Garga Chatterjee - Hindutva's mirror: The problem with Mamata Banerjee's felicitation of Ghulam Ali in Kolkata
NB: The author is right to call the WB Chief Minister's antics 'Hindutva's mirror'. People are reduced to being bearers or particles of some stereotyped identity - in Rohith Vemula's words, votes and numbers. They are seen to be, not thinking human beings, but useful things. Our political elite is habituated to this form of thoughtlessness. It has gone on for decades, it is futile to expect them to behave differently. We can only hope that younger Indians can see through this humbug and leave communal politics behind them - DS
The West Bengal chief minister conflates Muslims with Urdu, Urdu with Pakistan and, perhaps most dangerously, Muslims with Pakistan
The West Bengal chief minister conflates Muslims with Urdu, Urdu with Pakistan and, perhaps most dangerously, Muslims with Pakistan
Last October, the Shiv Sena objected to a pre-scheduled
concert in Mumbai featuring ghazal maestro Ghulam Ali of Patiala Gharana, who
happens to be a citizen of Pakistan. The event was cancelled. This cancellation
became a minor public relations embarrassment for the ruling Bharatiya Janata
Party government at the Centre, which also happens to be in power in
Maharashtra in alliance with the Shiv Sena.
Various non-BJP leaders from other states, eager to score
brownie points on "tolerance", invited Ghulam Ali to perform in their
respective states. Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of West Bengal, was
among the first to do so. On January 12, Ghulam Ali performed to a nearly 15,000
strong audience at Kolkata’s Netaji Indoor stadium. The organisation and
preparations for the event were personally overseen by Banerjee, who also
felicitated the singer. The ghazal maestro returned the favour by piling
effusive praise on the chief minister. “I am grateful to her,” he declared,
among other things. “She has done us a favour in the form of Saraswati”.
This hosting of Ghulam Ali, rich in its symbolism, certainly
goes a long away to send a strong message to certain kinds of intolerant forces
that the India is not united in its attitude of boycotting all things Pakistan.
In the macro-politics of the subcontinent, this can only be a good thing.
However, when one looks more closely at certain details, things are not so
simple in terms of what this means for West Bengal’s own political scenario in
terms of signals and symbols and how this fits into the communal/secular divide
in West Bengal.
Hindutva’s mirror
One would have thought that the West Bengal government’s
ministry of culture would have hosted the Ghulam Ali concert, since the whole
point was to show Hindutva forces that music has no religion. Or was it? But
the Ghulam Ali concert was actually hosted by the West Bengal Minorities
Development and Finance Corporation. It is unclear how minorities of West
Bengal, who are more than 90% Muslim, have anything “special” to do with a
Pakistani singer unless the West Bengal government wants to suggest that Ghulam
Ali of Pakistan belongs more to West Bengal’s Muslims than the rest of its
people.
Neither is Ghulam Ali’s Urdu a shared bond since only a minuscule
percentage of West Bengal’s minorities speak Urdu. This suggestion by which a
large section of the population of West Bengal is reduced simply to being
Muslim and, after that , that flattened identity is not-so-subtly connected in
some special way to a Muslim-singer from Pakistan, provides fuel to the worst
kind of stereotypes that exist about Muslims in India.
Such a conceptualisation of the West Bengal Muslim is hardly
different from the Hindutva concept of Muslims being suspect citizens
harbouring a special warmth for Pakistan. In May 2015, Banerjee’s government had hosted the stalwart
Urdu poet Allama Iqbal’s grands Waleed Iqbal in Kolkata. Waleed, a Pakistan
citizen, came from Lahore, on the invitation of the state government-funded
West Bengal Urdu Academy to receive an award on behalf of his long deceased
grandfather. Again, while there’s nothing wrong in felicitating a famous Urdu
poet, the Muslim connotation that Trinamool adds to Urdu makes this instance
equally troubling.
This is also apparent from Trinamool Congress’ 2011 Lok
Sabha election manifesto where it effortlessly mentioned madrassas and Urdu
schools together, thus revealing what it thinks of Urdu and Muslims. In text,
it conflates Muslims and Urdu and in the subtext of concerts and felicitations,
it conflates Urdu and Pakistan and perhaps most dangerously, Muslims and
Pakistan.
Representation vs tokenism
More than 90% of West Bengal’s Muslims are Bengalis who
speak Bangla as their mother-tongue and have nothing more to do with Urdu or
Pakistan or Ghulam Ali or Allama Iqbal than their Hindu Bengali counterparts.
Muslim Bengalis form nearly 25% of the state population but are thoroughly
under-represented in the Muslim leadership of the Trinamool. Given the
relatively minuscule population of non-Bengali Muslims in West Bengal, these
MPs serve the dual purpose of not having a mass-base to bargain with the
Trinamool leadership but come handy for the party to showcase its
Muslim-representation credentials.
And here lies the heart of the matter: Representative
leaders of Muslim Bengalis in West Bengal would be people with an autonomous
mass-base, who could therefore pose a threat to Trinamool’s Muslim
vote-management policy. In the pre-Partition period, Sher-e-Bangla AKM Fazlul
Haque, the prime minister of undivided Bengal, created precisely such an
independent power base among the Muslim Bengali peasantry – by struggling
against feudal caste-Hindu Bengali interests aligned with the Congress and feudal
and ashraf non-Bengali interests aligned with the Muslim League. West Bengal’s
Muslim Bengalis today lack their Fazlul Haque, thus allowing Banerjee to
under-represent them in favour of the Urdu clique. The hosting of Ghulam Ali and Waleed Iqbal must be seen in
this context.
Destructive politics
Certain kinds of pronouncements of separateness and
exclusivity, declared or foisted upon, however much in the garb of
“acknowledging” a community, can become Frankenstein’s monsters. This was
apparent during the recent Malda
violence when a call for blasphemy protest about an old incident in
far away Uttar Pradesh brought out tens of thousands of West Bengal Muslims. In 1992, West Bengal witnessed the other side of this
long-range solidarity when many in central Kolkata bought bricks at a premium
for funding the construction of a Ram temple at Ayodhya. This wicked form of
“solidarity politics” that joins Muslims
of Malda to “blasphemy” in Uttar Pradesh and beyond, and also joins
Hindus of central Kolkata to Hindus of UP, is destructive to the core.
Politics of real empowerment of West Bengal’s Muslims is
long and arduous, can be unpopular to start with, and may face opposition from
entrenched Kolkata ashrafs and other powers. But who said it would be easy?