Hamid Dalwai's "Muslim Politics in Secular India

Hamid Dalwai's "Muslim Politics in Secular India".

This is the book "Muslim Politics in Secular India" by Hamid Dalwai, 1968, as entered in facebook by Vipul Kashyap. Chapter 3 is missing. Also an appendix has been added "Sita Ram Goel on Hamid Dalwai" from the book "Defence of Hindu Society" by Voice of India, 1983.

THE PDF OF THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN UPLOADED BY ME ON ACADEMIA.EDU

MUSLIM POLITICS IN SECULAR INDIA

by Hamid Dalwai

[29-9-1932     To     3-5-1977]

                                                                             

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

1   Historical Background

2   Reading the Mind of Indian Muslims

3  Muslims: The so-called nationalists   and the Communalists [Missing]

4  The Communal Malady: A Diagnosis

5   Strange Bedfellows: Communists   Intimacy with Communalists

6  The Chief Obstacle in the way of Muslim Integration

7  Muslim Opposition to Secular Integration: Nature, Causes and  Remedies

8  Humanistic Modernism the only Solution

9   Indian Muslims at the Crossroads

10  Failure of a Mission?

11  The Meaning of Bangla Desh

12  The Angry Young Secularist

[Appendix added: Sita Ram Goel on Hamid Dalwai]

FOREWORD

A.B.Shah, Indian Secular Forum

                                 

I shall not try to summarize Mr Dalwai's views in this foreword, for
the simple reason that I am in almost total agreement with him.  I
would rather mention here the central point of his argument and
elaborate it with a view to bringing out its significance.  Mr.
Dalwai's thesis is that the basic malaise of Muslim society (in India
as elsewhere with the exception of Turkey and perhaps Tunisia) lies in
the fact that it has never had a renaissance in its entire history of
more than thirteen hundred years.  All other problems, including that
of its secular and democratic integration in the larger Indian
society, are derivative in character.  In the absence of such
integration, what has come to be known as the Hindu-Muslim problem
cannot be solved.  However, the type of integration that is necessary
here cannot be achieved unless Muslims no less than Hindus learn to
separate religion from the rights and obligations of citizenship of a
modern state.  And only those can promote such integration who
themselves are committed to the values of an open society and to the
outlook on man and the universe that is sanctioned by science and
scientific method.  Others can at best play a passive role, if not
obstruct the process of integration.  If one accepts this view of the
problem, one cannot help feeling that Integration Committees
appointed by Governments are not likely to accomplish anything worth
the name.  For instance, the Committee appointed among its members not
Maharashtra includes among its members not only representatives of
all political parties but also of the Majlis-e-Mushawarat, whose
leaders do not believe in Hindu-Muslim co-operation for fighting
communalism (see M. A. Karandikar's letter `Muslims & India' in `The
Times of India', Bombay, November 11, 1968).  Indeed, the Committee is
so large - it has sixty members - that it could have easily been made
completely representative by adding a Naxalite communist and a member
of the R.S.S. !

    It is clear that good intentions are not enough for lesser men to
solve problems where one like Gandhi could not succeed.  Hindu-Muslim
unity and the abolition of untouchability were two of the most
important elements of his programme for the freedom and regeneration
of India.  In a sense they were among the pre-conditions of Swaraj as
he visualized it, and therefore he often described their attainment as
even more important than the withdrawal of British power from India.

He succeeded in considerable measure in his fight against
untouchability.  Though much remains to be done, no Hindu except the
lunatic fringe represented by the Shankaracharya of Puri would have a
moment's hesitation in supporting measures designed to bring about the
complete liquidation of untouchability.  However, Hindu-Muslim unity
evaded Gandhi throughout his active life in India except for a brief
spell during the Khilafat agitation.  Not only that; in spite of
Gandhi's ceaseless effort the country had to accept partition as the
price of freedom.  And soon after Independence Gandhi had to die at
the hands of a Hindu fanatic, though he alone among the leaders of the
Indian National Congress was unreconciled to partition.  Why did this
happen?  How was it that Gandhi who advised the Hindus to be patient
and generous to the Muslims, and who asked the British to hand over
power to Jinnah if they so preferred but quit, came to be increasingly
isolated not only from the Muslims but even from his own followers in
his quest for unity?  And how is it that twenty-one years after
partition the Hindu-Muslim problem is still with us, in the sense that
we are still groping even for a valid theoretical solution?  A
satisfactory discussion of these question would require an examination
of Gandhi's philosophy of life, his theory of social change and, most
important of all, the nature of the Hindu and Islamic traditions and
the types of mind that they mould.  All this cannot be undertaken in
the space of a foreword and must wait for a later date.  Here I shall
only deal with some of these questions and that, too, to the extent
that is necessary for indicating the lines on which further discussion
may usefully proceed.

Gandhi was essentially a philosophical anarchist in his view of man
and did not subscribe to the idea of original sin.  On the contrary,
he believed that man was 'essentially' good, for every human being had
a spark of the divine in him and no one was beyond redemption even
though the struggle for self-realization was bound to be arduous and
long.  He therefore approached the problem of Hindu-Muslim unity as a
well-meaning, persuasive, non-sectarian nationalist.  He worked on the
assumption, based on his experience in South Africa, that if only
Hindus and Muslims could be brought together in joint constructive
endeavour, they would see that unity was in their common interest and
learn to live together in peace and harmony.  To this end he sought to
project the universal human values preached by all major religions
including Hinduism and Islam, and hoped that in the course of time the
forces of unity would triumph over those of separatism.  For, according
to Gandhi's way of thinking, `true' religion could only join, not keep
separate  men of different faiths.  If Hindus and Muslims in India
regarded themselves as essentially separate groups the fault, Gandhi
thought, lay not in the beliefs and practices enjoined by their
scriptures but in a defective understanding of their 'real' message.

    This is a noble view of man and religion.  But it overlooks the
fact that man, as a product of evolution, is a union of good and evil,
just as it overlooks the historically determined character of his
culture and institutions.  Consequently, Gandhi missed the deeper
socio-historical and cultural roots of the religious conflict in
India.  Instead, he attributed its origin to the wily British, who
certainly were interested in keeping the Muslims away from the
`seditious' and `Hindu' nationalist movement.  Gandhi was satisfied
that if only there were enough goodwill on the part of a sufficient
number of Hindus and Muslims, sooner or later they would realize the
suicidal implications of religious conflict and work together for the
attainment of freedom from foreign rule.  This approach, because it
postulated the peaceful coexistence of Hindus and Muslims without any
fundamental modification of their attitude to religion, was bound to
fail.  It did not take into account the hold that religion with its
dogma, tradition, custom and ritual has on the minds of men in a
pre-modern society.  Also, it presupposed that the logic of individual
or small-group behavior could be applied to huge, faceless masses
whose only common bond is blind loyalty to a tribal collectivity in
the sacred name of God and religion.

    This is another way of saying that the Gandhian approach was
saintly in the main.  It was also akin to the Marxist, in the sense
that it assigned a derivative role to the cultural factor.  Gandhi
believed that the urge for freedom would enable the Muslims to take an
enlightened view of their religion.  This, however, presupposes that a
certain measure of individuation has already taken place in the
culture system known as Islam, and Gandhi assumed that it had.  The
Hindu mind is essentially individualistic, indeed narcissistic, so
that it is easy for it to transcend intermediate loyalties and take to
the path of individual salvation.  This has its disadvantages as well
as advantages, and perhaps the former outweigh the latter.  The point
is that it is difficult for a Hindu to visualize, except by a special
effort of reason and the imagination, a mind that is almost totally
lacking in the conception of the individual and derives the
significance of human life solely from the individual's membership of
collectivity.  This, however, seems to be a characteristic feature of
almost all cultures based on revealed religion.  If Christian culture
appears to be different in this respect that is because almost from
its inception Christianity was influenced by the Greek tradition.  It
was the revival of the Greek tradition that led to the Renaissance and
the rise of Protestantism with its stress on personal interpretation
of the Holy Writ.  The humanization of Christianity, with the
consequent growth of a secular conception of individuality was thus a
direct outcome of its interaction with the Greek tradition.  It is
worth noting in this connection that unlike the People of the Book
the Greeks were not blessed with a prophet nor, unlike the Hindus, to
rely on reason and observation alone for discovering the nature of
things.  Also they were polytheist and their gods were hardly
distinguishable from human beings with superhuman powers but entirely
non-transcendental interests.  Consequently, the Greeks could develop
a tradition of critical inquiry and a climate of tolerance necessary
to let `a hundred schools contend' and `a hundred flowers bloom'.
They had also another advantage.  They had no counterpart of the
Vedas, which the Hindus regarded as eternal and uncreated by man.
Unlike the Hindus, they were therefore free from the burden of
unchanging Truth and able to create science as quest and the idea of
scientific method as providing a tool of inquiry as well as a
criterion for the validity of its findings.

    The Greek tradition might have had a similar effect on Islam too.
But by the time Islam came in contact with it - in the reign of
al Mamun (813-833) - the latter had already lost its elan and Islam too
had outgrown its formative stage.  More important still, Islam arose
in a society that was riven with inter-tribal feuds, had no state
worth the name and did not hesitate to subject dissent to crude tribal
persecution.  The founder of Islam had therefore also to found a state
before its message was fully delivered, let alone developed in contact
with a more advanced culture without the arbitration of force.  The
rapid and spectacular expansion of Islam during the hundred years
following the death of the Prophet over the stagnant and often
decadent societies of the surrounding region also had an inhibitory
effect on its future development.  For continued victory over others
strengthened the Muslim's conviction that his faith was not only
perfect but superior to others and its doctrine, infallible.  Dissent,
when it arose was as ruthlessly put down in Islam as in mediaeval
Christianity, so that even the finest and most courageous of Muslim
scholars were careful to avoid saying anything that might appear as
questioning the fundamental tenets of the faith.  Thus the Mutazilites
who made use of Greek ideas in the exposition and defense of Islamic
theological doctrine, `were regarded as heretical by the main body of
Sunnite Muslims' and were treated as such.  Even Ibn Sina, one of the
few really great Muslim philosophers, was criticized by authorities of
the Muslim tradition for `limiting the power of God to a predetermined
logical structure' and for `diminishing the sense of awe of the finite
before the infinite'.  Nor is that all.  Ibn Sina himself in the later
years seems to have turned into - or posed as - a devout gnostic.
Indeed, `it comes as something of a shock to be confronted with the
thickening web of "irrational" elements in the writings of such a
personality as Avicenna'.

    I have deliberately dwelt at some length on this aspect of Islam
as a cultural tradition.  The reason is not that Islam is unique in
its record of intolerance in the past: it is, rather, that Islam still
exhibits the same intolerance of free inquiry and dissent as it did in
less enlightened times.  What little possibility there might have been
of the softening of this attitude through the development of science
and philosophy after the mutual persecution of the Mutazilites and
their orthodox opponents was effectively destroyed by al-Ghazali (d.
1111) for centuries to come.  His work ensured that no renaissance
would ever take place in Muslim society unless, as in Turkey, it were
imposed from above.  Muslim scholars look upon al-Ghazali as the
greatest thinker that Islamic culture has produced.  I am inclined to
believe that he was the greatest disaster that befell it since the
death of the Prophet.

    So great has been the hold of orthodoxy on the Muslim mind that
nowhere has Muslim society so far been able to throw up an articulate
class of liberal Muslims committed to modern values and all that
such a commitment means in various fields of life.  Such a class can
alone subject the tradition of Islam to a critical scrutiny and
prepare the ground for the entry of Muslim society into the modern
age.  For, as the experience of developing countries in the post-War
period shows, efforts to modernize the political and economic systems
in the absence of social and cultural modernization accompanying, if
not preceding them can only result in frustration or perversion.

    That the issue is basic to the future of Muslim society is
illustrated by the still unresolved conflict, characteristic of almost
the entire Muslim world, between the conception of territorial
nationalism and that of a politico-religious ummat that cuts across
national boundaries.  The repeated attempts of the Muslim Brotherhood
to assassinate President Nasser in the name of Islam merely show that
the conflict cannot be resolved until the very ethos of Islamic
culture undergoes a qualitative change.  To initiate a process that
would bring about such a transformation is the historic task
confronting educated Muslims everywhere in the world.  There are signs
of this happening in some of the countries - Pakistan, for
example - where Muslims have to face the responsibility of running the
state.

    However, there are serious difficulties in their path, not the
least of which is the self-contradictory situation in which politicians
generally find themselves by trying to eat their cake and have it too.
At home the demands of development often compel them to adopt
policies, such as family planning and drastic modification of personal
law, which cannot but provoke the wrath of the orthodox.  At the same
time, they do not hesitate to rouse and exploit the religious passions
of their people when it suits their convenience, especially in
international politics.  Duplicity of this kind may prove useful for
the time being but the price it exacts in the long run is likely to be
out of all proportion to the gains.  For instance, it inhibits the
growth of genuinely critical, as distinguished from pedantic and
apologetic, scholarship.  The latter type of scholarship, of which
there is enough in the Muslim world, is generally sterile if not
positively harmful, from the standpoint of modernization.  It is only
the critical spirit that can release the springs of creativity and
wash away the debris of centuries.

    The tragedy of Indian Muslims does not lie so much in the
backwardness of a vast majority of them in relation to the
Hindus - which is only a symptom - as in the unwillingness of educated
Muslims to undertake a critical reappraisal of their heritage.  The
cost would be insignificant compared to what it would be in a country
under Muslim rule or what their Hindu counterparts had to pay in the
preceding century.  But the consciousness of a separate identity or
the desire to conform is unbelievably strong among them.  For
instance, even an eminent scholar like Professor M. Mujeeb finds it
advisable to begin an otherwise magnificent work with the following
obeisance to orthodoxy : `It is the author's firm belief that the
Indian Muslims have, in their religion of Islam, and in the true
(sic) representatives of the moral and spiritual values of Islam the
most reliable standards of judgment, and they do not need to look
elsewhere to discover how high or low they stand'.  This is very much
reminiscent of Hindu pandits of the past, who began their treatises
with an invocation to God regardless of whether in subsequent pages
they were to deal with logic or mathematics, statecraft or erotics.

If Gandhi was guilty of the saint's fallacy and educated Muslims of
excessive group-consciousness or desire to conform, the Marxists were
guilty of over-simplification and false induction.  They sought to
interpret Hindu-Muslim relations in terms of economic interests and
the machinations of the British.  Gandhi as well as the Marxists
assumed that the Muslim masses, as distinguished from their
upper-class leadership, had at heart the same political and economic
interests as their Hindu counterparts.  They therefore concluded that
as the struggle against political and economic injustice gathered
momentum, the basis of Hindu-Muslim conflict would gradually be
undermined.  And once freedom was established and justice was on the
march, the two communities would, it was hoped, begin to live in
friendship and peace.  In this perspective no critical examination of
religion as a socio-cultural institution, let alone a frontal attack
on some of the values and attitudes it sanctified, was considered
necessary by either group.

    That Gandhi should not have seen the need for such criticism is
easy to understand. What is surprising is the attitude of those who
swore by Marx.  For the left arose as a standard bearer of
enlightenment and was as much a protest against religious obscurantism
as against exploitation in the secular field.  It is true that Indian
Marxists were unsparing in their criticism of Hindu obscurantism.  But
that was relatively easy in view of the rather amorphous nature of
Hinduism and the tradition of critical self-inquiry started by the
reformers of the nineteenth century.  There was no such tradition in
Muslim society nor was there a large enough class of liberal,
forward-looking Muslims which, like its Hindu counterpart in the
preceding century, could initiate such a tradition.  Consequently,
Islam escaped the humanizing process through which Christianity in the
West and, to a certain extent, Hinduism in India had to pass.
Inspired by considerations that were primarily political, the Marxists
no less than the Gandhians missed the true nature of the role that the
doctrine and tradition of Islam played in the evolution of Muslim
politics in India.  Gandhi made Khilafat a national cause in order to
win the confidence of Indian Muslims.  The Marxists were not
particularly impressed by Gandhi's support of the Khilafat agitation.
But they too dared not criticize Muslim communalism except in
political terms, whereas what was required was a thorough-going
critique of the philosophy and sociology of Islam of the type that
Marx considered `the beginning of all criticism.'  Even M. N. Roy, who
alone among Indian Marxists subjected Hinduism to such an analysis,
failed in this respect.

    It is here that Mr. Dalwai is breaking new ground, though in an
indirect way.  His interest in the non-religious aspect of Islam stems
from his concern over the problem of Hindu-Muslim relations and its
bearing on our effort to develop a modern and liberal society in
India.  He therefore does not deal with religion as such, or with
Islam as a religion, except insofar as religion is used as a cloak for
obscurantist and anti-humanist ends.  It may therefore be useful to
consider here in brief the process by which all religions come to be
so used and defeat the inspiration of their founders.

    Every religion offers to its followers a vision of life and a
theory that incorporates this vision.  In the history of every
religion, however, a stage arrives when the vision fades into the
background except for a socially ineffective minority, and the theory
achieves an absolute status unrelated to the historical situation in
which it first arose.  When this happens religion proves a fetter on
human freedom and creativity, superstition triumphs over science, and
ethics itself is perverted into a specious justification of social
inequities.  Mediaeval Christianity and Hinduism from classical times
to the early years of the nineteenth century provide ample evidence
for this view.  The Renaissance humanized Christianity and Hinduism
too underwent a partial but significant change of the same type in the
nineteenth century.  However, Islam still awaits its renaissance, and
till it takes place Muslim society cannot be modernized nor can
Muslim society cannot be modernized nor can Muslims be integrated
into a modern secular society, regardless of whether it is liberal or
authoritarian.

    The problem of Hindu-Muslim unity thus appears as an aspect of the
larger problem of the modernization of Indian society.  For, given the
composition, past history and present context of this society, it
would be unrealistic to imagine that the Hindu and the Muslim can live
together as equal citizens unless each were willing to dissociate his
political from his religious or cultural identity.  For historical and
other reasons, the Hindu is at an advantage in this respect.  But
precisely because of that, he has to accept the onus of promoting the
modernization of Muslim society.  So far, he has defaulted on this
responsibility, apparently out of expediency but mainly because his
own understanding of the task of modernization has been superficial
and imitative.  Consequently, well-meaning Hindus in public life have
generally been soft-headed secularists in relation to Muslim society.
Over the years their attitude has seriously damaged not only the cause
of democratic secular integration but also the interests of Muslims
themselves.  It has created a vested interest in obscurantism, and
encourages among educated Muslims a tendency to self-pity of the Mock
Turtle kind instead of facilitating the emergence of a secular and
forward-looking Muslim leadership.  Worse still, in reaction to the
persistent refusal, in the name of religion, of the spokesmen of
Muslim society to meet the demands of the modern conscience and the
requirements of the modern age, a growing number of well-meaning
Hindus are rallying under the banner of Hindu revivalism. If the
present trend continues unchecked, in a few years from now most
politically articulate Hindus and Muslims will be confronting each
other from platforms like those of the R.S.S. and the Jamaat-e-Islami.
One need not worry about their fate-indeed, I would say to them: `a
plague on both your houses!' But an overwhelming majority of the
people of this country, be they Hindu or Muslim, are entitled to a
more decent society and its chances would suffer a great set-back.
That is why Mr. Dalwai pleads that those who speak in the name of
secularism and democracy should refuse to have any truck with
obscurantist groups claiming to represent the interests of Muslims
even if it means the loss of the Muslim votes for some years to come.
There are enough secular-minded Muslims, mostly of the younger
generation, who would like to establish rapport with their Hindu
counterparts.  They feel alienated from the bulk of their community
and also from the Hindus because of the latter's narcissistic attitude
and short-sighted opportunism.  Let secular Hindus seek them out and
give them a sense of belonging, not as Hindus or Muslims but as
fellow-citizens engaged in building an open society in India.

    I do not know to what extent Mr. Dalwai will succeed in persuading
educated Muslims of the older generation to look upon his approach
with sympathy.  But I know from personal observation that he has
succeeded in striking a chord in the hearts of younger Muslims who
seem to be groping for new moorings in post-partition Indian society.
I also know that he has been able to give well-meaning Hindus,
particularly the idealistically motivated members of the younger
generation, a feeling that Hindu revivalism is no way of meeting the
challenge of Muslim obscurantism.  That also explains why those who
believe that India should become a Hindu Rashtra have started having
second thoughts about him.  And if the younger generation of Hindus,
who constitute nearly eighty five per cent of the population of this
country can be prevented from turning obscurantist, what others think
of Mr. Dalwai is of little consequence for the future of secularism in
India.

                                                      A. B. SHAH, President, Indian Secular Forum

        

PREFACE

On January 24-25, 1968, Sadhana - a Marathi weekly published from
Poona - had convened a seminar on the Hindu-Muslim problem.  These
articles are based on notes for my lecture in the seminar. Sadhana
subsequently published them in the form of four articles.  To these, I
have added more articles specially written for this English edition.

    I am grateful to professor A. B. Shah for the co-operation he has
given me in preparing this book for publication in English
translation, and I must also thank Mr Dilip Chitre for translating the
articles into English.

    The Indian Secular Forum has sponsored the publication of this
book and I am grateful to this organization for all the assistance it
has given me.

HAMID DALWAI

Chapter 1

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

For the last few years I have been writing and speaking in public on
the Hindu-Muslim communal problem in India.  My analysis of the
problem has had a mixed reception.  Now that I am publishing my
articles in the form of a book, I would like to explain my views in
some detail to my readers-both Hindu and Muslim.  And I also have to
make an appeal to them.

    It is obvious why the Muslim reaction to my views should be as
adverse as it is.  It is also understandable why the Hindus have
generally welcomed my views, although there are some Hindus who
believe that my articles and speeches are aimed at confusing them.

    Although the Muslims have generally reacted adversely to my views,
there is some variety in their positions.  Among my critics are some
who had opposed the creation of Pakistan.  However, the reason why
they were opposed to the partitioning of the Indian sub-continent was
that they dreamt of converting the whole of India into Dar-ul-Islam.
Therefore, now that Pakistan has already been created, their efforts
are directed towards merging the rest of India with that Islamic
state.

    On the other hand, there are Indian Muslims who are being
modernized gradually.  At present, such Muslims are few and they are
confused. They have doubts and anxieties about their future and they
are worried about the security of the Muslim community itself in
India.  Being in doubt and feeling insecure, these Muslims oppose any
new and different approach to the communal problem in India.  They
imagine that the security of Indian Muslims lies in clinging to the
traditional structure of Indian society.  In short, they believe that
if Muslims were to have any place in Indian life they should remain
exactly as they are today.  Hence even such Muslims are opposed to my
views.

