Right Said Fred (But)

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee brought down a storm of condemnation on his head by criticising a section of Muslims, whom he described as adherents of jehadi Islam, during the meeting of the BJP's national executive in Goa last weekend. Vajpayee does deserve to be condemned in no uncertain terms for what he said in Goa, but not for the reasons being given by the Indian secular intelligentsia. Among the charges levelled at him are, first that he was always a Hindu fanatic wolf, who had finally grown tired of parading in sheep's clothing, and had finally shown his true intolerant face. Second, that he has declared war on the entire Muslim community by saying that wherever they are, they do not want to live with others (those who practice other faiths). Last, that he has condoned the attacks on Muslims in Gujarat by stating that none of it would have happened if there had been no attack on the train at Godhra.

A close examination of his remarks show that none of these charges are justified. On the contrary, all of them show a marked propensity to leap to the worst possible interpretation of what he said without giving him, for an instant, the benefit of doubt. To begin with, what he said about Godhra is self-evident. Had there been no attack on the train, the media would not have flocked to Godhra. Searing images of burning and later smoking carriages and charred corpses would not have been aired for hours on prime news channels; the vhp would not have called a bandh on February 28; Narendra Modi and his ministers would not have intervened to prevent the preventive detention of VHP cadres on February 27 and 28, and mobs crazed with bloodlust would not have come out on the streets of Ahmedabad and other towns in Gujarat the next day. The Godhra attack was completely uncalled for, not to mention unprecedented. However, it is not Vajpayee, but those who are 'explaining' it as a response to eve-teasing and rowdiness by kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya, who are justifying the riots as a response to Godhra. For if Ayodhya mitigates Godhra, then Godhra surely mitigates Ahmedabad and Mehsana. The truth, of course, is that all three stand separately, independent of each other in the catalogue of man's inhumanity to man.

The same lack of charity pervades the intelligentsia's response to Vajpayee's remarks about Islam. Even without his subsequent clarification, it should have been obvious (as it was to The Hindu correspondent) that when Vajpayee mentioned the Muslims' inability to live with people of other faiths, he was referring only to the followers of what he called jehadi Islam. His remark was undoubtedly unfortunate but it was not ill-intentioned, much less a declaration of war on Muslims. The distinction Vajpayee was seeking to draw was between those to whom Islam is a private faith, and those who have politicised it and sought to draw inspiration from it for political acts including terrorist attacks upon the state or upon neighbouring states. As Vajpayee made abundantly clear, pluralist, secular democracies have no problems with the first variety of believers in Islam. It is only with the second that not just India but all modern states (including Pakistan) are having problems.

There is thus nothing new in what he said. Indeed, the problem of how to deal with "jehadi" Islam—however one may choose to describe it—is one that has been exercising Muslim intellectuals in India as much as it has exercised Vajpayee. In fact, on Tuesday last week, Delhi saw the release of yet another book on the subject of Islam and jehad, by the veteran columnist and lawyer, A. G Noorani. Noorani pointed out that the highest form of jehad was not waging war but speaking out in the face of injustice—an individual act born of individual courage.At the function, Aligarh Muslim University vice-chancellor M.H. Ansari pointed out that jehad did not even denote killing. Over the centuries certain terms had acquired time-specific meanings whose relevance disappeared as the circumstances changed.

What was profoundly wrong with Vajpayee's remarks was not their content but the occasion he chose to make them. Had he penned these in another set of 'musings' or made them in a televised address to the nation, he might even have been lauded for his fair-mindedness and sagacity. But he made the remarks at a meeting of the bjp's national executive when it had not merely backed Narendra Modi to the hilt, but supported his move, in the teeth of an earlier decision of the Vajpayee government itself to dissolve the Gujarat state assembly and hold a snap poll. Vajpayee made these remarks at a time when his home minister, L.K. Advani, was telling the BJP's partners to confine their meddling to the central government of which they were a part and not poke their noses into the affairs of Gujarat which was ruled by the BJP and the BJP alone.

He did so at a time when BJP national executive members were jubilant at the thought of holding a snap poll, when hatred of Muslims was at its peak, and were convinced that it would win them 23 more seats in the state assembly than they would have otherwise won. In short, what Vajpayee managed to do was to legitimise the deliberate use of hatred as a political instrument, and to assert the absolute priority of a parochial state interest over the nation's interest. He has done both at a time when Indian democracy can least afford either, the divisiveness that the former will release or the impotence of the national government that the latter implies. What a sad end this is to a distinguished political career.