Author: M.J. Akbar
Publication: The Asian Age
Date: August 31, 2003
When facts become inconvenient,
what do we do? Change the facts? Change the subject?
Two bomb blasts rip through the
heart of Mumbai 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
signalled towards the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, a terrorist organisation
that advertises mayhem as a badge of honour. 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 towards 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
Mumbai's dead, and then celebrated Mumbai's recovery. There is no doubt
about it; Mumbai behaved heroically. It answered terrorism with a buoyant
Sensex. The terrorist aims to both destroy and provoke. The series of attacks
in Mumbai 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 Mumbaikars
believe that the bomb blasts are the work of Muslim groups, working with
or without the help of organisations 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 have 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% 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 civilised
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 and fundamentalism, and they argued,
correctly, that Islam itself was a light that had brought the Arabs from
the age of Jahiliya, or ignorance, into knowledge and progress.
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% 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? When they want Muslims, they bring out a tape to measure the size
of the beard.
Is it illogical then that the angry
young Muslim should also seek out the beards 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.
