July 28, 2008	Monday	Rajab 24, 1429

Archives Write to Mr. Jawed Naqvi

FOR many months a young man who had evidently graduated in Arabic from a Madressah near Delhi was visiting me, seeking a job. I had no use for him but he was desperate. He said he was willing to accept a menial job, so close was he to starvation. The man in his 20s sported a beard of the Tableeghi Jamaat style, and wore a characteristic short pajama and an adventurously long kurta. Edges of the white cap had yellowed with heavy use and oil.

I am not comfortable with overly religious people. However, to bail him out of his hapless condition, I proposed a paid assignment to transcribe Ehsan Jaffri’s poems into the Devnagari script he said he knew. As it turned out, that was not entirely true. His Hindi was poor and writing ability even worse. But his Urdu script was superb, as was his Arabic.

In any other country seeking to understand the Muslim mind (if there is one) or where the system was keen to grasp the complexities of Madressah education and its supposedly secret ways, or where someone wanted to watch or decode the countless websites in Arabic, Urdu and Persian that emote the world’s ideological divide, people like the youth from the Madressah would be snapped up with a firm job offer.However, in a country where even a Sikh commando cannot be hired to guard a Sikh prime minister because some insecure fellow in the higher echelons of the intelligence community derived the wrong lesson from a tragic episode in 1984, people like the young Arabic graduate have little chance of being trusted or given jobs of the nature just described.

Their chances of finding a worthwhile vocation are further weakened by a conviction that goes back to the discourse of Maulana Maudoodi. The former Amir of Jamaat-i-Islami had told the Justice Munir Commission in the 1950s, in the context of anti-Qadiani violence in Pakistani Punjab, that non-Muslims should not be allowed to work for an Islamic state and, conversely, Muslims in a secular (he said Kafir) country like India should not be given jobs by the state there. He would be happy if the Indian Muslims were treated instead like shudras, he said. The recommendations of the Amir are still pursued by some groups among India’s varied Muslims and they shun state jobs such as the army and civil services even if they are otherwise qualified for them. I am not sure if the Justice Sachchar Commission took up this issue at all when it recently recommended the need to open more government jobs for Indian Muslims.

Having said that, the question really requiring an answer is what does the state plan to do with quite a few million among the 150 million Muslims who have either opted out of mainstream education or been forced by their circumstances to be directed to the Madressah. At one level the problem is not different from the large number of schools run across the country by Hindu chauvinist organisations affiliated to the RSS. But the problem with a Madressah student is entirely different from the one faced by a boy who comes out, for example, from a Saraswati Shishu Mandir school or college run by religio-political Hindu organisations. Left to their devices, however, neither the Shishu Mandirs nor the Madrasas would have difficulty in gravitating to the Pope against Galileo in the battle between obscurantism and reason.

Recent bomb attacks that targeted innocent civilians across busy Indian cities may be rooted in this dilemma the Indian state faces but does not look ready to address. Where does one draw the line between private faith and public good? Instead of confronting the poser, the state assumes the posture of a pseudo-liberal ideologue, unwilling to see the direct nexus it has nurtured with motivated groups of religious fanatics. These groups are increasingly asserting their claim on the political agenda. Instead of shepherding a balanced rapprochement between the two conflicting sides a worried state apparatus suddenly senses trouble. The first reflex of a bloody-minded system then is to quell the offshoots of a problem that it has nursed, with brute force. It then unleashes a questionable legal system to mop up the haemorrhage, often further bludgeoning the victim while appearing to deliver justice.

No less a person than Mohandas Gandhi revealed early symptoms of this nexus between liberal ideology and mediaeval worldview when he supported the Khilafat Movement to spur his anti-colonial campaign. He thus worked overtime to endorse an anachronistic worldview whose time was long over. That Muslim stalwarts like Kamal Ataturk and Mohammed Ali Jinnah rejected the movement as undesirable in the new social context is something that is not usually discussed or applauded by the Indian state or its educational paraphernalia. On the contrary, the Congress evolved a bonding with religious and cultural obscurants who supported the Khilafat. To balance its embrace of orthodox Muslims, it began negotiating with religious groups among Hindus, Sikhs and even Christians. One of the consequences was the Ayodhya campaign, which led to the Mumbai massacre of Muslims by the Shiv Sena and eventually to the tragic blasts that shook India’s financial hub to its core in March 1993. Sikhs, Christians and Hindus in Punjab and Kashmir bore the brunt of this thoughtlessly played out balancing game.

With the mainstream Congress party busy cutting deals with religious groups that fetched it votes, liberal Muslims found themselves seeking shelter under the overarching communist movement just as Jinnah’s liberal admirers followed him to Pakistan. Tahira Mazhar Ali, who was a communist activist in her teens when the CPI asked her to hand over its letter of support for Pakistan to the Qaid, told me recently that the missive surprised Jinnah. “He was taken aback by the unexpected communist support. He said to me: but you people have never been with me, as if to say what is this you are doing now.”

Jinnah urged a still uncertain Tahira not to harbour fears about the arriving Partition because she was not going to lose her Indian comrades. “You would be meeting them across the border, just as I intend to be visiting Bombay fairly regularly.” Little did he realise that his agenda would be usurped and aimed against him by zealots who had so far only opposed his campaign for Pakistan. I think this is the lesson that BJP leader Lal Kishan Advani was unable to ignore when votaries of communal historiography gagged him.

Compounding the lethal chaos is a marked tendency among average Indians to erupt into patriotic and usually maudlin songs in victory and defeat, a musical tryst they see as a panacea to the pervasive religious virus. Allama Iqbal’s song about how Hindustan is greater than any other country is received as gospel truth. It is sung today to martial beats, unmindful of whether the neighbours endorse India’s claim on superior metaphors or not. Others throw a tantrum about singing Vande Mataram, still others in opposing it. (The clever state found a via media; it abridged the song.) Lost in the cacophony of musical patriotism is the need for a calm assessment of the raging parochial violence and a strategy to stem it.

Ever since the 9/11 attacks there has been an official policy of denial denial that Indian Muslims are capable of causing mindless harm and are just as motivated as their counterparts elsewhere in inflicting it. The Indian state has been building high fences to keep the evil virus of jihadis (in better days, when we liked them, they were called mujahideen) from Pakistan and Bangladesh, knowing but not admitting that a large number of alienated Muslims are brooding within the boundaries thus erected.

It is almost fashionable to flaunt it to the American friends that no Indian Muslim has joined the Al Qaeda. Similarly, the state looks very pleased when a group of Muslim clerics who derive their authority from official patronage than from the masses, issue fatwas against terrorism. I would say that the mysterious group called Indian Mujahideen, which has figured in the attacks in the three BJP-ruled states of Rajasthan, Karnataka and Gujarat could quite possibly be linked with any number of foreign intelligence agencies out to harm the country. But why should we deny that the people who carry out the damage might be Indians, alienated Indians. Why can’t the state get them? The answer is simple. To do that, it would also have to deal firmly with extremists of other communities, including ones that often enough rule this country. The Arabic graduate’s relentless misery is a consequence of the balancing game the state plays between a range of competing fanatics.

jawednaqvi@gmail.com