Commentary/Varsha Bhosle

Why I Am Not A Pinko

Ever so often, Bhosle decides to curl up with a book instead of raving and ranting on the Net. Someone up there likes me: This week, what fell off the shelf happened to be Why I Am Not A Muslim by Ibn Warraq. No need to add, it's a pseudonym. You see, unlike the Hindutva we see today -- The one that claims facilely to speak for the whole country, the one that cannot give anybody any answers, because, in a very deep sense, it does not and cannot speak for the country to begin with -- other religious movements are not exactly conducive to iconoclastic philosophising. So, even those antagonists of religion, those oh-so-rational in their approach to that opium of the masses, prefer to avoid analysing insurgence among non-Hindus.

In March 1989, a little after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses, the Observer, London, published an anonymous letter from Pakistan. It stated, "Salman Rushdie speaks for me... Mine is a voice that has not yet found expression in newspaper columns. It is the voice of those who are born Muslims but wish to recant in adulthood, yet are not permitted to on pain of death. Someone who does not live in an Islamic society cannot imagine the sanctions, both self-imposed and external, that militate against expressing religious disbelief... 'I don't believe in God' is an impossible public utterance even among family and friends... So we hold our tongues, those of us who doubt." The writer was Ibn Warraq.

The ayatollah's decree so outraged Mr Warraq -- still identified only as a man who had grown up in an Islamic republic but now living and teaching in Ohio -- that, in 1995, he went on to publish the book which surpasses The Satanic Verses in terms of blasphemy. In his review of Why I Am Not A Muslim, Dr Daniel Pipes wrote, "Where Rushdie offered elusive critique in an airy tale of magical realism, Ibn Warraq brings a scholarly sledgehammer to the task of demolishing Islam. Writing a polemic against Islam, especially for an author of Muslim birth, is an act so incendiary that the author must write under a pseudonym; not to do so would be an act of suicide... While the author disclaims any pretense to originality, he has read widely enough to write an essay that offers a startlingly novel rendering of the faith he left."

And what do you suppose the scholarly task included? To begin with, Mr Warraq refutes the existence of Muhammad, but concedes that if he did exist at all, then he had nothing to do with the Quran -- That tome being fabricated a century later in Palestine and then "projected back onto an invented Arabian point of origin." With the very source of Islam questioned, it would be dumb to expect the author to find anything uncorrupted in the rest of Islamic tradition: "Bowing toward Arabia five times a day must surely be the ultimate symbol of cultural imperialism", but colonialism, "with all its shortcomings, ultimately benefited the ruled as much as the rulers... The effects of the teachings of the Koran have been a disaster for human reason and social, intellectual and moral progress... All innovations are discouraged in Islam -- every problem is seen as a religious problem rather than a social or economic one." In short, the Quran is a fraud, and everything based on it is mumbo-jumbo.

So I went thinking, why didn't our secular pundits raise a hue and cry over Why I Am Not A Muslim as they are doing for Kancha Ilaiah's Why I Am Not A Hindu? Why isn't Mr Warraq's book a stunning eye-opener, a stick with which to beat Islamists? After all, he believes that crediting Islam for its medieval cultural glories would be like crediting the Inquisition for Galileo's discoveries. If Mr Ilaiah is a professor of political science in Osmania University, Mr Warraq, too, is an educationist -- in a country where "affirmative action" hasn't quite made the wretched dent in quality that reservation has in India. Also, both pin tails on the legacies they were born into. (Note: affirmative action is when the qualified among weak classes are given their due, while Mandalisation flatly reserves opportunities regardless of merit.)

This whole Why-I-Am-Not-A business began with Bertrand Russell's lecture to the National Secular Society, London, in March 1927. Published as a pamphlet that same year, the theme subsequently achieved new fame with his book Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays. Of course, it is not required that anybody carping about Hinduism must also drag WIANA-Christian or -Communist or -Mass-Murder into the gloating picture... but it does make one stop to think... Dear Bertie spawned a genre, and within a genre, comparisons, although odious, are to be expected. Sort of like, my disillusionment is bigger than yours.

