India’s Islam

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by Arun Nair

Firstly, I must apologise if this article smacks of an impolite urgency and prescriptive-ness. I mean not to be arrogant, but as someone addressing you on a matter of deep concern to us all, I felt that there was little room for ceremonial apologies before every sentence. Also, as an Indian middle-class Hindu who grew up in the Babri-masjid 90s, it is easy for me to say some of the things I say here.

Secondly, I address you, the reader, as an Indian citizen, not as a saintly Kabir or Gandhi preaching love for humanity. Our collective interests are being threatened by communal forces from within and without. WE MUST ACT. We must not merely lament about our respective versions of helplessnesses and others’ faults. We are free today because India’s greatest generation shook off the ghosts that bedevilled them, and took action to protect our interests. I implore you to continue that legacy.

Thirdly, while I will go into what in my opinion are highly plausible theories of Indian nationhood and nationalism, my primary aim here is not to write any treatise on politics or sociology, but to protect our rights to belong equally to India – our common ancestral land – as Indians, and as free, dignified humans.

Fourthly, my ideas will be presented largely based on first principles, also known as common-sense.

My thesis is this: India must boldly assert its claim on Islamic civilisation in the subcontinent. That is the key to end our communal woes.

This does not mean that India must become Islamic, or that Indian Muslims must be somehow Hinduised. The idea, instead, is to campaign relentlessly for India’s Islamic civilisational authenticity.

In the Indian psyche, Pakistan stands for Islam. Sadly for us and admittedly in a weaker form, Islam is also synonymous with Pakistan and everything Pakistani. This wouldn’t have been so bad if Pakistan wasn’t, well, un-Indian. We must use every tool at our disposal as a people to destroy the entrenched idea of Pakistani ownership of subcontinental Islam from within India. More importantly, this idea must be attacked from without it, because that is where it originates.

Our chief weapon to eliminate Islam-Pakistan hyphenation from the subcontinent will be an authentic claim: the centre of Islamic civilisation in South Asia has always been undivided India, and after partition, India is its natural primary heir. The fact that a few million Muslims left India during partition to settle in our erstwhile outlying provinces doesn’t change this. Neither does the fact that the Indian people chose a progressive, secular, democratic polity for their republic.

In our minds and in the world’s view, subcontinental Islam is under Pakistani occupation. The historical Indo-centric nature of subcontinental Islam should be used to throw off this psychological yoke. I urge Indians to rally together once again as our greatest generation did to protect our collective interests as the people of India. I urge friends of India all over the world to join us. Both in terms of geography and spirit, Islam in the subcontinent that coexisted and flourished alongside Indic cultures, has always been more Indian than Pakistani. If any single country represents subcontinental Islam as it historically was, it is India. Not Pakistan.

India’s Mughals. India’s Qutub Minar, Gol Gumaz, and Taj Mahal. India’s Kabir. India’s Tipu Sultan, Shah Jahan, Akbar, and, why not, Aurangazeb. India’s Urdu. India’s Ghalib and Khusro. India’s Delhi, Lucknow, Mysore, Hyderabad, Malabar, and Agra.

Good history has to be deliberately written

The people of India inherited thousands of years of history and associated baggage that we didn’t really ask for.

Keep in mind though that history is not a dead object – it is unfurling even as you read this. We may not be able to change what happened in India 200 years ago. But 200 years from now when people look back, they will see the Indian history that our generation wrote. It becomes then our duty, both as Indians and as sensible humans, to write it well.

It is a great privilege to deliberately be able to write a part of something grand like the history of India. The first generation of Indians who did a coordinated job of writing our history was the one that won us our independence – our “freedom-generation”. They could have attempted to write their Indian chapter any way they wanted to. We could have had a dark, China-style communism, for instance. But, given the Indian context, the freedom-generation chose the most egalitarian, elegant, and humanist theme they could come up with: a secular, liberal, constitutional, democratic republic, that takes its strength from its inherent pluralism and its inheritance of one of mankind’s greatest civilisations.

The freedom-generation’s legacy for us is the deliberate and intelligent manner in which they forged an Indian national identity. Thanks to their efforts, our nationality is a solid concept. An Indian from Karnataka has a robust nationalistic bond with Indians say from Punjab, Gujarat, Assam, or Delhi. Regardless of what languages we speak, we all recognise Marathi, Tamil, Bengali and Telugu as Indian languages – ancestral assets that all Indians collectively own.

