Why Modi is the best hope for Muslims in India

July 30, 2015 will forever be a historic day for India. A defining moment for a country that is being threatened by ISIS and fellow ultra-Wahabis despite being a relatively safe place compared to most Muslim countries.  Two Muslims were laid to rest on this day – APJ Abdul Kalam, to whom almost the entire nation, cutting across all divisionary lines, bid goodbye with misty eyes. The second was Yakub Memon, a terror convict for whom a set of pan-Islamist leaders backed by left-liberals shed tears after failing to save his life. One chapter taught Muslims to integrate with the nation and close the wounds left behind by India’s partition in 1947; the other one showed what happens when those wounds are festered by making separatist, pan-Islamist demands in the name of secularism by rejecting the corner stones of secularism – Uniform Civil Code and removal of Article 370 from Kashmir.

The episodes have a combined message for the nation. A message that points to only true justice, side-stepping the rant of a coalition of left-liberals-cum-pan-Islamist Muslims on the one hand, and on the other, that of the saffron hardliners, can bring sanity to India and put it on the path of progress. Significantly, when one talks of true justice in this country there are a lot of grey areas because there is a perpetual drought of people who can call a spade and spade and help define things in black and white.

The demand of the left-liberals and a section of Muslims for punishment to perpetrators of targeted (at Muslims) killings in Gujarat after the 2002 Godhra carnage is more than justified. But then they also have to answer why a large number of them tried saving the previous killers of Godhra before they were finally convicted in 2010. They propped up false shields like the Banerjee commission, with active help of the then Union railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, to label the Sabarmati Express train burning an “accident”. Worse, in their private discussions, they along with top Congress leaders, unabashedly spread the false story that the act was engineered by Modi and the RSS with the aim of winning elections. 

The fact is that Godhra carnage happened with many independent witnesses who stuck to their police statements right till the end. Here, one may pause and ask: “Since the killers were Deobandis, was there a conspiracy to save them by leaders of the Deoband school in collusion with Deobandi leaders spread across secular parties?” At least I know of one Deobandi who wanted to settle the issue with the then chief minister Narendra Modi by which Hindus and Muslims would save the accused persons from both camps. Modi reportedly refused point blank.

Godhra 2002: Through a clear lens

In a bid to save Yakub Memon, the pan-Islamists, led by Asaddudin Owaisi, raised many issues of communal nature each of which needs to be looked at with an open mind and with complete truthfulness for a peaceful future in the true spirit of APJ Abdul Kalam. They questioned as to why the 2002 convicts — Mayaben Kodnani and Babu Bajrangi — were being protected. The first question here is: do pan-Islamists have the right to ask this when they themselves unsuccessfully tried to save the killers of Godhra train burning? On the flip side, when we take this argument forward, then Mayaben’s case is decidedly different from Bajrangi’s. The judgment on Mayaben is a judicial riddle. The judgment says in less than two hours Mayaben travelled 75 km in her car, 48 of them in Ahmedabad, and in between, instigated Hindu crowds at two different places in the city and also visited the Godhra bodies at a government hospital. A lawyer commented on the judgment:  “She could have done it had she had wings to fly.''

Even otherwise, Owaisi’s demand that Kodnani and Bajrangi should be hanged, is a case of selective evidence being quoted to justify one’s own shaky position.  The two episodes are of a different nature. Plus, not many know that the rate of conviction in the Naroda-Patiya case (in which Bajrangi and Kodnani are convicted) is much more than in the Godhra carnage case in which the accused were Muslims. The rate of conviction in Godhra case is 30 per cent, while in the Naroda Patiya case, it is 51 per cent.  

Plus, there are other glaring facts of the 2002 Gujarat story left untouched by a vast section of the media: left-liberal NGOs and human rights activists have fabricated a lot of false evidence. A close perusal of the evidence created by the left-wing NGOs with the aim of fixing right-wing leaders or people close to them, shows that more than 50 per cent Hindus booked in Gujarat riots cases could be actually innocent. More, this tampering of evidence could end up giving benefit of doubt to the real accused. Brazenly enough, when pan-Islamists and left-wing activists raise Godhra, they never lament the victims of Godhra, the starting point of the episode. In that case, Hindus may well ask, “Are Hindu lives less precious than Muslim ones?”  

But on the flip side there were Muslim sufferers too amongst the Godhra accused in the 2002 episode, thanks to false evidence given by the right-wingers. For example, a Godhra lawyer and Congress leader Mohammed Hussein Kalota, who remained in jail for eight years before being acquitted in the Godhra training burning case in 2010, was booked only because he was a competitor to a saffron leader in the Godhra municipal body. All of Godhra knew he was absolutely innocent from day one. Why then did the police under the Modi government not remove his name from the list of the accused, when it was known soon after the incident that he was innocent? 

Babri demolition, violent Muslim reaction and anti-Muslim Mumbai riots: The real story 

A close scrutiny of pan-Islamist-Left arguments on the Mumbai riots, and the subsequent Mumbai blasts, indicates that much like in the Godhra episode, they give a complete miss to an important link in the story, thus encouraging common Muslims to overlook their own faults while charging the Hindus and the Hindu bodies with communal aggression. As it happened, in post-Babri riots at almost all places, including those in Ahmedabad, the riots in Mumbai, too, began only after many innocent Hindus were killed by Muslim mobs infuriated by the Babri demolition.

Till then, the Hindu crowds at most places were celebrating the demolition in an explosion of jubilation, but hadn’t indulged in violence. Anti-Muslim riots began only when Muslims started attacking Hindus violently. In Mumbai, too, the trigger came when seven members of the Bane family in Dharavi were killed by a Muslim mob, thus provoking the Hindus. And when Shiv Sena stepped in, it became a mass killing of around 1,000 innocent Muslims.

The Babri demolition was a blow to the relations between ordinary Hindus and Muslims, but the duplicity of the Left and pan-Islamists when they talk about Babri is unmistakable. Unimpeachable evidence has proved that Babri was a temple converted into a mosque, like many other such sites, where Muslim iconoclasts demolished Hindu temples before Emperor Akbar started a new chapter in Hindu-Muslim relations. 

But the Muslims and Leftists milking the Babri episode do not just deny it, they also discard all the well-documented episodes of temple demolition by iconoclasts during the medieval Muslim period. How good it would have been had the left-wing NGOs and Islamists ruing the Babri demolition and demanding justice also admitted the anti-Hindu acts of Muslim iconoclasts, as Pope John Paul did in 2000 in Televiv, writing a new chapter in human history.  In an apology that will remain etched in elevated minds forever, the then Pope said,  “I, on behalf of the Roman Catholics, apologise to the Jews for the atrocities committed on them by my community over the past 2,000 years.”

On the Yakub debate, too, truth has to be admitted by both sides. All along, the group wanting to save his life, said Yakub had surrendered to the police on the assurance of the Intelligence Bureau and the Indian negotiators. But the ultimate truth was finally revealed by retired police officer Arun Bhagat, who was involved in the episode. According to him, Yakub had thought of surrendering when he came to meet his lawyer in Nepal. But when he got contrary advice, he decided to return to Karachi and was caught by Nepali security personnel on suspicion at Kathmandu airport and handed over to Indian authorities. So, the idea that he surrendered is false.

Yes, once he was in police custody, he did cooperate with the investigation. Clearly, an argument that he had provided crucial evidence and so his life might be spared would not have been entirely misplaced, had the tone been one of request on the part of his supporters, and not that of a belligerent one as a matter of right, and that too by twisting facts. I have got a feeling that Yakub’s plea might have got a positive response had the left-liberal lobby and pan-Islamists not stepped in, turning the issue into a case of Muslim injustice. On the other hand, after an ear-splitting debate by pro-Yakub and anti-Yakub lobbies, no honest observer can deny that Yakub and his family accepted the death sentence with dignity, something the Hindutva brigade should appreciate at least privately if not publicly.

Communalism: Political and religious leaders are responsible, not the common man

In 2011, when the Deoband seminary’s then rector Huzaifa Vastanvi spoke positively about Modi and admitted there was no discrimination against Muslims under Modi, his fellow Deobandis and left-liberals made his life miserable and ultimately forced him to leave Deoband campus. When the controversy was raging, I got in touch with Vastanvi’s relatives and co-religionists , all Deobandis from the radical Wahabi umbrella, at his village Vastan near Surat. And I was surprised to find that most of them accepted Modi as a leader who had left the bitterness of 2002 behind and was leading Gujarat to new frontiers of progress.

A cousin of Vastanvi, Iqbal, who had at that time received a prize from Modi after being selected by the government as the best private dairy owner in Gujarat, was particularly excited about Modi. He told me: “How long can we cry over the Gujarat riots and keep away from progress? Even when a family member dies, there is an end to mourning. The courts are handling the 2002 cases and will do their job.” However, one year later, following an understanding with the Congress, Vastanvi actively campaigned for the party in the 2012 Gujarat Assembly polls, leaving his pro-Modi tune behind and even calling Modi a “shaitan” (the devil). The results were disastrous both for the Congress and Vastanvi. For, Muslims, including the orthodox Deobandis, voted in significant numbers for Modi in Muslim-dominated seats of South Gujarat, even ensuring BJP victory in at least two of them. It was a clear example of how leaders are the spoilers and not the common people.

Modi is Muslims’ best chance to heal the wounds of Partition

A very significant episode went unnoticed in Kashmir in November, 2014. An Army jawan in a moment of reckless aggression killed an unarmed Kashmiri Muslim youth during a protest in Srinagar when the youth was trying to jump a barricade. The case was of simple detention, not of killing. The jawan was later called to account for his act because PM Modi had, a few days earlier, instructed the security forces operating in the Kashmir Valley to ensure no innocent was killed, in a bid to improve the political environment. There were attempts in the army establishment to go slow on the proceedings but Modi’s diktat prevailed. 

Modi has a vision and understanding of India’s Muslim problem, if not in full, then at least partially. So, if left to him, he would like to carry all those Muslims along, who are willing to cooperate in the nationalist framework, including the moderate members of the Wahabi tanzeems, who oppose ideologies of their co-religionists like ISIS, Al Qaida and other international terrorist outfits. 

The maturity that Modi is showing on the Muslim issue is what the country needs – rejecting Muslim appeasement tokens like wearing topi and taking long-term view of the Hindu-Muslim problem, while at the same time taking acceptable Muslims along and restraining the fanatical fringe element in the Sangh Parivar in their anti-Muslim ranting.  In fact, Modi has several times requested the RSS bigwigs to restrain Parivar organisations from painting all Muslims with the same brush. And interestingly, many of them are willing to go along with Modi.

1947 remains the defining milestone

Significantly, India’s Muslim community can’t forget that the nation was divided in 1947 at the behest of a section of Muslims and against the wishes of Hindus, who saw it as partition of their motherland. After Partition, there was a savage attempt in Pakistan to ethnically cleanse many areas of Hindus, resulting in huge Hindu exodus to India. Today’s Delhi and many pockets across India comprise those hapless Hindus. Similar attempts on behalf of Sikhs and Hindus in India in Punjab and Bihar in reaction to the anti-Hindu violence in Pakistan were strongly put down by India’s founding fathers, Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehru and Sardar Patel. As a result, a majority of Muslims in India felt safe and stayed back. 

In this backdrop, how hollow are the claims of leaders like Owaisi promoting pan-Islamism when you consider the fact that the Hindu population in Pakistan has been in decline since 1947 as a result of ethnic cleansing, which still continues and has spread to even new areas in Sindh. In sharp contrast, the Muslim population in India has increased manifold since Partition. The disconnect between the leaders who discuss the Hindu-Muslim problem from studios of news channels and the common Hindu on ground is the symbolised by Partition. The leaders, including even those from the BJP, don’t bring Partition into the discourse, while every episode of alleged Muslim highhandedness is seen from the prism of Partition by an average Hindu.

I privately know of many Muslims who, in their drawing room discussions, described Kalam as a Muslim only in name. His playing of the Veena and reading of the Gita was an anathema to them. But Kalam also offered namaz. His funeral was done according to full Islamic rites. All his relatives were wearing skullcaps on the occasion. The moment all Muslims start following Kalam, the Hindu-Muslim problem will be largely solved.