Colours of Violence

by Kakar, Sudhir

  Stars sometimes appear in the waves

  Khalid sometimes leads armies

  Every age sees the rise of Yazid

  Every age witnesses the birth of Shabbir.b

  How much have we served this country! What have we not done to get freedom for this country! The equal rights given to Muslims under Indian law were not given as charity but because we earned them. And today they want to ban the Qur’an? Who led the country to independence? Everyone calls Mahatma Gandhi the father of the nation. Fine, we’ll also call him that. Who killed the ‘father of the nation’? Nathuram Godse. Who killed Indira Gandhi? Beant Singh and Satwant Singh. Were they Muslims? You eliminated them both.

  Even then you complain of my faithlessness,

  If I am not faithful, you too have not been a

  caretaker of my heart.

  Who did we eliminate? Let me tell you that since you call us ‘Pakistanis’. When Pakistan’s tanks rolled into the country then in the form of Abdul Hamidc we destroyed eight of those tanks. Whenever the country has asked for sacrifice, Muslims have given their blood. We have protected the country at every juncture and today you are questioning our loyalty? You talk of banning the Qur’an which taught us to die for the country’s honour. Qur’an gave discipline to the world. Qur’an gave even the lowest of the low the right to live in dignity. Qur’an was the first to raise its voice against caste distinctions. Qur’an was the first to abolish differences between high and low. Qur’an taught the world that man does not become great on the basis of birth but on the basis of religious virtue, abstinence, and truth. To ban the Qur’an means to ban reality, to ban truth. These bribe-takers want corruption to continue. These libertines want the honour of women to be violated. These drunkards want the looting of India to continue. But when people come to know the Qur’an, when they understand Qur’an’s laws, then Qur’an will save both the world and the millat [religious community of the Muslims].

  The political culture of fundamentalism, perhaps more than secular political cultures, is fundamentally a politics of imagery. The image Azmi first conjures up is of a besieged Muslim community, under attack from a vile, treacherous enemy, the Hindu nationalist. Azmi’s specific technique is to project the image of a relentless attack against the central symbol of Muslim religious identity, the Qur’an. This citadel of the community’s identity, idealized as the all-good, the all-just, the all-pure, and the source of all beneficence, is surrounded by a sea of Hindu corruption and debauchery. In contrast to a Hindu revivalist like Rithambra, who must first define and then draw up the boundaries of a Hindu community, Azmi does not need to engage in any such boundary-setting exercise. The religious-cultural identity of the Muslim qaum and its sense of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ has been traditionally clear-cut and relatively enduring. What Azmi attempts to do is to trigger and stoke a persecutory anxiety in his audience.

  In psychoanalytic thought, persecution is an internal event, a subjective, irrational experience often equated with the pathology of paranoia. Melanie Klein has related the anxiety it generates—the feelings of disintegration—to the earliest stages of life, to the baby’s experience of a depriving, frustrating breast-mother. But as Meira Likierman has pointed out, the feeling of persecution is also a normal part of the response to destructive and obstructive forces which we encounter in the course of everyday life.7 Connecting to the individual’s primitive persecution anxiety from infancy, damage, loss, deprivation, frustration are a range of events which constitute a destructive attack on our sense of identity and represent partial death. Persecution anxiety signals a situation of great danger and carries with it the fear of the group’s symbolic death, an annihilation of its collective identity. It is only when this particular anxiety courses through and between members of a group, making individuals feel helpless, frightened, and paralyzed, that people become loosened from their traditional cognitive moorings and are prepared to give up previously held social, political, or economic explanations for their sense of aggrievement and become receptive to the religious critique Azmi has to offer. Persecutory anxiety is one of those strong emotions which can take people away from ‘knowing’ back to the realm of ‘unknowing’—from a ‘knowledge’ of the cause of their distress to a state where they do not know what it is that gives them suffering and pain though they do know that they are suffering and in pain. One antidote to this paralyzing anxiety is anger, preferably in a violent assertion that is psychically mobilizing, as Azmi continues:

  Even the talk of banning the holy Qur’an shows what dangerous conspiracies are being hatched to damage our faith.

