Two Catalysts Which Have Changed India And US For Good

Two Catalysts Which Have Changed India And US For Good

                                                                                       Saeed Naqvi

What will the world look like after the coronavirus induced shut down? I am not in possession of a crystal for global survey but I can activate my intuition on the basis of two stories I have covered. I was in the US for the 2016 Presidential elections and I have followed the 2020 drama within the Democratic Party. In both the campaigns Democrats have been in convulsions not to select a nominee but to keep out the one they do not want – Bernie Sanders. And now they are all mimicking the Sanders platform. The coronavirus has brought out in bold relief, the idea of Bernie Sanders as the panacea for the general distress. The platform the senator from Vermont stood on was total anathema to the great American establishment, its soul torn between Mammon and Joe McCarthy. The pandemic has brought the powerful establishment to its knees. People now matter and democracy begins to look like one. Neither the democrats nor the republicans will ever mention Sanders by name. That would be like eating crow. But they are all furtively lifting the Sanders manifesto. The idea of Sanders in today’s context is larger than the possible nomination of Joe Biden.

In the Indian context, the idea of Shaheen Bagh, has likewise acquired a post pandemic, durability. The statement issued by “Shaheen Bagh protests” speaks for itself. “As we continue our struggle to be heard by our government, we wish to reiterate that we have merely suspended public gatherings, our movement is on. We will use other means to continue to resist CAA, NPR, NRC. For our detractors, it would be a sobering exercise to compare our protests with any in recent history.”

“Shaheen Bagh all over the country now soars with our strong resolve and blooms in our hearts. Each one of us is now a Shaheen Bagh.”

The authors of the statement, from protest sites across the country, sign off with “Inquilab”, which means “revolution”, a term Bernie Sanders’ supporters have been using to describe their challenge. And in the American context, revolutionary his platform is: Medicare for all, $15 an hour as minimum wages, expanding social security, no tuition fees, housing for everyone who needs it.” Does this list sound all that outlandish in the time of coronavirus? What explains the eruption of hashtags, and twitters:  “We deserve Sanders.”

This chant by the voters in total defiance of the Democratic establishment is not surprising. I shall never forget the banners in Philadelphia explaining why Trump won. “If you make Bernie Sanders impossible, you make Trump inevitable.”

It was a prescient statement. During the 2016 campaign as in 2020 when Sanders was on a roll, he had sensed the electorate’s mood. It was totally against the Washington centered establishment. While Sanders was hammering away at the Establishment from the Left, Donald Trump was doing exactly the same from the Right. When even Jeb Bush failed the nomination bid, the Trump candidacy seemed inevitable. At this stage, Laura Bush, the former first lady, let the cat out of the bag. “Let’s support Hillary Clinton then”, she squealed. In other words, the Bush family, the central column of the Republicans, sees Hillary Clinton as a member of the same club which goes under the label “Washington Establishment”. The same discredited Establishment that electorates everywhere are disgusted by. They find themselves hemmed in by two party systems serving the same corporate interests.

Even though it was universally accepted that Hillary Clinton was untrustworthy, indeed a liar, the Democratic party hierarchy chose to keep its corporate interests in humour even if it meant electoral defeat.

Three months before the 2016 election, film maker Michael Moore was prescient. “This election is only about who gets out to vote, who gets the most rabid supporters – the kind of candidate who inspires people to get out of bed at 5.00am on election day because a wall needs to be built. Muslims are killing us! Women are taking over! First in line with the polls.”

Moore was emphatic: “Those who vote for Clinton are those who would do so only to keep Trump out. They are not running towards someone they love; they are running away from someone they dislike.” Therefore personal persuasion on a large level was required and it wasn’t available to Clinton. “Those depressed at Bernie having been grounded would need extraordinary persuasion to walk to the polling booths to vote for Hillary.”

Had the Democratic Establishment learnt a lesson from their 2016 reversal, they would have seen the popular surge for Sanders as an asset. But they have once again produced a candidate (most likely) whom Laura Bush from the other side of the aisle would reach out to in preference to Trump. It is a compelling speculation: would Laura Bush and the Democratic establishment have acquiesced in Trump rather than risk American capitalism in the hands of a Democratic Socialist?

And now look at the alchemy of coronavirus: even Trump is dusting up measures which Prof. Jean Cohen, a political theory expert at Colombia University, describes with great emphasis, “that’s not free market capitalism.” She offers descriptive choices: “regulated capitalism; interventionist state or Democratic Socialism.” Private profit making is making way for policies which serve the public good.”

Ed Murrow, the great CBS reporter, had single handedly, and successfully taken on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt against Americans who deviated from raw capitalism. Has Bernie Sanders altered the terms of the socialism-capitalism debate in the very citadel of capitalism?

In the same way, an apolitical movement spontaneously evolving at Shaheen Bagh, has the potential to tone down the shrill tenor of Indian politics. Coronavirus has cast a pall on all our lives but, as Shakespeare said, “There is a soul of goodness in all things evil, would men observingly distil it out.”

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Evolution From A Good Muslim To A Bad One: Really?

Evolution From A Good Muslim To A Bad One: Really?

                                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

In Nandita Das’ film, Manto, the great story writer, who loved Bombay beyond distraction, finds himself under pressure from family, in the midst of the post Partition carnage, to leave for Lahore. Shyam, film star and friend remarks “you are not such a Muslim that you have to leave for Pakistan.”

“Enough of a Muslim to be killed, in a riot”, retorts Manto. The irony is that Manto was an atheist. Circumstances had imposed on his name an identity he was otherwise not comfortable with.

Haven’t some of us experienced this identity superimposition on the basis of our names? A few days ago a former Foreign Secretary took my breath away: he addressed me in tones that would have flattered the Sheikh of a Muslim seminary. In such extreme circumstances would you blame me if I am tempted to reintroduce myself. “Look that is not me at all.” In fact, what I wrote after the Moradabad riots of 1982, is what I am, give or take an inflection or two. Prior to that date, no journalist had ever taken that approach to the theme. Pardon me for repeating what I wrote 38 years ago. It may help to beat the current amnesia.

“Whenever events like Moradabad take place some of my friends turn to me with sympathy which generally leaves me cold because I guess I am a minority in my own community for reasons more than one.

My credentials as a good Muslim are quite as suspect as Ghalib’s were. “I am half a Muslim”, he said when, in the course of a litigation, a magistrate asked him to declare his religion. “I drink but I do not eat pork”.

However, my children generally describe themselves as Muslims while filling up school admission forms, although I wonder why such questions should ever be asked. Before you hastily trace my attitude to my anglicized education let me dispel the notion straightaway. Yes, I did have my schooling in an Anglo-Indian institution of sorts in Lucknow, but the home in which I grew up was a  deeply religious one even though the likes of the Imam currently in the news would not have been allowed within miles of it.

My grandfather, like Dryden, always maintained that “Priests of all religious are the same”, but some he respected, even befriended for their scholarship and conversation. I remember sitting through many a theological discourse, with Maulana Nasir-ul-Millat holding court; among the participants was one Mr Gurtu, a Kashmiri Pandit.

A moulvi of little distinction was hired ostensibly to brush up my arithmetic but actually to put me through my first paces in ‘namaz’. His efforts at proselytization were supplemented by my mother’s; she augmented our meager library with biographies of the prophets and the great Imams.

There was a quaint little mosque in the compound of our house in the village, Mustafabad, near Rae Bareli. Since we visited the village only during school holidays, marriages, deaths and births, it was not difficult to maintain a certain discipline and be seen in the mosque, at reasonable frequency, often only to please grandfather.

We were groomed into believing that Islam was the most dynamic of religions but we found it equally easy to accept that it was Islam’s interaction with a greater civilization that resulted in Dara Shikoh, Rahim, Kabir, Amir Khusro, Raskhan, Nazir Akbarabadi, Ghalib, and Anis. Nowhere in the Muslim world is there a monument, like the Taj or Fatehpur Sikri.

