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https://caravanmagazine.in/politics...islamophobia-and-the-protesting-indian-muslim
On 29 December, the Congress member of parliament Shashi Tharoor, who is popularly considered a liberal, retweeted a video of the slogan “La ilaha illallah” being raised at a protest. “Our fight against Hindutva extremism should give no comfort to Islamist extremism either,” Tharoor wrote in the text of his retweet. He added that “we” will not allow pluralism and diversity to be “supplanted by any kind of religious fundamentalism.”
After online backlash for statement, Tharoor provided an explanation via a thread of tweets stating he understands “primordial place” of the slogan in Islam and its usage as an assertion of faith. And yet, he revealed a basic flaw in his understanding by adding, “You can’t fight Hindutva communalism by promoting Muslim communalism.” His stance, that it is the Muslims who must understand that the very idea of India’s pluralism that is threatened, comes from a position of utter privilege and patronises a community facing an existential threat.
Tharoor claimed that the BJP is circulating such videos to give a communal colour to the movement. He failed to note that the threat to pluralism also comes from those who claim to uphold democratic values by singling out Muslim assertion and giving it a negative connotation. The only difference between the Congress and the BJP seems to be their articulation while shouting down Muslims—the former, in the name of the Hindu Rashtra; the latter, for its skewed definition of a plural, liberal and secular India.
Rather than asking the Muslim “other” to get along with liberal values, it is necessary to direct the questions at the privileged self. What does the liberal sense of solidarity entail for a group facing violence owing to its religious identity? How tolerant is the liberal idea of the “secular” and the “plural?”
At the brink of a possible annihilation, “Muslims have nothing to prove to India,” Apoorvanand, a professor at the University of Delhi, wrote in an article in The Wire. He highlighted how many “well-wishers” of Muslims are worried that the BJP will frame the opposition to the CAA as sectarian and essentially Muslim. “Should Jamia and AMU have kept silent, or the protestors of Seelampur or Purnia kept themselves confined to their daily chores since their ‘visibility’ would weaken the argument against the CAA?” Apoorvanand asked.
In Jamia, too, we encountered students who felt that framing the CAA issue in terms of the exclusion of Muslims and through slogans reflective of Muslimness could mean reinforcing of Jamia’s image as a backward, terrorist and a minority ghetto. This image was cemented in September 2008 with the Batla House killings—when the Delhi police shot two students in an alleged encounter in Jamia Nagar, an area that surrounds the varsity.
Many human-rights groups including the Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association questioned the authenticity of the encounter, terming it a part of the “shameful history of extrajudicial violence.” The killing brought more suspicion against the Muslim neighbourhood, and the university in particular. The right-wing then furthered this suspicion. Shortly after the incident, Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, said: “There is a university in Delhi called Jamia Millia Islamia. It has publicly announced that it will foot the legal fee of terrorists involved in the act. Doob maro, doob maro”—Go drown yourself. In 2017, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, an affiliate of the RSS, called Jamia a “refuge for anti-nationals.”
It was in the context of the Batla House case that over a decade later, a woman student on campus told us, “This is about Jamia’s image.” Many students asked us to distance ourselves from the residents of Jamia Nagar who had come out on roads in solidarity with Jamia students. In tones that reeked of condescension, several students gave us the directive: “They are an unruly mob; we are educated and distinct from them. Don’t join them.”
Rizwan Qaiser, a professor of Modern Indian History at Jamia, told the Indian Express that students are seeking constitutional, not religious, rights through their anti-CAA protests. Further, that it is crucial for people to know that Jamia is like any other “modern, liberal institution.”
But these narratives also go beyond Jamia. For example, the historian Ramchandra Guha wrote in a March 2018 article in the Indian Express that the Muslim community needs to come out of a “medievalist ghetto into a full engagement with the modern world.” He had also argued that any objection to the Muslim women publicly wearing burqas was rooted in emancipation and liberal values.
These comments are an implicit acknowledgement of the orientalist stereotypes of Muslims as barbarians, who need to be taught ways of an enlightened existence. They discredit Muslim identities to only legitimise the sarkaari musalmaan, the state’s version of an ideal Muslim—the one who does not have any symbols of Islam visible in the public sphere, who will be more favourable to the Indian identity of his hyphenated Indian-Muslim self, the one who would be the picture perfect on billboards, with a beard and skull cap even, to speak of India’s pluralistic image. The suggestion is that “living life as a Muslim is itself the problem,” according to Santhosh S, a cultural theorist.
