Post-Uprising Bangladesh Toddles Towards Democracy

Bangladesh’s post-uprising government is negotiating a sea of challenges as it speaks of radical changes to restore democracy

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
Updated on: 19 October 2024

Students stage a demonstration on the High Court premises during a protest to demand the resignation of pro-Awami League judges in Dhaka Photo: Getty Images

There was a hint of tragedy right at the beginning of Bangladesh’s new journey on August 5 that spoilt the celebration party, even if partially.

On August 1, when the stage was set for the student-led protesters’ one-point demand for Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s resignation, one video clip from a 2019 event went viral on social media. Its audio was used in the background of almost every visual of public gatherings in Bangladesh’s cities and towns in the first week of August.

The video had hundreds of students joining folk music band Joler Gaan’s members to sing Dhono Dhanyo Pushpe Bhora (abundant with wealth, food and flowers), one of undivided Bengal’s most popular patriotic songs, while waving their cellphone flashlights in darkness – a magical moment.

People sharing the clip on social media in August 2024 said the 2019 rendition – with hundreds in thundering chorus and Joler Gaan’s Rahul Ananda’s prompts in between – brought tears to their eyes, gave them goosebumps and filled them with patriotic fervour as they fought to liberate themselves from Hasina’s Awami League’s authoritarian rule. Joler Gaan members, too, participated in the protests.

But on August 5, as the news of Hasina’s resignation and exit from Bangladesh spread, and mobs started vandalising Hasina’s residence and statues, sculptures and properties of national importance across cities and towns, Joler Gaan founder Rahul Ananda’s residence-cum-the group’s studio in Dhaka was not spared either. Rare musical instruments were burnt, broken and looted. Ananda bore the brunt of collateral damage.

In Jessore, when a group of young protesters was reportedly vandalising an upper floor of ruling party leader Shaheen Chakladar’s 5-star hotel, another mob set fire to the lower floors, killing about two dozen youths stranded on the upper floor.

Since then, while being relieved at the fall of an authoritarian rule, the people of Bangladesh have also remained worried about the possibility of falling into anarchy or in the hands of another group of undemocratic forces, the Islamic radicals.

Mob rule has kept Bangladesh on the edge, in particular, leading to a series of tragedies. People have been lynched, humiliated, and forced to resign from government jobs. Hindu temples, Sufi shrines and Buddha statues came under attack. While the interim government, headed by peace Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, has taken multiple measures that earned praises from civil society, some trends keep even some of Hasina’s staunchest critics worried.

According to Dhaka-based economist and public intellectual Anu Muhammad, the interim government has taken the right steps to look deeply into the financial crisis, national indebtedness, problems with financing mega projects, agreements and contracts and mega corruption.

He lauded the efforts to reform the election commission, the civil administration and the police force and rewriting the Constitution. Some “good, well-deserved” people have found appointments in top posts in various institutions like Universities and art and culture academies, Muhammad says.

However, he is concerned with the government’s “inability or reluctance” to stop the mob violence, and attacks on religious and ethnic minorities, temples and shrines. He is also worried about the indiscriminate filing of cases against people connected with the previous regime. This he finds a violation of the new government’s promise to ensure free and fair trials of specific responsible persons of the past regime for killing and looting.

“Harassing women for dress, occupation and appearances has become a matter of big concern. The spread of discriminatory oppressive ideas and forces is also a matter of concern,” says Muhammad, a member of the newly formed Ganatantrik Adhikar Committee (Committee for Democratic Rights).

In Bangladesh, Will The August Of Liberation Last?
BY Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

Debates and Diktats

One of the positive aspects a Dhaka-based journalist highlights is the increase in the number of debates and discussions on a range of issues involving a wide variety of forces.

There are demands for rewriting the national socio-political history, re-evaluating major events leading to where the country stands today, identifying the roots of political authoritarianism and the search for the identity of Bangladeshi people and the role of language and religion in shaping politics and identity. People are debating about what the key features of the new Constitution should be.

Leaders of the interim government have argued that during Hasina’s rule, the AL appropriated the whole history of the country’s 1971 liberation war, suppressed the AL’s authoritarian turn during 1972-75 and erased everyone other than Hasina’s family from the history of nation building to create a cult out of her father, Mujibur Rahman, the leader of the Liberation War and Bangladesh’s first President.

This is why an objective history of the country, highlighting the roles of all heroes sidelined in history for so long, has to be rewritten, they have argued. AL supporters have seen in these efforts to erase Mujibur Rahman and the legacy of the 1971 liberation war. Some Islamic radicals have even called for disowning the 1971 ‘independence’ altogether, ob the ground that it came with India’s help.

There are debates about the nature of Islam – how the religion practiced in Bangladesh is different from those of northwest India, Pakistan, and the Arab world. Many such discussions are triggering radical backlashes, who are calling for turning Bangladesh into an Islamic country.

Bangladeshi political expert Mubashar Hasan, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway, agrees that people are speaking more freely on matters related to politics and governance. “People are enjoying this freedom of expression. No one is spared from criticism,” he tells Outlook.

Hasan, a survivor of the Hasina regime’s enforced disappearance tactics used to silence critics, lauds the Yunus government’s decision to join the Convention against Enforced Disappearance and the move to try those accused of the July-August violence perpetrated by the previous government and ruling party in the International Crimes Tribunal. He appreciates the government’s measures in the economic field, such as initiating talks with Western financial institutions.


Law and Order

Many in Bangladesh believe the Yunus government’s lack of control over law and order stems from its lack of political authority.

They argue that at the core of the interim government are Yunus and three student leaders – Mahfuz Abdullah (Alam), Nahid Islam and Asif Mahmood – from a student organisation, Ganatantrik Chhatra Shakti, launched only last year. It lacks organisational influence outside Dhaka and other varsity towns, even if the leaders enjoy high popularity among the masses.

“Due to their lack of political organisation and authority, they depend heavily on cooperation from the Army and myriad political forces opposed to Hasina, especially Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) and other Muslim groups,” says a Dhaka University professor who does not want to be named.

The professor adds that the government is trying to gain the civil society’s confidence but in the conflict between civil society and undemocratic religious forces, it stands indecisive or infirm. “At present, even the police fear getting mobbed and lynched. Only a government with a clear public mandate can restore law and order. ”

Among the most worrying trends, the professor highlights how the banned international terrorist organisation Hizb-Ut-Tahrir has been publicly holding rallies, displaying the black flag used by West Asian terror groups, and calling for establishing a Caliphate in Bangladesh. Besides, the syllabus reforms committee was dissolved after an Islamic cleric objected to some members for their secular stands.

“No one really knows who is in control. There is a cold tension between all forces. I feel that multiple forces are trying to assert and wrest control but none have it yet,” says a Dhaka-based journalist.

Hasan, however, attributes the Yunus government’s struggles in restoring control over the law and order situation to the police force’s lack of confidence. Many officers remain in hiding due to their brutal crackdown on protesters and are attempting to avoid public backlash and legal procedures, he says.

