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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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Never meet your hero!

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

The German writer J Wolfgang Goethe once quipped, “Blessed is the nation that doesn’t need heroes.” As if to expand upon Goethe’s words, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer wrote, “Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.”

There is every likelihood that Goethe was viewing societies as collectives, in which self-interest was the primary motivation but where the creation and worship of ‘heroes’ are acts to make people feel virtuous.

Heroes can’t become heroes without an audience. A segment of the society exhibits an individual and explains his or her actions or traits as ‘heroic’. If these receive enough applause, a hero is created. But then no one is really interested in knowing the actual person who has been turned into a hero. Only his mythologised sides are to be viewed.

The mythologising is done to quench a yearning in society — a yearning that cannot be fulfilled because it might be too impractical, utopian, irrational and, therefore, against self-interest. So, the mythologised individual becomes an alter ego of a society conscious of its inherent flaws. Great effort is thus invested in hiding the actual from the gaze of society, so that only the mythologised can be viewed.

One often comes across videos on social media of common everyday people doing virtuous deeds, such as helping an old person cross a busy road, or helping an animal. The helping hands in this regard are exhibited as ‘heroes’, even though they might not even be aware that they are being filmed.

What if they weren’t? What if they remain unaware about the applause that their ‘viral video’ has attracted? Will they stop being helpful without having an audience? They certainly won’t be hailed as heroes. They are often exhibited as heroes by those who want to use them to signal their own appreciative attitude towards ‘goodness’.

This is a harmless ploy. But since self-interest is rampant in almost every society, this can push some people to mould themselves as heroes. There have been cases in which men and women have actually staged certain ‘heroic’ acts, filmed them, and then put them out for all to view. The purpose is to generate praise and accolades for themselves and, when possible, even monetary gains.

But it is also possible that they truly want to be seen as heroes in an unheroic age, despite displaying forged heroism. Then there are those who are so smitten by the romanticised notions of a ‘heroic age’ that they actually plunge into real-life scenarios to quench their intense yearning to be seen as heroes.

For example, a person who voluntarily sticks his neck out for a cause that may lead to his arrest. He knows this. But he also knows that there will be many on social and electronic media who will begin to portray him as a hero. But the applauders often do this to signal their own disposition towards a ‘heroic’ cause.

We apparently live in an unheroic age — an age that philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche or, for that matter, Muhammad Iqbal, detested. Each had their own understanding of a bygone heroic age.

To Nietzsche, the heroic age existed in some pre-modern period in history, when the Germanic people were fearless. To Iqbal, the heroic age was when early Muslims were powered by an unadulterated faith and passion to conquer the world. There are multiple periods in time that are referred to as ‘heroic ages’, depending on one’s favourite ideology or professed faith.

The yearning for heroes and the penchant for creating them to be revered — so that societies can feel better about themselves — is as old as when the first major civilisations began to appear, thousands of years ago. So when they spoke of heroic ages, what period of history were they reminiscing about — the Stone Age?

Humans are naturally pragmatic. From hunter-gatherers, we became scavenger-survivalists. The image may be off-putting but the latter actually requires one to be more rational, clever and pragmatic. This is how we have survived and progressed.

That ancient yearning for a heroic age has remained, though. An age that never was — an age that was always an imagined one. That’s why we even mythologise known histories, because the actual in this regard can be awkward to deal with. But it is possible to unfold.

America’s ‘founding fathers’ were revered for over two centuries as untainted heroes, until some historians decided to demystify them by exploring their lives outside their mythologised imaginings. Many of these heroes turned out to be slave-owners and not very pleasant people.

Mahatma Gandhi, revered as a symbol of tolerance, turned out to also be a man who disliked black South Africans. The founder of Pakistan MA Jinnah is mythologised as a man who supposedly strived to create an ‘Islamic state’, yet the fact is that he was a declared liberal and loved his wine. Martin Luther King Jr, the revered black rights activist, was also a prolific philanderer.

When freed from mythology, the heroes become human — still important men and women, but with various flaws. This is when they become real and more relatable. They become ‘anti-heroes.’

But there is always an urgency in societies to keep the flaws hidden. The flaws can damage the emotions that are invested in revering ‘heroes’, both dead and living. The act of revering provides an opportunity to feel bigger than a scavenger-survivor, even if this requires forged memories and heavily mythologised men and women.

Therefore, hero-worship can also make one blurt out even the most absurd things to keep a popular but distorted memory of a perceived hero intact. For example, this is exactly what one populist former Pakistani prime minister did when he declared that the terrorist Osama bin Laden was a martyr.

By doing this, the former PM was signalling his own ‘heroism’ as well — that of a proud fool who saw greatness in a mass murderer to signal his own ‘greatness’ in an unheroic age.

The French philosopher Voltaire viewed this tendency as a chain that one has fallen in love with. Voltaire wrote, “It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”

Is the BJP winning the 2024 Lok Sabha elections?

Shekhar Gupta in The Print


As the combatants ready their manifestos for the 2024 campaign, the first set of opinion polls is with us. I understand the scepticism about news TV channels and the ‘so what else would you expect from these guys’ view among those who support the BJP’s rivals, but some data is better than data-free analysis.

Left to us journalists and pundits who predict poll outcomes after talking at a few dhabas and with three taxi drivers, we could conveniently give victory to our own favourites and then go to sleep happily. If the results are different, there are always the EVMs to blame.

The fact is, you do not even need any pollsters to tell you the BJP is way ahead in this contest. Even as the Opposition’s ambitious INDIA bloc has struggled to maintain cohesion, the BJP has set about repairing and rebuilding the NDA. The passion of the partisan aside, much of the talk within the opposition parties is about where they could limit Narendra Modi, rather than having him voted out of power.

That’s the state of play at this point in time, although the Opposition believes the revelations about the electoral bonds have put some wind in its sails. And the idea of the BJP’s ‘washing machine’ is a campaign pitch with some oomph. Is it powerful enough to turn the Opposition’s fortunes? Most opposition leaders would still look at the picture more soberly. It is about how to ‘limit’ Modi to a ‘reasonable’ number.

An insight into the Opposition’s thinking came in a conversation with the leader of one opposition party across the aisle on an IndiGo flight early in January. The third-generation dynast has inherited a party with a solid caste-based vote bank, albeit in a limited geography. I asked how he looked at the prospects, and whether he believed his caste vote bank would survive Modi’s pull.

The caste vote bank may be generally safe, he said, but when people go out to vote in the Lok Sabha elections, they will see only one choice. “How do you convince them there’s an alternative?” he asked. His party (and the Opposition), he said, was struggling to find an issue that brings a critical mass of people out into the streets. For example, if you raise the Agnipath scheme, only those affected will come to protest. The rest of the voters will be indifferent.

“What’s the solution, then? Has your three-generation politics come to an end?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “let’s see it like we are in a nuclear winter. All we can do is survive until it thaws. In politics, that would mean preserving your caste vote bank, winning at least a few seats and conserving your resources. Live long enough until times change.”

Prescient, I thought, and very wise, too. Except, just days after this conversation, he left the INDIA bloc and joined the NDA. He probably chose this as a way of dealing with his nuclear winter. At least when and if things change, he will still be in the ring, and up on his feet to weigh new options.

With self-preservation or surviving to fight another day being the topmost thought on the minds of the opposition parties, each one faces different challenges. For some, like Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, their state governments would be destabilised by any addition to the BJP’s 2019 tally of seats.

The currently embattled Aam Aadmi Party would look to make a bigger statement in Delhi than the wipeout of 2019. For the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena (UBT) and Sharad Pawar’s NCP faction, a relative success is essential for survival. For Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and Lalu/Tejashwi Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), a 2019-like performance will make their dream of returning to power in their states that much more improbable.

These parties also have limited avenues for funds. Where they aren’t in power, the taps have remained dry for years and the savings are running out. Those that still rule a state and can ‘persuade’ moneyed people to pay have the ‘agencies’ on their tail. This would scare their prospective donors even more.

All this is about one-state parties. Or maybe one-and-a-half states in the case of AAP. For the Congress, the challenge is of a different order. Of late, it has struggled to maintain cohesion. Between 2014 and 2019, its only achievement was maintaining that rock-solid vote percentage of just about 20 percent. But this does not make enough seats for it to even cross the threshold in the Lok Sabha to get the formal leader of the Opposition status. What is the number it should target to convince its supporters and adversaries that it is a genuine challenger for the future?

The hundred-seat mark would be an interesting thought and can alter Indian politics. But is it realistic? I understand if the Congress officially contests any suggestion other than the idea that it is leading INDIA to a majority, but its leaders are experienced, having tasted victory and defeat. They’d believe that any substantive improvement, any number past 80 seats, would put it on a great footing. This is especially so with the Haryana, Maharashtra and Jharkhand elections to follow soon after.

The results on 4 June will set the momentum for elections in these important states. The BJP faces challenges in each of the three. A Congress tally of 80-plus now would give its allies in Jharkhand and Maharashtra strength. If it fails to reach even that mark, however, it risks losing its pre-eminence as the natural leader in an opposition alliance. A third disaster in a row would mean an upheaval within the party and definitely persuade the other rivals of the BJP to look for alternatives. Some may also decide to take the cue from my fellow traveller to escape the nuclear winter.

Why, then, is the BJP looking so frantic? Why is Modi campaigning as if trying to win power for the first time in 2014? Why this flurry of raids and arrests of opposition leaders, even a serving chief minister? Why does the party look so worried if it is indeed in such a good place in this campaign?

Good questions, and we will explore some answers. The first is that it is simply the nature of the Modi-Shah BJP. For them, every election is to be fought like their life depends on it.

The second, as we wrote in a National Interest four Saturdays ago, is that Modi is now campaigning not just for 2024, but for 2029. What works better for him in that quest than to destroy the Opposition as comprehensively as possible, leaving the survivors to contemplate their future? The Opposition, especially the Congress, is right to fear a one-man/one-party/one-ideology domination of the kind not seen in India yet. And if they don’t like it, they have to convince enough of the voters that this isn’t good for Indian democracy. There isn’t much time left.

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