How To Fight Injustice Against Muslims? Some Unorthodox Suggestions

By Naresh Chandra Saxena, IAS (Retired) for New Age Islam 30 December 2024 To summarise, the community ought to consider and adopt the following course of action: 1. Concentrate on individual mobility through higher education, especially Science and Management 2. Take advantage of OBC reservation and join Class II and Class I jobs in large numbers, especially Police 3. Learn English and make it compulsory in all Madarsas 4. In some districts open an English medium Madarsa with 25% seats reserved for poor/dalit Hindus 5. Make AMU and Jamia the best Universities in India, so that these Universities, and not St Stephens College becomes the first choice for bright Hindu students 6. Set up Cultural Societies with the help of like-minded Hindus to promote amity and harmony, and reduce prejudice 7. Openly support abolition of triple Talaq, polygamy and gender equity in inheritance 8. Persuade the young not to take up the suicidal path of militancy and violence 9. Adopt neutral names and dress, discourage Hijab 10.Promote Sufi Islam and discourage Salafism -------------------‐---------------‐------ After coming to power, BJP, which is known to be both authoritarian and majoritarian, has openly promoted hatred against Muslims, reducing them to the status of second-class citizens. How does one fight against injustice? There could be three strategies, of which two have been tried, but these have their limitations. The third one, which would be most effective has not been tried at all. First is to condemn BJP Governments and RSS, through seminars and writing articles. But let us evaluate this dispassionately. How many have we been able to convince and convert? How many who were on the other side are now with us after reading our articles? I find most of my friends in the IAS or even my own relations, start whataboutery, when I try to bring them on my side. ‘What about Aurangzeb, what about Muslim leaders’ role in dividing our country, what about Kashmir separatism, and what about Islamic terrorism, etc etc.’ This strategy boils down to ‘the Converted appealing to the Converted’, with no increase in the number of liberal or secular minded people. The second strategy to fight against injustice is by resorting to agitational politics; take out processions, raise slogans, organise strikes, etc. This strategy will pay dividends if the party in power cares for your votes. Unfortunately, for the BJP Muslims are non-voters, and hence their concerns can not only be ignored but deliberately hitting at their interests occasionally (Art. 370, CAA, anti-conversion laws, UCC) is considered electorally rewarding. The path of agitational politics, so effective in a liberal democracy, is not likely to benefit Muslims as long as hatred against them dominates the Hindu mind. With the increasing gulf between the two communities, any agitation by Muslims against discrimination can arouse the very emotions amongst Hindus that foster discrimination and is therefore self-defeating. Hindu illiberalism has emerged with a vengeance. BJP's rise has left the community electorally irrelevant. After the Ayodhya verdict Syeda Hameed admitted (2020), 'I say with humility to my co-religionists that we have no power, no agency, no spaces left for protest'. The main problem is the strong bias that exists in the Hindu mind against Muslims. BJP has converted that bias into hatred, and gained politically. Bias had existed even in the 1970s and 80s (A phrase quite popular amongst the Hindus in UP is 'Makkhi, Machhar, Musalmaan', equating Muslims with flies and mosquitoes) which exhibited itself in excessive police violence against them during the riots even during the relatively ‘Secular’ Congress regimes. Since the 1980s, prejudice and suspicion against Muslims has further deepened due to the appeasement policies of the Congress governments, and the role played by Muslim political leaders and clergy in those years. Such policies helped the BJP to exploit Hindu fears for political gains, and after coming to power BJP has openly promoted hatred against Muslims, leaving them insecure and vulnerable to violence by Hindu hoodlums. To agitate against discrimination should be everyone's right. Protest movements empower the marginalised community, besides putting pressure on the government. But these also polarise the society and create a kind of us-them feeling. Some deprived groups such as Dalits (and also women) can easily ignore the cost of polarisation, as benefits from protest far outweigh the cost. Thus, they have gained a great deal in India through agitational politics. Muslim situation is however different in two ways. First, Dalits enjoy Constitutional safeguards in terms of proportional representation in legislatures and administration, which Muslims lost in 1947 due to their own choice of supporting partition. Second, no party can ignore the votes of Dalits or women. The geographical dispersal of Muslim population renders it impossible for them to convert their cultural identity into a political pressure group. It is not just a coincidence that the Muslim majority constituencies of Rampur, Hyderabad, and Kishenganj elected MPs like Azam Khan, Asaduddin Owaisi and Syed Shahabuddin, all known for their extreme popularity among the Muslim masses and equally abhorred by the majority community. One RSS leader once told me that when they go to the villages to seek votes they always carry a video with them. I asked, 'Mohan Bhagawat's?'' He said, 'No, Owaisi's, in which he says he will never chant Bharat Mata ki Jai even if a knife is put at his throat.’ He added, 'Hindus then forget their economic woes and rush to the booth to vote for us'. Therefore, rather than organize politically to fight for a separate Personal Law or impartial administration, the Muslim leadership should take steps to reduce the Hindu bias against them, which is the root cause of the success of political propaganda against them by the BJP. The problem is more social than political. The community suffers from four serious handicaps - Hindu bias, BJP in power, geographical dispersal, and the Indian Constitution which does not recognise religion as a category for group rights. Indian Courts too appear hesitant to strike down unfair laws, such as the CAA and anti-conversion laws recently passed by several BJP states. These states seem to have given informal police powers to the RSS and Bajrang Dal hoodlums to harass Muslim shopkeepers and beat up innocent Muslims. Let us not forget that each individual has multiple identities. Muslims should certainly protest as artisans, unemployed youth, or as poor, but not display their religious card. On the contrary, Muslims in India have started asserting their religious identity. While women displayed their religious fervour by wearing hijabs, men began growing beard and wearing skull caps. The reverse