    Of these two broad types of Indian Muslims who find my views
unpalatable, I would not attempt to initiate a dialogue with those who
dream of converting India to Islam and of merging it ultimately with
Pakistan.  If these people believe that it is their duty to convert
all Indians to Islam by whatever means they can think of, they are the
exact counterpart of those extremist Hindus who similarly wish to
liquidate all Indian Muslims even if it involved mass extermination.
I come from the Muslim community and yet I cannot entirely blame the
extremist Hindu communalists. Whereas the extremist Muslim
communalists have aggressive plans to destroy the Hindu community the
extremist Hindus , in reaction to them, want to eliminate the Muslims
in self-defense.  Thus I view extremist Hindu communalism as a
reaction to Muslim communalism.  Unless Muslim communalism is
eliminated, Hindu communalism will not disappear.  At the same time,
one has to bear in mind that extremist  Muslim communalists are so
much obsessed by their grand dream of converting the whole of India to
Islam that no argument at present will affect any change in their
attitude.  Their grand dream has to terminate in a grand
disillusionment first.  They must become aware of the fact that their
efforts are foredoomed to failure and their objectives are
unattainable.  Today, they cannot be made aware of the futility of
their ambition and hence my appealing to them would serve no useful
purpose.

    However, I believe it to be my duty to appeal to those Indian
Muslims who are confused and therefore still uncertain in their
approach to the communal problem in India.  They are misguided and,
therefore, they are communalist.  To initiate a dialogue with them and
to make them aware of an alternative approach to the problem will be
helpful.  Wherever I travel in India, I meet local Muslims and try to
discuss the issue with them.  I keep an open mind: for they may have
some genuine problems and difficulties.  I try to understand them.
Sometimes, I succeed; sometimes, I fail.  Generally, old and
tradition-bound Muslims uniformly oppose my views.  Often, they
boycott my public meetings or have them cancelled.  However, the young
Muslims I meet at such discussions do not greet my views with the
hostility shown by the older generation.  This does not, however, mean
that they agree with me on all points.  But neither do they agree with
their elders.  I have always felt that these younger Muslims are
struggling to free themselves from the shackles of rigid, orthodox
thinking.  My appeal is addressed to them.

    Even the younger generation of Indian Muslims imagine that it is
the Hindus who are responsible for all their problems and
difficulties.  They often ask me why I single out Muslim communalism
for criticism.  It is true that even Hindus are communal-minded.
And it is wrong to say that I have kept silent about Hindus
communalism while criticizing Muslim communalism in India.  I have
been ceaselessly criticizing the movement for a ban on cow-slaughter.
However, when I criticize Hindu communalist trends I do not criticize
the Hindus as such.  Nor is it the purpose of my criticism to ensure
that Muslims are able to eat beef.  That would be a naive way of
looking at the problem.  My criticism of the movement for a ban on
cow-slaughter is from the agricultural and economic point of view.  I
believe that such a ban would adversely affect two major national
interests: the development of Indian economy.  Similarly, when I
criticize certain Muslim attitudes, I criticize them in the context of
broad national interests which should be the concern of all Indians
regardless of their religious faith.  I do not criticize Muslims as
such.

    It is an old habit of Indian Muslims to blame Hindus for their
woes.  However, the Indian Muslim intelligentsia has never really been
critically introspective.  It has not sought to relate its problems to
its own attitudes.  It has not developed a self-searching,
self-critical attitude.  Compared to the Hindus, the Indian Muslims
accepted Western education rather late.  As a consequence, the Muslims
remained comparatively backward in several fields.  The real cause of
Muslim backwardness is found in the Muslim opposition to educational
reform during the early days of British rule in India.  Behind this
view was a peculiar sense of resentment.  Muslims in India believed
that the British snatched away from their predecessors what was a
Muslim Empire.  When Sir Syed Ahmed Khan urged Muslims to accept
modern Western education the ulema of Deoband came out with the fatwa
that Sir Syed was a kafir.  How can one blame the Hindus for this?

    Muslims remained backward because they were religion-bound
revivalists who refused to modernize themselves.  Sir Syed Ahmed Khan
in this light appears as a great visionary who heralded the Indian
Muslim renaissance.  It was due to his great efforts that the rigidly
religious mind of Indian Muslims began to show the first signs of a
thaw.  Educated Muslims began to redefine life in terms of the modern
age.  They gave up the grand dream of converting India to Islam.  This
was the beginning of a great upheaval among educated Indian Muslims.
A process that should have brought Muslims close to Hindus and broadened
their view of man and society.  The trend of this process was toward a
view according to which Hindus and Muslims would have been looked upon
as equals.

    This process was, however, ironically reversed because modern
Indian Muslims proved unequal to the task.  Their modernity proved
limited and they lacked the broad vision that could have ensured the
complete success of the Aligarh renaissance.  Ironically, this very
process separated the Muslims from the Hindus instead of bringing them
closer together.  The old Muslim habit of blaming the Hindus for their
problems reappeared and was set more firmly than ever.  Although Sir
Syed Ahmed Khan was free from the vice of religious fanaticism he
lacked the virtue of being free from the atavistic vanity of an
inheritor of the Moghul past.  In this very period when it was
possible for a national consciousness to emerge Sir Syed Ahmed Khan
himself succumbed to the egoistic conception that Muslims were the
conquerors of India.  It was he who was the father of separatist
Muslim nationalism, and not Jinnah as it is erroneously supposed.
Jinnah is only a later version of Sir Syed revised and enlarged.  Thus
the aberrant modern Muslim himself was responsible first for a
separatist Muslim nationalism and later for the creation of Pakistan.
The foundation of Muslim nationalism is the postulate that Hindu and
Muslim societies are autonomous and parallel social structures.

    It is no fault of the Hindus that the Indian Muslims embraced this
theory of a separate, Muslim nationalism.  Nor is it the fault of the
Hindus that Indian Muslims regarded their own (Indian Muslims')
security in India.  It is only once in a while that an individual or a
society gets an opportunity to make or mar its own future.  The
Muslims lost their rare chance of embracing modernity simultaneously
with the Hindus when they yielded to the pressure exerted on them by
the ulema of Deoband and rejected English education.  History gave
them another chance a little later-the opportunity to strengthen
Indian nationalism by joining forces with the Hindus.  But they let go
even this opportunity by succumbing to the erroneous notion that Hindu
and Muslim societies were autonomous and parallel social structures.
They paid scant heed even to geographical realities and refused to
consider where they lived and would live in the future.  The problems
faced by Indian Muslims today can be traced back to these two lost
opportunities.  If a chance that comes only once in a century is
wasted, it takes another century to make up for the loss.

    It is high time now that younger Muslims became critically
introspective and learnt the nature of their own mistake.  It is a
tragic fact that there does not yet exist a class of critically
introspective young Muslims in India.  A society which puts the blame
on the Hindus for its own communalism can hardly be called
introspective.  If Hindu communalism is responsible for Muslim
communalism by the same logic it would follow that Muslim communalism
is equally responsible for Hindu communalism.  The truth of the matter
is that the Muslim intelligentsia has not yet given up its postulate
of parallel society.  It has still not learnt to separate religion
from politics.  Their idea of religious freedom is merely that the
structure of the Muslim society in India should remain unaltered.
Basically, they are still `Muslim nationalists'.  They have not
accepted the modern concept of nationalism, and hence their attempts
to preserve Muslim nationalist trends in the present structure of the
Indian polity.  There is a curious collusion between these Indian
Muslims and the others who envisage the conversion of India to Islam.
This is precisely what brings Maulana Abdul Hasan Nadvi of the
Jamaat-e-Islami and Dr Faridi of the Majlis-e-Mashawarat together on
the same platform.

   These are the two broad trends one discerns among Indian Muslims
today.  One group has taken its inspiration from Shah Waliullah and
the other regards Sir Syed Ahmed Khan as its mentor and pioneer.
Today it is necessary to reject both.  The Hindus too had similar
trends; they exist even today.  But the Hindus also had a liberal
humanist tradition.  Nehru kept this tradition alive; Gandhi was a
symbol of this same great tradition.  That the Indian Muslim community
could not produce a Gandhi underscores its failure.  Only the
North-West Frontier Province could produce a great man like Abdul
Ghaffar Khan.  But it is significant, though not difficult to
understand, that Indian Muslims did not respond to him.

    Will the younger generation of Indian Muslims face this challenge?
This is their third, and perhaps last, chance to liberate and
modernize themselves.  If they avail themselves of it, they can still
make up for the loss the Muslim community has suffered by wasting the
two previous opportunities to create a tradition of modern enlightened
liberalism.  The only effective answer to the problems of Indian
Muslims would involve on their part a total rejection of the
prejudices of history.  Only when they rid themselves of the
misconceptions that history and tradition produce can they arrive at
the conception of a free, modern mind committed only to fundamental
human values.  The articles which follow are an attempt in that
direction.  I would earnestly appeal to my young Muslim readers to
give them serious critical consideration.

I would also like to make a similar request to my Hindu readers.
Several Hindu friends have welcomed the attempts of persons like me to
modernize the Muslim community in India.  However, there is a class of
Hindus which views with suspicion any Muslim's attempt to transform
the consciousness of the community.  This does not surprise me.  The
motives of even a man of Gandhi's stature were suspiciously viewed by
a vast number of Indian Muslims.  In such a situation, it is but
inevitable that a number of Hindus would suspect the motives of an
ordinary man like me.  It would scarcely be worth the trouble to try
to convince them of my bona fides.  However, there are some Hindus who
view Muslim society as a society which, like any other, can be
transformed in the course of time. My appeal is addressed to such
Hindus.  I urge them to accept the facts of the situation first: there
is no class of thoroughly secular Muslims in India today.  At the same
time the idea of a common Indian nationality requires that Muslim
society be integrated in the fabric of a secular Indian society.  The
only way in which this can be achieved is by first creating a small
class of modern, liberal and secular Muslims.  This is precisely what
people like me are attempting to do.  Personally, I believe that no
religion can provide the foundation for an ideal society.  It follows
that neither Islam nor Hinduism can be the basis of an ideal social
order.  Several people ask me where precisely I differ from communal
Hindus.  It should be fairly obvious now where I differ from them and
how radical the differences are.  However I agree with them on certain
points and it would be worthwhile to demarcate clearly the area of
agreement between us.  I agree with them that Muslim communalism is a
strong force in this country at present. I also agree with them that
in this nation minorities have a claim to equal rights and equal
opportunities but they should not have a claim to special status or
privileges.  I also agree with them that Kashmir is a part of India
and that every Pakistani aggression on Indian soil must be answered by
a strong counter-attack.  Finally, I agree with the communalist
Hindu's view that Pakistan was not the last demand of the Muslims of
this sub-continent.  Even today, both among Indian Muslims and among
the rulers of Pakistan, there are influential groups whose `last
demand' would be the conversion of the whole of India to Islam.
    However, I consider suicidal the Hindu communalist attempt to
answer Muslim communalism by obscurantist Hindu revivalism.  Muslim
communalism will be defeated only when the Hindu achieves a greater
degree of social progress and modernizes himself.  By making the
Hindus more obscurantist - by making them more puritan and
orthodox - Muslim communalism can never be eliminated.  The movement for
a ban on cow-slaughter provides an apt example.  I oppose the ban on
agro-economic grounds.  But I oppose it even more strongly on
non-economic grounds, because if the Hindu belief in the sacredness of
the cow is encouraged, it would prevent the Hindus from modernizing
themselves and from achieving a greater degree of social progress.
The Hindus have slid backward only because of their religious
obscurantism.  Mahmud Ghaznavi could defeat Hindu armies simply by
using herds of cows as a shield for his own army! One hopes that such
history will not be repeated in modern times.  Hindus must discard all
those religious beliefs which hindered their progress and deprived
them of their freedom.  I say this as a friend of the Hindus and not
as an antagonist.  No Muslim communalist will object to Hindu
obscurantism for the reasons I give here, simply because no Muslim
communalist ever wishes that Hindu society should become modern and
dynamic.  As a matter of fact, to protect their own medieval
obscurantist beliefs the Muslims would find it convenient that the
Hindus also remained medieval-minded religious puritans.  I attack
all aspects of medieval religious obscurantism whether it is Muslim
or Hindu.  And hence I am opposed to the movement for a ban on
cow-slaughter.  Eighty-five per cent of the population of this country
is Hindu and therefore the progress of this nation depends on the
Hindus becoming dynamic, modern and advanced.  And I want this nation
to be advanced, powerful and prosperous because my individual future
is inextricably tied up with it.  I would go even further and tell the
communalist Hindus that they cannot free Muslims from the shackles of
their own obscurantist beliefs if the Hindus themselves remain
religion-bound.  To modernize Indian Muslims, Hindus must first
strengthen the forces of modernization among themselves.  When Indian
Muslims are shocked out of their slumber by the advancement and
modernization of Hindu society, a similar process will start in Muslim
society and that would help the efforts of persons like me.
    Hindu communalists should not continue to make the tragic blunder
of mistaking every Muslim for a communalist.  It is true that today it
is difficult to find a thoroughly secular Muslim in India.  But if we
want secular-minded Muslims in the near future we must encourage and
support those Muslims who are already stepping in that direction.  One
can cite numerous cases where the Hindus can and ought to support
certain Muslims by acknowledging the worth of their efforts.  For
example Mr. Sadiq is making sincere and systematic efforts in Kashmir
to free Kashmiri Muslims from the hold that Sheikh Abdullah has on
their minds.  It would also be honest to admit that the Health
Minister of Maharashtra, Dr Rafiq Zakaria is making sincere efforts to
propagate family planning among Indian Muslims.  I mention this
particularly because the communalist Hindu, in his zeal to condemn
all Muslims as communalists, weakens the emerging liberal and modern
forces among the Muslims.  Indian Muslims will change only when they
begin to present a differentiated picture in their thoughts and their
view of society.  Hindus would also benefit from such differentiation
among the Muslims.  For as long as the Muslims remain monolithic in
their thinking their communalism will become increasingly awesome.  If
they divide into two camps, the modern liberals and the orthodox
puritans, their communalism would be much weakened.  I suggest that
communalist Hindus and particularly the younger Hindus should pause
and consider this.

    History, which has bred prejudices and animosity, is a hindrance
to all of us.  All of us have to come out of the grip of our
prejudices which originate in our past.  Hindu communalists must also
break away from the grip of their prejudices.  It is not the fault of
the young Brahmans of today that their ancestors gave inhuman
treatment to the untouchables, and today's Indian Muslim is not
responsible for the oppression to which Mahmud Ghaznavi or Aurangzeb
subjected the Hindus.  Fortunately, there is a class of Hindus today
which bears the burden of its ancestors' sins and conscientiously
tries to undo the damage by embracing social equality as a fundamental
value.  Similarly, there has to emerge a class of Muslims which would
accept the sins of Aurangzeb and, to undo the damage, would therefore
embrace the concept of secular citizenship.  The emergence and
sustained growth of such a class of modern, secular dynamic liberals
is the only effective answer to the Hindu-Muslim communal problem.
And therefore my appeal to communal Hindus is that they should free
themselves from historical prejudices before they examine the views
expressed by me in the articles that follow.

Chapter 2

READING THE MIND OF INDIAN MUSLIMS

The previous article was a brief review of the problem of Indian Muslims and its solution. I have described the symptoms of a disease and outlined its treatment without naming the disease as such.  One of the reasons for doing so was to focus attention on certain aspects of the problem at the very outset.  I also wanted to

show how certain pitfalls cannot be avoided when one begins to discuss a problem from the end to the beginning.  My main reason, however, was to invite my Muslim friends to do some necessary critical introspection so that they might start the discussion in a frank and systematic manner.

    It is my experience that the arguments of Muslims leaders always sound like the arguments of defense attorneys in a court of law.  In a court of law the lawyer's sole interest is to win his case.  The argument is addressed to a judge, who is a third party and who gives his verdict in the end.  If a lawyer defending an alleged murderer argues the defendant's case effectively, his client is acquitted even if he in fact is a murderer.  The sole emphasis in this kind of argument is on convincing the judge.  Muslim leaders in India argue in much the same manner.  One does not know whether they expect some judge to give a favorable verdict in the end.  For instance, most Muslim leaders in India advance the old argument that Muslims were not responsible for partition, and even argue that Hindus alone were responsible for it.  Of course, there can be different arguments as to who really was more responsible for partition but it is factually wrong to suggest that Muslims were not responsible for partitioning the sub-continent.  When Muslims say this, they do not want to claim merely that they were not responsible for partition. Their claim is much larger; they want to claim that it was not the Muslims who demanded the partitioning of the sub-continent.

    History provides some clues to the strange behavior and arguments of Indian Muslim leaders.  Indian Muslims always tried to impose their own demands on Hindus with the help of the British, who were a third party in the position of a judge.  It was enough for the Muslims to have presented effective arguments to the British.  If one recalls the entire history of the efforts made to solve the Hindu-Muslim problem, one can easily verify this.  It was Muslim leaders who obstinately held that the Hindus should not be granted freedom unless Muslim demands were met.  When they saw that the judgment in this dispute was to be given by a third party, they tried to tilt the balance in their own favor even by resorting to an unscrupulous and fallacious argument, and the Hindus who were eager for independence conceded their demand.  It is not important to discuss how the third party arrived at its verdict.  The important thing is to remember the historical fact that the Muslims got their verdict from a third party.  They never even paused to consider that the real decision was to be taken by the Muslims themselves in collaboration with the Hindu majority.  They looked at the dispute as if it was matter of litigation and could never think of the possibility of a compromise.

    In short, Indian Muslims committed the most grievous sin of obstructing the movement for Indian independence.  They took undue advantage of the presence of a third party.  They refused to arrive at a compromise with the Hindus.  Muslims in the entire sub-continent were responsible for this.  But there is an important difference between Indian and Pakistani Muslims.  Muslims in Pakistan did not have to face the consequences of this wrong-headed agitation.  In fact if the agitation were to succeed, it would be of benefit to them. And therefore, it must be said that Pakistani Muslims deliberately took a wrong step the consequences of which were to be suffered by Muslims who were to remain in India.

    But Indian Muslims have committed an even worse sin.  They not only relied on a third party but also participated in a movement which aimed at creating a separate nation comprising all provinces which had a Muslim majority.  In short, in order to solve their own problems, Indian Muslims as a whole came to an understanding with the British as well as with the Muslim majority provinces; and they refused to make any compromise with Hindus.

    What was the nature of this understanding?  To solve our problems, argued the Muslims in the sub-continent, a sovereign and independent state comprising provinces with a Muslim majority had to be created. In this new state Hindus should be in a minority.  That way only, they further argued, would Muslims in India have security.  This argument is known as the hostage theory.  In the middle ages the cruel and inhuman practice of holding human beings as hostages was quite common. It is tragic that Muslims in the sub-continent resorted to this old practice to solve their problem.

  ` But the interesting thing is that while Pakistan needed some Hindus at least as hostages she did not even keep a sizeable number of them in her territory though the subcontinent was partitioned only because Muslims decided to experiment with the theory of hostages. At the time, several observers had warned that this theory would create a problem of minorities in both India and Pakistan and that in both countries politics would be centered on vengeance wreaked on the minorities.  A prominent Muslim intellectual had issued this warning in a book published before partition.  Shaukatulla Ansari, at present Governor of Orissa, in his "Pakistan - A Problem of India" published in 1944, has made a very significant observation.  He predicted that if the sub-continent were to be partitioned, it would be partitioned in
an atmosphere of bitter hostility which would last for generations and would be difficult to eliminate. All of us are witness to the accuracy of his prophecy.

    Muslims in India agreed to remain in India as hostages in accordance with the theory propounded by the Muslim League.  Why should Indian Muslims complain about it now?  Do they say now that this entire theory was wrong?  No; their only complaint is that Hindus have started implementing the theory.  They are not worried whether Hindus are themselves unhappy about the theory.  Their only demand is that the theory should not affect themselves.  All Muslim leaders following the theory demand that there should be no anti-Muslim riots in India.  If one asked them any question about the fate of Hindus in Pakistan, they would dismiss it.  I have already observed that among Indian Muslims there still is no liberal class whose members would take an honest and just view of things.  It is sufficient for Muslim leaders in India to argue that Hindus in Pakistan are not treated in an unjust manner.  If one points to instances of injustice done to Hindus in Pakistan, Indian Muslim leaders have a ready answer.  They would say that it is a problem of Pakistan with which they are hardly concerned.  On the other hand, they would criticize the questioner for raising an issue which has to do with Pakistan and not with themselves.

    The question which arises here is: Why do Indian Muslims make the obviously false claim that Pakistan Hindus are treated with due justice?  And why did Indian Muslims earlier refuse to rely on the conscience of Hindus to get full justice for themselves?  I shall begin with the first question.  Those who claim that Hindus in Pakistan get due justice assume that this entire problem is still a case pending trial in a court.  They still imagine, perhaps quite honestly but no doubt unrealistically, that if they argue forcefully enough there still is a third party to give them a verdict in their favor.  They do not see the plain fact that the third party has already left the sub-continent and that, in India, it is replaced by the defendant in the case.  Now the judge's position is occupied by Hindus.  If it is justice that the Indian Muslims expect, they have to win the confidence and goodwill of the Hindu majority.  Do these Muslim leaders honestly believe that arguments like those of lawyers
in a court of law are going to secure justice for them?  But they refuse to look at this problem in a sober and realistic manner.  For they still believe that a third party is going to judge their case and that all they need to win their case is an effective argument, however fallacious it may be, coupled with the right amount of pressure.

They do not clearly name who the third party in the judge's position is today.  But one need not go very deep to find out what is fairly obvious: Indian Muslim leaders believe that in their dispute with the majority in India.  Pakistan is the third party occupying the position of the judge.

    I must say that the leaders who think so are still living in the pre-Independence age.  Some months ago, I had an opportunity of meeting Dr A. J. Faridi, leader of the Majlis-e-Mashawarat.  Dr Faridi claims to have a balanced view of things.  He also believes that one ought to point out the mistakes committed by Indian Muslims.  But it is an interesting experience to discuss this issue with Dr Faridi.

Once one enters into an argument with him, Dr Faridi has the knack of evading the very principles he himself professes.  For example, when I asked him why Hindus were driven out of West Pakistan, Dr Faridi came up with the fantastic answer justice that if Vallabhbhai Patel had not sent planes to bring them back the West Pakistani Hindus would not have come back to India at all.  in short, Dr Faridi is against any injustice done to anyone.  In that respect he is a perfect secularist. But if one choose to go into factual details about the injustice done to Pakistani Hindus, Dr Faridi would categorically assert that there had never been any act of injustice towards them.  On top of this, Dr Faridi is always ready to declare that he would protest the moment he learns that there has been any injustice done to Hindus in Pakistan. However, Dr Faridi always insists on being `convinced' and, as one might guess, it is very difficult to convince Dr Faridi.

    Let us now consider some of the views of Mr. Mohammad Ismail President of the All-India Muslim League.  In an interview given to U.N.I. before the last general elections, Mr. Mohammad Ismail said, "If I am convinced that the Hindus of Pakistan are ill-treated or that they are forcibly converted to Islam I would not hesitate to criticize Pakistan.  For Islam does not permit such injustice."  In short, Mr Mohammad Ismail is always prepared to say that if Pakistan ever treated her Hindus badly he would consider it to be a very wrong thing.  The real question therefore is of determining empirically whether Pakistan really does so.  It is a question of assessing plain facts.  it is the responsibility of whoever argues with Mr. Mohammad Ismail to convince him that it is a fact that Pakistan treats her Hindus unjustly.  Once he is able to convince Mr. Mohammad Ismail about the truth of this proposition, the rest follows quite easily. As soon as he is convinced, one would find Mr. Mohammad Ismail unsheathing his sword and brandishing it against Pakistan.  But wait! Nothing of this sort is really going to happen.  For even if Pakistan does in fact treat her Hindu population badly, to convince Mr. Mohammad Ismail of it is not an easy job.  In fact, Mr. Mohammad Ismail has
decided not to be convinced on this point by anyone.

