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How to hate Hindus and incite Muslims: A Primer by Prof Tahir Mahmood

I have before me a three-page note headlined Inducement by Law for Being a Hindu, authored and circulated by Professor Tahir Mahmood, chairman of the National Commission for Minorities. The content of this note is unadulterated verjuice and the purpose of the author is to taunt India's majority Hindu community and pour scorn and ridicule over the secular Constitution of India. Professor Mahmood, ever since he took charge of the National Commission for Minorities during United Front rule, has once again made majority-bashing fashionable.

In this note, faxed to newspaper offices and mailed to leading members of Delhi's chattering classes, Professor Mahmood has voiced unrestrained outrage over the Hindu Code for not encouraging Hindus to embrace Islam or Christianity. He has heaped scorn on Constitutional provisions and laws safeguarding Scheduled Castes for not offering sufficient inducement to them to become Muslims or Christians.

In sum, the note encapsulates Professor Mahmood's warped thinking and communal mindset. It reflects the dangerous view that the Constitution of India, the laws of this country and Hindu Personal Laws, as laid down in the Hindu Code, are inimical to secularism. The note is of a piece with unbridled communalism, made all the more objectionable because it emanates from a constitutional dignitary.

Two points merit mention in this regard. First, Constitution-thumping champions of secularism and Dalit rights activists have maintained a conspiratorial silence over the contents of his widely-circulated note, though it challenges the very foundations of their claimed commitments. Second, there are no prizes for guessing the extent of turmoil that would have been unleashed if a Hindu constitutional dignitary had publicly voiced dissent against Muslim Personal Law for not being elastic enough to encourage practitioners of Islam to abandon their religion and embrace, say, Hinduism.

It is, however, not surprising that Professor Mahmood should have the audacity to pour such scorn, such vitriol, on the Constitution of India and the Hindu Code. Ever since he took charge as chairman of the National Minorities Commission on November 26, 1996, under the benign patronage of the United Front regime, he has indulged in nothing but Hindu-baiting, mocking at institutions and shocking everybody who believes in India as one nation with his divisive statements that are hinged on the corrosive idea of India as a conglomeration of many nations, if not two -- Hindu and Muslim.

He has seized upon every opportunity to declare that "minority communities are under threat in Hindu India" and the shrillness of his denunciation has volubly increased ever since the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union Government took charge. During the United Front days, he took up the case of two mutinous Muslim jawans who had refused to shave before falling in at the morning parade. He misused his office to convince the then Raksha Mantri, Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav, that forcing a Muslim jawan to shave was "against his religious belief" and "violates the tenets of Islam".

As a result of Professor Mahmood's campaign, suitable instructions were issued, allowing Muslim jawans to look slovenly and have flowing beards, making them indistinguishable from maulvis in masjids.

In September 1997, entire Dumka, the tribal-dominated district of south Bihar, was in turmoil. A teenaged tribal boy, who lived in the hostel of St Joseph's School, run by missionaries, after months of sexual exploitation by a priest, confided the truth to his family. The protest that followed was led by tribals, most of them Christians, and the medical evidence did establish that the boy had been brutally raped.

Rather than defrock the priest as he deserved to be, the Church elders chose to stand by him. They petitioned Professor Mahmood and he promptly despatched a team to Dumka. Nothing wrong with that -- only, that the members of the team were those who had already declared their loyalty to the sodomiser. The team's report, endorsed by Professor Mahmood, made out the point that the problem lay in the fact that the BJP has a sizeable presence in Dumka.

How is the BJP's presence, or the lack of it, linked to the sexual exploitation of tribal boys by members of the Christian clergy? And how does it absolve the sinner of committing a sin for which fire and brimstone rained down on Sodom?

Similarly, in December 1997, Professor Mahmood castigated the district administration of Ludhiana, in Punjab, for street protests against some missionaries who had tried to convince the people that cure for medically curable diseases does not lie in hospitals and dispensaries, but in reposing their faith in Christ. He stunned the entire nation by declaring that Ali Mian, the well-known Muslim revanchist, was right in issuing a fatwa against the singing of Vande Mataram as the "National Song is unacceptable to Muslims".

