Five years ago I put up a couple of posts on Sharjeel Imam who is still in prison awaiting trial on various charges relating to the Shaheen Bagh protests which so greatly helped the BJP and harmed Congress.
He has recently published the article given below on the 'Polis Project' website. It appears that it was his late father- a small time politician with Nitish Kumar's JDU- who is most to blame for his poor career choices and crazy ideology. The irony here is that Nitish is currently propping up Modi's administration. Daddy, it seems, was on the side of the Fascists.
We should never judge anyone by how their adversaries represent them,
Unless those adversaries are smart and are working in our interest.
especially when it comes to fellow travelers.
Sharjeel was abandoned by his political chums because he was batshit crazy.
In my case, a month of working and speaking on the streets of Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh and Jamia during the 2019 protests against the union government’s new citizenship law, and a decade of sustained research and writing, was all ignored because of a clip mischievously propagated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and their supporters.
It was mischievously propagated by Sharjeel because was up to mischief. He wanted Assam to be cut off from the rest of India. He didn't get that the indigenous Assamese would massacre Muslim settlers if this happened. Mohammad Yunus won't be able to do shit. The Army will take over. The plain fact is, Muslims have never had the monopoly of ethnic cleansing. The thing is a two way street. Sharjeel may worship Jinnah but Jinnah had to abandon his property in India and move to Karachi where he didn't even own a house. His descendants are Indians. But they aren't Muslims.
Also because, having been a victim of “Congress nationalism,”
Manmohan Singh beat him up. Sonia Gandhi stole his lunch money. Rahul's chum, Kanhaiya Kumar pulled down his shorts and made fun of his puny genitals.
I try to seriously engage with the ideas of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
That idea was 'the two nation theory'. Indian Muslims should become Muhajirs. Sadly, the Pakistanis don't want them. Why not go to the Gulf? The smartest people from all over the world are moving there.
It was Jawaharlal Nehru, not Jinnah, who sabotaged the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan after it had been agreed upon by all parties (see Maulana Azad’s India Wins Freedom.
It was Nehru, not Jinnah, who was Prime Minister in Delhi when the Muslim population fell from 33 percent to just 5 percent. Nehru passed a law preventing Muslims who had fled across the border in panic from returning and reclaiming their property. Gandhi said that he knew which Congressmen in Bihar had been responsible for killing innocent Muslims. Did he suspend them from the Party? Nope. He collected some money and moved on.
Also, Aakar Patel’s
who helps BJP get votes in Gujarat.
The Constitution that wasn’t—or, a Muslim man’s vision of Independent India, National Herald, 26 Jan 2025).
That vision was of a Muslim India engaging in jihad against Israel.
Jinnah is more important than ever for any conversation around the decentralization of power, minority and community rights, and my invocation of him must be read in that light.
Jinnah protected Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan. Minorities in Pakistan are now a larger percentage of the population than they were in 1947.
In the words of Parthasarathi Gupta, my plea is “for a federal polity and a confederal association among the countries of South Asia”
Pakistan and Bangladesh will gladly embrace Hindu majority rule. This guy should join the RSS and gas on about 'Akhand (Federal) Bharat'.
. He further writes, “In our own country, if we were to shed some of the centralist features of GOI Act 1935 and make India a genuine federation of states,
and get the Muslims to stop thinking God wants them to kill kaffirs
we will set an example to our immediate neighbors and be in a position to make the states of SAARC [the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation] a genuine confederation of peoples…”).
So, India must change its constitution and conquer its neighbours so as to create a Federal Republic corresponding to undivided India. There's just one problem. Pakistan has nukes. It doesn't want anything to do with India. It doesn't even want Indian Muslims. Indeed, they are now deporting even Hanafi Afghans.
You might disagree with me, but judgements based on the image that the troll army wants of me are problematic.
Sharjeel's problem is that he is stupid. That is what causes his image to be that of a loser who may as well rot in jail because he is bound to make a nuisance of himself sooner or later.
So is calling me crazy or a BJP agent, only because my adversaries cannot digest my positions.
They are shit. Nobody wants to digest shit.
The way a section of “progressive” media and opinionmakers (both Muslim and non-Muslim) have sought to silence me and erase our tireless and decisive contributions to Shaheen Bagh from day zero to day 18
the thing failed. BJP and AAP gained votes from Congress and the Left. Delhi now has a BJP CM.
—I mean books have been written about Shaheen Bagh without even mentioning me, Asif Mujtaba, Afreen Fatima, or others—just goes to show that this section is either disingenuous or intellectually bankrupt.