    When Mr. Shri Prakasa was Indian high Commissioner in Pakistan he had a very significant experience at Karachi.  In this book "Birth of Pakistan", Mr. Sri Prakasa has noted the following incident: In one place a Hindu temple was broken into. Mr. Sri Prakasa brought this to the notice of a Central Minister of Pakistan.  He urged the Minister to give police protection to the temple.  But the Minister refused to do so.  What he said is quite memorable.  He said, "Islam has given us the notion of perfect justice.  How, in the circumstances, can a temple be broken into at all?  Such a thing is unthinkable in an Islamic state."!  Mr. Sri Prakasa was obviously flabbergasted.  It was a fact that the temple was broken into, but an Islamic state is
always perfectly just.  And all Muslim leaders would readily point to the idea of justice in Islam whenever such allegations are made.  They do not find it necessary to go into the facts of the matter.  If there is any injustice done to the Hindus in Pakistan, it would be a verifiable proposition.  But if facts are different from the claims to perfect justice made by an `Islamic justice',  Muslims do not use the
criteria used for verifying facts by ordinary people.  When they do injustice, they apply the canons of `Islamic Justice'.  When injustice is done to themselves they would demand justice by universally accepted principles and would demand an application of the universal criteria of evidence.  As to themselves, since Koranic justice is supposed to be equitably applied in an Islamic state, Muslim leaders believe that an Islamic state is always just.  It is only others who err.  Therefore, outside the Islamic state, Muslim leaders insist on the universally accepted principles of evidence and inference.  Such are the double standards they apply.

    Can Pakistan ever hope to get a better lawyer than Mr. Mohammad Ismail?  However, Mr. Mohammad Ismail would never admit that he pleads on behalf of Pakistan.  Perhaps it does not even occur to him.  There are a number of similar examples.  When questioned, these Muslim leaders indignantly claim that they are one hundred per cent Indian, that have fully identified themselves with the aspirations of this nation, and that they regard the Hindu majority in India as their fellow-citizens.  What, however can one make of these claims when they are seen in juxtaposition with the actual behavior of Muslim leaders and the opinions they frequently express?  Even while they claim to be perfect nationalists, Muslim leaders advance arguments to support the Pakistani claim on Kashmir.  In the same way, they argue that all Pakistani infiltrators in Assam are in fact Indian Muslims. It follows that they do not believe in any rules to determine citizenship.  They are prepared to go to any absurd length to argue that Pakistani infiltrators are in fact Indians.  At the same time, they admit that all Pakistani infiltrators should on principle, be evicted from India.  They claim that they have no quarrel with Hindus
as such; and yet at the same time they issue religious rescripts objecting to the recitation of the Koran after Nehru's death on the ground that such a recitation is not permitted by the side of the dead body of a kafir.  They want Dr Zakir Husain to be the President of India.  However, they are quick to point out that it is unbecoming of a good Muslim to take the oath of office in Hindi or to obtain a benediction from the Shankaracharya.  While justifying the creation of Pakistan, they would also argue that they have nothing to do with Pakistan which is a foreign country like any other.  They compete with one another to vouch for the peaceful intentions of Pakistan. Who is responsible for disturbing the peace in the sub-continent?
Their answer is ready: it is the mistakes of the Indian leadership that have created all the trouble that exists in the sub-continent. Indian leaders according to these Muslims have never been reconciled to the creation of Pakistan and hence they bear animosity towards that country.  Pakistan quarrels with India over Kashmir.  Once Kashmir is handed over to Pakistan these people argue, there would be no quarrel. It is obvious, they feel, that India has created hostility with Pakistan by not giving up Kashmir.

    I would like to point out that these views extend to even further extremes.  There is an organization of Indian Muslims known as the Jamaat-e-Islami.  The objective of this organization is to establish an Islamic State in India.  Margdeep, the Marathi organ of the party once wrote, "Religious conflicts in India are not likely to be resolved easily.  Only when all Indians embrace a single religion, religious conflicts in India would end."

    If one tries to view the inconsistencies in the views of Muslim leaders quoted earlier in the light of the above quotation from Margdeep, it will be obvious that Muslim leaders are engaged in a gigantic jehad - a holy war- against Hindus.  this war would be over only when all Indians have embraced Islam.  to achieve this objective, Muslim leaders are prepared to indulge in all kinds of acrobatics.  It is quite true that they regard themselves as Indians.  For they look forward to ruling the entire nation.

    Why did Muslims demand Pakistan?  The answer is obvious.  Muslims believe that their community is a separate nation.  Why did they follow Jinnah?  This too is obvious. Jinnah's anti-Hindu views attracted them.  In this context, one ought to remember that as long as Jinnah had not propounded his two nation theory Muslims did not accept him as their leader.  The reason for all this are quite clear. Muslims were fiercely anti-Hindu.  As soon as Jinnah inflamed their communal passions.  Muslims supported him. The passion proved to be so consuming that Indian Muslims failed to see its simple consequence which would turn them into a minority everywhere in India.

    However it must be pointed out that the support of Indian Muslims to the creation of Pakistan was not entirely based on emotional frenzy.  It was also based on the theory of hostages.  At the same time, Indian Muslims believed that India would eventually be ruled by Islam.  The creation of Pakistan was only the first step towards an integrated Islamic state in India.  One has only to recall Jinnah's tactics for the creation of Pakistan to see this point.  he tried to induce the princely States in Rajasthan to join Pakistan.  He tried to get Junagadh merged with Pakistan.  He instigated Hyderabad to rebel against India.  His propaganda that riots took place in India alone disregarded its consequence in Pakistan itself.  What did the Muslims expect?  They expected Hyderabad to become independent.  They expected Bhopal to follow.  Junagadh had already joined Pakistan. Kashmir had a Muslim majority and would therefore naturally go to Pakistan.  They expected all princely States to refuse to join India and to proclaim their own independence.  They predicted balkanization of India, from which Muslims would eventually benefit.  These hopes were later proved to have been false.  Sardar Patel merged the princely States within the Indian Union and thus shattered their hopes.  This is why Muslim leaders hate Sardar Patel.  One can easily understand why Dr. Faridi insists that it was Patel who brought Hindus from Pakistan to India.

    In my opinion, Muslim society still mentally lives in the pre-partition world.  I would like to cite another personal experience.  Sometimes ago, I visited Agra where I met a few educated Muslim youths.  I asked them only one question: "Today you complain that Hindus are suspicious of you.  I think this is an inevitable consequence of the creation of Pakistan.  Why did the educated Indian Muslims in India fall to see the terrible consequence of partition?" These young men came up with a significant answer.  They said: "We would have remained a permanent minority in India.  A nation is governed by the whims of the majority. We would have been utterly helpless."  In fact, Indian Muslims are even today a minority.  If anything, they are such a smaller minority now than before partition. But when Indian Muslims express the views mentioned above, they believe that they have freed themselves from Hindu domination.  One can understand such views if they are expressed by Pakistani Muslims. However, one finds that views which might be expected to be voiced by Pakistani Muslims.  However, one finds that views which might be expected to be voiced by Pakistani Muslims are in fact voiced by Indian Muslims.  The reason is painfully obvious.  Indian Muslims still regard themselves as Pakistanis, and they believe that their emancipation has been ensured by the creation of Pakistan.  They expect Pakistan to deliver them fully someday. And therefore they indulge in fallacious and hypocritical arguments.  Those who cannot resort to such arguments simply blame the Hindus for injustice done to themselves.

    In sum, Muslims cannot reconcile themselves with the nationalism of any country where they are in a minority.  They wanted Pakistan because they feared to remain a permanent minority, and they also knew that the creation of Pakistan would not solve the problem of Muslims in this sub-continent.  A Muslim periodical recently observed that while partition had solved the problem of some Indian Muslims, the problem of other Indian Muslims, the problem of other Indian Muslims was yet to be solved.  Mr. Suhrawardy said in a speech after partition that partition had solved the problem only of Muslims in Pakistan.  It was necessary he said, to tackle the problem of Indian Muslims.  And a little before this he had observed in a public meeting in Calcutta, "Is Pakistan our last demand?  I will not try to answer this question; but I can say, that is our latest demand."  Each time the latest demand would be a new one.  One might ask, "Which is the last demand?" It is obvious that the last demand is going to be Assam and then for a corridor to link the two wings of Pakistan.  I hope my readers are familiar with Mr. Bhutto's views in this direction.  Those Indian Muslim leaders who loudly proclaim that they have nothing to do with Pakistan should have assailed Mr. Bhutto.  However, it is significant that none of them uttered so much as a word of protest against Mr. Bhutto's statements.

    What, according to the Muslims, is the solution to the problem of Muslims in India?  It seems that the only solution which occurs to them is the establishment of an Islamic state in India.  The Jamaat-e-Islami has already a programme to achieve this objective. And what if they fail to achieve it?  They they would seek to establish within the sovereign state of India a sovereign Islamic society.  This idea of a state within a state, and a society within a society, appeals to them.  One has only to take a look at the nine-point programme of the Majlis-e-Mashawarat to know this.  The Mashawarat has demanded that the Indian Parliament should have no power to legislate in matters concerning Indian Muslims.  Salahuddin Owaisi, a member of the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly has in fact publicly suggested, "There should be a separate Muslim state within each state of India."

[Chapter 3 Missing]

[Although the full chapter 3, Muslims: The so-called Nationalists and the Communalists, is unavailable, I am adding, on 28/4/2020, the following selected quotations from this chapter, taken from elsewhere]

p.53: All Muslim leaders unanimously complain that injustice is done to Muslims in India. However, they have a strange definition of injustice..... One of the methods of ensuring justice is to claim that Pakistani infiltrators in Assam are not Pakistani at all. A second method is to demand the granting of Indian citizenship to those Pakistanis who are illegal residents of Bihar, West Bengal and some other states of India. A third method is to oppose family planning.

p.59: Savarkar admitted the existence of a separate Muslim nationalism. He had even shown his willingness to give them a written guarantee that their culture, their language and their proportional representation would be safeguarded. The only thing Savarkar denied to the Muslims was a separate, independent and sovereign state.

p.61-62: In an undivided India a specially privileged Muslim community would have vigorously continued a movement for Islamization of India. Maulana Hussain Ahmed Madni was considered a great 'Nationalist Muslim' leader. He was president of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-i-Hind. When the ulema convened a conference in Delhi in the year 1945, he said in his presidential address, "it is the non-Muslims who are the field of action for this 'tabligh' of Islam and form the raw material for this splendid activity ... We are opposed to the idea of limiting the right of missionary activities of Islam within any particular area. The Muslims have got a right in all the nooks and corners of India by virtue of the great struggle and grand sacrifices of their ancestors in this country. Now, it is our duty to maintain that claim and try to widen its scope, instead of giving it up." ("The Deoband School and the Demand for Pakistan" by Z H Faruqi, Asia Publishing House, Bombay, 1963, pg.117) The same learned Maulana has said elsewhere, "if Dara had triumphed, Muslims would have stayed in India, but not Islam. Since Aurangzeb triumphed, both Islam and Muslims were here to stay.".

p.62: What was the difference between Jinnah and the nationalist Muslims? While Jinnah wanted a separate state, the nationalist Muslims wanted the whole of India.

p.62:  Muslim leaders always blame Hindu communalism for partition. I fail to see where, in this entire discussion, Hindu communalism comes in.

p.63: Jinnah was not fighting Savarkar and Golwalkar. He never mentioned their communalism. Jinnah accused Gandhi of being a Hindu communalist, refusing to concede his demands. He criticized Nehru in the same way. Similarly, when Muslim leaders hold communalists responsible for the partition, they want to suggest that it was Gandhi and Nehru who were 'Hindu communalists'. Theimplications are clear: they charge every Hindu with being a communalist. At the same time, they make the strange claim that every Muslim is a nationalist.

p.63: The real conflict, therefore, was not between Hindu and Muslim communalists. It was a conflict between the secular nationalism of Gandhi and Nehru and the religious nationalism of Indian Muslims.

p.65: When Christians were not modern, even they forcibly converted Muslims to their own faith.

p.66: Independence, according to the Muslims, is synonymous with all power being concentrated in the hands of the Muslim community.

p.69: They claim that the Hindu majority in India treats them with injustice. They fail to realize that their definition of Islam is twisted and strange, for these leaders believe that the greatest injustice to Indian Muslims is the simple fact that there is a majority of Hindus in this country.

Chapter 4

THE COMMUNAL MALADY -   A DIAGNOSIS

Secular parties in India have always considered the problem of
Hindu-Muslim relations from the viewpoint of romantic idealism and
have refused to face boldly the harsh truth underlying it.  After the
outbreak of a communal riot, they have hardly ever thought it
necessary to do anything beyond issuing public appeals for communal
peace and ritually denouncing Hindu communalist forces as the prime
cause of the trouble.  If, even after the recent communal flare-up in
Maharashtra, they do not make any attempt to understand the real
nature of this problem and fail to make conscious efforts to foster a
new secular trend in the country, the future is likely to be more
bleak than ever.

There are many reasons why the communal problem has again assumed
menacing proportions.  After the birth of Pakistan Muslim communalists
were, for some time, lying low because of the fear of Hindu
retaliation.  Hindu communalists were paralyzed by the intensity of
popular reaction to Gandhi's assassination at the hands of a Hindu
fanatic.  Now in the changed situation, both are again rearing their
heads.
    This, however, is not the whole diagnosis.  During the
pre-independence period, Hindu communalism was never very strong, and
even today it is not as powerful as we imagine it to be.  It would be
unfair to underestimate the influence of the secular forces generated
by the Hindu liberal movement over the past hundred years.  If today
the liberal trends among the Hindus are on the wane, the main cause is
to be traced to the continuing predominance of separatist and
communalist trends among Indian Muslims even twenty-three years after
partition.  These separatist forces are motivated by the ideal of
separate nationhood rooted in the idea of a religious community and
are therefore opposed to the concept of secular nationalism.  It is
high time that secularists grasped this basic fact of our political
life.
    The true character of this conflict can be appreciated only if we
understand the historical urges of the Muslim mind.  The Muslim mind
considers nationalism in the context of religion and this problem
exists with varying intensity in all the countries-such as India,
Ethiopia, the Philippines-that have Muslim minorities.  The Islamic
doctrine of exclusiveness is essentially responsible for it.
    The tradition of considering nationalism in the context of
political power for a religious group impelled Indian Muslims in the
pre-independence days to keep themselves aloof from the emerging
secular nationalist trends in the country and demand a separate nation
comprising Muslim majority provinces.  However, even after the
creation of Pakistan, Muslims remained a minority in India. Mr. Jinnah
had asserted that after the creation of two nations, the problem of
minorities in both would wither away.  In a way, the problem did
"wither away" in Pakistan, in the sense that the Hindu minority was
ruthlessly made to wither away in West Pakistan.

    In India, however, the legacy of partition has remained to haunt
us in the form of a two-fold problem.  We have, on the one hand to curb
the expansionist ambitions of Pakistan and, on the other, integrate
the Muslims of India into the fabric of our secular nationalism.
    These traditions of Islam and the strong separatist trends they
have engendered among Indian Muslims are the main cause of the
persistent communal tension.  To claim that Muslim separatism
continues to exist because the country has not adequately imbibed the
spirit of secularism is to betray ignorance of the working of the
Muslim mind.  The real cause of the present conflict is that the
separatist urges of Muslim nationalism have always existed parallel
to those of secular nationalism.  Muslims have never agreed that
partition put an end to this problem.  As I have mentioned in a recent
article, Mr. Hasan Suhrawardy, Chief Minister of undivided Bengal, had
pointed out in 1946 that, "Pakistan is not our last demand".  In his
letter written after the partition to Choudhary Khaliquzzaman, Mr.
Suhrawardy had propounded the idea of a Muslim majority area in India.
It is not without significance that the post-independence trend of
Muslim politics in India has followed the direction laid down by Mr.
Jinnah and Mr. Suhrawardy.

Muslim communalism was not eliminated even during the Nehru era.
Muslim communalists in the Constituent Assembly had opposed his
concept of secular nationalism and, even during his regime, they had
raised a cry of "genocide" of Muslims being committed in India.  Mr.
Hafizur Rahman, leader of the Jamiyat-ul-Ulema had, in 1958, accused
him of being partisan on the issue of the Hindu-Muslim relations.  It
is also noteworthy that Muslim organizations had never supported Mr.
Nehru's stand on Kashmir and had charged that his double-faced policy
was responsible for non-recognition of Urdu as an official language in
certain States.

    It is necessary to consider here briefly Nehru's stand on the
issue of Hindu-Muslim relations.  The charge leveled by some of his
critics that he was pro-Muslim betrays their ignorance of his deep
understanding of history.  He was perhaps the only Indian statesman
who understood the historical forces operating behind Muslim politics
in India.  His policy was therefore aimed at rendering Muslim
separatism ineffective by strengthening the forces of secular
nationalism.  His insistence on a common electorate and the inclusion
in the Constitution of the enactment of a uniform the civil code as a
Directive Principle of State Policy in spite of fierce opposition from
Muslim communalists may be cited as examples of his determination in
this regard.

    Moreover, Nehru was well aware that Muslims could easily combine
themselves in one political party because of their social structure
and the absence among them of a modern political consciousness based
on secular considerations.  As regards Hindus, he knew that their
stratified social structure always impeded their mobilization on a
common political platform.  At the same time, because of their liberal
reformist traditions, Hindus had developed a progressive political
consciousness which made them alive to larger socio-economic issues.
Hence, he knew, they tended to choose political parties on
non-religious considerations.  Because of this peculiar situation he
usually tried to project himself as a guardian of Muslim interests
with a view to preventing the re-emergence of a strong Muslim party.

    He did succeed in achieving this objective to a limited extent.
But during the same period while the Jamaat-e-Islami, an anti-Hindu
Wahhabi organisation could establish its hold among Muslims in North
India, the Muslim League emerged in Kerala and the Tamir-e-Millat and
Ittehadul-Muslimeen were revived by former Razakars in the old
Hyderabad State.  Similarly, the Jamiyat-ul-Ulema which had associated
itself with the Congress in the national movement gradually adopted an
obscurantist and communalist posture.  Not only that, its influence on
the ruling party prevented the emergence of a secular Muslim
leadership within the Congress.

   
After Nehru's death the Indian political scene underwent a radical
change and there commenced a process of consolidation of Muslim
communalist forces. The Majlis-e-Mashawarat was established as a
united front of all Muslim communalist organizations.  It should be
remembered that the Mashawarat's call to vote against the Congress in
the 1967 general election was a decisive contributory factor in
radically altering the political situation in the country.

    A mere glance at the charter of demands drawn up by the Mashawarat
would reveal that it wants a sovereign status for the Muslim
community.  This is not surprising.  Being a community scattered all
over the country, Muslims cannod demand a sovereign constitutional
status within the Indian Union, to begin with.

    To be sure, the Mashawarat has not been able to achieve all its
demands.  For example, its demand for recognition of Urdu as an
official language in U.P. and Bihar could not be conceded by the
leftist parties because of the strong popular opposition.  However, in
Kerala the League could join the State Ministry and secure the
objective, advocated by Mr. Suhrawardy, of establishing a
Muslim-majority area in the form of Malappuram district.

    The aims of the Muslim separatists are clear and unambiguous.  The
Congress split had made the emergence of a coalition Government at the
centre a distinct possibility.  It was therefore not surprising that
these separatist forces counted on the possibility of Muslim
communalist organizations gaining representation in the Central
Government if the Muslim political parties and groups came together on
a common platform.

      Every communal riot has helped the growth of Muslim communalist
forces.  In this context, it is necessary to understand the viewpoint
advanced by the Muslim League leaders at its recent conference at
Palghat.  In their speeches, they claimed that communal riots did not
take place wherever the League had a strong hold among Muslims; they
occurred only where it was not strong enough.  It was therefore
contended that the League needed to be built up into a strong
organization all over the country to eliminate the specter of communal
riots.  This argument, however, also implies the communal riots are
essential for strengthening the Muslim League.  No other reason needs
therefore to be sought for the fact that many a time communal troubles
are provoked by Muslims.

The argument that the Muslims are always the worse sufferers and
therefore it is unlikely that they would ever provoke the riots is
also similarly deceptive.  Riots and political assassinations have
always been used as weapons by Muslim communalists to further their
ends.  The League achieved Pakistan by resorting to communal violence.

    Similarly, it engineered the assassinations of Mr Allabaksh in
Sindh, brother of Mr Rafi Ahmed Kidwai in 1937 and of Sir Shafat Ahmad
Khan, Congress member of the Interim Government at the Centre in 1946.

    The Khaskar's tradition of riots and the orgy of violence, arson
and loot indulged in by Razakars in Hyderabad are too well-known to
need detailed mention.  Muslims suffered more in these riots, also.
But these organizations had taken this into account while formulating
their objectives and strategies.  According to Muslim communalists,
this is part of their holy jehad and the Muslim victims are shaheeds
who lay down their lives for the cause of Islam.  It is not without
significance that Dr A.J. Faridi leader of the Majlis in U.P.
admiringly refers to these victims as shaheeds!

    Those who regard their community as constituting a separate nation
would always work for the attainment of separate nationhood.
Gradually that demand is being skillfully put forward by the Muslim
community.  Communal riots are grist to the propaganda mill of these
separatists.  They are asking for Muslim-majority areas as a step in
that direction.

    Radiance, the weekly organ of the Jamaat-e-Islami, in its May 17,
1970 issue has already asked: "Why not an effort be made to take five
or six States on a cultural basis, so that Muslims from all the States
may live there in an atmosphere of peace, free from periodic
chastisement?"  This indicates the ultimate aim of the Muslim
separatist forces.

    The Prime Minister wants to eradicate communalism from this land
but she is indulging in self-deception if she feels that she can curb
Hindu communalist forces by conniving with Muslim separatism.
    In fact, under pressure from Muslim separatists, she is
undermining the very foundations of secular nationalism laid by her
father.  The unceremonious exit of Mr. M. C. Chagla from her Cabinet
and the relaxation of the rule prohibiting polygamy among Muslim
employees of the Central Government are but two examples of the
concessions she is making to Muslim communalism.  The appeasement of
Muslim obscurantist forces would only jeopardize the future of our
secular nationalism.

