A low-grade fever, a relentless sadness: Being Muslim in the New India that is Bharat

This is a lightly edited version of the author's keynote address delivered at the inauguration of the 14th Goa Arts and Literature Festival on February 12.

Each time I come to the Goa Arts and Literature Festival, I am struck anew by the manner in which this festival continues to create a space for voices from the margins and explore “ways of belonging”.

The idea of identity, of belonging, has shaped much of my recent work. At the same time, I am also concerned about the dark underbelly of belonging, the forces of othering that are gathering like dark clouds over our country. On this glorious day, in this wonderful setting , it seems strange to talk about fear and I thought long and hard whether I should or not, but then I decided if not at GALF where else can one speak one's mind, where else can one speak of one's deepest, darkest fears?

I want to talk about fear, a fear that is very real for very many of us, one that rubs away insidiously at the idea of belonging. While I will mostly talk about the fear that Muslims in India feel, I know that fear is shared by many – by other minorities in India, by communities who find themselves on the margins and many from the minority community who sense and share this fear, some of whom gather in echo chambers to vent “gham ghalat karna”, as it is referred to in Urdu.

I must confess to a crushing fear, one that weighs my chest with an inexorable weight and makes it difficult to breathe sometimes. Yes, with all my privileges – of education, of class, of having friends in “high places” – I feel scared, more scared than I have ever been in my entire life. I must also confess to an almost persistent depression, like a low-grade fever, over the past few years, that doesn't quite halt the daily rhythm of life; it just slows you down by its continuous, relentless presence in your life making you feel sad and somehow empty, as though a great deal that one has taken for granted all one's adult life is like sand slipping through one's fingers.

I suspect I am not alone in this. I feel this fear and depression among a great many Muslims in urban India. I hear it in their silences. I sense it in their steadfast refusal to get drawn into political debates. I notice it in their stoicism in the face of virulent hate swirling about in school and college WhatsApp groups as well as RWA/housing society group chats. I spot it in the hastily withdrawn social media posts drawing attention to some recent communal outrage or atrocity. I recognise it in their zeal to distance themselves from instances of any sort of violence, be it a Muslim man killing his Hindu girlfriend and chopping her into pieces or a Muslim man killing his non-Muslim partner in a business dispute – where the perpetrator, not the victim, is a Muslim.

If my own fear and despair, and that of others like me, is so palpable and pronounced, what of those Muslims who are doubly marginalised by their poverty and illiteracy? Or vulnerable because they don't have the safeguards and barriers, however flimsy, that “people like us” have in our gated communities and cushioned lives? What of those who live on the edge of survival because they must perforce go out into the real world every single day to eke out a living? What of the plumbers, electricians, painters, carpenters, maids and sundry service providers who don't give their real, Muslim-sounding names for fear they will not be hired? Or the vegetable vendors who festoon their carts with saffron flags after every call to boycott small Muslim businesses? Or the biryani vendors, kabab sellers, quilt makers, car mechanics who have traditionally plied these trades for generations but now fear for their lives? What of the meat sellers whose makeshift stalls happen to be along the routes taken by the kawariyas during every monsoon? What of the imams and naib imams, often from the poorest of families, who are hired by Waqf boards to serve as custodians of small, isolated mosques often surrounded by hostile neighbours?

I don't “look” like a Muslim so, to an extent, I am safe. I have written a book with the same title – But You Don't Look Like a Muslim and I was invited some years ago to discuss it here at GALF. Unless called out to chant “Jai Shree Ram” to profess my Indianness, I am largely safe. But what of my name? How can I camouflage that? Or hide it when asked to provide proof of identity? While my first name can afford some benefit of doubt for it might pass as a Parsi's, my surname is a dead give-away. When push comes to shove in the New India that is Bharat, not even speaking English will give me an exit pass if a mob baying for Muslim blood were to gherao me. All my so-called privileges can be brought to naught by a crowd of lumpens. The realisation is chilling.

And if I were a man? Imagine, over 75 years after Partition and after reading all the gory stories penned by Saadat Hasan Manto and other chroniclers of communal violence, having your pants pulled down to check whether you are a “katua” or not? But what if I did “look” like a Muslim? What if I chose to offer namaz perfectly peacefully and quietly while sitting on my berth in a train? Worse still, what if I had a beard, wore a topi or a hijab and indeed “looked” like a Muslim?

