When the bill criminalising triple talaq was being discussed in India, it became amply clear that Muslim voices are sporadic and the community lacks a powerful and credible leader. Now, Mahmood Madani and Arshad Madani – both leading two factions of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind – are posturing to represent Muslims in India.
Mahmood Madani, a former Rajya Sabha MP and the general secretary of Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind (JUH), recently said he wants a nationwide NRC exercise that would determine illegal immigrants. He also spoke in favour of the Narendra Modi government’s move to abrogate Article 370.
On the other hand, Arshad Madani, the chief of JUH, has stamped the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) as the legitimate representative of the Hindu community. How else do you explain or justify him meeting RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat to discuss “Hindu-Muslim” unity?
JUH boasts of a 10 million-strong membership, which is why I am increasingly beginning to believe that the organisation, which is in the 100th year of its establishment, is posturing itself as the self-declared Muslim Swayamsevak Sangh. The RSS too boasts of having six million members.
The fact that the RSS’s political wing – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – has won a huge mandate in the last two Lok Sabha elections clearly shows that Hindus accept the RSS as their ideological representative too.
But how does an organisation like the JUH justify taking on the mantle of talking about Muslims and their issues when 1) they have not won an election; 2) they have not floated a political party like the RSS has in the form of BJP; 3) it’s an organisation riddled with infighting and therefore far from being an effective force
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Leaders Muslims have
Which brings us to our initial question: Who represents Muslims of India? The answer is simple.
No one.
The problem with India’s Muslim leadership is the lack of fluidity within personalities. Either a leader is popular only within the Muslim community and therefore unable to build any credible support in a Hindu-majority India, or is completely disconnected with the community and therefore can’t be seen as a credible Muslim leader. Prominent Muslim leaders of recent times range from an Azam Khan to a Salman Khurshid to an Asaduddin Owaisi. Throw in political voices from the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid, and the JUH – and you see yourself staring at names that evoke little to none loyalty. Then there are the BJP’s Muslims – Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Shahnawaz Hussain. Then comes the younger lot in the Congress who hardly get any space: Nadeem Javed, Muhammad Khan. Then come the seasonal turncoats who travel from one party to the other, vying for crumbs, like becoming governors: Najma Heptulla and Arif Mohammad Khan.
Hardly anyone has actually represented Muslims. Salman Khurshid has won the Farrukhabad Lok Sabha constituency only twice in his 40-year-long political career. The insignificance of his presence within the Muslim community is such that he even lost the election for the presidency of the India Islamic Cultural Centre in Delhi to the incumbent, Sirajuddin Qureshi, in 2009.
Muslim ministers from BJP, on the other hand, are ideal persons to run an introductory course on how to be a Hindutvawadi Musalman. They are more often heard saying Jai Shri Ram than an ‘As-salāmu ʿalaykum’ (“Peace be upon you”). It is no surprise then that many in the Muslim community don’t consider someone who joins the BJP as a ‘true’ Muslim.
When you have India’s Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi himself say that those who eat beef should go to Pakistan, then you are basically looking at a Giriraj Singh without a tilak.
Shahnawaz Hussain, in an interview in May, went on to say that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has condemned incidents of mob lynching, which is why “such incidents did not recur.” If that’s not delusional, I don’t know what is.
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The two blue-eyed men
This is where we come to the blue-eyed “men” from the Muslim community.
Azam Khan has been a member of the legislative assembly for nine terms from Rampur. That makes him a stellar politician, one with a strong presence not just within his community but in Uttar Pradesh too. The problem with Azam Khan is the nauseating lack of progressiveness. When he mentions Jaya Prada in a thinly veiled reference to RSS or tells a rape survivor to not look for ‘fame and attention’ in response to her calls for help in getting justice or when he hurls sexist remark at BJP MP Rama Devi during a parliamentary debate, can you expect anyone to take him seriously?
Then there’s Asaduddin Owaisi. His party All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, which literally translates to All India Council of the Union of Muslims, is a 91-year-old party. Their reach? Two out of 545 Lok Sabha seats; none in the 245-member Rajya Sabha; seven out of 119 assembly seats in Telangana; and one out of 288 assembly seats in Maharashtra. The favourite boy of Old Hyderabad’s mohalla, Asaduddin Owaisi’s maximum reach though is on TV. He dominates every channel on every Muslim issue because he wears a sherwani and a skull cap and dons a beard and calls Narendra Modi Wazir-e-Azam. So Musalman of him!
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Need a real secular leader
Which brings me to the mother of all questions in Indian politics. Do we need a Muslim leader only to represent a Muslim? Ideally, we shouldn’t. India is still a secular country, which means our representatives should, on principle, not be identified with their religion. But considering that the problems of the Muslim community need a deeper understanding of the religion itself since the lives of Muslims are so intrinsically enmeshed with their religion, it becomes easier for representatives who are from the community to understand it.
Which is why we perhaps need someone as malleable as a Shashi Tharoor-like personality to represent Muslims. Tharoor is a temple hopping devout Hindu and has written two books around the theme of Hinduism. At the same time, he slips into a modern-day Oxford dictionary sputtering ex-diplomat who is progressive yet rooted in his traditions. He sides with Sabarimala devotees to not allow women to enter the temple’s sanctum sanctorum keeping in mind the sensitivity of Hindus on the matter and also talks about secularism and criticises the RSS’ brand of Hinduism. Because of his strong Hindu identity, he also has the gumption to equate Modi to a ‘scorpion sitting on a Shivaling’.
If you want a secular India and therefore can’t accept people shouting Jai Shri Ram in Parliament, then you simply cannot justify anyone shouting Allahu Akbar either. They’re both two sides of the same coin called communalism. And today, with maulanas shouting hoarse on TV debates for honorariums, Muslims can only demand secularism when we choose secular representatives. But since secularism is an overused stale concept, I propose that progressivism is the only way forward, especially for Muslims.
The space for Muslim leadership is vacant and wide-open. It’s only a matter of time that we will see a new crop of Muslim leaders come up.
The author is a political observer and writer. Views are personal.