Those who have returned to duty often remain inactive, even in situations that require a proactive role from law enforcement. This contributed to insecurity among some minorities, as seen in attacks on minority religious groups and followers of Sufi traditions. The government finally granted magistracy power to the Army to improve the situation.

According to Hasan, the most pressing issue is when Bangladesh will hold elections, as at the root of the country’s current crisis lies the absence of a credible election in over a decade. People joined the student movement demanding Hasina’s resignation because they had already been calling for her departure for many months to pave the way for a free and fair election.

“Even during the student agitation, there was no talk of Rashtra Sanskar (state reforms). Their sole demand, which garnered widespread support, was for Hasina’s resignation. This was neither a coup nor a revolution. There was no pre-declared reform agenda—it was a mass uprising. While people want reforms, they also desire a government with a popular mandate to implement them. The government must prioritise conducting a free and fair election,” he tells Outlook.


Behind Bangladesh Protests, The Weight of Deep-Seated Frustrations
BY Rabiul Alam

Changing Political Landscape

Another debate that has gripped Bangladesh is whether the interim government should wait for all its intended reforms before conducting the elections or engage only in the reforms necessary for conducting a free and fair election and then leave the rest on the government form through electoral mandate.

While the main forces behind the uprising are favouring thorough reforms first, major parties like the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which was Hasina’s AL’s chief opponent and is now perceived to be the largest party, prefer the interim government to focus on electoral and administrative reforms necessary for conducting the elections.

Indicating a change in the political landscape, the BNP is increasingly trying to project itself as a liberal democratic force and engaging in conflict with Jamaat-e-Islami, the largest Islamic political party. The JeI was the BNP’s long-term ally against Hasina.

Political observers see in these developments the emergence of new political alignments, in which the BNP stands on one side, the Ganatantrik Chhatra Shakti-backed new political formation on the other, and a JeI-led alliance of Islamic parties as the third force.

While some Ganatantrik Chhatra Shakti leaders and others have argued for banning Hasina’s Awami League from politics, the BNP opposed it, saying it wants the AL to be on the electoral field. Hasina and her collaborators should face free and fair trials but all parties should get a level playing field for the proper restoration of democracy, BNP leaders argued.

BNP leaders believe the AL has earned such notoriety due to its authoritarian rule and the massacre of protesters between July 15 and August 4 that it has no chance of coming anywhere close to power even if allowed to contest.

Parties that had allied with Hasina, though, allege an atmosphere of terror that would not allow them any scope for free and fair participation in the elections. The Yunus government has already issued an arrest warrant against Hasina, who is reportedly living in India since her hurried exit from Bangladesh on August 5. Most other senior AL leaders are either in jail or in hiding. Leaders of some of Hasina’s ally parties have shared the same fate.

Recently, Army Chief Waker-uz-Zaman, while strongly backing the Yunus government, said that he feels the reforms should be completed and a transition to democracy initiated within 12 to 18 months. While Yunus has been evasive on any electoral timeline, the government’s chief law advisor, Dhaka University professor Asif Nazrul told the media that his “primary assumption” says conducting the elections should be possible by the next year.

Whether or when elections or reforms become a new conflict point remains to be seen.

Albania to create world’s smallest sovereign state for Bektashi order

Prime Minister Edi Rama confirmed plans for Vatican-style state within Albania’s capital Tirana. / bne IntelliNews

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By bne IntelliNews September 23, 2024

Albania is planning to create a sovereign microstate for the Bektashi Order, a Sufi Muslim sect, within its capital Tirana, Prime Minister Edi Rama confirmed in a speech to the UN General Assembly on September 22. 

The new state will be modelled on the Vatican City in Rome. The plan for the Bektashi microstate reflects Albania’s broader aim of promoting peaceful religious coexistence both at home and abroad.

The new state, which would occupy a 10-hectare parcel of land — about one-quarter of the size of Vatican City — would have its own administration, passports and borders, according to media reports. It will follow the religious practices of the Bektashi Order, a Shiite Sufi group founded in 13th-century Turkey. 

While specifics on the granting of sovereignty remain unclear, Bektashi leaders have expressed enthusiasm for the project. 

In his speech to the UNGA, Rama spoke of Albania’s historical role in fostering religious tolerance, citing examples from World War II and the recent Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, according to a transcript published by the government.

“While Albania may be a small country, it has given the world good examples, which has been taken to protect our common humanity,” Rama said, referencing Albania’s protection of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. “The Jewish community grew 20-fold during the Holocaust thanks to Muslim and Christian families who protected them from the Nazis.”

Rama also pointed to Albania’s recent sheltering of Afghans following the Taliban's return to power, calling it an example of the country’s commitment to protecting the vulnerable: “After the devastation of the fall of Kabul to the Taliban three years ago, we sheltered several thousand Afghans who would otherwise have ended up in the ninth circle of Hell!”

The Bektashi Order has a long history within Albania, having gained prominence in the 15th century through its influence on the Janissary Corps, the elite soldiers of the Ottoman sultan. The order was later banned in Turkey during the secular reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and many of its members relocated to Albania, where it has since thrived.

Nearly half of Albania’s population identifies as Muslim, but the country has significant Catholic and Orthodox Christian minorities.

The Bektashi Order accounts for about 10% of Albania’s Muslim population. It is known for its progressive values, including allowing alcohol consumption, permitting women to dress freely, and eschewing strict lifestyle rules.

The creation of the new microstate is seen as a continuation of Albania’s tradition of religious tolerance, which is central to its national identity.

“Albania … gave the world the youngest saint, Mother Teresa, whose life embodied love for humanity,” Rama said. “It reminded us that not all of us can do big things, but we can do small things with great love. This is the principle on which Albania stands… this is the source of our inspiration, to support the transformation of the center of the Bektashi World Order into a sovereign state within our capital, Tirana.”

The Bektashi leadership, led by Baba Mondi, the order's head, would oversee both religious and administrative functions of the state, with citizenship limited to senior religious figures. The order envisions the microstate as a spiritual and administrative hub, operating independently of the Albanian government.

 

Poet and journalist in Egypt faces intense cyberbullying: “The collective male mindset targeted my body”

It has become so normalized that if you disagree with a man, you criticize his ideas; but if you disagree with a woman, you attack her body and her morality. In the darkness of this form of conservativism, no one refutes it. As an intelligent woman in Egypt with my own ideas, the bullying takes myriad forms.

Fatima Naoot

• 13 mins ago
 
• August 6, 2024

Cyberbullying and online blackmail against women in Egypt is on the rise, according to a study published by the Speak Up initiative in March. | Photo courtesy of Niklas Hamann on Unsplash

This Op-Ed is one in a series aimed at shedding light on critical global issues that demand urgent attention and address a spectrum of challenges affecting us all, emphasizing the need for collective action and support. By fostering awareness and encouraging collaboration, the writer hopes to inspire positive change and contribute to a more compassionate and equitable world as we cover the multitude of issues that impact our global community.

Orato journalist Mahasen Hawary met with Fatima Naoot, an Egyptian poet, engineer, and human rights activist. The two engaged in conversation about women in conservative Arab societies and the challenges they face as thinkers and opinion-makers. The journalist asked her about her response to campaigns that attempt to morally and ethically assassinate her character rather than engage in substantive debate. Ms. Naoot shared these thoughts.

Being born in a conservative society in Egypt, I saw women treated like disabled creatures who need a crutch in the form of a man. My own problems began many years ago, but they are not my problems alone. Women who think and ask questions in society, become like strange beings, as if we should not exist. We appear to move beyond the natural boundaries set for us. Expected to allow others to think and decide for us, we cannot truly lead.

I am a woman with independent ideas in Egypt, in a conservative society often viewing women as mindless. I experience a culture where women represent mere bodies designed to please men, carry children, give birth, and raise them – nothing more. Consequently, the collective male mindset targeted my body, harassing me relentlessly and going as far as fabricating indecent images of me.

Escalation of bullying degrades woman poet, activist in Egypt

In the reactionary mindset of Egypt’s conservative culture, the simplest way to attack a woman is to degrade her. Throughout my intellectual journey, I faced many forms of bullying, but the fabrication of vulgar photos felt deeply disturbing. When someone published these pictures and others began spreading them widely, I felt upset and distressed. Even in a more civilized society, an experience like this would bother a woman.

It has become so normalized that if you disagree with a man, you criticize his ideas; but if you disagree with a woman, you attack her body and her morality. In the darkness of this form of conservativism, no one refutes it. As an intelligent woman in Egypt with my own ideas, the bullying takes myriad forms.

In addition to fake nude photos, bullies mock my appearance. For example, they make fun of the shape of my nose. Sometimes I wonder, “If I like my nose, why does it bother you?” I cannot understand why attacking someone’s facial features feels appropriate.

My reaction to bullying changed over the years. In the beginning, I often cried. When I expressed an opinion or shared a poem, people launched full campaigns against me. Some professors at my college who since passed away made their mark on Egypt’s cultural life and in doing so, stirred up stagnant waters. I leaned on them for support.

At that time, as a young poet recently graduated from the Faculty of Engineering, I maintained an idealized image of the world. I drew from my Sufi father’s perspective and the education I received in a school run by nuns. I never imagined at that time how cruel people could be.

Despite attacks on her and her family, woman continues to call for justice

The world of poetry supposedly represents a realm of delicate feelings, emotions, and imagination. Yet, the gossip and hatred I encountered shocked me. The attacks on me publicly escalated to moral assassination. In response, I once wrote an article entitled “My Ordeal with Intellectuals,” as I grappled with feeling psychologically broken. I isolated myself for a while from the cultural community, having once idealized it.  

As I grew accustomed the cyberbullying, these people took it a step further. They targeted my autistic son. Their evil and harsh words felt like daggers stabbing me. “If you were a good woman, God would not have given you an autistic son,” they said. “This is God’s punishment in life, in addition to the punishing you will get in the afterlife.” The pain of those words felt unsurmountable. It marked a new episode in my saga in their desperate attempts to demonize me.

Today, I have adjusted to the reality in Egypt. The praise no longer dazzles me, and I shrug the bullying off. Most of the hate campaigns stem from my calls for justice and citizenship. The women of Egypt exist in a society that leans towards racism and racial and gender discrimination. They differentiate between men and women, Muslims and Christians, and the rich and poor.

When someone like me advocates publicly for citizenship and justice, people become very agitated, especially if the voice comes from a woman. Most of my journalistic and poetic writings remain preoccupied with justice. Therefore, I constantly fight injustice.

Arrested and convicted, women fights on and sees some improvement in opportunity for women in Egypt

The culture of Egypt remains so male-dominated, women often take on male names. If a woman’s name, for example, is Khadija, she might refer to herself as Om Saeed or Om Mohamed, using her son’s, husband’s, or brother’s name. She cancels her own name to conform to society and gain its approval. In a way, she colludes in erasing her independent identity to align with social norms. I stand against those norms.

Some years ago, I advocated for a civil state in Egypt, free of religious discrimination. My vocal opposition to religious rule through writing and speech culminated in a controversy over the Muslim holiday tradition of sacrifice.

When I criticized animal slaughter taking place in public in front of children, a lawyer filed charges against me. I fought a fierce legal battle, experiencing firsthand the meaning of a “legal war.” In 2016, I received a prison sentence for alleged contempt of religion. It felt like a malicious case from the start,

Initially sentenced to three years, they reduced my conviction to a suspended six-month term. Remarkably, Egyptian legislation later criminalized public slaughter, shielding children from the sight. Despite personal attacks and moral assassination attempts, I do see improvements in women’s status in Egypt.

The political leadership now honors women with important ministerial roles and governorships—a first in our history. While I acknowledge these significant steps, I hope religious institutions will further respect women’s rights by preventing child marriages and addressing polygamy. More must be done.

 WAR ON THE SUFI

ICC war crimes verdict for Timbuktu jihad police chief

By

 AFP

The International Criminal Court on Wednesday will issue a verdict in the case of a jihadist police chief accused of “unimaginable crimes” during an alleged reign of terror and sexual slavery in the fabled Malian city of Timbuktu.

Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud, 46, is accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture, rape and sexual slavery, and destroying religious and historic buildings.

Prosecutors say Al Hassan personally oversaw amputations and floggings as police chief when Islamic militants seized control of Timbuktu for almost a year from early 2012.

During the trial, which opened in 2020, prosecutors said Timbuktu citizens had lived in fear of “despicable” violence, citing the case of a man whose hand was amputated after being accused of petty theft.

“He was tied to a chair… and his hand was chopped off with a machete. A member of the armed group then held up his hand as a signal to others,” said then-chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda.

Bensouda said the women and girls of Timbuktu suffered most under the “gender-based persecution” in force under Al Hassan’s alleged reign of terror.

He is accused of forcing women and girls to “marry” fighters, with some victims raped multiple times, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors said he was “personally involved” in flogging women accused of adultery. Other women were allegedly beaten for what the Islamists saw as misdemeanours such as not wearing gloves.

Al Hassan himself told investigators that the people of Timbuktu were “scared out of their minds”, according to the prosecutor.

– ‘Pearl of the desert’ –

Founded between the fifth and 12th centuries by Tuareg tribes, Timbuktu is known as the “Pearl of the Desert” and “The City of 333 Saints” for the number of Muslim sages buried there during a golden age of Islam.

But jihadists who swept into the city considered the shrines idolatrous and destroyed them with pickaxes and bulldozers.

The militants from the Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Ansar Dine groups exploited an ethnic Tuareg uprising in 2012 to take over cities in Mali’s volatile north.

Al Hassan is the second Malian jihadist tried at the ICC for destroying religious sanctuaries in Timbuktu, which is inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list.

The court sentenced Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi in 2016 to nine years in prison, reduced by two years on appeal in 2021.