It is a mistake, however, to think that the nation-building task they began is complete. Indian nationalism is not an idea frozen in time, but an evolving one. We, the successors of India’s freedom-generation, must exercise our prerogative to define its finer contours and bring in new ideas to enrich it. Furthermore, we have an obligation to both our founding fathers and India’s posterity to do this while being true to our quintessential Indian-ness, the just, egalitarian nature of our country as embodied in our constitution.

Given that India’s situation is not as pressing as it once was, new nationalist leaders – giants of the stature of Mahatma Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Subhash Chandra Bose, Bhagat Singh, Jawaharlal Nehru, Abul Kalam Azad or Vallabhai Patel – may be difficult to emerge. There is no need to though. We succeeded them, and we must take this task upon ourselves. The freedom-generation watches over us in the form of our fraternity as Indians which they moulded at a great cost, and our constitution.

Indian Nationalism – the idea of Indian brotherhood

Amidst all this noisy consternation of Taslima Nasrin, Babri-masjid, BJP-Congress etc., its easy to lose sight of the really big pictures. Consider, for instance, this question: what really is the essence of Indian nationalism? Why do we all feel so closely tied to India and to each other?

My answer is that, to put it simply, without the land we call India, Indians either have no identity, or very anaemic identities. All Indians share this same curious relation to India.
When we are born to the same human mother, we are brothers. Our constitution formed by our freedom-generation explicitly asserts fraternity among the Indian people. Fraternity – brotherhood. In what sense are we brothers?

Indians are brothers in the sense that the motherland that birthed my identity, also birthed yours. India is our ancestral land, and we should be proud of everything associated with it. Everything in India, its religions, its good and its bad, its languages, its glories and struggles, its rivers, its emperors, its heroes and villains, everything – is intricately weaved into our consciousnesses of who we are, where we come from, what our place in this world is, and how other humans see us. Without that identity, we are crippled.

Ours is no ordinary brotherhood. Indian people didn’t come into being merely a few centuries ago. We are an ancient civilisation, and what we have is a civlisational brotherhood – a bond arising from all of our belonging to the civilisation that unfolded in the same land, India. That brotherhood was formally declared through the constitution in 1949, but it existed much before that. Before our greatest generation gave it a concrete wording in the 20th century, it was well moulded in the crucible that is our land, in the fire of the previous several dozen, if not more, centuries.

Every country of the world has stories that define their national essences. What is the most essential feature of Indian nationalism? It is our Indian identity – our being tied to India, and our civilisational brotherhood to each other in being bonded so. All Indians, regardless of their religion or language, has this bond with India and with each other.
Indians must pause for a while and think why our anthem’s going over our landmarks is so emotive. Or why Hindu-Muslim-Sikh-Christian insignia are powerful. Or why merely thinking of our history, or our Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra, UP, Punjab and Bengal moves all of us equally.

It’s because they remind us of our organic ties to India, and the brotherhood that we have with each other. This natural bond given to us by our glorious and at times bloody history is important. If we don’t uphold this bond with the ferocity that our greatest generation did, if we don’t use it to protect our common interests, our country will remain weak.

Our country’s nature

What is the nature of our country? What does it mean for something to be Indian?
For one, if all of us Indians could get together today and declare in one voice that India stands for certain values, then that would be an authoritative statement. India is what Indians say it is. If, say, the people of the then-Indian civilisation – Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jains – had made such a statement 400 years ago and preserved its spirit through centuries, that would have probably have been one of the greatest Indian texts.

If you will recall, a very similar event actually did happen in 1949, when the founding fathers of the Indian republic adopted, enacted, and gave to ourselves – the sovereign people of India – our constitution. The preamble reads,

“WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens:
JUSTICE, social, economic and political;
LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship;
EQUALITY of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all
FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation.
IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY this twenty-sixth day of November, 1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION.”

In an absolute sense, the values of justice, liberty, and equality have an intuitive appeal to all humans everywhere. However, the formidable authority of our constitution comes from the crushed but proud people who paid a very high price for our right to live as equals and as dignified humans in India. We must take their word for what India is – they must have known and dreamt quite a bit about it.

India’s greatest generation definitely realised that divisivism, self-doubt, and other demons from our past would haunt the republic they formed. Which is why the constitution is important. It helps us protect our country from ourselves.

The Constitution. Indian Nationalism. How we will defend India.

