Modi on Jinnah

Modi on Jinnah

Dr. Mike Ghouse

Prime Minister Modi has missed many opportunities to show his goodwill; he is yet to translate his ‘good’ intentions into ‘outcomes.’ The troublemakers from his party have presented him another opportunity to show his mettle and stop them from tearing the society apart. All he has to do is speak up about Jinnah’s picture at Aligarh Muslim University.

Whether it is good, bad or ugly, we have to have to preserve our history as a reference. Every society has portrayed evil and good simultaneously, and religious scriptures are full of such stories. Not a single religion has wiped the wicked men in their narration.

Ravan is a part of our story. Should the man who abducted Ma Sita be removed from Ramayana?

Hitler is one of the evilest men in human history for attempting to annihilate a whole race. How can such a man be a hero to Modi’s organization, the RSS? 

Godse killed Mahatma Gandhi, and Godse’s picture adorns the sacred halls of the parliament; does it mean Modi would have approved Godse to kill Gandhi?  

No, we cannot change or alter history, it is what it is, and we have to live with it.

The rogues among us, the Indians are continually looking to brew trouble, while the Prime Minister remains silent or tacitly approves the agitation.

Sometimes I wonder, why didn’t we heed Sanjeev Bhatt? When the Gujarat riots broke out, Mr. Bhatt said, Modi chose to remain silent for three days and hinted to his men to go ahead and do all the damage they can until he is forced to stop it.

Do you see a pattern here? When Dalit girls were raped and hung on the tree, Modi did not say a word. When Kalburge, Gauri Lankesh, and others were killed in broad daylight, Modi did not say a word.  When Akhlaq was lynched and murdered, Modi did not say a word. The list is quite long, but the pinnacle of his silence came when the six-year-old Asifa and a four-year-old girl were raped, he did not say a word for two days until the entire nation came together to compel him to speak.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, in one of his books Six Glorious Epochs of Indian History clearly explains why raping of Muslim women is justifiable and not to do so when the occasion permits is not virtuous or chivalrous but cowardly. This idea is repulsive to the moderate majority of Hindus, but that is Modi’s indoctrination as a pracharak of the RSS. Is that the reason he chooses to remain silent when rapes tear up the nation?

If Modi were dumb, I would not complain, but he is not.  

If Modi were deaf, I would not complain, but he hears everything.

Some of his party members are raising hell over Jinnah’s photo at the Aligarh Muslim University. As head of the most important democracy in the world, his role is to build cohesive societies and not allow destruction and chaos. It will damage India in the long haul.

All Modi has to do is a tweet or hold a press conference immediately after the incident- and say that he will not tolerate anyone messing with law and order, even if it were his ministers. If this man has good intentions, it is time to prove it.  He should try this method at least five times and see how quickly things will stop from spreading.

No Indian should live in fear of the other; it is not good for the county, we should not be spending our time battling out on what you wear, eat, drink or believe. We should be spending time on how to save farmers, create jobs so fellow Indians can have three healthy meals. 

India’s prosperity is partially driven by foreign direct investment and trade.  If Modi does not control and puts a stop to harassment, lynching, rapes and chaotic situations, India may face what apartheid South Africa faced once. There is no incentive for the investors to feel safe with their investments in India. Modi’s friends will run away with money; the average Indian will lose. 

If Modi does not reign on these, he will sink India. https://www.theindianpanorama.news/featured/modi-will-sink-india-if-he-does-not-rein-in-the-rapists/

There are many Indians who have left India and gone on to become Citizens of other nations.  Let's say if America and India are at odds, the American Indians will stand with the US, they have to prove their loyalty to America and will go against India.  Should India strip all the civilian awards given to them because they are with the enemy now? I say no, what was done with good intentions should remain intact.

Jinnah was a part of our independence movement, together, we got the freedom. As Indians, we generally disagree with the partition, and Muslim Indians in particular, feel betrayed. That is a part of our history, and we have to live with it.

As a civilized nation, we cannot remove Jinnah’s picture. Jinnah is part of India’s history and will remain one. Will Modi speak up and put an end to the chaos or does it help him to play dirty and stay silent?

A few good videos worth watching:

1.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R-uF_T0sgw&feature=share

2. https://www.facebook.com/NationalMirror1/videos/2009302016002489/

The author is the president of the Center for Pluralism in Washington, DC. He is committed to building cohesive societies and offers pluralistic solutions on issues of the day.

A different kind of secularist

He is an amazing combination, he should be termed a pluralist rather than a secularist, he has weaved through many cultures. He was for Hindustani rather than Sanskritized Hindi or Persianized Urdu, indeed Hindustani is what is in currency in India even though we call it Hindi or Urdu. However, a language is simply a medium of communication and becomes one of the pillars of its own culture. 

Mujeeb Rizvi (1934-2015)

A different kind of secularist

Mujeeb Rizvi was a scholar-teacher who fought the pundits and the bigots

- See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/a-different-kind-of-secularist/#sthash.9oMjMJ7S.dpuf

The passing away of Professor Mujeeb Rizvi brings alive an old cliché that it is the passing of an era. His personal and intellectual biography represents the journey of a nation from its inception to its somewhat fraught maturity. Born and educated at Allahabad, the crucible of nationalist politics in the pre-independence era, he went on to study at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) before founding the Hindi department at Jamia Millia Islamia, where he remained the presiding head for nearly 30 years. His subject of study was medieval ‘Hindi’ poetry, a field dominated by pundits, literally and metaphorically. His disputations with punditry of all sorts, Hindu-Muslim, Urdu-Hindi, reflect an ethos and an era that seems quite incredible from the vantage point of our more bigoted times.

Born in the Chail region of Allahabad, which was famous for Syeds as well as police officers, he came to study at Allahabad in the 1940s, when independence and partition were around the corner. After finishing high school and intermediate there, he joined the famous university of the town a few years after independence. He was lucky enough to witness a university at the peak of its glory where the modern discipline of Indian history was being formed by pioneers such as Tarachand, Noorul Hasan and Satish Chandra.

It was while at university that he came under the influence and mentorship of the famous Gandhian, Pandit Sunderlal. He spent many years as his political and spiritual disciple. Rizvi joined Sunderlal’s peace mission to Telangana soon after the communist uprising of 1948, and a mission to China. Besides being a politician, Sunderlal was also a scholar. His two-volume tome, Bharat Mein Angrezi Raj, a blistering attack on British rule in India, had been banned by colonial authorities. He also wrote a succint polemic called How India Lost Her Freedom. The scholarship of these books is second to no historian of the period, but in addition they are informed by a moral indignation which parallels other anti-colonial polemicists like Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James. Like Mahatma Gandhi and Sunderlal, all his life Rizvi struggled against the burden of ‘angreziyat without the angrez’ , which was to become the fate of independent India.

Sunderlal was against both Persianised Urdu and Sanskritised Hindi and argued in favor of a simpler Hindustani, a la Gandhi, but sadly Hindustani lost out to Hindi by one vote in the Constituent Assembly. Soon after, Rizvi had an encounter with Purshottam Das Tandon, the right-wing Congress leader of UP who taunted him as to why Muslims do not study Hindi. Smarting at the taunt and desirous of bringing his political and personal life closer, Rizvi then went on to study Hindi at the AMU. At that time the university was reeling under the impact of Partition. Widely seen as the crucible for Pakistan, the stigma against the university was strong. It had lost most of its teaching staff as well as a majority of its students after 1947. The Muslim students who remained were strongly pro Muslim League. In tow with the student wing of the Communist party, of which he was never a formal member, Rizvi and his friends fought bitter ideological wars, academically and politically, with right-wing elements of both communities. Afterwards, he joined Jamia in Delhi.

