Hey Ram, What Have You Done to My Religion?

New Delhi’s sprawling Lodhi Gardens are a wonderful place to bring to mind India’s splendid Muslim heritage. The concept of gardens was introduced to India by the Muslim rulers. The Lodhi Gardens are located in Delhi’s most opulent real estate, surrounded by such illustrious neighbours as India International Centre, Golf Links and The Oberoi Intercontinental hotel. Within the premises of these gardens lie the tombs of several Sayyed and Lodhi sultans, including those of Ibrahim and Sikander Lodhi. Among these tombs also lies one of Mohammed Shah (1450), which was a prototype of the nearby Humayun’s tomb, which in turn was the prototype of the best-known advertisement for India, the Taj Mahal of Agra.

Lodhi Gardens are also an ideal place to have a picnic on a warm, sunny, Sunday afternoon in December with some very old friends; friends with whom one had spent the best of one’s youthful college days and who had done fairly well for themselves as professors, principals and teachers in colleges and university. After a satisfying meal and desserts of fresh fruits and Bengali sweets, the conversation turns to current events, especially the results of the recently conducted Gujarat elections. If one expected to find a revulsion among these educated elite on the way Narendra Modi had conducted his ‘Mian Musharraf’ campaign to malign Muslim Indians, one is disappointed. Indeed, there is no revulsion even at what had happened in Gujarat during the infamous anti-Muslim riots with the connivance of the state government. The general tone of the reaction is: ‘it is regrettable but they asked for it’. People expressing these sentiments are not evil or malevolent people but otherwise decent, upright citizens who have raised wonderful families and who had probably never hurt a fly in their lives.

I found similar refrain of ‘they deserved it!’ and ‘they asked for it!’ several times during my sojourn in India, at social gatherings of friends and relatives or while talking to strangers in trains. This attitude was quite different from that of the mainstream English news media, which had generally condemned those riots, but not different from what I had seen among the educated NRIs in Canada. The virus of intolerance seemed to infect the Hindu mainstream. No prominent politicain, not even the Christian Sonia Gandhi, spoke against the government’s handling of the Gujarat riots during the state election. Indeed, I began to wonder if the journalists themselves believed what they wrote or were just making politically correct statements.

India Today is the most successful English language newsmagazine of India. I have been reading it since its inception in 1975. It is a fairly accurate barometer to gauge the thinking of India’s urban, english speaking elite. The magazine was fiercely secular until the 1980s. These were the times when a fearless jouranlist named Arun Shourie reported from Kashmir the high-handedness of the state government and the sabotage of the democratic processes there. Today, India Today has lost its earlier zeal for secularism and frequently supports soft hindutva stance on many issues. On the other hand, veteran journalist Khushwant Singh, who has changed neither his turban nor his views all these years, is now mocked as naïve, senile and, the worst epithet of all, ‘pseudo-secular’ which makes one into as much of a pariah as the term ’communalist’ made someone in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
I feel sad at this rising intolerance among the adherents of a religion with which I had begun to identify myself and had even started to take a sense of pride in. This identification and pride did not come easily to me. I had grown up in Nehru’s India where it was untrendy among the educated classes to identify too strongly with religion, especially if one were a Hindu. It was all right to celebrate Holi, Diwali and other festivals but any signs of a visible religious identity were frowned upon. Indeed, anyone wearing a dhoti, a tilak or, God forbid, a tuft (chhutiya/bodi) was asking for scorn and ridicule. It was indeed fashionable to criticize the Hindu religion as backward, regressive, worshipper of animals and funny gods, and to associate it with the oppression of lower castes and women.

