What’s is it like being a Muslim in India 65 years after the cataclysm
of August 1947 that unleashed the ‘Great Divide’ in the South Asian
subcontinent and spawned India and Pakistan?
The question comes naturally to every curious mind keen to know how the
largest minority, i.e., its Muslims numbering around 180 million is
doing in what the western world is so prone to referring as ‘Shining
India.’
But for a Muslim who may have spent the better part of his life living
in, or working for, Pakistan-and now living in the west-the question
assumes both a greater curiosity than normal and an added intensity of
passion, for the simple reason that he was born an Indian Muslim
himself. In plain language, this scribe: born in Delhi, migrated to
Pakistan as a child with little inkling as to why he was leaving his
ancestral abode, but in all of his adult years remaining sentimentally
tethered to the place of his birth; the place where his ancestors are
buried.
They say-a saying attributed more to the Muslims of India-that
Pakistanis, especially those who came over from those parts of the
Subcontinent that fell to India, can’t help carrying a guilt syndrome in
regard to their fellow Muslims in India. That may be true but of that
generation of Pakistanis which has long since gone to its graves.
They-my elders-were old enough at the time of the Partition to know what
they were doing. Or were they really conscious of what they were doing?
Did they suffer from any guilt syndrome?
I never got to ask this question of my father. He wouldn’t allow me
even if I’d the gumption to put him this question. He was astute and
straight as an arrow. No looking back, in his case. And he was quite
forthright about it; he didn’t want to look back.
So the guilt syndrome may not have been passed on to me as a legacy of
my elders. But as a student of history I’ve never been too distant from
academic curiosity to entertain the idea-and nurture it consciously-to
visit India as often as possible to keep tabs on fellow Muslims and
their lot in that place where they had been rulers for centuries but
have now been reduced to minority status in a huge country, with a
bulging population second only to China.
As a career diplomat in the service of Pakistan visiting India wasn’t a
very popular idea, though nobody ever posed me any hurdles when I asked
for permission to visit my ancestral abode. But exigencies and demands
of an overtly engrossing career wouldn’t give me more than two
opportunities-the first in 1980 and the next in 1988-to set foot on the
land of my progenitors.
However, long before any Indian Muslim would hazard to pose the
question of guilt or not on my part, it’s the Indian Consul in Toronto
who reminds me that my parents-God bless their departed souls-had made a
horrible mistake when they scooped me up in Delhi and took me across
the border to Pakistan.
‘I’ sorry, Sir,’ he tells me with a poker face, ‘but I’m afraid I can’t give you a visa to India on your Canadian passport.’
‘But why on earth would you do that? I ask, totally flabbergasted and
miffed, ‘this Canadian passport is the most sought-after in the world
and people would give their left-hand to get one.’
‘True, Sir,’ he remains unfazed, ‘but in the hands of a former
Pakistani it doesn’t get an Indian visa,’ he’s quite matter-of-factly.
‘But my dear man, ‘I protest, ‘I was an Indian before I became a Pakistani. I was born in Delhi, what about that?’
‘Quite right, Sir,’ he intones, ‘but you migrated to Pakistan.’
And then he adds, ‘We’ll give you visa on your Canadian passport if
only you’d give us an affidavit, in writing, that you’ve renounced your
Pakistani nationality.’
‘You can’t be serious,’ I’m close to exasperation if not quite ready to
explode, ‘you think I’ll ever ‘renounce’ my Pakistani nationality for
the sake of a visa to India? Forget about it. You’re being naïve.’
In the end, it was my ‘official’ Pakistani passport that saved the day
for me. I couldn’t be refused a visa on an official passport; and for an
added courtesy, or a sweetener to take care of the egregious hurt
caused to me, I was to be exempted from reporting to police and register
with them upon arrival in India-a must for ordinary Pakistanis
venturing into India. Police reporting marks them, instantly, as
suspects that must be kept under surveillance.
So that’s it: the Indians associate nationality to land, whereas in
Pakistan it’s to the idea of Pakistan; a commitment to a notion and not
so much to a patch of earth.
The Pakistani perception of nationality-thankfully, to people like
me-is not land-bound, which it’s in India. That’s why Pakistan allows
its nationals to take other nationalities without surrendering their
Pakistani nationality. No wonder that some, like this scribe, have moved
on to other lands, far distant from Pakistan, and settled down there.
But their second migration hasn’t, in any way, overshadowed their
commitment or adherence to Pakistan or diluted their moorings in the
idea of Pakistan.
But how do our Muslim brothers-proverbially left behind in India and
deserted by us-feel about the idea of Pakistan? Do they approve of our
unflinching commitment to it? Or do they rather think it was naïve and
quite tentative of us to imagine that adherence to a common religion
would override and circumvent all the fault-lines that divided, or still
divide, the Subcontinent on ethnic, linguistic or sectarian bases?
These were some of the questions I routinely posed to my Muslim
interlocutors, of all ages and persuasions, in the course of my
month-long sojourn in India-my first in 24 years.
I distinctly recall that in my previous visit to India-24 years ago, in
1988-I was often cut short, brusquely, when I posed the same question.
They-and some of them were men of great insight and clarity of
thought-would instantly blurt out that it was a preposterous idea for
Mr. Jinnah (Quaid-e-Azam, or great leader, to us, Pakistanis) and all of
his cohorts and flunkies to think that bonds of a common religion,
alone, could keep a disparate people together.
‘Look,’ they would say with ill-disguised ire (some even with banter
and a chuckle) ‘you couldn’t keep East Pakistan with you for even a
quarter century; the Bengalis had had enough of your flirtation with
romance, if not your outright cruelty to them. So they decided to go
their separate way.’
They were right. East Pakistan became Bangladesh and put paid to the
idea of Pakistan, as far as they were concerned. Or, as the then Indian
PM, Indira Gandhi, had boasted with venom, the ideology of Pakistan was
cremated in the Paltan Maidan of Dhaka, that black December day, of
1971, when Pakistan’s General ‘Tiger’ Niazi, had meekly surrendered to
his victorious Indian counter-part, General Aurora.
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad-the sage, the clairvoyant, perhaps the only one
in the galaxy of leaders that adorned the then firmament of India
possessing a prophetic vision-was then routinely cited to buttress the
argument against the idea of Pakistan. Not so much now.
It was, in fact, heart-rending to me to see the Maulana’s tomb, under
the feet of Delhi’s still majestic Jama Masjid, bearing tell-tale signs
of neglect. I felt sad, very sad, at the apathy of our Muslim brothers
for not according to the sage’s tomb the decorum and dignity it so
rightly and richly deserves. I rushed to see it as soon as I was done
with the Friday prayers on my first Friday in Delhi.
I wanted to pay my respects to the sage all the more-felt an
incontinent urge for it-after listening to the sermon of the Masjid’s
custodian and Imam, Maulana Bukhari. It wasn’t a typical Friday sermon
but more in the format of a political address. The U.P. elections were
in the air and the Shahi Imam, Maulana Bukhari’s popular title, was
blowing hot-and cold (more hot than cold, in fact scalding hot) with the
rhetoric and eloquence of a seasoned political campaigner on-the-
stump.
Maulana Azad’s tomb, in palpable neglect and decay, seems to have
become a favourite hang-out for junkies. I could tell from the hazy and
clouded faces of a dozen or so of them languishing in the shade of the
tomb that they were there because the authorities wouldn’t bother them
in its sanctuary.
Ironically, the Maulana is now the most-quoted political thinker and
sage in Pakistan. The rising graph of his popularity and acceptability
in Pakistan is in inverse proportion to his fading profile in ‘Shining
India.’ I didn’t hear him quoted half as much in India as I would in
contemporary Pakistan.
There was a time, in the early days of Pakistan, when Maulana Azad, was
more reviled than Gandhi or Nehru. They’d refer to him as the Congress’
Trojan horse. The two-bit maulvis of Pakistan despised him and would
mention him with rancour.
No more of that nonsense. The Maulana is the star attraction and piece
de resistance in the increasingly popular and ongoing dialogue that
questions the logic of Pakistan. They quote him with admiration and awe
as the man who could see the future of Pakistan even before its birth.
Maulana Azad’s welcome intrusion into the critique of Pakistan is, no
doubt, as much a belated recognition of his intellectual stature as a
product of the Pakistani intelligentsia’s bitter frustration with the
dismal performance of Pakistan as a state.
Frustration is also writ large on the Muslims of India. But the
critique of Pakistan among the Indian Muslims is a product of Pakistan’s
holistic failure; it blends dismay at the idea of Pakistan with its
dismal failure as a state.
What impressed me, outstandingly, was the absence of rancour against
the idea of Pakistan, which was so much evident in the two earlier
visits, 1980 and 1988. By the same token, scorn at the founder of
Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, has come down markedly, if not
exponentially.
There’s more pathos than passion in the Indian Muslim discourse of the
day on Pakistan. The typical argument I heard in my visit went something
like this: ‘Look,’ they’d say with no visible shade of hurt, ‘Pakistan
may have been a bad idea. But it’s a reality, now, and we can’t wish it
away. On the contrary, we wish it all success and pray for it. We’ve,
after all, our kith and kin there whose life and future is dear to us.
We don’t want any harm to come to them, or to the country they call
home.’
‘That’s mature and healthy,’ I’d quip. But would then quickly turn to
my favourite theme in the discourse: ‘Do you still think Pakistan is
responsible for the plethora of your problems in India? Do you feel we,
the Mohajirs of Pakistan, turned our backs on you and left you to the
mercy of India’s majority population? Have you been treated unfairly, to
say the least, because we deserted you?’
Some of my interlocutors were more charitable than others. ‘We’ve
overcome the trauma of desertion that rankled us so much in the early
decades after Partition,’ they’d console me, ‘but the sense of hurt
revisits us every time there is a Babri Masjid tragedy, of 1992, or the
mayhem of Gujarat, 2002. The revanchist Hindus wouldn’t have dared to
pounce on us, as they did on those two occasions and many others before
them, had there been no Pakistan. Just imagine what formidable strength
we’d be as one Muslim people of India. Add the numbers to get the sense
of what we’re saying: 180 million Pakistanis, 160 million Bangladeshis
and 180 million Indian Muslims. That makes it a staggering number of
half a billion-plus Muslims. Would anyone, in their right mind, have
dared to take us on collectively?’
‘Your argument has merit and obvious thrust,’ I’d concede. But before I
could continue there’d be quick intervention: ‘Look, forget about any
other argument and just read the eye-opening report of the Sachar
Committee. It tells you, more graphically than any Muslim could argue,
of what horrendous price the Muslims of India are still paying for the
creation of Pakistan.’
This debate is to be continued. (MG)
