Siyasi Muslims Page 5

  The term ‘sharia’ or ‘shariat’, which became a dominant idiom of Muslim religiosity in colonial/postcolonial India, was legally defined as a collection of codified rules and norms based on the Quran and Hadiths (the sayings and acts of Prophet Muhammad). Since this codification has always been subject to various interpretations, there were various shariats among Sunnis and Shias. However, the idea that the shariat should be treated as the most authentic set of governing principles for Indo-Islamic communities came into existence only in the eighteenth century. Despite the fact that a large part of the subcontinent was ruled by Muslim kings and rulers before the British, the norms to govern political affairs as well as the sociocultural life of Muslims were not entirely based on a set of rules and interpretations called the shariat. There were many different sources which constituted the religious beliefs and practices of various Islamic communities. These historically evolved religious–cultural practices were termed ‘customary laws’, which were separated from ‘personal’ laws in the later period by the British judiciary.

  The translation of the Quran (in Persian and later in Urdu) and circulation of the Tafseer (explanation of the Quran) literature the established a clear distinction between shariat-based ideal Islam and the customary practices associated with various Muslim communities in the mid-nineteenth century. The Muslim reformers, particularly the ulema, constructed a highly idealized picture of classical Islam and started marking the actual cultural practices as un-Islamic. In fact, the term ‘gair sharia’ (anti-shariat) was established as an explanatory category in religious texts. Since shariat-based Islam had already been recognized by the colonial state, following its policy of non-intervention, customary practices lost their potential as a source of law. The Mussalman Wakf Validating Act, 1913, and the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937, in this sense, were evolved out of this legal schema.

  The representation of ‘personal law’ as the most authentic and legally sanctioned and codified form of Islamic customs was used very intelligently by the Muslim political elite. In September 1937, for example, M.A. Jinnah proposed to make it compulsory for all Indian Muslims to be governed by shariat law. The Muslim leaders of the Congress also used this legally sanctioned shariat law to show Muslim distinctiveness. They conceptualized shariat law as a sacred doctrine, which could not be amended or changed, and precisely for this reason it had to be protected to ensure the religious rights of Muslims in the proposed constitutional framework. The religious bond constituted by the shariat actually turned out to be a reference point for asserting Muslim political oneness in a strictly numerical sense. Two powerful political speeches made in 1940 are relevant in elaborating this point.

  Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the Congress president, in his 1940 presidential address at Ramgarh, said:

  The Muslims in India number between 80–90 million. The same types of social or racial divisions, which affect other communities, do not divide them. The powerful bonds of Islamic brotherhood and equality have protected them to a large extent from the weakness that flows from social divisions. It is true that they number only one-fourth of the total population; but the question is not one of the population ratio, but of the large numbers and the strength behind them. Can such a vast mass of humanity have any legitimate reason for apprehension that in a free and democratic India, it might be unable to protect its rights and interests?27

  M.A. Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam (great leader) of the Muslim League, also made very similar remarks in his presidential address at Lahore in 1940. He said:

  Musalman are not a minority, as it is commonly known and understood. One has got to look around. Even today, according to the British map of India, 4 out of 11 provinces, where Muslims dominate more or less, are functioning notwithstanding the decision of the Hindu Congress High Command to non-cooperate and prepare for civil disobedience. Musalmans are a nation according to any definition of a nation, and they must have their homeland, their territory and their state.28

  Both Jinnah and Azad, despite taking two very different positions, seemed to adhere to the claim that Muslims should be recognized as a powerful numerical entity. For Azad, the protection of Muslim distinctiveness is only possible in a secular, united India because secular nationalism ensures the rights of religious minorities. However, for Jinnah, the Muslim right to self-determination is just and legitimate because Muslims as a community constitute a nation in the modern sense. Interestingly, both the arguments survived: India was partitioned and the Muslims of Pakistan eventually became a nationality; and a large number of Muslims remained in India as the largest religious minority. In fact, that was the reason why Azad described Muslims as the ‘second’ majority in later years. In his famous book India Wins Freedom, Azad argued that Partition has reduced the political capacity of Muslims. He writes:

