Disservice to Muslims

Salman Khursheed's attempt at a mea culpa of sorts elides the core issue for Indian Muslims

It was apposite that the erudite Congress leader and the former Union Minister Salman Khursheed was speaking at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) when he admitted that the Congress was ‘stained in blood' when it came to the Indian Muslim community. For, educational institutions such as AMU have been converted, largely by stealth and with previously indulgent administrations letting this conversion come to fruition with a wink and a nod, into a hotbed for the idea of community-specific separateness. While the debate around whether AMU is a so-called minority educational institution or a national educational institution of excellence is for elsewhere, Khursheed — who in a previous avatar was instrumental in supporting the ban on the Satanic Verses and ended up due to his statements participating in the hounding of a leading liberal Muslim academic — has shown that the woof and warp of minority politics in India remains static since 1947.

That any riot, communal or otherwise, is an atrocious crime and the death of even a single citizen regardless of her mode of worship is unacceptable and a blot on the escutcheon of the political party in power, is a stand we vigorously endorse. But Khursheed was not saying that. On the contrary, he was reiterating the Congress' electoral-support oriented approach towards the Indian Muslim community which has swung wildly between nurturing a sense of supremacy or one of victimhood with very little in between. It is an unfortunate fact but it makes no sense in not addressing it that for the vast majority of Indians, the sub-continent's Muslim community iterated its separateness from the Indic cultural and civilizational ethos and chose to secede from it by endorsing the creation of Pakistan in 1947. Now, this is not to say that those who chose not to go or stayed back out of necessity are not equal citizens of the Indian Republic in every way, manner and form.

On the contrary, the onus was on the Indian state controlled by the Congress for the first 50 years of Independence to ensure that all citizens including those who follow Abrahamic religions, naturally, were included in the very difficult and ambitious but nonetheless noble project to graft a modern, liberal state on to our ancient nation. That would imply the promotion of reformist impulses among various communities premised on the notion that the rights of individuals are never, ever, trumped by group rights and that the non-supremacist nature of the Indic tradition in which a folk multiculturalism flourishes are the principles on which integration is accomplished.

The abject failure of Khursheed's party to do that has played a significant role in creating an ambient environment for the virulence and despicable violence against Indian Muslims that has degenerated into communal riots on occasion. The perpetrators of such brutality must always be dealt with in the harshest manner possible by the law; that, we must state unequivocally. The real challenge, however, is to change the narrative.