‘Nehru failed the Muslims’
By Anu Prabhakar
INTERVIEW Saeed Naqvi, journalist/political commentator
In his new book Being the Other: The Muslim in India, senior journalist and political commentator Saeed Naqvi revisits key moments that changed the course of Indian history. He delves into bloody episodes such as Partition, the Babri Masjid demolition, 'anti-Muslim pogroms' in Hyderabad and Jammu, and the Godhra riots among others, and questions the motives of those who were in power and the country's treatment of its Muslim minority.
█ In a TV interview, while discussing your book and the Partition in particular, you said that one must be careful about bringing up such sensitive topics. So why was it important to you to write this book now?
The book has been in the works for a while, at least since the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992. I thought the truth should be told, otherwise the drift would continue inexorably towards some unforeseen catastrophic denouement.
█ You say Nehru, who was revered by the Muslim community, was in a hurry to demarcate the Indo-Pak borders, and also deceived the Muslims who stayed back in India with false promises. So what kind of a leader was he in reality?
Remember, I position myself in Awadh, Rae Bareli, from where my uncle was the first Congress MLA. I place myself in the nearby ancestral qasbah, Mustafabad, from where we saw Nehru as God. We couldn't call him Nehru. He was Pandit Nehru. Such was the trust in him. In retrospect, we realised that Nehru had noone around him in the highest echelons of the Congress who would identify with us, our way of life, language, culture, music, poetry. At Ahmadnagar jail, Nehru had persuaded Maulana Azad to explain to him a couplet of Ghalib each day. Nehru relayed these couplets to his daughter, Indira Gandhi, in his letters.
We had foolishly placed all our eggs in the Nehru basket. And it turns out, Nehru had no colleagues in his mould, he was not able to set India on a path where our future, along with the nation's, would be secure. Of course, he was in hurry to become Prime Minister. We learnt much later how the genocide in Hyderabad and Jammu took place on his watch. Very slowly, the God failed.
█ During GB Pant's reign as UP's chief minister, the RSS allegedly drew a macabre plan to 'cleanse' areas around Muzaffarnagar of its Muslims. You say, instead of arresting 'the ring leader', Pant 'asked for the matter to be placed for consideration before the Cabinet at its next meeting'. This also allegedly revealed the nexus between the RSS and Congress. So I guess the obvious question here is, was Nehru communal?
The incident you refer to is part of the memoires of Rajeshwar Dayal of the ICS, the first Home Secretary of UP. After Dayal's testimony, how does one explain Nehru's elevation of Govind Ballabh Pant as the Union Home Minister? Nehru was not communal. When he could not measure up to his own moral standards, he resorted to the old dictum: politics is the art of the possible. The most charitable approach to Nehru, which I am quite willing to adopt (remember Nehru was our political romance), is to take his will for the deed. He possibly did not have the strength, collegial support to see through policies he was emotionally attached to. What emerges, therefore, are multiple Nehrus — many of them likeable.
█ Sardar Patel comes out looking the most communal of the lot in your book. But, as it may have been pointed out to you before, several works contest this claim. Mahatma Gandhi himself is believed to have said it's a travesty to call Patel's actions anti-Muslim...
About Patel, true, there is contradictory evidence available. Saeed Jaffrey, the actor who played Patel in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, told me that he studied every aspect of Patel to get into his character, and that he did not find Patel communal. The defence and the prosecution on Patel would take up reams of paper. Let us settle for one piece of evidence: the tallest statue in the country, 182 metres tall at Sadhu Bet near Vadodara, is exclusively a project of the Sangh Parivar, which adores Patel.
█ According to you, the Congress must accept a chunk of the responsibility for Muslims' state in the country. So, why not publish the book during the Congress' rule at the centre?
I never thought of the political backdrop. In any case, a running theme in the book is — Congress and BJP — tweedledum and tweedledee.
█ Perhaps your book could have focused a bit more on the current government, which has been accused of being intolerant?
Rise of intolerance was there from the very beginning. For instance, what happened in Hyderabad and Jammu. I have described the 1969 Gujarat riot in detail when I was press secretary to frontier Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who put down anchor in Ahmedabad when he heard of the riots in which Congressmen participated. That is where I heard for the first time: Mussalman ke do sthan, Qabrustan ya Pakistan.
█ You call Narasimha Rao 'the first BJP prime minister', criticising his complacency during the Babri Masjid demolition. But Vinay Sitapati's book Half Lion: How Narasimha Rao transformed India, suggests that he tried to facilitate talks between Hindus and Muslims and that he was 'honestly agitated'...
PV Narasimha Rao was described by LK Advani as the best Congress Prime Minister since Lal Bahadur Shastri. Accept Advaniji's plaudits, if you like.
█ The book mentions Sachar Committee, which was set up to study the 'socio-economic reality' of Indian Muslims. The report, you say, remains in cold storage. What were the findings?
