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Indian Muslims and their linkages

Last Saturday, the nation’s capital witnessed a remarkable political event: a massive gathering of Muslims at the historic Ram Lila ground issued a fatwa against terrorism. It is only a coincidence that this dramatic and demonstrative gathering took place a day before the Bharatiya Janata Party began its two-day national executive in Delhi; and the party found itself welcoming the fatwa. L.K. Advani even felt it expedient to exhort his party to reach out to Muslims. This restraint was in sharp contrast to the BJP president’s stridency a day earlier.

The Saturday congregation, in fact, was organised to proclaim a public endorsement of the stand taken a few months ago against terrorism by the Darul Uloom Deoband, India’s most respected Islamic seminary. Since then, Muslims have been organising seminars and conferences to carry forward the message. However, insofar as Islam recognises the designated clerics’ sole authority to interpret the scripture, the Ram Lila ground meeting can be deemed to be a creative innovation in democratic engagement within the Muslim community.

Perhaps the last time the capital witnessed such a gathering was more than two years ago when Muslims from all over north India met to register their anger over the blasphemous Danish cartoon and other American imperialist offences, including bullying New Delhi into the famous vote against Iran. Curiously enough, there is an overlap among the organisers and groups of the protest two years ago and those of the fatwa congregation against terrorism last Saturday; yet the tone and tenor of the two gatherings were markedly different. Instead of raving and ranting against real and presumed enemies, at home and abroad, last Saturday saw the community making an attempt to confront an entire gamut of perceptions, internal (to the community) and external.

Whatever the mix of motives behind the Deoband initiative, it would indeed appear that the community and its leaders are finally beginning to understand the importance of not doing or saying things that will help the sangh parivar consolidate the Hindu vote. By now, it should be obvious to every responsible Muslim in India that the so-called jihadi has turned out to be the most useful ally of those very forces and personalities which thrive, politically and electorally, on anti-Islam formulations and fears. For instance, it is possible to suggest that the outcome of the recent Karnataka elections could have been anybody’s guess had there been no Jaipur.

Since that defining 9/11 day, Muslims in India have deemed it as their collective obligation to stand up against the Bush administration’s catechism on terror; in the process, they have unwittingly played into the hands of those very political forces and leaders who were (and are) quite willing to create conditions of permanent civil war in India, in the hope of consolidating the Hindu middle classes against the presumed terror-loving Muslim community. Even the most sane majority community members fall for the meretricious argument that “while it is true that not all Muslims are terrorists, it is equally true that all terrorists are Muslim.”

With some help from a bumbling Bush administration, the terrorists have succeeded in their game plan: of generating irrational fears and a sense of insecurity among the majority community, and of invoking ham-handed administrative response from incorrigibly incompetent police personnel to create resentment, which in turn is used to find potential recruits in Muslim bastis and kasbas. The terrorists have set up shop in “mainland” India and they have managed to secure some kind of local support. And that ought to be a matter of grave worry for responsible Muslim leaders, as it is for the security establishment.

While the Indian state and the secular political leadership cannot walk away from the obligation to ensure that no community is victimised as we try to defeat the terrorist, it was about time the Muslim leaders themselves joined the battle of perceptions, within and without the community. The divisions, factions and frictions within the Muslim community are well known and cannot be easily wished away; also well known are the alliances and interests the community leaders have developed.

These limited “leaders” will need to subordinate their small-mindedness to the community’s larger interests — seeing through the communal strategies and using the democratic space to arrive at a workable reconciliation and social harmony. A few steps suggest themselves.

First, the Muslim leaders need to find ways of jettisoning the community’s traditional friends and protectors in the so-called secular camp. On sober reflection, they will realise that these traditional “friends” have kept the community trapped in slogans and shibboleths of the past. The more progressive a political protector, the lesser is his or her ability or intention to help the Muslim community get out of its ghettoised existence. It is time for Muslim leaders to think anew how best to secure an honourable and respectable place for the community in our democratic arrangements.

Secondly, Muslim leaders need to realise and relate to the current national strain of “India first.” Like any other country finding itself having to cope with the exacting demands of an increasingly globalised world, India too has discovered the uses of national pride and national insularity; distant battles and disputes — Palestine, Hamas, Abu Ghraib, Iran — do not engage the Indian middle classes’ attention. Muslim leaders have to understand that their excessive preoccupation with global concerns does not necessarily strengthen their voice at home.

The third requirement follows from the second: India has the second largest Muslim population in the world. Yet Indian Muslim leaders have ceded intellectual and theological leadership to outsiders. Just because a few sheikdoms have petro-dollars to hand around for building mosques and madrassas, the Indian Muslim clergy and leaders have been only too happy to get sucked into their agenda. Indian Muslims have their own religious institutions, traditions, learning and scholarship to judge and assess autonomously issues and problems confronting the community. This excessive kow-towing to the Middle Eastern donors and demagogues have distracted the community from demanding its legitimate share in national prosperity.

And, lastly, Muslim leaders have to get out of their victimhood mindset and learn to work the democratic opportunities in order to reclaim their rightful place under the Indian sun. Perhaps they are entitled to complain about the stereotyping of Indian Muslims; they also have a legitimate right to protest the police officials’ prejudices. Nonetheless, it is about time they realised that the Muslim community has to produce activists and talent who can help to correct the aberrations in the public discourse.

Muslims might have felt the pinch of a distorted public discourse. They need to see it as part of a larger malaise. Many Muslims must have experienced a kind of deja vu on seeing the manner in which the police and the media handled the Aarushi Talwar murder case — the unhealthy interdependence between the insensitive police officials and the gullible media, both pandering to an excitable public’s baser instincts.

Like any other segment of Indian society, Muslims too have a stake in democratising and humanising the public discourse. Admittedly, the media and other public opinion forums are dominated by non-Muslim personnel; but that need not be a discouragement to correcting institutionalised biases in an unrepresentative media profession.

As victims, Muslim leaders have an obligation to highlight how biases and prejudices end up making the jihadis’ task easier — deepening the community divide, legitimising the divisive communalist, and letting a lazy and incompetent security establishment get away with fake arrests and encounters.

Last Saturday’s fatwa against terrorism ought to be seen as a simple declaration: there are no takers for the jihadi agenda in India. In effect, Indian Muslims are trying to send a message to the global jihadis: we are not available to you to fight your distant battles; we are not interested in instigating a fire at home just to provide you ideological comfort; our destiny is irrevocably linked with a democratic India. The rest of India needs to summon responsible politics to help the Muslim discover the joys of harmonious co-existence.

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