Towards Extremism

The NRC is designed to push the undocumented residents out or into jail but the CAA says that if you have lived in India for 6 years and you are a Hindu, Jain, Parsi, Christian, Sikh or Buddhist, just as long as you are not a Muslim, you can stay in India and even become a citizen. The CAA is an insurance policy to prevent the Hindus from being deported from India by the NRC. The de jure and de facto national slogan of India has now become: No Country for Muslims.

Nationalization and nationalism are two similar words but with profoundly different meanings, may be even opposite in certain contexts. Nationalization is a practice most common in communist states where the state takes over companies and businesses from private control and places them under governmental control, for the perceived benefit of all. This is called the left wing school of thought. Nationalism, on the other hand, is about self-determination in a given state. Recently, it has come to mean a mindset or ideology that favours a certain race or religion to be representing the national character of one’s nation. India, Israel and Myanmar, among others, are the perfect examples of such a nationalistic ultra-rightwing thinking. In India, in particular, religious discrimination is now the law of the land, called CAA.

The rights that people enjoy in any country are not always because those rights are enshrined in the constitution. The existence of certain rights are ensured by the absence of laws violating those rights or rather by the inability of the governments to legislate in a way that would abridge those rights. For example, the American people have the right to free speech because the government is forbidden from making any law that restricts that freedom. They have the right to a free exercise of religion because the government is forbidden from making any law that would favour the establishment of a certain faith. Similarly, rights abuses also happen not because of the official policy directing it but rather the absence of safeguards preventing them.

It is not forbidden territory for the Indian government to enact laws that would violate religious equality and rights. Apart from the CAA, the Ayodhya verdict is another example where the state’s highest judiciary clearly sided with the majority religion in the country by giving it the land of the Babri Masjid for the construction of the Ram Janmabhoomi temple, thereby legalizing the mob demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. This drift of India from being a somewhat left-wing secular country to a perfect right-wing extremist state is both bad and good.

Bad because the powder keg aspects of Modi’s extremist agenda are enormous and unpredictable. The heat would reach the entire neighborhood including Pakistan. This is bad for the Muslims living in India. Good, because Modi is actually validating the Two-Nation theory. Pakistan was created because of the realization that the Muslims in India, who were in a minority, would be persecuted by the majority Hindus. Many in Pakistan like to indulge in counterfactuals, such as what if Muslims could have lived peacefully inside a united India and that why was there any need to create Pakistan? Such arguments are mostly made by those who think it might be considered a sign of intellect. The current situation in India, where anti-Muslim hatred has not even spared the actors’ community, should suffice as an answer to their despicable question. Muslims in India spend their lives proving their patriotism. How miserable!

Shabana Azmi has said, “I wanted to buy a flat in Bombay and it was not given to me because I was a Muslim and I read the same about Saif (Ali Khan). Now, I mean, if Javed Akhtar and Shabana Azmi cannot get a flat in Bombay because they are Muslims, then what are we talking about?” Saif Ali Khan is another leading Indian celebrity. If this is the fate of super-rich Muslims, imagine what the poor Muslims face in India?

Jinnah was even given the title of “the ambassador of unity” for his fierce advocacy of Hindu-Muslim unity in a united India. But then Gandhi injected religion into the freedom struggle, inculcating such terms as ‘Satya’, ‘Dharma’ and so forth. The zeal that followed was something Jinnah realized he could not control. He came to one unmistakable conclusion: that there has to be a separate homeland for the Muslims of the region. Hence, the Two-Nation Theory – and it has been further validated.