Pandits and Panjandrums

Pandits and Panjandrums

Listening to a retired Secretary of the Government of India from Kashmir, an elegant, dignified and polished man, I was reminded of a glorious tradition that has been elbowed aside by its inferiors.

This gentleman, a denizen of one of the top Muslim families from the Valley, was reminiscing about his earlier days as a Lecturer in the University of Kashmir at Srinagar.

He said something that resonates with most upper class Muslim Indians, who tend to be dyed- in- the- wool secular: “I miss the Pandits. They were my guides. All the learning and intelligence of the Kashmiris came from them. Without them, Kashmir has lost its class and sophistication”.

Such top class Muslims demonstrate their lack of orthodoxy in ways large and small. They marry whomsoever they want. And just because they fall in love. They worry not at all about religion. They marry Hindu, Sikh, Christian or even Jewish. They don’t feel limited by caste, creed, race, money, class. 

The Kashmiri gentleman I was talking to reminded me of the Sufi tradition of Islam, much beloved of all the Indian people. And once, not so long ago, the people of the entire sub-continent, including those in presently benighted Pakistan.

I thought of our Pirs and Babas, and their graves, where lakhs come to pay their respects all over the country. And of the miraculous Ajmer Sharif that has withstood and weathered the scorn of any bigot summoned mystically to its presence. Of legends about Jesus in Kashmir and how he learned to turn the other cheek there.

But what about this aggressive face of radical Islam that seems to have taken over the citadel?

We have probably Saudi Arabia and its misplaced zeal for the propagation of the austere strain of Wahhabism to blame for our plight. The money that the guardians of the Holy Ka’aba have spent on promoting Wahhabism is estimated at over $87 billion over the last twenty years alone. It is this Sunni puritanism and intolerance that has leached the peace out of Islam.

We have Wahhabism to blame for usually tolerant Sunni Islam’s largely stern face of late. It has brainwashed illiterate hordes to its austere tenets. It is Wahhabism and its mutation that is instrumental in our collective loss of innocence.

Saudi Arabia funds mosques and Islamic charities all over the world, pays publishing and television to promote Wahhabism; and is reported to be stepping it up further of late. It wants to retain its slipping hold and influence over its own creature.

It is Saudi money that has sowed the seeds of Al Qaeda, all its affiliates and sympathisers, and the Taliban too. But a key result of such unintended spawn was the round condemnation of the House of Ibn Saud for its close ties with The United States.

For its own “corruption”, its “decadence”, its “greed”, its “apostasy”. Of course,  any Frankenstein creation tends to snowball in unexpected ways. The radical Islamist movements of the world are now fuelled by drug and extortion money too.

It was perhaps inevitable, because of the internationalisation of the jihad. A diverse Islamic brotherhood came together in Afghanistan to expel first the Soviets and now the Americans. This counted Indonesians, Pakistanis, radical Kashmiris, and Chechens etc. in their ranks.

These people have overlaid austere Wahhabi ideas with the bloodthirstiness of revolutionary fervour. They bear no allegiance to anybody.

But all of this is in the end a sectarian Sunni phenomenon. And on the other side of the divide is Iran, and Southern Iraq around the holy shrine of Karbala, where most of the Shias of the world come from.

The irony is in that before the Sunni radicals, or indeed the Sunni powers, target Hindu and Christian infidels, they worry first about their fellow Shias.

It is Shia Iran that is working hard to go nuclear, and you can be sure Sunni Saudi Arabia, Sunni Pakistan and Sunni Afghanistan, Sunni most of Arabia and Asia, are a great deal more perturbed about this than even a covertly nuclear Israel.

While such fractures and contradictions trouble the Islamists, we in India have our own betrayal of the Muslim population to worry about and need to do something urgently to make amends.

The Congress brand of lip-service is both an insult and an injury. Indian Muslims comprise 14.6% of the population, accounting for 177 million souls, about a fifth of the total population.

The Sachar Report, tabled in 2006 and thereafter ignored, says the Indian Muslim is stuck at the bottom of every economic pyramid. Muslims have a minimal share in Government jobs, school and university places. There are only token Muslims in politics. Muslims are less educated, are poorer, have less access to bank finance, and are not well represented in the police or armed forces. This is after 55 years of so called “inclusive” Congress rule out of the 65 we have been independent!

Paradoxically, despite the noise about Narendra Modi’s and BJP’s supposedly communal outlook and “intolerance”, it is in Gujarat that the Muslims have prospered.

This has not happened in UP under the BSP or the SP, despite their professed leaning towards the cause of the minorities. This has not happened in any of the Congress ruled states. Nor in Nitish Kumar’s Bihar, despite his spurious concern about “secularism”.

It has also not happened in arch-left West Bengal under Trinamool or 34 years of Left rule. It is not true of Left ruled Kerala. And the same rate of Muslim progress is not evident in other BJP ruled states either.

But in Gujarat, 21% of the Muslims voted in Narendra Modi, to give him a fourth consecutive term. 

Because, they said, of his Government’s work for Muslims in development and maintaining communal peace.

Muslims and other communities alike backed Modi and the BJP in Municipal elections too, conducted in February, giving them victories in 47 out of 76 elections, including, famously, Muslim majority Salaya in Jamnagar.

There, BJP won in all 24 seats contested, fielding Muslim candidates. The people of Salaya are pleased because Modi is modernising their port in association with the Essar Group, and has established a massive power plant there.

Salaya was a Congress bastion in the past. This time, Congress failed to win even one seat.

It is clearly time to do something real, truthful and substantial at the national level for India’s Muslims. Narendra Modi, low on lip-service, deserves an opportunity to put teeth into his development- for- all and India First mantras.

And we, the Indian people, need to rid ourselves of hypocrites out to pull off yet another term of confidence tricks at our expense.  

1,108 words

April 14^th, 2013

Gautam Mukherjee