    It is a tragic irony of our political life that the Hindu
obscurantists who demand abolition of the property right conferred on
Hindu women by the Hindu Code clamor in Parliament for equal rights
for Muslim women; while the leftists and others, who are pledged to
modernize our society, support, if not justify, Muslim separatism and
obscurantism.
    The problem of national integration cannot be solved by appeasing
Muslim separatism.  It can be solved only by consciously fostering
liberal modern trends among the Muslims.  The policy of appeasement
adopted by the so-called secular parties is really hindering this
transformation.
    Unless it is given up, it would be futile to hope for any
improvement in Hindu-Muslim relations.  Indeed, they will continue to
deteriorate more and more till Muslims and the secularists learn from
experience or the Hindu-Muslim problem is "finally" solved in a tribal
manner.

Chapter 5

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: COMMUNISTS' INTIMACY WITH
                                               COMMUNALISTS

Muslims communalists in India and Indian communists have always
remained strange, but inseparable, bedfellows.  Many people are
perplexed by this unusually intimate relationship between those who
claim to believe in the Marxist dictum, `Religion is the opium of the
people' and see social change in terms of dialectic processes in
history, and Muslim communalists in India.

In fact, this intimacy is not at all surprising.  There are
significant resemblances between the communist movement and the Muslim
communalist movement.  First, both movements are international in
scope and character.  Both aim at establishing an ideological state
and neither cares for the means employed in achieving its end.
However, their purpose and the processes by which they achieve their
objectives are different.  As regards the communists, first there is
the emergence of the international communist movement in a country.
The movement seeks to establish a state.  Once the state is
established, the movement is directed towards creating the ideal, that
is, the Marxist, society.  In the case of Muslims the process is just
the reverse.  A Muslim society already exists.  This society seeks to
establish its own state.  Pakistan is an example of this.  In the
absence of a Muslim society a Muslim state cannot be brought into
existence.
    The basis of the Islamic movement is not the whole of a society
but only the Islamic segment of it.  The Islamic movement can
establish its own state only by subjugating, if not destroying, the
other parts of society.  For instance, if Muslims happen to be in
minority they can establish an Islamic state only by reducing the
non-Muslims to the status of a minority - either by proselytization or
by force.  Where there already is a Muslim majority an Islamic state
is naturally in existence. No modernist or liberal trends in a truly
Islamic state can ever revise its social structure.  This crucial
difference is likely to be ignored, for instance, in the context of
the collaborative attempts of China (a Communist state) and Pakistan
(an Islamic state) to precipitate chaos in India.  Islam is a religion
and therefore the elimination of other religious beliefs is a
necessary precondition for an Islamic state.  And no social change in
such a state would ever bring about a restoration of the former
composition of society.  An Islamic state may change.  It may even
become a secular state.  But even this secular state would be the
secular government of and by a Muslim majority, in which non-Muslims
would have little or no place.

      It would also be worthwhile to note the significant resemblances
between the communist and the Islamic movement.  The communists
believe that Islam was the first religion to bring about social
equality.  In fact, it is the claim to social equality that links both
these doctrines.  (Did Islam in fact bring about social equality?
What is the nature of social equality in Islam? Such questions arise
in this context, but they will have to be dealt with separately).  It
is assumed that neither movement is nationalistic in character.  When
communists are not in power, they are internationalists; when Muslims
are a minority in any country they lack a nationalistic spirit and
have an internationalistic, that is, pan-Islamic, attitude.  When
either the communists or the Islamists are faced with a choice between
modern territorial nationalism and allegiance to the state on the one
hand, and their own international ideology on the other, most of them
invariably choose the latter.  In short, a communist, when not in
power, is primarily an internationalist and only secondarily, if at
all, a nationalist. A Muslim in minority is primarily a Muslim and
only secondarily, if at all, a nationalist. Both Muslims and
communists regard their own concept of social structure as perfect.
Both reject freedom of thought.  What is even move significant is tha
fact the both employ strikingly similar methods of propaganda against
their opponents.  The communists usually dismiss their opponents
merely by calling them "stooges of the imperialists" (the current vogue
is to brand them all as "agents of the C.I.A.").  Indian Muslims, when
they criticize another Indian Muslim, call him an "agent" or "stooge"
of the Hindus ! (Footnote: For instance, Maulana Azad. I too have been
dubbed a 'Sanghist Muslim' in an editorial by "Radiance", the weekly
organ of the Jamaat-e-Islami.) Chair man Mao brands Russians
communists as "revisionist". In the Koran when Muhammad discusses the
messages of earlier Messiahs such as Moses and Jesus, he criticizes
them as `impure' due to `revisions.

      The resemblances between these two movements do not end at this
point.  As soon as they come to power, communists suddenly change from
internationalism to extreme nationalism.  Instead of decentralizing
power, they pursue a policy of strengthening and further centralizing
power.  The same happens within the course of the Islamic movement.
Most nations with a Muslim majority are extremely nationalistic in
their social and political outlook.  In pre-partition India, the Muslim
League used to demand greater provincial autonomy.  But as soon as
Pakistan was created, all remnants of autonomy were totally
eliminated.  Although all Arab nations have a common history,
tradition and language, they fail to unite.  Communists purge their
opponents no sooner than they come to power.  Muslim nationalistic
movements, wherever there is a Muslim majority, do not allow
non-Muslims to exist freely and equally. A clear example of this is
provided by the forced exodus of non-Muslims from Pakistan.  But is
phenomenon is not limited to Pakistan.  Every Muslim nation state,
with the exception of Turkey and Indonesia, treats minorities as
unequals.  Even Arab nationalism is no exception to this.  In fact,
Arab nationalism is not even Islamic nationalism.  It is racist.
Arabs believe that being Arab is being the most perfect Muslim and to
them "Islamic" means "Arabic".  In the Arab world, the political
connotations of the terms `Arab' and `Muslim' are identical.
    Let us turn now to India.  Events in India after 1945 help to
explain the communist strategy behind their justification of the
demand for Pakistan.  Since 1942 the communists had lost the
possibility of getting a popular backing due to their dissociation
from the struggle for independence.  There was hardly any backing to
be lost by them even if they supported the demand for Pakistan.  India
was on the verge of becoming independent.  The nature of this
independence was, for Indian communists, a matter of anxious
speculation.
    Peace had broken out and the cold war had begun.  The Soviet Union
and its Western Allies against the Nazi menace had developed a
relationship of increasing tension among themselves.  In such a
situation, the Indian communists had to speculate whether the ruling
party in India would support the Soviet Union or the West in the cold
war.  They decided to back Muslim communalists in order to precipitate
nation-wide disintegration, gain a popular backing from the Indian
Muslims, induce the ruling group in Pakistan to support Soviet
policies, and to benefit from the general chaos and factional fights
in the entire subcontinent.  This strategy has proved to be a
spectacular failure, because the assumption on which it was based was
wide off the mark.  Pakistan dealt with communists very sternly.  Dr
Ashraf and Mr. Sajjad Zahir who went to Pakistan from India to give a
momentum to the communist movement there landed up directly in jail.
It took them ten years to get out of jail and they chose to return to
India.  Although Ayub and Kosygin display a most cordial friendship,
there are many communist workers rotting for the last twenty years in
the jails of East Pakistan.

    However, during the intervening years Muslim communalists and
Indian communists seemed to act almost in collusion.  It was not a
mere coincidence that the Razakar movement in Hyderabad and the
subversive uprising in nearby Telangana occurred at about the same
time.
    When the CPI accepted the Ranadive policy of nationwide subversion
and uprising, many eminent Muslim League leaders throughout India
suddenly became `communists'!  The well-known Assamese writer Abdul
Malik, the editor of the Urdu weekly (and a fellow-traveller) Siyasat
published from Hyderabad - Abid Ali-Maulana Ishaq Shambli of U.P.,
Mohammed Iliyas of West Bengal, and Dr Ghani are some of the more
glaring examples of this phenomenon.

   The year 1947 saw the dissolution of the Muslim League in India.
Most of its leaders went to Pakistan.  Communal riots shook India and
the Hindus developed a feeling of strong abhorrence towards Muslim
communalism. Muslim communalists chose to change their strategy under
these circumstances.  Some pretended that they had given up their
communalism and joined the Congress.  The idea was to protect Muslim
interests from within the ruling party.  Mr A.K.Hafizka of Bombay, for
example, in such a recruit.  Those who did not relish compromises of
this type decided to continue with their subversive tactics under a
more acceptable label, knowing that Hindus would react adversely to
open expressions of Muslim communalism. They were attracted towards
communism not because they embraced the Marxist ideology but because
the communist strategy of permanent subversion was congenial and
appeared useful to them.

    Indian communists, however, have continued to practice
double-dealing in relation to Indian Muslims.  Their acrobatics make
an interesting study in itself.

Chapter 6

THE CHIEF OBSTACLE IN THE

WAY OF MUSLIM INTEGRATION

The demand for Pakistan was based on the theory that there was nothing
common between the Hindus and the Muslims of India.  In order to
justify this demand it was argued that the presence of a Hindu
minority in Pakistan was a guarantee for the safety of a Muslim
minority in India.  in short, a minority of the Muslims demanded in
1947 that (i) an independent sovereign state be established comprising
provinces with a Muslim majority, (ii) the Hindus should remain as a
minority in Pakistan, and (iii) the Hindus in Pakistan should be held
as hostages by the Pakistani Muslims for the wellbeing of Indian
Muslims.  The Hindus reluctantly conceded this demand and thus the
decision to divide the sub-continent was reached.
    I consider the Hindu-Muslim problem as a problem specific to
India.  Its scope does not extend to the entire sub-continent, nor is
it necessary to extend it in that manner.  The Hindu-Muslim problem in
the sub-continent no longer remains an issue between two communities;
it has now assumed the proportions of an international dispute between
India and Pakistan.  It is therefore a question of international
relations.  it can be seen as a conflict between two different kinds
of nationalism and the motive forces operating behind them.  We are
therefore compelled to discuss the nature of the decision made in
1947.
    To discuss the decision to partition the subcontinent is to
discuss the ambivalence that clouds it.  It is necessary to clarify
all the implications of this decision and to discuss the obstacles in
the way of its implementation. It is not only a matter of discussing
the decision to partition the sub-continent.  We must also remember
that we decided to integrate the rest of India on secular lines in
1947.  Our leaders decided to grant Indian Muslims as well as all
other minorities equal status as citizens of India.  We gave ourselves
a Constitution which grants equal opportunities to all citizens and an
even more important aspect of this decision is that we vowed that we
would create a multi-religious, secular, and integrated Indian society.
The moment we made this historic decision, the Hindu-Muslim problem
was in one sense eliminated for two reasons: (i) we gave Pakistan to
the Muslims in order to solve the Hindu-Muslim problem once for all;
and (ii) even more importantly, we decided to create an integrated
nation based on equal citizenship, cancelled separate electorates, and
abolished special representation.  We abolished all kinds of religious
prerogatives.  The moment we did this, we solved the problem for all
practical purposes.

    Today, the real problem we face in India is that of creating a
secular, integrated Indian society.  We are concerned today not with
the Hindu-Muslim problem but with that of removing the obstacles in
the way of a liberal society integrated on secular lines.  In short,
my theme in this essay is the problem of Muslim integration in the
fabric of a liberal and secular Indian society.

    To discuss this problem certain preconditions must be fulfilled.
We need participants in the discussion who are self-critical,
introspective and capable of thinking in a secular way.  Among Indian
Muslims there are very few people who are capable of introspection.
Individuals like Mr. M. C. Chagla and Professor Habib are exceptional.
Among Indian Muslims there is a conspicuous absence of unbiased,
self-critical and rational individuals who can discuss this fault of
individual Indian Muslims.  The capacity for self-criticism, the
courage to face facts, the ability to lead the community with a
critical awareness of one's own virtues and shortcomings, implies the
existence of a level of sophistication in the intelligentsia. The
Muslim intelligentsia in India lacks these qualities.  Their so-called
leaders are usually the leaders of a blind, orthodox, and ill-educated
community.  Such people do not discuss their own faults; rather, they
obdurately cling to their own views.  All of them put forward the same
arguments in the same tone again and again.  When they find faults the
faults are invariably those of other people.  They do not have the
capacity to understand their own mistakes and when people who lack
this capacity pretend to find solutions for a problem, the solutions
are hardly useful.  When the wrong kind of people enter the fray,
discussion does not lead to any meaningful dialogue. It only leads to
further mutual bitterness and further aggravation of tensions already
in existence.

    When I say that the Muslim mind is incapable of critical
introspection, I imply that the Hindu intelligentsia has to a certain
extent developed this capacity.  One sees that the Hindu intelligentsia
sometimes refuses to be swept by emotional appeals.  During the recent
agitation for a ban on cow-slaughter, one saw several instances which
could support this observation.  Some Hindu intellectuals have
been consistently opposing the demand for a ban on cow-slaughter.  It
is not necessary here to discuss the grounds on which they oppose the
demand.  Some oppose it because they believe that such a ban would be
incompatible with the secular ideals of Indian society.  Others oppose
it because they believe that the ban would hinder the economic and
agricultural progress of the nation.  In short, some members of the
Hindu intelligentsia view even a religious agitation such as this from
a rational viewpoint.

    The differential characteristic of an intellectual is that he
always analyses problems rationally.  If this criterion were to be
applied to the so-called Muslim intellectuals we would be sorely
disappointed.  It would soon become apparent that the `Muslim
intellectual' is not an intellectual in the real sense of the term.
He is merely a Muslim.  I would cite two examples in support of my
observation.
    In 1953, the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan published an abridged edition
of the book Living Prophets published originally by Thomas and Thomas.
Indian Muslims objected to the book on the ground that it contained
some misleading statements about the Prophet Muhammad.  However, they
did not stop at that.  They demanded a ban on the book.  In fact, they
launched a nation-wide agitation to demand enforcement of the ban.  It
is significant that there was not a single Muslim intellectual in the
country to point out that the agitation had an entirely wrong basis,
that other people had a right to express their opinions-even if they
wrong opinions and even if they were opinions about the Prophet.  When
the holy hair enshrined at Hazratbal was found missing, the same
attitude was laid bare.  I would have been happy if at that time some
Muslim intellectual had the courage to point out that it was wrong to
give the hair such great importance, and it was certainly senseless
that the whole of the Kashmir administration should be brought to a
standstill because of the missing hair.  But the unfortunate fact
remains that not a single intellectual from among the number of
Muslims who style themselves as intellectuals had the courage to speak
out openly on this occasion.

    A personal experience of mine throws light on a different aspect
of this issue. At that time I wanted to express the views which I have
stated above.  But when I wrote an article on the subject and took it
to the editor of a journal, he refused to publish it.  It fact, he
retorted: "Do you want me to have a Muslim demonstration storming my
office?: It is hardly necessary to add that the gentleman was Hindu.
A Hindu is used to playing several roles and he is an expert in
assuming different forms on different occasions.  I have already
referred to Hindu intellectuals and given the due praise.  But I must
frankly state that there is a kind of Hindu who is always terrified
when he thinks of Muslims.  This is no doubt a shameful state of
affairs.  At every critical moment this particular type of Hindu
pretends to be more of a Muslim than a Muslim himself, and thwarts the
attempts of those who are trying to make the average Muslim less of a
fanatic.
    The real obstacle in the way of secular integration is the vast
gulf that separates the intelligentsia of the two communities.  An
intellectual minority always helps to shape the rest of society on
proper lines.  It helps to establish a necessary equilibrium.  It
leads progressive movements in the society.  It effectively fights
obstinate revivalists.  It continuously accepts fresh ideas and
welcomes new values.  It examines values on the basis of its own
rationality.  It is conscious of its own faults and shortcomings
before it criticizes the defects of others.  An intellectual has the
capacity for critical introspection.  His approach is dispassionate
and analytical. The progress of a society is measured by the existence
and size of its intellectual minority.

    However, such a class does not come into existence in a society
all too easily.  It is the product of several complex historical,
social, political and other processes.  Exposure to such processes
helps to create a tolerant attitude which is necessary for the
existence of an intellectual minority and its movement.  Hindu society
has gone through such a process.  It has withstood the critical
pressures inherent in this process.  It has therefore been able to
give rise to a class of self-critical, liberal intellectuals.  The
Muslim community in India has not undergone such a process of
transformation.  It is just about to enter a phase in which this
process begins.  That is why I consider it a remote possibility that i
shall be able to discuss this problem with Muslim leaders whose
arguments are at present predictably obstinate.

    I do not, however, mean that there are no rational individuals
among the Indian Muslims.  There are a few exceptional individuals who
can think dispassionately and in a secular manner.  They are examples
of a progressive Muslim mind, but a handful of such people do not make
a liberal intellectual class and it is not possible for isolated
individuals to have any appreciable effect on society.  These people
cannot create a movement in the Indian Muslim community because they
do not have a place in the community.  The moment they became liberals
they lost the confidence of their backward and orthodox community.
Hindu liberals have been far more fortunate.  Nehru is an example.  In
1946 when anti-Muslim riots erupted in the State of Bihar, Nehru
threatened to bomb the rioting Hindus if they would not stop their
violence; and yet the Hindus continued to accept Nehru as their
leader.  In spite of partition Nehru gave this nation a secular
constitution; he gave Muslims equal rights; and yet a large majority
of Hindus accepted him as their leader.  One can cite numerous
examples of this sort.  Mr. Nirad C. Chaudhary is another example.  In
his book "The Continent of Circe", Mr. Chaudhary has discussed what he
considers the decadence of the Hindu mind.  He has attacked the Hindus
by calling them degenerate and yet Hindus consider him one of
themselves.  But the situation with the Muslims is different.  Maulana
Azad opposed Pakistan and it would be interesting to recall how he was
greeted by the Muslims for that.  This was twenty years ago.  What
status has Mr. Chagla today in the Indian Muslim community?  We know
what storm of criticism he had to brave when he proposed the Aligarh
University Bill.  As long as such a vital difference exists between
the mental make-ups of the two communities,, Hindu-Muslim tensions
are not likely to abate.  I think this difference between the two
communities is in the nature of a disparity of cultural levels.  The
wide cultural gulf that separates the two must be bridged.  Compared
to the Hindus, the Muslims today are culturally backward.  They ought
to be brought on a level with the Hindus.  This would imply the
creation of a liberal class in the Muslim community.  The Indian
Muslims today need, most urgently, a liberal movement.
    I do not think that fruitful discussion of this subject between
Hindu and Muslim leaders and intellectuals is going to be possible for
another decade or two.  Then there will be a meaningful dialogue
between the two communities.  And when this happens Indian Muslims
will have already found an equilibrium.  I do visualize the creation,
in the near future, of a class of liberals among Indian Muslims.  I am
not saying this simply because I am an optimist.  I feel that after
about twenty years Indian Muslims will have the benefit of a new
leadership. Such a leadership will not talk of protecting the
`religious' interests of Muslims.  It would be a leadership leading
different classes and strata of Indian society as a whole.  I shall
give only one example of the kind of leadership I have in view, the
example provided by My George Fernandez.  Mr. George Fernandez is a
Catholic by faith but his faith does not intrude into his social and
political life.  He is a leader of the working class.  He talks not of
defending `Catholic' interests but rather of defending the interests
of the working class.  People may assess Mr. Fernandez's political work
in different ways, what is relevant here is the fact that he does not
represent the `religions' interests of Catholic when he speaks as a
social and political leader.  When he speaks of removing English as
the medium of administrative and public communication, he forgets that
he is a Catholic.  He did not attend the Eucharistic Congress held in
Bombay.  It is irrelevant whether or not in his personal life he is
religious.  What is important is the fact that he does not bring his
religious interests into public life.  I hope that in future Indian
Muslims too will have such a leadership.  Today they do not have it.
In fact, even those Muslim leaders who call themselves Marxists
pollute public life with religious interests.  Mr. Mohammad Iliyas, a
Right Communist leader of West Bengal, is a case in point.  He
styles himself as a working class leader.  However, in 1967 he led a
demonstration of Muslim devotees seeking to assert their right to
offer prayers at a place the ownership of which was in dispute.  He
led this demonstration on a Friday - the day on which Muslims offer mass
prayers.  It is important to remember that Mr. Iliyas did not pause to
consider that dispute about the ownership of the place was sub-judice.
In order to justify his action Mr. Iliyas, who had no patience to wait
for the verdict of a court of law, made the curious claim that he was
defending religious freedom and was therefore defending the
fundamental rights of aggrieved citizens.  But surely, Mr. Iliyas's
`Marxism', which defines religious freedom as the right to trespass on
disputed property even as a court of law is about to settle the
dispute, is an odd kind of Marxism?

Chapter 7

MUSLIM OPPOSITION TO  SECULAR INTEGRATION
NATURE, CAUSES AND REMEDIES

Secularism implies a dissociation of religious considerations from
political and social life.  The modern view of man and society
includes a secular attitude to all political and social activities.
It does not insist on abolishing religion altogether but regards
religion as a matter of personal faith.  The ethical values on which
modern secular society is based are secular ethical values which are
rationally derived.  Religions may or may not contain a notion of
fundamental human rights as we understand them today.  As modern men,
we do not rely on religion for deriving our concept of social
conscience.  Our social conscience is inherent in the democratic
system of government we have accepted.  The democratic ethic is
liberal and is therefore heterodox.  It is thus necessary for a
democracy to be secular, that is, totally dissociated from religion,
to be a democracy at all.  All communities and individuals in a
democratic society have to conform to the basic liberal democratic
ethic.
    In many instances we witness an inevitable conflict between human
rights and religion based social attitudes.  In such a situation, the
only choice we have as modern democrats is to eliminate the obstacles
to democracy created by certain religious attitudes.  The very fact
that in India we call Muslims a minority and Hindus the majority
implies a non-secular attitude.  Yet all political parties seem to
regard this as a proper division.  A secular distinction between
people would be in the nature of a class distinction.  For instance, a
leader of the working class is a secular leader; a leader of Hindus or
Muslims is not.

    Secularism in India, although embodied in the Constitution, is as
yet only an aspiration.  It has not yet permeated our social life.  It
is even in danger today.  Within the Hindu majority, there is a strong
obscurantist revivalist movement against which we find a very small
class of liberals engaged in fight.  Among Indian Muslims there is no
such liberal minority leading the movement towards democratic
liberalism.  Unless Indian liberals, however small they are as a
minority, are drawn from all communities and join forces on a secular
basis, even Hindu liberal minority will eventually lose its battle
with communalist and revivalist Hindus.  If Muslims are to be
integrated in the fabric of a secular and integrated Indian society,
a necessary precondition is to have a class of Muslim liberals who
would continuously assail communalist dogmas and tendencies.  Such
Muslim liberals, along with Hindu liberals and others, would comprise
a class of modern Indian liberals.

    Liberal intellectuals emerge in any society only through a long
and complex social, cultural, political, and historical process.
Today Hindus have an influential liberal elite only because Hinduism
is historically heterodox and can accommodate dissent.  The modern
Indian liberal tradition starts from Raja Rammohan Roy, who was a
product of Hindu society.  It leads through such secular (as against
Hindu) liberals as Nehru to the present time.

