Riots take place when an ideology believes in its exclusivity; their frequency increases when others, in reaction, too start asserting themselves. Such flare-ups also happen when perpetrators believe they can get away with such crimes
Stories can be the most potent medium to send across a message. Our epics and Puranas often took recourse to this mode to convey some of the most abstruse ideas. So, as Delhi is witnessing another set of riots, this time in Jahangirpuri, I am reminded of a college friend who would take immense pleasure in reminding me how ancient Hindu texts like Manusmriti are discriminatory in nature and deserved to be burnt! Before anyone makes a communal meaning of the argument, I must clarify he was a Hindu.
One day, I was sitting with a couple of friends when he came in. I introduced him to the two friends — Usman and Amin. That day, however, it was my turn to lure him into the book-burning debate, and he fell for it. No sooner he finished his initial arguments, I passed him a book, with pages marked and lines inked. I told him to read those inked lines aloud, and then tell me what should be done with the book. He couldn’t go beyond a few lines. His revolutionary air was suddenly gone. Tension was palpable on his face. All he could say was, “Kya hai yeh?“
There was silence thereafter. What he knew was that those verses were from the Quran, specifically asking the believers to fight the non-believers till the world became Dar-ul-Islam; in those verses, there was no redemption for non-believers, till the time they converted to Islam. What he didn’t know was that those two friends were not Muslims. My prank worked. That was the last I saw of his revolutionary streak — at least, in front of me!
The story is a stark reminder of the limits of liberalism, especially vis-a-vis Islam: There is one parameter for Muslims, and another for the rest. The reverence for Islam, I think, is as much ideological as it is out of fear (my friend was definitely unsettled about reading those lines in front of two men he thought were Muslims). Suddenly, a couple of lines — such as the one that tells “to you your religion and to me, mine” — are searched for and quoted to bolster the claim that those few verses that reeked of intolerance are exceptions and don’t really convey the essence of the holy book.
Incidentally, the same purveyors of liberalism ignore the accommodative verses in Manusmriti that categorically say, as eminent historian AL Basham writes in The Wonder That Was India, that as “the penalty for theft the Shudra should pay a fine equal to eight times the value of stolen goods, while Vaishya, Kshatriya and Brahmin should pay 16, 32, and 64 times the values respectively”. Or, on corporal punishment, the laws of Manu place a Shudra on the same level as “one’s wife, son and brother”! Most importantly, what’s ignored is the fact that Manusmriti is just one of many smiritis in India, and that smritis never claim to be universal in nature but are time and place-centric. The same can’t be said about the Quran, which is the word of God and has to be taken literally!
The Jahangirpuri riots, too, are a reminder of the limits of liberalism: The basic narrative being pushed is that the Muslims were being provoked through loud music and sloganeering of “Jai Shri Ram” near mosques. What’s being ignored in between, quite deliberately I suspect, is that the same brigade keeps a steadied silence when Muharram processions pass through a temple area and do a similar kind of sloganeering. In fact, by that parameter, the majority community should take offence to a muezzin‘s Azaan calls on loudspeakers that inadvertently remind non-Muslims that their religion is false and that there is no God except the ‘One God’ that Muslims follow! The liberal propensity to get hurt by ‘Hindu provocation’ and turn a blind eye to that of Muslims is too glaring to ignore.
This trend, however, isn’t confined to India alone. Christopher Hitchens, in his ‘Foreword’ to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel: My Life, writes, “Across the intellectual spectrum of the West, voices are raised to say that the problem is not the exorbitant demands made by Muslim bullies… No, the problem is that of people like Ayaan, who upset and ‘offend’ the ‘faith community’ of Islam.”
It is this extreme sensitivity towards Muslim sensitivity that makes most liberals take an illiberal position to demand an exception to be made for Muslim immigrants: They want the host countries to change their national ethos to suit the new entrants, little realising that there can’t be a middle ground here: It’s my way or highway for these immigrants!
In India, this phenomenon gets magnified and more pronounced because there’s a liberal bogey that is supremely uncomfortable with the civilisational idea of Bharat. Its distrust and distaste for Hindu culture is as pronounced as its conciliatory approach vis-a-vis Islam. This may, in some way, explain why the Jai Shri Ram chants make our liberals uneasy, but when a girl in hijab shouts “Allah hu Akbar”, this same set of people sees it as an act of defiance against Hindutva patriarchy!
They fail on multiple levels — from their failure of comprehension to their double standards and even their fear to offend the believers. No doubt, our so-called liberals show their utter ineptitude in understanding Islam, which divides humanity into two irreconcilable groups of believers and non-believers. It’s a religion in which “a wrong theology is worse than wicked deeds”, as Ram Swarup, one of the profoundest thinkers of the 20th century writes in Understanding Islam Through Hadis. It is this ideological understanding that explains the contradiction in the utterances of Khilafat leader Maulana Mohammed Ali, who first hailed Mahatma Gandhi as “the most Christ-like man of our times” and yet “from the point of view of religion”, regarded the Mahatma as “inferior to any Mussalman though he be without character”.
BR Ambedkar has been scathing in his assessment of Islam. “Muslims in India are an exclusive group, and they have a consciousness of the kind possessed by a longing to belong to their own group and not to any non-Muslim group,” he writes in Pakistan or the Partition of India. At another place in the book, he calls Islam “a close corporation” that makes “distinction” between Muslims and non-Muslims. “The brotherhood of Islam is not the universal brotherhood of man. It is the brotherhood of Muslims for Muslims only. There is a fraternity, but its benefit is confined to those within that corporation. For those who are outside the corporation, there is nothing but contempt and enmity,” he writes.
Even more contemptuous was Ambedkar questioning the allegiance of Muslims to the land of their birth. He writes, “The second defeat of Islam is that it is a system of social self-government and is incompatible with local self-government because the allegiance of a Muslim does not rest on his domicile in the country which is his but on the faith to which he belongs.” He, not surprisingly, goes to the extent of supporting the transfer of minority populations between India and Pakistan, citing the precedent of Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria. No Indian leader, especially during the time he was in action, was sagacious enough to go that far.
At the core of the recent conflicts in Ram Navami and now Hanuman Jayanti lies this sense of exclusivity. Gandhi, in a good sense, thought to bring Hindus and Muslims together on a common platform during the Khilafat movement. But then what can be the middle ground with a religion which considers itself perfect and perfected? A religion which, as per the Hadis — which Muslim theologians regard as “the Quran in action” — asks the believers to not just be different from the rest but also look different. No wonder, the Khilafat movement culminated in the Moplah massacre of Hindus in the Malabar region.
Sir Vidia Naipaul, in Beyond belief, calls Islam “the most uncompromising kind of imperialism” that allows “only one people — the Arabs the original people of the Prophet — a past and sacred places, pilgrimages and earth reverences”. What further complicates the situation, especially in India, a ‘Dar-ul-Harb’ in the Islamic theological term, is the fact that “much before the Europeans emerged on the scene, Muslims had their own variation of the ‘White man’s burden’ of civilising the world”. As Ram Swarup puts it, “If anything, their (Muslims) mission was even more pretentious, for it was commanded by Allah Himself.”
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When one looks at communal flare-ups like Jahangirpuri’s, it exposes the liberal ineptitude — or even unwillingness — to grasp the idea called Islam, maybe out of “the fear of the sword” or the inherent hatred for the Indic tradition born out of coloniality. But this may also be the result of political ineptitude. When the administration failed to adequately handle the Shaheen Bagh protests, it showed the anti-Modi camp a chink in the government’s armour, provoking a year-long agitation on Delhi’s borders in the name of farm laws. And when the perpetrators of the 2020 Delhi riots, which were timed with the arrival of the then American President, were not dealt with the severity they deserved, it gave a message that the government was hesitant, could be challenged. Maybe the Centre, in a true federal spirit, can take a cue from the Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh.
Riots take place when an ideology believes in its exclusivity; their frequency increases when others, in reaction, too start asserting themselves. Such flare-ups also happen when perpetrators believe they can get away with such crimes.
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