Folks these days are ignorant of the 18^th century poet Nazir Akbarabadi’s poem “kya kya likhoon main Krishna Kanhaiya Ka baal pan” (How should I write about the beautiful childhood of Lord Krishna) or Mohsin Kakorvi’s “Samte Kashi se chala janibe Mathura badal” “jab talak Brij mein Kanhaiya hai yeh Khulne ka nahin” (The clouds are moving ecstatically from Kashi to Mathura and the sky will remain covered with the beautiful clouds as long as there is Krishna in Braj). These lines were written by the Muslim poet to celebrate the birthday of Prophet Mohammad?

In the region I was raised in, ‘Sohar’ was a song sung during a woman’s confinement. My mother’s favourite sohar was “Allah Mian, hamre bhaiya ka diyo Nandlal” (Oh my Allah, give my brother a son like Lord Krishna).

What does all this nostalgia has to do with “contemporary realities”, a friend asks.

Well, I guess I am no pandit but I do know a bit about “contemporary realities”. I know how Partition ruptured the fabric, bits of which I still keep with me. I also know about the status reversal experienced by the Muslims in independent India, particularly with the decline of the feudal order. It was the self-confident Muslim elite which found it easy to extend patronage to the beautiful aspects of Hindu culture: after all, Krishna Leela was preserved in its entirely in the Kathak style evolved in the Muslim courts.

With the decay of the feudal order, the lower middle class, always given to religiosity gained upward mobility. It is upon this class that the clergy dominated parties feed and which forms the central nervous system of the sort of fundamentalism on show. I also know of a certain pan-Islamic sentiment among the Muslims and I guess that the RSS does not like it. All this and more I have been aware of for quite some time.

It must, therefore, be a considerable intellectual failure on my part that in spite of all this I am unable to disengage myself from the folks who moulded me in my formative years. The credo they lived by is no longer part of the contemporary ethos.

Call it private grief, call it indifference, or both, but I find it, increasingly difficult to have a readymade response to Moradabad, Jamshedpur or Aligarh. And when friends turn to me with sympathy when such madness erupts, I feel a sort of numbness and have a strange feeling that they are addressing the wrong person.”

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Idea of India: Two Former Ambassadors Skirmish On Shaheen Bagh

                                                                             Saeed Naqvi

The Idea of India is being fiercely contested within Hindu society. Rampaging communalism is an offshoot. The latest to pick up the glove are two senior members of the Indian Foreign Service.

Deb Mukharji, 1964 batch, former High Commissioner to Bangladesh, in an article in Kolkata’s The Telegraph, applied the image of the falcon, which is what Shaheen means, to the Shaheen Bagh movement. The bird that soared, is his preferred simile. This invited a scowl from Kanwal Sibal, 1966 batch, and former Foreign Secretary. “Incidentally, falcons are predators.” Sibal’s riposte appeared on the IFS blog. So unabashed was he on the secularism-nationalism debate that Mukharji felt constrained to challenge him, rapier in hand, on the very same blog.

What should a discerning non-Hindu’s stance be towards conversations of this nature which are taking place at numerous levels with a frequency gathering in momentum? First, consider evidence.

Justice S. Muralidhar of the Delhi High Court is transferred within hours of his slamming the Delhi police over continuous violence for three days, its failure to register FIRs against hate speeches by BJP’s Kapil Mishra and others. Arbitrarily transferred he might have been, but the farewell to him by Delhi lawyers showed record attendance, with men and women in black gowns leaning over the railings. The optics proved who won.

Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s government plasters city walls in Lucknow with poster size photographs of activists in the anti CAA protests. The Yogi is determined to “Name and Shame” the protesters. The entire operation is on the basis of allegations – no proofs.

Chief Justice of Allahabad High Court Govind Mathur takes suo moto notice of the outrage and raps the UP government on the knuckles. The intra Hindu tussle is at its fiercest in U.P. Little Wonder, retired High Court Judge, Rakesh Sharma brings out his arsenal. He takes aim at the sitting Chief Justice. Justice Sharma apparently nurses a grouse against Lucknow’s “cultured tehzibyafta” citizens who indulged in what he swears was violence which caused damage to property and, according to him, deserve punishment. He comes to the Chief Minister’s assistance with his “tehzibyafta” prose. “The competent Revenue authority collector DM Lucknow has several powers, including coercive action of attachment sale of property through Dug Dugee.” Here you have an Honourable former Judge, retired much before the Yogi dreamt of Chief Ministership, anticipating a Bharat free of jihadists and tukde-tukde gangs. “Aage, aage dekhiye hota hai kya” Mir Taqi Mir had warned.