Shaheel is a Narcissist. Nothing wrong with that. Lots of politicians are. But they need to get someone smart to write their speeches or articles.
But thankfully, in this day and age, facts cannot be suppressed forever. I have no complaints; I am just pointing it out. Faith in God and the love of my people is enough for me.
His people are safer if he remains in jail.
“I am a pessimist because of my intelligence and an optimist because of my will.” Gramsci is supposed to have said that.
He did. He was quoting Romain Rolland who came to worship Stalin. What Gramsci meant by this remark is that the proletariat was fucked and would remain fucked till a Leninist party fucked everybody over so thoroughly that, by comparison, the proles would feel less egregiously fucked. Sharjeel's problem is that he is his own Lenin and Stalin. Also he is in jail not fucking up the country big time.
The same applies to my case although I would prefer a modified version: I am a pessimist because of my intelligence
he is a prisoner because of his stupidity.
and an optimist because of my faith. For some the two might be the same, but for me and people like me raised in the Islamic faith, “will” is meaningless without “faith” in God and His plans for me. There is the one grand “Will” of God, and the smaller “wills” cannot make sense or be optimistic without having faith in that “Will”—something that one can never fathom and only have faith in.
This is a garbled version of Iqbal's concept of 'khudi'. God can ensure that a small 'will' is optimistic or pessimistic or as stupid as Sharjeel. But, equally, God may not want Sharjeel to bee so fucking stupid. Predestination may involve non-deterministic algorithms. Indeed, since we know they are superior, we can assume that 'the best of Creators' would use them. Thus 'Qadr' can be non-deterministic in alam-e-khalq, this is not so in alam-e-amr which beyond Time and thus the scope of time hierarchy theorems.
In other words, one could say history is “unknowable,” present is “unknowable,” and the trajectory of future is also “unknowable.”
Not for Muslims. Prophets prophesy. They convey knowledge of the future.
All we have are inaccurate approximations and sometimes plain wrong guesses and conceptions.
What Sharjeel has is shit for brains.
To make sense of one’s contribution or one’s place in the grand scheme of things is impossible without faith.
No. You may lack faith and yet know that you are a stupid piece of shit. That's a good reason not to clutter up the penal system. Just get a job and pay your taxes. The grand scheme of things depends on stupid people acknowledging their stupidity and staying in their fucking lane.
There are those who are too eager to see change in their own lives, who think that a revolution is just around the corner.
They are called 'nutters'.
The problem with such an approach is that
it involves being a nutter
the patience required for fundamental change is missing.
a patient nutter is still a nutter.
Patience—self-effacing patience—can only come through faith.
No. It can come from not being a fucking nutter. That's how come most people can sit quietly waiting for their train or plane or bus. They understand that such vehicles won't turn up immediately just because you really want it to.
It is faith in God which drove me towards historical studies
rather than religious studies. I suppose if he had faith in Tooth Fairy he would have been driven towards Queer Theory.
and it is faith in God which sustains me in prison
this guy is too stupid to understand that he is a Jihadi nutjob. Just because he actually is Muslim doesn't mean he can't really really want to kill kaffirs.
and it is faith in God which allows me to contextualize my life and my life’s work in a span not of decades but centuries.
His life's work, like that of his Daddy's, was to try to gain some political power or influence. Nothing wrong with that. There's lots of money in politics. But, it appears, he hasn't made much money. Muslim politicians don't want to be associated with this useless nutjob. Owaisi condemned his remarks on Assam.
I have spent five years in jail now.
Jail is a good place to make contacts. Sharjeel knows IT. Maybe he could be crypto bagman or something of that sort. Perhaps, he is just pretending to be a nutter.
I would reiterate that these have been the most productive years of my life, not only because I got to read a lot—hundreds of books—but also because I have met a lot of political prisoners, have lived with people from Assam for six months, and have been living with people from Delhi and Haryana for over four years. All this has been a learning experience.
It must be admitted that Jail is more educational than the History Dept. of JNU.
I am a student of Islamic modernism
of the sort you see in UAE? Plenty of opportunities for IT mavens in Dubai.
and its scholars such as Jamaluddin Afghani and Muhammad Abduh of Egypt. Our own Akbar Allahabadi, Allama Iqbal and Maulana Azad, and Ali Shariati, the Iranian revolutionary, have shaped my understanding of politics as well as Islam.