Those who doubt the moral power of our freedom-generation, our constitutional ethos, and Indian nationalism need only look at Pakistan, which renounced all these in its attempts not to be seen as Indian. Pakistan’s leaders, in trying to defend their divisve national philosophy, forced the most horrible bankruptcy on its people.

Rather than using Indian nationalism and the constitution to tackle our communal issues, I am appalled at the general trend to merely lament that India is on its way to being declared an non-secular state – the hundreds of millions of Indians fully intent on preventing this notwithstanding.

Pakistan-style Islamism, Ummah-isation of Hinduism, alienation of Indian Muslims

There are three major trends in India today that are relevant to our topic.

Firstly, India has very serious conflicts of interest with Pakistan. We have gone to war with that country several times. Its society has issues with radicalisation and a general religious orthodoxy. Its regimes have relentlessly attacked India’s internal fault-lines over the past few decades in the name of Islam. Tens of thousands of Indian soldiers have died defending our country against them. It is distinctly un-Indian and anti-Indian.

Secondly, Hinduism is, for the lack of a better word, Ummah-ising, and this at times takes horrifyingly militant forms. I, given my personal biases, am all for Hindu solidarity and abolishing pseudo-secularism. However, an argument for Hindu-solidarity should not be allowed to take the form of an un-Indian religionalism that goes against the very spirit of India.

Thirdly, Indian Muslims feel alienated from their own country. In India, Pakistan is synonymous with Islam. Unfortunately, Islam is also weakly synonymous with Pakistan. This has significantly undermined Indian Muslims’ political standing in India vis-a-vis their fellow citizens.

The havoc all this has wreaked on our society must not be ignored. India was home to one of humanity’s greatest Islamic cultures for well over 1000 years. It is not, by any means, a dead part of our culture – nearly 160 million Indians are Muslims, several national icons are Muslims, mosques and Islamic architecture litter the country, and Muslim holidays are shared by all. And yet, to a lot of Indians, Islam doesn’t feel Indian, but Pakistani. Despite their respective religious majorities, it is odd that Buddhism doesn’t feel Sri Lankan, or Hinduism itself, Nepali.

The partition of India and secular India’s deprivation of its Islamic authenticity

Has anyone thought what has actually happened here? Why is it that in India, an ancient civilisational land which has a unique Islamic culture just like Egypt, Iran, and Iraq, Islam is seen as somehow foreign? That is not because of Islam’s being inconsistent with India – 1000 years and more of history and our combined freedom struggle should have proven this by now.

During partition, founders of Pakistan expropriated the subcontinent’s Islamic identity for defining their nation, Pakistan. Pakistan’s struggle to keep its ideology alive has robbed us of our Islamic authenticity. India’s secular nature not-withstanding, the ardour with which Pakistan argued its ideology and pushed its exclusivist national philosophy within the larger Islamic community ensured that it gained some traction in the Indian society. Pakistan’s military conflicts with “Hindu” India only amplified this.

It only takes a few of decades of intense activity for a new Zeitgeist to take root in a society. Consider denazification of Germany, China’s turn into capitalism, and India’s own economic liberalisation. 30 years – that is all it takes for a young generation to grow up shaped by a pervasive ideology.

Though quite smaller than India, Pakistan is by no means a tiny nation. It is the world’s 6th most populous country, one of its major economies, and a prominent player during the cold war. One cannot find fault with it – Pakistan had to defend its national philosophy. It has expended a tremendous amount of national effort over the last 60 years in achieving a strong association between subcontinental Islam and itself.

They have succeeded splendidly. Islam in the subcontinent today is seen as prominently Pakistani and India’s secular fabric warped by that perception. Pakistan is an Islamic nation – this somehow gives them a stronger claim on everything Islamic in the subcontinent. The world simply does not recognise India’s Islamic authenticity, and neither do many Indians within. India continues to be associated primarily with Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, but not Islam.

Does religious brotherhood entirely negate the organic bonds a human has to his ancestral land and its history, and to his fellow humans who share the same bonds as him? I don’t really know. What I do know is that this is not the principle on which the Indian republic was founded, and its definitely not an Indian value. Religious supremacism and breaking up of Indian people are un-Indian philosophies. It goes against the very spirit of our freedom struggle, nationalism, and our constitution.

Indians must remember that new Pakistani generations do not even have the same right to speak for India’s Muslims that their earlier generations might have had. Indian democracy has proven this unnecessary anyway.

Indo-Pak culture-drift and attempts at an unnatural bonhomie

There is a delusion among the political class and Indian people that our shared past can be used to achieve friendly relations between India and Pakistan. My view is that in doing so, we are only reinforcing the internal Islam-Pakistan hyphenation.

When historical developments asunder a people, over a period of time the newly formed groups drift increasingly farther from one another. Once upon time, Myanmar and Sri Lanka were part of India, just like Pakistan and Bangladesh. Afghanistan was part of several Indian empires. Today, though at a national level we have very cordial relations, they are distinctly unfamiliar to us.

Such a natural drift has definitely taken place between India and Pakistan. The strongest bond between us that keeps us in each others’ national memories is not anything positive that we share, but the acrid legacy of partition. It’s hard for me as an Indian, for instance, to imagine such an Islamism taking hold of Pakistan if it were under Akbar’s rule. That is, if it were under genuinely Indian-style Islamic rule.

I am not suggesting we should actively pursue enmity with Pakistan or vilify it. However, its being clumped together with Indian Muslims is simply not healthy for India. What has Pakistan’s ‘leadership’ of subcontinental Muslims, its advocacy of religious supremacism within, and its enmity with India effectively accomplished? It has robbed India of its genuine Islamic authenticity in the world’s eyes, and caused non-Muslim Indians to reject the culture of an un-Indian enemy. Pakistan has highlighted Indian Muslims’ being Islamic and consistently de-emphasized their being Indian.

Pursuing an unnatural bonhomie with Pakistan and stressing our similarities with them will only weaken our case for our differences, which are very real. To uphold our national interest, we must assert and amplify these differences.

Replace Islam-Pakistan hyphenation with Islam-India hyphenation in the subcontinent

I urge Indians to spearhead a change of perception of Islam in the subcontinent. Anything that prevents Indian Muslims’ fully asserting their claim on India as Indian citizens is against the national interest. The strong association in India between subcontinental Islam and the present day un-Indian Pakistan must go.

It is tempting to claim that all South Asian countries share Islamic civilization equally. It may be polite and civil to do so, and it may even have some historical merit, but it’s a weak claim for our purposes. It doesn’t have the necessary boldness and self-conviction to be effective. It also doesn’t forcefully argue for India’s Islamic authenticity. Our aim is to end Islam-Pakistan hyphenation for the welfare of a billion humans, not to be fair observers of history. We must hence push the strongest nationalistic claim possible: Islam in the subcontinent is Indian, and it always has been.

Indian Islam never ‘went’ anywhere – it is alive and well amidst us. Our nationalism and constitution are guarantees that it will thrive if Pakistan would let go of it. When the world thinks of Hinduism in South Asia, it thinks of India. Sikhism, it thinks of India. Buddhism, India. When it thinks of Islam in South Asia, it must think of India. Everyone in the subcontinent will be better off. Everyone.

The idea that Islam in the subcontinent is primarily Indian can gain currency only through a concerted nationalist campaign. No apologies should be made for such a movement. No one need be convinced of its proponents’ “patriotism”. The obvious worthiness of the cause, its truth, and its urgency are justifications enough.

What ideas might such a campaign seek to make current?

The countries in our region share an intertwined, messy history. We have a lot in common – languages, religions, culture, quirks – all part of our common and colourful heritage.

However, if our historical and religious assets must be divided amongst us, then the worthiest inheritor of Islamic heritage in the subcontinent can only be India. Not Pakistan, not Bangladesh, not Sri Lanka, not Myanmar, not Nepal. India is the only nation that has been true to the historical spirit of Indian Islam – that of flourishing alongside other Indic faiths in India.

Slay our demons ourselves

Has it ever struck you that in our country, we have a vicious circularity of the following sort: we feel dismayed that the country/political class/leadership has done nothing for us; a form of apathy and resignation sets in; the country/political class/leadership continues to do nothing; we feel increasingly more dismayed.

We are a democracy. We individually must act. Things won’t happen if we don’t.
I urge Indians to assert India’s secularism and nationalism to fight alienation of the Muslim community from Indian mainstream. This battle is the easier one to win – there are hundreds of millions of reasonable Indians, the Indian constitution, the liberal press, the legacy of our freedom-generation, and truth and justice on our side.

I also urge Indians to fight Pakistani supremacy of subcontinental Islam from the outside. That is the root of all our problems. That is the key battle in India’s war against communalism. We must learn to say, “Thanks, but no thanks. I understand what you mean, but this is not really true” to anyone who stresses commonalities of any sort in the subcontinent.

