Understanding the Indian Muslim
Indian Muslims: Where Have They Gone Wrong? by Rafiq Zakaria; Bharatiya Vidya
Bhavan, Mumbai, 2004; pages 565,
IT is difficult to write about living legends. Dr. Rafiq Zakaria combines in
his personality what grammarians might characterise as the past perfect, the
past imperfect and the present. His life spans two generations; his writings
are reflective of both. He has thus done readers a favour by putting together
in the volume under review 67 of his articles and essays on a specific theme.
The uninitiated might consider this enough of a contribution for a lifetime;
little would they know that this is merely the icing on a carefully baked cake
since Zakaria has also written and published a dozen books.
The book is a welcome addition to literature on a subject that, paradoxically,
remains inadequately explored. The subject, of course, is the Indian Muslim
Condition. Muslims constitute about 13 per cent of the Indian population,
number over 130 million, and are the second largest Muslim community in the
world. Zakaria has explored the subject in 12 aspects, pertaining to the past
and the present. For reasons best known to him, these essays have been
thoroughly revised and largely rewritten. This robs them of time
specificity, would disappoint a historian, and may induce some reviewer to
allege hindsight.
M.J. Akbar, in an erudite Foreword, has sought to portray the Indian Muslim
through the poetry of Amir Khusro, Mirza Ghalib, Akbar Allahabadi and Mohammad
Iqbal, and has raised a teasing question about the emergence of the Muslim
perception of being a minority. He suggests that going wrong has everything to
do with remembering or forgetting the Indian roots. If only one could live on a
diet of roots!
Certain themes run across the 12 sections of the book: Muslims and Partition,
the absence of Muslim leadership in the post-Partition period and until this
day, Muslim identity and stereotypes, Hindu-Muslim relations, communal violence
and search for physical security, the implications of Hindutva and the
questions of reform and modernisation. It is a wide sweep, reflective of the
pain and agony of personal experience; it also carries incisive judgments and
corrective recipes. One would have liked to see more of sociological analysis
to ascertain how different segments of Muslim society responded in the past,
and do so today, to these situations and challenges. Such a profile of the
Muslim community in various parts of India, as reflected in Census reports and
the National Sample Surveys, would have provided a proper backdrop to the
political perceptions reflected in the essays.
A PERVASIVE theme in contemporary Indian discourse, raised to its apogee by the
proponents of Hindutva, is the question of the Muslim responsibility for the
Two Nation theory and Partition. Interestingly enough and many years before
Mohammad Ali Jinnah could lay claim to it, the theory of there being two
nations in India was propounded by the father figure of what has been touted as
cultural nationalism. Jinnah may therefore be guilty of plagiarism, but not
originality.
As for Muslim responsibility, many questions relating to it remain to be
answered. Did all or even the majority of Muslims participate in the making of
the decision? If not, how representative - and by what process - were those who
took the decision? How did the decision come to be endorsed by other Indians?
Was it a conscious process or an unconscious one, autonomous or externally
induced? How, in any case, are present-day Indian Muslims responsible - morally
or legally - for what a previous generation is alleged to have done? The whole
business of Muslim responsibility is a classic example of what the Oxford
philosopher Gilbert Ryle called systematically misleading expressions that
misrepresent facts and falsify perceptions. This debate must be closed for the
good of India and Indians. We should leave it to the historians to delve into
the past and produce an authentic record. We as a nation cannot live in the
past, contrived or otherwise.
Rafiq Zakaria has written with anguish about communal riots - they reached
genocidal proportions in Gujarat in 2002 - and about the deprivation faced by
Muslims in various walks of life. He quotes from the report of a high-power
panel appointed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1980. A graphic picture of
Muslim deprivation also emerges from the studies done in recent years by the
National Council of Applied Economic Research. The findings have been summed up
in two sentences: Muslims in India have a poor human development status.
Widespread illiteracy, low income, irregular employment - implying thereby a
high incidence of poverty is all pervasive among the Muslims.
Muslims, in the words of one analyst, suffer double discrimination, by virtue
of being Muslim and poor. As a result they are under-represented in the
political,
