Shhh... It's A Free Country

In the cacophony of Indian political life, the Bush visit came as a prismatic event: it helped sharpen a few existing lines of polarisation. A disorganised polity seemed to get neatly divided into two, almost as if the classic Bush doctrine—"with us, or against us"—was being graciously conferred with proof by this most chaotic of laboratories. That rough caveat now rings like a prophecy. The Indo-US deal had its fair share of doubters, but as co-participants in the wider political games, they were often cut from the same nationalist cloth as the votaries, differing only in the detail of the weave. Even the substantial differences offered by the Left, in truth, represent the permitted flavours of dissent: it is the limit of consensus, the in-built veto without power. The real antagonists of the entente—no one has yet accused them of being nationalist—meanwhile filed out into the streets: blurring, in their sweeping anger, the gap between the American president and Danish cartoonists. The biggest show came under the aegis of the Jamait Ulema-e-Hind in Delhi. A peaceful incident by all accounts, a normal voicing of dissent in strictly democratic terms, it had a strange resonance—the sheer numbers of "beards and skull caps" in sullen assembly seemed to touch a collective raw nerve in the media.

What followed was revelatory: a rush of commentary from media sentinel, an invocation of the rules of political behaviour, a setting out of the secular media’s protocol of discourse. First off the block, an anchor on a TV channel made the maximal interpretation: "Not since the Khilafat have Indian Muslims got so mobilised on issues that originate outside India." The thread was picked up in print, on the front pages, in lengthy wafflings on edit pages, in news analyses, all feeding off each other and growing in volume. The drift was always the same: an ascribing of illegitimacy to the ‘Muslim’ protests, a hint that in the very act of speaking they spoke out of turn, and that in doing so they invited a right-wing reaction. The theme was given its most clear enunciation in The Hindu by a senior writer well respected for his sober, sage reflections on politics. He marshalled his argument around a few well-chosen cardinal points that merit a closer reading.

From an allusion to the rabble-rousing mullahs who put a prize on the scalp of the Danish cartoonists/Bush, it drew a straight line to the Jamait rally which, he suggested, was "an embarrassment". Then this assertion: the rally could not have been a spontaneous expression; Iran/the Prophet cartoons/Abu Ghraib are all "clergy-inspired issues" that do not quite touch the "Muslim masses"; "security agencies" are watching the role of "West Asian chancelleries" in all this. And lastly, the undesirability of "religious mobilisation" per se, the folly of its secular endorsement and the inevitability of Hindutva "reaction". Leave aside the reappearance of the ‘foreign hand’ bogey as an explanatory tool, or the banking on the security agencies, that infinitely resourceful minefield of suspicion where authority is claimed without the author taking responsibility. Or even the conflation of troublesome actors. The gist lay in the absolute belief that this was not truly a people’s protest, and that any public Muslim orthodox expression on ‘un-Indian’ affairs is not quite kosher.

This then is the threshold of secular tolerance. Firstly, the denial of political agency to Muslims as Muslims, of the possibility of them being a sentient people capable of thought or meaningful, purposive action, their reduction to that old Raj category—‘masses’, a subhuman blob, inert matter, below the radar of democratic choices. And, any hint of ‘extra-territoriality’ is to be obliterated. In this global economy of word and image, it is expected of them that they be passive consumers. Indeed, it is not necessary for anyone to have actually seen the Danish cartoons to be set up for a response; the mass of tertiary sources of information ensures that. In the ideal case, one should have read Rushdie or seen Husain’s drawings to be able to decide whether one is offended or not. But the way ideas get circulated and generate responses in a real-world scenario has nothing to do with textbook shoulds.