In that case, your understanding is zero. Islam is the same whether it is practiced by a British Lord- like Baron Stanley who converted in 1869- or a Iranian or an Indian or an Arab. But politics has changed greatly since the time of even Shariati. Some of his followers tried to kill Khatami. They were slaughtered.
It is these people who inspired me to take up a study of Islam and history as an engineering graduate.
Nothing wrong with that at all. Get a job in an Arab country and take instruction in different branches of Islamic knowledge. By all means visit leading seminaries and scholars back home. In Europe and America there are many fine seminaries as well as University Departments.
Alternatively, if you are interested in Indian politics, follow the example of Prashant Kishore. Learn a bit of Statistics and volunteer as a quant for a political campaign. Kishore has set up his own party in Bihar. Will it succeed? Perhaps not. But Kishore changed Indian politics for the better. Parties became more focussed on last mile delivery- particularly to poorer women.
I was raised in a traditional middle-class household in Bihar’s Patna and Jehanabad. My father was a local politician and contested as an independent from Kurtha in 2000. In 2005,
at a time when Nitish was allied with the BJP as he is now
he got the Janata Dal United (JDU) symbol from the Jehanabad seat for the state assembly. He lost both seats—coming third in Kurtha and second in Jehanabad—but established himself as someone who had behind him around ten percent votes in multiple state assembly seats and where Muslim population was only 10-12 percent. It gave him some hold in the JDU, which has held power in Bihar since 2005.
Nitish only broke with the BJP in 2013. Perhaps Sharjeel's father thought that his son could use JNU as a launchpad into Bihari politics- a very lucrative field- under Nitish's patronage. Also, it was possible that Rahul would shoulder Manmohan aside and lead the UPA to victory in 2014.
It is my father’s distributed vote bank that first made me aware of the flaws of the First Past the Post system (FPTP) as opposed to proportional representation.
The former makes for stability. The latter makes for either chaos or coalitions held together by corruption. Weimar made the mistake of going in for P.R because the Jewish Professor who wrote the Constitution thought his own party, which could only gain a few seats through PR, would have a bigger role. It was obvious that there could be legislative gridlock and so there was a clause permitting the President to rule by decree under certain circumstances.
As I have written earlier, under FPTP, a territory is divided into spatial constituencies, each sending a representative elected through a vote.
Proportional Representation is likely to be territorial in a big country with different languages.
The candidate receiving the largest number of votes is considered elected, even if they receive, say, less than 20 percent of the votes.
This can also be true of Proportional Representation. What matters is if coalitions are stable.
It is this system that enables parties with around a third of total votes to achieve a two-thirds majority in an assembly.
Under P.R, a party with 2 percent of the vote can gain 100 percent control of Parliament if there are many other parties none of whom pass a 1 percent threshold. Sharjeel is as stupid as shit.
India’s Constituent Assembly debates also witnessed disagreements over the issue as the Congress party abolished separate electorates.
Congress presided over the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Delhi itself. Disagreement didn't change this outcome.
While some Muslims did speak up, demanding proportional representation, it needs to be noted that separate electorates have a significant demerit, too: Hindus can’t vote for Muslims and vice versa.
By and large, Hindus won't vote for Muslims save in countries where White people are the majority. This is because Muslims have been corrupt, stupid and useless when they have not been crazy jihadists.
People like Hasrat Mohani, the poet freedom fighter and one of the most vocal opponents of FPTP, maintained that joint electorates would eliminate Muslim representation.
Hindu people didn't like Hasrat Mohani who was elected in 1946 on a League ticket. But, he understood he would have no political future in Pakistan. It is fortunate he died before the first proper election under universal franchise was held. He was unelectable.
The alternative was proportional representation where the number of seats would be decided by the percentage of votes received by a party and while Muslims could vote for Hindus and vice versa, minorities couldn’t be silenced.
They could be ethnically cleansed. I suppose if this nutter gets out of jail and runs amok once again, he may himself contribute to this outcome. There's a good reason people like Owaisi condemn him. An Indian whose hero is Jinnah doesn't have a political future unless he crosses the border. But Pakistanis or Bangladeshis won't vote for a nutter.
My years at IIT
In 2006, at the age of 18, I qualified the Joint Entrance Examination and got admitted to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay to study computer science. Apart from that, I was into religious literature in Arabic and Persian.
Nothing wrong in that at all. Stay away from booze and hit the books.
I was also reading Islamic history even though I had yet to encounter Islamic modernism.
which was either just 'modernism' or involved fucking off from Hindu India.
