The controversy over the alleged abduction and forcible conversion of two minor girls in Sindh has put an end to one piece of make-believe. India can’t ever again pretend that while the Muslim League succeeded in 1947 in tearing away some Muslim-majority areas, what remains is the secular successor-state to the British Raj. Rejecting that claim, Pakistanis persistently called India Hindusthan, a name Jawaharlal Nehru repudiated with equal vehemence. The most he would agree to was Bharat which was, of course, as much of a giveaway as Hindusthan.
Not that there can be any comparison between the two neighbours regarding treatment of minorities. Indian Muslims may face what the Canadian Islamicist, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, called the “radically new and profound problem” of having “to live with others as equals” because never before in the history of Islam had they co-existed with a majority of another faith. “Muslims have either had political power or they have not.
Never before have they shared it with others” he wrote in Islam in Modern History. That may have meant disorientation and even discrimination. The Rajinder Sachar Committee found that Indian Muslims were disadvantaged in almost every aspect of life. But that is a far cry from Pakistan where a small and dwindling Hindu population is struggling just to survive with its religion, assets, lives and womenfolk intact.
There was a time when Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s speech in Pakistan’s constituent assembly on August 11, 1947 (which Bharatiya Janata Party luminaries like Lal Krishna Advani and Jaswant Singh cited) encouraged – albeit briefly – a non-sectarian vision. Jinnah said he looked forward to a time “when Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not — in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”
Seven months later Jinnah assured radio listeners that “Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic State to be ruled by priests with a divine mission. We have many non-Muslims — Hindus, Christians, and Parsis — but they are all Pakistanis. They will enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other citizens and will play their rightful part in the affairs of Pakistan.”
The betrayal of that boast is usually ascribed to the dogged fanaticism of Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship. But the rot had set in many years before. In that anguished letter he wrote to the PM, Liaquat Ali Khan, on October 8, 1950, Jogendra Nath Mandal, one of Pakistan’s founding fathers wrote, “East Bengal Muslims in their enthusiasm wanted bread and they have by the mysterious working of the Islamic State and the Shariat got stone instead from the arid deserts of Sind and the Punjab.”
It was almost as if Mandal anticipated the present controversy when he warned 69 years ago, “I have come to the conclusion that Pakistan is no place for Hindus to live in and that their future is darkened by the ominous shadow of conversion or liquidation. Those Hindus who will continue to stay accursed in Pakistan will, I am afraid, by gradual stages and in a planned manner be either converted to Islam or completely exterminated.”
Not Hindus alone. Muslims outside “the charmed circle of the (Muslim) League rulers and their corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy” as Mandal put it, were equally threatened because “there is hardly anything called civil liberty in Pakistan.” He mentioned Muslim stalwarts like Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan “than whom a more devout Muslim had not walked this earth for many years” and “his gallant patriotic brother Dr Khan Sahib.”
Also Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, undivided Bengal’s last premier, and Fazlul Haq, “that dearly loved grand old man of Bengal, who was the author of the now famous Lahore resolution” that first formally articulated the demand for Pakistan. They were all in disgrace or detention. Mandal did not live to see the persecution of the Ahmadi sect acquire official sanction through Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s 1974 constitutional amendment declaring they were not Muslims. Zia-ul-Haq’s ordinance decreed 10 years later that Ahmadis who “posed as Muslims” would be jailed for three years.
At the same time harsh new blasphemy laws provided penalties ranging from fines to death. Most of the more than 1,300 people accused of blasphemy between 1967 and 2014 were Muslims. It’s even more revealing that many people accused of blasphemy have been murdered before their trials were over, while prominent figures who opposed the blasphemy law have been assassinated. Since 1990, 62 people have been murdered following blasphemy allegations.
The growing public intolerance of these murders indicates peaked in the recent knifing of Khalid Hameed, head of the English department at a post-graduate college in Bahawalpur by a graduate student, 21-year-old Khateeb Hussain, who claimed he attacked Hameed because the professor had disparaged Islam. Apparently, Hameed, who was due to retire shortly, was organizing a farewell party for departing students and the agenda would have included male and female students performing the Jhoomer folk dance.
Hussain felt this was anti-Islam and told the police he took the law into his own hands “as the government was not implementing blasphemy laws and was freeing blasphemers.” Indians may have their own views on such barbarism but it is no concern of the Indian government’s. That would have been commonsense even if the 1972 Simla agreement had not stipulated a policy of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.
The Bangladesh war represented a marked departure from this principle but it happened before Simla. India’s ostensible case then that it had to save its own economy and stability by staunching the flow of Pakistani refugees. Moreover, the Bangladesh cause Indira Gandhi defended was supposed to be linguistic with no religious dimension.
That things have changed since her time is evident from the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill which aims to provide citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians (but not Muslims) from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh who have been forced to seek shelter in India because of religious persecution or fear of persecution in their home countries.
They would have been illegal immigrants under the Citizenship Act of 1955. Under the new dispensation they will be beneficiaries of a law of return (such as Israel operates in favour of Jews worldwide) because they are Hindu. For the first time, religion will play a significant role in defining the Indian identity. But Narendra Modi still can’t take the shift to its logical conclusion, call India Hindusthan and treat Indian Muslims as aliens.
Like it or not, he needs them. For strategic reasons, his Hindu-oriented government is playing footsie with the Organisation of Islamic Conference even more vigorously than previous secular regimes in Delhi.
Sunanda K Datta-Ray is the author of several books and a regular media columnist.
