Is asking Muslims to introspect too much?

Ibn Khaldun Bharati in The Print

The Modi Raj has been an undisguised blessing for Indian Muslims. They never experienced the kind of peace and prosperity that they have been enjoying for the past 10 years. Never in the history of independent India a decade has been so free from long, protracted bouts of Hindu-Muslim riots as the one from 2014-24; and never since the 1990s have Muslims remained so untouched by the shadow of suspicion on account of frequent bomb blasts and terrorist attacks. More importantly, never have Muslims evinced such little sign of unrest over non-issues as in these 10 years.

There has been a positive behavioural change in the community. Their focus has shifted from emotional agitation to constructive pursuits, which has begun to reflect in the unprecedented success of their youth in competitive examinations. A sign of their all-round progress is this year’s Civil Services Examination results, which have as many as 51 Muslims in the list of successful candidates. Such a number was unheard of during the Secular Raj.

Though Modi Raj has inspired a behavioural change in the Muslim community, for it to become permanent, it has to be accompanied by a sincere ideological transformation.

Narendra Modi, who always spoke of Muslims as inseparable from the 140 crore Indians, recently, in an interview with Times Now, spoke especially to them, and urged them to do something which no one wants them to — introspect!

He urged them to look into the sense of deprivation that they have been nurturing. The day such introspection is undertaken, the ground will slip from under the feet of the liberal politics of appeasement and the Muslim politics of victimhood.

Aversion to introspection

Introspection is a word that infuriates Muslim ideologues and makes Left-liberals no less indignant. In their opinion, Muslims, as self-proclaimed victims, can only have a litany of grievances against the Hindu community and the Indian state and make the claim — the First Claim — on its resources as compensation. Introspection is another name for self-investigation. A guilty conscience can’t face it. Not surprising why it makes the Muslim opinion makers so uneasy. The entitlements internalised over centuries of Muslim rule have made the Muslim elite incapable of self-enquiry. They are a people of rights, not duties. Therefore, they want the Hindu community and the Indian state to introspect why the Muslims are not happy with them.

One may ask why the idea of introspection so unsettles Muslim ideologues — the ulema, politicians, academics, columnists, journalists and social media influencers. Is it because the inconvenient questions may lay much of blame at their own doorstep? For example, how Islam came to India and what the nature of the Muslim rule was may be an academic question, but to ask whether medieval supremacism has been renounced or continues to flow in the contemporary Islamic discourse is a politically pertinent question. Do they have the character to answer it honestly? The inability to satisfactorily answer it forces them to allege “victim-blaming” — they being the universal victims. There is a deeper reason too. Muslim politics is so intricately imbricated into Islam that questioning it may implicate the religion and bring discredit whose consequences may unravel their worldview. It’s an existential question.

Enemy’s enemy is a friend

Muslims’ aversion to introspection has been as much their fault as of the post-Independence ‘secular’ politics. Independence came with Partition — the triumph of Muslim communalism over secular nationalism. Even as secularism lay defeated, Jawaharlal Nehru sensed a threat to his rule from the large Hindu nationalist faction of the Congress, and the forces represented by Hindu Mahasabha and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He needed allies to fight them, and who could be a better ally against Hindu nationalism than the people of the Muslim League, who, having carved out a separate country for themselves, decided to stay back in India as they saw their interests better served here? Nehru needed them and pleaded with them to not leave. They were inducted into the Congress and made legislators and ministers without any re-education into the secular ethos on which he professed to base the new state. What an irony that they were taken into Congress not for their new-found secularism but for their old commitment to Muslim communalism. The perverse import that the Nehruvian template — the communalism of the majority is far more dangerous than the communalism of the minority — imparted to the secular praxis, has been so enduring that 77 years hence, no secular party wants Muslims to secularise. Indian secularism has thrived on Muslim communalism.

If the Muslim society is haunted by dejection for not having the standing that is its due, it’s the responsibility of their thought-leaders to diagnose the malaise and prescribe the recovery. Though the public intellectuals of any society come from its elite section, they inevitably end up critiquing the privileges of their own class, which hinders the progress of the masses. This small band of conscientious individuals keeps the moral compass of the society headed true north.