You might recall the incident that happened on a train to Mumbai when a railway protection officer shot dead three people in August 2023. What if I worked as an imam in a mosque? So what if I had just assured my family that all was well, that I was safe given the police presence all around me? What, then?

What if I, as an Indian, have been conditioned to believe that the tattered fabric of secularism will be held up no matter what? The violence in Gurgaon, also in July-August 2023, proved that these are no longer hypothetical scenarios. This is a lived reality for countless Indian Muslims. It gets an impetus when the chief minister of a state urges his people to “trouble the miyas” and to actively underpay them for services such as plying rickshaws. He goes on to post videos from his party's official X handle – since deleted – showing Muslims being shot at point blank range

And there are other instances:

Jab mulle kaate jaainge
Ram Ram chillainge

Or:

“Hindustan mein rehna hoga
Jai Shri Ram kehna hoga”

And “Goli maro saalon ko” by someone who is now a Union minister are no longer isolated instances of random, unrelated, personal biases and prejudices. They are dog whistles. They are a clarion call to a large, restive majority that is being brain-washed to believe they are second-class, nay “seventh-class” citizens, in their own land. They are part of a larger narrative, a grand design.

Since we have clearly turned into a nation of “whatabouters”, each of these hate-filled, terror-inducing slogans are instantly and viciously countered with those raised by the PFI [Popular Front of India] or other fringe minority outfits. When rapes, murders, corruptions, scams and scandals are thwarted in Parliament by elected representatives of the people by instances of whatabouts, how can these rising incidents of bigotry and hate not be similarly countered? It's easier to come back with counter-accusations, to point fingers, to obfuscate, to fling more filth, to parry hate with hate than it is to understand fear, to acknowledge militant, muscular majoritarianism, to call out the elephant in the room.

As we spiral inexorably downwards, as every fresh instance of bigotry is outstripped and outdone by even bigger, bolder, more blatant, more bare-faced occurrences, we don't seem to pause to think of the consequences. This rampant whataboutery – both at the political and the individual level – is exhausting, predictable and eventually empty. It will derail the India we have known and loved – probably forever.

What we are witnessing today is a creeping normality (also called gradualism, or landscape amnesia), a process by which a major change comes to be accepted as “normal”, even “acceptable” if it happens slowly through small, often unnoticeable, increments of change. A change that might otherwise be viewed as objectionable if it were to take place in a single step or short period is seen as quite all right – as some of us of a certain age can bear witness to the slow-building horror of the past few decades.

I don't quite believe that one way of life ended in 2014 and another began in May 2014. No, I believe localised, small, seemingly insignificant events, beginning with the country-wide Rath Yatra of 1990 have kept adding a layer of “normal” till we have reached this stage of the New Normal where blatant bigotry, bare-faced communalism and publicly-aired prejudices are considered perfectly all right.

I will come back to the fear I began with. From this platform today, all I am asking for is an acknowledgement of this fear, a fear that I have about being a Muslim in India today. A fear that is shared – in different ways and in different degrees – not just by Muslims but by other minority groups, by adivasis, by LGBT communities, in fact by large numbers of those who are sneeringly referred to as LIBTARDS.

Many of you may not fully understand this fear, some might dismiss it as part of a victim syndrome, an exaggerated sense of harbouring a grievance, of wanting to wallow in self pity, a tendency to focus on the negatives; a handful among you might even accuse me of fear mongering. To you I say, try any one of these simple experiments: Walk into a Barista and announce your name as Salman or Salma or, for that matter, Umar Khalid or even Sharjeel Imam; wave off a friend or relative at a train station or airport by announcing “Khuda Hafiz”; go about your day as you would ordinarily with one single addition – wear a skull cap – as the Delhi journalist Mayank Austen Soofi did and recorded the chilling consequences; or do as I did on my flight from Delhi to Goa – read a book in Urdu in public. Try it.

However, it would be a sad day if one were to give in to fear or simply feel sorry for oneself. I am not a politician or an activist. I am only a writer. Words are all I have and I want to use them as tools in the only way a writer can: I can bear witness, I can speak up, I can record and chronicle both for the present and for posterity.

To come back to fear, its only antidote, I do believe, is empathy, cultivating the ability to say, I am not you, but I see you, I hear you. Remember these lines from To Kill a Mocking Bird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Rakhshanda Jalil is a writer, translator and literary historian.

Source: Scroll
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