48 5 august 2019By Mani Shankar Aiyar
W
hen, seven decades
after Independence,
the eminent grandson
of former President
Zakir hussain, feels the need to explain
“What am I as a Muslim?” we have to
ask ourselves where as a nation have we
gone wrong.
The founding fathers of our Repub-
lic ‘anchored democracy in India on
religious toleration and secularism,
and ensured that India belonged to all
Indians irrespective of their religious
beliefs’ [Jawaharlal Nehru by Rudrangshu
Mukherjee]. Indeed so ingrained was
religious pluralism in the Indian mind
that immediately after realising his goal
of ‘two nations’, Mohammed ali Jinnah,
in his inaugural address to the Pakistan
constituent assembly, had this to say
about the two communities he had earlier
claimed were two incompatible nations:
“...every one of you, no matter to what
community he belongs...is first, second
and last a citizen of this state with equal
rights, privileges, and obligations ...I can-
not emphasise this too much...in course
of time all these angularities of majority
and minority communities...will van-
ish...you are free to go to your temples,
you are free to go to your mosques or to
any other place of worship in this state
of Pakistan. You may belong to any reli-
gion, caste or creed—that has nothing
to do with the business of the state...you
will find that in course of time hindus
would cease to be hindus, and Muslims
would cease to be Muslims, not in the
religious sense...but in the political sense,
as citizens of the state.”
It was a speech that could have been
made by nehru or dr ambedkar. But
within a week of this noble pronounce-ment, Pakistan began voiding itself of
its minorities. a few months later, there
were few left to ‘go to their temples’ or to
their gurdwaras. Why did this happen?
despite Jinnah? Or because of him?
Both, I think, is the answer. This once-
upon-a-time ‘ambassador of hindu-
Muslim unity’ had unleashed forces he
neither comprehended nor controlled.
The rest, as they say, is history.
India’s principal freedom fighters,
on the other hand, refused to vindicate
Jinnah by devising a ‘hindu India’ in
juxtaposition to a ‘Muslim Pakistan’. For
so many decades did main-
stream India pride itself on being
a secular Republic and adhere
to that fundamental principle
that even when Jayaprakash
narayan cobbled together the
Janata Government after deci-
sively defeating Indira Gandhi,
the Government broke down
within two years (1977-79) on
the key nation-building question
of ‘double membership’, that is, whether
India’s first-ever non-congress Govern-
ment could continue to contain those
whose primary allegiance was to the Rss
and its poisonous advocacy of ‘hindutva’.
It was not Indira who brought down
Morarji. It was secularism—as understood
and subscribed to by all Indians barring
the small minority committed to savarkar
and Golwalkar, who decided that the
Janata Government would have to go un-
less it stopped co-habiting with the Rss.
alas, that unshakeable national
consensus and commitment to secular-
ism as the cornerstone of our nationhood
has been weakening since the 1980s. The
BJP’s decisive victories in two successive
general elections, the second time withan increased majority, and its capture, by
fair means and foul, of a huge majority of
state governments, has rendered ‘secular-
ism’ a bad word in the lexicon of much of
the political class (although two-thirds of
our electorate are yet to declare them-
selves for the alternative Idea of India
embodied in the word ‘hindutva’).
Prime Minister Modi and his cohort
are, with increasing success, engaged in
fulfilling the ‘two nation’ theory of Jin-
nah and the Muslim League which held
(and holds) that our sub-continent and
its historical and civilisational heritage
show that far from being
the composite state that our
freedom fighters and found-
ing fathers envisaged, we do
in fact constitute two separate
nations in which the minority
is subordinated to the major-
ity and survives at the sweet
will of, and on the conditions
imposed by, the majoritarian
state, in keeping with Gol-
walkar’s injunction that Muslims “can
have no place in the national life unless
they abandon their differences, adopt
the religion, culture and language of the
nation and completely merge them-
selves in the national Race”.
after all, the expression ‘two nations’
was first coined by neither allama Iqbal
nor Rahmat ali nor Mohammed ali
Jinnah but by none other than vinayak
damodar savarkar who then went on to
state infamously in nagpur on august
15th, 1943 that he entirely agreed with
Jinnah that India comprised two nations
and not one. so, Modi’s drive to hindu-
tva is fulfilling not only Jinnah’s dream
but also those of his mentors—savarkar
and Golwalkar.DiviDeD we Fall
What’s it like being a Muslim in today’s India?
Salman Khurshid takes a personal journey with
a political message
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