When facts become inconvenient, what do we do?
Change the facts? Change the subject?
Two bomb blasts rip through the heart of Bombay on a placid afternoon, and 50 innocents die. Instant accusations are always motivated, even when justified. Silence is one way out: why name the guilty when the guilt is yet to be proven? But silence can become fertile territory for speculation, or for mischief. It is no palliative to anger, and it is the duty of a politician to ensure that the reaction does not degenerate into corrosive revenge. Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani signaled toward the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist organization that advertises mayhem as a badge of honor. To many this sounded like a tired accusation, but the astute home minister had a purpose. He was doing what he could to divert wrath toward a known enemy, aware that anger against Indian Muslims could demand a terrible price.
Maharashtra’s chief minister, Sushil Shinde, whose common sense is wiser than the pyrotechnics of his leader, took another approach. He changed the subject. Like others, he mourned Bombay’s dead, and then celebrated Bombay’s recovery. There is no doubt about it; Bombay behaved heroically. It answered terrorism with a buoyant Sensex. The terrorist aims to both destroy and provoke. The series of attacks in Bombay are designed to disrupt the vibrant pulse of the Indian economy as well as spread a sense of fear. Normalcy is the sharpest slap on the face of the terrorist.
But the fact remains that Bombayites believe that the bomb blasts are the work of Muslim groups, working with or without the help of organizations across the partition line. You cannot deal with this volcanic social problem by shoving it under a liberal carpet. Its periodic eruptions will destroy liberalism itself.
We need to face the truth if we want to shape its future. But truth must also be honestly defined. Public discourse in a democracy is conducted through language, and if the language is not accurate, distortion will create a twisted reality.
It is absolutely wrong, therefore, to say that Indian Muslims were behind the bomb blasts. It is, equally, absolutely right to say that some Indian Muslims were behind the bomb blasts. The difference does not really need to be underlined; it should be apparent that the two are completely separate statements.
The sins of a few cannot, must not, be visited upon the entire community, or you create the environment for a pogrom. And we have seen, in Delhi in 1984 and Gujarat in 2002, where that can take us. Media is often culpable in the use of such misleading shorthand. Sometimes it is out of mental laziness, and sometimes deliberate communal provocation.
However, it is indisputable that a section of Indian Muslim youth has become fanatic enough to believe in arbitrary and savage mass killing. It is important to understand why, because you cannot heal without a diagnosis. Some of the reasons are obvious. There is a bubbling and continuous anger against riots. The children of 1992 and 1993 have become teenagers now, and if they needed any reminders they got it in Gujarat last year. Most human beings learn to absorb such anger, and appreciate that life cannot become an unending conflict. But terrorism does not seek the allegiance of 99 percent of the people; it requires only one person in a thousand or ten thousand to believe in senseless violence. Havoc is an anonymous bomb.
But this is a surface cause. There is no society on earth that can boast of perfect equality, or even exemplary equality. There will always be sections who are disadvantaged, and become victims of majority discrimination and worse. Only rarely does this syndrome acquire extreme dimensions: after all, millions of Jews lived in Germany before Adolf Hitler came to power because, despite levels of discrimination, life in Germany was better for the Jews than it must have been elsewhere. They migrated only when the Nazis applied their unbelievably brutal fascist techniques on the community. Muslims in India have been an exceptionally fortunate minority throughout for most of their history. For large phases in the last thousand years, most of the subcontinent was ruled by a variety of Muslim nobility, enabling the community to exist with a sense of security that is extremely rare for minorities.
In fact, the word minority itself is a comparatively modern term. For Muslims never saw themselves as a minority under, say, the Mughal Empire, just as the Christians never felt oppressed or discriminated under British or Portuguese rule. It is relevant to assert that minority is a political rather than demographic reality. He who feels discriminated against is a minority. The Dalits are the only communities who can legitimately claim that they have been a minority throughout history, for they have suffered brutal racism in the past and continue to face it in milder forms today.
