5 august 2019 http://www.openthemagazine.com 49
It is this that explains salman Khur-
shid’s pressing need to answer his own
question: “What am I as a Muslim?” he
sees his book, Visible Muslim, Invisible
Citizen: Understanding Islam in Indian
Democracy (Rupa; 320 pages; Rs495) as a
companion volume to shashi Tharoor’s
Why I am a Hindu. neither title would
have found any traction in the first six
decades of our Independence. so, what
has changed in the country to render
Tharoor’s work a best-seller and Khur-
shid’s will also doubtless follow? Well,
principally because the hindutva move-
ment launched in 1990 by advani’s Rath
Yatra has gathered so much momentum
that Modi’s Opposition flinches from
even using the word ‘secularism’ anddesperately searches for synonyms like
‘pluralism’ to mean the same thing. The
irony is that this amounts to ‘appease-
ment’ of the hindutvists. Instead of
boldly confronting them on the secular
ground, secularists are now trying to
show that non-BJP/Rss hindus are
more hindu than BJP/Rss hindus. That
is to concede half the battle before it
even begins. For Indian secularism has
never been anti any religion—sarva
dharm sambhaav. It has always been a
matter of respecting the right of others
to hold beliefs that you yourself may
not hold and having a special care for
the minority communities to ensure
their protection because while all forms
of communalism are to be combated,
given the imbalance of numbers in our
country, “majority communalism is
worse than minority communalism”, as
nehru unabashedly affirmed at the start
of our life as an independent nation.
Khurshid’s magisterial survey of
the condition of his community seven
decades after our constitution guaran-
teed equality of status to all communities
reveals with telling effect the vicissitudes
and travails that confront India’s minor-
ity Muslim community, aggravated by
India’s current descent into a majoritarian
state. These are the problems of citizen-
ship, refracted through the prism of issues
related to identity, dignity and security that
continue to plague the community.
equal citizenship is founded on the
imperative of ‘unity in diversity’, on
recognising that the alternative of ‘unity
through uniformity’ will lead only to the
disintegration of India. While hindutva
grants the right to be different to most
ethnicities, it demands to know why
Muslims should look differently, talk
differently, dress differently, eat differ-
ently, greet each other differently, and
subscribe to a different code of personal
law instead of conforming to what they
claim as the ‘national’ ethos, the ‘nation-
al’ norm. Thus, instead of a ‘cooperative
democracy that preserves self-esteem
and identity essentials for all citizens’,
Khurshid convincingly demonstrates
that both the public and political space
for Muslims is ‘shrinking’ as is the ‘intel-KhurshiD’s magisterial survey oF the
conDition oF his community reveals with
telling eFFect the travails that conFront
in Dia’s minority muslim community
saurabh singh