The Hindu society has been brought back to life by the people whose critique abolished their own privileges. In the social reform movements of the 19th century, it were the ‘upper’ caste men who first agitated against caste and gender discrimination. Later, the Constitution was enacted by the members of the Constituent Assembly, who had come from privileged backgrounds and were elected by a very limited electorate of the elite. However, by enshrining the promise of equality and instituting adult suffrage, they effectively abolished their own class. And, in the aftermath of independence, it were largely the legislators from the landed gentry who passed the zamindari abolition and land ceiling laws. The regeneration of Hindu society owes a lot to the self-annihilation of its elite. The ideal of tyag (sacrifice) had some reflection in collective renunciation too.

Character of Muslim elite

The Indian Muslim elite, aka the Ashraaf, remained tenaciously wedded to their tribal interests, and with animalistic instinct of self-preservation, tried to defend their privileges. They couldn’t reconcile to the loss of centuries-old political power, and as the Hindu society developed and raced past them in education, culture and politics, they formulated the ideology of victimhood. The promise of equal citizenship appeared to them as a diminution of their historical stature, and therefore, ‘weightage’ and ‘special treatment’ became the stock phrases in their political lexicon. They wanted an equivalent of Article 370, or special provision, in every sphere.

And, because they controlled the religious discourse and the political narrative, their sense of loss became universalised as the deprivation of the Muslim masses. In reality, however, the Muslim masses had been steadily prospering alongside other Indians, as the economy grew and democracy deepened. The Muslim melancholia is a poetic trope and narrative tool. It is a false consciousness.

Playing kingmaker

The arrogance of “satta pe hum bithayenge, hum utarenge (We decide who shall rule and who shall not)” is another delusion that Modi has appealed to Muslims to disabuse themselves of. The Hindu society has been in continuous churn for the last 200 years. India’s growth is a direct outcome of the progress toward social justice achieved through caste and gender reforms. Muslim ideologues mistook this churning as implosion, and the reform as derangement. They not only looked with glee at what they misperceived as the disintegration of the Hindu society, but actively interfered with the process by siding with one caste group against another. The only thing worse than divide-and-rule is divide-but-not-rule. While the Muslims strutted around as kingmakers, they were just wageless mercenaries. Being viewed as the ones who, after dividing the country, were now dividing the Hindu society, the Muslims invited the wrath that they could have done without.

And what did they receive from their favoured parties in return for the en bloc voting? Little besides a license to indulge in socially aggressive behaviour that would give them an illusion of political domination. Very often, there would be an open display of brazenly communal, anti-social and even anti-national activities. Riots were the inevitable consequence of this kind of politics. The irony is that when a riot erupted, the vote-bank parties left Muslims to their fate. During the Secular Raj, Hindu-Muslim riots were as regular as seasonal crops.

Not against Muslims

Though he need not, but Modi specified that he is not anti-Muslim or anti-Islam. He is just pro-India, which, besides being 80 per cent Hindu, is 14 per cent Muslim too. If Muslim ideologues see him as anti-Muslim, they would better introspect about the inherent conflict between their idea of the Muslim identity and India. Have they ever wondered why there isn’t a complete overlap between Muslim and Indian as there is between Hindu and Indian? Why the phrase ‘Indian Muslim’ doesn’t sound as ludicrous as Indian Hindu? Why do they have to resort to arcane theories of multiple identities and avoid answering their own question about the hierarchy of identities, whether one is first an Indian or a Muslim? They have to resolve the self-created dichotomy of belief and belonging. The Modi era is the best time for this, for he is not into a transactional relationship with them. He serves them equally irrespective of whether they vote for him or not.

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How did Sri Rama's idols suddenly appear in Babri Masjid on 22 December 1949?

Krishna Jha and Dhirendra K Jha in The Wire.In


The night was almost over. Ayodhya was still numb with sleep. Piercing through the quiet, a young sadhu, drenched in sweat, came scampering from Hanumangarhi, a fortress-like Hindu religious establishment housing over five hundred sadhus in Ayodhya. He had been sent to summon Satyendra Das to his guru, Abhiram Das, who seemed to be breathing his last. Those were the early hours of 3 December 1981, and a curtain was coming down over a few forgotten pages of history.

