In
the latter part of the 1980s, as Rajiv Gandhi’s honeymoon with the voters who
had given him a thumping majority in Parliament came to an end, people began
muttering about alternative leadership. Some names were muttered more than
others. One was V.P. Singh, who in fact became the next PM. Another was Arif
Mohammed Khan, the dissident Congressman who had opposed the government’s
handling of the Shah Bano affair and resigned soon afterwards. Arif was (and
remains) a Muslim, of course, and for that reason few took him seriously as a
prime ministerial candidate. He later joined the BJP. But in that moment, when
the Congress – internally eroded by Mrs. Indira Gandhi – was showing its
weakness, various Indian politicians who had no nationwide base became viable
contenders for the top job: not only V.P. Singh, but also Chandra Shekhar,
Inder Gujral, H.D. Deve Gowda and Narasimha Rao. Arif’s religious identity,
which made him an unlikely candidate, also gave him a certain romantic appeal,
quite apart from his reputation as a man of conscience in a cynical capital. I
want to suggest that although it came to nothing – his political career went
downhill – Arif’s brief moment in the sun reflects a strain of Hindu self-hate
that is worthy of recuperation.
The
romance of the Muslim is both an unlikely and a resilient part of Indian
nationhood. The cultural history of the republic is littered with it, from Mughal-e-Azam, through the cricket
captaincy of Pataudi, to the popularity of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam at the height of
the Hindutva wave. It may be argued that Akbar, Pataudi and Abdul Kalam were
all “safe” or “palatable” Muslims: one dead, one secular-debonair, and one a missile
scientist. They did not hold forth on unpleasant subjects like police brutality
or discrimination in housing and employment. But the fact remains that they were also quite
different types, and the nationalist imagination had room for them all. Had
Abdul Kalam been a Hindu, he would have been a rather ordinary figure. But a
Muslim president who wrote poetry about nuclear weapons and presided over a BJP
administration was, well, romantic. It was as if the historical project of national
purging, or Muslim-exclusion, had unexpectedly unearthed – even produced – a
miracle of inclusion. The novelist Anita Desai recognized the dynamic in Clear Light of Day, which is probably
her best work: as the Partition takes its bloody course, the bed-ridden Hindu
poet Raja fumes at the ongoing attacks on Muslims, pens derivative shairi and fantasizes about heroic feats
of rescue. Desai is somewhat unkind to Raja, who “saves” (marries) a Muslim neighbor
with a rich father and becomes rich and fat in consequence. Nevertheless, the
self-indulgence of his heroism and bad poetry do not altogether efface a particular
type of romantic majority-subjectivity that is very much a part of Indian
nationalism. As much as Indian secularism, from which it is not fully distinct,
its most basic function is the rescue and protection of the religious minority
– specifically, Muslims – from the dangerous margins of majoritarian
nationhood.
In
general, romantic nationalism is an artifact and instrument of the right; our
understanding of the phenomenon is inextricably bound with the histories of European
fascism. But it would be more accurate to say that all nationalism is romantic:
sooner or later, even the most drily civic and liberal nations acquire fuzzy,
feel-good mythologies in which liberalism itself becomes a romance and a
bloodline. Romance is both a necessity and a danger within nationalist
projects, sustaining the community by making the exclusion of outsiders a
source of pleasure. Indian majoritarianism (and indeed, the Pakistani and
Bangladeshi) indicates, however, that alongside this exclusive “mainstream,”
with its erotics of violence and demonization, there is a romance of inclusion
which produces alternative communities in which majoritarian considerations are
not so much set aside as differently deployed, often by the same people who
subscribe to the more conventional constructions of identity and nationhood. Simultaneously
normative and deviant, these other romances are redemptive possibilities within
majoritarian democracy.