On Friday, the ICC made public an arrest warrant for one of the Sahel’s top jihadist leaders over alleged atrocities in Timbuktu from 2012 to 2013.

Iyad Ag Ghaly, is considered to be the leader of the Al-Qaeda-linked Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (JNIM), which operates in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

Also known as “Abou Fadl”, Ag Ghaly is wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed in Timbuktu, the ICC said.

These included murder, rape and sexual slavery, and attacks on buildings dedicated as religious and historic monuments.

Judges issued the warrant against Ag Ghaly in mid-2017, but the document has been kept under wraps for the past seven years because of “potential risks to witnesses and victims”.

by Richard CARTER

The Anti-Colonial Marxism of Mahdi Amel

The Lebanese Marxist thinker Mahdi Amel was assassinated on this day in 1987. Amel developed a version of Marxism that was grounded in the experience of colonized societies, showing how class struggle converges with the fight for national liberation.

Lebanese Marxist Mahdi Amel. (Archives of Assafir Newspaper)

BYHICHAM SAFIEDDINE
05.18.2024
JACOBIN

With rare exceptions, non-Western theorists of Marxism receive short intellectual shrift. When they register on the radar of ideological debates at all, such debates summarily present their work as proof of Marxism’s universalism rather than a means of transforming Marxism itself.

This has largely been the case with the Arab Marxist Mahdi Amel, who was assassinated on this day, May 18, in 1987. Born in 1936, Hassan Hamdan, who later adopted the pen name Mahdi Amel, was a member of the Lebanese Communist Party and had joined the party’s national leadership by the time he was killed.

Amel’s legacy did experience a revival during the Arab uprisings that broke out a decade ago. His work garnered further attention after a volume of his selected writings was translated into English in 2021. But interest in his philosophy of Marxism and its implications for how we understand colonialism in relation to capitalism remains rudimentary.

A historical materialist reading of Amel would integrate his conceptual contribution and praxis into the ideological canon of twentieth-century Marxism. This requires a sustained and critical analysis of his philosophy’s assumptions, arguments, and conclusions in comparison and contrast to European Marxism as well as heterodox or radical schools of Marxism that emerged after World War II, such as dependency theory and racial capitalism.

We can take a modest step in that direction by briefly examining his methodology and its application to major themes of post-WWII national liberation, including the ongoing struggle for a free Palestine.

Marxism, Colonialism, and Methodology

Amel called for a “methodological revolution” in Marxist philosophy in order to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism. He opposed the application of preformed Marxist thought to the colonial social structure, but not in the name of some supposedly authentic precapitalist thought. He equally rejected forms of postcolonial analysis that threw the historical materialist baby out with its Euro-centric bathwater. Instead, Amel labored in a dialectical fashion to construct a theory of Marxism born out of colonial social reality and employed for its socialist liberation, which he argued, is also the liberation of all humanity.

Amel laid out the logic of his methodology, first in brief and later in detail, across a series of essays and book-length treatises. He then applied it to a wide range of historical phenomena and forces including sectarianism, Islam, education, and revolutionary culture. These writings were engaged in direct conversation with ideological debates that emerged during his age and remain relevant to ours.Mahdi Amel called for a ‘methodological revolution’ in Marxist philosophy in order to understand and overcome the historical reality of colonialism.

While Amel’s texts may be dense and at times repetitive, his reasoning was straightforward. Karl Marx’s discussion of colonialism was incidental to his general analysis of capitalism. Given Marx’s own historical context in a capitalist Europe and his ignorance of the socioeconomic conditions of colonized countries, he was incapable of taking full stock of colonialism and incorporating it into his theory of capitalism.

The historical reality of colonized peoples is the inverse of that experienced by Marx. Their encounter with capitalism was incidental to, or mediated via, colonialism. Colonization, in the words of Amel, “cut the thread of continuity” in their history and “sent through it violent tremors.”

He believed these tremors reached all the way to the strata of the relations of production, as the material basis for precapitalist production was destroyed while the material basis for industrialization was denied. To put it another way, the difference between capitalist and colonial social formations does not merely concern the level or scale of production, but the entire structure of production.


For Amel, it follows from this point that the colonial relation, which is all-encompassing rather than purely economic, is the fundamental contradiction in colonized societies and that colonialism is the “objective basis for the colonized country’s social structure.” Consequently, colonialism does not end with the end of military occupation or by gaining political independence, but with the total severance of this relation in a process of violent and revolutionary transition to socialism.

Amel’s inquiry along these lines yielded the concept of the colonial mode of production (CMOP), which he defined as “the form of capitalism structurally dependent on imperialism in its historical formation and contemporary development.” Marx’s distilled observations on colonialism furnished Amel with a sound theoretical basis to develop his model. In each step, Amel drew on Marx’s relevant commentary and identified first principles.

For instance, Amel relied on Marx’s reference to the “fusion” of modes of production and on Vladimir Lenin’s description of different modes coexisting in a single social space to support the idea of a colonial mode of production as a fusion of capitalist and precapitalist modes of production under the rubric of colonial conquest, and thereby distinct from either. This methodology retained Marxian logic and concepts like class formation, class struggle, capitalization, and class consciousness, but tried to elucidate their specific historical form in a colonial setting.

Colonialism and Class Struggle

Amel’s theorization led him to conclude that the process of class formation under a CMOP is characterized by a lack of class differentiation. Thanks to the structural inhibition of large-scale industry, the colonial bourgeoisie is necessarily a mercantile rather than an industrial bourgeoisie.The instability of rule in colonized countries is a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist proclivities for military rule or dictatorship.

Small-scale manufacturers in this context are a faction of the petty bourgeoisie, whose members occasionally engage in finance on a similar scale. This apparent diversity in economic activity is not due to some “excess energy” of this social class, but rather stems from the limitations upon concentrating production.

These constrained economic relations of production had political implications. Tied in its own class existence to its colonialist or capitalist counterpart, the colonial bourgeoise is incapable of carrying out a political revolution and establishing a liberal democracy in its European bourgeois form. The instability of rule in colonized countries is therefore a result of the stability of the colonial social structure, not a reflection of orientalist proclivities for military rule or dictatorship.

An extreme case of the lack of class differentiation is the fusion of the two social factions, urban merchants tied to foreign trade and landowners who direct their agricultural production toward colonial trade. This fusion negates the existence of either a national bourgeoisie, usually associated with industrialists, or a feudal class, usually associated with a colonial alliance.

Similarly, the process of proletarianization of the colony’s toiling masses — prominently peasants — is never complete at the economic or social level. Given the centrality of land in colonial agricultural production, which is concentrated around cash crops and extractive labor, peasants are the overexploited class under the CMOP.

When peasants migrate to urban centers seeking employment relief, they rarely, according to Amel, experience a radical transformation in terms of class existence and consciousness. Although embedded in a new class position that involves small-scale consumer industry, they preserve their previous class connections and retain much of their past class consciousness, transitioning between the two positions with ease.