strategy would have been to adopt Hindu names, which Muslim film stars (Dilip Kumar, Madhubala) did in the 1950s to improve their acceptability. It is worth noting that in Thailand and China, the official name of Muslims has to be a native one, and cannot be Islamic. If advocacy is on economic issues, such as lack of sanitation in Muslim bastis, even the BJP Government is likely to respond favourably. Religious cleavages have much less legitimacy in India today than those based on language, region, class, or caste. For instance, improvement in the quality of vocational training schools would certainly benefit Muslims, who are mostly self-employed skilled workers, but one hardly hears such demands from Muslim platforms. Is it because the leaders are Ashrafs, and not concerned with the problems of pasmanda Muslims? However desirable affirmative action in favour of Muslims may be from the point of view of justice and equity, it is not feasible under the changed circumstances. One must learn to make a distinction between what is desirable and what is feasible, what ought to happen vs what is likely to happen. India under the BJP rule has already become de facto a Hindu nation. All that the Muslims and their sympathisers can do is to prevent its downslide into a Talibani one. When chips are down Muslim strategy should be not how to maximise their gains, but how to minimise their losses. When there are negative returns from protests, the community should introspect what it can do on its own to improve its lot without inviting the wrath of the majority, and how to promote communal harmony and reduce Hindu bias against them. This all leaves little choice for Muslims, except to look within and achieve success on merit. Rather than put pressure on the government which has now become counterproductive, the community must search within and reflect on how it can improve its socio-economic status by pooling its resources, a strategy that would invite admiration rather than animosity from the majority. This needs a new kind of leadership that would kick off a fresh social movement amongst Muslims towards excellence through self-reliance. There have been many such movements amongst the Hindus - Bhramo Samaj in Bengal, Arya Samaj in the north, and Justice Movement & SNDP in the South, and time is ripe now for a similar initiative from the marginalised Muslim community. On the other hand, reformers such as Hamid Dalwai who had the 'potential to take their community out of a medievalist ghetto into a full engagement with the modern world' (Guha 2018) were unfortunately unpopular with the Muslim masses. Asghar Ali Engineer and JS Bandukwala who suggested internal reforms were expelled from the community. Interestingly despite their hostility to Muslims as a group, Hindus admire those individual Muslims who do well on their own merit, such as Bollywood’s three endearing Khans, musicians Bismillah Khan and Naushad, and cricketers like Pataudi and Azharuddin. Bollywood has been full of successful Muslims as producers, directors, actors, and singers, and no one has ever accused the public or industry of evaluating them negatively on the basis of religion. There is also no overt discrimination against them in education and recruitment to government jobs. Therefore Muslims should aspire not only to increase their share in elite professions, but also to improve their image, which would happen if in the next 20 years the best doctors, teachers and administrators in the country were Muslims. They need a mass movement in which basic thrust should be on the qualitative aspect of education. Why should their excellence be confined to music and films only? Hindu-Muslim unity is certainly desirable for achieving our country's goal towards a cohesive and plural India, but for Muslims, it is a question of life and death. Hence their leaders must ponder in what manner they can contribute to achieving this goal. Hindu parents aspire to send their kids to Christian convent schools, why not to Madarsas? Why not promote English medium Madarsas - at least one in each minority district, and open them to others too? If institutions controlled by Muslims - and this includes Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Milia - could become world -class, the image of Muslims would certainly improve. The community needs another Sir Syed. Muslims have been digging their own grave by allowing themselves to be led by religious and political leaders who promised to get them group privileges. Unfortunately, it remained a mirage, and further deepened Hindu hostility that has been the bane of day-to-day Muslim life. Syed Shahabuddin, the tallest Muslim leader in post-Independence India, shouted effectively against the Indian state’s biased behaviour, but did not direct his energies for internal institutional reforms of the Muslim society. 'This was a great difference from Sir Syed's line of thinking as Sir Syed always emphasized internal reforms and modern education and politics was his later priorities but Shahabuddin Saheb was so much passionate about the politics as if his sole aim was to polarise Indian society and this was the most negative contribution of his political activism in India', observed P. Mohammad (He also said that if our Mullahs/Leaders with BIG MOUTH stop talking nonsense for 5 years only, then BJP will be finished. http://muslimmirror.com/eng/an-intellectual-debate-in-delhi-and- washington-over-syed-shahabuddin/). Is the community showing any signs of such a movement? I wish it did. Mr. Bahuguna, ex-Chief Minister of UP, who was considered to be very close to the Muslim community, in a one-to-one chat with me in 1974 (I was DM Aligarh then) quipped, 'Hindustan ka musalman Ek dedh taang ka admi hai, yeh kabhie seedha nahin chal sakta' (Indian Muslim is a one and a half legged animal, he can never walk straight). It may be worthwhile to recall what Allama Iqbal wrote in Jawab-e-Shikwa, ‘God has not been unjust to the Muslims; they have been unjust to themselves’. References Guha, Ramachandra (2018). Liberals, sadly, Indian Express, March 24 Hameed, Syeda (2020). The Ayodhya verdict: Is this justice? I ask myself, at https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/the-ayodhya-verdict-is-this-justice-i-ask-myself/story-rRBa0Sn6kJxTZdFFF5XEP.html) ---- A career civil servant, Naresh Saxena had worked as Secretary, Planning Commission and Secretary, Ministry of Rural Development in Government of India. On behalf of the Supreme Court, Dr Saxena monitored hunger-based programmes in India from 2001 to 2017. Author of several books and articles, Dr Saxena did his Doctorate in Forestry from the Oxford University in 1992, and was awarded honorary PhD from the University of East Anglia in 2006. URL: https://www.newageislam.com/islam-politics/fight-injustice-muslims-unorthodox-suggestions/d/134186 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism