On a prime Pakistani TV channel a few years ago, with the formidable Hamid Mir moderating, Asaduddin Owaisi and I faced off with a virulent Jama’at-e-Islami propagandist who denounced India in the most vicious terms, concentrating his ire particularly on the treatment of Muslims in India. Owaisi had the advantage over me of being fluent in Urdu with a wide and vivid vocabulary that he deployed with piercing logic and soaring rhetoric to demolish our opponent. He insisted that Pakistan had nothing to offer the Indian Muslim, and that our Constitution had all that was needed to protect the minorities and promote their interests.
It was a display of impassioned patriotism that cannot be diminished by his refusal to be compelled into shouting the slogan ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’, at the behest of majoritarian communal elements that are trying to make this slogan from the freedom movement (in which they themselves did not participate) the litmus test of loyalty to the nation.
Owaisi is a long-standing parliamentarian, who has had no hesitation in taking the oath prescribed for MPs to assume their seats in the House every time they are elected or re-elected. He stands up in fealty to the nation when parliamentary sessions commence with the playing of the national anthem. He never walks out when parliamentary sessions end with the playing of the first verse of Vande Mataram—only the first verse because it contains no religion-specific injunctions or undertones. This was recommended by none other than Rabindranath Tagore to make the song representative of the whole nation.
In defence of his position, Owaisi stresses that his loyalty is strictly to the Constitution that nowhere mandates as obligatory the shouting of any particular slogan to establish loyalty to the country. Of course, it does not proscribe shouting the slogan—but by the same token, the Constitution also does not proscribe believing in La Ilaha Il-Allah or beginning any undertaking with the words Bismillah hir Rahman nir Raheem. I know of no Indian Muslim who deems it necessary for any non-Muslim to invoke either of these key concepts of the Islamic religion to prove his ‘secularism’.
Asaduddin Owaisi | PTI
Owaisi’s position that he will not say ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ at someone’s bidding is essentially the liberal, not Islamic, position that one cannot be compelled to shout a slogan. Indian Muslims are not Pakistanis—they are Indians who chose to remain in India when Pakistan, the promised Land of the Pure, was inveigling them to prove their piety by undertaking a ‘haj’ to Pakistan. Confronted with a choice between apostasy and loyalty to the land that had nurtured them for generations, the 18 crore Muslims of India have demonstrated, in war and peace, that they are Indian nationalists—provided their Constitutional rights are respected.
Owaisi underlined in his interaction with NDTV that he had “no problem with the slogan, but why make it the sole test of one’s patriotism?” This was an interesting position for him to take because, as the renowned Bengali historian Amales Tripathi has said, “the heady inspiration of the Vande Mataram… equated the motherland with the power of the goddess Durga.”
Yet, it was not to the religious dimension of ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ that Owaisi objected (as many Muslims did in pre-independence India), but to this one slogan being made “the parameter to question my loyalty and nationalism to this great nation of ours”. Indignantly, Owaisi declared, “It is the Muslims of India, my forefathers, [who] defeated Jinnah. We said to Jinnah that you are wrong, we will not follow you.”
And in the same spirit he has declared that he will not be compelled to shout this slogan even if a knife is taken to his throat. Rabindranath Tagore, as quoted by Sugata Bose, MP and Harvard historian, in The Economic and Political Weekly (August 1, 1998), deplored “the naked passion of self-love of nations in its drunken delirium of greed, dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance”.
What a perfect description of Mohan Bhagwat, RSS chief!