Amel described the pattern in Lebanon:


The worker returns to his village at every opportunity, for holidays, vacations, and funerals. In this way, his village becomes his centre of gravity and exerts a pull over him stronger than that of the city. Ultimately, he longs for the land he left and demands to be buried there, home to his ancestors.

Amel warned that the lack of class differentiation does not mean that class struggle is absent in the colonial setting, as nationalist forces would have it. Nor does it mean the national question is insignificant, as some anti-imperialist or internationalist Marxists would have it. Given the indirect relation of exploitation under a CMOP that is governed by the colonial relation, class struggle is directed against a structure of dependency and domination, not another social class. This means that socialist revolution in colonized societies is synonymous with national liberation:


The struggle for national liberation is the sole historical form that distinguishes class struggle in the colonial formation. Whoever misses this essential point in the movement of our modern history and attempts to substitute class struggle with “nationalist struggle” or reduces the national struggle to a purely economic struggle loses the ability to understand our historical reality and thus also to control its transformation.

Amel prevented his philosophy from lapsing into determinism or economism by placing his structural analysis in a historical perspective as he theorized class struggle.

He emphasized the nature of class consciousness as a historical force of class becoming and resistance. He argued that before World War II, sectoral and economic forms of struggle by different factions of the toiling masses independent of each other precluded their very formation as a class. The period after 1945 saw these struggles converging in a broader political struggle for liberation from colonialism.

At that moment, the colonial relation became mutually constitutive of colonizing and colonized societies. It is necessary to sever this relation in order to transcend, and thereby destroy, both capitalist and colonial social structures.The global ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative, culturalist turn across the Arab region.

The global ascendance of neoliberalism in the 1970s precipitated a conservative, culturalist turn across the Arab region. Amel’s intellectual labor focused on pertinent questions of culture and the growing role of religion, namely Islam, in politics.

In contrast with other Arab leftists or secularists such as Sadiq Jalal al-Azm and Adonis, Amel’s thought did not lapse into orientalist tropes. He countered the ideology of defeat that ascribed the Arab loss in the 1967 war with Israel to cultural rather than military factors and lambasted the Arab bourgeoisie for portraying their own political failings as universal failings of Arab civilization and cultural heritage.

For Amel, turath, or cultural heritage, was itself a problem of the interpretation of the past by a colonial present rather than a precolonial problem that persisted in the contemporary world. At the same time, Amel avoided absolutist perspectives toward Islam of the kind to be found in secular or communist polemics that saw Islam as being inherently reactionary.
Islam and Revolutionary Thought

By the 1980s, the culturalist turn led to the emergence of what Amel called “everyday” thought. He warned against this new discourse that depoliticized social struggle by ignoring the role of geopolitics, structural forces of history, and class interests as motivations in sectarian or regional conflicts.

Amel developed critiques of different manifestations of this new trend, some of which he categorized as nihilist, obscurantist, or Islamized bourgeois currents. His denunciation of the latter current did not lead him to dismiss Islam as an ontologically regressive force at all stages of history. Unlike many scholars of Islamic intellectual history who saw the primary contradiction in Islam — or any other religion — as being that between faith and atheism, or between religious and rational thought, Amel identified a dividing line between those who defer to power and those who defy it.

The traditional classification of precapitalist Islamic scholars is one example. Conventional scholarship associated progressive thought with reason, exemplified in the figure of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), while ascribing conservatism to philosophies that elevated religion or belief over reason, exemplified in the figure of al-Ghazali. Amel argued that such a classification was simplistic and rested on the assumption that reason was a monolith.The different manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force.

He pointed out that one could find a single scholar, such as Ibn Khaldun, invoking scientific reasoning as well as Salafi legal reasoning. These contradictory forms of reason remained within a religious logic or paradigm, which meant that they were never fully antithetical to each other. As a result, subversive thought, as expressed in illuminationist Sufi Islam, took the form of rejecting reason in toto.

For Amel, the primary contradiction was not between religion and earthly life, but between two concepts of religion: spiritual (Sufi) and temporal (juridical). Spiritual Islam, however, was not atemporal in a metaphysical sense. Islam, by force of historical becoming, was temporal and by extension political. Sufism, or certain strands of it, negates the institutionalization of Islam, which turned it into an authoritarian apparatus.

The different manifestations of Islam demonstrate, according to Amel, that Islam was never a singular force. It was Islam’s material rather than otherworldly existence that determined its reactionary or revolutionary character, even if, in Amel’s estimation, it had mostly served the interests of the ruling classes.

He identified notable exceptions to this rule in precapitalist Islamic societies that included the revolt against the third “Rightly Guided” Caliph, ‘Uthman Ibn Affan, in the period following the death of Muhammed, as well as a certain phase of Qarmatian rule in Arabia. Modern examples that Amel cited of Islam forming part of a revolutionary struggle in the age of national liberation included the Algerian War of Independence and armed resistance against Israel.
Revolution, Liberation, and the Palestinian Cause

Amel’s treatment of the Algerian revolution and resistance to Israel shed light on the particularities of class struggle under colonialism, which included the role of noneconomic factors such as racism and cultural identity. In the case of Algeria, Amel noted that the overwhelming majority of European settlers, whether they were artisans, farmers, bourgeois, or workers, opposed the revolution for national liberation.

The politicized working class was no exception. The working-class Algiers district of Bab el-Oued had been nicknamed the “red neighbourhood” for serving as a popular base of the Algerian Communist Party. Yet it became “a haven of European racism” and “centre of fascist European terrorism against the revolution” after the outbreak of the war of independence.

The same anti-colonial logic applies to theorizing class struggle in Palestine. So-called labor Zionism was a racialized ideology complicit in the oppression of Palestinian workers and peasants and as such cannot be characterized as socialist. By contrast, Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a force of revolutionary class struggle.

The failure of Arab communist parties to recognize this distinction and their willingness to blindly follow Moscow’s directive led the leadership of these parties to support the 1948 partition of Palestine. They rationalized this decision by a simplistic depiction of the conflict as a struggle between workers, both Arab and Jew, and a mercantile and landed bourgeoise, both Arab and Jew. It caused the communist movement to suffer a loss of popular support in Arab societies.Amel saw the Palestinian struggle for liberation from colonialism as a force of revolutionary class struggle.

In the case of Lebanon, the Communist Party’s revision of its pro-partition stance in the late 1960s and its alliance with the Palestinian liberation movement was a radicalizing force that had an impact on class struggle in Lebanon itself. Following the Israeli invasion of 1982, Amel ridiculed left-wing pundits who minimized the significance of successful armed resistance against Israeli occupation in the name of focusing on strengthening the central Lebanese state at a time of right-wing Phalangist hegemony.

Israel’s own attitude toward Lebanese and Palestinian political factions was and remains determined in the last instance by the decision of those movements to adopt or reject national liberation strategies, including armed resistance, regardless of whether their ideology is secular or religious. For Amel, the significance of armed resistance to Israel and its allies derives from the objective centrality of the colonial relation in determining the character of class struggle in a colonial context.