In my second year at the IIT, in a literature class, when the professor started talking about evolution, I objected saying evolution was just a theory and not a fact of science.
Maybe the rumours are true. Biharis are stupid.
The professors in the IIT were like those in JNU, so he didn’t shut me up.
He was teaching 'literature'. Fuck would he know about science? Anyway, if a hefty Bihari buffalo wants to talk, let him do so. Otherwise he might knife you.
He asked me to do a presentation on the subject. The next week, standing in front of 200 students of Literature 101, I offered my presentation filled with comments from Christian pseudoscientists I had found in some Islamic books refuting evolution.
Muslims don't even have 'pseudoscientists'. They have to turn to Christians to eke out their ignorance. To be fair, we are speaking of a Bihari. Most are bright. But some aren't at all.
Listening to my presentation of half an hour, the professor appreciated the work but asked me to read a few texts. However, more than those texts, what helped me understand evolution was
Richard Dawkins? John Maynard Smith? Nope. This Bihari buffalo
Iqbal, the poet philosopher of
Pakistan. Khameni rates him though admits that his Farsi was shite.
the 20th century. Revered among the Muslims of South Asia, people at large remember Iqbal only as the poet who wrote Saare jahan se achha. Iqbal the philosopher has been summarily ignored.
Because he was stupid. You can either be a Muslim or a follower of Nietzsche- unless you are Punjabi and thus can use Punjabi logic. Incidentally, Iqbal fell in love with Mussolini even though the dude was slaughtering Muslims in Libya.
It was Iqbal who led me to Henri Bergson and his Creative Evolution.
Which was nonsense.
He also led me to Karl Marx and his Capital.
IIT students should be able to comprehend the mathematics behind evolutionary theory or Capital theory. They shouldn't be taught 'literature' by a cretin.
Iqbal had his critiques of both, yet with profound respect.
Profound ignorance. To be fair, lots of people who returned to India after higher studies abroad went quietly mad or suffered grave mental impairment. D.D Kosambi took to proving the Reimann hypothesis by 'statistical' methods!
My point is it wasn’t Marx who opened my eyes about capitalism,
Sadly, Sharjeel's eyes were never opened to anything.
or Darwin who made me respect evolution,
why not Newton so he could get to respect gravity as well?
but Iqbal who made me understand these things. The reason is simple:
Iqbal was stupid and Sharjeel is stupid. Stupid reasoning appeals to stupid people.
the materialist treatment of these ideas by most of the protagonists of the 20th century drove me—a young and curious but faithful Muslim kid looking for answers—away. (I am not anti-communist. I mean their contributions towards the most meaningful political and economic analysis of the recent human history, towards class struggles, against superstition or ugly ideologies of capitalism would naturally be incorporated into any future development of the human thought.
Bihari buffalo thought- maybe. Human thought- not so much.
What is often problematic about communists, though, is their claim that dialectic materialism is a science,
It can have a mathematical description a la William Lawvere. If the thing generates better predictions or yields a structural causal model which enables better outcomes to be achieved, then the thing is a science.
even though materialistic ontology was abandoned by physics over a century ago.
Nope. All Physics has a physicalist description which is materialistic in the sense that Energy and matter are interlinked.
For a longer discussion, see my Worldview in a cell: a Muslim political prisoner’s insight.)
Don't. It is dreck.
Even though science abandoned deterministic materialism in the early 20th century,
It did so in the Seventeenth century when 'action at a distance' had to be accepted because it was so useful.
political ideologies still follow the old vocabulary of the Newtonian era.
The ideologies of Bihari buffaloes- maybe.
This is where a figure like Iqbal breaks new ground
for a Bihari buffalo
while avoiding the impression that we know everything or that we’re on way to knowing everything.
We know all we need to know about Sharjeel. He is stupid. Should he be in jail? No. He should be running amok thus helping the BJP to win elections.
This is where faith as the foundational building block of community and individual development comes into play.
Christians and Hindus and Jews have Faith. Sadly, if Muslims try to kill them, they may retaliate. This is bad for the economy and thus bad for everybody. That's why it is worth locking up nutters like Sharjeel.
Iqbal was one of the few philosophers who attempted to synthesize this post-Newtonian scientific knowledge with questions of faith.
Islam did that long long ago by making the insha/khabar (imperative/alethic), with Scripture being wholly imperative, and alam-al-amr/alam-al-khalq distinction. This is the workaround for Darwin.
