Aditi Phadnis: The marginalised Muslim

PLAIN POLITICS

Political parties' lack of vision for liberal Muslims has left leaders like Arif M Khan stranded.

Once upon a time, there was a man called Arif Mohammad Khan who considered himself a liberal Muslim politician. A powerful leader of his time, history almost forgot him until he surfaced the other day. Writing in Dainik Jagaran a few days ago, he remarked that many Muslims he knew were wearing the same half-mocking, half-satisfied smiles that they did when Mohammad Ali Jinnah spelled out his two-nation theory. The context was the Sachar Committee report and the discourse that the Indian state has not stood by the Muslims.

For a man who is virtually on the margins of politics, this seems a remarkably brave thing to say. If few remember Arif Mohammad Khan today, it is not because of the problems of the community's access to facilities, education and so on, that the Sachar Committee report describes. It is because of the political vision or lack thereof political parties have of a modern Muslim.

A modern Muslim in the Congress runs the risk of becoming a symbol of tokenism (because the Congress's affiliation to the regressive Muslim League continues to be deep and abiding. E Ahamad is the League's representative at the centre). In the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), he stands reduced to being a mindless deliverer of a vote bank subject to the caprice of one leader. And in the BJP, he is viewed, at best with incomprehension, at worst with visceral suspicion, even hate. What does a Muslim in politics do? Where does he go?

Today, there are reports that clerics and muezzins in mosques of UP are taking up slum development work, normally the provenance of municipal-level politicians, and that two of them have actually formed a political party. In Assam, a new party, the Assam United Democratic Front, is supporting the Tarun Gogoi Congress government, it says, unconditionally. Its leader, Badaruddin Ajmal, is an unabashed Muslim revanchist. Khan and others like him are asking themselves where they went wrong "" why is it that an assertion by the Muslim community always ends up strengthening the conservatives?

You could recount the similar crises faced by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and Maulana Azad. Sir Syed, who espoused a modern western education for the Muslims, was viewed with suspicion by sections in the Congress for his "loyalty" to the British and detestation by the orthodoxy in his own community for selling out on his commitment to Islam.

Maulana Azad represented another irony of Indian history "" while possessing a thorough Islamic training, he ended up espousing a secular vision of nationalism, informed by personal religious sensibilities. On the other hand, his opponent Jinnah, a modernist with a minimal religious upbringing, ended up vying for a separate Muslim state, informed by purely political considerations. Azad had to resign from the presidentship of the Congress to allow that party to try to bridge the breach between it and the Muslim League and limit the damage from the imminent danger of Partition. He paid the price for his liberal political beliefs as the Congress tried to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds.

Maybe the problem is with the structure of political parties and the nature of power politics. In Khan's case, there is no political formation he has not tried out to put across what he believes should be the vision of liberal Muslim politics. He was minister for energy in Rajiv Gandhi's government when the Shah Bano debate (1986) was on and he became known as a crusader for the rights of Muslim women by asking his party to define Islamic law in the light of contemporary reality and accept the Supreme Court verdict instead of going by the interpretation of the orthodoxy. When the Congress equivocated on the issue, Khan resigned.

When V P Singh's Jan Morcha was formed in 1987, Khan was in the forefront, later becoming cabinet minister for energy when V P Singh became prime minister. He also testified in the St Kitts forgery case. His statement had the effect of tightening the noose around Chandraswami's neck, charged by the CBI with forging papers about the account to tarnish V P Singh's image.

When the V P Singh government fell, he waited before joining the Bahujan Samaj Party. He lost little time in deposing before the Jain Commission by attesting that the V P Singh government had never discussed in cabinet meetings the question of Rajiv Gandhi's security (implying Gandhi's assassination was the result of a security lapse). V P Singh attributed his testimony to a "failure of Mr Arif Mohammad Khan's memory".

But Congress doors remained shut to him because of a cabal of Muslim leaders there. When Khan joined the BJP, his justification was that the Congress was no better when it came to communalism. After the Gujarat riots, he and Ram Vilas Paswan asked the Congress for a few seats, any seats, even the weakest, to fight communal elements in Gujarat. The Congress refused to give him a single seat.

What about the BSP? Couldn't that have been a route to Muslim politics? Khan tried that as well. But he resigned from the BSP when it decided to share power with the BJP in Uttar Pradesh. At that time his logic was that he did not want to be treated as a tradeable commodity.

And now, with the Sachar Committee report, Khan is trying to reinvent himself again. Let's face it "" today it is hard to describe the Congress as secular. There are many who think the BJP is simply not communal enough. With the political ferment that is going on among the Muslims and the Hindus, new political formations are being thrown up. In the recent Bihar by-elections, for instance, it was Shahnawaz Hussain, a Muslim from the BJP, who got 46 per cent of the votes from the Muslim areas and became Lok Sabha MP from Bhagalpur. The Janata Dal (U) won the election from Katihar, a seat held by a Congress Muslim who died. The Congress candidate who lost was his son. So it is neither sympathy nor sentiment but hardheaded calculations to do with leadership and governance that is driving people to decide who their leaders should be.

The people are ahead of the parties that represent them. Maybe it is time for political parties to consider internal reform. Otherwise the Arif Mohammad Khans of the world will come to represent a tragedy of our times: the permanently marginalised liberal Muslim.