Dharam Das, the other disciple who stayed with Abhiram Das in his one-room tenement, the asan in Hanumangarhi, had asked for him so that they could be with their guru in his last moments. The news did not come as a shock. Satyendra Das had been almost awaiting the moment, since he had known for long that his guru was nearing the end of his journey. He had been at his bedside the whole day and the signs were not encouraging. Even when he had left Abhiram Das’s asan to get a breather after hours of tending to the terminally ill, he had a premonition that his guru – the man who had led a small band of Hindus to surreptitiously plant the idol of Lord Rama in Babri Masjid on yet another December night three decades ago – might not live long. After he had come away from the bedside, unwilling but tired to the bones, Satyendra Das was restless and unable to sleep. He dreaded the moment, yet knew that someone would knock on his doors with the news any time, and when it came, he responded fast, wrapped a quilt around himself and ran out along with the young sadhu who had come to fetch him.

It was very cold outside. The winter night was fading into a dense fog that smothered everything in its folds. Nothing was visible. The duo, almost running in total invisibility, knew the nooks and crannies of Ayodhya like the back of their hands. As Satyendra Das arrived at the asan, he saw Abhiram Das lying in the middle of the room on a charpoy, surrounded by a few sadhus from Hanumangarhi. No one spoke; it was very quiet. Only Dharam Das moved close to him and murmured softly that their guru had passed away minutes before he had stepped in. Slowly, as the day began to break, devotees and disciples started pouring into the room. Soon, preparations for the last rites of the deceased were begun with the help of some residents of Hanumangarhi.

The rituals for the final journey of ascetics are not the same as those for non-ascetic Hindu grihasthas, particularly in north India. Sadhus, unlike Hindu grihasthas, are rarely cremated. There are two options: either their bodies are smeared with salt and buried sitting in a meditative posture or they are dropped down a sacred river tied with a rock or sacks full of sand. The fact that sadhus who take vows of complete renunciation are not cremated symbolizes their separation from the material world. The claim goes that cremation for sadhus is superfluous since they have already burnt their attachments through ascetic initiation, opting for a life of austerities and renunciation.

In Ayodhya, the normal ascetic practice has been to immerse the body of a sadhu in the Sarayu – the name given to the river only as long as it touches the shores of the town. Before and after Ayodhya, the river is known as the Ghaghara. The reason for this nomenclatural confusion lies in a particular Hindu belief. As mythology has turned Ayodhya into the birthplace of Lord Rama, the river owing by it has also assumed the mythical name of Sarayu – the stream that is believed to have owed through the kingdom of Lord Rama.

Back in Hanumangarhi, by the noon of 3 December 1981, Abhiram Das’s disciples and friends had completed all preparations and were ready to initiate the final rituals for the deceased. Outside the asan, the body of Abhiram Das had been placed on a platform made of bamboo in a seated posture, his face frozen into a mask of self-control, his eyes half-closed as if he were deep in meditation. A saffron piece of cloth that had the name of Lord Rama printed all over – a particular kind of cotton or silk material called ramnami – had been carefully wrapped around his body. A similar cloth covered three sides of the arch made out of split bamboo that rested on the hard bamboo platform holding the corpse. The bamboo structure – euphemistically called viman to symbolize the mythical transporter of souls to the heavenly realm – had been kept uncovered on one side to enable people to have a last glimpse of the deceased.

Slowly, a group of sadhus lifted the viman on their shoulders and climbed up the flight of stairs leading to the temple of Lord Hanuman in the centre of Hanumangarhi. At the temple, the group swelled further and as the viman was taken out of Hanumangarhi, the motley crowd accompanying it chanted, ‘Ramajanmabhoomi Uddharak amar rahen (Long live the saviour of the birth place of Rama).’

