Muslims in the Age of Coronavirus

The recent chain of events starting with the annual conference of Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) at the Nizamuddin Markaz (headquarters) on March 13 has led to an outpouring of scorn and hatred against a community that was already a victim of hate campaign by leading members of the ruling party. But some facts first. There were roughly over 3,000 delegates from India and about 250 from abroad, though no definite numbers have been put forward either by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) or the Markaz. One expects the MHA to provide facts on this event, since the Intelligence Bureau monitors activities of all such organisations in Delhi and reports on a regular basis to its controlling Ministry -- the MHA -- and also to local police stations in case it expects any trouble.

It is impossible to believe that the TJ went ahead with such a major event without obtaining prior permissions from the authorities. And it’s also possible that the MHA had received a list of foreign delegates well in advance so as to give clearances to our missions abroad and the immigration authorities at Delhi international airport. Of course, the officials concerned may have taken it all in their stride knowing that it’s an annual affair and nothing much needs to be read into it. Also, none of them would have expected this bolt from the blue of a ‘janata curfew’ and then the ‘country-wide lockdown’ being declared during the course of this conference.

There are reports that the conference had ended and hundreds of delegates had left Nizamuddin before PM Modi announced the ‘janata curfew’ on March 22, but there were still over a thousand members inside the Markaz and their exit became impossible after the country-wide lockdown on March 24. The fact that many of them contracted the coronavirus and further spread it in all the districts they returned to compounded an already worsening national health crisis. Though some saner elements within the government have appealed to people not to make this into a ‘communal issue’, some TV channels and the informal channels of communication such as WhatsApp groups went into overdrive demonising these Muslims as ‘Corona Jihadis’, an epithet that found ready acceptance in a milieu that was already fertile in its hostility to the minorities. Though the governments at the Centre and the states have issued advisories to their party men, incendiary posts have been forwarded by two Karnataka MPs -- Shobha Karandlaje and Anantkumar Hegde, both of the BJP, indulging in ‘wanton vilification or attacks upon the religion…of a particular group…’, an offence under section 153A of the IPC.

While the country will certainly get more polarised on the basis of religion, what is worrying is the response of some ‘liberal Muslims’, such as Najmul Hoda, an IPS officer who has served the nation with distinction. The write-up by Hoda ‘Secularism in the Age of Corona’ (DH, April 10), seemed to be a rather despairing appeal to liberal Muslim leaders to stand up and be counted in an age of ruthless majoritarianism, or be swamped into a ghetto of medieval backwardness to which the Mullahs would lead them. Hoda seems to be in no doubt about the intent of this regime to declare India a Hindu Rashtra sooner or later, and says that this is precisely what the Mullahs, too, want as that would enable them to “become even more insular, ghettoised and obsessed with religion and identity.”

Of course, Hoda’s outpouring of angst is triggered by the activities of Tablighi Jamaat, which he regards as ‘suicidal recalcitrance,’ but he stops short of squarely blaming them for the ills of the community. The power of this Jamaat is so widespread that it’s almost impossible for reasonable Muslims without either being sucked into its medieval ways or become ostracised. No Muslim politician will dare take on the Tablighis.

The powerful influence of Wahabism on the millions of Indians working in the Gulf, the construction of hundreds of huge mosques in India funded by Saudi money and the preaching of their clerics in India has, over the last three decades, enormously strengthened their vice-like grip on the Muslim mind. So much so that the women’s wing of TJ has been singularly responsible in persuading almost every Muslim woman and girl to wear burkha in public, a practice unknown in most parts of India a few decades ago. As they set apart their identity guided by their Mullahs, the Hindus began to distance them, too.

Gradually, the politics of vote banks forced the Congress government, right from Rajiv Gandhi’s government, to appease the clerics rather than focus on the developmental and participatory needs of the Muslim community and make them a part of India’s growth story and its vibrant democracy. Neither Mulayam Singh Yadav nor Lalu Yadav, well-known socialists who were seen as benefactors of the Muslim community, escaped the Mullah’s hold.

Hoda makes two very important points: one that the Hindu Rashtra is just a matter of semantics and already exists in practice and, secondly, that it suits the Mullahs as they will be “the slum lords of the Muslim ghetto”.

This need not be so, and it shall not come to pass. The innate liberalism, tolerance and ‘secular’ psyche of the people that helped India survive as a nation for over a thousand years, and the immutable dialectics of caste will defeat the aggressive aggregation of Hindutva forces. Secondly, the Muslim voter is shrewd enough to know that it is finally the politicians who deliver goods and services, not the Mullahs. Of course, the educated Muslims have to play a critical role in drawing their illiterate kin away from the Mullahs and take them towards secular education and jobs of a modern economy.

(The writer, a former Cabinet Secretariat official, is Visiting Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi)