View from the other side

As Saeed Naqvi’s “Being The Other” hits the stands, the seasoned journalist talks about the dangers to our composite culture and how we can overcome them

August 03, 2016 11:00 pm | Updated October 18, 2016 12:48 pm IST

MAKING A POINT Saeed Naqvi at his residence in New Delhi.

MAKING A POINT Saeed Naqvi at his residence in New Delhi.

One day an old lady felt that if she called out the name of her grandson in a moving train everybody would start looking at her because he is called Sibtain. Another day, the erudite daughter of a noted journalist while returning from Banda by train after completing her social work assignment was offered a piece of apple in a bogey where local Muslims had just been asked to vacate their seats. Not hungry, she politely refused the offer only to be told, ‘feel free, we are not Muslims.’ The son and father in this case is Saeed Naqvi, whose roots are in Awadh, that repository of India’s composite culture which has yet to go dry. This ‘othering’ pricked Naqvi somewhere and hence started a journey to find its genesis. Unfortunately, Naqvi discovered that his god had feet of clay. Naqvi brings Jawaharlal Nehru, the face of Indian secularism, down from his pedestal in a well-argued book, which is part memoir and part exploration of the acts of our political leaders that led to marginalisation of the largest minority group in the country, “Being The Other” (Aleph) pokes the conscience ever so gently in the good old Awadhi way even as it shows us view from the other side.

To begin with, Naqvi says the timing of the release is just a coincidence. “It is not an attempt to criticise the Congress when the BJP has come to power. I could have held it back but the theme of the book is that the Congress and the BJP are like tweedledum and tweedledee. We discovered it late that in 1947 itself Hindu raj had dawned on India. Pehle sharafat se chalaya, phir shararat se,” avers Naqvi on a cloud-free day in monsoon.

Naqvi, who grew up admiring Nehru for his good looks, achkan and the propensity to shift to Urdu when angry, cites Sunder Lal report on the military action in Hyderabad to overthrow the Nizam and the ethnic cleansing in Jammu during Partition to indict Nehru. “He comes across as a virtuous young man who played piano in the brothel without knowing what went on upstairs.”

He goes personal as well when he relates the episode of the alleged marriage between Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Syud Hossain which was ostensibly annulled because Nehru and Gandhi felt it would have serious implications on the National Movement. “Had it succeeded, it would have been a very successful Love Jihad!,” remarks Naqvi.

All for reappraisal of reputations, Naqvi goes on to quote from H.M. Seervai’s book on Transfer of Power documents which reveal that it was Congress, and not Jinnah, which insisted on Partition. “For Jinnah it was just a bargaining tool to get a better deal. But both the countries are silent on this because it will show that Indian leaders had feet of clay and Jinnah would appear as a fool.” Naqvi is also critical of Maulana Azad. “He knew the inside story and was against Partition but still he didn’t quit.”

In that sense RSS and BJP seem more straightforward in pushing their agenda. “In a sense, yes!” exclaims Naqvi. “At least we could have bargained with them. They disagree with me but in my face. The Congress stabbed us from the back.”

By partitioning the country, Naqvi says, we trapped ourselves in a triangle marked by Srinagar-New Delhi, India-Pakistan and Hindu-Muslim lines. “This is the fulcrum of the book. You cannot touch any one of these lines without disturbing the others. For instance you cannot touch New Delhi-Srinagar without bringing in Pakistan. But the moment you bring in Pakistan you increase the temperature on Hindu-Muslim relations. It does not suit the powers that be for two reasons. They are on the way to build Hindu nationalism and secondly this is their mechanism to manage the caste turbulence in the society. They show the fear of Muslims to consolidate Hindus. To that extent there is no solution. This is a trap. If you take note of this trap you can think of coming out of it. If you ignore it, it means you are selling lies to us. The delegations will keep coming and going without results.”

Considering Naqvi calls himself almost an agnostic and only culturally a Muslim, some might feel that he is romanticising the other.

After all his efforts to please Mahesh Yogi to get an interview with the Beatles are well documented. He fondly talks of his days in Chennai where as the editor of a reputed newspaper he would often go to Tirupati and Sabrimala. “It was my upbringing in Awadh that made me curious and respectful towards other faiths. Of course, I am not the other and I became a minority in a minority also,” he says quoting Iqbal, ‘Zahid-e-tang nazar ne mujhe kaafir jaana, aur kaafir ye samjhta hai musalmaan hoon main.’

“But this doesn’t mean that the othering is a figment of imagination,” argues Naqvi. “A very important part in my career was the coverage of the Gulf War. I saw the big machine. The Soviet Union had just collapsed. The victorious were asserting their military might. The global media was born. You saw the war in your drawing room. For the Western audience it was triumphalism but for the Iraqis and Muslim countries it was defeat and humiliation. The world had been divided into two sets of audiences by television. Taking TV non-seriously is a crime. The role of television in communalising society is enormous.” Without reaching the desired level of social development, Naqvi notes, the government gave the electronic media in the hands of the corporate sector.

Like his book, which is more reflective than definitive, Naqvi throws pointers. Like how Naqvi got a first hand experience of the othering process when his good friend and school mate late Vinod Mehta didn’t appreciate his world view where India is increasingly getting sucked into war on global terror.

“Earlier we could solve it among ourselves, now we have brought in external powers into the mix.” He underlines his Shia identity, which doesn’t believe in conversion and together with sufi strain of Islam provide syncretic foundation to the society. He reminds how in Ajmer dargah the langar food has no onion and garlic because the idea is the food should be acceptable to the maximum number of people. He criticises ghettoisation in certain sections of Muslim community. He notes the increasing assertion of Muslim identity and divisive forces like the Owaisi brothers. “If injustice is law then resistance is duty.” The fact that the Qutab Minar and the Red Fort stand in the dark irks him. The communal politics on monuments frustrates him.

However, Naqvi says all is not lost. “I have tolled the bell. TRP rating is a disguised way of communalising the media. If the government take note of the triangle and invests big money in public news service after insulating it from the system and market, things can change. Cover India for the world and the world for India. I travelled to 110 countries because I didn’t want my opinion to be coloured.”

He reminds of the short film project called Mera Bharat that he made for Doordarshan. “In one of them, drawn from my childhood memories, Hazrat Bibi, the Prophet’s daughter, asks sugra the parrot to go in search of her husband, ‘Ali Sahib’, who has not returned from battle. ‘If you cannot find him, go to Vrindavan, where Krishna is. Look for him there.’”

As one pauses the recorder, Naqvi goes back to wall where his mother’s last words in Persian poet Hafiz’s verse are shining.

Naqvi interprets “Quran ko jala do, har burai karo, ho sakta hai khuda tumhein maaf kar de lekin agar tumne kisi ka dil dukhaya to uski koi bakshish nahin hai. And, she goes on to add that this is the essence of every religion.” Simple!

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