Three decades back, on the morning of 23 December 1949, the First Information Report (FIR) registered by Ayodhya Police following the planting of the idol of Lord Rama in Babri Masjid on the night before had named Abhiram Das as the prime accused. He had also been tried for the crime he and his friends had committed that night, but the case had remained inconclusive. In course of time, many Hindus in Ayodhya had started calling him Ramajanmabhoomi Uddharak.


Krishna Jha and Dhirendra K. Jha, Ayodhya – The Dark Night, Harper Collins

The slogan-shouting grew louder as the viman reached the entrance of Babri Masjid, where it was carefully laid down. The priests of Ramajanmabhoomi, the temple that operated inside Babri Masjid ever since the idol was planted in it, as well as those of nearby Hindu religious establishments already knew about the demise of the sadhu, and they came out and garlanded the corpse and paid their homage to the departed soul.

By and large, however, Ayodhya remained unaware of Abhiram Das’s death. Though some residents looked at this funeral procession with curiosity, for the majority it was the demise of yet another old sadhu. After three decades, the historical facts associated with the developments in 1949 had slipped into obscurity. e propaganda of All India Hindu Mahasabha and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – that the idol had never been planted and Lord Rama had manifested Himself at His place of birth – had gained ground among devout Hindus by now, largely delinking Abhiram Das from what he had done in the dark hours of that fateful night. Booklets and pamphlets written by Hindu communalists during the intervening period had flooded the shops of Ayodhya and had gone a long way in reinforcing the myth of ‘divine exercise’. For legal reasons, even those who had a role in that surreptitious act found it convenient to let the myth grow and capture popular imagination. e law, after all, could catch human conspiracies, but a ‘divine exercise’ was beyond its reach. Yet, to a small group of Hindus in Ayodhya, Abhiram Das continued to remain till his death Ramajanmabhoomi Uddharak or simply Uddharak Baba.

Whatever be the case, the lack of interest among locals could not be missed by many present in the cortège as it wound down the narrow lanes of Ayodhya and moved towards the banks of the Sarayu. On the bank, where the cortège reached at around two that afternoon, those carrying the viman on their shoulders bent down to put their burden on the ground. The sadhu’s body was taken out of it, bathed in the river and, after being smeared with ghee all over, was wrapped in a fresh white cloth. Two sand-filled sacks were tied to the back of the body, one beneath the shoulder and the other under the waist, which was then gently laid out in the boat that sailed o the moment Satyendra Das, Dharam Das and three other sadhus of Hanumangarhi boarded it. Within minutes, the boat reached the centre of the river, where it was no longer shallow and which had traditionally been used for such water burials. Those present on the boat performed the final rites before lifting Abhiram Das’s body and casting it into the cool, calm waters of the Sarayu.

II

The indifferent response that Abhiram Das’s death evoked among the local populace in 1981 was at odds with the atmosphere the town had witnessed three decades ago, during the years following Independence. At that time, many in Ayodhya, as in several other parts of the country, had seen things differently. The communal frenzy which had accompanied the partition of India had intensely brutalized the atmosphere. No less important was the role played by organizations which saw the immediate aftermath of Partition as an opportunity to derail the secular project of independent India. e conspirators associated with these organizations and the conspiracies they hatched had already resulted in major national tragedies.

One such was the gruesome murder of Mahatma Gandhi on 30 January 1948. The hands that pumped bullets into the chest of the Mahatma were that of Nathuram Godse, but, as was proved later, the assassination was part of a conspiracy hatched by top Hindu Mahasabha leaders, led by V.D. Savarkar, whose prime objectives were to snatch political initiative from the Congress and destabilize all efforts to uphold secularism in India. The conspiracy to kill Gandhi could not remain hidden for long even though the trial, held immediately after the assassination, had failed to uncover its extent.

The surreptitious occupation of the Babri Masjid was an act planned by almost the same set of people about two years later – on the night of 22 December 1949. It was, in many ways, a reflection of the same brutalized atmosphere that saw Gandhi being murdered. Neither the conspirators nor their underlying objectives were different. In both instances, the conspirators belonged to the Hindu Mahasabha leadership – some of the prime movers of the planting of the idol had been the prime accused in the Gandhi murder case – and their objective this time too was to wrest the political centre stage from the Congress by provoking large-scale Hindu mobilization in the name of Lord Rama.

