Daily Times

“Here comes the god to send the devil right back to his cave. We are going to drop the bomb on the Yakub crew,” said the rapper Grand Puba (Maxwell Dixon) in 1990. The British-Asian sketch comedy show ‘Goodness Gracious Me’ had an Indian character who would regularly claim that everything was invented by Indians and everything comes from India. Ironically and quite tragically, the show was not too far off the mark. Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister (PM) of the Republic of India, the world’s largest democracy and an avowed secular state (whatever that may mean in this context), uttered these immortal lines at the dedication of a hospital in India recently: “We can feel proud of what our country achieved in medical science at one point of time. We all read about Karna in the Mahabharat. If we think a little more, we realise that Mahabharat says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside of his mother’s womb…we worship Lord Ganesh. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time that got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.”

Notice the “we all read”. It did not occur to Modi that hundreds of millions of Indians who are Muslims or Christians do not form part of this ‘we’. However, that is hardly the problem is it? That a country claiming to be a world power can elect a leader so befuddled by the difference between myth and fact, and that this leader now in theory controls India’s nuclear arsenal, is a scary proposition. Doomsday scenario pundits have often opined about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal falling into the wrong hands, but in India a crazed religious fanatic with a mental state bordering on insanity now has his finger on the button.

Modi has also taken to referring to ‘1,200 years of slavery’, referring of course to 1,000 years of Muslim rule as well. The narrative then is that India, before barbaric Arabs and Turks took it over, was a place of science and technology as advanced as the modern age. What are some of these beliefs that Indians hold about ancient India? Modi has laid claim to genetic science and plastic surgery but there are also people in his party who claim that horseless chariots (cars) and vimana (aeroplanes) existed in antiquity. Arjuna (the companion of Krishna) is said to have used nuclear weapons and missiles, i.e. Arjuna’s arrows. An educationist from Gujarat wrote a book saying that live telecasts of the Mahabharat were broadcast to Hindu households in that golden age. In other words, according to the common Indian, ancient India, before the Arabs and Turks ruined it and before the evil British looted it, was the most advanced society on earth the likes of which humanity has not seen since.

This reminds me of the standard mythology that the black group called Nation of Islam (founded by W D Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad) in the US, to which Malcom X initially belonged, believes in. The Nation of Islam at its initiation was not so much a religious sect as it was a Black supremacist ideology. A central feature of the myth was Yakub’s History. According to this myth all human beings were initially black. Yakub the scientist, who lived for 6,600 years in Mecca, separated the ‘black germ’ from the ‘brown germ’ in a high-tech genetics lab, thereby laying the foundation for the creation of the brown, yellow and white races. The white race then led the destruction of human civilisation and gradually the white race enslaved black people and wrote an entirely false history of the world. Much like Modi’s 1,200 years of slavery, the black race was said to have endured slavery for 6,000 years and the process had now begun to put them back on top.

This narrative clearly fills a deep void. At the heart of the void is the pure denial of logic and common sense, therefore India must have been a great civilisation before the Muslims and British took it over. Black people must have ruled the world and worked in tall buildings and high-tech laboratories before they invented the white race that enslaved them. It is as if their self-esteem is tied to collective greatness. By no means is this limited to the two groups mentioned above. Imran Khan sadly has engaged in similar myth mongering, though it must be said to his credit that none of what he has said is quite as off base as the Indian PM’s ‘scientific’ views. The most Imran Khan has said is that the Scandinavian social welfare system is inspired by something called ‘Omar’s Law’, and it is clear that the misquote from Macaulay that Imran Khan shamelessly promoted earlier was the work of his woolly headed young advisers who cannot distinguish between fact and fiction. Then there is the high court judge in Islamabad who routinely has a cleric start court proceedings with sermons against family planning. Those of us who have practiced law long enough remember when this kind of outward display of piety was looked down upon in the judiciary. This is no more the case since the ‘Modi-fication’ of Pakistan’s judiciary under former Chief Justice Chaudhry Iftikhar. In the meantime all we can do is try to push back with all our force. One fears though that we are fighting for a lost cause.

The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com