The Great Speeches of Modern India

by Rudrangshu Mukherjee

  For four decades, pseudo-secularists have commanded an undisputed supremacy in Indian politics. Jana Sangh’s and the Bhartiya Janata Party’s was, at best, a feeble voice of dissent. Ayodhya has enabled our viewpoint to become a formidable challenge.

  Unable to meet this challenge at the ideological and political level through discussion and debate, the Government has pulled out of its armoury all the usual weapons used in such situations by repressive regimes like arrests, ban on associations, and ban on meetings.

  The demolition of the Babri structure is only an excuse to carry out what they have been itching to do for quite some time. After all, all this talk about the need to have BJP derecognized or deregistered has not started now. Mr Arjun Singh had formally petitioned the Election Commission in this regard more than a year back. The Election Commission rejected his plea. Ever since, the ruling party has been toying with the idea of amending the Representation of the Peoples Act to achieve this objective.

  Without naming either the BJP or the RSS, Mr Narasimha Rao himself, in his presidential address to the Congress session at Tirupati, had endorsed the idea. When I met him and registered my protest, he tried to backtrack, and maintained that he had in mind only organizations like the Majlis (of Owaisi).

  Elementary political prudence should have restrained the Prime Minister from taking the series of unwise steps he has taken after December 6—banning the RSS and VHP, dismissing the BJP Government of Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, and promising to rebuild the demolished ‘mosque’. But then, history keeps repeating itself in a quaint fashion.

  Left to himself, Mr V.P. Singh may not have obstructed the Rath Yatra of 1990. But the internal politics of Janata Dal forced his hand. To prove himself a greater patron of the minorities than Mr Mulayam Singh, V.P. asked Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav to take action before the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister did so. Mr Yadav did as he was told, and became instrumental for terminating V.P.’s tenure.

  This time around, Mr Arjun Singh has played a Mulayam Singh to Mr Narasimha Rao. The denouement may well be the same.

  In Parliament as well as outside, a prime target of attack for our critics has been Mr Kalyan Singh. He is being accused of betrayal, of ‘deceit’, of ‘conspiracy’, and what not. The general refrain is that Kalyan Singh promised to the courts, to the National Integration Council, to the Central Government, that he would protect the structure; New Delhi trusted his words, he has betrayed the trust.

  None of these Kalyan baiters ever mention, there was an addendum that he would not use force against the kar sevaks, because he would not like to see any repetitions of the traumatic happenings which took place in 1990 during Mr Mulayam Singh’s tenure. This has been stated even in the affidavit given to the Supreme Court by the UP Government.

  On December 6, Mr Kalyan Singh stuck to his stand. When informed that all efforts at persuading the kar sevaks to desist from demolishing the structure had failed, and that protection of the structure had become impossible except by resort to firing, he resigned forthwith.

  When political leaders have been driven into such difficult corners, they have been generally inclined to issue oral orders. Bureaucrats have often had to pay the price for such deviousness. In contrast, Mr Kalyan Singh acted in an exemplary manner. He put down his orders about not using force in writing so that the officers are not punished for what was entirely a political decision.

  I shudder to think what would have happened that day at Ayodhya if firing had taken place. Jallianwala Bagh would have been reenacted many times over. There would have been a holocaust not only in Ayodhya but in the whole country. Thus, Mr Kalyan Singh acted wisely in refusing to use force.

  It is significant that the last phase of the demolition, the clearing of the debts, installation of the Ram Lalla idols with due ceremony, and erection of a temporary temple to house the idols—all happened after New Delhi had taken over the state administration. Yet, wisely again, the Narasimha Rao Government made no attempt to use force to prevent it all from happening.

  No doubt, it was Mr Kalyan Singh’s duty to protect the Babri structure. He failed to do so; so he resigned. The protection of the country’s Prime Minister is the responsibility of the Union Home Minister. The country should not forget that Mr Rao was the Home Minister, when Mrs Gandhi was brutally killed. It can be said that Mr Rao failed to protect her and that he failed to protect more than 3,000 Sikhs who were killed in the wake of Mrs Gandhi’s assassination.

