I congratulate Saeed Naqvi sahib for having this book, published two years earlier, translated into Urdu, Hindi, and some other of our languages.
Thus linguistic diversity is a fact. The Eighth Schedule of the Constitution mentions 22 languages and the Linguistic Survey of India lists 122 languages. These do not include a language called Hindustani, mentioned in Article 351 of the constitution and in which, according to the official verbatim record of the Constituent Assembly, the presided of the Assembly Dr. Rajendra Prasad and several other Member spoke on August 14-15 spoke.
The book is an aap beti, an autobiography. It expresses the author’s viewpoint on past and contemporary happenings.
The title, Watan main Ghair: Hindustani Musalmaan is intriguing and distressing. Who made whom ‘ghair’, how was the ‘Other’ crafted?
In Urdu literature ‘ghair’ has multiple meanings and is used in many senses. In poetry ‘raqeeb’ and ‘ghair’ are used interchangeably.
This book is not about literature. It is about how a substantial segment of the citizen body of the Republic of India have been blamed and punished for the ‘sin’ of having brought about the Partition of 1947. This simplification is a falsehood; diligent research shows that all concerned were responsible for it and all consented. A good example of it (but not the only one) is Sardar Patel’s speech in Delhi on August 11, 1947: ‘We took these extreme steps after great deliberation. In spite of my previous strong opposition to partition, I agreed to it because I was convinced that in order to keep India united it must be divide.’
Blaming Muslims alone for partition is factually wrong and mischievous, more so because this lie has been used as an instrument of discrimination and exclusion from the benefits in equal measure of state-induced developmental schemes. The book gives many instances of acts of commission and omission in regard to this in the past seventy years.
The chapters of the book on communal riots and failures of state machinery are graphic in their gory details. Every happening appears to have been used to blame it on the ‘Other’.
It is instructive to trace the development of the narrative. A loaded meaning seems to have been given to the term ‘minority’. When the Report of the Committee on Minority Rights was being discussed in the Constituent Assembly on August 28, 1947 and after defining the Scheduled Castes ‘as part of the Hindu Community’, Maulana Hasrat Mohani had asked why are Muslims only being referred to as minority? ‘I refuse to accept Muslims to be a minority?” Later, on November 22, 1949, a highly respected Congress member Ajit Prasad Jain said in the debate that the birth of Pakistan ‘smoothened our work of constitution-making’ as ‘the question of minorities, which had been our headache and which thwarted all our efforts for the solution of national problems, has ceased to be a live issue.’
So the Muslim segment of the citizen body was tagged as ‘minority’, blamed for being responsible for the Partition, offered palliatives at times, demonized at others, and perennially threatened with assimilation and homogenization in the garb of national integrity.
Religious minorities constitute 20.2 per cent of the population of India. Thus every fifth citizen belongs to a religious minority; this includes 14.2 percent Muslims numbering around 190 million or one out of every seven. How can such a large number be the Other?
Many decades earlier the poet Mohammad Iqbal had summed up the requirement:
Bichroun kon phirp mila dain, naqsh-e-dui mitaa dain