Azadi’s daughters and sons...Side-effect

It so happened that I finished Seema Mustafa's memoirs, 'Azadi's Daughter - Journey of a Liberal Muslim', while being in Delhi last week. The author lives in Delhi and the book was published from there. But Javed Jabbar had given me this fascinating autobiographical account in Islamabad a couple of months back. When I started reading it, I had no idea that a poetry reading event is coming up in Delhi in some weeks. I was half way through with the book when the trip happened. I decided to carry it with me and thoroughly enjoyed finishing it in the place where it was written, a city with a nonchalant splendour.
Seema Mustafa is an arch journalist and political commentator. She has created an absorbing narrative by intertwining personal history and large scale political developments taking place around her. She chooses a particular vantage point for herself for understanding Indian politics that has unfolded since independence from British Raj in 1947. Her vantage point is different from that of a mainstream Indian writer who comes from the majority Hindu community, even if the person is nonreligious, secular and compassionate towards minorities. It is different from that of a conservative Muslim point of view where victimhood provides the bedrock of understanding their position in India or the rest of world.
It is also different from that of the Indian Muslims who go out of the way to prove that everything is hunky-dory about the Indian state and society. While she remains committed to the founding principles of a secular republic and a plural society in India, her analysis is thoroughly objective and critical. She does not gloss over the sectarian and ideological divides that exist within Muslims and provides a sharp view of the communal tensions and misgivings between the Hindu and Muslim populations.
At a time in Indian political history when Narendra Modi, the rightwing Hindu nationalist chief minister who is accused of letting the Gujarat pogrom of

Muslims take place, is being considered for a national leadership role by his party, Mustafa’s reminder to Indian political class becomes hugely significant. She ends her book by saying, “The morrow will not be bleak, if the Indian political class realises the importance of maintaining and nurturing this unity in diversity. And if sense dawns as the Indian nation matures, to understand that pluralism and secularism are strengths that make the country unique in every sense of the word. One can only believe that this era of darkness where man is made to fight man is only temporary, and a new age will dawn in which the minorities, the poor, the oppressed, the victimised, the marginalised, the discriminated will move up to the top rung of the ladder to find equality and justice. It is necessary for India to survive as a democracy, vibrant and flourishing.”
In Pakistan, if we replace the word ‘India’ in the last line with the name of our country, each and every word that Mustafa has written applies to us. For both countries and also for other South Asian nations, the morrow will actually be bleak, even bleaker than what some of us are facing today if diversity is not recognised, equal citizenship for all is not established and outstanding issues, both within each of the countries and between them, are not resolved in a peaceful manner. But there is political expediency, vested interest and certain economic benefit for a few that thrive on instilling communalism in the hearts and minds of people, hate speech and whipping of religious emotion.
We experienced one such incident at the outset of the amazing Jashn-e-Bahar Mushaira, an annual event of great worth and prestige which promotes Urdu language and its poetry. While three poets from Pakistan and three of Pakistani origin who live in North America were sitting on the stage and the event was about to formally begin, a young man with a saffron cloth wrapped around his neck took to the stage and raised slogans against Pakistan and asked the Pakistani poets to return home.
He was whisked away by the police and there was no further disruption. The event was spread over more than four hours and it went along quite smoothly. However, it caused embarrassment for the organisers and for a few minutes created a difficult situation for both the Pakistani poets and the large audience that was very warm and friendly. I have been to literary meetings and poetry readings held in different parts of India before. This was my first such experience but a bigoted voice fails to change my views on South Asia and the need for peace, prosperity and development across our region. The commitment of the organisers and the behaviour of people at large confirmed my assertion.
I witnessed once again that how the bigots on one side of the border provide life support to the bigots on the other side. Upon our return the next day, I found the story about the incident that was carried in an Indian newspaper, exaggerated, twisted and uploaded on a couple of websites in our country. What I found particularly strange was the abuses hurled at Pakistani poets, particularly our arch women poets and writers, Kishwar Naheed and Fahmida Riaz, by people who had little idea of what happened and how the organisers and the Pakistani poets responded to the situation.
There is no point in elaborating on that here. Since friends do not need explanations and foes do not believe in whatever you say. I will go back to Seema Mustafa’s work here. It is about time that South Asians realise that a narrative based on hate and intolerance within each of their countries provide the basis for a similar regional narrative. Pulling down Babri Mosque in UP or oppressing Hindu minority in Sindh cannot be delinked from each other. Pakistanis forget that the number of Muslims in India outnumber the total population of Pakistan. Likewise, being hawkish towards each other, fighting wars, inflicting terror attacks and playing dangerous games to destabilise the rival have not a wee bit helped the one billion wretched and poor who inhabit the Subcontinent.
Indian intelligentsia, media and political class have to remind themselves that if right wing Hindu nationalism is allowed more political and intellectual space, Muslims will become more insecure and as a result will become more radicalised. Sikhs and Christians have also faced persecution. India’s survival is in its secular and plural vision. As Mustafa writes in her book, “India has to get used to her largest minority, with all their warts as their beauty spots, that make them human, and not objects of curiosity to be derided with hostility. India’s secularism has to find new assertiveness to cope with the challenges posed by international war-mongering and acute divisiveness. It has to be matched by political understanding of her complex character, pluralism that should be strengthened to breed unity and not exploited to turn on its own people.”
For us in Pakistan, the more we suffer from radicalisation, intolerance for difference of any kind and rampant terror attacks on innocent citizens in the length and breadth of the country, the clearer it becomes to any rational Pakistani that establishing an inclusive and pluralistic society is the only way left to preserve our very existence. And, I reiterate that the premise for Partition was to establish peace in the Subcontinent and not create a perpetual war. We have to remind ourselves that our fates are tied together.
Email: harris.khalique@gmail.com