  The only result of the creation of Pakistan was to weaken the position of the Muslims in the subcontinent of India. The 45 million Muslims who have remained in India have been weakened. On the other hand, there is as yet no indication that a strong and efficient government can be established in Pakistan. If one judges the question only from the point of view of the Muslim community, can anybody deny today that Pakistan has been for them a very unfortunate and unhappy development?29

  The three paradoxes of Muslimness

  The story of Muslims as numbers, I argue, does not stop here. It takes new shapes and forms in postcolonial India. The following chapters will unfold the various layers of this story. However, the brief discussion we have had so far may introduce us to three important paradoxes which are deeply associated with the Muslims of postcolonial India.

  One or many? Many, and yet one?

  Documentations on Muslims show that there are a number of Islamic communities in India who describe themselves as Muslims in a variety of ways. The existence of caste and the practice of untouchability among Muslims is observed and recognized by many colonial and Indian scholars. The census reports, anthropological studies on Muslims and even those who have surveyed the old and ancient monuments of the country tell us that it would be impossible to find any cultural similarity that unites Muslims as a community in the modern sense of the term. However, this crucial finding is ignored and, officially, Muslims are defined as a distinct legal, religious and cultural category. Interestingly, the dominant Muslim political elite continue to use this closed and integrated picture of Islam/Muslims.

  Constructed Islam versus lived spirituality

  The religious reform movements among Muslims, especially the evolution of sharia as a legal entity, draw their inspirations from colonial modernity. These movements, including the Deoband movement which eventually paved the way for the known pro-Congress organizations such as Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind and leaders such as Maulana Azad and Husain Ahmad Madani, produced a fully worked out imagination of Islam which was comparable with British modern English education. This Islam had a well-defined history, which could be compared with the modern history of various nations and religions; it had a distinct system of law, the sharia, which was to be juxtaposed with modern civil law; it had a sacred book, the Quran, which could be presented as a divine constitution; and it had a figure of the Prophet, whose acts and deeds are fixed in history. This systemic image of Islam was very different from the local beliefs, rituals and the everyday world of spirituality, which is followed and practised at the lower levels of society. The constructed Islam of reform movements survives as a public entity, while the lived Islam(s) of everyday type is/are completely marginalized.

  Muslim issues as Muslim politics

  The unified and homogeneous picture of the Muslims of India also produced a set of issues known as ‘Muslim issues’. In colonial India, this set of issues was called the Muslim problem—an obstacle that was presented by the British as one of the most important justifications of the Raj. They argued that Muslims were a problem because if there weren’t any Muslims/Islam in India, it would have been much easier to work out a Hindu nation state of th
e European kind. The Muslim question in the British political imagination was not a solvable issue. The Muslim question was transformed into Muslim issues in the post-Partition period, though Muslim issues are also envisaged as problems. Eventually, the protection of Urdu, the minority character of Aligarh Muslim University, personal law, triple talaq, Babri Masjid and the burkha/purdah emerge as purely Muslim issues. This dominant imagination of Muslim political identity fits very well with different political ideologies. For instance, the Congress and other so-called secular parties use the portrayal of pukka Musalman to nurture their ‘protection of minority’ agenda, while the BJP (and the erstwhile Bharatiya Jana Sangh!) employ this Muslimness strategically to consolidate and strengthen their core Hindutva constituency. Competitive electoral politics reproduces these fixed images of ‘Muslims as a political community’ and we are left with a strange and somehow stupid question: Can a Muslim be an Indian?

