S.R Faruqi on marginalisation of Muslims

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, though a peerless ornament of our Republic of Letters;  nevertheless, like many of his generation, made a mistake in considering a facile sort of Left Liberalism more profound than his own ancestral religion and literary tradition.

This means that, though Faruqi is an extraordinarily erudite and cultured man, he fails to appreciate the philosophical depth of his favourite poets.

 Faruqi also has an exemplary record of public service- unfortunately, it was at at time when the public was being very poorly served by Civil Servants.

Still, Faruqi is head and shoulders above the sort of retired bureaucrat or man of letters who dashes off an op-ed in five minutes and so we should pay attention when he speaks.

This is what he has to say-

Harsh Mander is right: Muslims are being relentlessly marginalised in this country.

Faruqi comes from a part of India which had a large highly educated Muslim elite. Whether they went to Pakistan or remained in India or emigrated, many of them did very well purely because of their outstanding ability and sterling character. However, in countries or regions where corruption was rife, the ethos of this elite was compromised. Consider the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce. Its founder and many of its staff belonged to Faruqi's class. Most were honest and excellent at their job. But the Bank operated in a corrupt region and was revealed to have been thoroughly criminal itself.

By contrast, elite Urdu speaking Muslims who went into STEM type fields did extremely well without endangering their ethos in any way. They were also more willing to see merit in their ancestral religion and less swayed by an infantile Left-Liberalism predicated on an all-powerful, utterly benevolent, State.

It is true that elite Muslims tainted by a connection with the administration or a corrupt and infantile Academy or a wholly meretricious Media are 'relentlessly marginalised'. But, so are elite Hindus of the same description- even if their name happens to be Rahul Gandhi.

Faruqi is respected for his achievements in Urdu and English. His mistake is to think that the socio-economic elite, he adorns, actually did either language- or any language, save that of stupidity- any favours at all. Nehru's English was good and he relished Urdu poetry. Mrs. Gandhi, when stirred, could acquit herself quite well on the stump. Even Rajiv could read out a speech if it was typed in Roman letters. Rahul Baba's Hindi and English are good and he seems to be speaking his own mind- but it is the mind of a moon-calf.

I would like to add that marginalisation of Muslims has been an ongoing project since shortly after Partition, though not with such venomous intensity as now.

Muslim marginalisation began much earlier. What could have reversed it? Well, if people of Faruqi's class had not felt compelled to concentrate so exclusively on upward mobility in the 'Civil Lines'  or  liberal professions, but rather risen in Commerce or even returned to their ancestral land and improved it in the manner of the Nawab of Chhatari (who had to interrupt his studies and look after his land because of the death of his father) then they would have retained, or indeed gained, in salience. Instead, the educated elite bought into the myth that the State had some magical power to transform a rural country just by drafting memos and writing speeches for Ministers. The Left raised the bogeyman of Hindutva to terrify them into paying lip-service to a shallow and stupid Secularism greatly inferior to Islam's own grand juristic and social-political vision and practice.

How can Muslim marginalisation be reversed? The answer is that Muslims need to continue to move into higher value added skills based manufacturing and trust based services. A lot of them are doing it already. Long run, political marginalisation means the disintermediation of their own gangster class- a good thing. In that sense, the future of Muslims is bright.

Consider the Bohras. Asghar Ali Engineer has been fulmining against their leadership for many years while himself peddling a deeply dated Liberation theology of the (admittedly, more discredited) Swami Agnivesh sort. Yet, as the Bohras have grown orthodox, their prosperity and security has gone from strength to strength.  Faruqi may not like the 'costly signals' the Bohra community requires but those signals have created a separating equilibrium such that the Bohras have soared upwards- Prime Minister Modi will take a call from their leadership any time of day or night- while the jhollawallah type Muslim intellectual can scarcely get the time of day even from the Minorities Commission.

Abul Kalam Azad opposed Partition for many reasons; one of them was that a predominantly Hindu India will be majoritarian and oppressive to non-Hindus.