I am referring here of course to the ontological and epistemological questions raised by the 20th century revolutions in physics—relativity and quantum physics—and the ways in which it shattered metaphysical assumptions of materialist schools of thought as well as most religious schools of thought.
This is ignorant nonsense. What happened was that empirical evidence challenged the 'aether theory'. This in turn opened the door to what Einstein called 'Mach's principle'. Crucial experiments and empirical observations continue to drive paradigm shifts. Nobody gives a shit about 'metaphysical assumptions' or whether you are a good Muslim or Jew or whatever.
To name a few important texts, for a critique of materialism and determinism one must read Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science by Werner Heisenberg.
No. Heisenberg himself thought that God knew the position of subatomic particles. This is perfectly compatible with physicalism which is a variety of deterministic materialism.
one of the founders of quantum physics. For an argument in support of the mystical thought, read What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell and Mind and Matter, both by Erwin Schrodinger, another founding figure of quantum physics.
Who took an interest in Vedanta. But his views have been overtaken by something like the law of increasing functional information.
Further, I’d urge you to see The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics by Max Jammer (specifically its chapter “The Philosophical Background of Nonclassical Interpretations”) to understand the influence of the 19th-century Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard—the Danish precursor of existentialism and neo-orthodox theology—on Niels Bohr, another of the pioneering quantum physics scientists.
Sharjeel does not understand that philosophy or religion or politics or ideology didn't initiate or change anything. The Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 together with technological advances driven by commercial and military considerations did the rest.
Further, read the letters of Kurt Godel—arguably the greatest mathematician of the 20th century—between 1946 and 1966 for an enunciation of his Christian, monotheistic faith.
Wholly irrelevant. His proof of God was flawed.
A summary can be found in A Logical Journey: From Godel to Philosophy, a 1996 essay by Hao Wang. For Godel’s engagement with general relativity, read Godel Meets Einstein: Time Travel in the Godel Universe.
Again irrelevant. Still at least the fucker isn't quoting Zakir Naik.
And for an early Islamic reaction especially to relativity and evolution, one must go through Iqbal’s Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (1930), Javid Nama (or The Book of Eternity, 1932) and Saqi Nama (or The Book of the Winebringer, 1935).
Rubbish! Iqbal was a shithead. He didn't know Science. Also, because he didn't know Arabic, he could say little about the concept of 'barzakh'.
I am cramming these pages with references because
you are a Bihari buffalo who wants to be considered smart by other Bihari buffaloes.
I want you to enquire and engage with my ideas for themselves.
Your ideas are shit.
My words are not mere ramblings but philosophical and historical questions rooted in my reading of science, theology and history.
Shite from before the war.
There is so much to say and explain about these theories that I cannot do presently. I shall, however, try to write in more detail in future.
You wasted your life. It is too late to catch up.
By the time I graduated from IIT Bombay, I had made up my mind to study philosophy.
Because you were wholly ignorant of it.
My summer internship in Copenhagen in 2009 also provided some exposure to western universities and the Scandinavian model of welfare states. I had a long conversation about this with Amitabha Sanyal, my favorite professor and project guide. He encouraged me to take up philosophy and gifted me The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler.
So, even his professors were unaware of any of the new mathematical ideas which gained currency in the Sixties and which underlie the IT revolution. The fact is problems of concurrency, complexity, computability and categoricity have fundamentally changed Epistemology. Everybody doing useful work is a pragmatist in practice. Everybody teaching empistemology is a useless wanker.
Turn to history
I applied for PhD in dozens of American universities but all of them said I needed to have a master’s in philosophy.
He still doesn't have one. But he thinks he is a great philosopher.
I decided to go to Egypt to study Islamic theology and Arabic at Al-Azhar University but the Arab Spring stalled that plan in 2011.
I'd have suggested applying for a Saudi scholarship.
So I took up a placement offer in Bangalore and started my corporate job
without having any intention of doing well in it.
while continuing to study philosophy and Islamic theology. In 2012, I appeared for the MPhil/PhD in Philosophy entrance for Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). I qualified for the viva, where the faculty appreciated my attempt. But they asked me to come back next year since I didn’t have a proposal. By then, however, something transformed and I turned to history instead.
Perhaps his father thought JNU would be a launchpad for his useless son to get into Bihari politics.
My mind had always been conflicted, coming from a scientific background.
Code monkey background.
Twentieth-century physics, as discussed above, is a philosophical tinderbox for the religious as well as the irreligious
No. It is wholly unimportant. It turned out that Philosophy was useless and 'Scientific Method' was neither scientific nor methodical.
but for a community that’s been a victim of Partition
because it couldn't make the majority community a victim and decided against migrating to the 'land of the Pure'
as well as majoritarian politics and violence,
of the sort he tried to incite
and as a son of a politician who dedicated his life against such forces,
by joining Nitish at a time when he was an ally of the BJP.
South Asian history and its fault lines were part of my daily life in a very conscious way.
A very stupid and useless way.
I had started learning German in 2011. By 2013, I was deep into 20th-century Germany and the history of fascism.
Bihari buffaloes can't go deep into any subject.
It tilted the balance in favor of history. I realized the philosophical and socio-political questions of the nature of human existence and social justice, of casteism in India and the rise of nationalism, of majoritarianism, Partition and minority rights—the most urgent questions I was seeking answers to—were historical.
The Muslims had once dominated North India. Then they lost dominance. Why? They were stupid, ignorant, and- whenever possible- an active menace to their neighbours.
Soon I left the corporate world to join JNU for a master’s in modern history. A parttime job paid me Rs 25,000 a month, a mere fraction of what I earned previously.
Bihari buffaloes are downwardly mobile.
But tragedy struck right after—my father was diagnosed with stomach cancer in January 2014 and my second and third semesters were spent at Delhi’s Rajiv Gandhi Cancer Institute. When I asked my father if I should leave JNU and find a corporate job again, he prohibited me saying, “Your money will not save me.” It was my uncle (my mother’s brother) who took care of all the expenses as my father, despite being a powerful figure, earned just enough to keep the household running. His possessions included a total of two vehicles, two rifles
because when it comes to killing kaffirs, one gun is never enough?
and a shop. He didn’t own a house. If not for my uncle, I would have had to abandon my studies and find a job. I will never be able to repay him (an engineer in the state government, he has since retired).
Hopefully, this cretin will be released soon and can trigger some nice communal riots and ethnic cleansing.
My mother had been a patient and sacrificing partner of my father and she wanted me to go back to my previous career. She weighed in, asking my father to tell me to go back. But my father told her, “Let him be. He will write the history of our struggles.”
He is a footnote in the history of the stupidity of the Bihari buffalo.
In May 2014, my father was watching television in the hospital when Narendra Modi was sworn in as prime minister. “Sharjeel, you should leave India,” he said. “Go to the United States, study there. If you stay here, you’ll join politics. It will be a struggle, and they’ll send you to jail.”
Fair point. Rahul had funked it. Modi would repeat his success as CM of Gujarat. Nitish would go back to the BJP.
I thought it was his paternal instinct, because he wouldn’t be around to protect me.
More to the point, he didn't have a political godfather who could protect his idiot son.
I was such a naive young man.
Stupid is the mot juste.
He knew the world better than I. He even knew me better than I. He knew I was stubborn and opinionated enough to crash headlong into this emerging fascist ecosystem.
i.e. the Justice system. Did you know that the majority of Judges and police officers in Hindu majority India are Hindu?! That is blatant majoritarianism a.k.a Fascism! No Muslim should ever be arrested for any crime. Let some innocent Hindu be convicted in their stead.
Not that he would have prohibited me, but he saw it coming.
If he hadn't made money, he too was a failure. Things of that sort can be hereditary you know.
While I hardly attended classes that year, I wrote tutorials, made software (the small salary was still a lot), and read to my father in the hospital. I remember reading a book on the Iranian revolution and listening to his comments on the events as he recalled his youth.
Oh. The family is Shia. That's why he didn't want to go to Saudi Arabia.
He passed away in November.
I spent the next semester, my fourth, idly grieving. It was my worst semester in JNU. (I am particularly apologetic to Janaki Nair, one of my professors. I took a course and a seminar but did nothing except reading the whole of Tipu Sultan’s Persian diary.)
Nair had her own problems. Her pension was withheld pending an inquiry into 'misconduct'. The Left was being pushed out of JNU thanks to the antics of people like Sharjeel.
A father’s lessons
Coming back to my father, I learned two things from him. One, that Partition led to a systemic exclusion of Muslims in the Indian polity
thanks to Jinnah. That's why this nutter idolizes him. But Jinnah got to be the Governor General of the country he created. If this nutter succeeds in provoking another ethnic cleansing, where will he go? Pakistan won't take him. Iran? Maybe. But then he'd be executed as an Israeli spy. T
and that Jinnah was right in his demands against centralization and for a true federal structure and minority rights.
He demanded and got Pakistan where minorities had the right to either be beaten to death or raped to death.
And, two, that it’s not a democracy if we have only one side to vote for.
It's not a democracy if Muslims are the majority though the Army may pretend otherwise from time to time.
That is why he said that both the JDU and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) should be strong and competing forces. Otherwise, if one side was left open for the BJP with no strong leaders and parties to keep it in check, then however good the RJD alliances may be, Muslims will not be their voters but their “slaves.”
Muslims should be slaves to this nutter. He is the Jinnah who will lead them to a new 'Pure land' at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
The first lesson about Partition and Jinnah led me to the theoretical quest I’m currently following.
I suppose his call to cut off Assam from the rest of India was his attempt to force a Partition.
The second and more practical lesson about electoral politics has become more evident and urgent in the last decade as Muslims have lost political agency in almost all of India, except probably Tamil Nadu and Kerala and to a lesser extent Andhra and Bihar. Even in Bengal, the emergence of the BJP means we cannot be picky.
Why does this nutter not mention Owaisi?
It is based on these two lessons from my father that I have been reading and doing research and finding people invested in similar subjects.
Useless JNU jhollawallahs.
Both my MPhil and PhD are about violence inflicted on Indian Muslims.
In other words, they are propaganda, not works of scholarship.
Why this line of enquiry is of utmost urgency is visible today around us—the loss of political agency of Muslims is not accidental.
Owaisi has plenty of agency. Abdullah is a C.M. This nutter lost political agency because he was shit at politics. But he also lost agency as an IT maven or a post-grad scholar because he was stupid and did stupid shit.
It is systemic and historical, just that its most pernicious manifestation has emerged in the post-1990s era because of the alignment of many global and local variables of polity and economy.
Sharjeel was cool with ethnic cleansing of Muslims under Nehru. He was very happy with ethnic cleansing of Hindus from the Vale of Kashmir in the Nineties. Then there was a War on Terror and 1.3 million mainly Muslim people were killed and tens of millions were displaced. Sharjeel thinks this is very pernicious.
Paying lip service to equality and secularism is not enough.
It is a waste of time.
Reducing everything to class is also problematic.
Why not get a job instead?
The only way forward is through realizing that systemic change is necessary to restore agency to Muslims and other minorities of India.
But non-Muslims may exercise their agency to ethnically cleanse jihadi minorities. Why does Sharjeel worship Jinnah and wish to repeat his mistake? Jinnah could emigrate to Pakistan. Indian Muslims will not be welcomed there even if they want to go to that shithole.
And for this reason, Jinnah is more relevant today than he was in 1947, when he was anticipating the contradicting tendencies of Brahmanical forces
Nehru was a Brahmin. Patel wasn't, thank God.
and the alienation of Muslims in the narrative of “secular” Gandhian nationalism, which according to both Jinnah and Iqbal was not fundamentally different from Brahmanical revivalism with its imagined nationalist history and a tendency towards centralization and majoritarianism aided by a large section of capitalists.
But Jinnah and Iqbal had shit for brains. Pakistan is a shithole.
(For more, read Aakar Patel on the centralizing tendencies of the Congress and the possibility of a better future had true federalism been adopted, the kind that Muslim leaders such as Jinnah had hoped for.)
If you love Aakar so much, why don't you marry him?
The only lacuna in Jinnah’s political expression seems to be his silence on the issue of caste among Muslims, ostensibly because in the context of impending decolonization and Hindu consolidation in the Congress, the most urgent task was to counter centralization and majoritarianism, which required some kind of consolidation of Muslims.
Hilarious! One third of sub-continental Muslims were left on the wrong side of the border. There was no consolidation. There was Partition. Then Bangladesh went its own way and Mujahirs in Pakistan started getting it in the neck.
Representation and the Muslim League
What was anticipation then has become stark reality today. For Jinnah, the Congress party’s secularism was essentially a tool to silence and exclude Muslims and other minorities.
For Indian Muslims, Jinnah was the dick who fucked them in the ass.
Recall his assertion about secular majoritarianism and its attempt to erase other identities: “Democracy does not give one community the right to rule over another through the ballot box.”
Being Muslim, and having military or mob power, means killing kaffirs or chasing them away. Sadly, non-Muslims can do this equally well.
About Jinnah, historian Joya Chatterjee writes in Shadows at Noon (page 67): “From 1906 … until … he died … Jinnah remained a liberal constitutionalist with a rare talent for negotiation.
