Of Extremists and their Hot Takes
One of the hazards of an existence of social media is that you are exposed to a huge number of what are known as “hot takes”. These are controversial opinions, often to elicit a reaction from a particular group of people than making a coherent point about any topic. “Hot takes” come in almost fields that get discussed online, right from dissing on the most popular and successful cricketers to claiming that Poha is bottom/top tier food (don’t know which is worse).
As with any other phenomenon, by far the most controversial hot takes are found in political spheres. I recently came across one such extremely hot take, by one Sharjeel Usmani. He claimed that “Jai Shree Ram” is a terror slogan, among a lot of other, some unsubstantiated, some over-the-top and some downright malicious, claims, in his 3 page document that he, quite provocatively, titled “On Why I Refuse To Be Civilized”, presumably an attempt to justify something even more outrageous in the future.
A few more examples of what Usmani, a budding fiction writer, going by his article, wrote that made me question my sanity are as follows. He cites Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s struggle for Civil Rights in America and using, nay, misuing, one of his statements by partially quoting it, to try to pass off rioting mobs we saw during the anti-CAA riots as “only defending rights of his people to express their totally justified anger and rage towards their oppression which the oppressors either ignore, overlook or at times even deny.”
He called popular news anchor Rohit Sardana a genocide-enabler and celebrated his death on social media. He insisted that the act of Shahrukh Pathan, that of waving a gun in the face of a police officer be seen as a “courageous act of self-defense” and claimed that that act actually saved lives, and that Shahrukh was better off picking up a gun and fighting back, against what, no one knows.
He accuses “liberals and centrists” of various things, including
1. being too soft on hatred shown by Hindutvawadis
2. being too privileged by their Savarna Hindu identities and the consequent lack of will to share their space with others
3. being in a fool’s paradise that secularism in India actually works
4. not being proactive enough so as not to alienate their allies, that is, Muslim activists.
The Same False Equivalences
This is not a detailed rebuttal of Usmani’s views, which would probably be more of a boring read than his article itself. Besides, another person has already attempted to rebut him and put forth an alternate view, and he has done so quite well. I will only be responding to a few points made in that article, in an effort to make a few of my own points.
In a previous blog, I had written how equating the struggles of African Americans in America and Muslims in India is a false equivalence of a gargantuan scale. I do not wish to repeat myself, yet I must make this point.
The use of Dr King Jr only goes to show the pitiful levels of understanding of history Usmani has. African Americans were brought into America as slaves and kept that way right up to 1863, by law. Even after slavery was abolished, it took another 100 years to grant them equal rights as white Americans. That was the background of Dr King Jr’s movement.
For a good 6–7 centuries, Muslims ruled parts of India. Most Muslim monarchs in India discriminated against their non-Muslim citizens with oppressive laws and taxes, destruction of temples and massacres and mass conversions of Hindus. To conveniently gloss over this historical background and claiming Muslims to be oppressed in India like African Americans and that the same moral justifications for their actions should apply is not just ignorant but also insensitive.
Usmani says something very strange and questionable, that “liberals and centrists love peace and hate hate”. The words themselves may not appear to be objectionable, probably, except that he says that disapprovingly. I’m sorry, Sharjeel, what would you rather them do? Disregard peace and egg the likes of Shahrukh Pathan (in pic below) to pick up arms against the police? I mean, what sort of a movement do you want to lead? One that uses the heckler’s veto to get their way?
And if, heaven forbid, there are clashes and/or riots again, like there were in Delhi in Dec 2019 and again in Feb 2020, when President Trump was visiting India, and lives are lost, Sharjeel and his compatriots will be the ones gloating their moral high ground, as if the lives lost in the process were merely cannon fodder, only to be combusted at some or the other opportune moment in the service of their sordid and diabolical ideological campaign.
Speaking of Delhi riots and Shahrukh Pathan, Usmani really seems to think, not ironically or as a joke, that pulling a gun, illegally obtained, in the face of a police officer, who himself showed an almost saintly level of restraint and presence of mind, and even firing a few rounds in the air in a riot situation, where there is already quite a bit of tension in the atmosphere, was an act of self-defense and that it actually saved lives. I mean, this has to be a marvelous feat, as far as the power of imagination goes. Amazing.
Jai Shree Ram is a Terrorist Slogan?
The one big claim I intend to talk about is that Jai Shree Ram is a terror slogan. Several things to unpack here. Let us start with trying to understand what a terror slogan means and what is entailed in its implications. When a slogan is used as a chant to strike fear in the minds of people by terrorists, most commonly during the commission of an act of terror, like blowing up a busy market or firing an AK47 at people in a railway station or hijacking a plane or attacking civilians in a war-torn zone could be considered a terror slogan.
The chant in question may be religious in its origin or it may not be. The original context loses its meaning when it is repeatedly used in knife attacks and lynchings, which are not necessarily terror incidents, going strictly by its definition. Do not get me wrong, those are still crimes, and heinous ones at that. But they are not always acts of terrorism. Watering down the definition of terrorism to suit one’s nefarious agenda is not only intellectually dishonest, but also a harmful precedent to set. Every murder is not a terrorist incident.