On 29 December, the Congress member of parliament Shashi Tharoor, who is popularly considered a liberal, retweeted a video of the slogan “La ilaha illallah” being raised at a protest. “Our fight against Hindutva extremism should give no comfort to Islamist extremism either,” Tharoor wrote in the text of his retweet. He added that “we” will not allow pluralism and diversity to be “supplanted by any kind of religious fundamentalism.”
After online backlash for statement, Tharoor provided an explanation via a thread of tweets stating he understands “primordial place” of the slogan in Islam and its usage as an assertion of faith. And yet, he revealed a basic flaw in his understanding by adding, “You can’t fight Hindutva communalism by promoting Muslim communalism.” His stance, that it is the Muslims who must understand that the very idea of India’s pluralism that is threatened, comes from a position of utter privilege and patronises a community facing an existential threat.
Tharoor claimed that the BJP is circulating such videos to give a communal colour to the movement. He failed to note that the threat to pluralism also comes from those who claim to uphold democratic values by singling out Muslim assertion and giving it a negative connotation. The only difference between the Congress and the BJP seems to be their articulation while shouting down Muslims—the former, in the name of the Hindu Rashtra; the latter, for its skewed definition of a plural, liberal and secular India.
Rather than asking the Muslim “other” to get along with liberal values, it is necessary to direct the questions at the privileged self. What does the liberal sense of solidarity entail for a group facing violence owing to its religious identity? How tolerant is the liberal idea of the “secular” and the “plural?”
At the brink of a possible annihilation, “Muslims have nothing to prove to India,” Apoorvanand, a professor at the University of Delhi, wrote in an article in The Wire. He highlighted how many “well-wishers” of Muslims are worried that the BJP will frame the opposition to the CAA as sectarian and essentially Muslim. “Should Jamia and AMU have kept silent, or the protestors of Seelampur or Purnia kept themselves confined to their daily chores since their ‘visibility’ would weaken the argument against the CAA?” Apoorvanand asked.
In Jamia, too, we encountered students who felt that framing the CAA issue in terms of the exclusion of Muslims and through slogans reflective of Muslimness could mean reinforcing of Jamia’s image as a backward, terrorist and a minority ghetto. This image was cemented in September 2008 with the Batla House killings—when the Delhi police shot two students in an alleged encounter in Jamia Nagar, an area that surrounds the varsity.
Many human-rights groups including the Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association questioned the authenticity of the encounter, terming it a part of the “shameful history of extrajudicial violence.” The killing brought more suspicion against the Muslim neighbourhood, and the university in particular. The right-wing then furthered this suspicion. Shortly after the incident, Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, said: “There is a university in Delhi called Jamia Millia Islamia. It has publicly announced that it will foot the legal fee of terrorists involved in the act. Doob maro, doob maro”—Go drown yourself. In 2017, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, an affiliate of the RSS, called Jamia a “refuge for anti-nationals.”
It was in the context of the Batla House case that over a decade later, a woman student on campus told us, “This is about Jamia’s image.” Many students asked us to distance ourselves from the residents of Jamia Nagar who had come out on roads in solidarity with Jamia students. In tones that reeked of condescension, several students gave us the directive: “They are an unruly mob; we are educated and distinct from them. Don’t join them.”
Rizwan Qaiser, a professor of Modern Indian History at Jamia, told the Indian Express that students are seeking constitutional, not religious, rights through their anti-CAA protests. Further, that it is crucial for people to know that Jamia is like any other “modern, liberal institution.”
But these narratives also go beyond Jamia. For example, the historian Ramchandra Guha wrote in a March 2018 article in the Indian Express that the Muslim community needs to come out of a “medievalist ghetto into a full engagement with the modern world.” He had also argued that any objection to the Muslim women publicly wearing burqas was rooted in emancipation and liberal values.
These comments are an implicit acknowledgement of the orientalist stereotypes of Muslims as barbarians, who need to be taught ways of an enlightened existence. They discredit Muslim identities to only legitimise the sarkaari musalmaan, the state’s version of an ideal Muslim—the one who does not have any symbols of Islam visible in the public sphere, who will be more favourable to the Indian identity of his hyphenated Indian-Muslim self, the one who would be the picture perfect on billboards, with a beard and skull cap even, to speak of India’s pluralistic image. The suggestion is that “living life as a Muslim is itself the problem,” according to Santhosh S, a cultural theorist.