As I have always maintained, in this orchestra the first violin was played in 1947. That musical score is now approaching the loud clashing of cymbals reminiscent of Wagner who, incidentally, was Hitler’s favourite composer. But the crescendo and the de crescendo in this musical score continue to fluctuate. Justice Muralidhar and Justice Mathur are standing firmly behind the Republic. Those opposed to them are out to alter the nature of the Republic.

The Mukharji-Sibal exchange is a summing up of the epic debate which has the nation in thrall. Since both are eloquent on their respective positions, let them speak. Mukharji sees three distinct takeaways from Shaheen Bagh.

“First, the Muslims as a community have emerged from a state of withdrawal and firmly demanded their rights as citizens of India, without seeking any crutches of political support.

Second, Muslim women have liberated themselves from the taboos that kept them confined to their homes in large parts of India. Veiled women have been able to look their interlocutor in the eye and firmly claim that neither “mard” nor “maulvi” would stand in the way of their demanding a just future.

Whatever the eventual political outcome of their demands, the liberation of the spirit of the community, and its women in particular, is here to stay.

Third, the women of Shaheen Bagh have reclaimed what others had ceded to an aggressive nationalism of violence, hatred and divisiveness — our flag and our national anthem. And the nation has been reminded that the ultimate guarantor of our freedom is the Constitution of India.”

Enter Sibal, frothing with anger. He furnishes what to some might sound like a non-sequitur.

“You have completely overlooked the hatred and poison injected into the people by the so-called tukde tukde gang, the adulation of terrorists, Owaisi's rants, those of the leader of the Bhim Sena, recent statements about emulating Shaheen Bagh and cutting off our northeast by Muslims who form a majority in the Chicken Neck area, the attempt to block the Jafrabad metro area in the light of the seeming success of the Shaheen Bagh that you extol, and, of course, Mamta Bannerjee's ravings.” 

Mukharji is determined not to let this go unchallenged. “I am disturbed by your comment about cutting off our North East by Muslims who form a majority in Chicken Neck area.” Having been posted to Bangladesh, Mukharji knows the vulnerability of Chicken’s Neck. He therefore asks with authority “But what is the Muslim connection?”

On Sibal’s tukde-tukde swipe, he is hard hitting. “When approached under RTI, the Home Ministry said they had no knowledge of any such entity.” He agrees with Sibal that India is not yet a fascist state, “but I think we are showing disturbing signs of a pre fascist one.”

This war within has had its share of martyrs too: rationalists like M.M. Kalburgi, Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and Gauri Lankesh, to name a few.

Participation in this epic Kurukshetra by Muslims like the Personal Boards have in the past helped exactly the forces which menace the nation today. Keep an equal distance from the Hindu who by himself is better situated to let hundred flowers bloom. Even more important is to keep the venerable Maulanas away, busy with matters of faith. Emulate the women of Shaheen Bagh who, guided by an intuitive and robust common sense, have been extraordinarily focused on the Constitution, national anthem and the flag. The larger society is sorting itself out.

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The Greatest Movement Since Independence But What’s Shaheen Bagh’s Future?

The Greatest Movement Since Independence But What’s Shaheen Bagh’s Future?

                                                                                          Saeed Naqvi

It would be unfair to compare the Shaheen Bagh anti CAA, NPR, NRC movement with mass mobilization efforts leading to independence. The movement has no Gandhi leading it. Its spontaneous expansion across the length and breadth of the country and locations across the seas is unprecedented.

As the movement completes its third month in the next few days, a degree of restlessness is discernable among those who have hovered on the margins and who are asking, sometimes in whispers, “What next?” The quest for the “next” on the part of a limited group, admittedly, gives a clue to their expectations. In their minds they had probably set targets which have either been achieved or are unachievable.

Surely the target was not to enable AAP to win in Delhi. Yes, the movement’s popularity across communities may well have helped blunt the saffron in the air. In other words, the atmosphere the movement generated helped the only party poised to defeat Hindutva.

