(Dawn
April 23, 2007)
by Jawed Naqvi
EMERGING from an inter-faith conclave in Delhi on Saturday, a former foreign minister and a former cricket captain, both from Pakistan, looked disturbed. ‘It is bad enough that we are fighting one category of mullahs in our country. But to nurture nine different kinds of obscurantists in the name of communal harmony must be a bigger nightmare,’ said one.
My instinct is the reference was to the Muslim clergy’s counterparts in other religions that straddle South Asia. The Buddhist and Christian zealots of Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese community, for example, who preach hatred of Tamils. And Tamils of the island nation, both Hindu and Christian, who see the Sinhalese as their enemy. Core Hindus of Nepal, generously helped by India’s RSS, deified their authoritarian king ‘ before he was deposed by his own less trusting subjects ‘ as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu. The Nepalese currency notes still bear the salutation to the government of ‘Sri Paanch’, a reference to the deity the king embodied.
The dishonour inflicted on minority Hindus as also on Muslim women by mullahs in Bangladesh has been extensively documented by rebel writer Taslima Nasrin. But a more institutionalised form of religious and ethnic discrimination bordering on slavery seems to have existed in Pakistan for decades. According to a report in the Dawn last month, the Supreme Court directed the Sindh police to ensure the recovery of a nine-member peasant family of Munnu Bheel by April 14. Bheels are predominantly Hindu peasants who lived in the once dense forests of northern India. This particular family has been missing since 1998.
According to the Dawn report, the Bheel family was abducted by an influential Muslim landlord some nine years ago. The landlord was arrested and jailed on the intervention of the apex court. At the last hearing, the Sindh police chief had conceded that the centuries-old decadent culture of bonded labour in the region was behind the disappearance.
It was in 1996 that Munnu Bheel’s family members and 71 other Hindu peasants slaving on the land of Abdul Rehman Marri were rescued by a task force of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. But on February 4, 1998, nine family members were again kidnapped apparently by the same landlord after the family refused to pay back a loan owed to the feudal lord. Bonded labour is rampant in India too, but it exists along the more entrenched caste contours, which though an aspect of religion has a dynamic of its own. In South Asia, caste should be part of any fair discussion on religion but that wasn’t the case at the conclave in Delhi.
There used to be a quaint phrase to describe a platform of religious preachers like the one addressed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last week. ‘Unity in obscurantism’ ‘ that’s what we called it. And obscurantism, as we all know, works in tandem with the dominant feudal culture of the region. At the same time, this bizarre unity of obscurantism’s practitioners in South Asia has another seamy side to it.
If you read the chilling testimony of Maulana Maudoodi from Justice Munir’s inquiry into the anti-Qadiani riots of 1950s, and compare it with the hatred vented by Hindutva’s Guru Golwalkar in1939 against Indian Muslims in the book ‘We, Our Nationhood Defined’ you wouldn’t find any difference in the level of zealotry. Worse, as the case of Munnu Bheel exemplifies, Maulana Maudoodi’s prescription of treating non-Muslims as second class citizens is still merrily practised in Pakistan despite recent measures, like the court’s intervention, to stem the rot.
As Prime Minister Singh addressed the religious conclave in familiar clich’s last week, he emphasised the need to observe and practise communal harmony, as opposed to merely tolerating the other’s religion. He quoted Swami Vivekananda’s widely parroted lines ‘ ‘As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, sources in different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.’ This, however, has never worked out quite the same way in practice.
On the contrary, religion and its concomitant communalism has become an essential feature of India’s mainstream politics.
In fact, even as Dr Singh was addressing the South Asian inter-faith conclave, the country’s election commission was hearing a petition to punish the main opposition party for spewing hatred against Muslims in the Uttar Pradesh election campaign currently under way. Some would see this as a sign of a healthy democracy in which even a powerful and influential party such as the BJP could be put out of the electoral fray if found guilty of electoral malpractice, which spreading communal hatred is. In reality though the idea is far-fetched. The horrible events of Gujarat, for example, are a case in point, where terrorised Muslims are subjected to an ongoing social boycott and daily abuse by the BJP. That’s proof enough that religious fascism cannot be fought by pious ideas alone. If the election commission couldn’t dislodge the BJP in Gujarat, it is hardly likely to provide any relief to India’s secular idealists in the case of Uttar Pradesh.
And if it does ban the BJP by a quirk of luck, does Dr Singh have the stomach to thwart the backlash that would follow? Most likely not.
Under the circumstances what can the Indian prime minister do? For starters, since secularism is not a mere absence of communalism, he can begin by practising a more palpable secularism in his own backyard. It is a shame that while India can boast of a Sikh prime minister and even a Sikh army chief ‘ unthinkable in the aftermath of the 1984 violence against the community ‘ a bureaucratic subterfuge prevents the country from hiring a Sikh bodyguard to protect the Sikh prime minister. This is ridiculous and this is what Dr Manmohan Singh should be addressing, instead of mouthing shibboleths on secularism and communalism.
Do we need news agencies to remind us that there are scarcely any Muslims working in India’s 10,000-strong external intelligence agency, and neither Muslims nor Sikhs working as bodyguards for the country’s top leaders? The Outlook magazine reported in November last year that mainly Hindu but officially secular India has its first Sikh prime minister but his community is not trusted enough to guard him?
Further, the magazine claimed that India’s minority Muslims were not trusted by the security apparatus because of fears they could sympathise with the country’s mainly Muslim neighbour and long-time foe Pakistan. Is this true? Dr Singh has to answer.
Secularism is not sermon or a slogan to embellish some conclave of obscurantist representatives or to win a few brownie points in a public debate. If India has to demonstrate a healthy distance between religion and politics, which is what secularism really is all about, the state has to provide the beacon light, and not some ragtag alliance of clergymen. We’ll wait for Dr Singh to demonstrate his commitment to secularism by blowing the whistle on the communally-motivated bureaucrats who have kept Sikh and Muslim bodyguards from joining his detail.
As for Pakistan, it can do its bit by producing Munnu Bheel’s family and ensuring their safety against future abuse of their religion and ethnicity. The Supreme Court’s deadline of April 14 has already passed.
|