That
redemption is most readily visible in the movies. Indian popular cinema retains
a small but powerful and resilient niche for narratives of Muslim-inclusion: Mughal-e-Azam, Jodhaa Akbar, Bombay, Pinjar,
Veer Zaara, and so on. These are
very different films. Mughal-e-Azam invited
the audience to identify with protagonists who were largely Muslims. It
succeeded at least partly because Akbar’s status as the patron-emperor of
Indian unity meshed with the Nehruvian secular ethos, allowing a momentary
nostalgia for Mughal Hindustan. Since then, secularism has acquired the
“pseudo” prefix and Akbar has become a marginal icon (streets and jumbo jets
are no longer named after him), needing a Rajput princess to capture the
sympathy of Hindu cinema-goers. But the films continue to articulate fantastic
desires for union or reunion, or an alternative/hybrid Indian self that not
only admits the greatest possible intimacy between Hindus and Muslims, but that
spotlights the menace of pure selves. In this recuperation of a self that is
“both,” there is the modern promise of a secular Indianness that arches over
communal identities, as well as a residue of older, un-partitioned maps and
imaginations. Each is a romance of a nationhood that may never have existed,
but that is nevertheless experienced as both lost and real. It exists as a
ghost ideology, or a recurring dream to which even fascists are susceptible.
This
brings me back to Arif Mohammed Khan and Muslims in the BJP. Quite apart from
the big names – Najma Heptulla, M.J. Akbar and others – some three millionMuslims have joined the party this year alone. It is not difficult to
understand why Muslims might join an overtly anti-Muslim party. The reasons are
entirely prosaic: affiliation brings a measure of security and patronage. There
is also the nature of the BJP, which is not just
an anti-Muslim organization. It is increasingly taking the place of the
Congress as India’s “big tent” political party. It is possible, given the right
incentives, to overlook the more rabid expressions of Hindutva and focus on
other things.
It is harder to gauge the effect of Muslim participation on the BJP. In theory, small numbers of Muslims function as a fig leaf, giving the party the respectability of a secular veneer. In practice, however, even modest numbers of Muslim politicians and voters function as brakes on the chariot: every vote counts in a tight election, and the hate-speech must be tamped down to give spin doctors like M.J. Akbar something to work with. Just as importantly, it reflects and strengthens a political and ideological environment in which respectability comes from inclusion, and the realism of the minority is tied up with the romantic imagination of the majority. This is why the presence of Muslims in the BJP is qualitatively different from a hypothetical situation in which Jews join the NSDAP, and even the participation of Palestinians in Zionist parties. No Arab politician could be a spokesman for Likud in the way that M.J. Akbar can be the spokesman of the BJP.
It is harder to gauge the effect of Muslim participation on the BJP. In theory, small numbers of Muslims function as a fig leaf, giving the party the respectability of a secular veneer. In practice, however, even modest numbers of Muslim politicians and voters function as brakes on the chariot: every vote counts in a tight election, and the hate-speech must be tamped down to give spin doctors like M.J. Akbar something to work with. Just as importantly, it reflects and strengthens a political and ideological environment in which respectability comes from inclusion, and the realism of the minority is tied up with the romantic imagination of the majority. This is why the presence of Muslims in the BJP is qualitatively different from a hypothetical situation in which Jews join the NSDAP, and even the participation of Palestinians in Zionist parties. No Arab politician could be a spokesman for Likud in the way that M.J. Akbar can be the spokesman of the BJP.
It can be argued that the Muslim who
joins or votes for the BJP exhibits a form of self-hate. But what is self-hate?
If we consider the modern Jewish concept of the self-hating subject, it is immediately
evident that there are two, intertwined, forms of this perversion. One is the
angst of Herzl’s “new Jew,” who remained insecure about his distance from the “old
Jew,” who he saw much as gentiles did: stunted, weak, cringing, easily
murdered, unenlightened, Oriental, and so on. The other is the treason of the
Jew who refuses to align uncritically with Zionism. Among Indian Muslims,
something akin to the first variety can be glimpsed in Syed Ahmed Khan’s remark
that compared to the English, his compatriots were dirty animals. The second
variety would materialize later, in the post-1937 Muslim League narrative of
Congress Muslims. Ironically, in independent idea, a diluted version of that
second criticism has been adopted by the secular left and aimed at BJP Muslims.
But generally speaking, Indo-Muslim self-hate has migrated to Pakistan and more
problematically, to Bangladesh, where like Hindutva (with its contempt for the
“pseudo-secular” Indian and obsession with “appeasement”), a reformulated
Two-Nation Theory can thrive on epithets pinned on critics of the unfettered
power of the majority.
Self-hate
in Indian nationalism is primarily a phenomenon of the modern Hindu who loathes
what he sees as the historical weakness of his compatriots: their indiscipline,
effeminacy, cowardice, fatalism, servility, softness, excessive spirituality, military incompetence, indifference
to the hard requirements of the material world, and reluctance to embrace the
prerogatives of the majority on its own land. The Hindu right’s hatred of
Gandhi, Faisal Devji pointed out, was rooted in the perception that he practiced
a politics of minority activism: coming out of South Africa, where Indians were
a minority, Gandhi never made the switch to majoritarianism. Indeed, it may be
accurate to say that modern self-hate is intertwined not so much with fear of a
particular minority as with fear of minority-ness, or the minority condition in
the scheme of popular sovereignty.
At
the same time, it is readily apparent that the rhetoric of self-hate secretes a
series of fractures within the modern self. The separation between the hater
and the hated remains unreliable. Moreover, the barb can be – and is – flung in
either direction across the left-right divide, with each side accusing the
other of being self-hating, and not without justification. (It is not a
coincidence that in Indian politics, the charge of having strayed from
secularism is a weapon of the right as well as the left.) Self-hate is, in
fact, ubiquitous in nationalism. It reflects not so much a disavowal of communal
identity, as a refusal or failure to be sealed within it. From the standpoint
of justice, the acceptance of identity is as important as the ambivalence
towards it, because it undergirds a responsibility that is otherwise diluted to
homeopathic proportions within liberal-secular universalism. It is the
combination of acceptance and refusal/failure that produces cosmopolitanism,
and more specifically, the cosmopolitan citizenship that makes calculations of
majority and minority contingent and fascists apoplectic. There is something
salutary about it, and I am entirely in agreement with Mike Marqusee’s remark
that people without a measure of self-hate are not to be trusted. It is
precisely those nationalities that have been pushed by historical circumstances
into hating themselves a little – Germans, the Japanese – that have produced
the more encouraging examples of non-militaristic nationhood.
In
South Asia, the liberal form of secularism has not worked very well: that much,
I think, is apparent to liberals as well as to those who do not care much for
liberalism. Various romances have flourished instead: those of Syed Ahmed Khan,
Bankim, Iqbal, Savarkar. Typically, the authors of these romances have urged
their co-nationalists to remember: to remember Mahmud and Somnath, Shivaji and
Aurangzeb, Punjab in 1947 and Bangladesh in 1971, Saurabh Kalia and Papa II, and
so on. But people also tend to forget, and what we see in India’s cinema of the
intimate Muslim is a desire to forget, which is inseparable from the urge to conjure
up mythical tales of Akbar-and-Jodhabai, and a self that has overflowed its communal
boundaries. In Mani Ratnam’s Bombay, the
frantic father searching for his children in the middle of a riot shouts that
he is neither a Hindu nor a Muslim, only an Indian. To describe that desire as
secular is to strip it of its meaning and power, because what it really is, is
romantic. Self-hate, in other words, is as much about forgetting as about
remembering, and where memory has been harnessed to the power and violence of
the nation, forgetting functions as an intimate form of resistance to the
hegemonic ideology. It generates unexpected variations on nationalist
iconography. In Yash Chopra’s Veer Zaara
– an utterly mainstream product and one of the most commercially successful
Hindi films ever – the standard heroic figure of the uniformed warrior swaggers
into the frame in the decidedly non-violent form of a rescue pilot in an
unarmed helicopter, and even he resigns his IAF commission midway into the
movie. Our self-hating Squadron Leader is no Top Gun.
When
the liberal foundations of secular citizenship are weak, as they are in India,
the bases of tolerance and minority rights have to be sought within majoritarian
nationalism itself. Forgetful desire is not, of course, a reliable means of
justice. Modern states are by definition creatures of memory-making and
record-keeping, and it is at best naïve to believe that the Indian state (or
the Pakistani or the Bangladeshi) will wither away, leaving happily devolved
communities of Gandhians and Nandians. The building and maintenance of secular-liberal
institutions and the production and dissemination of histories that are not
recycled Orientalist fables remains essential, even as we acknowledge that
these will remain embattled in their existence and compromised in their
operation. But it is also important to see that such institutions, which may be
resented by the illiberal nationalist, can complement the unreliable boundaries
of self-hating subjectivity, and that majoritarian romance is a resource that
deserves to be taken seriously and better utilized in everyday discourse and practice.
What makes the romantic fiction of Indian secularism hopeless also keeps it
alive.
June 8, 2015