Passing the buck has been a favourite pastime across political parties, religious and caste communities and amongst those inhabiting different regions, both within the same country and elsewhere. It’s almost always the case that the entire blame for one’s misery and misfortune is laid at the door of the ‘other’, only to feel good about oneself and then to justify all that one does in an effort to pin the other person down who is ‘perceived’ to have caused the misery. Whether it is the partition of the subcontinent, the thought of a one thousand year Muslim rule in India or the plight of Muslims in contemporary India, it’s the popular perception about these historical developments that have shaped our worldview of things which is thus doomed to be rooted in a wishful understanding of the historical reality, shorn of veracity and objectivity. Which is why there are vast sections of Indians who blame Muslims for everything that has gone wrong with this country over the centuries and by the same analogy, this vast section of Indians being matched in equal measure by legions of Indian Muslims who look at their plight in India being rooted solely in the denial of rights and equal opportunities to them by the educationally and economically superior Hindu majority of the country. Although the recent developments in the country do serve to lend a certain amount of credibility to these contentions, the fact remains that the chief source of their problems has to be sought elsewhere, right there in their own backyard, actually!
To begin, how does one make sense of educational and economic backwardness of Muslims in India? Much as one may pin it down to the cataclysmic events preceding the partition and the subsequent communal conflagration that has been their fate ever after, the reasons for their predicament need also to be located where they actually belong. In the instant case, these have to be sought in the manner in which the community has conducted itself in independent India. With the Hindutva brigade on the prowl seeking to appropriate political space in India, it is time for the Muslim community to revisit certain cast-in-stone habits of its mind that include, in particular, their diehard allegiance to religion as being the sole determinant of their social and political life in India. It’s this mindset that has come home to roost like never before insofar as the Indian Muslim community is concerned. I cannot get myself to do better than quote verbatim the following passage from one of the books by B. R. Ambedkar.
“There is thus a stagnation not only in the social life but also in the political life of the Muslim community of India. The Muslims have no interest in politics as such. Their predominant interest is religion. This can be easily seen by the terms and conditions that a Muslim constituency makes for its support to a candidate fighting for a seat. The Muslim constituency does not care to examine the programme of the candidate. All that the constituency wants from the candidate is that he should agree to replace the old lamps of the masjid by supplying new ones at his cost, to provide a new carpet for the masjid because the old one is torn, or to repair the masjid because it has become dilapidated. In some places a Muslim constituency is quite satisfied if the candidate agrees to give a sumptuous feast and in other if he agrees to buy votes for so much a piece. With the Muslims, election is a mere matter of money and is very seldom a matter of social programme of general improvement. Muslim politics takes no note of purely secular categories of life, namely, the differences between rich and poor, capital and labour, landlord and tenant, priest and layman, reason and superstition. Muslim politics is essentially clerical and recognizes only one difference, namely, that existing between Hindus and Muslims. None of the secular categories of life have any place in the politics of the Muslim community and if they do find a place—and they must because they are irrepressible—they are subordinated to one and the only governing principle of the Muslim political universe, namely, religion.”
The point is that the Indian Muslim has not helped his cause any which way by choosing to subordinate his life to a view of religion that is not only not in consonance with the broader principles of Islam but which has, as a result, condemned him to a state of statis marked by mental ennui leading him to sit back and do nothing as he is taught to set great score by the idea of other worldliness. That should serve to explain the educational and by implication the economic backwardness of the Indian Muslim who happens to remain mired in the same state of educational backwardness as other under-privileged sections of the society, not excluding the Dalits.
All the same, it would be a case of monumental error of judgement to read into the above lines the only possible reasons responsible for the shambolic state of affairs of the Indian Muslim. To be sure, there indeed are other factors too that have complicated matters for him and over which he obviously has no control. These include the state’s stock in trade response in situations involving say, an act of terror having been reported and the inevitable identification of the Indian Muslim with that act of terror, regardless of the person and the place where the act has been committed. The resulting hatred and animus towards the entire community thus follow as a natural and an inexorable outcome of these perceptions which have been sedulously cultivated and shaped by those who wish to paint the community as the real villain of the piece, responsible for all the ills and afflictions of the majority community. However, the contrast with the actual reality on the ground underlying the ills besetting the majority community in India belies this perception.