Azad had once dreamed of being the Imam ul Hind. Being traditionally educated, he hated the Western educated Aligarh Muslim and this did give him a brief salience.  But that's all it could do. Azad had no following in the countryside- nor, indeed, any comprehension of it. Unlike Kidwai, who served Nehru well in this matter, Azad was bringing little to the table.

Bihari Muslims had been oppressed and forced to give up cow slaughter in 1917. The Muslim landlord may have felt that 'majoritarianism' was being held in check in the Twenties and Thirties but the situation of the ground was quite different.

Apoorvanand is also right when he says that everyone wants the Muslim to be liberal, that is to say, more Hindu than Muslim. This is the prophecy of Azad coming true in spades.

 There was a time when politicians would say 'the people will not tolerate the elite speaking English and wearing Savile Row suits and sipping cocktails'. That time has long gone. Why? Governance matters- Gandhian topis don't. Navin Patnaik said he'd learn Oriya when he was first elected C.M. He stopped saying it once he realised that voters did not want high flown speeches in their ornate native language. They trusted Patnaik precisely because they thought that if he remained  untutored in his own mother tongue, the sycophants and intriguers would find it an uphill task to manipulate him.

In India, Muslims are valued for their labour power. They don't have any great riches we can plunder and share out amongst ourselves. No doubt, if Muslims have higher sobriety, better hygiene (e.g. re open defecation), and a stronger work ethic, their rise will cause jealousy and some of them will be attacked by losers just as 'Paki' grocers were attacked by mindless skinheads in the U.K.

 Personally, I am against burka, hijab, skull cap, unkempt beard, the whole works. If possible, I never lose an opportunity to berate the wearer of any of the above appendages.

 This is the crux of the problem. A non-Muslim may be against the outward marks of the Islamic faith. But this gives rise to no entitlement to berate individual Muslims. Faruqi may believe that Islam itself condemns beards and skull caps and so on. He is welcome to try to make that argument. But that would destroy his own credibility as a scholar.

But I do admire every attempt by a minority in a democracy to make a statement of its identity.

Faruqi is making an extraordinary claim about Indian Muslims. He is saying they- unlike their Hindu neighbours- don't take their Religion seriously. It is not genuine piety and deep spiritual hunger and desire to serve the Lord selflessly which causes them to be observant of the precepts and practice of the Prophet, peace be upon him. Rather they are just 'making a statement of identity'- like wearing an ear-stud in one ear rather than another to indicate sexual orientation.

So long as such attempts are not outlawed, they should be understood for what they are — an individual’s attempts at assertion of her right to be what she is. I remember, during the years of Sikh extremism, how comfortably, even insouciantly, the average Sikh bore his identity markers. And why not? It was his right to be Sikh if he chose to be one.

Once again, this is a rather peculiar view. There may be some deracinated keshadari Sikhs who are just asserting their identity, not affirming their faith, by wearing the turban. However, it is quite false to suggest that the vast majority of Sikhs are acting out of 'insouciance'.

I feel that to be affirm one's faith- whether it be an ancestral faith or one which one has been 'born again' into- is to feel one has been chosen to suffer and bear witness. This is not an economic or idiosyncratic choice. It is about the Divine Substance not some ephemeral Style.

That the Sikh was handed a horrendous punishment for asserting his right is another story.

Innocent Sikhs were killed by the minions of the Dynasty because two Sikhs had shot the Empress. Why does Faruqi think Sikhs were killed for asserting the right to wear a turban? The President, at the time, was a Sikh. But he was only President because he was loyal to the Dynasty.

Perhaps Ramachandra Guha is warning the Muslims against precisely the same denouement when he denounces the burka, and by implication, the hijab, the skull cap and the beard?

Guha is a Tambram. He knows that it is dangerous to display the sacred thread at certain times and in certain places in Tamil Nadu. But, in this instance, I don't believe he is issuing a covert warning to anybody.

There should be something for us to pause when we hear the term “love jihad” bruited about as a valid way of describing a legal social act.

In law, a marriage entered to for an improper purpose is not a 'legal social act'. If one party is acting in bad faith, there may be grounds for dissolving the marriage and punishing the liable party.