    The target of Hindu liberals has been Hindu orthodoxy.  And due to
their continuous critical evaluation and leadership in social reform
Hindu society as a whole has been benefited to a certain extent.  I do
not wish to suggest here that Hindu society has accepted the liberal
democratic ethic and has modernized itself to any satisfactory extent;
It has not.  But this continuing liberal tradition places the Hindu
community in a culturally better position than that of Muslims in
India.
    Why do Muslims in India lack a liberal elite?  The answer has many
facets.  But one thing is certain.  The explanation of Muslim
backwardness is to be found in the very make-up of the Muslim mind.
    Indian Muslims believe that they are a perfect society and are
superior to all other communities in India.  One of the grounds for
this belief is the assumption that the Islamic faith embodies the
vision of a perfect society and, therefore, being a perfect Muslim
implies not having to make any further progress.  This is an
unacceptable claim by modern criteria.

    Islamic personal law runs contrary to the modern notions of human
rights.  Its anomalies are obvious to anyone except Muslim males and
need not be detailed here.

    The second reason for this belief is the fact that Indian Muslims
resent being a minority and still dream of spreading their faith
throughout India or at least of ruling India.  They suffer from
delusions of grandeur and also from a persecution mania.  I can cite a
number of examples of this from the Muslim press in India and the
statements of Leaders of the Jamaat-e-Islami and the
Majlis-e-Mashawarat.  Another reason for this belief is found in the
pre-partition history of Muslim politics in India.  Muslims have always
believed that they are a state within a state and society within a
society.  Their ideas of representation are based on this claim and
therefore they run contrary to the concept of a democratic society
itself.  Today they believe in a parallel co-existence with the
majority with complete autonomy as a community.  This explains their
resistance to a change in their personal law.  But going even
further, Indian Muslims oppose family planning because they are
obsessed with the idea of increasing their numbers to be effective in
power politics.  This is the same old dangerous attitude as led to the
demand for, and creation of, Pakistan.  Their sense of loyalty to
Pakistan, that is, their view of the Kashmir problem and their defense
of infiltrators in States like Assam, is another aspect of this
anti-secular view.  Their failure to identify themselves as Indians
becomes obvious in these and many other ways.

    The only leadership Indian Muslims have is basically communalist.
An exceptional Muslim liberal like M. C. Chagla has no place in Indian
Muslim society.  Nor will individual modern liberals suffice. Indian
Muslims today need an avant garde liberal elite to lead them.  This
elite must identify itself with other modern liberals in India and
must collaborate with it against Muslim as well as Hindu communalism.
Unless a Muslim liberal intellectual class emerges, Indian Muslims
will continue to cling to obscurantist medievalism, communalism and
will eventually perish both socially and culturally.  A worse
possibility is that of Hindu revivalism destroying even Hindu
liberalism for the latter can succeed only with the support of Muslim
liberals who would modernize Muslims and try to impress upon them
secular democratic ideals.

    I believe that the only remedy to Muslim communalism is an
enlightened liberal intellectual leadership.  This leadership, to have
credibility and persuasive power, must emerge from amongst the Indian
Muslims themselves.  The first task of such a liberal leadership would
be to destroy the hold of communalist leadership over Indian Muslim
masses.  The influence of organizations such as the Jamaat-e-Islami,
the Majlis-e-Mashawarat and Tamir-e-Millat hs to be eliminated.
So-called `nationalist' Muslims, who are basically communalist, must
be exposed.  Also, Muslims who are today leaders of political parties
such as the Right Communist but like Mr. Mohammed Iliyas of West Bengal
are proven communalists, must be exposed.  The ulema must be prevented
from propagating anti-national ideas in the name of religion.  The
communalist Muslim press must be rendered ineffective. In short, the
pervasive influence of all kinds of communalists has to be rendered
ineffective.
    There are some Muslims who are members of the Indian elite but who
are afraid of their own community's reaction to modern attitudes.
These uncommitted and hypocritical liberals are not only of no use,
but are also a hindrance to the progress of Indian Muslims.  They are
either moral cowards or are apathetic to a great social problem which
is also a problem of democracy in India.  They must make a choice now.
If they do not provide liberal intellectual leadership to Indian
Muslims, the younger generation has to commit itself and carry out
this task.

    It is often argued that Muslim communalism is only a reaction to
Hindu communalism.  This is not true.  The real conflict in India
today is between all types of obscurantism, dogmatism, revivalism,
and traditionalism on one side and modern liberalism on the other.
Indian politicians being short-sighted and opportunistic, communalism
and orthodoxy is always appeased and seldom, if ever, opposed.  This is
why we need an agreement among all liberal intellectuals to create a
non-political movement against all forms of communalism.  If this is
not done, democracy and liberalism will inevitably collapse in India.
The stakes are high.  It is a pity that few people realize the
gravity of the situation.  It is even more unfortunate that they are
hardly informed about the true nature of the problem.

Chapter 8

HUMANISTIC MODERNISM

THE ONLY SOLUTION

In the preceding chapters I have discussed the nature of the Indian
Muslim problem.  In this context,, one ought of consider Hindu
communalism.  However, I believe that Hindu communalism in India has
sprung up primarily as a reaction to Muslim communalism.  If Muslim
communalism is effectively eliminated, the root cause of Hindu
communalism will be destroyed.

    This is not the only reason why I consider these two forms of
communalism on different levels.  As I have stated earlier, the Hindu
community already has within it an influential liberal elite which is
conscious of fundamental human values and is committed to them.  This
small but influential class of liberals continuously fights Hindu
communalism.  Such a liberal elite does not exist among the Indian
Muslims.  This is the Chief reason why I do not regard the two
communalist forces as being on the same level.  Basically, Muslim
communalism is aggressive and expansionist; Hindu communalism is a
defensive reaction.  However hard Hindu communalist leaders may try,
they cannot make Hindu communalism aggressive beyond certain limits.
By its very nature, Hindus society is not well-knit.  Liberal Hindus
are well organized and they are continuously trying to check
aggressive communalism.  Even during the post-partition days when
communal feelings ran high, Hindu communalists could not subjugate
the forces of secular nationalism among the Hindus.

    However, the Hindu assumes various forms.  It will be useful to
study the Hindu mind in contrast with the Muslim mind.  Hindu society
allows free expression.  This opens out a certain inlet for new and
different ideas.  A Hindu can take up extremely wrong positions at
times and even try to propagate highly non-conformist views.  Such a
wrong-headed Hindu can even muster up some support.  As a result, we
simultaneously find among the Hindus people who are extremely tolerant
and humanistic and also others who are extremely cruel and
narrow-minded.  The Hindus wears many masks.  In a sense, Hindu
society is a multi-headed organism.  Sometimes this creates great
complications.  It also explains the indecision and the ambivalence of
the Hindu mind.  It postpones decisions and avoids frankness.  At the
same time, it tries to obtain full credit for its independence of
mind.
    Of course, there is another side to this.  This other side is
equally important in the context of Muslim politics and the
Hindu-Muslim problem.  As I have observed earlier, Gandhi and Nehru
had recognized the fact that Hindu society had refused to accept the
Muslim challenge.  But Hindu communalists failed to recognize this.  I
must observe here that Hindu society lacks the dynamism without which
no national challenge can be faced.  For centuries it has been in the
doldrums.  It is yet to find a direction.  I am not referring to the
controversies raging in this country today.  The real question is
whether we have enough dynamism and sense of direction to overcome
these controversies.  American society has such dynamism and so too
the Russian.  In comparison to the Russians and Americans, the
Europeans are losing their dynamism.  And therefore, they are being
left behind.  It must be remembered that dynamic nations go on
extending the spheres of their influence.  sometimes they may expand
geographically; sometimes, their expansion is cultural; and sometimes
their influence spreads in the form of economic and political
influence.  Today, India is a shrinking nation in this sense and this
points to the lack of dynamism in a majority of Indians.  It is not
the leadership alone which is responsible for this waning of
influence.  English society overthrew Chamberlain to prove how a
dynamic society can reject weak leadership.  However, even in periods
of difficulty we have been unable to overthrow our weak leadership.
Our leadership is merely a symbol of the weakness of Indian society as
a whole.

    Does Muslim society then have such dynamism?  The answer is, `No.'
We have recently witnessed how Arab power shrank up within only
twenty-four hours.  Nowhere in the world today do we find a dynamic
influence of Islamic culture.  These are the symptoms of a debilitated
society.  Islamic dynamism is preoccupied only with spreading
religion.  Muslims call this dynamism; in fact, it is only a
hang-over of barbaric medievalism and it contains the seeds of its
own destruction.

    How they are we going to explain the spectacle of the Hindus'
helplessness in the face of Indian Muslims?  The creation of Pakistan
cannot be attributed to Muslim dynamism.  Pakistan was created by the
Muslims in collusion with a third party.  It is a sealed chapter now.
However, the conflict continues.  It is a conflict of two attitudes.
The Muslim mind is basically expansionist because it dreams of
religious expansion.  The Hindu is conservative.  He would not
transcend self-imposed limitations.  This habit of the Hindu is
sometimes expressed in an absurd form.  He decides not to enter
Kashmir which is a part of his own nation.  He refuses to everyone,
including himself to enter Naga territory.  These are symptoms of
decadence.
    When I talk of expansionism, I should not be misunderstood as its
advocate.  I am not suggesting that a society ought to be
expansionist.  After all, the modern conscience provides a yard-stick
to determine what kind of expansion is ethically justifiable.  I
expect a dynamic Hindu society of the future to develop a modern
conscience.  I believe that if the Hindus were sufficiently dynamic,
the Hindu-Muslim problem would be solved.  For if the Hindus were
dynamic, they would subject the Indian Muslims to several shocks which
history has spared them.  Muslims would be left with the one stark
alternative to perish if they did not wish to change.  And any society
prefers change to extinction.  Hindus can accept the challenge of
Muslim politics in India only by developing dynamism and a balance of
mind.  But to develop such dynamism Hindu orthodoxy itself has to be
liquidated.  The caste system has to be eliminated.  The Hindus must
embrace modernism.  They must create a society based on fundamental
human values and the concept of true social equality.  Unfortunately,
the Hindu mind lacks balance.  Even those Hindus who have accepted
modernity, justice and brotherhood as their guiding principles
sometimes support Muslim communalism.  Some avoid speaking against it
and some even indirectly encourage it.  Those Hindus who ought to be
combating communalism today seem, instead, to be trying to put the
clock back.  They are supporting obscurantism, revivalism, the caste
system and the cult of the cow.  This is a process which would drain
Hindu society of whatever little dynamism it may still have.  There
have to be enough Hindus trying to modernize the Hindu society and, at
the same time, opposing the irrational politics of Muslim communalism.
I hope this would happen.  For that would precisely be the process by
which the Hindu-Muslim problem can be eliminated.  Muslim communalism
today makes the most of the rift between liberal Hindus and
communalist Hindus.  It is ironical that Muslim communalists gain the
support of Hindus, both liberal and communalist.  The Muslim
communalist demand for making Urdu a second official language in Uttar
Pradesh and Bihar has been supported by the so-called modernist Hindus
under the impressive label of secularism.  The `secularism' of such
Hindus encourages the anti-secularism of the Muslims.  These
so-called secularist Hindus are opposed to e creation of a common
personal law because it might displease the Muslims.  They support
Sheikh Abdulla and suggest measures which are bound to result in
giving Kashmir over to Pakistan to settle our disputes with that
country.  When members of the Jamaat-e-Islami are arrested for
demonstrating against President Nasser in New Delhi, these
`secularist' Hindus promptly protest.  They back the Muslim agitation
against the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, publishers of the controversial
book on the Prophet.  When Hamid Dalwai's novel Indhan (`Fuel') raises
a storm of protest from Muslim fanatics, these so-called Hindu
secularists would support the fanatics and oppose Hamid Dalwai.  When
Mr. Chagla attempts to straighten up the communalist twist given to the
Aligarh University issue, under the pretence of being anti-Congress
the secularist Hindus would just sit on the fence.  Such, in short,
are the ways of the so-called secular Hindu.

   Consider, next, the orthodox Hindu.  He stages an agitation
against the proposed removal of the word `Hindu' from Banaras
University, and secures the support of the Muslim League.  He would
start an agitation for a ban on cow-slaughter and Muslim communalists
would support even that.  For when they support him on such issues,
both of them can establish a united front against Mr. Chagla, and then
the Muslim communalist would also be left free to stage nation-wide
agitations for a re-display of the Prophet's lost hair.  He can bully
critics of the Prophet.  In short, he will always turn Hindu
revivalism to his own benefit.  It must be remembered that the
obscurantism of one community helps to strengthen the obscurantism of
other communities.  If Hindu obscurantism is attacked and eliminated,
it would also be a strong blow to Muslim obscurantism.
    Who then is really fighting Muslim communalism?  The answer is, a
handful of modern Muslims.  Mr. Chagla in fact leads the modern
liberal Muslims.  And all of us know Mr. Chagla's situation now.  He
is opposed by the Muslims and unsupported by the Hindus.
    There is no doubt that the picture I have painted of Indian
Muslims is terrible.  But it is true.  One would be deceiving oneself
if one tried to believe it was otherwise.

    This, however, is what we observe on the surface, On the surface,
Muslim society appears to be mediaeval in its make-up.  Yet, somewhere
deep down, a change is taking place in this society.  There is nothing
dramatic about this change.  It is largely imperceptible and indeed
very slow.  It is a process which began quite a few years ago.  It has
still to cover many stages before it reaches its completion.  Sir Syed
Ahmed Khan represents the first phase in the modernization of Indian
Muslims.  He wanted to modernize the Muslims although he was still
opposed to the Hindus.  Jinnah and Iqbal represent e second phase.
In the beginning, neither Jinnah nor Iqbal was anti-Hindu.  However
later they began to talk in the name of Islam and this Islamism
ultimately led to anti-Hinduism.  This is where the process of Muslim
modernization was arrested.  The Hindus, on the other hand, had
progressed much further.  Raja Rammohan Roy represents the first phase
of Hindu modernism.  Many of his views were similar to those later
held by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan.  For instance, the Raja, like Sir Syed,
thought that British rule was a divine gift to India.  Savarkar
represents the second phase; he wanted to modernize Hindu second
phase; he wanted to modernize Hindu society, although he seemed to
emphasize technological modernity more than scientific outlook out of
pragmatic considerations.  Nehru represents the third phase.  Nehru
was modern in that he was firmly committed to democracy and the values
of an open society.  It is interesting to see that the Hindus had a
Savarkar and a Nehru almost simultaneously.  The two phases
overlapped.  Muslims in India have yet to produce their Nehru or even
Savarkar.
    However, a new generation of Muslims is emerging in India today.
One can see the first glimmers of a genuine modern humanism in them.
In the vast mass of a mediaeval Muslim society one witness a few young
Muslims who have a modern, humanistic and rational attitude.  They are
still scattered and isolated like islands in a vast ocean.  Their
modernity is reflected in what they speak and write.  It is seen in
their actions.

    It may be useful to cite a few examples.  Some educated Indian
Muslims show the signs of a newly emerging attitude of unbiased
detachment.  For instance, Professor Mohammad Yasin's book, Social
History of Islamic India.  Professor Athar Rizvi's work analysing
Muslim revivalism in the 16th and 17th centuries, and Professor M.
Mujeeb's book Indian Muslims, reveal a new attitude of critical
detachment.  This kind of modern attitude is also shared by Professor
Mohammad Habib and the Head of the Department of Political Science at
Osmania University, Dr Rashiduddin Khan.  During my recent visit to
Aligarh I had a chance to meet and talk to some men and women students
as well as some of the teaching staff.  Even among them I found the
hopeful signs of a critically introspective attitude.  In many cities
in Northern India not only is the purdah fast disappearing but there
is also a rapid spread of education among Muslim women.  Many of these
have married men of other faiths.  It is significant to note that
these men of other religions who married Muslim women were not urged
to become Muslims.  All these trends indicate the emergence of
modernity among Indian Muslims.

    Are we going to welcome these new trends?  Are we going to
encourage them and let them flourish?  This is what we have to decide
now.  We have to check Pakistani expansionism and protect our borders.
We have to adopt a clear and decisive long-range policy towards
Pakistan.  We have to support Muslim modernism in India.  We have to
insist on a common personal law for all citizens of India.  All
marriages in India must be registered under a common Civil Code.
Religious conversion should not be allowed, except when the intending
convert is adult and the conversion takes place before a magistrate.
Children born of inter-religious marriages should be free to practice
any religion but only after they reach legal adulthood.  If either a
dargah or a temple obstructs the passage of traffic on a thoroughfare,
it ought to be removed.  Government should have control over the
income of all religions property.  The income should be spent on
education and public welfare alone. It should not be obligatory to
mention one's religion and caste (even today, the admission form used
in schools compels students to state their religion).  The Banaras and
Aligarh Universities should be declared national institutions of
higher learning and their constitutions should be modified for the
purpose.  The special status given to Kashmir should be scrapped.  All
Indian citizens should be free to visit Nagaland.  There should be
opportunities for the development of Urdu; even schools which use Urdu
as medium of instruction should have full protection.  However, the
demand for giving Urdu the status of the second official language of a
State should be firmly resisted.  The status of all Indian women
should be governed by a single, common Civil Code.  The purdah should
be legally banned.  The question of a ban on cow-slaughter should be
settled strictly with reference to the agricultural and economic
development of the country.  Family planning should be made compulsory
for all, for example, by compulsory sterilization of one of the
partners after the birth of the third child.  Those Muslims who oppose
these reforms should not be entitled to full citizenship rights.  For
instance, they should have no right of vote.  They should not be
eligible for receiving the benefits of any social welfare scheme.
Those Muslims who oppose reform on the ground of religion should be
governed strictly according to the Shariat law in its entirety.  For
example, if they are caught stealing, their hands should be cut off in
public.  If they speak a falsehood, they should be publicly whipped.  A
Muslim woman who is found guilty of adultery should be stoned to death
in public. I hope those who insist on following the Shariat law will
not indeed find this separate code of crime and punishment for
orthodox Muslims outdated.  If so, they should not seek to apply the
Shariat only partially.

    The only answer to the communal problem in India is secular
integration of all the peoples of India.  If the question is viewed in
this light, liberal Muslim modernism would be strengthened.  Today we
have a suitable climate for the emergence of a strong modernist
movement among the Muslims.  Muslims no more enjoy power.  Muslim
orthodoxy without power is like a serpent without its poison fangs;
only its tail would wriggle.  In future we need not discuss the
Hindu-Muslim problem.  We should discuss a common Civil Code and
launch a movement for it.

    For all this to happen, the present division among the Hindus
should cease to exist.  Those Hindus who want to counter Muslim
communalism unfortunately try to strengthen Hindu revivalism.  And
those Hindus who went to lead the Hindus and ultimately the whole of
this nation on the way of modernity are unfortunately supporting
Muslim communalists.  This has to change.  I am on the side of all
Hindus who oppose Muslim communalism; but when the same Hindus help
revivalism, I am opposed to them.  I support all those who want to
modernize the Hindus; but when they adopt a policy of not opposing
Muslim communalism, I oppose them.  If the Hindus develop a proper
balance of mind, I believe the present tensions would soon begin to
resolve.

Chapter 9

INDIAN MUSLIMS AT THE

CROSSROADS*

(* Presidential address at the First All-India Conference of Forward-Looking Muslims held at Delhi on December 4-5, 1971.)

  Let me at the outset thank the Indian Secular Society for the great
honor they have done me in asking me to preside over this Conference.
Friends who have gathered here from various parts of India are united
with each other and with the Indian Secular Society by the common bond
of a shared point of view.  I also share this point of view and I feel
happy and proud to belong to this fraternity.  We are here to pursue
the possibility of bringing on a common all-India platform all Muslims
who are convinced that modernization of Muslim society is the only
effective way of solving its problems.  The establishment of such a
platform will help Muslims to emerge from their present condition of
isolation and despair, give them a lead in tackling their own problems
and the problems of the country from the secular point of view, within
the framework of a free, egalitarian, secular society.  It is this
thought and hope which lie behind the effort to organize this Conference.

    I do not want to enter into the bitter and tragic history of
Hindu-Muslim tensions in this sub-continent, leading to the acceptance
of partition as a remedy which has proved worse than the disease.  It
is a familiar enough story.  What is more pertinent is the fact that
the Muslim society has not been able successfully to face the
challenges with which it was confronted in post-Independence India.
We must identify the causes of this failure, for in the absence of
this understanding it will not be possible for us to deal effectively
with our problems.

    Before Independence all sections of Indian Muslims were united in
the belief that establishment of a separate state of their own was a
panacea for all their problems.  There were different currents of
thought prevalent in different sections and strata of the Muslim
society though most of them converged on the demand for Pakistan.  One
line of thinking was that as Muslims were denied recognition as a
political entity enjoying parity with the majority, they were left
with no alternative to establishing a state of their own.  Others
thought that in a united India Muslims all over the sub-continent were
bound to remain perpetually at the mercy of the Hindu community.  The
establishment of the sovereign state of Pakistan would not only
liberate a section of Muslims from this thralldom, it would also bring
about some kind of parity between Hindus and Muslims by reducing both
communities to the position of minority in one of the two successor
states.  Muslims who were to remain in India were called upon to
sacrifice their security and welfare to ensure a glorious future for
fellow Muslims who would constitute the majority in Pakistan.  But
they were also assured that the establishment of Pakistan was the only
way in which their safety and welfare could be assured.  Hindus in
Pakistan would be hostages to a secure future for Muslims in India
and, the more fair-minded among the champions of this theory would
perhaps have added, vice versa. A few liberal, secure Muslim leaders
did raise their voice against separatist Muslim nationalism but it
remained feeble.

    I do not claim to be conversant with subtleties of sophisticated
political theory. I am not a thinker or a theoretician or an
academician. I am an ordinary social worker and have some concern for
the state of the society to which I belong. I want merely to place
before you the conclusion forced on me by my experience of the Muslim
mind and its dominant attitudes, which I have gathered in the course
of my social work. The conclusion appears to be inescapable to me that
the reasons I have just enumerated are not the only or even the most
powerful ones which impelled Muslim society to adopt the doctrine of
its separate nationhood. Any such belief would amount to nothing less
than self-deception on the part of Muslims. That the Muslim society is
a nation in itself is a belief firmly rooted in the Muslim mind.
History tells us that a people who believe themselves to be a nation
will not rest till they have made their nationhood a reality in the
form of a politically sovereign state. The demand for a sovereign
state as an embodiment of its separate nationhood is made irrespective
of whether the people have received just or unjust treatment at the
hands of others. Obviously such a state can come into existence only
in a territory in which this people has a majority. This accounts for
the emergence of Pakistan as a sovereign state and its boundaries.  To
imagine that a section of the people who till the other day fervently
believed in their separate nationhood would readily and entirely shed
this belief merely because it finds itself in the position of a
numerical minority in India would not only be to fly in the face of
human nature; it will also give us a distorted picture of the nature of
the problems facing Indian Muslims.

    Any discerning spectator will be convinced that Muslim politics in
the post-Independence era continues to be based on the conception that
Muslims constitute a separate nation.  The persistent attempts to
organize Muslims into a solid political group cannot be explained in
any other way.  Muslims continue to regard themselves as an autonomous
society within the nation.  It is quite true that partition far from
proving to be a solution to the Muslim problem has only aggravated it.
But it is simply not true that there was a happy solution waiting
round the corner only if partition had been avoided.  For the Muslims
demanded parity as the price for remaining in a politically united
India and surely this was an impossible demand.  There is no precedent
anywhere in the world for granting parity to a minority or any group.
The only unexceptionable way to integrate a minority of people within
a nation is to grant equal citizenship to everyone.

    The reasons why partition aggravated the problems of Indian
Muslims are many. In the first place the relations between Pakistan
and India were never happy.  And there is no hope of their improving
so long as the rulers or Pakistan are not prepared to give up their
territorial ambitions and their age-old anti-Hindu prejudices.  Now
that the revolt in Bangladesh is threatening the very existence and
unity of Pakistan, Indo-Pak relations have ceased in have any
relevance to the problem of the security and future of India Muslims.
There is a real possibility that the emergence of Bangladesh as a
sovereign, democratic state will give a new and hopeful turn to
Hindu-Muslim relations.  Whatever validity the obnoxious `hostages'
theory ever had has been drained away by the fiendish decimation of
Hindus in Pakistan.  Within three months of the creation of Pakistan
almost all Hindus and Sikhs were driven out of West Pakistan.  Then
started a steady exodus of Hindus from East Bengal with occasional
spurts.  Of the nearly 10,000,000 refugees who have fled from the
terror deliberately let loose by the Pakistani army in Bangladesh to
crush the freedom struggle, 6,500,000 are Hindus.  The number of
Hindus and Sikhs residing in Pakistan when it came into existence was
16,000,000.  Bearing in mind the rate of growth of population in this
sub-continent,, their strength should have gone up during the last 24
years to about 25,000,000.  If one takes into account the number of
recent Hindu refugees who have crossed into India, the total strength
of the Hindus left in Pakistan cannot be put higher than 3 - 5,000,000
[edit.Note: This last figure is not clear in the copy of the book as given in facebook and should be checked].

This means that Pakistan expelled more than 75 per cent of its
minorities.  As against this there were 40,000,000 Muslims in India at
the time of partition.  According to the 1971 census this figure has
gone up to 65,000,000.  One of the ostensible reasons behind the
demand for separate state for Muslims was their fear that they would
never receive justice at the hands of the Hindus who would always
enjoy a brute-majority in undivided India.  It will be difficult to
say that the Islamic state of Pakistan has set a model of fair and
generous treatment of minorities.

    The response of Indian Muslims to the struggle for liberation of
Bangladesh has also been rather strange.  Apart from a few stray
individuals and some minor organizations all Muslims have rushed to
the defense of and have been at considerable pains to justify and even
extol the actions of the ruling junta in West Pakistan.  Muslims
resent the remark that they do not yet seem to have joined without
reservations the mainstream of Indian national life.  But the fact
that when the entire people of India and all political parties are
united in supporting the heroic struggle for democracy and human
rights that is going on in Bangladesh, only the Muslim public opinion
should sound a discordant note seems clearly to indicate that Muslims
have not yet identified themselves with the mainstream of the national
life.
    It is against the background of these facts that I would like to
offer a few remarks on some of the problems facing Indian Muslims.  It
appears to me that the main challenge before the Muslim community in
India is to establish relations with other communities on the basis
of equality within the framework of a secular nation.  It is a sad
fact that Muslims have not yet faced up to this challenge.  Nor have
they shown the courage necessary for transforming their
tradition-bound social structure in accordance with the modern values
of individual freedom and social equality.  Transformation of the
Muslim society and establishment of egalitarian relations with
non-Muslim communities in India are not so much distinct challenges
as two sides of the same challenge.  For the Muslim reluctance to face
them is basically due to their rejection of the concept of equality of
individuals.  It will just not do to brush aside such criticism the
stock assertion that Islam was the first religion to preach and
practice equality.  In fact, no religion has shown much concern for the
rights of the individual and Islam is no exception.  Islam
discriminates between men and women and the awareness of the
distinction between a believer and non-believer has always been rather
intense in the Muslim mind.  Islamic doctrine does recognize and
sanction this distinction and it has often found extreme expression in
the actual practice of Muslim individuals and groups.  Whenever
Muslims are in a majority they have refused to recognize the equal
rights of non-Muslim minorities and where they are in a minority they
have been generally reluctant to regard themselves as part and parcel
of a non-religious nation.  The recent revolts of Muslims in the
Philippines, Thailand and Ethiopia are merely expressions of the
Muslim unwillingness to participate in a common social order on equal
terms with others and this unwillingness is rooted in a long and
deeply entrenched historical and religious tradition.

    It will be useful to examine this question in depth.  The fact
that Muslims constantly raise the flag of separate nationhood has
something to do with the form Muslim society assumed when Islam first
became established as a distinct religion.  Right from its beginning
Islam has been characterized by unification of spiritual authority and
temporal power.  Muslim society has therefore become historically
conditioned to regard sovereign political power as one of its
inalienable rights.  This is the real reason why when Muslims are in a
minority in a country they are generally at odds with its nationalism
which seeks to integrate its diverse elements into a common nation.
The demand for Pakistan can be traced to this historically conditioned
mentality.  The restiveness of Muslim communities in the Philippines.
Thailand and Ethiopia which occasionally express itself in open
rebellion is rooted in the same mentality as also accounts for the
separation of Indian Muslims.

    It must be emphasized that it is not a feature peculiar to the
Muslim society that its mind and outlook have been conditioned by its
history and traditions.  There was a time when the Christian society
exhibited this feature and so did the Hindu society until very
recently.  However, the Christian society has succeeded in
emancipating itself from the narrowness and particularism of its
tradition and in basing itself on universal human values.  This it
could do because of the powerful impact made on it by the movement of
renaissance which proclaimed the values of free, critical inquiry and
human creativity.  The Hindu society is also progressing steadily if
slowly in the same direction.  If the Muslim society is also doing so
it must be confessed that its progress is so slow as to be almost
imperceptible.  One example should suffice to illustrate the point I
am making.  When the recent exodus from Bangladesh started Christian
missionary organizations were the first to rush to the scene to
alleviate suffering.  The Ramakrishna Mission have a long tradition of
bringing succor and solace to the victims of man-made or natural
calamities irrespective of their caste and creed.  The Ramakrishna
Mission has also been working in the same spirit in this
sub-continent.  But it is significant that there is no Muslim
religious organization which works in the same spirit, trying to help
human beings in distress irrespective of their caste or creed.  It is
significant because it is symptomatic of the lack of concern for human
values displayed by contemporary Muslim society.

    By and large Muslims have not yet mentally accepted the need for
the separation of religion from Government and the state.  Theologians
refuse to countenance such separation and even educated Muslims on
whom their religious faith sits lightly but who are prone to seek
mental security in a collectivist Muslim nationalism reject it.  It
would be wrong to conclude that just because educated Muslims are not
very religious they must therefore be secular.  Jinnah was not
particularly religious but neither was he secular.  And it would
appear that the thought and actions of the educated Indian Muslims
have been profoundly influenced by the example of Jinnah, whom they
seem to have taken as a model.  Jinnah, because of this loyalty to
Muslim collectivism continued even after the creation of Pakistan to
be exclusively concerned with the welfare of the Muslims.  Even today
eminent political leaders like Dr A. J. Faridi, Mr. Badruddin Tyabji,
Sheikh Abdulla, Mr. Mohammed Ismail and political commentators like Mr.
A. G. Noorani continue to play the same game with varying skill and
finesse.
    This tendency to accord supremacy to a collectively loyalty to
Islam, to which every other consideration is sought to be subordinated,
and the resulting indifference to human values are by no means
confined to Indian Muslims alone.  Muslim communities everywhere in
the world display the same attitude.  When Muslims stage a revolt in
the Philippines, or when there is a riot in Ahmedabad, the chief
theologian of the Al Azhar University of Cairo raises his voice in
protest, bemoans the massacres of Muslims and condemns the governments
of the Philippines and India.  But when West Pakistanis who after all
constitute a minority of the population of Pakistan, massacre East
Bengalis the same divine feels no hesitation in defending this inhuman
action as necessary for maintaining the integrity of Pakistan.

    Spokesman of Muslim nations and organizations habitually adopt
double standards when faced with situations of this kind.  This is
strikingly illustrated by the curious resolution passed by the
Afro-Asian Muslim Conference which met at Jakarta in 1964.  This
resolution demanded for Muslim minorities in all countries their
fundamental rights recognized by the United Nations Charter of Human
Rights.  So far, very good.  But for non-Muslim minorities in Islamic
countries it asked for a fair and just treatment in accordance with
the ideals of Islam.  This kind of double-talk is sufficient evidence
to convince a person like me of the fairness of the remark made by G.
E. von Grunebaum in his Modern Islam that Muslim society is
`essentially anti-humanistic.'

    The fact is that Muslim society has not yet thrown up in a
significant number individuals who are genuinely committed to
liberalism and humanism.  It continues to be a tribal society held
together by a collectivist loyalty.  Even educated Muslims whose
religious faith is often skin-deep rarely rise to a broad, humanist
outlook.  Their sensitivity to human suffering as human suffering is
as yet feeble.  This is perhaps the reason why even a person like
Badshah Khan, who was a close associate of Gandhi, while commenting on
current happenings in Pakistan expresses his sorrow over the massacre
of Muslims by Muslims.  The cruelty to which innocent and helpless
Hindus are being subjected is apparently a matter beneath his notice.
Some Muslim leaders have indeed made a reference to the atrocities
against the Hindus.  Such things, according to them, are condemnable
because they tarnish the high ideals of Islam.  In view of the
uniformly unfair treatment meted out by Muslim societies to others
everywhere in the world, one feels compelled to ask : What precisely
are these high ideals of Islam?  Surely the actual practice of the
persons following a religion provides a much more reliable guide to
its value than their professions.  If this criterion is adopted then
surely religious fanaticism expressing itself in religious persecution
with have considerable claim to be recognized as one of the `ideals'
of Islam.

    Curiously enough, this is a point where the two extremes-viz. the
so-called liberal Muslims and Sanatani Hindus-meet.  Sanatani Hindus,
while trying their best all the while to make Hindus intolerant, are
constantly proclaiming that tolerance is an essential mark of
Hinduism.  Gandhiji never asserted that Hindus were, as a matter of
fact, tolerant.  The only insisted that they should cultivate
tolerance.  To assert that Muslims in their actual practice are
committed to high, humanitarian tendencies entrenched in the Muslim
society.  Jinnah for instance, averred that love of justice was a part
of Islam.  It is a misfortune of the Muslim society that a Muslim
Gandhi who would insist on Muslims cultivating love of justice is yet
to be born in it.

The problems of Indian Muslims are rooted in this predicament of
Islam.  So long as Muslims do not acquire a genuinely secular outlook
and concern for human values, so long as they do not develop a
capacity for viewing their own problems and the problems of others
with whom they have to live in intimacy in the framework of human
values their situation is bound to remain unaltered.  The remedies
which have been suggested or applied so far were superficial. They
never sought to induce in Muslims an introspective mood or to
transform radically their outlook.  The Muslim mind remains untouched
by modern thought and values.  I am convinced that a new Muslim mind
can emerge only if the Muslim society experiences an authentic
renaissance.
    While all this is true and needs to be said one must not ignore
other relevant aspects of the situation.  One must not be so very
naive as to imagine that secularizing Muslim society will by itself
provide a final solution to all their problems.  There are situations
in which any amount or reason, good sense and accommodation displayed
by a minority is of no avail against the fanaticism and exclusiveness
of the majority community.  Hitler's Germany and Pakistan are examples
that come readily to mind.  The Jews were either massacred in Germany
or flushed out and the fate of Hindus in Pakistan has not been very
dissimilar.  What happened in Germany and Pakistan can be understood
only in the context of the history and social traditions of these
countries.  It will not be far-fetched to say that the expulsion of
Jews and Christians from Arabia in the reign of Caliph Omar has
furnished a precedent sanctioning the expulsion of Hindus from
Pakistan.  The nightmarish doings in Hitler's Germany which pass
belief appear not very unnatural when viewed as the culmination of the
deeply rooted racialist, militaristic traditions of Germany which are
not without some connection with the teachings of Martin Luther.

    I said some time ago that a Muslim Gandhi is yet to be born.  It
might perhaps be helpful if I explain this remark.  Gandhi was not a
historical accident.  He represented the high watermark of the Hindu
renaissance and embodied in his life and work some of its highest
impulses and achievements.  He symbolized the universalistic humanist
outlook towards which this renaissance was steadily working.  The
activities of Muslim communalists can only have the effect of
striking at the roots of this powerful secularist humanist movement
and debilitating it.  Even if Hitler's misdeeds were made possible by
certain dominant trends in German history it would not do totally to
ignore the contribution made towards realizing this dark possibility
by the fanaticism which marked the Zionist movement.  At least some
Germans must have been pushed into following Hitler by Jewish
extremism.  There is, I think, a salutary lesson in this history which
Indian Muslims will do well to ponder.

    It is necessary to consider the problems facing Indian Muslims in
the context of these historical and social currents because it is
these currents which determine the possible directions history can
take at any critical juncture.  It would be unduly naive to suppose
that partition and the shameful and tragic events which preceded and
followed it could have been averted only if Gandhi and Jinnah had come
to an understanding or if the Congress leaders had done something to
satisfy Jinnah's vanity.  Individuals can play only a secondary and
subordinate role in history.  It is the historical forces that
determine both the concrete setting within which individuals have to
act and the possibilities they can effective pursue.

    If Muslims do not have the courage to confront these historical
forces and the religious and social traditions which create and
sustain them, they will be able to do very little to help their
society to extricate itself from its present predicament.  What is
necessary is that Muslim society should experience the emancipating
and vitalizing influence of modern thought.  But so long as Muslims
are unwilling to consider their tradition, history and religion from a
detached point of view and subject them to rational criticism, they
will be unable to assimilate modern norms and values.  And so long as
this does not happen, the hope of any radical and lasting reform is
bound to remain futile.  I am aware that the task I am urging you to
undertake is not very easy.  But I must also add that it is not
impossibly difficult.  If you will not charge me with excessive
vanity, I would like to state that I have been able to work along
these lines with some success and I feel quite proud of my
achievement.  I have been deliberately maligned because of this by
interested parties.  I have had to face bitter criticism and I have
been at least twice subjected to physical assault.  I am not saying
this in a complaining mood because it is my firm conviction that
unless an increasing number of Muslim men and women come forward in a
spirit of self-sacrifice work with courage and patience and
determination, they will not be able to lift their society out of the
morass into which it has landed itself.  I am happy to say that quite
a few Muslims in Maharashtra have been steadily working in this
direction under the banner the Muslim Satyashodak Mandal and their
efforts have not been altogether unfruitful.  We can at most claim to
havce made a breach in the citadel of Muslim communalism and
obscurantism which a few years ago appeared to be quite impenetrable.
Incidentally about thirty-five members of the Satyashodak Mandal are
attending this Conference as delegates.  The Satyashodak Mandal has
also planned to hold a Conference of Muslim women at the end of this
month and it is to be hoped that the Conference will mark the beginning
of an organized struggle by Muslim women against injustice and for
elementary human rights.  The Mandal has kept a two-fold aim before
itself.  It aims at bringing about a transformation of Muslim soicety
in accordance with the modern values of freedom and dignity of the
individual and social equality.  Secondly, it aims at establishing
harmonious relations between individual Muslims and individual
non-Muslims on the basis of equality within the frame-work of a
secular nation.  This, according to it, it the best way to promote
national integration.  I have made this somewhat detailed reference
to the work of the Satyashodak Mandal in the hope that their
activities, and, experience may have some relevance to the issues we
will be deliberating on in this Conference.

    I have no doubt that out collective deliberations will give us a
better understanding of the problems of Indian Muslims and some
guidelines for future action.  I can only hope that the thoughts I
have placed before you make even a little contribution towards this
end.  I once again thank the Indian Secular Society for the honor
they have done me and I thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen, for the
indulgence with which you have heard me.

Chapter 10

FUTURE OF A MISSION?

Badshah Khan has come and gone, leaving behind him a sense of
bewilderment and resentment in the minds of many people in India.  The
feeling of unqualified respect and affection that greeted him when he
arrived had, by the time he left, given way to one of confusion and
surprise.  Most of his admirers refrained from saying anything
critical while he was in India.  Apart, from other factors, they were
also moved by considerations of hospitality.  But in the latter part
of his stay a number of them began to voice their criticism of some
of his statements, particularly on the Hindu-Muslim problem.

    Overt criticism apart, the gradual decline in Badshah Khan's
popularity was reflected in the size of the audience he attracted at
different stages of his tour.  One his arrival about half a million
people gathered at the Ramlila grounds at Delhi to accord him a truly
massive welcome.  When he went to Bombay three months later, hardly
ten thousand attended his meeting.

    How did this happen?  It is not likely that Badshah Khan himself
would practice some introspection in order to understand this change
in the public attitude.  From the way in which he repeated certain
controversial statements with great emphasis it would appear that he
has strong convictions - a fact which is not conducive to
self-examination.  However those who invited him to India in order
that their countrymen benefit by his visit cannot evade the
responsibility of understanding the phenomenon.

    I am afraid things went wrong from the very beginning.  The first
mistake was the three-day fast that Badshah Khan undertook soon after
he arrived in India.  The fast was first supposed to be a protest
against the Hindu-Muslim riots in India. Later, it was declared to be
a protest against the growth of violence in the country.  But it was
clear that Badshah Khan's fast was really in protest against the riots
in Ahmedabad and some other towns of Gujarat a few days before his
arrival.
    In the same context Badshah Khan went on expressing one-sided
views on the Hindu-Muslim question without thinking of the reactions
to which they might lead.  It is true that in the beginning he
exhorted Muslims not to mix up religion with nationalism and also
repeated his criticism of the pre-partition Muslim League.  But apart
from this the main target of his criticism and exhortation was the
Hindu section of the Indian society.

    This is not the place to go into a detailed analysis of the
Hindu-Muslim problem in India.  But it seems that Badshah Khan has not
tried to understand the complexities of the problem.  The attitudes of
both the communities have been shaped by the history of the preceding
800 years and they cannot be changed merely by telling them that
religion does not teach hatred of anyone.  What is necessary is to
examine critically the social and cultural traditions of the two
communities based on religion and, indeed, the basic assumption of
their doctrines themselves.  To say merely that religion does not
teach anything wrong is, in such a situation, equivalent to avoiding
this responsibility and thus by-passing the real problem.  Exhortation
may postpone the solution for some time, it cannot provide a
substitute for it.  This is not to suggest that leaders like Badshah
Khan who sincerely believe in the goodness of religion are insincere
in their efforts.  The point is that a critical examination of the
doctrines and role of religion in human society is indispensable for
resolving conflict among religious groups.  Exhortation, however
well-meaning, is an anachronistic approach.  That is why Badshah
Khan's effort has proved sterile.

    Neither Badshah Khan nor those who arranged his programme in India
seem to have realized that in the twenty-two years after independence
a new generation of Indians has come of age.  It wants new values and
new symbols.  It is not going to be satisfied with the old, naive and
uncritical language and symbols typified by the familiar statement
that all religions are good.

    The fact that Badshah Khan repeatedly talked of our having
forgotten Gandhi is evidence of the lack of understanding of this new
awareness.  Travelling by third class, plying the charkha, and such
other symbolic acts had their value during the period of the freedom
struggle.  But what is more important is the new way of looking at
life and its problems that Gandhi showed to his people.  it may be
that the Hindus have not lived up to this ideal.  But surely this
would be equally true of the Muslims who never accepted Gandhi during
his life time.  Also, Gandhi was not the only great teacher to have
been forgotten by his followers.  The Buddhists have not lived up to
the ideal set by the Buddha, nor have Christians been able to forswear
violence in accordance with the teachings of Jesus Christ.

    That men have failed to be true to the teaching of their Masters
should not cause surprise.  Indeed, if it were not so, Christ would
not have been necessary after the Buddha, nor need Gandhi have been
born after Christ.  Man is naturally weak and that is why there has
been a succession of great men who have sought to make him a human
being.  This is an unending process and Gandhi was merely a link in
it.
    However, let us be fair to the Hindus.  They have made mistakes
and occasionally even committed crimes.  But in normal times they
subscribe to the ideal that Gandhi placed before them and, once the
passions aroused by a crisis have subsided, they feel ashamed of
their lapses.  Muslims, on the contrary, have no such ideal before
them.  It would not be unfair to ask them `Who is the great man whose
ideal you accept in the modern world?'  No Gandhi has been born among
them so far.  The Hindus had to produce a Gandhi before they could
forget his teachings.

    But it is not quite true that the Indian people have completely
forgotten Gandhi.  The very fact that democratic institutions have
survived in India along among the large number of countries which
gained independence after the last World War would mean that Gandhi
has left some real impress on the Indian mind.  Millions of uneducated
Indians have peacefully participated in four General Elections and
have brought about peaceful changes of Government since Gandhi died.
    This is not something insignificant.  True, democracy and
secularism found in India suffer from many imperfections.  Nor does
anyone claim that they are perfect.  But let us not forget that they
can improved only through the working of free institutions, and that a
remarkable experiment to work them is under way in India.  It would be
wrong to imagine that this has been possible solely due to the legacy
of the British.  Pakistan and number of other countries also inherited
a similar legacy, but free institutions did not survive there for
long.  As regards Pakistan, neither the Muslim League nor Mr. Jinnah
ever accepted the democratic tradition which the British sought to
create in this sub-continent.  Pakistan was achieved through riots.
In Africa, tribal loyalties proved overwhelmingly powerful.  It is
only in India that the democratic tradition has been preserved and the
credit for this would largely go to Gandhi's teachings through word
and deed.  Only he could have shown the moral courage to suspend the
Chauri Chaura agitation on the outbreak of violence at the hands of
his followers.

    This is also why violence in India immediately calls forth
condemnation by organized public opinion.  Law is no doubt broken, but
invariably voices of protest are heard against the breach of law.
Corruption is prevalent, but those who practice it have to be
constantly aware of the Damocles sword hanging over their heads.  The
conventions of democracy are flouted, but one also witness insistence
on their observance.  All these, I would suggest, are signs of the
fact that Gandhi has not been completely forgotten in India.

    Nor have a majority of the Indian people forgotten the fact that
there are nearly 60 million Muslims in India.  It was because of
Gandhi's martyrdom that they could continue living in India after
partition and were given the opportunity of identifying themselves
with the mainstream of India's national life on the basis of equal
citizenship.  This, again was made possible by people who believed in
the humanist ideal put forward by Gandhi.  This would explain why, in
spite of practically unceasing provocation from Pakistan, an
overwhelming majority of the Hindus are still not hostile to Muslims
in India.  To see this one has only to consider the fact that whereas
the population of Hindus in Pakistan has gone down by nearly forty per
cent during the last twenty-two years, that of Muslims in India has
increased by nearly forty-five per cent in the same period.

