Daily Times

Despite globalisation, recent times have seen an unprecedented reversion to local, fundamentalist, and fiercely anti-internationalist interests.

The installation of Yogi Adiyanath as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh supports obscurantism and duplicity. His bigotry defines identities and ideologies; treating the idea of a multilingual, multiethnic and secular nation as if it were a myth. Adiyanath’s unambiguous encouragement to enjoin the native mob to commit acts of violence, even against the corpses of Muslim women, were “replete with appeals to national pride, racial redemption, contempt for law and civility” (Ahmad, Lineages 183).

The identity of a state run by someone who endorses sanctioned extremist religious and political ideologies will be built on unquenchable vindictiveness. It will cash in on the pain and grief of other people, some of whom will not have the luxury of closure.

It is clear as day that in the age of a global economy, the concepts of reason, rationality, and political and moral ethics have been spurned.

The Bharatiya Janata Party and its votaries have completely ignored how diverse communities can grow historically within the framework created by the combined forces of modern national and transnational developments.

The supposed liberatory discourse endorsed by the BJP serves to emphasise, reinforce, and then establish cultural myopia and monocultural identities. Its short-sightedness will prove detrimental to the constitutional integrity of India.

I have been working on my fifth book for a while and was compiling the speeches that Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah had made in Deoband, UP, in 1968, when the 2017 UP and Uttarakhand election results came in. Apropos!

The increasing criminalisation of Indian politics is a juggernaut that seriously questions the myth of secularism in India. The increasing religiosity in Pakistan is just as damaging. As a poignant reminder to the students of Indian history and subcontinental politics, I would like to point out that Jawaharlal Nehru had observed in the Constituent Assembly of India that the greatest danger to India will not be from Muslim communalism but from Hindutva, which could potentially become expansionist and communally belligerent.

The polarising rhetoric deployed by the BJP bigwigs on the campaign trail in the UP has portrayed the nation as an invention that breeds relentless hatred. Their myopic vision renders the nation all the more threatening because the belligerent politics leading to its construction is internecine and does not bind Muslim to Hindu or Bengali to Kashmiri but rather sunders Bengali from Bengali and Kashmiri from Kashmiri. Such an irregular politics polarises these ethnic groups into Hindus and Muslims who are required to disavow their cultural, linguistic, and social unities.

This moulding of collective identities by the evocation of pan-national religious affinities results in the stifling of minority voices expressing divergent cultural and social opinions. The politics of the BJP has established an inclusion/exclusion dichotomy in which those who belong to the majority can be winnowed away from those who are outsiders; the minority.

I now segue into the speeches that Sheikh Abdullah had made in Deoband in 1968.

In his January 1968 speech to the Muslims of Deoband, he said,

“If we want to put an end to our miseries, we should correct our conduct. Misfortunes do come, but men of courage must face them boldly…We, in Kashmir, are continuing our fight against injustice, but we are not unmindful of the difficulties of Indian Muslims. We shall not take any step which may harm their interests, but we shall not submit to any blackmail. It is the right of Indian Muslims to live in their mother country, but that right does not depend on the accession of Kashmir to India. The Muslims of India should be able to say that if Kashmiris accede to India, they are welcome, and if they do not, it is their choice.

Islam has a human outlook. It does not differentiate between man and man. God, according to the teachings of Islam, is the master of the world, not the master of Muslims alone. Islam teaches equality. A true Muslim does not harm his neighbour. The Muslims of today should cultivate strength of character with which they, like other great Muslims of India, can fight their battles without armies and bloodshed.”

On January 28, 1968, he said in Deoband,

“Thousands of people have laid down their lives for the freedom of the country, and they have cried themselves hoarse shouting ‘Independence for India!’ But the dreams of freedom that we saw before Independence do not seem to be coming true. It is a tragedy of circumstances that the two brothers fought the battle for freedom together but fell out while attaining it, and the country was partitioned.

Look at the unenviable position of Kashmir: toward the west stands Pakistan and toward the east, India. The only way to save Kashmir, India, and Pakistan is to create a strong bond of friendship and mutual love — but there are people who do not allow a favourable atmosphere to develop. The masters of our destiny are more concerned about keeping their jobs and positions and spare little time to see that the masses have bread to eat.

I appeal to the people who instigate our young men for their own purposes to think deliberately about the after-effects of this bitterness on the progress of the country. You should direct your energies to our problems and search for a solution rather than wasting your time on disputes and demonstrations.”

I would argue that the Hindutva movement in India privileges the idea of an ethnically pure Hindu nation. Previously, the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat had divided the state along religious lines, causing such irreparable damage that its seismic tremors continue to destabilise other parts of the Indian subcontinent.

The prevalent majoritarian politics and uncertainty in India help in the institutionalisation of unaccountability. As opportunists make hay, unpredictability in Kashmir remains unresolved. Obviously, an important challenge — both then and now — is the restoration of a democratic process in Jammu and Kashmir. It needs the validation of a secularism that recognises diverse religious identities and allows for the accommodation of those identities within a secularist framework; creating new openings for people, including the young, to discuss public issues, and become active participants. This process should aim at the repair of the frayed regional and political fabric in all parts of the state. Mainstream regional parties and separatists in Kashmir require a clear roadmap that enables us to preserve our identity, influence on legislative and decision-making process, not simply increasing our nuisance value.

The writer is a member of the Harvard-based Scholars Strategy Network. She is the author of Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism, Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir, The Life of a Kashmiri Woman, and the editor of The Parchment of Kashmir and the Oxford Islamic Studies’ special issue on Jammu and Kashmir. She can be reached at nylakhan@aol.com