What made me reassess these views about Hinduism was the sense of tolerance that seemed to be an integral part of the religion. I did not learn about this tolerance from a textbook or a religious discourse but had grown up with it as part of my upbringing. I had seen Arya Samajis, Sanatanists as well as Sikhs in my extended family mingling with each other and maintaining a healthy respect and acceptance of the others’ beliefs. I had seen girls from one belief system marrying into another and seamlessly adjusting to their new family’s traditions without giving up the belief system in which they were brought up. And I could see Hindus genuflexing in churches, singing shabads in gurudwaras and seeking blessings from peers at dargahs without anyone questioning their faith in their own religion. This tolerance -even acceptance- of the validity of the other’s faiths as much as of one’s own was what won for me the respect for the religion which I had happened to have inherited by birth; tolerance became my mascot or, as it were, my ‘kul-devta’ (family god) of Hinduism. I was therefore pained to see the Hindus discarding this tolerance, this kul-devta of mine.

I began to wonder how this intolerance crept into the Hindu society. The way I saw it, it all started with Ram. Back in the 1980s, when the official Doordarshan TV channel was the only game in town, it telecast an immensely popular serial on Ramayan. The serial was so popular that all businesses and social visits came to a halt while it was being shown. It rekindled among the Hindus, especially the young and the educated, a sense of pride in their religion and they enthusiastically responded to the BJP’s call of ‘gurv se kaho hum hindu hain’ to take pride in being a Hindu.

This was the time when the government of Rajiv Gandhi caved in to the Muslim demand of rejecting the Supreme Court decision on the Shah Bano case, much against the advice of progressive Muslims, such as his own Law Minister, Arif Beg, who was then piloting reforms to the Muslim Personal Law. He also caved in, without a fight, to ban Salman Rushdie’s ’Satanic Verses’ even before it was published, based only on the excerpts published in India Today. The ban gave the democratic, socialist, secular India the dubious distinction of being the first country to ban the book. In trying to appease the Hindu backlash following these appeasements, Rajiv Gandhi tried to "balance" his act by appeasing the Hindu obscurantists as well. At that time, a bye-election was taking place in U.P where Rajiv’s former deputy, V.P.Singh, was waging a formidable campaign against his government, based on the the Bofor scandal. Rajiv cynically tried to manipulate the popularity of the Ramayan serial to make the actor playing Ram appear with him in full costume during election meetings to sway the gullible masses. The Ramayan serial also gave a new impetus to the old simmering dispute about the Babri Masjid, claimed by many Hindus to be built upon Ram’s place of birth. Rajiv Gandhi went to Ayodhya and took part in the religious shila-nayas sthapna (foundation ceremony) for building a temple where the Babri Masjid stood. The Ram mandir movement went from strength to strength from that point on until the Masjid was demolished by a Hindu mob on December 6, 1992.
The destruction of the Babri Masjid did not end the communalist beast but only made it stronger. The mobs went on a rampage through the paintings of India’s best-known painter, M.F.Hussain, for allegedly desecrating goddess Sarswati. This, too, on the basis of a 20-year old painting of Sarswati by a painter who probably had a greater reverence for the goddess than the vandals complaining against the painting. Unfortunately for these new ‘thekedars’ of Hinduism, their religion did not allow them to define who was a Hindu and who was not, but they did take it upon themselves to define who was an Indian and who was not. The primary target of their attacks was Muslim Indians whom they started calling foreigners, Babar ki aulad, Pakistanis and anti-Indian. Muslims - who unfortunately still carry the burden of creating Pakistan on their shoulders - reacted to these attacks with fear and anger. They were further stereotyped as irresponsible citizens who maintained multiple wives and bred children like rats The insurgency in Kashmir and the Pakistani aggression in Kargil only added to the Muslim woes: support for India’s stand on Kashmir and enmity towards Pakistan became the ‘agni-pariksha’ or fire-test through which a Muslim had to pass to ‘prove’ his loyalty to India.

The Indian secularists, especially Hindus, have failed to develop a strategy to fight this intolerance if they are to preserve the unity and integrity of India and, most of all, the noblest element of Hindu religion, which is its tolerance of those who do not share the Hindu faith. Indeed, they seem all set to repeat the mistakes of Rajiv Gandhi. The Congress Chief Ministers of the two large states facing assembly elections this year have adopted a holier-than-thou attitude to beat the Hindutva parties. Ashok Ghelot, the Chief Minister of Rajasthan, has gone on a spree of building state-funded temples, including a temple to Kaushalya, the mother of Lord Ram, an innovation of sorts on his part. Mr. Digvijay Singh, the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh and an otherwise educated and progressive leader, is doing all this and more. His party started rumours that Vajpayee eats beef and is not a true Hindu, in order to discredit him among his Hindu followers. He has started publicly praising the beneficial effects of cow’s urine and even claims to have imbibed it. The Congress and other secular leaders should remember that they cannot kill the communalist beast by feeding it. The way they are going, Hindutva in its worst form, is going to get entrenched even if the BJP is defeated at the polls.