The Muslims' socio-economic condition came down to a level below Dalits, which is splendid for egalitarianism but not necessarily for a just society.
█ Your book talks about Bangladesh, which grapples with attacks against bloggers, terrorist attacks against civilians, and so on. Who is to blame for its state?
Bangladesh is the only double-distilled entity to come out of Partition. It fought Islamic hegemony of Pakistan and is a most attractive embodiment of sub-continental syncretism. A strong minority and Jamaat-e-Islami latches on to its Pakistani past. That creates room for militant mischief, but Bangladesh has sacrificed millions for its identity, and it will be very difficult to bring it to its knees by Jihadism, Islamism or whatever else you call it. I call it third-rate communal politics.
█ What do you think is the future of Hindu-Muslim relations in the country?
There is one overriding purpose in writing this book. The consequences of the mistake made in 1947 cannot be undone. But for India and Pakistan to prosper, we have to understand what happened in 1947.
What happened is this: we trapped ourselves in a triangle. India-Pakistan, Srinagar-New Delhi, Hindu-Muslim are one complex of issues. This triangular reality is cast in stone. You tinker with any line in this triangle and the other two will be immediately affected. You cannot tranquilise the New Delhi-Srinagar axis without bringing Pakistan in.
You talk to Pakistan and immediately the Hindu-Muslim temperature comes down, this may not be in everybody's interest. Particularly those who must cast Muslims as 'the Other' to build the Hindu Rashtra. They are overreaching themselves. The Congress has already done for us in 1947 something the Parivar can never improve on. Seamlessly, the Congress glided from British Raj to Hindu Raj. Just as all of us Hindus, Muslims, served British, we would have served under Hindu Raj. To please Nehru and his ilk we would call this the secular state. But then, a rose with any other name would smell as sweet.
The Hindu of the Congress variety wanted all of us in the vehicle with one proviso: only his hand would be on the steering wheel. If we had allowed ourselves to be driven around at some stage, he would have begun to feel like a taxi driver.
Jokes apart, imagine our road choked with automobiles of every variety. And yet our youth cannot drive out to other parts of the globe. They will be clocked at Wagah. Even in Cyprus, people can drive past the border at Nicosia; you can drive from Spain to Gibraltar, from Belfast to Dublin. We can't go anywhere — what psychological suffocation.
Being the Other: The Muslim in India, priced at Rs 599, is published by Aleph Book Company and is out for purchase now.
INTERVIEW Saeed Naqvi, journalist/political commentator
In his new book Being the Other: The Muslim in India, senior journalist and political commentator Saeed Naqvi revisits key moments that changed the course of Indian history. He delves into bloody episodes such as Partition, the Babri Masjid demolition, 'anti-Muslim pogroms' in Hyderabad and Jammu, and the Godhra riots among others, and questions the motives of those who were in power and the country's treatment of its Muslim minority.
In an interview with Mirror, he discusses whether the architects of India's independence, such as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru were communal; the future of Hindu-Muslim relations in the country, and what we can learn from the mistakes.
█ In a TV interview, while discussing your book and the Partition in particular, you said that one must be careful about bringing up such sensitive topics. So why was it important to you to write this book now?
The book has been in the works for a while, at least since the demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992. I thought the truth should be told, otherwise the drift would continue inexorably towards some unforeseen catastrophic denouement.
█ You say Nehru, who was revered by the Muslim community, was in a hurry to demarcate the Indo-Pak borders, and also deceived the Muslims who stayed back in India with false promises. So what kind of a leader was he in reality?
Remember, I position myself in Awadh, Rae Bareli, from where my uncle was the first Congress MLA. I place myself in the nearby ancestral qasbah, Mustafabad, from where we saw Nehru as God. We couldn't call him Nehru. He was Pandit Nehru. Such was the trust in him. In retrospect, we realised that Nehru had noone around him in the highest echelons of the Congress who would identify with us, our way of life, language, culture, music, poetry. At Ahmadnagar jail, Nehru had persuaded Maulana Azad to explain to him a couplet of Ghalib each day. Nehru relayed these couplets to his daughter, Indira Gandhi, in his letters.
We had foolishly placed all our eggs in the Nehru basket. And it turns out, Nehru had no colleagues in his mould, he was not able to set India on a path where our future, along with the nation's, would be secure. Of course, he was in hurry to become Prime Minister. We learnt much later how the genocide in Hyderabad and Jammu took place on his watch. Very slowly, the God failed.
█ During GB Pant's reign as UP's chief minister, the RSS allegedly drew a macabre plan to 'cleanse' areas around Muzaffarnagar of its Muslims. You say, instead of arresting 'the ring leader', Pant 'asked for the matter to be placed for consideration before the Cabinet at its next meeting'. This also allegedly revealed the nexus between the RSS and Congress. So I guess the obvious question here is, was Nehru communal?