  Today, I am not arraigning Mr Rao for failing to resign on that score. I am only trying to point out how outraged he would have felt if, say, in 1984 he had been accused not just of a failure to protect, but of actual complicity in the perpetration of those horrendous crimes!

  Political observers who have been feeling baffled by the abrupt change of mood of the BJP-RSS-VHP combine, from one of regret on December 6, to one of ‘determined belligerence’ from December 8 onward, must appreciate that it is a similar sense of outrage over all that the Government and our other opponents have been saying and doing that fully accounts for it.

  Let it also be realized that once you start circulating conspiracy charges with irresponsible levity, the distrust generated will ultimately boomerang, and get back to its source. I was really amused to read a column by Tavleen Singh in which she summed up the attitude of Congressmen towards Mr Rao in these words: ‘Those who are still with him charge him only with being indecisive and weak. Those who are against him are saying much more. Even ministers are admitting, albeit privately, that the Prime Minister had adequate information, before December 6, to be prepared for what eventually happened. Some go so far as to charge him with collusion with the BJP on the grounds that he is not interested in a Congress revival in North India as this would make it harder for a Prime Minister from the South’ ( The Observer, December 18).

  Some of our critics have been comparing the demolition of the Babri structure with the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. The comparison is ludicrous. But from a purely personal angle, I can establish a nexus. I was 20-years-old at that time, and as RSS pracharrak in Rajasthan, Mahatmaji’s murder also was followed by a ban on the RSS. I was among the tens of thousands of RSS activists jailed at that time. I recall that the accusations and calumny heaped on us then were far more vile and vicious than we are having to face today. The trail of Godse and the Commission of Inquiry set up later, nailed all the lies circulated, and completely exonerated the RSS from the libelous charges hurled at it.

  The RSS emerged from that first major crisis in its life purer and stronger. It is not without significance that one of those who was spearheading the anti-RSS campaign in 1948—Mr Jayaprakash Narayan—later became one of its most ardent admirers and protagonists.

  When the RSS was banned the second time in 1975, BJP and RSS became comrades-in-arms waging an unrelenting battle for the defence of democracy.

  In one of his speeches in 1977, the Loknayak observed: ‘The RSS is a revolutionary organization. No other organization in the country comes anywhere near it. It alone has the capacity to transform society, and casteism, and wipe the tears from the eyes of the poor. May God give you strength and may you live up to such expectations.’

  Self-preservation is a basic instinct of all living beings. Only a human being can think of and commit suicide. There is, however, a rodent found in Scandinavian countries, called the lemming, which in this context is supposed to be unique among animals, and behaves unnaturally.

  The Concise Oxford Dictionary describes the lemming as a ‘small Arctic rodent of the genus Lemmus…which is reputed to rush headlong into the sea and drown during migration.’ To me, it seems the Congress Party these days is in the grip of a terrible lemming-complex!

  Let the Congress do with itself what it wishes. For the BJP, the situation poses a challenge which, if tackled wisely, with determination and a readiness, if need be to wage a protracted struggle, can become a watershed in the history of independent India.

  Let us al
so realize that intolerance and fanaticism are traits which may appear to give a cutting edge to a movement but which actually cause great damage to the movement. They have to be consciously eschewed. Once that happens, even our Muslim brethren would appreciate that in India there can be no firmer foundation for communal harmony than cultural nationalism.

  The present situation presents to the country a unique opportunity. Let us grab it by the forelock. December 6 did not turn out to be as we expected, we did not want it to happen that way. But then, as the famous essayist Sir Arthur Helps has said: ‘Fortune does not stoop often to take any one up. Favourable opportunities will not happen precisely in the way that you imagined. Nothing does.’ Or, as Goswami Tulsidas has put it in a somewhat different way: ‘Hoi hai soi jo Rama rachi rakha’!

