On The spot
Tavleen Singh
In the week in which two sickening, senseless jihadi massacres occurred I found it ironic, if not bizarre, that I came under vicious attack on social media sites for daring to suggest in my last column that Islamic radicalization could have been part of the problem in Muzaffarnagar. Between gazing in horror at images of innocent shoppers massacred in a Nairobi mall and innocent Christians massacred in a Peshawer church I read with growing disbelief tweets from Indians, both Muslim and Hindu, expressing the extraordinary view that jihadi influences in India were a myth. In my column last week I said that the most obvious signs of religiosity, evident from Kashmir to Kanyakumari these days, were the beards and burqas that now prevail in Muslim neighbourhoods and so I was attacked for implying that all bearded Muslim men and veiled Muslim women were terrorists. This was not my implication. But, I was definitely suggesting that increased use of religious symbols indicated sympathy for the cause. What is this cause? At the root of the worldwide jihad is the belief, totally mistaken in my view, that there is an international plot to destroy Islam.
Ominous manifestations of sympathy for this cause in India have been the brutality with which those opposing aggressive, Islamist religiosity are dealt with. Remember the teacher in Kerala whose hand was chopped off by jihadis because a textbook he used for his students had an image of the Prophet? Remember the college professor in Kolkata who lost her job in an Islamic college because she refused to wear a veil? Remember the acid attacks on Kashmiri schoolgirls who dared to wander about Srinagar unveiled? Are these not signs of a radical new kind of jihadi religiosity in a country in which Islam has always been more syncretic?
Indian Islam has been so different to the unquestioning submission demanded by the Wahabi version of Islam propagated by Saudi Arabia today that it was possible for poets like Ghalib and Mir to question Islam’s very fundamentals. Indian Muslim poets have been so openly critical of these fundamentals that another poet, Yaas Yagana Changezi, who came a hundred years after Ghalib and Mir dared to write this couplet in the fifties. ‘Sab tere siva kaafir, aakhir iska matlab kha. Sar phira dey insaan ka, aisa khabt-e-mazhab kya.’ Loosley translated this verse says: What does it mean when you say that everyone is an infidel except those who believe in your religion. Would such an idea not drive sane men mad?
These lines came often to my mind as I read the angry response to my having written last week in this column that the towns and villages in the vicinity of the Deoband seminary had been radicalized since the nineties when Omar Sheikh took his foreign hostages to a village in this part of Western Uttar Pradesh and imprisoned them there for months. Anyone who has even the smallest idea of rural life in India will confirm that such a thing would not have been possible without the full knowledge of the whole village.
As for that seminary in Deoband I have my own experience of it that is worth recounting here. I visited it during the 2004 election campaign and was stopped at the gates because I was not suitably veiled. The guard informed me that the head Maulana did not talk to unveiled women. When I walked through the gates anyway I found myself surrounded by male students of jihadi bent who told me that they could not speak to me because the only language they were allowed to speak in was Arabic. The one or two women that I spotted on the grounds were so heavily veiled that only their eyes were visible. I wrote at the time in my Indian Express column that it felt as if I had wandered into a bit of Saudi Arabia. I should add here that I have seen Muslim villages near Nagaur in Rajasthan where the atmosphere was frighteningly similar with huge newly built mosques dominating squalid bazaars and hovel-like homes.
For reasons of political correctness these are not things we discuss in ‘secular’ India but it could be time that we did before we reach the stage that Europe has where Islamist aggressiveness has caused countries to ban minarets and veils. Indian Muslims face little or no discrimination by comparison but there is no end to the litany of grievances, magnified by our secular, leftist intellectuals. From these worthies we have not heard one word of criticism of what is going on in Syria but they have been quick to condemn the military coup in Egypt and express their support for the Muslim brotherhood. From them we have not heard one word of criticism of the brutal massacre of Christians in that Peshawar church but try to hint, as I did, at the growth of jihadi type Islamism in India and they become afflicted by twitter diarrhea. They have not hesitated for a moment to blame Narendra Modi for ‘communalizing’ the atmosphere in Uttar Pradesh but they would never dare suggest that it could be the Samajwadi Party government that is behind this.
In the name of secularism much has gone wrong in recent years with Indian secularism and this is something that we need to address. It is not ‘secular’ to accept religious fanaticism in Muslims but condemn it vociferously in Hindus. It is not ‘secular’ to deny that nearly every act of terrorism on Indian soil in recent years has been the work of jihadis. It is not secular to equate the worldwide jihad with what the Congress Party’s leaders like to call ‘saffron terrorism’ because the two are not two signs of the same coin. And, it is not secular to blame all Islamist radicalization on the demolition of the Babri Masjid because then it would be hard to explain 9/11 or the horrible acts of jihadi violence we saw in Nairobi and Peshawar last week.
Only if we admit truthfully that the real grievances of Indian Muslims are to do with their economic and educational backwardness and not with the alleged denial of their religious freedoms will we be able to deal with the ugly and unacceptable manifestations of Islamism that we see across the country today.
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