INSTIGATING A CONTROVERSY.

Is it compulsory for every citizen of India to chant "Bharat Mata Ki Jai"? Obviously it is not. As Asaduddin Owaisi, the ebullient and often provocative leader of the All-India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), says, this is not a condition called for in the Constitution. In that narrow, technical sense he is right. Yet, it is not the language and precise wording of that sentiment that is the only issue of relevance today. The Constitution obligates every citizen ("We, the People of India...") to a certain commitment to India - the nation, the country, the collective, the Republic, the civilisation, call it what you will, of which that Constitution is an embodiment. Some choose to express that commitment by using "Bharat Mata Ki Jai", a simple yet evocative phrase that has resonance for many thousands and millions of Indians and goes back to the freedom movement and the larger enterprise of nation-building under the Mahatma.

Others may prefer "Vande Mataram" or use the Urdu "Madre Watan" instead. Still others may offer their "Salaam" to "Sar Zameen-e-Hindustan", or use the pithy coinage of Subhash Chandra Bose: "Jai Hind". A younger generation may get goose pimples listening to A.R. Rehman's electrifying "Maa Tujhe Salaam..." - composed and sung for the fiftieth anniversary of Independence in 1997. There could be those who may not use any of these terms at all but still show their commitment to India and the Constitution by simply and silently doing what they do best - working hard, paying taxes and living honest lives. Each one is free to choose. Having said that, while that commitment to India and its Constitution may not expressly demand that one stand up each morning and chant "Bharat Mata Ki Jai" - or any of the other phrases mentioned above - does it give anyone the right to deliberately mock those for whom such an expression is dear, revered and deeply felt? That is the key question, the answer to which must put Mr. Owaisi in the dock. He has been egregiously offensive and has manufactured and instigated a controversy where none existed, as well as sought to design a denominational quarrel on an issue that doesn't bother most ordinary Muslims at all. His unstated implication, that to have citizens who may be Muslim say "Bharat Mata Ki Jai" is an insidious attempt to force idol worship on them, is so ridiculous that even many of his co-religionists have been left exasperated.

Just what is a "Muslim Issue" - that is, a concern that genuinely affects religious sensibilities of Muslims and interrupts the manner in which they practice their faith? Let us go back 25 years, to the spring and early summer of 1991. India was preparing for a mid-term election, in the aftermath of the Mandal Commission announcement, the rath yatra and the Congress' decision to withdraw support to Chandra Shekhar's short-lived government. It was a pulsating political session that saw a genuine ideological context between very different concepts of India and nationhood. In the midst of all this, a Janata Dal politician - among the Asaduddin Owaisis of his age, if you get my drift - began a campaign to have the film Hum banned. A film that in effect began the second phase of Amitabh Bachchan's career - putting him in senior roles, rather than as the proverbial "Angry Young Man" - Hum had just been released and featured a popular and catchy song Jumma chumma de de... The song sequence had the hero serenading the woman he was wooing - she was called Jumma - and asking her for a kiss, as she had apparently promised, on Jumma (Friday).

Jumma or Friday is sacred in Islam and is the day of congregational prayer. According to that Janata Dal politician of 1991, the song was deeply offensive to Muslims and had caused outrage and anger in the community. As such it needed to be banned or acted upon in some manner by the government. His claim was absolute nonsense. This writer lived in Calcutta (now Kolkata) at the time, in a neighbourhood that had a substantial Muslim population. There were Muslims from a variety of social strata, ranging from the local paanwallah to a distinguished Professor of History at the University of Calcutta. The song was frequently heard in the neighbourhood (as were other popular songs of the period) and there was no sense of "anger" or "outrage". There is little reason to believe it was different in other mohallas elsewhere in the country. As can be expected, the silly controversy lasted only a few days. It gave the politician in question his 15 minutes of fame and then had him quietly moving on.

A film song and a slogan offering salutations to and expressing empathy with India are very different. It is not the intention to either compare these or place them on the same pedestal, not at all. However, the point remains that Muslim leaders like Mr. Owaisi do the Indian Muslim enormous justice by reporting to such gimmicks. In that he has been as dishonest as his Janata Dal predecessor of 1991. Mr. Owaisi is an articulate man and a frequent face on news television. Frankly, though, the national media tends to treat him with kid gloves. The inability to interrogate him or ask him harder questions has been disappointing. This may be due to absence of desire, or perhaps to an individual media person's inadequate engagement with history outside of a quick Google search.