Yet the two incidents differed – as much in the modus operandi used by Hindu communalists as in the manner in which the government and the ruling party, the Congress, responded to them. While the Mahatma was killed in full public view in broad daylight, the Babri Masjid was converted into a temple secretly, in the dead of night. Apparently, the quick and massive government reprisal in the aftermath of Gandhi’s assassination had taught the Hindu Mahasabha leaders several lessons. One was to avoid confrontation with the government so that they could extract maximum political advantage out of their act. Another was to involve a section of the Congress that was sympathetic to their cause. So when, two years later, they set out to execute the Ayodhya project, they remained extremely careful, keeping themselves in the backstage until the mosque was actually impounded and ensuring a large-scale mobilization of Hindus in the immediate aftermath without wasting any time. Though the political objective they had planned through this act of communal aggression in Ayodhya could not be achieved in the manner they had hoped for, they greatly succeeded in keeping the story of the night and the conspiracy behind it a secret, for it never came out in its entirety.

Also, while the conspiracy to kill the Mahatma was probed thoroughly by a commission set up by the Government of India albeit two decades later, no such inquiry was conducted to unmask the plot and the plotters behind the forcible conversion of the Babri Masjid into a temple. As a result, an event that so remarkably changed the political discourse in India continues to be treated as a localized crime committed spontaneously by a handful of local people led, of course, by Abhiram Das, a local sadhu. It was, however, a well-planned conspiracy involving national-, provincial- and local-level leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha undertaken with he objective of reviving the party’s political fortunes that were lost in the aftermath of the Gandhi assassination.

Time has further pushed the secret story of the Hindu Mahasabha’s Ayodhya strategy into obscurity, leaving only what is most apparent for public debate. The unending process of litigation which it triggered completely shifted the focus away from that fateful night and has now become the basis of communal politics in the country. Incidentally, the most crucial part of the controversy – the hidden one – remains an ignored area of research. For instance, the White Paper on the Babri Masjid–Ramajanmabhoomi dispute of the Government of India dismissed the incident of 1949 – legally the root cause of the dispute – in just one paragraph. Issued in the aftermath of the demolition of the mosque on 6 December 1992, the document does not have more to say on the incident:


The controversy entered a new phase with the placing of idols in the disputed structure in December 1949. The premises were attached under Section 145 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Civil suits were led shortly thereafter. Interim orders in these civil suits restrained the parties from removing the idols or interfering with their worship. In effect, therefore, from December 1949 till December 6, 1992 the structure had not been used as a mosque.

It seems impertinent to say that so little is known about the night of 22–23 December 1949 since, in a sense, almost the entire dispute over the mosque emanates from the appearance of the idol of Rama inside that structure. Nevertheless, it is true that there has been little research by contemporary or later writers to fill the gap. This missing link of history remained out of focus till the issue was politically revived and strengthened by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) in the mid-1980s. And by then the story of the night had been taken over by the politics of communalism and the debate over the proprietorship of the disputed land. 

But till Lord Rama ‘manifested’ Himself inside the Babri Masjid, all moves had sought to construct the temple at Ramachabutara, an elevated platform outside the inner courtyard of the mosque. Only after the idols were placed inside did the demand for converting the Muslim place of worship into a temple enter the legal arena. And yet the development of that night did not attract much attention in the media when it actually took place. No major newspaper or journal of the time gave it the kind of serious coverage it deserved even though the import of the development was not at all lost on Congress leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Govind Ballabh Pant and Akshay Brahmachary as well as Hindu Mahasabha president N.B. Khare, its vice-president V.G. Deshpande and its all India general secretary and president of the party’s UP unit Mahant Digvijai Nath.

The only journal that covered the events in detail was a local Hindi weekly in Ayodhya called Virakta. Its editor, Ramgopal Pandey ‘Sharad’, was a known Mahasabhaite. The kind of material that Virakta published had a pronounced Hindu communal bias, and it was hardly expected to carry objective reportage on the developments. If anything, this journal was the first to promote the theory of ‘divine exercise’ – though in bits and pieces – to explain the appearance of the idol of Lord Rama inside the mosque.