By steering clear of all political parties, the movement has placed itself unassailably on a pedestal. It is clearing untraversed terrain. It may well have paved the way for a secularism of common aspirations which the British found necessary to snuff out after Hindus and Muslims had, in the words of Benjamin Disraeli, found a “common interest and a common cause” during the 1857 uprising. In his address to the House of Commons, Disraeli rebuked the administration in India. “Our Empire in India was, indeed, founded upon the old principle of divide et Empira (divide and rule)”. This “principle” had been lost sight of by the British in India making it possible for the “rebels” to very nearly defeat the British. If Disraeli were to be interpreted, the rebellion by Hindus and Muslims was the secularism of common aspirations. The confused vision of secularism India’s founding fathers accepted was profaned in electoral practice.

Shaheen Bagh and its affiliates, over a hundred of them across the country, some of these bearing the name Shaheen Bagh, has been a unique evolution. For the first time, Muslim women have defied all the stereotypes which portrayed them as timid, homebound and subjugated. They form the core of the protests everywhere, holding the national flag and reciting the preamble to the constitution with expert ease and speaking to the media with clarity and poise. University campuses are wholeheartedly in it.

The breakdown of a system of uninstitutionalized apartheid or separate development of communities has been a singular achievement of the movement. Communities which thought the worst of each other in the absence of any interaction are now sharing the same shamiana, chanting slogans for the protection of the constitution. No single event in recent history has revved up a secularism of common purpose on this scale. When I visited Shaheen Bagh earlier this week a regular langar, started by a group of Sikhs from Punjab, had become permanent at the protest site. Goodness, generosity, charity are infectious impulses. Muslim youth sweeping the site in the shadow of Guru Nanak poster is the kind of “kar sewa” which is mandatory for Sikhs at Gurudwaras. The media may not be deliriously ecstatic at the composition but I found it symbolically transformational. That every Gurudwara in Delhi opened its doors, including in the riot hit north east, harmonized with the mood that Shaheen Bagh has set.

The core of the protest movement, the women, have demonstrated extraordinary reserves of stamina. But equally on show is the lack of commitment on the part of exactly the left-of-centre groups who had initially boosted Shaheen Bagh by enthusiastic participation. Does it occur to these groups that their dwindling presence will at some point begin to dishearten the protesters?

Shaheen Bagh shunned political parties from pitching their banners on the podium. The parties in response were mean in their calculation: they saw no profit in strengthening a movement which guaranteed them no returns. The quest for “returns” was a little puzzling on the part of the parliamentary left. They have negligible presence in Delhi. The cussedness on show is the mirror image of the CPM’s stance in West Bengal: “to revive in the state we must target Mamata not the BJP.” Does not the BJP, in its Amit Shah avatar, pose an existential threat to the nation? Or is that, according to the politburo, dwarfed by the party’s desire to revive.

Left and progressive groups addressed a rally at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar last week against violence in North East Delhi. It went largely unnoticed. Supposing each one of the star speakers had taken time off on separate days to address the protesters at Shaheen Bagh, they would have given heart to the women who have begun to look over their shoulders, searching for the OB vans and the TV cameras which have left for other assignments elsewhere.

Even with a movement of such benign intent, AAP maintained a strict neutrality throughout the election campaign, just in case the BJP amplified even notional sympathy for Shaheen Bagh as an anti national association with “the little Pakistan”. “Tukre-tukre” or Pakistan may not be considerations keeping progressive Hindus from participating in the movement in states like UP, but it must be admitted that the protests are increasingly Muslim driven, particularly in UP. It would be unreasonable to expect T.N. Krishnan make en core appearances repeatedly on a movement which will soon enter its fourth month. How long, one wonders, will the BJP wait before resorting to brute police action. Will police action in Delhi and UP snuff out the idea which has taken root everywhere?

An unexpected menace the protest faces is Coronavirus which militates against groups huddled in one place. Protesters have to ponder that one.

In reasonable times one could have imagined Shaheen Bagh institutionalized as a permanent speaker’s corner, focused on Constitutional practice, a variation on the corner in London’s Hyde Park (and numerous locations across the globe) where even Karl Marx and George Orwell once spoke.

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