    The difference between the two communities does not end here.
Wherever Muslims are in a majority, they have denied equal citizenship
to non-Muslims.  In practically all the Muslim countries only a Muslim
can become the head of State according to the Constitution of the
country.  Even Turkey, which has been rightly praised for attempting
large-scale secularization of Muslim life, has not been free from
charges of discrimination against non-Muslims.  For instance, Kemal
Ataturk claimed to have solved the problem of Turkey's Christian
minority by resorting to genocide.  Indeed, the word `genocide' was
first used in the League of Nations during a discussion on this
action.
    Pakistan has not behaved in a different way.  Within months of its
establishment, it drove away practically all the Hindus from its
Western wing.  As to the Sikhs, it is now confirmed from a letter
written by Sir Francis Mudie to Jinnah that there was a deliberate
plan to drive out the Sikhs into India.  The atmosphere of terror
created in the early stage was kept up through periodical riots which
killed or converted large numbers and forced millions of Hindus to
migrate.  The riots of 1964 again sent nearly a million Hindus for
refuge to India.

    The fact that no major Hindu-Muslim riot has taken place in
Pakistan after 1964 does not mean that the Muslims of Pakistan
suddenly became secular after that year's holocaust.  Steady
persecution of the Hindus and even of Muslims from what now is India
has been going on without allowing the facts to come out.  Hindus are
not now allowed to migrate to India without forfeiting their property
to the Government.  Nor are they allowed to sell their property except
with the prior permission of the Government.

    A major reason for preventing Hindus from migrating to India is
the Pakistan Government's anxiety over the possible reaction in India.
According to Taya Zinkin, who is no enemy of Muslims, for the first
time in the history of Hindu-Muslim riots the number of Muslims who
were killed in India exceeded that of Hindus killed in Pakistan in the
riots of 1964.  The Govt. of Pakistan has now realized that it will
have to provide for more Muslim refugees from India than the Hindus
they drive away from Pakistan.

    Apart from communal riots, the official policy of the Government
of Pakistan is also discriminatory towards the Hindus.  Since most
landlords in East Pakistan were Hindus and in West Pakistan Muslim,
the land legislation enacted by the Pakistan government permits a much
greater ceiling in the Western wing than in the Eastern.  It is
therefore curious that Badshah Khan should say that the economic
condition of the Hindus in East Pakistan is good.

    Even in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries Hindus are treated,
not as partners in the State but as `guests' of the nation.  A guest
has no claim to anything as of right except to what is willingly
connected by the host.  Consequently, there is no problem of tension
between the local Muslim population and the Hindu `guests' over any
issue of the type that leads to tension between the Whites and the
Blacks in the US or the Hindus and Muslims in India.  The attitude of
the Muslim majority in these countries to the Hindus is precisely what
the RSS advocates towards non-Hindus in India.  They are `guests' and
guests have no rights; they are only entitled to security and
reasonable courtesy, but only if they `behave'.  Badshah Khan does not
seem to have understood this difference between the condition of
Hindus in Muslim countries and of Muslims in India.

    The Muslim attitude to non-Muslims has its roots in the early
history of Islam itself.  The Prophets did not merely establish Islam
but also a state in Madina.  Ever since, Muslims have not been able
to separate religion from nationalism.  That is why wherever they are
in power they treat non-Muslims as second-class citizens, and wherever
they are not in power they demand the right to form a separate state
on the ground that they constitute a separate `nation'.  They
demanded, and ultimately got, a separate state for themselves in the
Northern and Eastern parts of the Indian sub-continent.  Even after the
creation of Pakistan no real change in this attitude seems to have
taken place.  For instance, at a recent conference called by the Prime
Minister at Delhi after the Ahmedabad riots, Dr A. J. Faridi asserted
that India was a multi-national state and that Muslims should be
recognized as a separate nation.

    However, Muslims are unwilling to concede a similar right to
non-Muslim minorities, as has been illustrated by the attitude of the
Federal Government of Nigeria to the attempt of the Christian Biafrans
to set up a separate state of their own.  At the same time not only
organizations like the Jamaat-e-Islami and Majlis-e-Mashawarat but
many so-called nationalists do not see anything wrong in challenging the
sovereignty of the Indian Parliament in matters affecting the Muslim
citizens of India.

    I wish Badshah Khan had told some home truths to these
standard-bearers of Muslim separatism in India.  Perhaps he does not
know that the award of the Nehru Prize to him by the Government of
india was criticized by the Jamaat-e-Islami's weekly organ Radiance.
In an editorial, Radiance asked how the Government of India would
react if the Government of Pakistan were to award a similar prize to
Phizo, the rebel Naga leader.  It is a tragic irony that while those
who were looking forward to Badshah Khan's visit to India were left
confused and disappointed, Muslim communalists were more than pleased
with him towards the end of his trip.

    It seems to me that in spite of his close contact with Gandhi,
Badshah Khan failed to understand the wisdom of his great leader.
When Gandhi thought of the problems of the Hindus he could not do so
without also thinking of the interests of the Muslims; when he thought
of the problems of India, he could not forget those of the world.
With Badshah Khan it is the other way round.  When he thinks of the
Hindus, he cannot forget that he is a Muslim - a Khudai Khidmatgar, no
doubt, but a Muslim nonetheless; when he thinks of the Muslims, he
cannot forget that he is a Pathan.

    This also is implicit in the Muslim tradition.  The Muslim mind
has historically been incapable of introspection.  Consequently,
well-meaning Muslim leaders like Badshah Khan can easily see the mole
in other persons' eyes, they cannot see the beam in their own.  They
do not realize that in dealing with problems of this type only he can
advise others who has first chastised his own fellow-men.  Otherwise,
they can best help by striving to reform the attitudes of their own
community.  A reform of one's own people also promotes, even if
indirectly, a similar reform of others.  By fighting obscurantism and
narrow communalism in one's own community, one strengthens the hand of
those who are engaged in a similar fight in the other community.
Gandhi understood this, and therefore on many occasions he close to
keep quiet rather than criticize the Muslims.  Unfortunately, Muslim
society in India has not yet produced its own Gandhi.  Indeed, it will
not be able to do so till the ground is prepared by a generation of
men who subject the religion and culture of the Muslims to ruthless
scrutiny in the light of modern values.  Badshah Khan is a great and
good Muslim, and also a follower of Gandhi.  But he is no Gandhi
himself.  Therein lies the cause of his failure.

Chapter 11

THE MEANING OF  BANGLADESH

    It is clear that the average non-Muslim Indian has spontaneously
responded to the freedom struggle of the people of Bangla Desh.  Of
course, there is a section among the Hindus who have been pleading for
caution.  Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was once a member of the Muslim League
and a follower of Suhrawardy, and it was when Suhrawardy was the Prime
Minister of Bengal that the Hindus were massacred in Noakhali.  All
this is true; but what is relevant today is the present nature of the
Awami League and the fact that during the last two decades Mujibur
Rahman has continuously worked for secularizing the politics of East
Bengal.  For instance, as early as 1958, in a speech in the National
Assembly of Pakistan he declared that "President Ayub Khan is raising
the bogey of Indian aggression only in order to consolidate his own
power" and added: "If we come to power, we shall resolve the
differences with India and reduce the defense expenditure of
Pakistan."  Even the Hindu refugees from East Pakistan vouch that he
made sincere efforts to give protection to the Hindus and to quell the
riots when the Hindus were violently attacked in East Bengal.  At one
time, Mujibur Rehman looked upon Jinnah as his leader; today he
regards Subhash Chandra Bose as his ideal of a leader.  This change in
his attitude and in the aspiration of the people of East Bengal should
be understood in the context of Muslim politics in the Indian
sub-continent during the last one hundred years.  Not to consider it
in this, its legitimate context would amount to hugging the dogmatic
and perverse view that Muslim communalism is something permanent and
immutable.
    The Muslim mind has always craved for power.  It has seldom
accepted territorial nationalism wherever Muslims are in a minority.
Muslims throughout the world believe that Muslim society is a nation
by itself.  Where they are in majority this consciousness is not so
evident.  They are already in power in such places, and are therefore
able to merge their Muslim nationalism with territorial nationalism.
However, where Muslims are a minority Muslim communal nationalism is
found to be in perpetual conflict with territorial nationalism.  All
that one can therefore say in the context of the events in Bangla
Desh is that Mujibur Rahman is attempting a synthesis of linguistic
territorial nationalism, on the one hand, and religion-based Muslim
nationalism, on the other.

    However, considering the political tradition of Muslims in the
Indian sub-continent during the last hundred years, even this
development is of revolutionary significance.  In Arab as well as
Muslim countries, successful attempts have been made to synthesize
Muslim nationalism with territorial nationalism.  No such attempt was
ever made in the Indian sub-continent.  Jinnah believed that the
Muslim community scattered throughout India constituted a nation.  In
undivided India he wanted this `Muslim nation' to be given parity with
the majority `Hindu nation'.  When he found that Muslims could not
win parity with the Hindus, he began to work for the establishment of
a separate sovereign state of the Muslims.  Such a state could only
comprise those regions in which the Muslims were in a majority.  The
creation of such a nation therefore implied the cultural and political
break-up of Muslim society.  For not only the Muslims of the
sub-continent were divided between India and Pakistan but within
Pakistan itself, once the bogey of Hindu domination ceased to exercise
the Muslim mind non- religious factors defining territorial nationalism
began to assert themselves.  The revolt of Bangla Desh is therefore a
logical consequence of the partition of India.  There is reason to
believe that Jinnah as well as Nehru had some inkling of the
inherent instability of Pakistan.  For different but easily
understandable reasons neither ever talked about it in public.  it is
significant that even after partition Jinnah and his successors
always found it necessary to keep alive the bogey of a `Hindu India'
bent on destroying Pakistan.  Mr. Bhutto is only the latest in this
line.
    However, neither Jinnah nor those who followed him were able to
create and consolidate a sense of territorial nationalism among their
people because none of them had accepted as final the political
borders of Pakistan as laid down at the time of partition.  The
principle of parity and equal partnership which Jinnah propounded in
undivided India continued to obsess the later rulers of Pakistan.  They
might not have articulated this attitude in clear terms.  But their
policy towards India and their insistence on claiming parts of Indian
territory even after partition were rooted in this principle.  It is
true that there were some in the Muslim League-for example.  Raja
Ghazanfar Ali Khan - who believed that once a separate state in which
the Muslim community was sovereign was established, the conflict need
not be continued.  The Raja made sincere efforts to protect the Hindus
and Sikhs from Muslim communal violence when West Punjab was aflame
after the partition.  But such leaders were few.  Mujibur Rahman was
one of them.

    It is necessary to realize that this change of attitude on the
part of even a small number of Muslim leaders was possible only
because of the partition.  The tragedy and torments of partition were
bound eventually to lead to the beginning of a Muslim renaissance in
the Indian sub-continent.  Its origins had to be in a colossal tragedy
because of the nature of the historic tradition of Islam, which has
made a militant political ideology out of proselytizing religion.
    While attempting to create a nation of their own the Muslims only
achieved their own political social and cultural disintegration.  It
is important for the Muslims to understand clearly the significance of
this abortion of history.  They will have to pay a heavy price for
the partition, and the price will not be measured in political terms
alone.  The cultural and social cost of partition is as high, if not
higher; and worse, it is recurring.  They will also have to understand
that the doctrine of Islam-organized and exclusivist as it is-has
proved unsuccessful in facing the complex challenges of the modern
age.  On the other hand, though amorphous and disorganized, Hindu
society will be able to cope with these challenges to a much greater
extent than the dogmatic and organized but closed and exclusive
Muslim society.

    The revolt of Bangla Desh is not, therefore, related to the
Bengali personality.  It is a widespread but erroneous belief that the
Bengali personality as such aspires to form an autonomous society.
Indeed, even if all the citizens of Bangla Desh were Urdu-speaking,
and even if they were not economically exploited by the West
Pakistanis, a separate nationalism would still have thrived in Bangla
Desh.  Attack on economic exploitation is only an easily available
weapon for the political demand for autonomy and the Bengali language
is merely a symbol of the aspiration for a separate, territorial
national identity.  The germ of the political disintegration of
Pakistan is to be found in the geographical fact that the two wings of
Pakistan are separated from each other by nearly one thousand miles.
In the emotional heat of the struggle for a separate state, the
Muslims of the Indian sub-continent forgot even the facts of
geography.  Psychologically Muslims do not recognize geographical
boundaries.  In practice however, they are unconsciously drawn by the
facts of life into the stream of territorial nationalism.  So far
there is not a single example of two geographically separate
territories successfully constituting a single nation and it was not
possible for Pakistan to be an exception to this rule.  Again a nation
is created with a purpose; its existence cannot be taken for granted
in the absence of a secular purpose shared by its constituents.  The
rulers of Pakistan never recognized this.  They took for granted the
political unity of all Muslims qua Muslims.  It takes systematic and
sustained efforts to integrate every group and every territory into
the single, broad framework of modern nationalism,.  If there is
variety of well-defined linguistic groups for example then it is
necessary to harmonize the collective aspirations of each of them into
the aspirations of the nation as a whole.  India has been trying to
integrate such groups through among other things, the linguistic
reorganization of the States and equal autonomy to all the States.
This may not have led to the desired degree of national integration,
but integration would have been altogether impossible without regard
to the aspirations of every linguistic group.  Pakistan's approach to
the same problem was, on the contrary, to abolish all linguistic
provinces and to integrate them into a single province of West
Pakistan.  Today ten years later, this one province has had to be
again reorganized in terms of separate linguistic units.  The rulers
of Pakistan were naive enough to believe that human beings were
merely so many flocks of sheep which could be herded together in a
single compound and thus miraculously integrated into a single nation.
There are people in India who fear that the revolt of Bangla Desh
would provide an impetus to the forces of disintegration which are
latent in India itself.  They do not take into account the radical
dissimilarities between the political structures of the two countries.
India is a geopolitical unit and when there is geographical unity,
forces of disintegration can be easily discouraged and weeded out.  At
one time the Czar established control over Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan,
which were on the fringe of the Czarist Empire.  England established
control over India which lay thousands of miles away.  Both these were
conquests and as conquests, there was no difference between them.
However, in the course of time, India became an overseas colony of
England whereas Uzbekistan became a part of the Soviet union.  This is
also the difference between the revolt in East Bengal, on the one
hand, and the separatist movement in Nagaland or Kashmir, on the
other.  Kashmir and Nagaland have geographical continuity with India.
Bangla Desh has none with West Pakistan.

    There also are a few who express the apprehension that if Bangla
Desh were to achieve independent nationhood it would lead to the
process of both the Bengals together aspiring for reintegration.
However a major obstacle in the reunification of the two Bengals is
the same communal conflict between the Hindus and the Muslims as led
to the partition of Bengal and of the Indian sub-continent.  Today,
after having experienced the turmoil of the riots following partition,
the Hindus would not like to be the citizens of a united Bengal with a
Muslim majority.  Nor would the Muslims of East Bengal like to have a
united Bengal in which the Hindus would have an equal partnership.

Again, it is not possible to visualize a united Bengal in the context
of the strong communist movement in West Bengal.  For in the event of
a united Bengal being formed, the Muslims would comprise 51 per cent
of its population and therefore unless the communist movement there is
given an Islamic tinge, it would not strike a sympathetic chord in the
minds of the Muslim masses.  Mr. Jyoti Basu is shrewd enough to
understand that in such a situation the Bhadralok leadership of the
communist movement in West Bengal would soon be eliminated.

        The Bangla Desh revolt is an event which has shaken to the
foundations the policies of all great powers towards the Indian
sub-continent.  Most Indians have so far been complaining that India
had no friends in the outside world and that in every Indo-Pakistan
dispute the great powers have always supported Pakistan.  It is also
believed that Pakistan has a powerful propaganda machinery and that it
has an effective lobby in all countries.  It is natural for them to
feel that they are fair in dealing with Pakistan and yet the world has
been backing the unjust position of Pakistan. They feel so because they
are deeply aware of the post-partition history of Indo-Pakistani
relations and the unpleasant facts of pre-partition Muslim politics in
this sub-continent.  Even if reluctantly, India did concede the Muslim
demand for a separate state in the form of Pakistan, and it did not
seek to destroy Pakistan after it had come into being.  On the
contrary, it has always extended friendly hand towards Pakistan.
Often disregarding strong public opinion the Government of India made
pacts with Pakistan such as the Indus Waters Pact.  India gave equal
rights to its minorities.  After the partition, in the face of extreme
pressure from Hindu revivalists, India gave itself a secular
constitution.  In contrast to Pakistan, India has always treated its
minorities decently.  Ever since independence India has been able to
preserve democracy and civil liberties.  It has made efforts to
achieve a gigantic social transformation through peaceful and
democratic methods.  More significantly, while all other new-born
Afro-Asian nations were victims of political instability, India could
preserve its own stability.  When Indians feel aggrieved that other
nations, and particularly the great powers, are always partial to
Pakistan in Indo-Pakistani disputes they cite all these points.
However, they forget that the policies of nation states are not based
on criteria of objective justice but on consideration of realpolitik.
Nations determine their policies towards one another strictly in the
light of their own interests.  Considering the size, the population,
the natural resources and the geographical position of India the great
powers naturally think that it would be detrimental to their own
interests if India were to become a world power.  For, were India to
become powerful, its influence would soon extend deep into the
neighboring nations and it would make inroads into the traditional spheres of the hegemony of the big powers.

This would also lead to a radical change in the political balance of power in the
world.  Thus Britain has from the beginning nurtured a grudge against
India because it was the Hindus who first demanded freedom, and it was
they who articulated the nationalism of this country.  Even before
partition, the British hated the guts of the Indian National Congress
which fought for India's independence.  They had a soft corner for the
Muslim League because it obstructed the struggle for freedom.  After
partition although Britain's relations with India have obviously
changed in every Indo-Pakistani dispute it has supported Pakistan.

    The policies of the United States and the Soviet Union did not
have any such conditioning influence of the past.  However, even they
would not like India's political power to grow.  In the early days of
the cold way, the US backed Pakistan and the Soviet Union gave support
to India-or so it seemed.  But the Soviet Union's support to India was
not a product of friendship or sympathy.  Pakistan was a major link in
American's military containment of the Soviet Union.  The latter
therefore made countermoves against the US and lent support to India
against Pakistan on the Kashmir issue.  When the cold war began to
resolve into a gradual detente, and when the Soviet Union's relations
with China became sour it modified its policy of unambiguous support
to India.  The Tashkent agreement was the culmination of this change
in Soviet policy.  Even Prime Minister Shastri who was a soft-spoken
man, has to say, bitterly about the Tashkent agreement: "Everybody has
decided to condone the crimes of Pakistan!"  And Mr. Krishna Menon, who
had been continuously supporting Soviet policies, was forced to
observe that "Tashkent is a hoax."

    This does not however mean that the US and the USSR the
anti-Indian.  Both of them agree that India should not be allowed to
disintegrate.  But they also want that it should remain a second-rate
power, that it should not have any significant influence in the
international competition for power, and that it should always play
the role of a middle-man in peace efforts whenever convenient.
Neither the Soviet Union nor the United States wants India's influence
to exceed these limits.  They are aware that apart from Pakistan none
of the neighboring small states regards India as hostile to it, and
also that since the Indo-Pakistani conflict has a long historical
background it is not likely to be resolved very soon.  It is natural
that these powers would want neither a war nor a resolution of the
tensions between India and Pakistan.  Their policies would be such as
would keep Indo-Pakistani tensions unresolved and yet they would try
to prevent a full-scale military conflict between the two nations.
This policy has been and still is being reflected in the economic and
other aid given to India and Pakistan; for instance through greater
aid to Pakistan the tensions between India and Pakistan have been
effectively kept alive by the big powers.

    However the revolt of Bangla Desh has shaken the foundations of
this policy.  Till now, the great powers had been ignoring the inner
contradictions of Pakistani politics.  Now these contradictions have
been exposed in the form of an open revolt by one wing of Pakistan
against the Pakistani regime. Therefore, the great powers are confused
and are unable to realign their policies towards Pakistan with the
requirements of the emerging situation.  For if Pakistan disintegrates
the pressures brought by them to bear on India would be less effective
than they have so far been.  The distortions that have marred India's
foreign policy since 1954 are also likely to be removed.  Therefore,
at least for the present, it is in the interest of the great powers
not to let Pakistan disintegrate, and their policies are likely to be
framed on this basis.  Hence they are not prepared to go beyond
expressing up sympathy for the people of East Bengal.  However, in
case Pakistan does break up into two nations, on the basis of this lip
sympathy they can later claim to have been supporters of the freedom
fighters of Bangla Desh.  For the time being they are merely waiting
for the final outcome of the civil war.  If the political map of the
Indian sub-continent changes due to the creation of an independent
Bangla Desh, they would be mainly interested in asserting their
hegemony in the context of the new balance of power.  This, in short,
seems to be their present policy.

    China's policy is broadly similar to those of the US and the USSR.
However it has its own peculiar slant.  Until the Sino-Indian military
conflict of 1962, China looked upon India as a competitor for Asian
leadership.  Now India decidedly lags behind China in this competition
and therefore China no more considers India to be in a position to
challenge its own quest for the leadership of Asia.  Just as at one
time the Soviet Union was brought closer to India due to the American
policy of encirclement today Soviet efforts to isolate China have
brought China closer to Pakistan.  China is determined not to let the
Soviet Union maintain or extend its hegemony over the nations of South
and South-east Asia.  Even the anti-Indian statements issued by China
in the context of Bangla Desh are an angry reaction to India's habit
of toeing the Soviet line on every issue.  If India wishes to bring
about any change in China's policies, it will have to change its own
policy towards the Soviet Union.  And India's policy towards the
Soviet Union will largely depend on the outcome of the struggle for
the liberation of Bangla Desh.

    Pakistan's anti-Indian policy has distorted India's foreign policy
towards the Muslim nations.  If one takes a look at the map of India
and its neighboring territories, one will be struck by the fact that
to its north India is fringed by Muslim nations in a semi-circular
fashion.  Pakistan has always made attempts to raise an anti-Indian
front of these Muslim nations.  And in order to prevent Pakistan from
achieving this objective, India has evolved its present policy towards
these nations.  This is not the most appropriate place to discuss
India's - and in particular, Nehru's - policy towards these Muslim
nations.  With the exception of a few blunders, Nehru's policies were
far-sighted and they did achieve a certain measure of success.  He
might not have been successful in converting all these states into
friends; but it is also true and significant that he was successful in
preventing them from becoming enemies.  Were Pakistan to disintegrate
and become weaker, India would have no need to support the Arabs
unconditionally in their fight against Israel.  It is significant that
all Muslim nations are either silent on the Bangla Desh issue or
inclined to help Pakistan in preserving its unity.  However, India has
failed to grasp the significance of the attitude of Muslim nations.
They are not sure whether they would continue to get India's support
in their fight against Israel once Pakistan disintegrates.  The
greatest beneficiary of the disintegration of Pakistan would be India,
and no Muslim nation would accept this with equanimity.

