Lal Krishna Advani

A Rath Yatra in India in full swing


10 June 2005


LAL KRISHNA ADVANI TENDERS HIS RESIGNATION


Even today it is dangerous to speak well of a Muslim leader in ‘secular’ India

By: Ali Ismail

aliismail_uk@yahoo.co.uk

Mobile telephone: 0778-842 5262 (United Kingdom)

I was surprised two days ago, when trawling the newswires for the Bangla Mirror’s international pages, to read of the furore that has followed Lal Krishna Advani’s recent visit to Pakistan. In my mind, there were echoes of a conversation on a train in India with a Muslim doctor who had strong views about the destruction in 1992 of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya and its replacement with an intended ‘Ram Temple’ and subsequently, a series of questions from my local Pakistani-owned shop’s staff about exactly why I was sending books to an institution in India.

My premise is that we South Asians appear to have a track record of not getting on particularly well with each other and of thinking and acting communally rather than nationally - let alone globally - which is a gift horse to persons who wish to control us.

The core of the controversy now surrounding Mr Advani is that during his six day tour of Pakistan, on 4 June he visited the mausoleum of Mohammed Ali Jinnah and wrote in the visitors’ book: ‘There are many people who have an irreversible stamp on history. But there are few who actually create history. Qaed-e-Azam Ali Jinnah was one such rare individual. In his early years, leading luminary of the freedom struggle Sarojini Naidu described Jinnah as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. His address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11 August, 1947 is really a classic and a forceful espousal of a secular state in which every citizen would be free to follow his own religion. The state shall make no distinction between the citizens on the grounds of faith. My respectful homage to this great man’.

The outburst of Hindu outrage erupted even before Mr Advani returned to India. Members of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) religious parent body, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh called Mr Advani a “traitor”, presumably for commending a Muslim who had played the leading role in dividing the former British India into West Pakistan, the former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and India. Mr Advani tendered his resignation as BJP party president but the party leaders have thus far refused to accept his resignation.