Later, Ramgopal Pandey ‘Sharad’ wrote a booklet in Hindi – Shree Ramjanmabhoomi Ka Rakta Ranjit Itihaas (The Blood-soaked History of the Birth Place of Lord Rama). In Ayodhya, this has remained the most popular and perhaps only available material on the subject ever since. Like Virakta, this booklet, too, explains the developments of that night in terms of divine intervention rather than as a communal tactic conceived and executed by the Mahasabha in collaboration with local communalists. is is what the booklet says:


Twenty-third December 1949 was a glorious day for India. On that day, after a long gap of about four hundred years, the birth place of Lord Rama was redeemed. e way developments happened [on the night before], it can be said that Lord Rama himself redeemed his place of birth.

While this theory was being used by communalists to explain the mystery of those dark hours, no serious attempt was made to explore the events of that night objectively, neither by the government nor by any institutions or individual researchers. Debunking the theory of ‘divine exercise’ is one thing (and there is no dearth of works in this regard), but unravelling the truth that was sought to be covered is something else.

Surely, part of the reason why the facts could not come out as and when they occurred – as happened in case of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination – had greatly to do with the power politics of the time. After the assassination of Gandhi in 1948 until the death of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in 1950, the Congress party was beset with an intense intra-party power struggle. Though it had witnessed factional fights earlier as well, there had always been an element of restraint under the influence of Mahatma Gandhi and the idealism of the freedom struggle. But as soon as these restraints disappeared, the fight between the two power blocs in the Congress – Hindu conservatives led by Patel and secularists led by Nehru – came out in the open.

The United Provinces, in particular, emerged as one of the main battlegrounds for these power blocs in the Congress, merely months after Gandhi’s assassination. Govind Ballabh Pant, the chief minister of the province (called prime minister before adoption of the Constitution on 26 January 1950), was a staunch loyalist of Patel. His desperation to remove all those who appeared to be potential challengers to his authority in the state Congress led him to align with Hindu revivalists in Ayodhya – a move that, apart from paying him dividends, greatly emboldened Mahasabhaites and set the ground for the eventual appearance of the idols at the Babri Masjid.

With the Hindu conservative faction of the Congress, in a bid to neutralize Nehru, openly trying to outsource political strength from communal elements outside the party, and the latter endeavouring to arrest this political drift and salvage its own position, there was hardly much time, or determination, to probe the misdeeds of the Mahasabhaites. This was even more so in the United Provinces where the government appeared to be more interested in protecting the Hindu communalists than bringing them to book.

By the time this battle was won by Nehru in late 1950, the incidents of the night of 22 December 1949 had got lost in legal thickets, and the mood of the nation had changed, with the secular fabric seemingly no longer threatened by Hindu revivalists. As the focus shifted following the promulgation of the Constitution of India on 26 January 1950, almost all the players of the Hindu Mahasabha’s Ayodhya strategy either lost their relevance or, in cases where some of them managed to remain in currency, their ability to break the secular equilibrium got severely restricted and their link with the night became part of this missing link of modern India’s history.

The Marwari hegemony of Indian Media

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn


A FRESH Cobrapost sting operation has shown a number of big media outfits accepting money to spread fake news and whip up religious hysteria to boost the BJP’s chances in the 2019 elections. The Cobrapost is held in high regard and its exposés in the past have helped the interests of Indian democracy. This one, however, has left one a bit confused. Did we need to bribe Goebbels to do what he was already good at doing and was likely to do anyway?

Another way of seeing the matter is through the ideological affinity and collusion that exists between most media houses and Hindutva, which makes them predisposed ideologically to align with the BJP. Congress has elements the coterie can support, mainly with regard to business leeway. Otherwise, Indira Gandhi’s nationalisation of the banks, which they owned, and her initial flirtation with the left in a Nehruvian romance won her the clique’s disapproval. Even Rajiv Gandhi went for their jugular when he exhorted Congress workers to shake the moneybags off their backs. The business clique’s preference for a non-Gandhi Congress leader makes eminent sense.