Why is democracy essential for the survival of India? Because democracy has been designed for the civilized and stable release of historic as well as contemporary anger. It is meant to translate anger into power, and thereby rid the body politic of the continual spasms of fever that afflict it. We have seen this happen. This is how the Northeast has been, slowly and gradually, assuaged. This is how the anger of the Sikhs in Punjab was absorbed, and the community readjusted into the system. Muslim anger too has become a political tornado, helping to sweep out national Congress governments in Delhi, and destroying the regional Congress in UP and Bihar.
But why has legitimate anger taken a new, illegitimate, direction in recent years?
Because Indian political parties in general, and the Congress in particular, has handed over the political leadership of the Muslim community of India to fundamentalists, isolationists, agent provocateurs. This was not true of the Congress in the past. The independence movement nourished a remarkable group of committed Muslim leaders in the Congress, men of substance and idealism, intellect and independence. They fought bravely against the Muslim League tide before 1947, and when that tide left behind an Indian Muslim community that was marooned by history, they picked up the pieces and set about restoring the community’s self-confidence. The brightest of that constellation was the remarkable Maulana Azad, but the Congress as well as the Socialist movement had clusters of stars that had their own luminosity. These were not men who denied their religion; what they denied was obscurantism.
But from the seventies onwards, as the last of this generation passed away, the Congress took the easy way out and began to promote the mullah as the interface between the party and the community.
It was with Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s benign, if indirect, encouragement that the All India Muslim Personal Law Board was set up in 1972. The landmark moment was 1980 when Mrs. Gandhi, with the help of Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna, signed a “pact” with an Imam of Delhi’s principal mosque, the self-styled Shahi Imam. It was the symbolic and real surrender of the whole community’s vote to the mullah element.
The process only intensified under Rajiv Gandhi, although, to be honest, he was privately deeply troubled by what he was doing. But his private views did not matter because his public decisions affected history. Perhaps after the surrender over Shah Bano there could be no turning back. And yet, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi do not deserve all the blame for this. Those who came after them could have used their massive popularity to reverse the trend; instead they courted the mullah even more assiduously.
Vishwanath Pratap Singh sank even deeper into this trough. The Socialists were little better — except for one Socialist, Mulayam Singh Yadav, who on one occasion called the Shahi Imam’s bluff and proved his point in the next Assembly election. Muslims in the upper echelons of the Congress would find it difficult to win a municipal election in a Muslim-majority constituency.
The consequences are before you. There is not a single Muslim leader in any political party, inside or outside the Congress, who commands the respect of the community. Muslims constitute more than 35 percent of the electorate in Bengal but they do not have any Humayun Kabir. They vote for the Marxists. In Bihar Laloo Prasad Yadav is their leader and in Uttar Pradesh Mulayam Singh Yadav.
A cabal of self-appointed, semi (if not wholly) hysterical arrivistes have stepped into this vacuum. If today a foreign correspondent has to file a “Muslim” view on any issue, he turns almost instinctively to someone in the Muslim Personal Law Board, or to some mullah. When such questions arise (may I add, that they do so very rarely, since no one cares) the blame for the “lack of leadership among Muslims” is immediately transferred to the community itself. “Muslims have not been able to produce a leader” and so forth is heard. But which political party has really created space at the top for Indian Muslims whose political philosophy reflects the ideals of a modern, secular Indian nation?
Is it illogical then that the angry young Muslim should also seek out the extremists when he needs an outlet for his passions?
For more than three decades now Indian Muslims have been squeezed into a political trap, or perhaps driven into a political minefield by an unthinking class of modern politicians.
Democracy functions when leaders inspire confidence, when people believe that their representatives are their voice. The children of despair are those who have become convinced that their voice has been lost in the tumult of India. It is but a single, lonely step from despair to terrorism.
- Arab News Opinion 31 August 2003
