02 June,2025 06:40 AM IST | Mumbai | Ajaz Ashraf
(Clockwise from top left) Basharat Peer, journalist; Ali Khan Mahmudabad, academic. Pics/Wikimedia Commons; Colonel Sofiya Qureshi. Pic/PTI; Booker Prize-winning author Banu Mushtaq. Pic/Facebook
Their relative silence on two other writers in the news - Banu Mushtaq and Basharat Peer - shows they are psychologically disabled from comprehending the heterogeneity of India's Muslims community - and the deeper meanings of patriotism. Their psychological disability arises from them having been weaned on the belief that all those Muslims who oppose Hindutva are not only their foes but also of the nation.
Banu Mushtaq won the coveted International Booker Prize for Heart Lamp, a collection of 12 stories. This is arguably as great an achievement as any of India's cricketing triumphs, which Bharatiya Janata Party leaders never fail to celebrate. But for the Yediyurappas, both father and son, none of the BJP leaders applauded Mushtaq. And even the Yediyurappas largely harped on what the Booker has done for Kannada, not on the political significance of Mushtaq's work.
This is surprising, for Mushtaq's Heart Lamp depicts the stranglehold the self-serving Muslim clergy has on the community, the propensity of Muslim men to opt for divorce and remarriage, patriarchy's stifling circumscribing of Muslim women, the relative absence of birth-control practice in the community and the ensuing burden on mothers of having to raise four-five-seven children - and, yes, the class conflict bedevilling them. In Heart Lamp, Hindutva isn't blamed for the everyday perils of being Muslim.
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These tropes should have had BJP leaders take more than a note of Mushtaq, for it has been their crib, for decades, that Muslims don't confront their socio-economic backwardness. Here's an author who, in an interview to academic Yogesh Sikand, called Muslim patriarchs "fascist forces." She was assaulted twice for publicly advocating that women have the right to pray in mosques.
Hindutvawadis could be silent on Mushtaq because they haven't read her. But another reason could be their acute awareness of Mushtaq's politics - her radicalism isn't confined to Muslims alone. She has participated in Dalit and farmer movements, and was at the forefront of the opposition to the attempts to turn Karnataka's Baba Budhan dargah into a temple. The BJP can't celebrate her because, to put it bluntly, she isn't an Arif Mohammad Khan, who justifiably critiqued the Muslim clergy but also sided with Hindutva.
Journalist Basharat Peer was referred to in every breathless coverage of Homebound, the Indian film which received a thunderous ovation at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. Peer was lauded because Homebound is a dramatised version of a story - A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway - that he wrote, in 2020, for The New York Times.
As a lockdown was suddenly, and severely, enforced upon India, to stem the spread of Coronavirus, Mohammad Saiyub, a Muslim, and Amrit Kumar, a Dalit - friends from an Uttar Pradesh village - joined lakhs in trekking from cities to their far-flung homes. On the way, in Madhya Pradesh, Amrit was beset with a fever and bouts of coughing, prompting others travelling with them on a truck to order him out. Saiyub refused to desert his friend. A photo of them stranded on the highway, with Saiyub cradling Amrit's head in his lap, went viral. Amrit died in a hospital. Saiyub overcame tough Covid protocols to transport Amrit's body to their village for the last rites.
Deeply moved, Peer visited Saiyub to narrate his story, which reads like a celebration of a Hindu-Muslim friendship enduring in the time of Hindutva ascendancy; a counterpoise, in flesh and blood, to the politics of hate. For Hindutvawadis, therefore, praising Peer's poignant story would be as good as indicting themselves.
The accolades the BJP has heaped on Col Sofiya Qureshi is in sharp contrast to its silence on Mushtaq and Peer. Her brilliance was hailed by the Supreme Court in a 2020 judgment, which mentioned her as the first woman to lead a contingent in a multi-nation military exercise.
That said, her veritable stardom was more crafted than flowing from her brilliance, for she was handpicked for the military briefings because the Modi government realised India's diversity could be deployed to taunt Pakistan that it couldn't shatter India's social cohesion. Qureshi mostly read from a prepared statement to detail India's hits against Pakistan. Her symbolic appeal certainly transcended her brilliance.
Yet Hindutva strives daily to belie the symbols of India's pluralism, a point Ali Khan Mahmudabad made in his now famous social media post - and underwent a spell in prison for it. As he wrote, "⦠the grassroots reality that common Muslims face is different from what the government tried to show [through Qureshi] but at the same time the press conference shows that an India, united in its diversity, is not completely dead as an idea." But this idea might just be headed for the crematorium unless Hindutvawadis realise that Muslim dissenters are patriots par excellence, as are also the ordinary, quiescent millions of them in whom burns the heart lamp for India.
The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.
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