There is more for us to pause when a high court chooses to dissolve a marriage because it seemed like love jihad, or a prelude to terrorist acts.

Sheer nonsense! Courts have to decide on the validity of all sorts of marriages. For example if an elderly widow who owns some property marries a young man of known bad character, the Court may step in. Similarly if the intention of the groom is to force his bride into prostitution or some other criminal enterprise, the Court may intervene.

There is time to stop and think where we are going when another high court grants bail to a principal accused in the murder of a Muslim youth in Pune because it was provocation enough for the accused to be a murderer if the victim belonged to another religion.

The wording of the relevant judgement could indeed bear this interpretation. This is the objectionable passage- '"The meeting was held half an hour prior to the assault. The accused otherwise had no other motive such as personal enmity against the innocent deceased Mohsin. The fault of the deceased was only that he belonged to another religion. I consider this factor in favour of the accused. Moreover, the accused do not have criminal record and it appears that in the name of the religion, they were provoked and have committed the murder."

What is the true scandal here? It is that the Maharashtra High Court- like many others has declined greatly in quality. But, in fairness, we must also admit that it was a terrible mistake to retain English as the language for higher courts.
No doubt, the Judge thought the accused were simple men- not genuine members of a political party who would receive support from Party funds. Giving them bail would enable them to feed their families. The case was bound to drag on for years.

We are lucky to have a Supreme Court which ultimately strikes down the dissolution of the marriage and pronounces strictures against the high court judge who granted bail to the accused in the Pune murder case.

Luck? People of Faruqi's class did nothing when the District Courts slid downwards, they said nothing when High Courts turned septic, why are they trusting to luck that the Supreme Court might not go down the pan as well?

But the question to ask is: Did we, as an independent, secular nation need to be lucky in such matters? Does not the lawful culture of the land ensure that such “lucky occasions” never arise?

The 'lawful culture' means the ethos of the legal profession. Clearly, it declined. Why? Well, the lawyer-politicians who inherited power couldn't be bothered with reforming the legal system- though they well knew it was not fit for purpose. Instead, even the right to jury trial was abolished.

 The Left-Liberals dismissed the Judiciary as the creature of the Exploiters. Like Amartya Sen, they believed Justice was something to be achieved directly, by administrative fiat, not the 'due process' of the Courts.
Caste based criminalisation of politics meant that the lower judiciary itself became corrupt or casteist. Naturally, this filtered upwards. The Dynasty was pleased. It viewed the Judiciary as an enemy.

No doubt, there was a time when there was a 'Structuralist' theory which held 'Cultures' to be above incentive systems. But that sort of stupidity died a death in the Seventies and survives only as a counter-productive trope for gesture politics.

Many years ago, I was in Karachi, and the writers there held a reception for me. In his welcoming remarks, a very senior writer praised what he described as my moral courage. He said that our guest of the evening made a public protest against the demolition in Ahmedabad of the mausoleum of the Urdu poet Wali Gujarati. In my reply, I stated that my “moral courage”, such as it was, was possible because there exists in India a very sizable body of liberal Hindu opinion whose support and weight permits the Indian Muslim to survive and even thrive.

I am sorry, but I cannot make this statement today.

There has never been a 'very sizable body of liberal opinion' in India because it is a very poor segmentary society. So is Pakistan. No doubt, efficient public servants and cultured savants were cocooned from reality so that they could remain productive. But they were 'useful idiots' merely.

