The evidence of Indian Muslims winning their freedom from the emotional stranglehold of Pakistan is so impressive that it is difficult for a discerning observer of the country’s political scene to miss it.
The move away from Pakistan among Indian Muslims in fact began, though imperceptibly, in the early ’fifties. One of the authorities on the subject, Mr Wilfred Cantwell Smith wrote in his well-known book, “Islam in Modern History”, in 1956, “It is our observation that it (the community) has moved in this direction (‘liberation’ from despair of the immediate post-partition period and psychological dependence on Pakistan) during the past five years – despite all the troubles. Of the various factors contributing to this move, the chief has been the success of secularism. The success has, of course, been partial, yet basic. The Muslims have seen law and order prevail, have seen the police prevent riots against themselves, have seen the secular state restraining triumphant Hindus from reconverting a mosque into a temple (the Ajodhya mosque incident, Fazyabad, UP, in 1956). In other words, they have discovered that they could live at peace with India, and were free to practise, and indeed to preach, their religion.”
Revived
The shift has, in the nature of things, been a zig-zag one and not a linear one. The terrible riots in 1961 in Jabalpur (Madhya Pradesh) and in a number of Gujarat and Maharashtra towns in 1968 and 1969, for instance, revived the sense of insecurity among Indian Muslims. Even otherwise they have continued to feel discriminated against, especially in respect of employment in government offices, public sector undertakings and private enterprises. And they have deeply resented the steady eclipse of Urdu with which so much of their history and culture is bound up.
The Indo-Pakistan war over Bangladesh in 1971 was a decisive turning-point. India’s military victory in the east, the rise of an independent Bangladesh based not on Islam but language and culture and the consequent disarray and loss of morale in what was left of Pakistan finally convinced Indian Muslims that Pakistan could not be a source of strength and pride for them. It had long ago ceased to be a country where at least the better educated and the skilled among them could go for jobs and settle down as citizens.
At no time before, however, has the evidence of Indian Muslims moving away from Pakistan been so conclusive as recently in the case of Mr Bhutto’s trial and hanging. While the Pakistanis have been divided over the issue, almost every Indian Muslim has been deeply sympathetic to him. Most Indian Muslims have not been willing even to consider the possibility that he might in fact have been guilty of the murder charge on which he was tried and convicted. Some of them in fact lapsed into a world of fantasy on the day Mr Bhutto was hanged. They invented stories that President Zia-ul-Haq had been shot dead and distributed sweets to “celebrate” the occasion. One has only to read the Urdu papers of that period to appreciate the depth of the pro-Bhutto and anti-Zia sentiment among Indian Muslims.
On a superficial view, it is possible to dismiss this assessment. Indeed, some Janata leaders and supporters have argued that the sympathy that Indian Muslims have shown towards Mr Bhutto proves that they remain emotionally tied to Pakistan. Their case is that Indian Muslims have felt intensely for him because he had talked about a thousand-year war with India, pushed Field Marshal Ayub Khan into an armed conflict with this country in 1965, given a pro-China twist to his country’s foreign policy which made it possible for Islamabad to think in terms of grabbing Jammu and Kashmir and called Indians dogs at a meeting of the UN Security Council.
These Janata leaders and supporters have primarily been interested in proving that Mr Bhutto was no friend of India in order to justify the government’s refusal to plead with President Zia for clemency for him. They have, therefore, not cared to make the additional point that Mr Bhutto was the tallest Pakistani leader who alone could, on the strength of his personality, redress to some extent the power imbalance between his country and India. But that is a fact.
There is an obvious flaw in the argument of the Janata leaders. For a lot of non-Muslims in India have also been equally sympathetic to Mr Bhutto and his family members, greatly harassed by the Pakistani authorities. And surely, they cannot be said to have been attracted by Mr Bhutto’s anti-Indian past. On the contrary, they have had to ignore it quite deliberately in order to share the agony of his family, friends, and supporters in Pakistan.
Attracted
It can be argued that after 1971 Mr Bhutto was genuinely interested in reasonably friendly relations with India and that he tried to resolve the main dispute between the two countries by absorbing the so-called Azad Kashmir into Pakistan and thereby converting the line of control as agreed upon at the Simla summit in 1972 into a de facto international frontier. But I doubt that many Hindus have been influenced by this consideration.
Apart from the human factor which inevitably comes into play in such cases of important leaders being maltreated and disposed of by petty tyrants, the non-Muslims have clearly been attracted by some other aspects of Mr Bhutto’s personality. He was a modern man who would, if only he could, have loved to push his people into the twentieth century. And his modernity and commitment to modernisation have been sharply brought out by the actions of President Zia-ul-Haq who is without doubt the most fundamentalist individual to have reached the highest office in Pakistan.
By normal logic these aspects of Mr Bhutto’s personality should have repelled most Indian Muslims. For they are generally conservative in their social outlook. Indeed, they should have felt drawn towards General Zia because he has introduced some of the so-called Shariah laws as part of his effort to establish what he calls Nizam-e-Islam. But they have responded in exactly the opposite way. They hate prayed for Mr Bhutto and they have been hostile to the General. Surely we should look for an explanation for this apparently surprising development.
I would like to suggest that gradually Indian Muslims have come to recognise their separate identity – separate, that is, from the Pakistani Muslims – and the merits of the secular and democratic Indian state. The theological debate over whether it was possible for them to co-operate with the Hindus in maintaining and strengthening a non-Muslim state has long been over. For years now they have been trying to come to terms with the reality of the Hindu majority and power, both political and economic, and not only in a spirit of sullen resignation.
Unique
In his book cited earlier, Mr Smith listed Indian Muslims among the “cardinal Muslim communities of today” and he cited three factors in support of this view – size, history and situation. They are the largest Muslim community in a non-Muslim country; in the past they have played a major role in the history of both India and Islam; and they are the inheritors of the traditions of Islam of undivided India if only because the main Muslim monuments and centres of Urdu literature are located in this country. Above all, India’s is the only Muslim community which is sharing power with non-Muslims through the exercise of its democratic rights.
This sharing of power by Indian Muslims with non-Muslims is, of course, unique in the history of Islam. Muslims have either ruled over others and themselves or been ruled over by others. They have never before shared power with others. But more pertinently this compulsion on the part of Indian Muslims to live and share power with other communities blocks for them a disastrous option which many other Muslim communities are trying to exercise – a return to early Islam as if it were possible to blot out the history of the last 13 centuries.
On this reckoning Mr Smith expressed the hope that the community would one day make a major contribution to both Islam and India. It has not yet fulfilled this hope. But it remains uniquely placed to do so and it is trying to move forward in the educational and the economic fields. It is also notable that all attempts to persuade Indian Muslims to join political organisations exclusively their own have failed. The pull of the past remains considerable but that of the present and the future is not feeble either.
If all this is even partly true, the situation is not without hope. It will be tragic if the Hindu society’s preoccupation with itself or communal riots or both push the Muslim community back into its shell.
The Times of India, 9 May 1979