Who will go first?

Based on the concept of ownership of our destiny, what are the answers to these questions:

“But how can non-Muslims claim that Islam in the subcontinent is Indian when it is represented by Pakistan and Indian Muslims themselves imply so?”

“How can Indian Muslims make the Indo-centric claim when there is a genuine sense of their alienation in India and rest of Indian society accuses them of siding with Pakistan. We cannot move against Pakstani Muslims. There is a lot in common between us.”

I don’t know! I am definitely going, in my own way. That I know. I will not ever treat any Indian by as automatically allied with a foreign, inimical power. I will continue making people aware of the need to end the subcontinental Islam-Pakistan association and replace it with Islam-India.

We shall NOT vilify. We shall have faith.

Indians should stop vilifying each other. Not because it would be saintly to do so, but because it only weakens our unity.

Our nationalism and our constitution are solid stuff. Our greatest generation did their job well. If we must challenge our fellow Indians, invoke these instruments. Face with stead-fast stoicism any slurs, any accusations of you being an anti-Indian Muslim or a communal Hindutvawadi. Let the diatribe die down. Repeat your arguments invoking our nationalism, constitution, and your reasoning again. Do not ask anyone to ‘prove’ his or her patriotism. It’s demeaning to do so.

Satyameva Jayate – truth alone triumphs. If you are right, you will win. Have faith in our country and in every Indians’ goodness and genuine attachment to their land.

Augmenting India’s ideological basis

Earlier I mentioned that our work on Indian nationhood is not a frozen process, but a continuing one. We can and must correct any earlier mistakes that continue to torment India’s communal harmony.

If the greatest challenge the freedom-generation faced was ending the British rule and forming a stable republic, the greatest challenge before us is to take back leadership of subcontinental Islam from Pakistan. Our challenge is to do this without sacrificing India’s secular nature.

To tackle our new communal challenges in the 21st century, I propose the following:
1. Secularism will continue to remain the Indian union’s lynch pin. It should not, however, require any particular religious group’s giving up their right to assert religious solidarity. We should genuinely address any concerns about hypocrisy in the name of secularism.

2. India is a mature concept, and we should actively use it to tackle the challenges before us. Secularism is an integral part of our nationhood and a historically irreversible development. It follows that religionalism – wherever it is practised – is distinctly un-Indian. Within India, it is also anti-Indian in the sense that they weaken India and goes against its spirit.

3. The natural heir to Islamic civilisation in the subcontinent is India. Subcontinental Islam has always been an Indian phenomenon. Pakistan’s oft-reinforced association with Indian Muslims must be destroyed.

4. India’s brotherhood with its neighbours is dying. Soon there will be an Indian generation which doesn’t have a single Indian born before partition. Every single human in the subcontinent would have been born in the countries as they existed after partition. The continuing attempts to maintain an unnatural bonhomie with India’s hostile neighbours is not a tenable project – Pakistan has moved too far away from what was once India.

Indian Muslims. India’s Islam.

A shockingly large amount of our national energy is wasted in countering the effects of Islam-Pakistan hyphenation in the subcontinent.

The solution is simple. Reclaim the part of Indian identity that was robbed of us some 60 years back. If India is Hindu, then for similar reasons, it is also Buddhist, Sikh, Christian – and Islamic. Purported authority over sub-continental Islam by other entities in the subcontinent is an outrageous farce that must be ended right away.

There is no obligation to do this meekly. India doesn’t have merely a substantial claim or merely an equal claim. It simply has more right to subcontinental Islamic heritage than anyone else by an overwhelmingly large margin, period. We must use it for our national well-being.

Who can assert subcontinental Islam’s Indian nature boldly, loudly, without an iota of self-doubt or hesitation? Who needs this to be done most urgently? Who suffers from a deprivation of their right to belong to India the most? The Hindus? Sikhs? Buddhists? Christians? Jains? Clearly not. Who else?

The Indian Muslims. The others are left distinctly poorer and their country’s communal harmony stressed, but their Indian genuineness is unquestioned within India and the world over. There is not going to be an un-Indian leader-nation for India’s Sikhs, Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and Christians in our neighbourhood any time soon.

Photograph: Diwane-Aam, Red Fort by Sadia Raval

Tagged as: Communalism, hindus, mughal, Pakistan, partition, secularism