Consider the contradiction. Mr. Owaisi attacks the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Hindu Right, accusing it of 'forcing its ideology' on others. His intellectual auxiliaries make references to 70 or 80-year-old quotes of RSS personalities, which may appear angular and unacceptable in a contemporary context, and ask whether the current leadership of the RSS and the Bharatiya Janata Party believes in them. Fair enough. Has anyone cared to ask Mr. Owaisi whether he subscribes to the letter and text of Qasim Razvi, the founder of the MIM and commander of the Razakar militia, who can only politely be described as a bigot and a religious fanatic? Could Owaisi tell us if he is willing to repudiate Qasim Razvi? The response would be revealing . ---Based on an article by Ashok Malik published in Deccan Chronicle dated 20th March, 2016. The author is a senior fellow, Observer Research Foundation. He can be reached at malikashok@gmail.com---        

BARBARIC INDEED.

When judges assume messianic roles while seeking to act on perceived outrage, it may result in inventive remedies but not necessarily achieve complete justice. It is not usual these days to find some of them traversing beyond the remit of the cases before them and seeking to find or suggest solutions to many of society's crimes and ills. In the Madras High Court, one has seen recent instances of a judge suggesting mediation between a victim and the perpetrator of a rape, another laying down that mere sexual relations amount to marriage, and one prescribing pre-marital potency tests to prevent divorces happening. The latest (27th October, 2015 in The Hindu) is the suggestion of Justice N. Kirubakaran that castration be made an additional punishment for child rape. Significantly, he himself acknowledges that this would be criticised as being barbaric and retrograde, but yet goes on to say that barbaric acts require barbaric punishments. But this is out of character with Indian Jurisprudence as well as known canons of modern criminal justice. For one thing, the principle of proportionality of punishment is a limiting norm that militates against excessive punishment, and is not an eye-for-an-eye rule. Secondly, civilised systems have moved away from retributive sentencing, especially from ideas such as torture, decapitation, mutilation and chopping  off parts of the body as forms of punishment. It may also be counter-productive if castration is added as a form of punishment as it may deter foreign courts from allowing the extradition of offenders to face trial in India.

The judge's suggestion is not qualified as 'chemical castration' in the operative part of the judgment. To be fair, he has listed the countries and some States in the United States that do have provision for chemical castration, or the injection of drugs that reduce testosterone levels and control libido - and it is not a suggestion that has not been made in the past. Also, he has called for wider consultations involving experts before such a measure is introduced. The Justice J.S. Verma Committee, which in 2013 recommended far reaching changes to criminal law to protect women from sexual offences, also received suggestions to that effect. However, the committee had noted that the effects of chemical castration were temporary, and repeated monitored doses at regular intervals may be required. It will violate human rights treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which bars cruel and unusual forms of punishment. In other jurisdictions it is done with the offender's consent and is a form of psychiatric treatment and not a judicial penalty. None, least of all the courts, should assume that rapes occur because of uncontrollable sexual urge. There can be no 'magical results' in curbing crimes against women, unless there is transformation in society and its very thought process. The rising rate of sexual crimes against children in the country is indeed alarming, but that is not reason enough for courts of law to advocate medieval forms of punishment.

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INDIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY UNDER THREAT.

The old colonial notion that ancient Indians had no sense of history has by now been blown to bits by outstanding scholars like V.S. Pathak and Romila Thapar. They have also established that ancient India drew its sense of the past from a vast range of sources, of which religious texts were one, and that its understanding of the past differed radically from the Western notions of history. Romila Thapar, in particular in her magisterial work, The Past Before Us - Historical Traditions of Early North India (published in 2013), scrutinises the vast corpus of Vedic texts, the great epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, the itihas-purana traditions, the Buddhist and Jain canonical texts, hagiographies, biographies, inscriptions, chronicles and theatrical compositions like the Mudra-rakshasa to form her database and arrives at conclusions which frontally challenge received wisdom from the West. 

Court narratives: Come Medieval India and a new genre of history comes alive. These histories, more like court chronicles, titled Tawarikh, plural of tarikh which denotes both date and history, followed strict codes of chronological and spatial location of an event and were narrative rather than analytical in content, although a certain view point always inheres in any narrative account. There was an interesting dichotomy as part of the narrative. The framework that enclosed the tawarikh was largely derived from Islam, which not only brought a new religion to the world but also a new concept of history. The chronological framework that was almost invariably followed was that of the Islamic hijri era, with the exception of Abul Fazl, Akbar's courtier and historian. Abul Fazl abandoned it in favour of Ilahi era, created to commemorate Akbar's accession to the throne, and disengaged history writing from the axis of Islam. At any rate, Abul Fazl had rather a low opinion of the hijri era. Within this overall chronological framework, historians were more particular  about locating each event in the precise year of the reign of each ruler whose deeds formed their main narrative. 

More important, they did not look at history as a breach of Islamic theology, unlike their European counterparts. In medieval Europe, histories composed by church fathers, the only literate class, perceived all historical events as manifestations of God's will. For them the past, present and future - all constituted part of God's grand design in which nothing happened haphazardly, even as these appeared so to human beings. In medieval India, on the other hand, historical events are treated as individual, independent events and not part of a grand pattern, and historical causation is established in human violation and at best human nature. God is invoked only when the historian is unsure of the veracity of an event, akin to our everyday invocation, "God knows" when we are unsure of something.