A straight reading of Akshaya Mukul’s well-documented book Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India, for example, would nudge the reader to see the Cobrapost’s media sting — available on its website — from a different perspective. A key question flows from the operation. Would the media barons not work for the BJP or, worse, work against it, if they were not offered huge sums? One is not excluding the mercenary angle in the projection of a political idea and there are good arguments to see Hindutva as a business investment too, but more of that another time.

Mukul’s book is about India’s business community of Marwaris — who happen to own much, possibly most of the so-called mainstream newspapers and TV channels — and the coming about of the Gita Press in Gorakhpur. The right-wing press was to become the fountainhead of reactionary Hindu political and communal discourse and also a platform for mobilisation 1926 onwards against India’s Dalits, assorted minorities, but chiefly targeting the Muslims. The book also prompts an unintended question as an aside. Why is it that nearly all the exposés involving Marwari business houses are carried out in the form of books?

 The answer lies in another question. Who owns the press? Consider the fact that William Caxton’s induction of the printing press in England in the 15th century was put to use in subsequent eras by capitalists, communists and evangelists alike. It served the purposes of colonialism via Macaulay and it also fashioned a mode of anti-colonial upsurge. Muslim and Hindu communalists harnessed the technology to vend their own venomous messages.

Interestingly, the first challenge to the Marwari hold on news dissemination came from a leftist public-minded intellectual, one Debjyoti Burman, in 1950 in the form of a book. He wrote the Mystery of the Birla House as an exposé on the Calcutta-based business group. But the Birlas reportedly bought all three editions and eventually the copyrights of the book.

Mr Burman, however, presented his book to Purushottam Das Tandon, president of the Nasik session of Congress. In the foreword, he expressed the hope that Mr Tandon “will hear the tears falling and throw his weight on the side of the masses to save the country from ruthless exploitation”.

Burman told Tandon that “the health, wealth and happiness of our people are being butchered” by the business group. A copy of the disappeared vignette exists in the ‘rare textbooks’ section of the Nehru Memorial Library in Delhi. Other books on Marwari business houses have been made to disappear mysteriously. In fact, in his quest for material on the Gita Press, Mukul found that copies of a rival journal that wrote detailed profiles of Indian communities were available for most groups but not the one that covered the Marwaris. He retrieved it anyhow with the help of a private archivist.

While the books that have either disappeared or failed to find vendors dealt mostly with financial exposés and the dark backstage of businesses, Mukul’s work deals with the Marwari pursuit of a religious and cultural platform to propagate their worldview, which invariably waded into politics, usually of a scurrilous kind.

“I wanted one of the issues of the journal Chand, which used to come out in the early 1920s — a particular issue on Marwaris, which was banned in that period,” Mukul has been quoted as saying in an interview. “Chand was taking on all castes. It brought out issues on Kayasths too so it was an equal opportunity offender. They did it to everyone; they were quite a gang. I was looking for this ‘Marwari Ank’ but all the libraries in Allahabad and Banaras had all the issues of Chand but not that one because it was banned at that time and the community had bought up all the issues and destroyed them. But one antiquarian in Banaras dug up this copy of ‘Marwari Ank’ for me! So there are people who helped a lot outside the archives.”

There was a time when Marwari-owned newspapers ran professional outfits with editors valued for their integrity. That seems to have been more of an enforced discipline to conform to the political climate of secularism firmly tethered to a mixed economy driven by socially driven five-year plans.

The Cobrapost’s revelations are important to palpably feel the extent of the rot in the Indian media. But any suggestion that the newspapers and TV channels owned by the Gita Press-minded businesses were driven by the profit motive alone is to stretch the point.
“The idea [behind the Marwari publication] was that Hinduism should speak in one voice just like Islam does,” says Mukul. “According to them, Hindus were in big trouble because they didn’t speak in one voice.”

