Author: Editorial
Publication: The Indian
Express
Date: December 23, 2000
Does Mamata Banerjee's
presence at Sonia Gandhi's iftar party and her absence at those hosted
by the prime minister and BJP president Bangaru Laxman earlier this week
add up to a rift between the Trinamool and the BJP? At her party, Sonia
Gandhi reportedly patted Banerjee on the cheek. That was enough for
political observers to wonder whether the Mahajot was coming about, after
all. What political signals may be gleaned from the Muslim attendance
at the iftar party that Vajpayee hosted a few days ago? While iftars have
traditionally been high on the calendar of events that are followed closely
by political chroniclers, there has surely been an escalation in interest
in them in recent times -- in direct proportion, perhaps, to the significance
of the "Muslim vote". With the Ayodhya issue back again on political
centrestage, it is no surprise, then, that the iftar party is one of the
most valued political barometers this season.
Signals of so many kinds
can be sent out from and read into the iftar party. The attendance,
thin or large, of ministers, babus, diplomats, and other VIPs is seen as
a measure of the waning or increasing clout of the host in circles that
matter. The presence of certain politicians and the staying away
of others is deemed a useful pointer to which way the political wind is
blowing and may yet blow. Most of all, though, competitive iftaring
is minority politics by a more festive name. In the television age,
iftars provide an instant and entirely painless way of demonstrating solidarity
with the minority community. They offer a ready-to-use platform from
which to posture to the Muslim Votebank. Basically, throwers of the
Capital's high-profile iftars are creatures of a reified, incestuous world.
They are not overly bothered by cumbersome questions such as these -- is
there even such a monolith out there which goes by that name? Is it influenced
at all by politics of such an obviously symbolic kind?
In all this, though,
there are those who rue that the iftar itself has transformed beyond recognition.
Time was when in the month of Ramzan, the fast was broken after the evening
prayer with a light meal, to be followed later by a heavier dinner -- the
empty stomach had to be given time to readjust. They were essentially
private and intimate occasions in which relatives and friends sometimes
participated. Delhi's political iftars, on the other hand, are unwieldy,
impersonal affairs that lay out rich designer feasts. In a larger
sense, the escalation in the number and scale of iftars also marks the
passing of an older way of living. The lifestyle of unselfconscious
participation by communities in each others' concerns and affairs has given
way to an ostentatious tokenism. The moment of breaking the fast
as a community has mutated into a PR exercise in which the togetherness
is a contrivance of the political kind.
