My article will be in three parts. The first will be called Madness, the second Hatred and the third Hope. I will then present my conclusions.
Madness:
Bernard-Henri Levy, the French celebrity philosopher, has coined the phrase for the period in which we are living as the age of madness. The coronavirus, he has argued, is revealing the fault- lines that divide society. We in South Asia appear to be living in our own bubble of hyper-madness within the age of madness.
There is a battle brewing that will define not only India but the entire region. If the mood of unchecked hate grows in India, a clash with Pakistan will be inevitable and it could involve a nuclear exchange. The leaders of India can huff and puff against Pakistan but in their heart of hearts they can never be sure that Pakistan, if attacked and backed into a corner, would not press the nuclear button.
The two nuclear armed nations appear to be teetering on the brink of conflict. You would expect the leaders to tip-toe back from the brink. That is not the case. Now with the China-India confrontation in the Himalayas the situation becomes even more dangerous and complicated. There are now three nuclear powers rubbing against each other in and around Kashmir, and with the US explicitly lining up with India, it makes four. Soon it may be too late for South Asia.
Although India’s founding fathers Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru promoted coexistence between the religions, their vision of modern India is facing an existential crisis
It is this uncertainty that gives the confrontation an existentialist edge. A single minute miscalculation could plunge the entire region into apocalyptic chaos. It would be an extinction level event. Let those planning nuclear destruction of the enemy understand there will be no winners. Mutual destruction is assured.
In the sci-fi classic The Planet of the Apes when a nuclear apocalypse destroys the planet the only victors are the apes. The last lines of The Planet of the Apes are as eloquent as any of Shakespeare’s. They could be the epitaph for South Asia if we continue on the current path of madness: “You finally really did it. You maniacs. You blew it up. God damn you. God damn you all to hell.”
Hatred:
There are two sets of grievances poisoning the atmosphere in South Asia
and we need to navigate between them. The Hindu sees real or imagined insults and humiliation under Muslim rule over the centuries. Muslim grievances are more recent. They see themselves as victims of Hindu prejudice and violent hatred in the last decades of independent India dominated by Hindu culture and politics.
I could give dozens of examples from newspaper reports and widely seen videos of the horrific violence against Muslims in India. The controversy around Panipat, the recent Bollywood historical blockbuster about an invading Afghan warrior king, that erupted last year in India was not an isolated incident. Just as President Donald Trump had labeled immigrants coming to the US from the Latin south as rapists and murderers, Bollywood had aggressively begun to make films depicting Muslims coming from the north as rapists and murderers. 2018’s Padmaavat about Alauddin Khilji depicted him in this negative light. There is already a full-blown campaign to malign the historical image of Tipu Sultan, ruler of the south Indian Kingdom of Mysore and once seen as a celebrated nationalist Indian ruler (and Prime Minister Imran Khan’s hero). Songs like the one by Laxmi Dubey threatening to “perform ceremonies with bullets,” and “cut off the tongues of enemies who talk against Ram” are blasted into Muslim neighborhoods to intimidate them.
Mobs of Hindus armed with staffs go out looking for members of the minority communities and kill them often aided by the police. All the while the gang films the gory details on videos that are then widely circulated. In the mayhem, Hindu sadhus, Dalit, Christians and even nuns have been attacked.
Muslims have been targeted in the name of “cow protection” by the mobs. Muslims are now accused of bringing coronavirus as part of their “Corona jihad.” The Coronavirus upon its arrival on the subcontinent turned everything upside down. Indeed, the Indian establishment reacted with Pavlovian predictability by blaming it on Muslims/Pakistan. Even medical doctors, discarding the Hippocratic Oath, have made public statements blaming Muslims for spreading the coronavirus and advising the hospital staff not to treat them as they would be better dead.
A leader in the Hindu nationalist Dharm Jagran Samiti organization announced on television a target to “finish Islam and Christianity” in the country by the year 2022, while a member of the Legislative Assembly from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Uttar Pradesh, the nation’s most populous state, set a date of 2024 when India would be exclusively Hindu and spoke of the “animalistic tendency” of Muslims.
From the harsh lockdown in Kashmir, to the lynching and burnings across India, to the citizenship laws that make Muslims third-class citizens in their own land, to the media and police onslaught, the Muslims of India are reeling. In the public’s mind Muslims and Pakistan are fused and the hatred easily shifts from one to the other. The acclaimed Indian novelist Arundhati Roy speaks of a “crisis of hatred against Muslims.”
The tragedy is that the prejudice is accompanied by ignorance. How many politicians and media pundits know of Babar’s beautiful letter written just before he died to his son Humayun who was the next emperor of India? “Oh, my son,” begins the letter, keep your “heart cleansed of religious bigotry,” see that “temples and abodes of worship of every community, should not be damaged,” “bring together the diverse religions” “in particular refrain from the sacrifice of cows,” and ” dispense justice according to the tenets of each community.” Islam is best served by “The sword of kindness, not by the sword of oppression.” Babar’s celebrated autobiography reflects exactly the same spirit of inclusiveness and generosity. Presidents and Prime Ministers today, and not only in South Asia, could learn a great deal about governance and humanity from Babar.
For those who claim Muslims contributed nothing to India, let me state that we cannot contemplate Indian culture or history without the Muslim imprint whether it is in art, architecture or political leadership. I could give an endless list of Muslim contributions starting with two of India’s most iconic symbols-the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort. The prejudice against Muslims is also a betrayal of those Muslims who marched for Independence shoulder to shoulder with the Mahatma like Ghaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi, and Maulana Azad.
Although India’s founding fathers Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru promoted coexistence between the religions, their vision of modern India is facing an existential crisis. There were many tell-tale symbols of the ignominious rejection of Gandhi and his philosophy of non-violence in India; Gandhi’s ashes being stolen; Gandhi’s image being publicly shot at by the national secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha organization; Gandhi’s killer being hailed by the title “Mahatma,” temples being constructed in his honor and a cult of personality built around him; above all the overt rejection of ahimsa or non-violence and the frequent explosions of violence.
Hope:
Theories of geopolitics that dominate local thinking are based in modern constructs that calculate on the basis of the zero-sum equation and the clash of civilizations in which the aim is not to merely defeat the enemy but extermination. These theories rarely if ever take into account human emotions and human feelings.
AKBAR AHMED, Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, School of International Service, American University, Washington DC, and former High Commissioner from Pakistan to the UK and Ireland delivered this lecture at the ISSI, Islamabad, 6 August 2020. Dr Rajmohan Gandhi was the discussant and Ambassador Aizaz Chaudhry moderated