I am no admirer of the Congress. I know that much of what I see today is to be laid firmly and unequivocally at the door of the Congress. It was during a Congress regime, led by a venerated Congressman, that idols were placed (miraculously appeared?) inside the Babri Masjid (1949). The district magistrate refused to carry out the order of the chief minister to have the idols removed. The premises were locked down. From a mosque built in 1528-1529, the Babri Masjid became a “disputed structure”. It was during another Congress regime (1986) that the “disputed structure” was unlocked to freely admit worship of the idols. It was during another Congress regime that the Babri Masjid was demolished (1992). As the day of the smashing and tearing down of the “disputed structure” decayed into night, I was a witness to the atmosphere of the terror and sorrow among Muslims in the “Nawabi” city of Lucknow, famed for its ganga-jamni culture.I was in Patna when the Bhagalpur “riots” occurred in 1989. It was actually a massacre, almost a dress rehearsal for what happened in Gujarat in 2002. Officially, there were 1,074 deaths, a vast majority of them were Muslims. More than 11,000 homes were destroyed; an overwhelming number of them were Muslims’ homes. More than 65 mosques and 20 Muslim mausoleums were destroyed. The culpability of the police chief was so glaringly evident that Rajiv Gandhi, when he visited, had him summarily transferred. I still remember my bitter chagrin when he tamely succumbed to the pressure from the VHP and its allies and the transfer was rescinded the next day.If the Congress was not the perpetrator of these and countless similar large-scale crimes against the Muslims, it was certainly a brazen accessory, direct or indirect. The organised attempts to suppress if not eliminate Urdu, the tacit affirmation of “Hindi-Hindu-Hindustani”, the alienation and demonisation of the Muslim, the list goes on and on. The Congress may have forgotten, but the world remembers. Still, I would vote for the Congress today, for if nothing else, it pays lip service to pluralism and tolerance in society and openly decries the BJP and the sangh parivar as communal and Hindu supremacist entities.Unfortunately, the poison of the Hindu supremacist idea has spread so wide and so deep in our political life that Sonia Gandhi blames the BJP for blackening the face of the Congress as “pro-Muslim”. All that Sonia Gandhi needed to say was that the Congress is pro-India, and not just pro-Muslim.

Sonia Gandhi could see with her own eyes that Indians don't care about caste or creed. They care about the price of onions and want their kids to have a good education. People of every caste and creed dream of a son or daughter getting into Medical College or IIT.

She has made one or two maladroit statements- but then neither Hindi nor English is her first language. She is perfectly Indian in that she harbours no animosity against anybody but rather, as a pativrata widow, is simply trying to preserve the ancestral legacy. It must be said that she has done a spectacular job.
Rajiv Gandhi, however, was directly responsible for the killing of innocents. He had cynically calculated that this sort of blood-letting was simply something that happened on the ground he flew over in his plane.
By contrast, Modi put an end to the political instrumentalisation of communal riots in Gujarat which began in 1969. The issue here is not whether it is the Wahhabis or the Mahasabha who smash up the tomb of Wali Deccani, but whether gangsters like 'Raees' are to rule the roost.
Muslims don't prosper if a bootlegger prospers. They do prosper when they set up businesses and are protected from harassment by bribe-seeking Government inspectors.

Faruqi Sahib, a former Post Master general who never took a bribe but who presided over a vast network of post-men who always insisted on their tip when delivering a money order, is foolish in believing that what some dynast says matters in the slightest. Most Muslims are working class. They need to be protected from a predatory 'stationary bandit' of a State.

Faruqi however has no fear on that score. Why?

In spite of this, I have hope. Rahul Gandhi seems to have tried to correct the pernicious slant that his mother apparently prefers for her party.

WTF? Sonia, with Ahmed Patel by her side, has a 'pernicious slant' does she? And Rahul, who has no Muslim advisers, isn't reinventing himself as some sort of janeo wearing celibate constantly popping into temples while his sycophants make out that Amit Shah is a dirty Jain and Modi himself some low sort of atheist?

Maybe Rahul Gandhi was only performing a formal genuflection at the shrine of multiculturalism and liberalism. But at least he professes to be for India, and not for Hindus alone.The Congress never did much to reassure the Muslims that India is their home. The Muslims, lacking sane and far-sighted leadership, spend their energies on non-issues, fighting among themselves on petty questions of religious practice.

Are Indian Muslims really so crazy? No. It is just that the 'Secular' parties pick up the gangster and the nutjob for 'vote-bank' purposes. The reality of Muslim life in India is that people are turning their backs on politics to get on with constructive work. They are lifting themselves up by their bootstraps. But then every community which enjoyed a brief period of political dominance suffered greatly as a result. The only way to prosper is to disintermediate the netas and concentrate on building trust and goodwill through hard-work and enterprise.