  1. This speech was originally published in The Indian Express.

  The fatwa (Cambridge, February 1993)

  SALMAN RUSHDIE (1947–)

  In 1989 Rushdie was forced to go into hiding when Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed a fatwa against him because his novel, The Satanic Verses was offensive to the Prophet Mohammad and Islam. This thoughtful, stirring speech, about human rights and personal freedom, was given in King’s College Chapel in Cambridge University on the fourth anniversary of the fatwa. Rushdie continues to remain under the death threat.

  To stand in this house is to be reminded of what is most beautiful about religious faith: its ability to give solace and to inspire, its aspiration to these great and lovely heights, in which strength and delicacy are so perfectly conjoined. In addition, to be asked to speak here on this day, the fourth anniversary of the notorious fatwa of the late Imam Khomeini, is a particular honour. When I was an undergraduate at this college, between 1965 and 1968, the years of flower-power and student power, I would have found the notion of delivering an address in King’s Chapel pretty far-out, as we used to say; and yet, such are the journeys of one’s life that here I stand. I am grateful to the Chapel and the college for extending this invitation, which I take as a gesture of solidarity and support, support not merely for one individual but, much more importantly, for the high moral principles of human rights and human freedoms that the Khomeini edict seeks so brutally to attack. For just as King’s Chapel may be taken as a symbol of what is best about religion, so the fatwa has become a symbol of what is worst.

  It feels all the more appropriate to be speaking here because it was while in my final year of reading history at Cambridge that I came across the story of the so-called satanic verses or temptation of the Prophet Muhammad, and of his rejection of that temptation. That year, I had chosen as one of my special subjects a paper on Muhammad, the rise of Islam, and the caliphate. So few students chose this option that the lectures were cancelled. The other students switched to different special subjects. However, I was anxious to continue, and Arthur Hibbert, one of the King’s history dons, agreed to supervise me. So as it happened I was, I think, the only student in Cambridge who took the paper. The next year, I’m told, it was not offered again. This is the kind of thing that almost leads one to believe in the workings of a hidden hand.

  The story of the ‘satanic verses’ can be found, among other places, in the canonical writings of the classical writer al-Tabari. He tells us that on one occasion the Prophet was given verses which seemed to accept the divinity of the three most popular pagan goddesses of Mecca, thus compromising Islam’s rigid monotheism. Later he rejected these verses as being a trick of the devil saying that Satan had appeared to him in the guise of the Archangel Gabriel and spoken ‘satanic verses.’

  Historians have long speculated about this incident, wondering if perhaps the nascent religion had been offered a sort of deal by the pagan authorities of the city, which was flirted with and then refused. I felt the story humanized the Prophet, and, therefore made him more accessible, more easily comprehensible to a modern reader, for whom the presence of doubt in a human mind, and human imperfections in a great man’s personality, can only make that mind, that personality, more attractive. Indeed, according to the traditions of the Prophet, even the Archangel Gabriel was understanding about the incident, assuring him that such things had befallen all the prophets, and that he need not worry about what had happened. It seems that the Archangel Gabriel, and the God in whose name he spoke, was rather more tolerant than some of those who presently affect to speak in the name of God.

  Khomeini’s fatwa itself may be seen as a set of modern satanic verses. In the fatwa, once again, evil takes on the guise of virtue; and the faithful are deceived.

  It’s important to remember what the fatwa is. One cannot properly call it a sentence, since it far exceeds its author’s jurisdiction; since it contravenes fundamental principles of Islamic law; and since it was issued without the faintest pretence of any legal process. (Even Stalin thought it necessary to hold show trials)! It is, in fact, a straightforward terrorist threat, and in the West it has already had very harmful effects. There is much evidence that writers and publishers have become nervous of publishing any material about Islam except of the most reverential and anodyne sort. There are instances of contracts for books being canceled, of texts being rewritten. Even so independent an artist as the filmmaker Spike Lee felt the need to submit to Islamic authorities the script of his film about Malcolm X, who was for a time a member of the Nation of Islam and performed the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca. And to this day, almost one year after the paperback of The Satanic Verses was published (by a specially constituted consortium) in the United States, and imported into Britain, no British publisher has had the nerve to take on distribution of the softcover edition, even though it has been in the bookstores for months without causing the tiniest frisson.