We are thus introduced to "strong" or "weak" rulers, "liberal" or "orthodox" rulers and the complete history of their reigns merely unfolds their nature. Best examples: Muhammad bib Tughlaq ("his nature consisting of contradictory qualities"), Akbar ("liberal"), Aurangzeb ("orthodox"). Diversity necessarily inhered in the explanation since no two persons, not even rulers, would possess the same nature.

Colonial invention: It was James Mill who metamorphosed the entire, long history of ancient and medieval India, divesting it of all diversities by making the religious identity of the rulers, instead of their nature, the central category for understanding the past; all diversity of explanation was lost to the uniformity of the religious identity of all the rulers, whether Hindu or Muslim. His History of British Rule, published in 1818, created the tripartite division of India's past into the Hindu, the Muslim and the British periods. As a Utilitarian and as a colonialist par excellence, he had contempt for religion, for both Hinduism and Islam but more for the former, and emphasised that prior to the British rule, India was mired in religious obscurantism with no worthwhile achievement to its credit; thus the Indians ought to be thankful to the colonialists for setting them on the path of progress.

This was further reinforced by Elliot and Dowson's 8-volume History of India as told by its own Historians, published from 1854 onward, bluntly stating in the Introduction: "This history will teach the bombastic babus of India the great benefits British rule has brought them". The foundation of the infamous "divide and rule" strategy had been laid.

Since then the tripartite division has remained operative in the teaching of history in India and even when the nomenclature was altered to Ancient, Medieval and Modern, first by Stanley Lane-Poole in 1903, the basis of division remained the same until around the early 1960s. Religious identity and religious conflict were clearly the central analytical categories in this history. Fundamental to it was the assumption that colonialism was the harbinger of "modernity" to India, as it was to the rest of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This view was shared by almost all European thinkers during the 18th and 19th centuries from Montesquieu to Karl Marx, even as their modes of thought as well as their sympathies were as different from one another as chalk was from cheese.    

From the late 1950s and 60s, Indian historians began to revisit all the assumptions and categories of historiography handed down to them by colonialism. A few, indeed very few, of the historians who fundamentally revised colonial history writing were committed Marxists and many more were not. It is the Marxists who questioned even Marx's understanding of India's past, including his notion of the Asiatic Mode of Production. One substitute for it was the concept of "Indian Feudalism", but this was soon thrown open, with the question "Was There Feudalism in Indian History?" - the title of an essay that became the centre of a long drawn, international debate, which unearthed several facets that lay unseen below the surface. The long cherished colonial notion that India (indeed the Orient) was unfamiliar with any socio-economic mutations before the colonial engine of modernity was set in motion, was blown to smithereens.

Religious identities were assigned their due priority in the saga of change, but were no more the lone, determining element. History was no longer mono-causal but multifaceted. Sights were moved from individual character of rulers to social and economic structures, technology and trade as the motors of change, uprisings of peasants and artisans against the state's exploitative excesses. A threshold had been crossed.

From the 1980s and 90s, yet another threshold was crossed when still newer methods of looking at history evolved. The history of women and gender, ecology, inter-personal relations, sexuality, history of the notions of time, space, habitats, of perceptions of masculinity and femininity, the nature of polities, alternative views of history evident in the vernacular languages, the enormous dynamism of Hindu philosophy especially in the 17th century, the evolution of Bhakti culture and worldview in opposition to elite Brahamanic culture, the formation of identities and most important the recognition of and respect for immense diversity in the perceptions of the past either as a mega narrative or as individual events such as the Partition of India - all these and more have taken us a long, very long, distance from the colonialist and even Marxist historiography. We live in a fascinatingly fast-moving environment. 

Hindutava discomfort: It is this immense diversity and its inescapable premise - discussion, disputation and debate at a level of professional competence - that the Hindutva brigade finds so uncomfortable, largely because history can no longer revert to mono-causal explanations, which is its sole and entire worldview. It is no surprise that while we had some outstanding professional historians down to the 1960s, like R.C. Majumdar, who were committed to the "Hindu" version of history and were yet deeply rooted in the discipline, the Hindutva brigade has since failed to produce any notable professional historian. The new developments in the discipline have passed them by.

The categories created by colonialism have been abandoned even by the British scholars as a consequence of interaction with Indian historians. But the present regime, guided and controlled by the RSS, is still sticking to them with unprecedented fervour. Ironically, the Hindutva brigade touts its claim to "Indianising" Indian history as a giant step towards cleansing it of colonialist (and Marxist) pollutants. How masterfully George Orwell had in his fictional Ninety Eighty Four portrayed the crucial role of "doublespeak" in running a duplicitous state system.

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