Unlike many leftists of his time, Amel was careful to assess Islamist resistance forces in relation to this structural contradiction without ignoring the role of political (and therefore subjective) consciousness in swaying this struggle toward a socialist or progressive horizon. In 1984, when sectarian Islamist forces rebelled against pro-Israeli sectarian Christian forces in Beirut, Amel identified the objective revolutionary significance of the military victory, while stressing that it was uncertain whether this victory would point toward the end of sectarianism or its reproduction:

Either they go against the reactionary sectarian form of their ideological consciousness, i.e. in the direction of radically changing the sectarian political system of rule by the dominant bourgeoisie, or they align with this same reactionary sectarian consciousness — (but against the class interests of their toiling factions) — and lean towards sectarian reform of this system. In the latter case, the system would catch its breath in a movement that would renew its crisis, and subsequently the conditions for civil war.

There is no sectarian crisis in Palestine similar to that of Lebanon. But the leading armed resistance forces today in Palestine and across the region are Islamist in their ideology. Analyzing this resistance without centering the colonial relation, as Amel showed elsewhere, is a methodological error that mischaracterizes its revolutionary role as the latest stage in the war of national liberation.

The twentieth-century global conjuncture of national liberation may have passed in relation to other regions of the world. The colonial social reality of Palestinians, however, remains unchanged, as does their right to resist by all means necessary. A Marxist analysis that ignores this primary contradiction is bound to repeat the mistake of early Arab communists, and, in this case, contrary to Marxist tradition, the second version will be as tragic as the first.

CONTRIBUTOR
Hicham Safieddine is an associate professor of history at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon (2019) and the editor of Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings of Mahdi Amel (2021).

2024 Elections: What’s at stake for India’s minorities?

Could a third term under Narendra Modi see the formalising of second-class status for minorities and the destruction of the country’s ancient composite culture?

Sajjad Hassan 

Published April 29, 2024 

PRISM/DAWN

If the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) under Prime Minister Narendra Modi succeeds in winning a third five-year term in the ongoing Lok Sabha elections, many fear that India’s religious minorities, especially Muslims, will see their second-class status formalised in law and practice.

But for Hindu supremacy to be fully realised, which is the stated aim of Hindu nationalists, they will have to expunge India of any Muslim influence, of which there is much, historically. When Indians cast their vote in the coming weeks, they would do well to be aware of the weight of their electoral choices. And the international community would do well not to drop the ball on India.
Second-class citizens

In a recent article, political scientists, Ashutosh Varshney and Connor Staggs asked the rhetorical question: “Is India under Narendra Modi … beginning to resemble the American South under Jim Crow?” referring to state and local laws introduced in the southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th century that enforced racial segregation.

They explain that Jim Crow laws were aimed at blunting the Reconstruction Amendments that abolished slavery and gave equal rights to Blacks. They were designed to make Blacks second-class citizens. Similarly, in India, Hindu nationalists seek to diminish the constitutionally guaranteed equal citizenship of Muslims and turn them into marginalised, less than fully equal citizens.

Jim Crow laws lasted for almost a century, ending only in the 1960s. Varshney and Staggs claim that since Hindu nationalism is in its early phase, it could still be forestalled before it is institutionalised via political and legislative processes. They suggest that the ongoing national elections present an opportunity for Indians to do that.

However, the comparison between Jim Crow and Hindu nationalism diverges in their ultimate objectives. While Jim Crow merely targeted the equal citizenship of Blacks, Hindu nationalism has a more totalitarian goal.
What does Hindutva want?

To fully grasp the end-goals of Hindu nationalism or Hindutva, it is necessary to read its foundational texts. There are none more seminal than We or Our Nationhood Defined (1939) by Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, who led the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) from 1940 to 1973. The RSS is considered the heart and soul of the vast network of Hindu nationalist organisations, of which the BJP is the political wing. Narendra Modi, a life-time member and former official of the RSS, credited it for grooming him to political leadership.

In his text, Golwalkar writes of his wariness of “hostile elements” within the country that “act as menace to national security”, singling out Muslims as the number one threat, followed by Christians. His solution to “the danger of a cancer developing into its body politic” was offering the “foreign element” two options: “either to merge themselves in the national race and adopt its culture or to live at its mercy so long as the national race may allow it to do so, and to quit the country at the sweet will of the national race”.

MS Golwalkar. Credit: Golwalkarguruji.org — image via Scroll.in



Another of the movement’s foundational texts is Essentials of Hindutva (1923) by Vinayak Damodar Savakar, who is considered by many to be the foremost Hindutva thinker. In Essentials, he provided Hindu nationalism with an ideology, which in a nutshell claims that India was special, as it offered something nobody else could — Hindu thought. This unique Hindu supremacy, Savarkar believed, was under threat because of the presence of non-Hindus. He called on Hindus, fragmented as they were, to unite and reclaim their supremacy. Violence against Muslims, Savarkar said, was the means to achieve that goal.

Golwalkar drew on Savarkar’s thoughts. He also admired the race theories of fascist Germany and Italy and recommended that Hindustan, the land of Hindus, should profit from their lessons. In We or Our Nationhood Defined, he wrote: “To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging the country of its semitic races — the Jews. Race pride at its highest has been manifested here.”

Golwalkar saw the world in apocalyptic terms. His objective was clear: “To rule over the world was the heavenly task ordained to Hindu race.” He called upon Hindus to “rally to the Hindu standard, the bhagwa dhwaj [and] set our teeth in grim determination to wipe out the opposing forces”.

Some Hindutva leaders today have explicitly articulated this vision. For instance, in March 2020, a Hindu priest named Yati Narsinghanand, who is the president of Akhil Bharatiya Sant Parishad (All India Priests Council) and someone close to the BJP, was reported to have told his followers, “Humanity can only be saved if Islam is finished off. Hindus: Read the Gita along with Mahabharat, and learn how to die fighting.”

This call was made around the time BJP leader Kapil Mishra was leading processions in Delhi calling for violence against the mainly Muslim participants in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, chanting the mantra: “Desh ke ghaddaron ko, goli maro saalon ko [Shoot the traitors of the country].”

In 2023, another BJP leader, an MLA from Telangana, T Raja Singh, at a rally in Mumbai, urged his audience to take to arms. “I would like to request all my Hindu brothers that the coming time is the time of struggle, it is the time of war,” he said. “Every Hindu is obliged to unite. Hindu should not become one who rings temple bells, but rather he should become a Hindu who kills landyas”, a derogatory reference to Muslims.

At a public meeting of Hindu priests in December 2021, in the holy town of Haridwar, a star speaker, Annapurna Maa, the general secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha, was heard exhorting her audience: “If you want to eliminate their population, then be ready to kill them and be ready to go to jail. If only a 100 of us become soldiers and each of us kills 20 lakhs of them, we will be victorious…”

Modi is circumspect in his speeches now, but was not always so. As chief minister of Gujarat, soon after the pogrom there in 2002 during his term that left at least 2,000 dead, mostly Muslim, he was often reported in his public speeches to evoke visions of a religious struggle of good over evil.