It is worthwhile to bear in mind that Mohammed Ali Jinnah was a secular leader, not a religious leader. He spent some of his formative years learning the law in London in order to qualify as a barrister and lived in a Westernised fashion in England. Years later, when inaugurating the Pakistan Constituent Assembly he said: "You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State. ...I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State."
Mr. Advani, for those who don't follow Indian politics, is not only the president of India's BJP and the most prominent advocate of the Hindutva movement, but also its most intelligent exponent. After a four-decade career castigating the belief systems and lifestyles of Muslims, stirring up dissentions with a 'Rath Yatra', being very much on hand when the Babri Masjid mosque was physically torn down by hand in defiance of court orders, all topped by his sinister silence as home minister when the Gujarat riots and mass killings took place in 2002, Mr Advani, now leader of the opposition in India's parliament, was, forsooth, in Pakistan for a visit last week.
Now we Muslims, Pakistanis included, may stand accused of many things by non-Muslim Indians, but lack of hospitality is not among them. Almost every Indian who has ever visited Pakistan or Bangladesh, whether male or female, remembers being amazed by the sincere warmth of the reception shown by so many people from all levels of society, including particularly the ordinary citizens of Pakistan and Bangladesh - ‘the masses’.
In Lal Krishna Advani's case, he was also returning home for a visit. He was born in Karachi and he had spent the first 20 years of his life in that southern city before migrating across the new international border following the 1947 partition of former British India. Now, at 78, long past the normal age of retirement, he was re-visiting the place where his old home stood, his old school, his old haunts and all the time surrounded by an outpouring of affection which, as an Indian Hindu nationalist leader, he had no reasonable cause to expect.
The trinity of his holiday spirit, the hospitality and welcome of the Muslims and his own nostalgia no doubt served to infuse Mr. Advani’s spirit with conciliation. This is the man who, even amidst the worst communal horrors that India can provide, always projected an image of urbanity and benevolence.
Mr. Advani made some observations that astonished his hosts in Pakistan and horrified his own supporters in India. He quoted Mohammad Ali Jinnah - bad enough, but there was worse was to come. He quoted Mr Jinnah advocating secularism! Pakistan would be a secular country, Mohammed Ali Jinnah said, where the state would have nothing to do with religion. Had Mr Advani merely said that that was what Pakistan should live up to, he would have been making an intelligent and socially acceptable debating point and there would not have been much resulting agitation.
In the event, he went far beyond leaving it at that. He added to what he had previously said, that this was the ideal to which India, Pakistan and Bangladesh should all aspire.
One has to bear in mind that since Mr Jinnah’s speech came on the heels of civil disturbances in which approximately a million people had died and several millions had migrated, it could be described as wishful thinking or even hypocrisy. At any rate, Mr Advani, as a popular leader, knows the power of raw emotions among the ordinary people of South Asia.
It could be argued that Mr Advani was a veteran statesman who was merely doing his social duty in trying to point out the common heritage of all three countries - India, Pakistan and Bangladesh - in the subcontinent which had once been an undivided India, in which case what he did could be described as a statesmanlike approach to a major regional problem, which is religious communalism.
Mr. Advani stated in his own defence that he was moved to quote from Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s speech partly because he had been called upon to lay the foundation stone of the reconstruction of an old Hindu temple in the Punjab and that he was highly gratified by the fact that the Pakistani government itself was carrying out this project. It is well to pause at this moment and reflect that it was Lal Krishna Advani, no other, who had waxed eloquent and wrathful whenever he detected the government of India rendering ‘help’ of virtually any description to Muslims.
With regard to the now celebrated guest book entry at the Jinnah mausoleum, here we have Mr Advani praising Mohammed Ali Jinnah as the man who changed regional history by creating Pakistan almost single-handed despite being an enthusiastic secularist. The word ‘Pakistan’ means ‘pure land’ when translated into English. Now, it is true and worth while recalling that Mr Jinnah made contributions to secularism in the sub-continent and at the beginning was something of an ‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’. Notwithstanding that, by rendering such an unreserved commendation on Mr Jinnah's whole life, the last 15 years or so of which were almost wholly devoted to communal, that is to say Muslim-only causes, Mr Advani has managed to confuse many of his ardent Hindu nationalist faithful.
The BJP and its associated network of organizations, called the ‘Sangh Family’, or ‘Sangh Parivar’, has one strong emotional point: They had always been presenting the Partition of India as a ‘wound’, which needed to be healed; this is a sentiment many Indians believe in implicitly even though most of them must be aware of its practical infeasibility. Mr Advani shattered their collective dream of a united India - Pakistan, Bangladesh and India all together- and earned their enmity.
The morning after he reached New Delhi, Mr Advani drove over to the private residence of his party's secretary and handed him his resignation from the presidency of the party. He found it necessary to mention to the media that he had written the letter the previous night in Karachi itself.
The background of all this must surely be the legacy of colonialism. Throughout British India the Hindu-Muslim antagonism was a vital assist to the colonial power. Even now, in some circles, it is recalled that British Army soldiers used to start riots for amusement. They would give small sums of money to street urchins to put pieces of pork in mosques or pieces of beef in Hindu temples; that was all it took to start a riot in a country such as ours.

Let us hope that Lal Krishna Advani does not, in his old age, pay the final price that Mahatma Gandhi paid for being too ‘soft’ on Muslims - a bullet from a Hindu nationalist.

The moral of this tale is surely that in all three countries - India, Pakistan and Bangladesh - communal politics works. It pays a person with political ambitions in our social context to work on religious and sectarian emotions. It is far easier to divide and rule than to unite and rule.

If we are to collectively change and leave the ‘Third World’ permanently we will have to change our outlooks and that includes the doctor on the train and my local Pakistani shop assistants.

THE END