  These three paradoxes, I suggest, continue to survive—not merely in the political speeches of Muslim leaders like Jinnah and Azad in the 1940s but also in the recent discussions on Muslim identity. Ramachandra Guha’s forceful assertion that Indian Muslims had only three progressive leaders in postcolonial India is a good example. Like Azad and Jinnah, Guha sees Muslims merely as numbers, whose Islam is well-understood and who should be held responsible for not producing progressive leaders.

  It worth noting that Guha’s selective use of Ambedkar to justify his sweeping generalizations is equally puzzling. Ambedkar did not blame Muslim men for purdah! Nor did he feel that Islam was the main problem behind women’s subjugation. Ambedkar evokes Muslim plurality as a framework and situates it in the specific political context of the 1940s. He argues:

  It seems to me that the reason for the absence of the spirit of change in the Indian Musalman is to be sought in the peculiar position he occupies in India. He is placed in a social environment which is predominantly Hindu. That Hindu environment is always silently but surely encroaching upon him. He feels that it is de-musalmanizing him. As a protection against this gradual weaning away, he is led to insist on preserving everything that is Islamic without caring to examine whether it is helpful or harmful to his society.30

  Ambedkar further states:

  Muslims in India are placed in a political environment which is also predominantly Hindu. He feels that he will be suppressed and that political suppression will make the Muslims a depressed class. It is this consciousness that he has to save himself from being submerged by the Hindus socially and politically, which to my mind is the primary cause why the Indian Muslims [. . .] are backward in the matter of social reform.31

  In my view, Ambedkar was probably the first and only political commentator of the 1940s who talks of Muslim caste, the Muslim practice of untouchability and the subjugation of Muslim women in relation to the dominant Muslim elites’ quest for protected representation and the Hindu elites’ anti-Muslim communal politics. His argument not only reminds us of the crucial difference between the Muslim elite and Muslim masses, it also explains the fact that Hindu communalism is one of the most important reasons behind Muslim backwardness.

  Ambedkar, in this sense, pushes us to go beyond the dominant story of ‘Muslims as numbers’ and the paradoxes associated with Muslim identity. However, it is important to remember that the questions of Ambedkar were very different from our questions. He is certainly very relevant to us, but at the same time, the mere worshipping of Ambedkar would not solve our purpose. We must extract a framework out of his observations. This is what I wish to do in this book.

  I address Muslims not as numbers but as a constitutional category, a religious minority and as a collectivity in two different senses. In a positive sense, I use Muslims as a collectivity when individuals with Muslim names and/or groups, who prefer to call themselves Islamic, are recognized as a beneficiary of constitutionally granted collective rights, such as the right to profess religion and the right to protect culture and heritage. However, I also use Muslims as a collectivity in a negative sense, particularly when individuals with Muslim names and legally recognized minority institutions with Islamic contents are threatened and attacked especially by Hindutva essentialists. In both cases, the term ‘Muslim’ is used as a generic, unspecified expression, which acquires various concrete meanings only when it is employed in everyday conversations. Hence, there is a need to examine ‘Muslim’ as a term in relation to Muslim caste systems and untouchability, economic disparity and the class structure of Muslim societies in India, the Muslim forms of patriarchy and gender relations and, finally, the regional/linguistic conflicts among Muslims. This workable conceptualization of Muslimness, I hope, can help us in examining the political manifestation of the three paradoxes of postcolonial Muslim identity, which we have outlined in this chapter.

  2

  Muslims as a Religious Community

  ‘Pukka Musalman’

  On 20 August 2018, an interesting video clip was posted on Twitter by a user with the handle @AnuMishraBJP. (This Twitter account carries a picture of Rohit Sardana, a Zee TV journalist. Later, it was claimed to be a fake Twitter account.)

  In this fifteen-second video, a teenage boy tears the Indian national flag and says: ‘Pakka Musalman hoon.’1

  The tweet, which is in Hindi, elaborates on the video and asks a question:

  भारत के राष्ट्रीय ध्वज को फाड़ के फेंक दिया इस लड़के ने कह रहा है . . . कि ‘पक्का मुसलमान हूँ’ ये मानसिकता कहाँ से पैदा हो रही है घ् ? @sardanarohit @KapilMishra_IND @TajinderBagga

  (Tearing and throwing away the national flag of India, this boy is saying that . . . ‘I am a true Muslim.’ What is the source of this mentality?)