  Awake O Indian Muslims before you disappear

  completely

  Even your story will not find a mention in other

  stories.

  What steps should we take under these conditions? The Muslim will not come to the court to prove the truth of the Qur’an. The Muslim will come out with the shroud tied to his head to protect the Qur’an. We will cut off tongues that speak against the Qur’an. We will tear off the skin of those who look askance at the Qur’an.

  After having tried to erase previous cognitive structures through a heightening of persecution anxiety and having dealt with the paralyzing fear engendered by this anxiety through fantasized violence, what the fundamentalist has before him is a newly born group without memory and with but inchoate desires. Azmi proceeds to shape the identity of this freshly minted group by offering it a series of narcissistically enhancing self-images—‘This is who you are!’—particularly in relation to the elder sibling, the Hindu.

  After thirty-five years of oppression the Indian Muslim has remained loyal to the country. If there is anyone loyal from Hindustan to kabristan [graveyard], then it is the Muslim. You [the Hindus] die, we die. What happens after death? You are cremated. Next, your ashes are thrown into the Ganges. Where does the river flow to? You flow from here and reach Pakistan. Ashes scattered by the wind can land anywhere. When you die, Mother India does not care. When we die, the motherland says, ‘My dear son, you will not leave me to go anywhere else. If you have lived on top of me, after death you will sleep in my lap.’

  There are three kinds of sons. One son, who according to the law of the land and in the light of his faith fulfils his obligations toward his parents is called put [son]. Another is called suput (good son) who not only fulfils his obligations but sacrifices his all for the happiness of the parents. The son who shoots his mother, cuts her throat, kills both his father and mother—he is called kuput [bad son]. Now look at the sons of this motherland and decide who is the good and who is the bad son. The Muslim who believes in Qur’an and calls India his own country is the suput. When after the formation of Pakistan there was trouble in Kashmir then it was Brigadier Usman Ali from my town of Azamgarh who was one of the first to fall to Pakistani bullets. When his twitching corpse fell to earth at the border the motherland said, ‘This is my son who sacrificed himself to protect my honour.’

  When Abdul Hamid stopped the Pakistani tanks which would have rolled on to Delhi and had his flesh torn to ribbons then the Indian earth said, ‘This is my suput.’ And they who killed Mahatma Gandhi, the liberator of the country, killed Indira Gandhi who sacrificed so much for the honour of the nation—what will you call them, put, suput, or kuput? You decide.’

  While on the surface the whole tenor of the speech is concerned with distancing the Muslim from the Hindu enemy, on the more unconscious level it betrays the existence of an unwanted relationship with the same foe—an intimacy held at bay by disdain, even hate, but an intimacy nonetheless. Viewing oneself as the ‘good son’ of the mother, as opposed to the Hindu ‘bad son’, is an unconscious acknowledgement of their connectedness, even when this connection exists only in an unending and obsessive competition. After exorcizing doubt—including self-doubt—about Muslim loyalty to the country (vis-à-vis loyalty to the religious community outside the borders of the nation), the self-images offered to the group in the following passages are of a
grandiose variety, of an exhilarating Muslim superiority. The enhancement of collective self-esteem then serves to increase the security of the group self by countering the deathly threat to its survival.

  Like spokespersons of all ethnic groups in conflict around the world, Azmi’s vision of Muslims and Hindus is of two groups in eternal competition to answer the question which is more civilized, stronger, and, generally, better.8 As his evidence for Muslim superiority, he offers Muslim virtues in comparison with Hindu vices. First, this superiority consists of a heightened Muslim apperception of the aesthetics of life, in the Muslim’s greater resonance for sensory and sensuous experience and in greater artistic giftedness.

