50 5 august 2019lectual and attitudinal space’ available to
the community. among the most useful
archival material he has retrieved is the
lively debate in the columns of The
Indian Express (March, 2018) that fol-
lowed upon Ramachandra Guha’s curi-
ous argument that Muslims would be
well advised to do away with the burkha
and the skull cap as outward symbols of
the religion to which they belong.
To push this agenda, salience is being
deliberately and viciously teased out
between Muslims and Pakistan. Repeat-
edly, the community is being put to more
and more absurd ‘loyalty tests’, when 70
years ago they passed the biggest loyalty
test of all by closing their ears to the siren
call of ‘Islam in danger’ and refusing to
go to Pakistan. ‘Why,’ asks Khurshid,
should today’s Indian Muslim ‘have to
answer for Partition and be asked to go to
Pakistan?’ For those who do not know or
choose to ignore the contribution of the
community to our Freedom Movement,
Khurshid painstakingly lists them out; to
those who choose to ask what the Indian
Muslim has done to build the modern
nationhood of independent India,
Khurshid provides a compendium of
distinguished Indian Muslims and their
contribution to different walks of life. Per-
haps the greatest of these contributions
has been to promote through poetry,
music, literature and the arts—all copi-
ously quoted—the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb
that has made India the envy of other
nations coping with diversity, a compos-
ite culture that is now, most regrettably,
being challenged and repudiated.
This repudiation of a shared heritage
opens the road to an assault on the
dignity of our fellow Muslim citizens.
Perverted stereotypes are trotted out of
the Muslim as a hidebound reaction-
ary, as an oppressor of women, as a
potential or actual terrorist. Khurshid
patiently puts all this in perspective, cit-
ing chapter and verse from not just the
holy texts of Islam but from all the great
literary sources and key Muslim leaders,
past and present, that testify to the high
respect in which they have traditionally
exalted beliefs other than their own. he
draws pointed attention to the Islamic
rendition of secularism in classical
arabic: ‘lakum dinakum waliya din’: ‘To
you your religion, to me mine,’ adding,
‘Meaningful co-existence is part of the
idea of India as much as of Islam.’
he gives detailed jurisprudential
analyses of key issues relating to Muslim
practices—triple talaq, the uniform civil
code, shah Bano and shayara Bano—ininterpreting matters of faith in the light
of the judicial injunction to keep in mind
‘constitutional morality’. drawing
attention to progressive attempts within
the Muslim community to undertake
social reform and keep at bay illiterate
mullahs and their unwarranted fatwas,
he deplores, however, the BJP’s attempts
to ‘use gender injustice to inflict injustice
on the Muslim’. Pointing out that ‘the
identity of individuals and groups have el-
ements of faith as well as social norms,’ he
underlines that ‘when identity is attacked
in its entirety, there is no occasion to pick
and choose between different aspects.’
as for the security of the commu-
nity, their concern began with advani’s
‘chariot of fire’—his Rath Yatra of 1990
that left burnt homes and dead bodies
in its wake. The demons that the Rath
Yatra unleashed led to the horror of the
demolition of the Babri Masjid (in the
august presence of the entire leadership of
the sangh parivar bar vajpayee). The riots
that followed, particularly in Mumbai,broke what residual faith the community
had comforted itself with in regard to the
machinery of the state providing personal
security to innocent Indian Muslims.
after 2014, ‘a pervasive sense of fear has
become the hallmark of the BJP govern-
ment...most intense among Muslims’.
This haunting sense of insecurity has
been intensified step by step through ‘love
jihad’, ‘ghar wapasi’ and, above all, the ‘gau
rakshak’ movement that has effectively
legitimised vicious attacks by hindutva
vigilantes on innocent, unarmed Mus-
lims (and dalits) virtually unrestrained by
their leadership. Ten gruesome incidents
of lynching, ranging from Mohammad
akhlaque to akbar Khan of alwar, are
summarised in the book.
Repeated unconvincingly explained
‘encounters’, targeting young Muslims in
the name of fighting ‘terrorism’, includ-
ing the bizarre Batla house encounter of
september 2008, are another source of
physical insecurity. Instead of reassuring
the community that they are not being
targeted, a culture of encouraging people
‘to lend interpretations that suit their
own prejudices’ is promoted by the saf-
fron establishment. Khurshid chillingly
provides (from an answer given to an
unstarred question in the Lok sabha) the
cold brutal statistics of the wide spread of
communal violence, deaths and injuries
in the period 2014-17. It is testimony to
the consequences of demonising the
‘Other’ which is the fundamental raison
d’etre of a majoritarian state.
What is the answer to this dreadful
state of affairs? Of course, ‘this is not and
must not be a battle for Muslims alone,
but also a battle within hindu society’
for ‘ultimately, the battle against bigotry
and communalism will be fought by
the majority of hindus whose commit-
ment to the idea of India ensures that
we remain a secular country’. It is also
for the Muslims themselves to rid their
community of regressive social practices
and work towards the educational,
social and economic emancipation of
their co-religionists. nMani Shankar Aiyar is a former
Union MinisterKhurshiD Draws pointeD attention to the
islamic renDition oF secularism in
classical arabic: ‘laKum DinaKum waliya
Din’: ‘ to you your religion, to me mine’books e s say