  As expected, the video was widely circulated on social media. Pro-Hindutva Twitter handles used the video to demonstrate the fact that Indian Muslims do not respect the Indian flag—the most revered symbol of our patriotism.

  The story does not end here. Another video was uploaded on Twitter and other social media on the same day. In this second video, the boy is beaten up by a group of people, who eventually force him to apologize and say ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ and ‘Main Pukka Hindu Hoon’.

  This video was reposted by the editor-in-chief of Sudarshan News, Suresh Chavhanke. He also wrote an explanatory tweet in Hindi:

  पक्का मुसलमान हूँ इसलिए तिरंगा फाड़ के फेंकने वाला ‘स्वामी अग्निवेश’ संस्कार होते ही#भारत_माता_की_जयबोल कर नारे देने लगा । लातों के भूत बातों से नहीं मानते । अब कोई कहेगा कि ये तो #Lynching है पर कोई यह भी बताए कि संविधान इस को कैसे रोक सकता है ? कानून तो इनको रोकने में विफल है!

  (The moment this boy was given the ‘Swami Agniwesh–type treatment’, he started shouting ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’. Some people really deserve this treatment. One may say that this is #lynching; but please enlighten us how does the Constitution bring an end to such events. After all, the law has completely failed.)2

  It is obvious that ‘Swami Agnivesh–type treatment’ was referring to the lynching of those individuals who do not subscribe to the ideas of radical Hindutva. The boy, who is shown as a Muslim in this video, was lynched in a similar manner to make him truly patriotic/Indian/a pukka Hindu.

  Interestingly, this boy later turned out to be a Hindu! This incident took place in Surat, Gujarat. Surat police traced the boy and his friend, who actually filmed him, and circulated the video (though it was not clear whether the video was actually uploaded on Twitter by this boy or not).

  In a statement given to Alt News, the police insp
ector, Amroli police station, Surat, clarified, ‘Both the teenagers are friends and belong to the Hindu community. The boys have also apologized for acting childishly.’3

  The episode did not die down. The two videos are available on Twitter and no one has apologized for this fake propaganda.

  Although the proliferation of such news and videos on social media has now become the new normal, the way in which the binary between good Muslims and the patriotic Indian has been established in this incident is quite instructive. The lawlessness in the name of ‘pukka Hindu’ is justified and presented as the most acceptable reaction to the pukka Musalman phenomenon.

  ‘Pukka Musalman’ refers to two related aspects of Muslim identity: religious commitment and patriotism. The religious commitment of Muslims is often underlined by emphasizing the fact that Muslims are more religious than other communities. It is strongly asserted that this commitment is so powerful and overarching that it does not allow them to pay respect to any other social affiliation. As a result, the mentality of disrespecting the national flag can be said to come from Islamic teachings!

  The second aspect of the pukka Musalman concept is related to the post–British Raj story of South Asia. The partition of British India on a religious basis is understood through the prism of the European-style nation state. It is believed that the European model of state based on ‘one religion, one culture and one ethnicity’ is the ideal mode to realize the real and enduring form of nationalism. Following this dominant perception, a very simplistic conclusion is drawn: Muslims as a community, which follows Islam as a religion, were able to achieve Pakistan—a Muslim nation state. But the Hindus could not get a Hindu Rashtra in India despite being a majority. The success story of Muslims (and the evident failure of Hindus) is also attributed to the idea of pukka Musalman—the strong sense of community and religiosity among Muslims. The VHP’s famous slogan ‘Garv se Kaho Hum Hindu Hai’ (Say proudly I am a Hindu!) must be seen as an attempt to create a community of pukka Hindus!