Not for Indian Muslims. Thanks to Jinnah, they were fucked. True, non-Muslims in Pakistan were equally fucked. J.N Mandal, Jinnah's law minister, had to run away to India. But that would have happened anyway because Muslim majorities kill non-Minorities unless there is a powerful King or Viceroy or Dictator to prevent those fools from killing the golden goose.
… What changed … in the 1930s and 40s was not Jinnah but the Congress whose leadership became ever more insistent that it represented the entire nation. … Its leadership saw less reason to conciliate those who rejected that claim. This more hegemonic stance drove out those, Jinnah among them, who believed that constitutional safeguards were necessary for minorities in Indian circumstances and that there were identities other than “Indian” that demanded space, recognition and respect. It proved impossible in the end for the arch negotiator to bring about a compromise with the party (Congress) which would not bend.”
In 1937, when elected provincial administrations were formed, it became obvious that Indians were shit at running things. There was no point keeping the country together if it was bound to turn into a shithole. You may as well support some nutter of your own community who could do the job just as well.
You could also read Iqbal’s presidential address at the All-India Muslim Conference, 1932:
if you have Pakistani citizenship- sure. But if you are an Indian Muslim, what is the point? Pakistan won't give you citizenship even if you claim you are being persecuted by the Hindus. Any way, Pakistan is currently a worse shithole than India.
“Congress leaders claim that they are the sole representatives of the peoples of India. The last round-table conference made it abundantly clear that they were not. This they (the Congress) naturally resent. … They have therefore started the present campaign … to defeat a pact which they fear may find a place in the coming constitution, and to force the government to settle the matter of minorities with the Congress alone. The Congress resolution … made it perfectly clear that since the government had refused to regard Mahatma Gandhi as the sole representative of the country, the Congress decided on Civil Disobedience. How can then a minority join a campaign which is directed as much against itself as against the government?”
In Kerala there is still a Muslim League. But there was no separatism there. In North India, there is no Muslim League. If the place is 'dar ul harb' do 'hijrat'. Try jihad, and the majority will slaughter you. This is also true of Muslims in Europe and America. Reading Jinnah & Iqbal isn't going to magically make Muslims the majority. London has a Muslim mayor. Is Sadiq Khan reading Iqbal or Jinnah? No. Sharjeel is. But Sharjeel has shit for brains and is rotting in jail. Khan has just been knighted by the King.
Sharjeel is right that Indian Muslims want Muslims to rule India. But they also understand that they will lose if they start any rough stuff. One final point. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was right when he said reading Urdu poetry rots your brains. Vid
For instance, read Iqbal on Gautam Buddha:
Qaum ne paigham-e Gautam ki zara parwah na ki
Qadr pehchani na apne gauhar-e-yaqdana ki
The nation paid no heed to the Buddha’s message
Little did it understand the worth of the priceless pearl
India paid great head to the Buddha's message for over a thousand years. That is why invading Muslims took so much trouble rooting it out.
Or his words on Guru Nanak:
Phir uthi tauheed ki sadaa Punjab se
Hind ko ik mard-e kamil ne jagaya khwab se
Once more has a monotheistic banner been raised in Punjab
India has been raised from slumber by a saintly man
Iqbal lurved Ranjit Singh- right?
I clarify again that I am neither essentializing any religious community nor passing judgements on individuals.
Nor are you saying anything sensible.
I am merely discussing the conceptual categories. I agree with Iqbal’s articulation of that delicate idea:
Kafir-e bedar dil pish-e sanam
Beh zi dindari ki khuft andar haram
The pagan idol worshipper with a living heart
Is better than the religious man who sleeps in the haram
Iqbal was wrong. The ahl al Suffah slept in the Medinan mosque. They were better than the pagans with whom they fought. It must be said, even the most boorish Bihari buffalo can't plumb the depths of Pakistani logic.
As Ahmad Faraz said:
Main kat girun ki salamat rahun yaqin hai mujhe
Ki ye hisaar-e-sitam koi to girayega
Tamam umr ki iza-nasibiyon ki qasam
Mere qalam ka safar rayegan na jayega
No matter I’m slain or I survive, I believe
This cruel siege will be broken one day
And the tortured destinies of a lifetime bear witness
The journey of my words will not go astray
The fucker ended up as Musharraf's poet laureate. Sadly, the Pakistanis don't want Sharjeel. He is a Bihari buffalo. Let him rot in an Indian jail. He is merely a talker. How many kaffirs has he killed? None. Duffer!