  In the East, however, the fatwa’s implications are far more sinister. ‘You must defend Rushdie,’ an Iranian writer told a British scholar recently. ‘In defending Rushdie you are defending us.’ In January, in Turkey, an Iranian-trained hit-squad assassinated the secular journalist Ugur Mumçu. Last year, in Egypt, fundamentalist assassins killed Farag Fouda, one of the country’s leading secular thinkers. Today, in Iran, many of the brave writers and intellectuals who defended me are being threatened with death-squads.

  Last summer, I was able to participate in a literary seminar staged in a Cambridge college and attended by scholars and writers from all over the world, including many Muslims. I was touched by the friendship and enthusiasm with which the Muslim delegates greeted me. A distinguished Saudi journalist took my arm and said, ‘I want to embrace you because you, Mr Rushdie, are a free man.’ He was fully aware of the ironies of what he was saying. He meant that freedom of speech, freedom of the imagination, is that freedom which gives meaning to all the others. He could walk the streets, get his work published, lead an ordinary life, and did not feel free, because there was so much he could not say, so much he hardly dared to think. I was protected by the Special Branch; he had to watch out for the Thought Police.

  Today, as Professor Fred Halliday says in this week’s New Statesman & Society, ‘the battle for freedom of expression, and for political and gender rights, is being fought out not in the senior common rooms and dinner tables of Europe, but in the Islamic world.’ In his essay, he gives some instances of the way in which the case of The Satanic Verses is being used as a symbol by the oppressed voices of the Muslim world. One of the many Iranian exile radio stations, he tells us, has even named itself Voice of the Satanic Verses.

  The Satanic Verses is a committedly secular text that deals in part with the material of religious faith. For the religious fundamentalist, especially, at present, the Islamic fundamentalist, the adjective ‘secular’ is the dirtiest of dirty words. But here’s a strange paradox: in my country of origin, India, it was the secular ideal of Nehru and Gandhi that protected the nation’s large Muslim minority, and it is the decay of that ideal that leads directly to the bloody sectarian confrontations which the subcontinent is now witnessing, confrontations that were long foretold and could have
been avoided, had not so many politicians chosen to fan the flames of religious hatred. Indian Muslims have always known the importance of secularism; it is from that experience that my own secularism springs. In the past four years, my commitment to that ideal, and to the ancillary principles of pluralism, skepticism, and tolerance, has been doubled and redoubled.

  I have had to understand not just what I am fighting against—in this situation, that’s not very hard—but also what I am fighting for, what is worth fighting for with one’s life. Religious fanaticism’s scorn for secularism and for unbelief led me to my answer. It is that values and morals are independent of religious faith, that good and evil come before religion: that—if I may be permitted to say this in the house of God—it is perfectly possible, and for many of us even necessary, to construct our ideas of the good without taking refuge in faith. That is where our freedom lies, and it is that freedom, among many others, which the fatwa threatens, and which it cannot be allowed to destroy.

  Survival and Right to Information (Hyderabad, December 1996)

  ARUNA ROY (1946–)

  On 29 December, 1991, newspapers in Hyderabad carried a report that two unidentified Naxalites were killed in an encounter at Masjiguda, on the outskirts of the city. According to the police they were killed in the early hours of 28 December in an exchange of fire. By the next evening it became clear that one of the killed was Gulam Rasool, a reporter working with Udayam, the third largest circulating Telugu daily. The death of someone the police described as a Naxalite in the hands of the police opened up for the activist, Aruna Roy the complex questions of the relationship of the rule of law and the democratic rights of individuals. In 1996 when the speech was made it was often impossible to get information about those who had died in the hands of the police and how they had died. The phrase ‘encounter killings’ was coined to cover a multitude of sins. Roy addresses these issues and this speech marks the beginning of her journey to campaign and establish the Right to Information Act.