    There are also religious motivations behind the present policy of
the Muslim nations.  Pakistan is the world's most populous Muslim
state.  The Muslim mind would never like Pakistan to disintegrate.
Only recently, Muslim states have come together in a new organization
and Pakistan is one of its major members. If Pakistan disintegrates
the organization of Islamic states itself would be seriously weakened.
Moreover, today the leadership of the Muslim world is largely with the
Arabs. They believe at least by tradition they inherit the leadership
of the Muslim world. However this would not be a lasting situation.
Barring the Maghreb in Africa, fifty per cent of the newly independent
nations of the world have a Muslim majority and their emergence in
world politics will have far-reaching implications for the pan-Islamic
movement.  The balance of power among Muslim nations has been
gradually shifting in favor of the African states.  This is something
which the Arabs would resent.  In these changing circumstances and
with their unpalatable possible consequences, it would be surprising
if the Arabs believed that the existence of a united Pakistan would be
useful to them in retaining their hegemony over other Muslim nations.
However, it is more important to understand the reactions of Indian
Muslims to the revolt of Bangla Desh.  With the exception of a small
section, most of them seem to be supporting the West Pakistani
regime.  They have been shaken by the revolt of Bangla Desh and
instead of accepting the facts of the situation, they either believe
that the Indian media of mass communication have been exaggerating the
happenings in East Bengal, or argue that the disintegration of
Pakistan would spell the beginning of the process of the
disintegration of India as well.  Some are even bolder in stating
their true feelings.  They ask why India should interfere in the
internal affairs of Pakistan.  The boldest reactions are exemplified
by the following exclamation in private talks: "Mujibur Rahman is a
Mir Zarar.  He should be shot dead!"

    Indian Muslims who now demand that India should not interfere in
the internal affairs of Pakistan and warn that if Pakistan
disintegrates India too would follow suit, did not protest when
Pakistan interfered in India's internal affairs, supplied arms to the
Nagas and the Mizos, and actively worked for India's disintegration.
On the contrary, they want Pakistan to remain united so that India
would eventually disintegrate.  In his "Meaning of Pakistan", F. K.
Khan Durrani argues that the creation of Pakistan was necessary as a
base for conquering the rest of India.  The reaction of Indian Muslims
to Bangla Desh gains meaning in the context of Durrani's argument.
None of the Muslim organizations in India has conceded the right of
self-determination to Bangla Desh.  At best, they have vaguely
supported the halting policy of the Indian Government.

    The revolt of Bangla Desh is an occasion for a fresh examination
of the Hindu-Muslim problem and the remedies suggested for resolving
the communal conflicts through which it often expresses itself.  Most
of the proposed solutions have nothing new or original about them, nor
has any political party except the SSP tried to relate the communal
problem in India to that of Bangla Desh.  The SSP has once again put
forward the idea of a sub-continental federation that was first mooted
by the late Ram Manohar Lohia some years ago.  Lohia argued that
partition had failed to solve the problem.  This may be true, but it
is doubtful whether Lohia understood the reasons for this failure.
The fact is that most Hindus continue to be obsessed with the dream of
an India that is reunited.  The obsession appears in two forms.  There
is a small group of Hindus which still is unreconciled to partition on
the ground that India is the home of the Hindus and that the creation
of Pakistan is really an act of continuing aggression by the Muslims.
The second, and larger group's concept of Indian territorial
nationalism is based on the geopolitical boundaries of undivided
India and on the Hindu cultural and historical traditions.  They would
willingly grant equality to Muslims as to other non-Hindu communities
within the framework of their own brand of nationalism.  In order that
their dream be realized, they would even go to the extent of conceding
parity to the Muslims though they would constitute only about
twenty-five per cent of the population of united India.  On the one
hand, they wonder why Gandhi and Nehru failed to reach agreement with
Jinnah, and why the Congress Party in 1937 could not accommodate the
Muslim League in the U.P. ministry.  On the other, they also blame
Gandhi and Nehru, especially the latter, for having rejected the
Three Unit Plan before the partition.  In short, they are utopians who
are willing to purchase their dream of a united India at any price, no
matter how great.  The logic of power politics has always been beyond
their ken.  They forget that the Muslims in India would, in certain
circumstances, be more passionate champions of a united India - only
their conception of united India would be different from that of the
Hindu utopians.  If partition has failed to bring about lasting
communal harmony to the sub-continent, the reason has to be looked for
in the Muslim  aspiration to rule the entire sub-continent.  The
revivalist Muslims wanted to achieve this goal through religious
conversions.  Jinnah and the western educated Muslim intelligentsia
wanted to achieve it through political means, for instance, through
parity and fifty per cent partnership with the Hindus in running the
state.  Nehru was shrewd enough to see through this strategy.
    Nehru's own views were sharply different from the two trends among
the Hindus described above.  He accepted as relevant India's
historical but not its religious traditions.  He opposed the demand
for Pakistan because he believed that the minorities had a rightful
claim to equality, but none to secession.  He did not take for granted
the existence of an Indian nation; his ambition was to create a modern
nation in which every citizen would have equal rights regardless of
caste, creed, race or language.  At the same time - and this is where
he and Sardar Patel differed from Gandhi - he did not wish to prevent
the partition of India if the price of unity was too high in human
terms.  He therefore decided that if the Muslims were unwilling to
accept common citizenship on the basis of equality, it was better to
let them separate.  Today's events prove that this was a wise
decision.
    Ideas such as that of a sub-continental federation, thrown up in
an emotionally charged atmosphere of the kind created by all the
revolt of Bangla Desh, are likely to give a dangerous turn to Muslim
politics in India.  Revivalist Indian Muslims have always championed
the demand for an undivided India for reasons indicated earlier.  The
Muslim intelligentsia in India, on the other hand, advocated the
doctrine of parity before partition, and after partition the doctrine
of the separate, autonomous status for the Muslim community as a
political entity.  However, when they realize that the experiment of a
separate Muslim state in the Indian sub-continent has irreparably
failed, all of them - in India as well as in Pakistan - are likely to
unfold the idea of sub-continental federation.  This may not happen
immediately.  For the time being, Muslims will continue to take the
stand that Pakistan should not be allowed to disintegrate.  But once
such disintegration seem inevitable, there will be a call for a new
political solution of the Hindu-Muslim problem on the lines mentioned
above.  Suggestions implying the need for such a solution have
already been made, albeit in a guarded manner.  Radiance, the organ
of the Jamaat-e-Islami has in a recent issue (May 2) editorially
observed that not only has the two nation theory failed but also the
idea that India is a single nation has been proved without substance.
It is imperative now according to Radiance, to recognize that India
consists of several nations.  Another well-known Muslim commentator,
writing in the Sunday Standard on pre-partition politics in Bengal ends
his article on the same note but in more sophisticated terms.

    The real question, however, is not how India and Pakistan can be
reunited; it is, rather, how soon can Bangla Desh emerge as a free
country.  For once Bangla Desh is a viable political reality, Muslim
society in the sub-continent will begin to undergo rapid
fragmentation.  This will in the course of time, lead to the erosion
of the tribal, collective identity which has characterized traditional
Muslim politics in India.  The political disintegration of Pakistan
will nurture the nascent movements towards secularism and liberalism
in Muslim society.  This is the significance of Bangla Desh which
democrats in India have yet to grasp.

Chapter 12         

THE ANGRY YOUNG SECULARIST

AN INTERVIEW by DILIP CHITRE

I met Hamid Dalwai twelve years ago in the crowed and musty office of
a Marathi literary magazine.  At that time he had already made his
mark as a short story writer while I, who was younger and practically
unknown in literary circles carried all my unpublished writing on my
person.  (Since I wrote only poems then, the most portable of
literary genres, this was not difficult.)  He had already published a
brilliant short story called Kafan-chor (meaning: `The Shroud-stealer').

    He has not, in appearance, changed much since.  But if my vague
memory is right he sported a full beard then.  I too had a full beard.
But his beard was treated with a different sort of significance.
Although he spoke Marathi with an authentic Chiplun accent, he was a
Muslim.  Some of his readers, reading his fluent Marathi, even thought
that the name `Hamid Dalwai' was a pseudonym.  This, too, is quite
significant.  If I remember correctly, when I met him first what drew
my attention to him was the fact that another Marathi writer greeted
him with the mock-exclamation "Ya Yavan!"  The word `Yavan' was
formerly used for Greeks, but after the Hindu revival it has been
specially reserved for Muslims, at least in Marathi.  A Yavan is a
`bloody foreigner' - an outsider with doubtful credentials.  The
greeting was jocular, but not insignificant.

    During the last twelve years, things have changed for both of us.
I have been generally preoccupied with creative and critical writing.
Hamid Dalwai on the other hand is totally involved in a much more
unsafe and urgent social and cultural task.  He is working with
stupendous intensity on an almost one-man programme to create a
modern, secular, and democratic consciousness among Indian Muslims.
So now, in addition to being a Yavan to Hindus, he has achieved the
distinction of becoming a kafir to orthodox Muslims.  He has not
entirely given up creative writing.  But today he spends most of his
time lecturing to Hindu and Muslim audiences throughout India.  He
meets younger Muslims and talks to them.  He engages in all kinds of
debates and polemics.  It was he who led the first morcha ever of
Muslim women in Bombay to the Chief Minister, demanding a
modernization of Muslim personal law.  A similar morcha in Poona was
even greater in size and impact.  Incidentally, the Chief Minister of
Maharashtra met the deputationists, but the Prime Minister of India -
a woman herself - refused even to see for a few minutes the woman
leader of the morcha in Poona!  Now in his middle thirties, Hamid
looks younger than he is.  He is, on principle, clean-shaven now.  At
one of his public meetings at Sholapur, he said that if he were in
power he would compel all Muslims to shave off their beards.  Beards
have become a community emblem for some Muslims.  It is like those
Hindus who still display their caste-marks in this so-called secular
society.  However, the next day, at another rally, a shrewd old
orthodox Muslim, referring to Hamid's proposal for a compulsory
removal of beards, observed: "We had been told that our friend Mr.
Hamid Dalwai was a learned man from Bombay.  But yesterday, during his
discourse, we were taken aback when we discovered that he was only a
self-championing barber...!"  Hamid himself told me this story,
roaring with laughter.

    Hamid Dalwai is a self-made man.  He does not have a university
degree.  He comes from an extremely poor family living in a village on
the Konkan coast.  And yet today he is a village of those few young
Indians who are action-oriented in a selfless way.  He has risked his
life and the security of his family.

    His last novel, Indhan (`Fuel') sparked off a series of explosions
in his native village.  In the novel, a Maharashtrian young women - a
high-caste Brahmin - attempts to seduce the bachelor
protagonist-narrator after having had a long affair with his married
elder brother.  The protagonist is a Muslim.  This really proved to be
`Fuel': the orthodox Muslims in Hamid's village instigated the orthodox Hindus to
protest!  Together, the entire orthodoxy boycotted and persecuted
Hamid's eighty year old father.  Such is the fear of pollution and
such are the notions of parallel purity and compartmentalized
`co-existence' in communalist India in the nineteen-sixties.  In
Bombay, Hamid received anonymous letters threatening the life of his
young daughter and his wife besides his own.

    Despite his lack of formal education, he can write and argue
very well.  He is not an intellectual.  But his sincerity
distinguishes him anywhere.  His human warmth and sense of humor make
him an admirable conversationalist.  He has been a journalist, an active
political worker (SSP), and a creative writer.  But of late, these
things have slid into the background: his central concern is with
making the people around him sane, sober, modern, secular and
democratic citizens.  And he works.  This sets him apart from
intellectual sitters-on-the-fence as well as from political
opportunities of all shades of color.

         I decided to interview him because it is a unique thing, at
least in present-day India, for a promising creative writer to forgo
his literary ambition and get involved in social and cultural action.

    When I interviewed Hamid Dalwai recently, he was not exactly
prepared for it.  Nor was I.  We met at my office - for not having a
study of his own, Hamid is continuously in circulation - by previous
appointment.  It was four o'clock in the afternoon.  The weather was
stuffy and uninspiring as it is just before the monsoon sets in.
Hamid walked in and settled down in front of me and continued to read
a weekly which he had already unfolded.  Unsure of how to begin, I
said, "So I am going to interview you, am I?"  He dropped the paper on
the table and winked with his green-grey eyes.

    It is difficult to `interview' Hamid in the conventional sense of
ther term.  when he speaks it is a mixture of conversation, monologue,
and public speaking.  His voice has a terrific volume.  And his
speaking has a kind of absentminded velocity too.  So, when he is
quite involved, he is unstoppable.  He drowns one's interruptions into
the sheer volume of his own voice.  But fortunately, he has the
uncanny knack of anticipating one's next question.

    "When did you first start taking Muslim communalism seriously?"

I asked.  "I was born in 1932," he began, "in a Maharashtrian Muslim
family.  It was in 1946, I think, when I joined the Rashtra Seva Dal
that I was first confronted by the problem.  When I joined the Rashtra
Seva Dal, I was the first and only Muslim boy in my village to do so."
    "What was the reaction of your parents and other Muslims?"  I asked him.

     "Hostile," he said as if I should have known the answer.

    "Why?"  "They thought it wasn't the right thing to do.  One should
not leave one's own fold.  Muslims should stay among Muslims: it is
simple!"
    "And then? Did you continue?"

    "Of course, I did.  I couldn't understand why I shouldn't have
done it."  Then he paused for a while and said,, "Look! I have got to
say some more important things.  Let me finish these autobiographical
preliminaries quickly.  Are they necessary at all?  Anyway!  When I
was studying for my SS.S.C. examination, I wrote some articles on
Urdu and the Marathi-speaking Muslims.  They were punished by a
leading Marathi daily in Bombay.  They even provoked editorial
comments."  He chuckled and paused again.

    ""You took to politics quite early, didn't you?"  I asked, taking
advantage of the unexpected pause.

    "Yes," he said telegraphically, "Congress Socialist Party -
Socialist Party - Praja-Socialist Party - Socialist Party (the Lohia
one) - Samyukta Socialist; that was how it went".

        "Are you still with the SSP?" I asked.

    "Yes and no!" he said, "I totally disapprove of their line on
communalism."  "In fact, it's a wide rift.  The point is, the SSP has
failed to take up a clear, hard line on Muslim communalism."

     "Do you see any other party which has?"

  "No!" he said, "They are all equally reluctant to undertake
the task of real social transformation - which is the crux of the
problem."
      "What do you think this task involves?"

   "First and foremost people must be made conscious that there is
such a thing as fundamental human values and these must be separated
from religious values.  This is something which Muslims would
never concede because it is claimed that the Koran itself defines
fundamental human values perfectly."  Here he paused, winked again for
effect, and added "They are as orthodox and anti-modern as the
Communists in this respect.  Theirs is a closed system."

   "Isn't there any liberal tradition among Indian Muslims?"

  He laughed, "Indian Muslims are, as a rule, liberal only when
liberal Hindus blame communalist Hindus.'"  Then he continued in a
more serious tone, "Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was a liberal.  Today, I can
count them on my fingers.  Professor Mohammad Habib, the opposition
candidate for Vice-Presidency in the last elections, is a liberal I
know."  His look became a little abstracted "You know, among Hindus
there is a modern, liberal tradition starting from Raja Rammohan
Roy.  Nehru, in my estimate, was a modern, secular Indian liberal.
But he had a tradition behind him.  There is no parallel to this among
Indian Muslims."

    "Why?" I asked.

  "Well! It is all there in their history.  Muslims were rulers in
India for 800 years.  And yet they have remained a permanent minority.
They strongly resent this.  you will find that wherever they are in a
minority Muslims always resist secular integration.  In India, it is
worse.  The ulema still dream of a Dar-ul-Islam in this sub-continent.
That was why they opposed partition, not because they were interested
in secular Indian nationalism.  Those who implicitly accepted the fact
that Muslims would remain a permanent minority in the sub-continent
demanded Pakistan and got it.  But those who still remain here dream
of a `deliverer' - which is an illusion, almost a sickness.  Now while
the ulema sided with the Congress in opposing partition, after
partition they still continue to champion a separate Muslim identity
: a parallel society within the Indian society that will have the
least possible to do with non-Muslims.  Mentally, they still live in a
mediaeval world.  And they do not realize that this makes them misfits
in the modern world."

  "How do Indian Muslims react to `Muslims' like you?"
   "Well! To most of them I am a sort of a kafir, an infidel!"
   "How then do you expect to have an impact on them?"
    "I have hopes.  For instance, Muslim girls and women in India do
show an awareness of the inequalities of Muslim personal law.  But
this is a difficult task I mean the task of secular integration.  No
political party in India is forthright enough to take steps towards
eradicating communalism.  They appease the Muslims.  My own party -
the SSP - is no exception.  there has to be a non-party organization
to tackle the problem.  We have made a small beginning in this
direction in the form of Indian Secular Forum."

    "What is the response?"

    "Not very encouraging, except that a few dedicated people have
joined us.  Some have come up with financial help.  But financially,
we are very badly off."

      "How do you work?"

   "Ah!" he said, "I move about, talk to people, try to make them
think and argue.  I write articles too."

   "What about your creative writing?"

  "It will look after itself, I suppose, when the need arises!" he
said, "Right now, this is all that is bothering me: political parties
have failed to solve the problem.  The National Integration
Convention was just a joke.  People come up with mere platitudes.
Nobody tries to go to the root of the problem."

    "What about the Hindu liberals you spoke of?"
   "Even they will be eventually swallowed up by Hindu revivalism and
Muslim revivalism which seem to be acting, ironically, in collusion.
If secular democratic ideals are to survive, all liberal forces in
this country have to rally and work together on a non-party
non-political basis!" He paused and added, finally, "One can't
helplessly watch the game.  The rulers have to change."

APPENDIX:  SITA RAM GOEL  ON HAMID DALWAI

[The following is an extract from the book "Defence of Hindu Society" by Sita Ram Goel, published by Voice of India, New Delhi, in 1983. It consists of the introductory part of chapter 9, "Character of Nehruvian Secularism", pp.87-90 of the book]

Twenty years ago  (in 1963)  I had been invited to a seminar on Hurdles To Secularism. It was presided over by the late Shri Jayaprakash Narayan (JP). The Working Paper had been prepared by the late Professor A.B.Shah. It was a surprising departure from the usual norm of such papers. While he had repeated the current cliches about 'Hindu communalism', Professor Shah had been equally unsparing about what he had nailed down as 'Muslim communalism'.

In the event, however, the paper remained irrelevant to the discussion that took place. The several speakers that rose, one after another, became red in the face and foamed at the mouth as they fulminated against Hindu society for denying employment to Muslims in the public as well as the private sector, for reducing the Muslim minorities to the status of second-class citizens, for committing untold atrocities on the poor and helpless Muslims in a repeated round of riots,, and so on so forth. The most vociferous of them was Balraj Puri who has managed to masquerade for many years as a martyr in the service of what he proclaims to be humanist causes.

There were four or five Muslim participants present in that seminar. One of them was a professor of Arabic from a leading university. Another was a lawyer well-known for his championing of all communist and Islamic causes at all times. They were invited to speak next. But they all smiled and said that they had nothing to add to what their 'Hindu brethren' had already said so 'loudly and so lucidly'.

And then all of a sudden I saw some fireworks from the same silent and satisfied Islamic fraternity. They had all stood up, shaking with uncontrollable rage, and were shouting at the same time, "He is lying!" They were pointing their fingers at the gentleman who had been invited to speak by the president and who had said only a few sentences. Balraj Puri kept sitting. But he looked as if he would burst out of his skin.

This was the late Hamid Dalwai. I had heard of him. But this was the first time I saw him. He was a tall man with a slight stoop, a smiling face, and a rather relaxed self-possession. He was saying, "All that has been said about Hindu communalism today is nothing new. We have heard it for the nth time. The intention of the working paper of this seminar, however, was to highlight for the first time what has so far been ignored by all progressive people who swear by secularism. What I want to expose today is Muslim communaliam which has already divided the motherland, and which is still strong enough to poison our body-politic…".

It was at this point that the Muslim gentlemen had stood up and started shouting. I had been asked by JP not to speak at all. He was of the view that I being a well-known 'Hindu communalist' was quite likely to say something wild and thus mar the proceedings. It was Professor Shah who had extended the invitation to me, and then conveyed to me the condition laid down by JP if I wanted to be present. So I had kept quiet in spite of the insufferable Balraj Puri staring at me provokingly, off and on. But I could restrain myself no more. I stood up and addressed JP as follows: "For almost an hour and a half we have been listening patiently to what so many Hindus have said about Hindu society. Now a Muslim gentleman wants to say something about Muslim society. Why should we not listen to him with the same patience? Why is this gentleman, who is not attending this seminar as a gate-crasher but as an invited participant, be shouted down in this shameless manner?"

JP had also come to feel very strongly the iniquity of it all. He looked at the Islamic fraternity with annoyance on his face, and said with a touch of temper in his voice, "I insist that Hamid should be allowed to say whatever he wants to say". The Islamic fraternity collapsed in their seats with pained and perplexed expressions on their faces. They felt betrayed. It was the most unkindest cut of all, coming as it did from a man of such eminent standing in the world of India's Secularism.

Hamid continued:

"Hindu society has produced many communalists. Admitted. But it has also produced men like Mahatma Gandhi who went on a fast unto death to save the Muslims of Bihar from large-scale butchery. It has produced men like Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who had the Bihari Hindus bombed from the air when they did not respond to the Mahatma's call. These have not been isolated men in Hindu society, as Rafi Ahmad Kidwai and M.C.Chagla have been in Muslim society. The Mahatma was a leader whom the whole Hindu society honored. Pandit Nehru has been kept as Prime Minister over all these years by a majority vote of the same Hindu society.

Now let me give you a sample of the leadership which Muslim society has produced so far, and in an ample measure. The foremost that comes to my mind is Liaqat Ali Khan, the first Prime Minister of Pakistan. Immediately after partition, there was a shooting in Sheikhupura in which many Hindus who were waiting for repatriation in a camp were shot down. There was a great commotion in India, and Pandit Nehru had to take up the matter with Liaqat Khan in Lahore. The Prime Minister of Pakistan had brought the Deputy Commissioner of Sheikhupura with him. The officer explained that the Hindus had broken out of the camp at night in the midst of curfew, and the police had to open fire. Pandit Nehru asked as to why the Hindus had broken out of the camp. The officer told him that some miscreants had set the camp on fire. Pandit Nehru protested to Liaqat Ali that this was an amazing explanation. Liaqat Ali replied without batting an eyelid that they had to maintain law and order. This exemplifies the quality of leadership which Muslim society has produced so far. This…"

All hell now broke loose as the Islamic fraternity stood up again, and started shouting that they had not come to the seminar to be insulted by "a hired hoodlum of the RSS fascists". JP could restrain them no more, and declared the proceedings closed with a note of anguish in his voice. As we walked out, I saw that the Hindu champions of Secularism avoided Hamid as if he was a snake. He was trying to take leave of them by approaching each one of them with a smile still lingering on his face. I was the only Hindu who shook hands with him, and patted him on the back for the brave stand he had taken in the face of a rowdy opposition.