Sociology of Fratricide

 - Dasu Krishnamoorty

Communal clashes in India are episodic, each episode recurring and repeating an earlier one in substance though not in detail. Watch the latest episode. First, a Muslim mob in Godhra sets ablaze a train carrying Hindu devotees returning from Ayodhya, killing nearly 70 persons. Next, angry Hindu crowds in other parts of Gujarat retaliate and destroy life and property of Muslims manifold. The army, the police, and the fire services swing into action to douse the communal fires that have now become a conflagration beyond their control. Congress and other opposition party MPs invade the well of Parliament and obstruct the business of the House, compelling the Speaker to adjourn for the day. As the drama unfolds, media and the political parties take sides and strive to keep the fires alive through daily debate. Government names a commission with a usual Supreme Court judge as its head and sets a time limit for the submission of the report. The judge takes more than a decade to do his job, a decade which sees several more Godhras. This is an endless serial of gory tragedy in which the Hindus and the Muslims exchange roles alternately as the aggressors and the victims.

For the last half a century, this cycle has been repeating relentlessly. Every time, both the media and the polity register the same autopsical responses. The basic mistake lay in our pretending that such serious challenges have no chance in a secular state like ours and that these problems are the handiwork of the lunatic fringe. This lunacy will persist and spread as long as the core of our secularism is embedded in religion. By accepting partition on the basis of religion, we endorsed the thesis that religion could be the basis of nation making. On top of it, we enshrined religion in our Constitution by conferring privileges and safeguards on minorities, again on the basis of their faith. Several times, the Supreme Court tried to define the frontiers of religious privileges. Nearly every political party, mainly the Congress, thwarted such efforts. For instance, the bill to reserve seats in Parliament for women could not even be tabled because the secular parties demanded that the seats be shared on a religious basis.

When Pakistan was born in bloodshed, large numbers of Muslims stayed back in India acknowledging its secular nature. This détente was shattered when the constitution makers grafted into it an article that would regard the minorities not as Indians but as followers of their faith. The Muslims or other minorities never asked for such privileges. It is not certain when the Congress party began to see the Muslims as voters and not citizens. This encouraged the resurgence of the Muslim League that won Pakistan on the two-nation platform. Secularism utterly failed to foster communal harmony as Jinnah-type politicians began raising their ugly heads. The Congress and other left parties conferred legitimacy on these communal outfits by accommodating them in coalitions led by them or by signing pre-election seat sharing.

From just being Indians, the Muslims thus became voters who can be courted both by fundamentalist and secularist parties. What do the Muslim and secular leaders promise to their constituents in return for votes? Not education; not food; not shelter but Babri Masjid. Levelheaded Muslims have no voice, either in Parliament or in the media which liberally offers space to Hurriyat leaders, the likes of Shahi Imam of Delhi and Dawood Ibrahims. Well-meaning magazines like the Frontline end up in inflicting a sense of martyrdom in the Muslims by highlighting exclusively the stridency of the majority community. In an 800-year-old history of Hindu-Muslim distrust and disaffection, it is difficult to say who threw the first stone. A basic sense of survival should tell the minorities that they should not be the first to strike. It is comical to link the Godhra thrust to the Ayodhya saffron rag because the Ayodhya insanity is ten years old and cannot cause sudden provocation to a crowd few thousand miles away.

It is criminal to condone communalism, Hindu, or Muslim. In law, the abettor shares the culpability with the accused. It is the mainstream media and the secular mandarins who should be blamed for herding the minorities into insular ghettos. There are many good things that have happened to the Muslim minority, inconceivable without the goodwill of the majority community. They inserted an article in the Constitution conferring freedom of religion on the minorities when the wounds of the partition carnage were still raw.

Three of India's Presidents were from minorities. Several Muslims became vice-presidents, governors, chief justices, and even chief ministers of such big states as Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Bihar, and Assam. Not a single Hindu has ever become the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, though Jammu is a Hindu majority region. India's leading musicians are Muslims. Noorjehan, Madhubala, Suraiya, Nargis, Waheeda Rehman dominated the Hindi screen as does the Khan clan today. Two Muslims, Abdul Kalam and Bismillah Khan received the highest civilian honour of Bharat Ratna. The Hindus are proud of them.

The media and the secular parties painstakingly created a mindset among the minorities, which does not allow them to see the freedom they enjoy and to regard themselves as part of the Indian society. The media prominently feature the attacks on the minority communities and impart them a permanent sense of persecution. Such attempts by secular parties to just garner votes and by the media to appear liberal and secular will do great harm to the minorities who gave the country such patriots like Abul Kalam Azad, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai and now Abdul Kalam. Do these things happen to any minority in any Muslim-majority country?

Simple commonsense should tell the Hindu-bashing secular media that behind the successes of these Muslim celebrities is the patronage of a Hindu constituency. Pankaj Mishra, a writer of fiction, in an article in the New York Times (25 Feb. 2002) blamed the patriotic films made by the Hindi film industry for Hindu resurgence. The film industry, no doubt, has been making patriotic films but they are all addressed to all Indians and show a lot of communal harmony, unlike films made by 'intellectuals' like Mahesh Bhat or Buddhadeb Sengupta. Does Mishra know that heroes of all these patriotic films are Muslims? And, what is wrong in making patriotic films? Most lyricists are known Muslim poets: Hasrat Jaipuri, Kaifi Azmi, Javed Akhtar etc. But the producers who determine who should be the hero or heroine or lyricists are all Hindus.

Take sports. Several Muslims captained Indian cricket, hockey, and football teams. Azharuddin was the darling of the Indian crowd till he made that mistake. The constituency, whether for films or sports, is predominantly Hindu and if they choose to boycott sports or films featuring Muslims, they can do the same thing that some of them did to Meera Nair's films. It is unfortunate that learned people like Mishra fail to see the camaraderie that the majority community extends to the minorities in the country. He should abjure fiction and embrace fact. The fact is there has been no exodus of Muslims, which is natural if there is a pogrom of the kind Mishra mentions. On the other hand, there has been an influx of 20 million Bangladeshi Muslims into the country, welcomed by Mishra's patriotic media and 'secular' parties. He will do well to know that these intruders are a great security risk and agents provocateur.

The media and the secular parties must stop this dangerous game of setting one community against the other and repair the damage already done to Hindu-Muslim amity by one-sided reporting.

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