Author: Vinod Kumar
Publication: Kashmir Herald
Date: January 2003
URL: http://www.kashmirherald.com/featuredarticle/mushirulhasanandgujarat.html
Mushirul Hasan, an erudite man,
highly regarded in India's political and intellectual arena, in a recent
article (Strongman Politics, Indian Express, and November 27, 2002) has
compared Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat to Josef Goebbels of
Nazi Germany.
Then he goes on to lament that in
the upcoming elections in Gujarat, both the BJP and the Congress, are invoking
only the name of Patel - the first Home Minister of India. He chastises
Patel for "suspecting Muslims loyalty to India" and levels other anti-Muslim
charges against him. He then laments "that not one person made even passing
reference to Gandhiji or Jawaharlal Nehru, the principal architects of
the great Congress movement. But what was even more disturbing to him was
that even "the Congress has chosen to discard them during electioneering."
He thinks it is "a serious error of judgement… It is
vitally important to invoke shared tradition and religious plurality, and
to remind people of the values that Gandhi and Nehru stood during their
public life."
On Modi and Goebbels
Equating Modi with Goebbels is
too ridiculous to even deserve a comment. No sane person will even dream
of such an equation. I too will let it pass. It reflects more of the writer's
mindset than what Modi did or did not do. How I wish Hasan had lived in
Nazi Germany as a Jew?
On invoking Patel
Mushirul Hasan charges Patel of
suspecting the loyalty of the Muslims to India. Well, if he did, he was
not the first or the only one to do so.
It were the Muslim scholars who
had themselves declared that as per their religion a Muslim cannot owe
his allegiance to any nation, and specially a kafir nation. The very concept
of a nation goes against the basic precepts of Islam.
Muhammad Iqbal - the spiritual father
of Pakistan and a great Islamic thinker of the modern era wrote:
"Our essence is not bound to any
place;
The vigor of our wine is not contained
In any bowl; Chinese and Indian
Alike the shard that constitutes
our jar,
Turkish and Syrian alike the clay
Forming our body; neither is our
heart
Of India, or Syria, or Rum,
Nor any fatherland do we profess
Except Islam."
Iqbal is not unique in such opinion
about loyalty of Muslims to a nation state. I can go on to quote hundreds
of Muslim scholars who have expressed such sentiments.
Dr. Ali Muhammad Naqavi also observed
"nationalism is incompatible with Islam, both schools having two opposite
ideologies" and "the idea of nationalist Muslim is as absurd as that of
a 'religious communist' or 'capitalist Marxist." "Islam rejects the idea
that citizenship depends on birthplace. Islam asserts that it depends on
belief" he went on to write.
Jinnah in his presidential address
at the Annual convention of Muslim League at Lahore in 1940 had declared
that Hindus and Muslims can never "evolve a common nationality and this
conception of one Indian nation has gone far beyond the limits, and is
the cause of most of our troubles, and will lead India to destruction,
if we fail to revise our notions in time." The Muslims of India endorsed
Jinnah overwhelmingly (86.6%) in the elections in 1946 - that led to the
creation of Pakistan.
Ambedkar, in 1940 in his analysis
on the question of partition, raised question of the loyalty of the predominantly
Muslim army should an attack come from Afghanistan. "But suppose the Afghans
singly or in combination with other Muslim States march on India, will
these gatekeepers stop the invaders or will they open the gates and let
them in? This is a question that no Hindu can afford to ignore" he wrote.
Lala Lajpat Rai, as early as the
twenties of the last century, had raised similar doubts in a letter to
C R Das.
Then how can Patel, if he did question
the loyalty of the Muslims who were left behind in India, be faulted after
when 86.6 percent of them had voted for Muslim League on the platform of
Pakistan in 1946? Had the Muslim outlook changed in favor of India and
on the question of nationality in just a few years?
Were the Muslims who created Pakistan
and went there also not Indian Muslims?
On Invoking Gandhi and the Congress
It is rather laughable that today
the Muslims should invoke the name of Gandhi. Gandhi had staked his entire
political life on Hindu Muslim unity. He became the co-President (with
Maulana Mohammad Ali) of the Khilafat movement to revive the Khilafat which
had been abolished by a Muslim ruler of a Muslim country. Even though the
basic concept of the movement - Indian Muslims' loyalty first went the
Khalifa - ran against what Gandhi preached that Indian Muslims were Indian
first and they were loyal to India, he still garnered wide Hindu support
for the movement. He had hoped by "showing respect for the religion of
the Muslims, Hindus would obtain respect for their religion (and specially
an end to cow- slaughter) from Muslims in return."
How were the Hindus and Gandhi rewarded
with for this?
By Moplah riots, where the Hindus
were mowed down in ghastly massacres and conversion. And Muslim ulema had
the audacity to proclaim "if the Hindus converted to Islam to save their
lives, it cannot be called conversion by force."
There is good reason why even the
Congress does not invoke the name of Gandhi in Gujarat - the land of his
birth?
Gandhi had failed in the most important
mission of his life - Hindu Muslim unity and preventing partition of India.
It was Gandhi's ambition to be leader
of all Indians irrespective of their religion and caste. He came as a man
of ahimsa and he is so identified in the world.
The Hindus accepted him as their
leader but not the Muslims. Jinnah always called him a Hindu communal leader.
And the Muslims rejected him and his Congress party outright when the Nationalist
Muslim candidates forfeited their security deposit in many instances and
the Muslim League won every Muslim seat. His philosophy of Ahimsa was torn
into zillion pieces in the massacres of lacs of Hindus during partition.
What did Gandhi do to stop the Hindu
massacre? Pray?
How can even Congress - the party
of Gandhi invoke his name after having sent over half a million troops
to Kashmir to fight Islamic terrorism and having been the main force in
development of India's nuclear arsenal?
It is laughable for a Muslim to
invoke Gandhi's name today. And it is fully understandable for a Hindu
not to do so. Hindus have paid too heavy a price for their blind faith
in Gandhi. Anyway, there is not much of Gandhi that is followed in India,
or for that matter anywhere in the world other than paying lip service
to the concept of nonviolence. The world has yet to see a nation disband
its army and fight an invader or even social unrest within on Gandhian
nonviolence. India, too, is highly unlikely to confront Islamic terrorism
or an invasion by Pakistan by Satyagrah or by Dandi type march as Gandhi
did against the British and might have recommended had he been alive.