Mr Salman Khurshid, deputy minister in the Union government, has made what is perhaps the most important statement in connection with the current trouble in Jamia Millia Islamia. He has said that liberals must be prepared to pay the price for what they say.
Clearly, Mr Khurshid has made the statement in the context of the demand for the resignation of Prof Mushirul Hasan, pro vice-chancellor of the university, on the ground of his interview questioning the effectiveness of the ban on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. As such, he has in effect endorsed the demand while maintaining the facade of neutrality. But that is the obvious implication of his statement which need not detain us. There is another implicit implication which is far more significant.
Mr Khurshid himself may not be fully aware of that implication. Even so, it is not an accident that he should have spoken of Muslim liberals, and not militants, having to pay the price for what they say. On the contrary it speaks of a mind-set which assumes that militants represent the ijma (consensus) of the larger community and liberals violate that consensus.
The deputy minister may not have argued the problem in this mind in such precise terms. But that would only show that the ijma concept is so integral a part of his psychic and mental make-up that it does not need to be deliberately brought into the argument and articulated.
Struggle for power
A great deal has been written and spoken about the struggle for power in Jamia Millia. It is difficult to say how far all that is accurate. But whatever the truth of the charges and counter-charges, there is a larger dimension to the current controversy in Jamia Millia which must not be lost sight of. That dimension relates to the place of the individual vis-à-vis the community.
It is also possible, indeed likely, that when Prof Hasan gave the controversial interview, he was not fully alive to the consequences. But, as in Mr Khurshid’s case on the other side, that would only suggest that he has imbibed liberal values so deeply from the prevailing atmosphere in the country that his natural reaction is to oppose ban on a book, however distasteful and offensive. He abhors The Satanic Verses and is still opposed to the ban.
By this reckoning the issue is joined, however accidentally and without forethought on the part of dramatis personae, between the concept of ijma, central to Muslim political culture as it has obtained for a whole millennium, and liberalism.
The importance of this particular episode should not be blown out of proportion. It may turn out to be no more than a skirmish. But the skirmish itself is a rare event in India and should be recognised as such. One point needs to be underscored in this regard.
Despite the considerable support that Prof Hasan and the vice-chancellor, Prof Bashiruddin Ahmad, are receiving from non-Muslim liberals and leftist intellectuals and political leaders, the controversy is essentially an intra-Muslim affair as no other development has been for a long time. Muslims are challenging Muslims in a matter which is principally of interest to Muslims.
The Muslim intelligentsia was doubtless divided in the Shah Bano case as well. A number of well-known Muslim intellectuals were opposed to the demand for an enactment which would annul the judgment of the Supreme Court obliging Shah Bano’s former husband to pay her a modest maintenance allowance. But the trouble in Jamia Millia bears no comparison with the Shah Bano case on two counts.
Unassailable pillars
First, Syed Shahabuddin, Imam Bukhari and Maulana Nadvi, of Lucknow, popularly known as Ali Mian, could represent the Supreme Court judgment as an encroachment on the Shariat and the Muslim Personal Law based on it, and thereby mobilise the community to demand its annulment.
Secondly, the government could enact the necessary legislation only if it could be persuaded or pressured to do so. It was so persuaded and pressured. After having led Mr Arif Mohammad Khan, then minister of state in his government, to oppose the demand on the floor of the Lok Sabha, Rajiv Gandhi changed his mind under a mix of persuasion and pressure.
In the present case, Syed Shahabuddin, Imam Bukhari and Maulana Nadvi have asked for Prof Mushirul Hasan’s resignation. But it is not open to them to arouse the community against Prof Mushirul Hasan by invoking anything so sacrosanct as the Shariat and they cannot possibly demand abrogation of the right to free expression and the autonomy that Jamia Millia enjoys as a university.
The situation is asymmetrical. While it is a safe assumption that Syed Shahabuddin and others of his persuasion command wide support in the community, Prof Hasan, Prof Ahmed and their allies lean on two unassailable pillars – the right to freedom of expression and the autonomy of the university they preside over. They are not too badly off in the numbers game as far as Jamia Millia itself is concerned. But their strength does not lie in numbers; it lies in the above two principles.
All that apart, the Jamia Millia controversy has helped call attention to the point that the right to freedom of expression involves a limitation not only on the powers of the state to interfere in the life of the individual so long as he does not encroach on the liberty of other fellow citizens, but also on that of the social group to which he belongs. This has been recognised since the classical age in Greece. The great Greek statesman and orator Pericles, for instance, proclaimed: “we … do not nag our neighbour if he chooses to go his way … We are free to live exactly as we please.”
The liberal revolution has, of course, been a painful and prolonged process. In its birthplace in Western Europe itself, it has had to contend with fierce resistance first by the church and then by one collectivist ideology after another, Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism being only the last of them. Indeed, it is only recently that organised ideological resistance has collapsed and that too not completely. For, China, North Korea and Cuba still adhere to communism, though they too are no longer impervious to the wind of change that is sweeping the world.
There is, however, one extremely important exception to the decline in the power of collectivist philosophies. That exception is the world of Islam. In no Muslim country can the philosophy of liberalism be said to be in the ascendant. In fact, if anything, the hold of the collectivist approach has increased in recent years. That is what Islamic fundamentalism represents.
Indian situation
That reality inevitably impinges on Indian Muslims, including the intelligentsia. There is, however, a difference in the Indian Muslim situation as it obtained before Partition and as it obtains now. A couple of points are relevant in this regard.
First, Muslim leaders, such as they are, cannot now invoke the concept of ijma as their predecessors could and did before 1947. Secondly, no organisation or individual can claim to embody such a consensus as the Muslim League and Jinnah could. Thirdly, the present Muslim leaders cannot in today’s India pour ridicule on the politics of numbers as men like Sir Sayyid Ahmed could.
To put it differently, they cannot question the legitimacy of the political order based on the Constitution which in turn rests on the right of the individual. Many of them are in reality opposed to individualism and therefore liberalism and secularism; all three are products of one large revolution, but they cannot bring this opposition into the open. For that would deny them the political space in which they operate and manoeuvre and the legitimacy they need to function in predominantly non-Muslim India. That should help illustrate at once the dilemma they face and the essential nature of the battle in Jamia Millia Islamia.
The Times of India, 4 June 1992