“This is the holy place of shakti [godly power], the power for extermination of asuras [demons],” he said in one speech. “We have resolved to destroy and stamp out all forces of evil…”
The montage that is India

Beyond the goal of cleansing the Hindu land of the “cancer” to save the nation, there is another equally compelling reason for the Hindutva project to be more than just about marginalising Muslims. That has to do with the fact that India today is, in the words of historians Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot, “an intricate montage assembled from assorted material”, of which the Islamic is a critical element. The desire on the part of Hindutva leaders to fully realise Hindu supremacy will also require extirpating Muslim life and Muslim imprint from today’s India.

Historians view the era between 1200 AD and 1750 AD (Medieval India in history textbooks) as the foundation for the highly diverse human landscape of modern South Asia, with its pluralistic culture that draws on both Indic and Islamic traditions. In their magisterial work, India Before Europe (2006), Catherine Asher and Cynthia Talbot show how the Central Asian ethnic heritage, Persian cultural orientation and Islamic religious affiliation of North India’s ruling elite class in the period after 1200 AD led to the dissemination of many innovative elements through the subcontinent.

While acknowledging that the encounter between Indic and Islamic peoples and cultures led to short-term conflicts, Asher and Talbot note the vast degree to which cultural practices inspired by Perso-Islamic traditions became integral to the subcontinent as a whole in the long run. South Asia’s art and architecture, its political rituals, its administrative and military technologies and even its popular religions were deeply inflected by the new forms.

This composite culture, the authors note, forms the basis of India that exists today, in its foods, dressing and music, languages that people speak, the built architecture, and its popular religions, among others.

The ruins of the Krishna temple in Hampi, Karnataka, in 1868. 

Credit: Lyon, Edmund David (1825-1891)., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — taken from Scroll.in

In the south of the peninsula, the ‘Hindu’ Vijaynagara empire (1350-1550) drew significantly from Islamicate influence in military technology, secular architecture, courtly dress, as well as local languages. The successor ‘Muslim’ sultanates of the Bahmani state in the Deccan too, followed in this tradition, most importantly in their patronage to local languages, so much so that Golconda rulers, around today’s Hyderabad, occupied an important place in the historical memory of Telengana language — with one of the sultans, Ibrahim Quli Qutub Shah (1550-1580) often called Ibharama Chakravati by Telgu poets.

Bijapur’s Ibrahim Adil Shah II (1580-1627), called Jagat Guru, authored a collection of songs in dakani, Kitab-e-Nauras (book of nine rasas), that opens with an invocation to Saraswati, Hindu goddess of learning, followed by praise of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and then the Chisti saint Gisu Daraz. These were no exceptions.

In Bengal, the Hussain Shahi (1493-1538) rulers adopted local customs, such as purification by the water of Ganga at coronation ceremonies, and the Sufi poet, Saiyid Sultan (d 1648) published a genealogy of prophets of Islam, called Nabi Vamsha that included the Hindu god, Krishna.

In Gujarat, amid the flourishing literary tradition that the Ahmad Shah rulers patronised was the Sanskrit work Raja-Vinoda (pleasure of the kings), written in honour of the ruler, Mahmud Begada (1460s), presenting the sultan as an ideal Indic king, whose court was graced by the presence of the Hindu deity Saraswati, the goddess of learning. In Malwa, in central India, capital Mandu had fine libraries that included among their collection the track Nimat-nama (c. 1500), an illustrated recipe book for making dishes suitable for all seasons, including vegetarian as well as meat-based, with illustrations drawing on both Persian and Indic tradition, including the Bhagwata Purana.

However, it was the Mughals, especially Akbar (1556-1605), who helped create a state that was more Indian in character. The aesthetic that developed under Akbar’s guidance was composed of a fusion of Timurid and Indic models, and which went on to set a standard for subsequent Mughal arts and culture, including food, architecture and courtly dress and culture, Asher and Talbot argue.

Besides, in the realm of built architecture, of which there is ample evidence, literary production was an important site of Indic and Islamic collaboration. Examples are the translation of Ramayana and Mahabharata in Persian (Razm-nama) and Abul Fazl’s including in his Ain-i-Akbari, extensive sections on “the learning of India” — including philosophical schools, music, life cycle rituals, and modes of image worship. The scale of the borrowing led Audrey Truschke, a prominent historian of Sanskrit at the Mughal court, to conclude that these were efforts on the part of Abul Fazl to convince Akbar’s supporters of the virtues of infusing Sanskrit knowledge into Indo-Persian thought.

The tendencies towards synthesis had significant consequences. Man Singh, the highest ranking noble in Akbar’s court, only after his sons, built temples throughout the domain, including the Govinda Deva temples in Vrindavan, the largest in North India, in a recognisably Mughal style, and helped to spread Akbar’s belief in multiculturalism, just as Abdul Rahim Khaan-e-Khanan did by commissioning an illustrated Ramayana.

Among the most consequential contributions of the Mughal court to Indian letters, Allison Busch shows, was its engagement with Brajbhasha. A local (Hindavi) dialect of the region around Agra and Delhi, Mughal heartlands, Brajbhasha had existed until then, mostly as bhakti devotional poetry. Under Mughal patronage, it developed a sophisticated courtly style, inspired by Sanskrit poetics, and became the principal poetic language of north India. In creating the outcome, that could be described as classical Hindi, were Akbar’s nobles composing works in the language, including Todar Mal, Birbal and the Rajput nobles, as also Faizi and Abdul Rahim Khana Khanan — showing how courtly literature in Brajbhasha was nurtured within the multicultural context of elite Mughal society.

There were other enduring contributions too, of this age and milieu, outside the courtly realm. A major influence in the early part of this period was Sufis, and their dispersal, throughout much of the subcontinent. By the 14th century, the practice of Sama, devotional musical congregations, and Urs, annual pilgrimage to the shrines of Sufi saints, had become established Sufi traditions. Sufi shrines drew both Muslims and Hindus, and were themselves influenced by local traditions, including the Shattari Sufis of Bengal drawing on Nath yogis, and Rishi Sufis of Kashmir who led celibate lives and practised vegetarianism.

Sufism also contributed to reform in Hindu tradition, starting in the 14th century with the rise of sants, who like Sufis, were mystics, believed in a formless God, and extolled devotion to God as a primary religious practice. Kabir, the most influential, attacked rituals and customs of traditional religions, and excoriated the caste system. Guru Nanak (born in 1469), the founder of the Sikh tradition, also came from the same context.

Notably, Sufism also influenced Hindu bhakti tradition, as the historian of Indian religion John S Hawley points out. This is evident in the commonalities that the latter began to show in its focus on love for God, as did Sufis, the use of poetry and music in worship, and an ethics of compassion for others. Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas (1575), crafted in about the same age and the middle Gangetic Awadhi milieu of Sufi poets, Malik Mohammad Jayasi (Padmavat, 1540) and Mir Siyyid Manjhan (Madhumalati, 1545), exemplified this shift. Ram, an incarnation of Vishnu, became the preeminent object of devotion, in place of Siva.