For one thing, how is it that they look at acts of terror in India or elsewhere in the world as bearing a certain specific colour, even as an act of terror does not have to be labelled as such – Islamic terror, Hindu terror or Bhuddist terror per se, but only as an ugly act by ugly people motivated by an ugly ideology. How does one account for the concerted effort at highlighting terrorist activities where Muslims happen to be involved – or are manipulated to have been involved as in the Mecca Masjid and Malegaon blasts- as Islamic terror. If that be so, there is then a case and a strong one at that, where the act of terror may be unequivocally qualified as Hindu terror. If the innumerable acts of lynching involving victims belonging to a certain faith, or those earlier cases of terror involving the Samjhota express or Malegaon blasts are not a clear manifestation of acts of Hindu terror, what is! Or, consider the reign of unspeakable brutalities being visited upon Rohingya Muslims by those who claim to be practicing Buddhist faith in Burma. And with the tacit support and abetment to these acts of terror by those in positions of power, the conclusion is inescapable: that terror indeed comes in different hues. Those who are still in denial of this stark reality are choosing to be oblivious to the presence of the Dinosaur in the room. It is no longer a myth but very much there as an undeniable fact of life which one would ignore but at one’s own peril.
If all that has been said above is not enough to carry conviction with the sceptics, just spare a thought for your ‘perceived’ enemy country next door and try to figure out how the enemy looks at the events as they unfold in India. On my part, I see unmistakable signs of the ‘enemy country’ finding plenty of reasons to relax and save its resources for a cause other than to ‘bleed India with a thousand cuts’. To my mind, it takes no more than a modicum of understanding- unless one is schooled in the Sangh ideology – that with the way India is being run and (mis) ruled by those who are calling the shots right now, the country needs no outside enemies to wreak havoc on everything that the Indians would boastfully claim as their bailiwick, something that distinguished this country from the rest of those in the region. With the hordes of goons being let loose by the political establishment upon those who happen to belong on the other side of the political divide and who are thus on the receiving end of violence of unimaginable magnitude through the length and breadth of the land, the country’s prized institutions involving its democracy, judiciary, constitution, secularism, pluralism, cultural diversity and not excluding its much hyped economy stand vastly compromised. In the backdrop of the spate of these unsavoury developments, the reading is clearly on the wall that India is on way to a downward slide which is fast losing its credibility as a diverse society as well as its carefully cultivated image of a regional superpower and of a global player in international politics. The enemies of this country must be laughing in their sleeves and wondering if indeed there are those in India who have outsourced to themselves the dirty work that they (the enemies) are no longer committed to do any more, and thus save their precious resources to invest elsewhere – for the good of their people and their own country while enjoying the sight of their bête noire being reduced to a nondescript entity, on way to being consigned to the dustbin of history by its own Bhakts!
Back home in my own state of Jammu and Kashmir, the fact remains that Kashmiri Muslims are no exception to this ‘pass the buck’ syndrome about a whole lot of things involving the political developments having unfolded there over the past three decades. This was brought home in a recent article by this author that had appeared in these columns some days ago. However, the story of Kashmiri Pandits on this count remains no different. It’s so painful to be witness to large sections of the KP’s looking for scapegoats for their ‘predicament and misery’. This has been in evidence by their endless vilification of the KM and more recently, by how they have chosen to look at the Kathua gruesome rape/murder case purely through the prism of communal politics by bringing in narratives which are completely extraneous to this grisly episode. I just can’t get myself to make sense of the bile and venom that they nurse towards KMs which is unfortunately rooted in their misplaced notions of the latter’s imagined role in their flight from the valley in the early nineties.
To set the record straight involving what is clearly a misplaced perception, I reiterate without a shred of doubt and on the strength of hard evidence on the ground, that the KMs had absolutely no role in their mass migration from the valley at a time when there was anarchy and complete breakdown of the state machinery in the valley. By way of reference to certain instances of the elemental fury that was in witness at that point in time, I wish to draw attention to one such episode that involves the occasional noises being heard during those fateful days from certain quarters in the valley exhorting people to ‘desist from sabotaging the resistance movement’. Whereas such instances of defiance were surely there to have caused a certain amount of unease amongst sections of the Kashmir society, they were by no means meant to be aimed exclusively at the KP community to have informed their decision to leave the valley en masse. Be that as it may, it ought to be conceded that whereas their decision to leave the valley in the conditions that prevailed here at that point in time was understandable, same cannot be said about the manner in which they have sought to demonise KMs in all possible ways. The fact, however, remains that they would surely not have stooped so low in vilifying the KMs if it was not for the usual suspect: their willingness to become prisoners of perception and in the process to have lost their sense of proportion. All said and done, it is not too late to mend; in their own interest, they would do well to shed their mistrust and misplaced paranoia of the KMs who hold no grudge against them and who continue to look up to their safe and unconditional return to their roots in the valley.
In essence, screaming victimhood may be a politically correct position but only in the short run. For longer shelf life of a struggle for an honourable and dignified survival, the willingness to give in to the temptation of scapegoating the other has to be resisted at all costs. This applies as much to the majority community in mainland India as to the Indian Muslims as well as to the Kashmiri Muslims and Pandits alike. The need is to look inwards and to set one’s own house in order rather than look elsewhere and invoke the spectre of a ‘perceived’ enemy who has set your house on fire!
M A Sofi is Professor Emeritus, Department of Mathematics, Kashmir University, Srinagar