Puppets of Faith: Theory of Communal Strife (A Critical Appraisal of Islamic faith, Indian polity), BS Murthy [microsoft ebook reader .TXT] 📗

do. And having succeeded in subduing the squabbling Nawabs and the disjointed Rajas, the British slowly but steadily unified the country to usher it into the modern era; they built roads and bridges, brought in the radio and the railways, and the telegraph and the telephone.

But, to the chagrin of the Musalmans, the British banished Persian, the language of the Mogul Court, and introduced English to administer India, which turned out to be a boon to the Hindus for it facilitated their entry into the administrative portals, and that gave them an edge over the Musalmans, thereby ushering them into a new age in their ancient land. Even though the evangelists failed to take the Hindu souls en masse onto the Christian path of salvation, yet the British saved the Indian souls by modernizing the hitherto neglected healthcare system. And it was their educationists that enabled the Hindu’s innate scientific temper to flower in the, Ramans, the Boses, and the Ramanujans et al.

Besides, the secular education that McCauley introduced produced a body of Hindu thinkers and reformers, mostly Brahmans, and predominantly Bengali at that – the Arabindos, the Tagores, the Bankimchandras, the Ram Mohan Roys, the Ambedkars, the Tilaks, the Malaviyas , the Gurajadas, et al – in their scores, which laid the seeds of equality in the Indian soil at long last. But yet there are the critics, who aver that his educational mechanism turned India into a nation of clerks, of course not without some justification; and as history tends to repeat itself, the skeptics of the day aver that the IT upsurge in the end would reduce humans into a bunch of keyboard operators; undeterred though the technology has set its eyes on AI. Whatever, there is a price to pay for a millennium of stagnation of slavery, isn’t it?

So, the Brahmans, as though to make amends for the sins of their progenitors, strived hard to clear the social debris that Brahmanism had left on the Indian soil. The Hindu reformist zeal, with due help from the Western Samaritanism, which put the Brahman orthodoxy on the back foot, which, in turn, enabled the community to contain abominable practices such as sati, untouchability, child marriage et al, that is besides opening the altars for widow marriages.

With the momentum so gained on the social front, as the Hindus began to dream about changes in the political arena, Gandhi ingenuously transformed India’s masses into ‘Soldiers of Peace’ to fight against the mighty British that stunned them in the end. While the world marveled at it, India showed to it as to how an ancient nation of peace loving people, with a dominant religion of philosophical orientation, can successfully shape its struggle against a foreign rule in the modern world through non-violent means. How well, Pearl S. Buck captured it all in her assertion that only a religion like Hinduism and a country like India could have produced a Gandhi!

Nonetheless, India’s struggle for freedom had had its righteous streaks of aggression as well as the pacifist stances of Islam, for even as Subhas Chnadra Bose and others across the country, opted for an armed struggle, the Indian Musalmans, along with the majority of the Hindus, stuck to the Gandhian course of non-violence. That is, till Muhammad Ali Jinnah fired the Muslim imagination with the call for the creation of Pakistan, the separate homeland for the Musalmans of Hindustan. Whatever, as the Hindu hopes for freedom rose, so did the Muslim fears about the domination of their religious rivals in free India increased, and it seemed as if the wheel was about to turn the full circle for the Hindus and the Musalmans as well.

While for the Hindus, the end of the British Raj would seemingly herald a Rama Rajya, i.e. after a thousand year interregnum, for the Musalmans, whose domain of eight centuries the British had ended; it portended the worst – the Hindu domination of them. That was after the baneful land reforms of the British, which had already proved to be the last nail in the coffin of their parasitic life of leisure and luxury. Besides, given the propensity of the Musalmans to live by their glorious past, the prospect of a Rama Rajya would have seemed a setback for Islam in Hindustan.

Since the religious loss of face is something that the Musalmans dread the most, so, what would have salvaged the Islamic prestige than a separate nation for them in the subcontinent? Besides, a ‘here’ they can call their own, that would enable them to take home their fond memories of the past glories that the two-hundred-year mogul rule symbolizes. Moreover, as the notion of a Muslim nation would restore the loss of power and pelf under the British Raj, the craving of those Musalmans for Pakistan cannot be faulted.

But it’s their hypocrisy behind the demand for separation on the specious ground that Muslims cannot coexist with the Hindus, that is abominable. Why didn’t they live with the Hindus for a thousand years by then; oh, that was when they happened to be the rulers, isn’t it? Well in reality, Indian Musalmans found it galling to live under the imminent Hindu rule in the independent India; and in an encore, the same supremacist psyche came to the fore in latter-years as the Hindu nationalists, at long last, had come to rule their Bharat that is India.

Whatever, after centuries of inimical Muslim misrule the Hindus have had to endure, they should have a reason to feel indebted to the British for having given them a modern nation, though truncated. Maybe, the Singh Pariah’s nationalist lament over a lost Akhand Bharat, patriotic though, is misplaced for with one Musalman for every two Hindus in it; Islam would have erected enough roadblocks for the undivided India to modernize itself. Moreover, if not for their grant of Pakistan as the homeland for the Indian Musalmans, the British could have unwittingly Balkanized India, or worse!

So, notwithstanding the unpalatable partition of their ancient land, the Hindus have every reason to be grateful to the British for releasing them from the Islamic shackles that their Brahman-kshatriya duo willy-nilly put them into. And for the same reason, the Musalmans are wont to grudge the British for having divested them of the Dilli gaddi that is in spite of their having ensconced them in Rawalpindi, which, of course, they see as a consolation prize. Won’t the Indian Musalmans’ resentment of the British validate the adage that “one’s meat is another man’s poison”? It’s another matter though that in hindsight it appears that the Pakistani capital-shift from Rawalpindi to Islamabad was a forerunner into its Islamic disaster!

 

Chapter 24

Ant Grows Wings

 

Never in the history of Islam, not excluding that of its Messenger, was the destiny of the leader so providentially tied with the fate of his people as that of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Indian Musalmans. And like Muhammad before him, Jinnah (peace be upon him as well for his soul too must be restless in his grave) also did not survive long enough to bring about the political consolidation of Pakistan, and to the like effect. While the grand religion of Muhammad rendered itself into sub-faiths so soon after his death, Quaid -e- Azam’s Pakistan, as if to prove the truism of the Italian saying, ‘to its own hurt that ant grows wings’, sundered itself into two nations that was before it could celebrate the Silver Jubilee of its coming into being. Just the same, by then, it had glaringly exhibited the brutality of the intra-Islamic intolerance on its Eastern stage, in all its Punjabi – Bengali variation, for all to see, and for any of those who might have missed it, it was reenacted in the Iran-Iraq war by Ayatollah Khomeini and Saddam Hussein. Well if anything, their legacy of Shia-Sunni strife is sought to be perpetuated in all its cruelty in Iraq, Pakistan et al, seemingly forever.

Whatever, the roots of the Islamist separatism in Hindustan lay in the political ambitions of the Muslim aristocracy and the economic interests of the middle-class Musalmans, who wanted to have it easy in a country of their own bereft of any Hindu competition. But the separatist sentiment propelled by the mullahs and the self-interest of the elitist groups needed political fusion to facilitate Pakistan, and the leadership for that came from an unexpected source, in the persona of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, whom Muhammad, if not banished him as an infidel, owing to political expediency, would have certainly branded him a hypocrite. Like the hostility of the Quraysh motivated Muhammad to capture the kabah for Islam, so was Jinnah’s zest to take up the cudgels of Pakistan for the Indian Musalman arose from his desire to settle scores with Gandhi’s Congress that sought to sideline him.

But unlike Muhammad, who provided for his faithful of Medina with the ‘spoils of war’, Jinnah was constrained in propping up Pakistan for Islam had no precedents for nation building, intellectually speaking that is. While Allah in his own wisdom withheld its wherewithal from Muhammad, he too did not survive long enough after the conquest of Arabia for him to have developed the grasp of managing the national economy. So the Musalmans have no hadith or sunnah to go by on that count, and even otherwise, Muhammad’s methods would show that he believed in the adage of ‘ends justifying the means’, rather than in the ‘merits of the means applied ’.

Given that man, in passing through the pathless woods of life, has to remain in tune with its ever changing currents, the Musalmans though are forever in a quandary sticking to ‘whatever’ dished out in the quran, hadith ‘n sunna. True, they pore over their Islamic texts in the hope of finding a clue here or a hint there but to no avail; well how were Muhammad to know about the complexities of modern life in his desert times of yore. That is about the Muslim habit of viewing the ever-altering world through Muhammad’s rusted medieval prism, and what they divine through that is there for all to see. After all, one only sees what one looks for, and no farther.

Moreover, being an autocrat that he was, besides being their sole arbiter, Muhammad had no compunctions in furthering the faith among his flock with “do as I say but don’t do as I do” dictum. So the Caliphs, who succeeded him, and the Sultans, who followed them, found it expedient to follow in his convenient footsteps to the detriment of the umma though as an increment to the Islamic tradition that came in handy to others who followed them. It’s thus the rulers of today’s Islamic world, Saudis downward; tread on Muhammad’s autocratic path with hadithian props. And true to form, the democratic nation of Pakistan that Jinnah envisaged for the Indian Musalmans first came into the Quranic domain and, in the end, ended up being the fiefdom of its fauzis and fast ripening for being taken over by the jihadis.

And in time, thanks to Zia ul-Huq’s political expediency that ushered in the sharia to humor the mullahs, the ‘land of the pure’ was turned into the backyard of the jihadis as well as the launching pad for the fidayēn, the martyr missiles of Islam. Well, as if to add insult to injury, Zia famously declared that democracy wouldn’t suit the Muslim genius, nevermind their theologians proclaiming from the rooftops of the world that Islam as a religion is essentially democratic! While that only shows how far the ‘frog in the well’ vision can take one, Pakistan failed to infuse Iqbal’s muse to better his sāraē jahān se achchā hindōsitān hamārā, which he penned for India before he pitched in for Pakistan

But much before Pakistan was tilled in the Islamic fields of Hindustan; its seeds of failure, as observed by W. W. Hunter in The Indian Musalmans, lay in the Wahabi roots of the Indian Muslims at the loss of their imperial power to