Renaming ‘Muslim Indian’ Tuesday August 7 2007 13:32 IST
S GURUMURTHY
An interesting story and instructive too. Kafeel Ahmed, an Islamist Jihadi - who, along with his brother, Dr Sabeel Ahmed, planned to blow up the Glasgow airport - has succumbed to the burns he inflicted on himself to do what he intended to but fortunately failed to.Indians, particularly Muslims among them, are rightly indignant that the two Bangaloreans have trashed the reputation of Indians as peace-loving people and also added the Muslims in India to the list of global terror suspects and Al-Qaeda sympathisers. Yes, for their acts which have done irreversible damage to Muslims in India and outside as much as to Indians and India, they are rightly demonised. But without sounding perverse, can it be said that what they have done has also the potential to do good to India, to its Muslims? How? Read on.First, to partition India and its people, Mohammed Ali Jinnah divided the people who were just Indians into ‘Indians’ and ‘Muslims’ and got Pakistan exclusively for Muslims who refused to be Indians, leaving the mainland India as the motherland for the rest of Indians including Muslims. So, at the dawn of freedom, it was Pakistan for Muslims and India for Indians. Next, post-freedom, national political leaders divided Indians into vote banks, classified them according to their faith and identified an Indian national who was a Muslim as ‘Indian Muslim’. Third, thanks to communal and votebank politics that began eroding the nationalist sentiments built during freedom struggle, the religious identity of a Muslim in India was, in post-Partition India, becoming more and more emphatic than his identity as an Indian. Fourth, with this designed trend deepening, Islamist leaders who were driving this trend, would not tolerate the religious identity of a Muslim appearing next in order after his national identity as an Indian.They insisted that a Muslim in India was a Muslim first and then an Indian! That is to say he was not just an ‘Indian’ or ‘Indian Muslim’, but a ‘Muslim Indian’. So from ‘Indian’ to ‘Indian Muslim’ to ‘Muslim Indian’ - the design was clearly to distance the Muslim from India to integrate him in global Islam.The Islamist leader who expounded why the Muslim in India was not an ‘Indian Muslim’ but ‘Muslim Indian’ was not an Islam-centric Imam or Mulla like the ones who lead the Talibans for instance. He was Syed Shahabuddin, a well-educated, ex-diplamat with global experience. Atal Behari Vajpayee as the foreign minister in the Janata Government in 1977 had become so fond of Shahabuddin, that the diplomat was inspired to quit service, enter politics. But, soon he began articulating Islamic politics, turned an Islamic leader in early 1980s, nevertheless being in a secular party! He detested the fact that the identity ‘Indian Muslim’ places the religious identity of ‘Muslim’ behind and lower than the national identity ‘Indian’ and therefore gives secondary importance to it. He insisted that the two identities be re-ordered the other way round, that is, ‘Muslim’ first and ‘Indian’ next, as ‘Muslim Indian’.The intent was obvious. The Islamic religious identity was a greater, even global, identity than national identity as Indian and so it has to be ahead of the national identity. Shahabuddin even ran a journal ‘Muslim Indian’ to reinforce his Islamic view that a Muslim’s religious identity supersedes his national identity. The idea was to take the Muslim in India closer to the global Islamic identity and away from his national identity. No one from the Islamic community, yes no one, objected to this thoroughly antinational identity politics that was, more dangerously, camaflouged as secular. Far from it, this made Shahabuddin the intellectual icon of the Islamic community.The seculars, as usual, were petrified at the loss of Muslim votes if they objected to Islamic identity being placed ahead of India and if they insisted on reversing it. Shahabuddin also hijacked the Islamic leadership in the Ayodhya controversy and of course led the community to disastrous consequences, by his militant stand that pre-empted any possibility of a solution to the temple issue. Before Shahabuddin was consigned to political oblivion, the damage he intended to do had been fully done; his identity theory confused the Muslims in India as to what comes first: their religion or country. In this identity politics even cross-border Islamic terrorism in Kashmir and terror attacks on Indian people were underplayed by pseudo-secular politics as that might alienate Muslim votebanks of secular parties.Thanks to Muslim-secular votebank politics and spurred by Muslim appeasement manifest in political acts like the mindless overturning of the Shanbano ruling by the Supreme Court, Indian political theatre was getting polarised between pseudo-secularism and, as a reaction, the Hindutva movement, through the Ayodhya issue, through the 1980s and, particularly, 1990s.Simultaneously globally, the global Islamic forces had no one to target, in the post-cold war era, after the Soviets ceased to be; so they began to target their benefactor, the US itself. The cold war between Islamists and the US through the 1990s finally peaked in the most violent terror attack on the US on September 11, 2001. It did not take too long for the West to openly admit the terror that targets the US and the West was Islamic in its drive. Thus the secular world began openly to identify terror with Islam. For a while the US President George Bush chose to be politically correct, like the seculars in India, by not prefixing Islamic identity to terror; in contrast in his address on September 20, 2001, to the US Senate and Congress, he even certified that Islam was a peaceful religion, for which he even earned the derisive title ‘Imam Bush’.It did not however need a seer to confirm that the terrorists had had a religious motive and were inspired by Islam as they viewed it, to die to masskill. Despite all efforts to be politically correct, the prefix of Islam has now stuck to terror in global debate. Those who were against political correctness in defining terror argue that unless terror is Islamic it does not explain why all terrorists drawn from different countries, now including India, have only one thing common among them - and that is Islam. As the core of global debate on terror is about its Islamic drive, the aborted terror of Kafeel and Sabeel is seen by the world as evidence of Muslims of India making debut in global Islamic terror.This is what has damaged both India and Muslims in India. This damage in the global theatre is beyond the capacity of seculars and Muslim leaders in India to contain. So, their effort now to abandon the emphasis on Islamic identity and fall back on the identity of Muslims in India as Indians. The effort today is to do the reverse of what Shahabuddin once insisted. That is a move away from the global Muslim identity - that started in the early 20th century tryst with Wahabism in India and perpetuated by pre-partition and secular politics - and a move back to the Indian national identity. The global Muslim identity which tormented the Muslims in India is now not a pride but a burden. Hence the chorus ‘Kafeel and Sabeel are Indians’; the plea to “not identity them by their religion as Muslims”!Will Shahabuddin repeat the philosohy of ‘Muslim Indian’ today? Never. Yes, ironically, thanks to Kafeel and Sabeel adding Indian Muslim as participants in Islamic terror, outside India, particularly the West, a saner Muslim from India does not want to be known as ‘Muslim Indian’ as Shahabuddin asserted earlier. He would prefer to be an Indian and just that, in and outside India, particularly in the West.Has not what Kafeel and Sabeel have done the potential to undo the damage done to India and Muslims in India by Jinnahs and Shahabuddins? Has it not the potential to rename the ‘Muslim Indian’ into ‘Indian’? Yes it has. A caveat: But, will the seculars and Muslim leaders tolerate a Muslim in India being just an Indian, not ‘Indian Muslim’ and ‘Muslim Indian’? The future will answer and it alone can.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
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