Don’t ignore the saner voices of moderate Muslims

SA Aiyar in The Times of India

There is much in common between those who hit Paris last week and Mumbai on 26/11. Let nobody pretend, like elements of the left, that Paris was just revenge against Western imperialism. ISIS aims to become the biggest imperialist of all, re-creating the ancient Islamic empire from Portugal to China. The Ottoman caliphate once came close to conquering the whole of Europe, and ISIS would like to finish the job. It claims a divine right to kill those who come in the way — Arabs, Jews, Americans, Europeans, Indians or anyone else.

UP home minister Azam Khan outraged many by making excuses for the Paris killings. He said this was a reaction to the actions of global superpowers like America and Russia. “History will decide who is the terrorist. Killing innocents whether in Syria or Paris is a highly deplorable act… But if you created such a situation, you have to face the backlash too.”

This determination to justify the attack, while grudgingly condemning it, is hypocritical communalism. It has parallels with the grudging criticism by BJP leaders of the lynching of the Dadri Muslim accused of eating beef. Tarun Vijay wrote that the lynching would indeed be terrible if it turned out that he had only eaten mutton. Culture minister Mahesh Sharma claims it was just “an accident.” Former MLA Nawab Singh Nagar said those who dared hurt the feelings of the dominant Thakurs should realize the consequences, and claimed that the murderous mob consisted of “innocent children” below 15 years of age. Srichand Sharma said violence was inevitable if Muslims disrespected Hindu sentiments.

The inability of these BJP leaders to condemn the lynching outright is matched by Azam Khan’s inability to condemn the Paris attackers outright. Communalists cherry-pick events from history to claim they are victims, with the right to vengeful retribution. Sorry, but groups across the world have been both attackers and victims. Through history, imperial conquest, killing and loot was considered great (hence Alexander the Great, or Peter the Great). Modern notions of civil rights, secularism and nationhood did not exist. Might was right, indeed greatness.

And so there were Muslims who conquered and plundered, and other Muslims who were at the receiving end. Christian conquerors created large empires by the sword, and were in turn subjugated by others. Hindu, Chinese, Mongol, Arab and African kings killed and looted for personal aggrandizement, and in turn were killed and looted.

Communalists harp on events in which they were victims, ignoring others where they were victimizers. ISIS and Azam Khan repeat the victimhood theme of Muslims in the 20th century, complaining of being bombed and dominated by the West, and claiming that revenge is both justifiable and inevitable. They are unable to see themselves also as victimizers who slaughtered and looted for centuries, from Portugal to China. Nor will they accept that victims from Portugal to China have a right to revenge.

Right message: Last week’s fatwa against ISIS signed by 1,070 Indian imams and muftis deserved more coverage

A sane, safe society is not possible if every community wants to avenge events of the past. Every community needs to accept that it has been both a victimizer and victim, and leave the past behind. Some communities have succeeded in doing this — notably Germany after World War II — and that has been the basis for civilized progress. The contrast with ISIS could not be greater.

While the media has rightly focused on Azam Khan, they have ignored the much saner response of moderate Muslims. It’s wrong to constantly highlight communal Muslims and downplay nationalist ones.

TOI last Wednesday reported “the biggest fatwa ever” against ISIS, signed by 1,070 Indian imams and muftis. The fatwa, which condemned ISIS categorically as “inhuman” and “un-lslamic”, has been forwarded by Abdur Rahman Anjaria of the Islamic Defence Cybercell to the UN, several foreign governments and the Prime Minister’s Office. Anjaria says the fatwa is the biggest ever initiative by Indian ulema to reject the dangerous ideology of ISIS, which “has disgraced the name of Allah and the Prophet….It is the duty of every Muslim to join the fight to defeat it.”

I think this news should have been on page one in every newspaper. Instead it was hidden in the inside pages of the Times of India. So was another small report on a protest meeting in Delhi by the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, to condemn the strikes in Paris, Turkey and Lebanon in the name of Islam. Without naming Azam Khan, its general secretary, Maulana Madani, said “We completely dismiss the action-reaction theory propounded by some persons.”

Prime Minister Modi needs to highlight and cite such moderate views. It’s not enough to say India needs social harmony. It’s also necessary to give kudos to those who promote that moderation.

Religion for Atheists

Alain de Botton for Atheism 2.0

An Indian's analysis of America