The incident you refer to is part of the memoires of Rajeshwar Dayal of the ICS, the first Home Secretary of UP. After Dayal's testimony, how does one explain Nehru's elevation of Govind Ballabh Pant as the Union Home Minister? Nehru was not communal. When he could not measure up to his own moral standards, he resorted to the old dictum: politics is the art of the possible. The most charitable approach to Nehru, which I am quite willing to adopt (remember Nehru was our political romance), is to take his will for the deed. He possibly did not have the strength, collegial support to see through policies he was emotionally attached to. What emerges, therefore, are multiple Nehrus — many of them likeable.
█ Sardar Patel comes out looking the most communal of the lot in your book. But, as it may have been pointed out to you before, several works contest this claim. Mahatma Gandhi himself is believed to have said it's a travesty to call Patel's actions anti-Muslim...
About Patel, true, there is contradictory evidence available. Saeed Jaffrey, the actor who played Patel in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, told me that he studied every aspect of Patel to get into his character, and that he did not find Patel communal. The defence and the prosecution on Patel would take up reams of paper. Let us settle for one piece of evidence: the tallest statue in the country, 182 metres tall at Sadhu Bet near Vadodara, is exclusively a project of the Sangh Parivar, which adores Patel.
█ According to you, the Congress must accept a chunk of the responsibility for Muslims' state in the country. So, why not publish the book during the Congress' rule at the centre?
I never thought of the political backdrop. In any case, a running theme in the book is — Congress and BJP — tweedledum and tweedledee.
█ Perhaps your book could have focused a bit more on the current government, which has been accused of being intolerant?
Rise of intolerance was there from the very beginning. For instance, what happened in Hyderabad and Jammu. I have described the 1969 Gujarat riot in detail when I was press secretary to frontier Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who put down anchor in Ahmedabad when he heard of the riots in which Congressmen participated. That is where I heard for the first time: Mussalman ke do sthan, Qabrustan ya Pakistan.
█ You call Narasimha Rao 'the first BJP prime minister', criticising his complacency during the Babri Masjid demolition. But Vinay Sitapati's book Half Lion: How Narasimha Rao transformed India, suggests that he tried to facilitate talks between Hindus and Muslims and that he was 'honestly agitated'...
PV Narasimha Rao was described by LK Advani as the best Congress Prime Minister since Lal Bahadur Shastri. Accept Advaniji's plaudits, if you like.
█ The book mentions Sachar Committee, which was set up to study the 'socio-economic reality' of Indian Muslims. The report, you say, remains in cold storage. What were the findings?
The Muslims' socio-economic condition came down to a level below Dalits, which is splendid for egalitarianism but not necessarily for a just society.
█ Your book talks about Bangladesh, which grapples with attacks against bloggers, terrorist attacks against civilians, and so on. Who is to blame for its state?
Bangladesh is the only double-distilled entity to come out of Partition. It fought Islamic hegemony of Pakistan and is a most attractive embodiment of sub-continental syncretism. A strong minority and Jamaat-e-Islami latches on to its Pakistani past. That creates room for militant mischief, but Bangladesh has sacrificed millions for its identity, and it will be very difficult to bring it to its knees by Jihadism, Islamism or whatever else you call it. I call it third-rate communal politics.
█ What do you think is the future of Hindu-Muslim relations in the country?
There is one overriding purpose in writing this book. The consequences of the mistake made in 1947 cannot be undone. But for India and Pakistan to prosper, we have to understand what happened in 1947.
What happened is this: we trapped ourselves in a triangle. India-Pakistan, Srinagar-New Delhi, Hindu-Muslim are one complex of issues. This triangular reality is cast in stone. You tinker with any line in this triangle and the other two will be immediately affected. You cannot tranquilise the New Delhi-Srinagar axis without bringing Pakistan in.
You talk to Pakistan and immediately the Hindu-Muslim temperature comes down, this may not be in everybody's interest. Particularly those who must cast Muslims as 'the Other' to build the Hindu Rashtra. They are overreaching themselves. The Congress has already done for us in 1947 something the Parivar can never improve on. Seamlessly, the Congress glided from British Raj to Hindu Raj. Just as all of us Hindus, Muslims, served British, we would have served under Hindu Raj. To please Nehru and his ilk we would call this the secular state. But then, a rose with any other name would smell as sweet.
The Hindu of the Congress variety wanted all of us in the vehicle with one proviso: only his hand would be on the steering wheel. If we had allowed ourselves to be driven around at some stage, he would have begun to feel like a taxi driver.
Jokes apart, imagine our road choked with automobiles of every variety. And yet our youth cannot drive out to other parts of the globe. They will be clocked at Wagah. Even in Cyprus, people can drive past the border at Nicosia; you can drive from Spain to Gibraltar, from Belfast to Dublin. We can't go anywhere — what psychological suffocation.
Being the Other: The Muslim in India, priced at Rs 599, is published by Aleph Book Company and is out for purchase now.
