India’s Muslims, 75 years after choosing a secular democracy over Partition

Arif Ayub

 

This Republic Day hurt like no other. Not that those in the past made a visible difference to our lives. But at least they kept a pretence. At least, as a national ritual, Indians, irrespective of their Hindu or Muslim identity, came together to celebrate the day that bound them through a Constitution whose preface guaranteed Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

Yet today, 75 years after India became a Republic, constitutionally enshrining equality for all its citizens, many of the promises it made lie in tatters. Muslims of India are facing a relentless flood of hate and bigotry. Justice is not only being denied but also the very show of equality before the law. Muslims are being uprooted, disenfranchised, bulldozed, and written out of history books and social consciousness.

Today, we swear by the Constitution of our country only in words, not in spirit. Not because the majority willed it to be this way, but because a large part of the majority and the political class of our country has chosen indifference and disdain.

Post-Independence, India became a unique and distinct country that offered its very diverse populace, including all its minorities, equal rights, when most nation-states around the world were being shaped along ethnic lines. India chose to be a plural democracy not because it had many religious groups, but because it had an overwhelmingly large Hindu population that chose to be so.

And yet, it is also true today that India has become a majoritarian and exclusive democracy because an overwhelming majority of its Hindu population seems to have chosen it to be thus. The blatant majoritarianism on display has sought to “other” its largest minority, the Muslims. It silently approves the growing and unfiltered hatred being unleashed against Muslims and Islam.

This majoritarian India is complicit in the forced and extreme ghettoisation of Muslims not just across its villages, towns and cities, but also in the collective psyche of a majority of Hindus. The growing majoritarianism, which has offered handsome political returns over the last decade to the ruling dispensation, has emboldened right-wing and pro-Hindu national and state governments in India to adopt rabidly anti-Muslim postures and policies. It has infected institutions into biased inaction and plagued administrators with a pliant amnesia of their constitutional duties.

Increasingly, it seems that Muslims of India have not been failed by the idea of India, but instead by the very people on whose assuring claims of brotherhood they chose to reject the idea of Pakistan and embrace the idea of India—a secular, democratic republic.

Instead of celebrating Indian Muslims for rejecting the two-nation theory, each day of the last 11 years, and the preceding 22 years before that, India’s Muslims have been reminded that they were wrong. They have been forced to second-guess the decision their forefathers made for them and to question their future in this Republic.

The othering of Muslims has become a presumptively “democratic” process embodied within legislatures and practised as an administrative project. It is being practised and perfected with impunity by the top echelons of political power and put in fluid motion by pliable institutions.

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Indian Muslims are proud, in equal measure, of their dual identity—India and Islam. By 2050, India will have the largest population of Muslims on the planet. However, with every passing day, we are being snatched of our primary identity of being Indian and reminded that we remain Muslims—unequal, unwanted people. A threat.

Our secondary identity is now the majoritarian toolkit used to target us and strip us of our primary identity and democratic rights. The primary identity of our Indianness has been so relentlessly questioned that it is now almost acceptable to cast doubts over our patriotism.

Muslims are brazenly referred to as outsiders, ghuspaithiyas, termites, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, gaddar, deshdrohis, jihadis (of all assorted types—land, love, thook, bangle, food, road, etc.). Not by the fringe, but by the governing and political leadership of our country.

And to ensure it passes legal scrutiny, institutions are being directed to question, pursue and (in)validate the primary identity of Muslims who may speak Bengali or Urdu or any other language, like their Hindu brethren, while remaining Indian.

  • “Desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maaro saalon ko.”
    Shoot the traitors of the nation.

  • “Musalmano ke do hi sthaan, Pakistan ya qabrastan.”
    Muslims have only two places: Pakistan or the graveyard.

  • “Babar ki aulad.”
    Children/descendants of Babur.
    (Used as a slur, implying Muslims are foreign invaders.)

  • “Tel lagao Dabur ka, naam mitao Babur ka.”
    Apply Dabur oil, erase Babur’s name.
    (A call to erase Muslim/Mughal historical presence.)

  • “Hindustan mein rehna hoga, Jai Shri Ram kehna hoga.”
    If you want to live in India, you must say “Jai Shri Ram.”

  • “Jab mulle kaate jaayenge, Ram Ram chillayenge.”
    When Muslims are slaughtered, they will scream “Ram Ram.”

  • “Na mullon ka na Qazi ka, ye desh hai Veer Shivaji ka.”
    This country belongs neither to Muslims nor to Islamic clerics; this is the land of Veer Shivaji.

Hundreds of leaders and thousands of political and Hindu right-wing rallies have brazenly shouted these slogans, calling for the death and destruction of Muslims. No one—not even the judiciary—has found them dangerous enough to condemn, let alone punish those who chant these xenophobic slogans and slurs.

Dangerously othering Muslims and calling for their annihilation is not a clandestine project but an overt programme mirroring the purge of Jews by Nazi Germany. This is the new India that has been normalised.

An India that, on one hand, is chasing the dream of Viksit Bharat by 2047 and wishes to be the third-largest economy in the world, while at the same time marking, targeting, uprooting, bulldozing, disenfranchising, denying and depriving 250 million Muslims of equal access to freedom, equality, justice and opportunity.

India, unfortunately, has become a pretence of the Republic it once was. It does remain a constitutional democracy, only now it seems to be a work in progress toward becoming a democracy “of the Hindus, by the Hindus, for the Hindus”—across its Parliament and state legislatures, its government, its administration and even its judiciary.

I, like my parents, their parents and their forefathers before them, was born in this land. My forefathers, about fifteen generations ago, chose Islam, like millions in this country. They would not have imagined that their descendants would be made to suffer because they chose Islam as their religious and spiritual guide—an Islam that ingrained itself within the subcontinent and lived in peaceful coexistence alongside Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, Christianity, Judaism and other faiths.

India and Islam are the identities we, as Muslims, have chosen to live with—for ourselves and for generations to come. We are proud of them. And both are non-negotiable.

I will proudly celebrate my Republic today and every day, just as I will celebrate my faith. I will remain a Muslim, and I will remain an Indian. Forever.

And I will cherish the idea of India and our Republic that allows us to be who we are, what we speak, what we wear, what we eat and whom we may choose to live with.

Long live the idea of India. Long live our Republic.