On December 5, 1998, Professor Mahmood shared a platform with the highly dubious Milli Council that has, in the past, exhorted Muslims to boycott elections as Islam neither mentions the concept of democracy nor provides for elected governments. Much like the Muslim League leadership's call for Direct Action Day, Professor Mahmood called for December 18, 1998, to be observed as "Minorities Day".

Without bothering to hear the Gujarat government's version, Professor Mahmood has denounced it for the violence in Dangs. Ignoring the fact that 12 of the 24 charged with the crime of raping three nuns in Jhabua, Madhya Pradesh, are Christians, he has dubbed the incident as persecution of Christians by Hindus.

Professor Mahmood's latest demands are to reserve a quarter of jobs in police forces for Muslims and to declare Hindus as minorities in six border states -- Arunachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Punjab and the Union Territory of Lakshadweep. The second demand is not without ulterior motives, implicitly suggesting that these states should not be seen as part of "Hindu India".

The deadly import of this implicit suggestion has been seized upon by American policy-makers who have not tried to hide their interest in Professor Mahmood's postulation. Indeed, the American ambassador to India has more than patted Professor Mahmood on his back, recommending him to fellow diplomats based in Delhi.

But there is nothing that can be done to defang Professor Mahmood of his poison teeth, to halt his dangerous campaign that verges on reviving Mohammed Ali Jinnah's campaign of Muslim separatism. Professor Mahmood enjoys constitutional privileges and powers, derived from the Commission he heads. To touch him, to even try and tame him, would invite the wrath of the secularist brigade. To allow him to continue with his calculated campaign of inciting minority communities, especially Muslims, and indulging in Hindu-baiting would have serious consequences and cause irreparable damage.

The BJP-led government is caught in a conundrum not of its making. If only Mr P V Narasimha Rao's government had desisted from formalising the communal politics of Mr V P Singh by giving statutory status to the National Commission for Minorities and instead vested its powers in the National Commission for Human Rights, India would have been saved from such body blows against the secular State.

On that day in May 1992, when Mr Narasimha Rao's Congress government had pushed through the Bill giving the National Commission for Minorities statutory status, the champions of secularism who voted for the Bill chose to ignore Sardar Patel's sage advice: "In the long run it would be in the interests of all to forget that there is anything like a majority or a minority in this country and that in India there is only one community…"

Today, thanks to Professor Mahmood and his ilk, we cannot but recall Jawaharlal Nehru's warning in the Constituent Assembly during the debate on minority rights: "(In) a full-blooded democracy, if you seek to give safeguards to a minority, and a relatively small minority, you isolate it. May be you protect it to a slight extent, but at what cost? At the cost of isolating it and keeping it away from the main current in which the majority is going -- I am talking on the political plane of course -- at the cost of forfeiting that inner sympathy and fellow-feeling with the majority."

The National Commission for Minorities was ostensibly set up, and given statutory powers, for the purpose of what Nehru described as giving "safeguards to a minority" -- the Muslims of India. Christians and other minority communities, let there be no mistake, are only incidental to the interests of Professor Mahmood. Nehru's prediction has come true -- thanks to the activities of the Commission and its chairman, Muslims and others are close to "forfeiting that inner sympathy and fellow-feeling with the majority."

There is still time to prevent the cauldron from bubbling over. But if verjuice of the sort contained in the note which Professor Mahmood has been circulating, along with his "hate-Hindu" utterances, continue to be added to the cauldron of communal disquiet, we could look forward to disaster and worse.

Kanchan Gupta is a political analyst based at the Bharatiya Janata Party headquarters in Delhi and editor of the party's official organ, BJP Today.

ALSO SEE:
The Rediff Interview/ Tahir Mahmood

Kanchan Gupta