Jamia Millia Islamia was a highly important experiment in nationalist education. Founded in 1920 at the peak of the Khilafat-Non Cooperation Movement, Jamia set itself up against the crony and separatist politics of Aligarh. Inspired by Gandhi and following his ideas on Basic Education, Jamia already had a sterling record as a secular and nationalist education centre by the time Rizvi joined. It demanded of its teachers more than educational instruction. It asked them to be role models of service, for the students as well as the community around. Jamia’s famous adult education program, with outreach extending to several villages in that corner of South Delhi, remains distinguished in the country. Teachers and students ate from the same mess, lived simply and practised ideas of education that extended beyond class room teaching. Its famous vice chancellors, Zakir Husain and Mohammad Mujeeb to name a few, and teachers, articulated an academic, emotional and theological space for the Nationalist Muslims, across the country, who badly needed this succor after the dark days of Partition.

For his PhD, Rizvi chose the apt theme of Jayasi’s Padmavat, a 16th century poetic epic, in a genre called sufi premakhyans. For nearly five centuries, sufis of North India had created epic poetic works which, while ostensibly replete with Hindu religious terminology and deeply influenced by Sanskrit erotic conventions, depicted the internal spiritual journey of a sufi. These poets extensively translated passages from the Quran and from Persian masters to create a language and a discourse without which the great Bhakti poets such as Tulsi or Kabir may not have existed. Some of these works were even recited from mosques in medieval India. Rizvi’s distinctive contributions to this field, including the wider world of Bhakti poetry, was to show their great debt to Persian, in vocabulary and in choice of themes. This is something that famous Indologists such as George Grierson as well as Hindi scholars, mostly Brahmins, who dominated this field of study had completely missed out leading to erroneous conclusions.

Rizvi was a dedicated teacher who preferred to spend time with his students rather than to produce research papers to advance his academic career. The list of people who benefited from his discourses cuts through many fields. Historians such as Shahid Amin, Muzaffar Alam and Aditya Behl, Hindi writers such as Asghar Wajahat and Abdul Bismillah are only a few names of the thousands who benefitted from his learning and affection. Through the nearly 50 years he spent in and around Jamia, he spent the longest fighting ‘the Mullahs’. One of his favorite statements was to wonder why “God only spoke in Arabic to the Mullahs”. And he did this from within the largely Muslim dominated landscape of Jamia, the university as well as the locality. Yet, Rizvi’s secularism was not hollow of religion. He found his secularism from deep within the practice of religion in this country, from figures such as the Gujarati saint Mahamati Prannath, who wanted to teach Aurangzeb the Quran!

Since the time off Gandhi, intellectuals in India have come in broadly two forms, desi and vilayati, English educated though they may all be. The desi ones know that all wisdom does not come from the West. Rizvi was a desiintellectual par excellence. Of all scholars and activists I have seen, perhaps thanks to his early training, I found Rizvi occuping the most unique position. He was a Gandhian as well as a leftist, a secularist as well as profoundly versed in religion, an agnostic who was truly spiritual and a sufi who put humour before seriousness. 

A scholar who put praxis before pedantry, a devotee without any sectarianism, he embodied a true sense of karuna. Not for him the humbug of seminars, publications, conferences and self promotion. He sat in his place, engaged with the world, in it yet not of it. He imparted affective, not bookish knowledge. He represented a generation of intellectuals, secular Muslim nationalists, who occupied the most precarious position in this nation, then and now, and, perhaps, because of it came to stand for the best and the most exemplary that modern India has to offer. We have lost an irreplaceable scholar of medieval India. But more than that we have lost a life and a man, of modern India, that we may soon not know how to mourn.

Baatein Hamari Yaad Rahein Ab Baatein Na Aisi Suniyega/ Parhte Kisi ko Suniyega to Der Talak Sar Dhuniyega (Remember our talk, for you will not hear it again/ You will hit your head for long when you hear it recited)

The writer, the son-in-law of Rizvi, is a Delhi-based dastango