source is the two nation theory: “our heroes are their villains and vice versa,” a logic that can equally hold true for Shia/Sunni, Urdu/Bengali, and all other ways that humanity can be divided. Today Pramila Rani Baruah is a hero for Bodos and a villain for muslims: this is the proud legacy of the TNT.
the
rhetoric of Modi/Shah amounts to
this: Muslims got two countries out of Partition and rejected secularism; why
are they still in India trying to vote against us?
It is basically a massive con game. The agenda will be set by conservative muslims males who have only one thing in their mind: Islam khatre mein…..and that’s it. It was the Shah Bano case that convinced the Hindu upper-caste, middle-class (the primary source of opinion-makers) that secularism should be ditched in favor of majoritarianism and gave rise to the BJP as a political player. The secularists are opportunists who would pursue soft-Hindutva (Congress in Gujarat) and soft-Islamism (Samajwadi party in UP, Trinamool Congress in West Bengal) to get votes. Sure they dont have a genocidal agenda, but they dont have the good of any community at heart. Politics to them is an exercise to simply feather their family beds. If the Aam Admi party stands apart from the crowd it will get the votes of deprived muslims as well as relieved hindus. If it adopts the same formula as the secularists it will be doomed to a cut in the vote-bank and nothing more.
……………………..
Muslim
equals terrorist equals Pakistani equals infiltrator equals Bangladeshi is not
a new construct for the Sangh parivar. But in this election, the BJP is using
the Bangladeshi immigrant rhetoric with particular emphasis as it believes
there are gains to be made by polarising sensibilities in Assam, Bengal and
Bihar. So the demonology only needs to be updated and tweaked. And this time
the Muslim bogeyman returns in the shape of the “Bangladeshi”. The immigrant,
illegal migrant, settler, foreigner etc.
At
one level, these are all battles erupting around the Partition fault-line, the
wounds that routinely get infected and begin oozing pus. At its base level, the
rhetoric of Modi/Shah and even the more sophisticated right-wingers amounts to
this: Muslims got two countries out of Partition and rejected secularism; why
are they still in India trying to vote against us? If they want to stay, it
should be on our terms, not those set by people who are infiltrators and
terrorists anyway.
Communal ideology and prejudice are easy to spot and
analyze. It is harder to confront the great crisis of Indian secularism, that
is now so hollowed out that it makes it easy for communal forces to grow. One
could even borrow the phrase Mohammed Ali Jinnah used for the Pakistan he
got—“moth-eaten”—which is what the fabric of Indian secularism has become
today. For those who still have idealistic stardust in their eyes, we must
blink and accept that Indian secularism is not about some utterance of the soul
as a Jawaharlal Nehru may have once imagined it. It appears to be mostly about
electoral management by secular parties that involves first seeing Muslims as a
herd and then trying to keep that herd together.
But
the crisis of secularism is no laughing matter. The Muslim community has
slipped on all human development indices. Yet in modern secular India, an
entire mobilisation has thrived on the argument that they are “appeased”. There
is indeed a section of the community that is appeased: the clerics. All
political parties go to them. Last week, Priyanka Gandhi did so in Rae Bareli;
simultaneously in Delhi Mehmood Madani, an influential cleric from the Deoband
tradition, who has of late been making pro-Modi noises, said “Priyanka would
have been better than Rahul” for the Congress.
Since Independence, secular
parties in India have approached the Muslim community through clerics and in
the process given them legitimacy. The maulanas, in turn, have used the cover
of “secularism” to keep retrograde personal laws in place and thereby their own
relevance intact till presumably they land in paradise. They rarely talk of
jobs, employment, modernity. The result now is that having been given
“secularism” to eat and a vote to brandish, the Muslims of India have been left
in their ghettos with many “sole spokesmen” of the community. It is these
clerics who promise the deliverance of that herd during election time. Their
projection of their own clout is often a fraudulent exercise.
As
the BJP thrives, so will the clerics who live off victimhood and the fears of
the minority community. Among the most successful is Badruddin Ajmal, who leads
the AIUDF in Assam. In the 2012 violence in the state, he too had stoked the
flames. A graduate of the Deoband seminary, he describes “religious discourse
and Islamic theological exchanges” as among his favourite pastimes on his
website. He is a perfume moghul with expansive business and charity interests,
who no doubt sees himself as a protector of the community and a servant of
Allah.
How
did we get here? For one, the clout of the maulanas has increased ever since
the Congress famously capitulated before them when it overturned the Shah Bano
judgement in 1986. It is hardly worth restating that this not only pushed
Muslims deeper into the ghetto, it eventually created conditions for the rise
of the BJP on the stage of national politics in the late ’80s.
The
All-India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) was at the heart of that churning.
Founded in 1973, it is a collection of clerics with a motley crew of
professionals whose main purpose is to protect Sharia law. Of its 201 members,
101 are life members. They represent an orthodox male viewpoint that has not
just been allowed to go unchallenged but has also been promoted actively by the
secular state.
Outright corruption in the name of secularism too is part of
the disease. Particularly so in the matter of Waqf properties that can be
described as religious endowments made in the name of Allah for the benefit of
the poor and needy in the Muslim community. There are approximately 3,00,000
registered Waqf properties in India on about four lakh acres of land (the
second largest land holding after Indian railways). It is a national resource
that should have been developed for the welfare of the community, as it is meant
to. Instead,
this resource has been mortgaged, sold and encroached upon with the connivance
of the same clerical class in league with elected Muslim representatives. Waqf
boards in all the states are repositories of corruption, yet they get away with
it because any demand for scrutiny is described as an attack on Islam.
Meanwhile, issues that really concern the community such as employment,
safety, prosperity are not addressed. The police and the entire judicial
system is known for its profiling on communal lines and the only area
where Muslims are over-represented is in Indian jails while even
well-to-do members of the community are not rented homes in many
localities in Indian metros.
……….
Link: http://www.outlookindia.com/printarticle.aspx?290671
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regards
