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The itinerant prime minister yet to visit a Muslim country (One year of Modi government)
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By Saeed NaqviMeasuring a government’s achievements in its first year has to be
inherently speculative. But some things can be put down to Narendra
Modi’s account with a degree of certainty. He has in his first year as
prime minister, never worn a Muslim cap although it is difficult to
identify a cap of that denominational description.
Time was
when a dopalli topi or a white muslin cap was standard headgear among
Hindus and Muslims alike. In winters, muslin gave way to wool. A variety
of headgear was on exhibition at prime ministerial Iftar parties, a
standard Congress fare, but which mushroomed in direct proportion to
Congress decline.
Mulayam Singh Yadav, an equally eager Muslim
vote hunter, went on an Iftar feeding spree too, wearing funny hats. But
he also struck a high cultural note to accentuate his secular identity.
So far political leaders had mobilized the clergy from Deoband, Imam
Bukhari of Jama Masjid and sundry Mullahs as potential vote gatherers.
Mulayam Singh was persuaded that Muslims along with a religious
identity, also had a cultural dimension. They were, in other words,
amicable to charms of Urdu poetry as well.
It turns out that in
UP there is an Urdu poet buried behind every culvert. In the
contemporary era there have been some very famous poets. Someone
mentioned the name of Josh Malihabadi. But he had blotted his copy by
going over to Pakistan where Faiz Ahmad Faiz beat him hollow in the
popularity stakes. Next in status would have been Firaq Gorakhpuri. But
his full name was Raghupati Sahai. Mulayam asked shrewdly: how would
that affect voters?
Jigar Moradabadi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Shakeel
Badayuni, Ali Sardar Jafri (Balrampur) and, the greatest of them all,
Majaz Lucknowi, were all within hailing distance of Mulayam Singh. But
they all suffered from one handicap: they had no lobbies to promote
their candidature.
In this respect, Kaifi Azmi was doubly
blessed. His daughter, the distinguished actor, Shabana Azmi and
lyricist and poet, Javed Akhtar, worked on Mulayam’s aesthetic
aspirations with great diligence. There is no Indian poet in any
language who has a railway train named after him: Kaifi does. There is a
Kaifiat Express to Azamgarh where in Mijwan village, a girl’s school
and haveli have been resurrected in his name. This is not all. All India
Kaifi Azmi Academy has been opened in Lucknow in service of Urdu, with
generous cash replenishments from the state.
Mulayam Singh’s
single minded patronage of Kaifi Azmi does serve the cause of Urdu,
which must be welcome. But it surely cannot be anybody’s case that in
Lucknow, the city of Urdu’s greatest masters, all iconography must be
focused on Kaifi Azmi alone, a remarkable poet though he was.
Excepting
a flair for sartorial colour combinations, Modi has in his first year
not demonstrated a sensitivity to aesthetics. Muslims associated with
him, Najma Heptullah, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Zafar Sareshwala, have all
been assigned to maintain some kind of paddocks for Muslims. Heptullah
and Naqvi are senior and junior ministers for Minority Affairs and
Sareshwala a newly appointed Chancellor of Maulana Azad National Urdu
University in Hyderabad.
Modi is giving out two signals: in my
generous, “genuine†secularism I have three outlets for minorities.
There is a second and more important message: away from the mainstream,
there are separate watering holes for Muslims. Does it not smack of
apartheid? A ministry for minorities is in any case a retrogressive idea
in a secular state. And if you must have such a ministry, it would seem
more wholesome in enlightened Hindu hands. That would have been more
integrationist.
The conceptual framework in which Modi sees
Muslims became clear in his very first speech in parliament after being
sworn in as prime minister: he talked of “1,200 years of ghulami†or
servitude. In other words he sees the entire Muslim period as one of
“ghulamiâ€. This is direct, blunt and possibly hurtful but at a wide
variance from the Nehruvian construct about only 200 years of British
rule being foreign. The professional secularist ofcourse glosses over
this one in tactful silence, which is another way of telling a lie. This
is one of the unsettled questions of the Indian condition after
Partition.
How this appraisal of history plays on Modi’s
neighbourhood policy has yet to be seen. His very hectic foreign
itinerary has some very revealing gaps.
For a prime minister who
has undertaken more foreign travel than any in his first year, Modi
probably holds an unnoticed record: he has not yet visited a Muslim
country. He even refused to attend the 60th anniversary of the Bandung
conference on April 22 attended by statesmen like China’s Xi Jinping.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo tried to contact Modi on the phone but
could not. Whether he was avoiding Jakarta, capital of world’s largest
Muslim country or discarding a Nehru trail remains unclear.
An
outstanding success story for India in foreign policy terms happens to
be Sheikh Haseena in Bangladesh. Will Modi break his taboo on travel to
Muslim countries by an early visit to Dhaka?
There obviously is a
new, secretive style being enunciated in South Block of which
itineraries are only a glaring part. It would therefore be premature to
arrive at conclusions even on the basis of Modi’s travels and the Sangh
Parivar’s known stance on minority issues. Who knows what script has
been thought through on the BJP-PDP arrangement in Jammu and Kashmir
which has been managed with skillful patience and care so far. All these
are salient features in his first year.
(A leading commentator
on political and diplomatic issues, Saeed Naqvi can be reached on
[email protected]. The views expressed are personal.)