To beat the communalists requires, first of all, a recognition of the problem. A disease cannot be treated unless it is properly diagnosed. The media should stop blaming the lumpen proletariat and the lunatic fringe of the sangh parivaar alone for the intolerance, which has gone well beyond that point and now pervades a very large segment of the Hindu society, especially its successful, young, urban and educated segments. It is no coincidence that the most virulent form of intolerance is also being practised in Gujrarat, one of the most prosperous states of India where the living standards approximate those in some East Asian countries.

Secondly, there must be a strict application of the law of the land when dealing with religious bigotry. It has been shown time and again that the anti-minority mob acts only when the administration is lax. The anti-Sikh riots succeeded in 1984 in Delhi but not in Calcutta where the administration was vigilant. Riots followed the Godhra incident in Gujarat but not after the dramatic Akshardham temple shootings because the same Modi administration showed a resolve to prevent a backlash, as did the Kerala government in the more recent Muslim violence against Hindus in that state.
The Indian policemen and women must be trained to act as professionals and view all lawbreakers as criminals rather than Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs or Christians. Senior police officers who display communal bias in the discharge of their duties must be disciplined, instead of rewarded as is reported to have happened in Gujarat. Hate laws must be used against people like Togadia, Singhal and Bal Thackray who keep spewing their venom against Muslims with impunity. Since the politicians are not always willing to do the needful, the judiciary should step in to uphold the law of the land and the basic human right to the life and property of all citizens.

But the one thing that the secularists must not do is to condone Muslim communalism. There has been a tendency among India’s secularists to underplay, even excuse, Muslim acts of obscurancy and violence. From my reading of the newspaper reports, there is some truth to the allegation that communal riots are sometimes initiated by Muslims themselves. Most riots start in cities, towns and localities where Muslims are a majority or a sizeable minority; riots rarely take place in areas where Muslims are present in small numbers. Muslims generaly come out worse off in these confrontations not because they are outnumbered or outgunned by the Hindu mobs; they suffer more because they have to face the bullets of the police which generally fires upon them rather than the Hindus. If the riots are started by Muslims, the miscreants should be condemned without making any excuses. The way the Godhra incident was portrayed is a prime example of how not to respond. The incident was not condemned as strongly by the secular media as it should have been (although it was strongly condemned by some prominent Muslims); instead, the victims of the massacre were denigrated as Hindu activists, provocateurs, and miscreants. Attempts were even made to show that the incident was a conspiracy by the Sangh parivaar to justify future carnage against Muslims. Such stories may be believed by Muslims and Pakistanis but have as much credibility among Hindus as the story of jews destroying WTC towers in New York. They play right into the hands of those who want to inflame Hindu passions against minorities and those whom they call pseudo-secularists.

Finally, to meet the communal challenge at an ideological level, the Hindu communalists must be confronted by the secular media, by highlighting the positive contributions of Muslim Indians to modern India. Fortunately, there is much to draw upon their contributions in all areas of national endeavours – culture, sports, arts, language, sciences, poetry, music, politics, and even industry. The historical contributions of Muslims to India’s heritage in language, architecture, monuments, music, cuisine, spirituality, even dance, also needs to be emphasised. As Firaq Gorakhpuri, the famous Hindu Urdu poet once remarked, India owes to its Muslims the concepts of garden, gardening, courtyards, stitched garments, perfumes, crockery, minaret and dome. India as we, including those in the sangh parivaar, know and love today, wouldn’t be the same without the multi-faceted contributions of Muslim Indians.