India 

That 

Is

Bharat

Satiricus

Fatwa Mullah Mulayam Jumme ke din

ISLAM being the state religion of secular India, Satiricus did not see anything surprising in UP Chief Minister Mullah Mulayam issuing a Fatwa—sorry, fiat—that all government schools and junior colleges in the State must close down at mid-day, Jumme ke Jumme. Newspapers reported that he had done so “to prove his secular credentials”. Quite right. A Hindu can be accepted as a credible secularist only when he shows himself to be more Muslim than a Muslim. Unfortunately, not all Muslims were sensible enough to see it that way. Muslim Personal Law Board member Kamal Farooqi said Muslims need more schools, not closed schools. Syed Shahabuddin, that knight in shining secular armour, said, “Nobody asked for it. You can always offer namaz during lunch break.” Many others said it was tokenism with a political purpose. Satiricus is sad. Satiricus is sad to see that even after gunning down ramabhaktas Mulayam Singh's sterling secularism remains suspect. In Satiricus's considered opinion, all criticism of Mulayam's oh-so-secular step was ill-conceived. In the first place, what is this ridiculous remark about Muslims wanting more schools? The country is teeming with thousands of madrasas, and, as a Muslim reporter of an English-language daily not long ago wrote, they teach valuable values of life like love and so on.

So when a madrasa is there who needs a school? And if Muslims do need schools, how come the need is felt only now? Satiricus, in all his innocence (or ignorance) would have thought fifty years of Independence were enough to have a plethora of schools instead of a multitude of madrasas. As for Shahabuddin saying nobody asked for it, Satiricus can only say that the glory of Indian secularism lies in Muslims never asking for anything, but in demanding everything and the Hindus (read non-Muslims) surrendering it with their tails between their hind legs.

This being so, the devotion with which Mulayam Singh sought to practise his secularism cannot be dismissed so summarily as tokenism with a political purpose. Looking at it from the other end—is not all politics tokenism? Even soft-brained Satiricus knows that in politics what you do is not important, what you seem to do is. It is the token, the symbol, that counts, not the substance. So every time elections come round, voter Satiricus sells his vote to buy the most attractive token in the market. He has been doing this faithfully every five years. Indian politics being a succession of symbols, Satiricus knows that politicians may come and politicians may go, slogans and tokens go on for ever.

Of course the tokens change from time to time, but there is one constant—service to secularism. In India that is blessed Bharat, every political party must serve secularism, and if, while rendering such service, it has to shed its Hindu past, so much the better. That being so, how could the ex-Hindu and now-secular BJP denigrate Mulayam's doing by calling it a poll stunt? It should rather compete with him in serving secularism more substantially—which, fortunately it has been doing as the head of the NDA in power.

Take, for instance, this Haj subsidy business. According to some figures published recently by this journal, this official subsidy has grown from 10 crore rupees to 200 crores in ten years. In 1995 it was

Rs 5,000 per pilgrim, now it has exceeded Rs 28,000. For the fourth time recently the BJP-led NDA government thought of (and even talked about) reducing this subsidy. And what was the result? Zilch! Why? Simply because the more the merrier—the more the subsidy, the more the secularism. Unfortunately, subsidised secularism doesn't seem to sell, for Mulayam Singh had to cancel his order, calling it “wrong”, when he saw that neither the communalists of the BJP nor the secularists of the Muslim Personal Law Board were willing to buy it. Strangely enough, it is possible that Mulayam Singh's aborted attempt to serve secularism on jumme ke din could not succeed because jumma itself may have an anti-secular origin.

For according to RSS Sarsanghchalak Shri Sudarshan “It is said that ‘Kaba’ is derived from ‘Kavya’, another name of Shukracharya, and hence ‘Shukrawar’, Friday, is considered auspicious among Muslims.” This is certainly a serious setback for secularism. Even then, should Mulayam Singh, with his admirable anti-Rama achievement, have lost heart? He should have known that if, as the bard said, the path of true love does not run smooth, neither does that of true secularism. Look at Haj and the fundamentalist fervour with which the BJP-led government favours it. This holy Islamic pilgrimage is anything but Islamic, if Anwar Shaikh, that abominable apostate, is to believed. In his book Islam: The Arab Imperialism he writes: “The Haj ceremony has been a part of the Arab culture from time immemorial. It has developed from the Indian principle such as Trimurti, Sabeanism, local superstitions, and Greek influences... . Even during the early times of Mohammed it (the temple of Kaba) was the centre of idol-worship along with the age-old custom of kissing the Hajr-e-Aswad... . The Haj ceremony belongs to the pre-Islamic times. It is as much representative of idolatry today as it ever was. “Holy terror! If Haj is so Hindu, does it mean the NDA government's ever-increasing subsidy for it amounts to catering to communalism?”

All in all, it unhappily appears to Satiricus that almost every Islamic aspect of Indian secularism is so heavily Hinduised that the defining difference between being a Hindu and being a secularist has deteriorated into the same difference as between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. To cap it all, Satiricus recalls Advani declaring (once upon a time) that India is secular because India is Hindu. That does it. If secular India and secular Hindusthan are one and the same thing, what happens to that fanciful figment of a fevered imagination called Hindu communalism?   In India every political party must serve ‘secularism’, and if, while rendering such service, it has to shed its Hindu past, so much the better.