In any case, are these really "clergy-inspired" issues—are they so opaque to the people as is made out? Cartoons caricaturing the Prophet, frankly, are not quite as arcane a thing as the half-life of Uranium-239. To ask a common Muslim to swallow a taunt in silence seems to make for sane politics, but is implicitly authoritarian. As if there exists some unwritten Faustian instrument of accession. Do not insist on voicing collective rights, write these away to a power of attorney, let the state and the secular elite safeguard it for you—even if they fail resoundingly on occasion, as in Gujarat. India wants a politically neutered Muslim population, incarcerated in a wordless prison, to be let off only on the display of exemplary behaviour. Don’t ask for too many jobs in the intelligence services, stick to the circus or cricket or whatever, join the commies if you will but keep up an endless supply of Urdu poetry and Shikampuri kababs. In short, stick to the script of Javed Akhtar, who gave us the ‘good Muslim’ in films and real life. Remember the blind maulvi who walked tremulously up the masjid stairs after sacrificing his son for the village? The figure is alive and well and appeared, with necessary outward mutation, in Rang de Basanti: the long-haired dude who wants to come out of the ghetto and played the revolutionary Ashfaqullah (the only other notable thing about the film was the rehabilitation of the Bajrang Dal goon, and the pat recovery of a patriotic kernel in him).

Set against this the Jamait rallyists. The spectre of a Muslim crowd—not a mob, mind you, but a demonstration—taps one of the most deep-rooted fears in India. The mob is, by comparison, seen as a more transient, hence lesser, source of fear. It leaves a trail of violence in its immediate sphere, but strangely does not disturb the psychological equanimity of the nation overmuch. It is what it seems—spontaneous, sporadic, reactive, and ultimately criminal. The absence of criminality and claim to legitimacy of a political Muslim crowd, on the other hand, makes it a more abstract but real danger. The Partition, after all, was not achieved by medieval horsemen but by an arch-constitutionalist, exacting revenge for his marginalisation by the use of modern tools, manoeuvring the legal space available to him. Herein lies the subliminal urge to deny the democratic space to ‘political Islam’. It’s an understandable reflex, but to want to police another’s politics by your aesthetic yardsticks is not a self-evidently valid exercise. Nor will wishing away a real issue tactically produce the resolution you desire.

An inkling of this self-same instinct to seek refuge from complexity was available, quite tangentially, from another quarter. While the middle-of-the-roaders agitated over ‘Muslim mobilisation’, the usual suspects on the right, happily, seemed to be on vacation. One of them, typically, was busy being "charmed" by the vigour of free speech in Britain—including on the issue of dog-walking. The other took time out to reminisce on his New Year’s experiences on the Golden Quadrilateral: one especially smooth stretch in Gujarat lulled him into a weak, unguarded confessional moment. It was possible on that flawless tarmac, he wrote, "to forget that one was in India". One has always suspected this to be the real purpose of these highways, and the secret desire of a lot of politics conducted in the name of the nation: they are not a means to get to India, but to escape it altogether. How we long to transcend to a hard European ground of political logic, the precise geometry of the autobahn. And when faced with the ‘blooming, buzzing confusion’ that is real India—its urban snarls, its small-town cul-de-sacs, its messy democracy—to be able to build, as our writer put it memorably, "a bypass to bypass the bypass".

Evasion will leave some basic questions open. Do the landlords in the liberal centre, and those stuck in the cynical world of the 1980s-vintage ‘appeasement’ policies, actually share the right’s blind spots when it comes to the ‘Muslim issue’? If there is an issue, it is this: citizenship is unconditional. It can’t be granted merely as a barter in return for the state and its minders extracting your silence. Religious orthodoxy, whether Muslim or Hindu, does exist and has a natural place in the spectrum of life—to seek to rob it of speech may actually be the worst way to negotiate with it. In the possibility of their ‘coming out’ lies the real scope of them reassessing their social/ moral universe in the clear light of day, of their mainstreaming if you will. Exploiting it to create a constituency of the aggrieved will leave their condition unchanged. Passing a sentence of death by asphyxiation will only force them down into the reeds, to putrefy and to occasionally emerge as a truly disruptive force. Secular vigilantes who patrol the borders of the permissible—not a few of whom became errand boys of the counter-revolution when theBJP seemed set to rule forever—will only deliver them to hands of the Yaqoob Qureishis of the world. And he has before him the glittering example of the last decade-and-a-half, set by his counterparts in political low life, in how to make that amazing journey from lumpenism to legitimate power.