It is these constructions of a cosmopolitan Indian paradigm, resulting in innovations that spoke to both traditions that Hindu nationalists must disentangle and destroy to be able to achieve their vision of a Hindu supremacist India. This will undoubtedly leave much violence in its trail.
‘Authentic fantasies’ of suffering

These historical accounts of co-living and co-production contradict Hindutva claims that have much purchase today, in popular as well as scholarly circles about the thousand years of conflict between Muslim “outsiders” and “local” Hindus; of forced conversions and the wanton destruction of temples. Hindu nationalists have developed a wide repertoire of suffering and victimhood of Hindus at the hands of Muslims. Evidence to support their thesis is slim.

Richard Eaton, one of the foremost historians of medieval India, shows how the claim that Islam spread in South Asia by the sword is incongruent with the geography of Muslim conversions in South Asia. There is an inverse relationship between the degree of Muslim political penetration and the degree of conversion to Islam, he notes. Most conversions happened in the north west and north east — Punjab and Bengal, farthest away from centres of Muslim power.

As to temple destruction, Eaton found, over a span of more than five centuries from 1192 to 1729, there were “some 80 instances of temple desecration”, well short of the 60,000 claimed by Hindu nationalists. Typically, the desecrated temples would have been associated with the authority of an enemy kingdom. The instances of desecrations followed a long-established pattern in India, of temples having been natural sites for the contestation of kingly authority, well before the coming of Muslim Turks, including their destruction. Among the most recent examples was the destruction in the 10th c of the Pratihara temple of Kalapriya near Jamuna, by the Rashtrakuta king Indra III.

But as the Bosnian historian, Edin Hajdarpasic, shows from his study of Balkan nationalism in the 19th century, enthusiastic depictions of suffering convey the essence of a political threat more vividly than simple facts or documentary narratives — a phenomenon he calls “authentic fantasy”. Hindu nationalists, themselves inspired by European nationalist movements at the turn of the 19th century, relied much on the construction of suffering and victimhood of Hindus, however divorced from facts.

Decolonial historiography shows how they drew on the Orientalist bias of British colonial historians, who saw the period of the previous 600 years, as a history of Muslim arrival and their dominance over Hindus, marked by Muslim fanaticism, and temple destruction, forced conversion, and Hindu oppression. In contrast to the dark Muslim medieval age, colonial historians like James Mill posited the ancient Hindu age as golden, and modern British, as liberal.
Call to violence

Hindu nationalists in power today are seeking to inflict retribution for their perceived sufferings by rewriting history. In some cases, this has taken physical forms — such as in the destruction in 1992 of the 15th century Babri mosque in Ayodhya, a criminal act that was legitimised by the Supreme Court of India in 2019. Claims for several other historical mosques to be converted into temples have been set in motions across the country.

Elsewhere, place names have been changed to erase any hint of their Muslim heritage. Allahabad is now Prayagraj, Mughalsarai station is Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction, Aurangabad is Sambhajinagar and Gulbarga is Kalaburagi. Not satisfied with occasional erasures, the BJP government has thought fit to change high school history and politics textbooks by significantly altering and in some cases, fully scrapping the sections on Mughal history.


C

redit: Yasminsheikh, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons — taken from Scroll.in



The act of political forgetting targets minorities to deprive them of history, of the right to narrate, of the capacity for recognition. History tells us it is also a precursor to violence. As eminent historians Aditya and Mridula Mukherjee noted recently, “…genocide of a community is often preceded by the community being demonised, their names changed, their history being erased”, claiming “these processes have begun in India and open calls for genocide of Muslims are being given in various parts of the country with amazing impunity”.

More than Jim Crow South, the history of the Balkans in the late 19th century and post-Yugoslavia 20th century provides a better guide to understanding the future of minorities in India today. Hajdarpasic’s account of Balkan history alerts us to the real consequences of the claims of victimhood. Nationalists there used stories of suffering not only to inspire collective sacrifice but also to encourage mass violence against entire communities perceived as threats. He demonstrates how certain stories of victimisation in the region long outlived their original inspirations. Decades after overthrowing Turkish rule, Serbian nationalists could revive narratives about Turk-like enemies even in the late 20th century with catastrophic consequences.

Tanika Sarkar, eminent historian of modern India, demonstrates similar impulse in early modern Hindu nationalist thought. Emblematic of this repertoire was Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s 1818 novel, Anandmath, whose main character, the Hindu sanyasi (ascetic) rebel, Satyanand, is engaged in a messianic battle “for exterminate(ing) all Muslims on this land, as they are enemies of God”, a recompense for “inflicting misfortune on Hindus”. The novel is set in the context of the 1770 famines in Bengal, as the East India Company was inserting itself at the expense of the Nawabs of Bengal, and that resulted in a third of the population starving to death, both Hindus and Muslims. Historians inform Muslim fakirs (ascetics) rose up, along with sanyasis, against the depredations.

Sarkar calls for Anandmath, “the first explicit message in our literary history for ethnic cleansing”, one foretelling Hindu nationalist thoughts to emerge later in 20th century. Its protagonists deemed “elimination of Muslim rule and Muslim presence from the land” an act of worship of Bharat Maata (motherland), a deity that first emerged in the novel. In 1920, Savarkar and Golwalkar adopted Vande Mataram — hymn to Bharat Maata, contained in Anandmath — as aHindu nationalist anthem. Vande Mataram was also the rallying cry of Hindu communalists in anti-Muslim violence to follow during Partition.

Vande Mataram continues to inspire Hindu nationalist thoughts and action to this day. So when the terror-accused BJP MP Pragya Thakur recently instructed her audience to “keep your weapons sharpened”, to “in this world created by god … finish all oppressors, wrong-doers, sinners…”, she was deploying Anandmath’s template of the holy war — calling for violence against the entire Muslim population.

It is in such violent contestations borne out of ‘authentic fantasies’ of past sufferings that Hindu nationalists of today — following that of Savarkar and other Hindutva ideologues — seek to create Hindu supremacy, by waging permanent war against India’s 200 or so million Muslims and other ‘foreign elements’. Already, United Nations experts are alerting us to the fact that “India risks becoming one of the world’s main generators of instability, atrocities and violence, because of the massive scale and gravity of the violations and abuses targeting mainly religious and other minorities, such as Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and others.”

Mass atrocity experts are warning: “If nothing is done to address these risks, India may continue to experience a rise in the number of violent (and fatal) attacks against religious minorities, an escalation in the scale of the violence, and an increased level of state involvement in atrocities.”

The burden on Indian voters to use the ballot to forestall the institutionalisation of Hindu nationalism, before it reaches a point of no return, is therefore, even heavier.

This piece is a longer version of the article, titled “Is the 2024 Lok Sabha election India’s last chance before the point of no return?” by Sajjad Hassan published on Scroll.in. It has been reproduced here with permission.

Header image: A protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act — photo taken from Prashant Waydande/Reuters