  And you who raise slogans about Muslim loyalty, who talk of a ban on the Qur’an, have you ever looked at your own face in the mirror? It was the believers in the Qur’an who taught you the graces of life, taught you how to eat and drink. All you had before us were tomatoes and potatoes. What did you have? We brought jasmine, we brought frangipani. We gave the Taj Mahal, we gave the Red Fort. India was made India by us. We lived here for eight hundred years and we made India shine. In thirty-five years you have dimmed its light and ruined the country. A beggar will not be grateful if made an emperor. Lay out a feast for him and he will not like it. Throw him a piece of bread in the dust and he will get his appetite back. Do not force us to speak out. Do not force us to come in front of you as an enemy.

  God, look at their ignorance to believe we have

  no words

  When out of pity we gave them the power of speech.

  Azmi’s attempt to sharply differentiate the Hindus from the Muslims, suggesting that the Muslims consider themselves as having come to India from outside the country eight hundred years ago (and from a superior racial stock), is partly a consequence of the current antagonism between the two communities. In such a hostile situation, the fundamentalist exhorts the Muslims to shun contamination by any of the Hindu symbols and strive to keep their shared Islamic identity intact and pure. The fundamentalist is loath to acknowledge any Muslim similarity to the Hindu and focuses only on the differences which, he seeks to persuade those yet unconvinced, are of stubborn emotional importance.

  From the relative level of sophistication of the two civilizations, the battle for superiority now shifts to the arena of power as Azmi offers up the image of a powerful Muslim nation, much stronger than the Hindu enemy.

  There is a limit to our patience and tolerance. These wicked people should understand that we can sacrifice all we have, including our lives, but not our honour. We cannot compromise the glory of the Qur’an. Today the whole world is in turmoil. Some madmen are disturbing the peace of the world. This is not a challenge to the two hundred and twenty million Muslims of India but to the over a billion Muslims of the world. That is why I request you to remain alert. Today’s tense atmosphere should make every Muslim who is still living unawares a true Muslim. They are banning the Qur’an. Has the time not come that you become regular in saying your namaz as ordained by it? They are thinking of banning the Qur’an. Has the time not come that you keep your rozas even in the heat of summer? The more they talk of banning the Qur’an, the more you should live according to it. Give your life a religious cast.

  The secret of Muslim strength does not lie in the sheer number of Muslims all over the world, a millat of which the Indian Muslims are also a part, a notion of a pan-Islamic collectivity which is the stuff of the Hindu nationalist’s nightmares. For the Muslims, the offer of such a collective identity helps to counteract the feeling of being an embattled minority in one particular country. The real secret of Muslim strength, however, lies in the superiority of Islam over the religion of the Hindus. Our religion makes us stronger, their divisive faith makes them weaker. Our religion is of the future, theirs mired in an outdated past. We are stronger than we think, they weaker than what they or we might believe.

  Why do they talk of a ban on the Qur’an? Why are they so afraid of the Qur’an? They are afraid because their religion is one of touchables-untouchables. Qur’an gives a religion of universal equality. They have no place in their hearts for their own people. Let them allow a Harijan to drink water from their wells. These high-caste people who talk of Rama and Sita, let them first permit Harijans to enter their temples. In contrast, look at the Qur’an. It gives every human being a right to equality on the basis of his humanity. That is why thirteen thousand Harijans, thirteen thousand tribals, converted to Islam in Meenakshipuram in Madras. They did not know what is written in the Qur’an. They only knew that Qur’an gives people of low caste the right to sit together with people of higher castes on terms of equality. So these Harijans who have been given so many benefits by the state are ready to throw them away. We do not want benefits which give us food and clothing but which leave our hearts enslaved. We want freedom of our minds, freedom for our souls. We are prepared to tolerate slavery of every kind but not of the soul. You, enslavers of the soul, Qur’an liberates the soul! That is why we believe in the Qur’an which gives life to the soul, makes a black like Billal the chief of a fair-skinned tribe.d Today, when Muslims are being massacred everywhere, when there is talk of doing away with Muslim personal law, when the honour of our mothers and sisters is being violated, when our children are being martyred, when our very existence is unbearable to others, thirteen thousand Harijans chose to convert to our religion. Because man wants freedom for the soul. A bird will be unhappy even if confined in a palace of gold. Its soul craves for the freedom of the garden. Islam gives that freedom. The result is that not only in Islamic but also in non-Islamic countries, people are flocking to convert to Islam. No one is asking them or telling them to become Muslims. It is because of its teachings that people are taking refuge in the Qur’an.