So, how did I react to WIANA-Muslim? Sorry to disappoint you, but I thought the book was way over-the-top; put that down to my (smirk, smirk) Hindu sense of equity. Although Dr Pipes called Mr Warraq's thesis "a well-researched and quite brilliant" indictment of Islam, I thought it lacked the dispassionate detachment inherent in Mr Russell's work of the same nature, and thus bordered on the scurrilous. It did not leave this non-Hindu-bashing fundie reeling; I was loathe to indict Islam on the basis of one man's anger, however justified it may be (for that, I have recourse to the anti-kafir suras of the Quran). Islam ain't gonna die because Mr Warraq wills it. And Hindutva don't need no tombstone because Mr Ilaiah and friends write an epitaph for it.

In the quest to belittle Hindutva, it is being echoed that the Dalitbahujan spirit is a non-Hindu spirit; that the opposite of Hindu culture is Dalitbahujan culture; that the idea of the great majority in this country being Hindu is pure nonsense; that Dalitbahujans are profoundly distinct from Hindus... Yes, OK, all right. But then, will someone please explain to me why caste differences exist among Christians and Muslims? I mean, you can't get a more non-Hindu spirit than in these guys, can you?

In August 1996, at its first national convention in Delhi, the All-India Muslim OBC Sangathan publicly acknowledged that Indian Muslims practice caste discrimination, including the inter-caste restrictions followed by Hindus. Some 115 Muslim backward castes, based on occupational divisions, are identified in Maharashtra alone. This acceptance of a Hinduism-like system -- since it came from Muslims themselves instead of the Sangh Parivar -- made our modernist intellectuals have kittens over its "progressiveness". It was deemed a step towards "a trans-religious solidarity" which would make vote bank politics redundant. Meaning, a trans-religious caste-based vote bank is preferable to a communal one -- since the latter nearly put the saffron-tilak culture into power. Hahahaha... the illuminati are *so* transparent.

The All India Catholic Union, too, has been in the forefront of the struggle for Dalit reservations. Its vice-president, Dr Remy Y Denis, writes: "The Caste system, many argue, is a feature of the Hindu religion and therefore the evil social effects are applicable to only Hindus. It is a fallacy to relate the problem only to Hindus ... They (Dalit Christians) are not only discriminated outside the Church but also within Christian society. They have separate places to sit in the Church. They have separate burial grounds and they have no matrimonial relationship with non-Dalit Christians. Even their children do not get preferential admission in our prestigious institutions."

So tell me: Do Muslims and Christians fit Mr Ilaiah's non-Hindu-spirit bill? And where does that leave the great-majority-isn't-Hindu theory? The simple truth is, in India, whatever religion you may be born into, you are a Hindu first, and the rest afterwards. If you weren't, you wouldn't be bogged down by the centuries of idiot traditions. Of course Dalits have been and are exploited; of course they make legitimate charges. But to tack that for justifying Mandalisation and proving the ulterior motives of the Sangh Parivar is pure pigswill. It's just another pinko in the woodpile: Since it's getting more and more difficult to support mitthoo miya's divisive-communalist-fundamentalist-forces squawking, the new song being rehearsed is divisive-casteist-elitist-minority (!) forces.

Even if all the posts in every governmental department were to be filled with Dalits, it would not bring about social justice: Ideas can be crushed only by better ideas. The annihilation of the Romanovs brought the proletariat to power, but saddled him with a green-blooded aristocracy -- and even that came to naught. It is not self-serving scum like V P Singh, Kanshi Ram and Mulayam Singh that can better the SC/ST/OBC lot! What's needed are social reformers (almost all of whom, BTW, have been zaalim Brahmins) to cleanse minds on both sides, because anything else can only provoke an upper caste backlash. The object of the Mandal exercise -- like, make Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs eligible for reservations and institute their separateness; perpetuate caste by bestowing privileges -- is to subvert Hindu society and so keep alive parties that thrive by dividing the majority.

Fact: where there is man, there is disparity. Whether WASPs in America, Slavs in Russia, or Wahabis in Arabia -- the elite will carve their pound of flesh. Discrimination narrows as it moves from race to religion to country to region to gender... But to crucify Hinduism as One Bad Mamma in order to propagate one's imported brand of politics is abhorable intellectual skullduggery. Henry Miller said, "Religion is always revolutionary, far more revolutionary than bread-and-butter philosophies." Meaning, prosperity cannot replace religious cohesion -- or why would wealthy American Jews and Catholics keep afloat Israel and Northern Ireland? So I say to the Ilaiahs: Hinduism is caught, not taught; better that it be wrought than fought. And that is why I am not a pinko.

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