  Do you think Qur’an can be finished off by merely banning it? We have lived with the Qur’an for fourteen hundred years. We have passed under arches of swords. We have come through the battlefield of Karbala. We have passed through the valleys of Spain, through the hills of Gibraltar, through the plains of India. We can say with pride that in spite of thousands of ordeals it has undergone, the Muslim nation remains incomparable. The love it has for the Qur’an is unmatched by that of any other community for its religious books. No one loves his religion more than the Muslim loves Islam. We need to maintain relationships with Muslims all over the world. We have tried and succeeded in developing these relationships. We can then deal with any challenge that comes from either inside or outside the country. Our faith grows stronger with each challenge it faces and makes us more powerful. The fox which wakes up a sleeping lion should first look after its own safety. Anyone who dares to challenge the Qur’an should be aware that either he or his father or his offspring will have to become a Muslim.

  It is the voice of Mohammed, the command of God,

  which can never be altered

  The world may change a thousand times, the

  Qur’an never.

  In summary, the psychological process involved in Muslim fundamentalist politics, which has as its goal the replacement of political, economic, and social bases of politics with a religious critique, consists essentially of two steps. First, there is an attempt to erase previous cognitive structures, as they relate to political life and issues, through the generation of a strong persecution anxiety in the group. Second, on the now relatively clean slate of the group’s political psyche, the fundamentalist politician proceeds to draw a group self-portrait—offers the Muslims a collective identity—which emphasizes the community’s superiority in relation to the enemy group, the nationalist Hindus. Although this superiority may have many other features, such as the strength to be derived from an identification with a larger, powerful pan-Islamic community, its core is a conviction in the inherent superiority of the group’s religion, Islam, and of all its symbols. To maintain this feeling of superiority and the strength it gives to the members of the community, it is considered essential for the individual to be zealous in th
e observance of religious duties, accept the priority of religion in all areas of life, and to acknowledge the demands of religion as having the first call on individual loyalty.

  To conclude: The reasons for the attraction of the fundamentalist identity for many Muslims are not difficult to fathom. Apart from providing a forum for resistance to perceived domination and repression, fundamentalism offers a narcissistic enhancement for a sense of self-esteem fractured by the workings of a historical fate. Besides giving a sacred meaning and transcendent purpose to the lives of the hurt, the dislocated, and the shipwrecked, fundamentalism also makes a masochistic reparation for guilt feelings possible. In defining an Other as a competitor with a deadly intent toward one’s own group, fundamentalism provides a focus for undue anger and unresolved hate. Little wonder that many are willing to pay the costs of a fundamentalist identity—a considerable denial of reality, the closing of one’s eyes and mind to the structures of the contemporary world, and the renunciation of a pleasure-seeking attitude in favour of a religiously disciplined life.

  Religious Conflict in the Modern World

  Our times are witness to a worldwide wave of religious revival. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, the new religions in Japan, born-again Christians in the United States, and the Protestant sects in Latin America are undergoing a resurgence which is regarded with deep distrust by all the modern heirs to the Enlightenment. Although a secular humanist might find most manifestations of the current religious zeal personally distasteful, he or she is nonetheless aware that the revitalization of religion at the end of the twentieth century constitutes a complex attempt at the resacralization of cultures beset with the many ills of modernity. As Andrew Samuels reminds us, this fragmented and fractured attempt at resacralization to combat the sense of oppression and a future utterly bereft of any vision of transcendent purpose is not only a part of the new religious fundamentalisms but also integral to the so-called left-leaning, progressive political movements.1 One can discern the search for transcendence even in concerns around ecological issues and environmental protection where at least some of the discourse is comprised of elements of nature mysticism.