Now, going by this, which slogans or chants come to mind as terrorist slognas? Does Jai Shree Ram make the list? What other slogans should be considered? Bharat Mata Ki Jai? Allahu Akbar? La Ilaha Illallah?
How do we identify terror slogans?
I shall refrain from inane and, frankly boring, rhetoric of “Scream Jai Shree Ram at an airport and nothing will happen. Scream Allahu Akbar and you will be arrested.” It is a childish, although not an incorrect, example. And it is for 2 reasons. One is that such arguments are more rhetorical than logical. It is not that Jai Shree Ram has not been used (read as sullied) by mobs that went on to beat Muslims up. The other reason is that such a comparison is a false equivalence that assumes both of those chants are somehow to be viewed as the same since they are both religious in nature.
I’ll start by saying this. One cannot deny that there have been incidents where Hindu mobs have not just chanted Jai Shree Ram while beating up Muslims, but also made the victim chant the same. The reasons for such attacks and lynchings range from affairs or attempts at “Love Jihad” to suspicion of carrying cow meat to thefts or cow smuggling. Whatever be the reason, there can absolutely be no justification or defense of lynchings or vigilante justice. And especially not while chanting the name of Shree Ram, who is regarded as a just and virtuous god-king. Some such cases have also been debunked, but not all are false. There have also been incidents where Muslim youth were beaten up and made to chant Bharat Mata Ki Jai, although this is not nearly as common.
However, these incidents, however heinous, appalling and unequivocally condemnable, are not acts of terrorism. Why? Well, for one, these are isolated incidents, almost no two instances being connected to each other. They are sporadic. These criminal acts, also, do not conform to any reasonable definition of terrorism. There was no conspiracy, nor was there large scale loss of life or damage to property, no indiscriminate violence, no involvement of enemy nations, e.g. Pakistan, no intent to undermine the sovereignty or territorial integrity of the country and also no attempt at an armed struggle to dislodge the government of India. On what basis these can be labelled as terror incidents in good sense escapes me. Just the fact that these criminal acts were perpetrated in furtherance of a political or religious goal does not make them terrorist acts. They are communal crimes or political crimes, at the most, and must be viewed and treated as such, nothing more, nothing less. However, there has to be more vigilance on the part of the law and order machinery since there appears to be a pattern to these crimes. Strict and swift action needs to be taken against such criminals.
Now that I have attempted to establish that Jai Shree Ram is not a terror slogan, let us have a look at probably the biggest and the stupidest counter to this. One may say, “Then how about the Babri Masjid demolition, Amogh?” Mobs upon mobs chanting the name of Shree Ram gathered at the erstwhile “dispute land” and demolished the structure standing upon the temple. I prefer not to get into the history of the issue of Ram Mandir, because that would take a long time to unpack. I will just contextualize it a little.
What about Babri?
A temple that was demolished by a barbaric invader from a foreign land owing to his own iconoclastic ideas, ingrained in him by the fanatical tenets of his own religion, only to have a mosque built in his name there, which in itself is a mixture of hypocrisy and irony, quite like the mixture of dung and mud, was itself radical and extremist. And yet, Hindus never left the area, nor did they relinquish their claim of that land. The land is rightfully theirs, The evidences of the existence of a temple below the ruins of the mosque are so stark, only the visually challenged could miss them. And yet, I accept that the demolition of the mosque in the manner that it was one what is today known as Shaurya Divas is not justified in my view. The destruction of the structure by the mobs was illegal, although I do not feel the least bit bad, now that it is gone. Still, be that as it may, is that an act of terror? Was there any indiscriminate violence? Was it a part of a larger design to destroy and demolish any and all mosques in that region? No, no to all of that. How is that terrorism, if that is the case?
I think I found something
Now, let us look at some actual terrorist incidents. Let us start with 9/11, where the hijackers had documents instructing them to shout a phrase that would strike terror in the hearts of non-believers. This was the first major terror incident in the West where that phrase was used. Since then, there have been hundreds of terror attacks and dozens have seem the chanting of that slogan, may it be attacks in London, Nice, Brussels, Paris, Vienna or several other places. That slogan is the Naara-e-Takbir.
The phrase “Allahu Akbar” itself means “God is the greatest”, as far as I understand it. Seemingly not the most objectionable or controversial phrase in itself. In fact, many have argued that the phrase has been co-opted by terrorists and there may indeed be some substance to these claims. But the fact remains that terrorists all over the world have used this phrase while committing actual terrorist acts, and that too with the express purpose to strike fear into the hearts of non-believers.
This is not the only slogan that should be under the microscope objective lens. Another extremely dangerous and infamous utterance was “Kashmir me rehna hoga to Allahu Akbar kehna hoga”. This is much clearer in its context and meaning relating to the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus (and Sikhs) in Jan 1990. These wounds are still fresh in the minds of thousands, if not lakhs, of exiled Kashmiri Hindus. I ask you, the readers, is this not a terror slogan? Was the massacre of hundreds of Kashmiri Hindus and Sikhs not serious enough to be classified as a terrorist incident? A war, a proxy war and an insurgency that rage on, even today, that not just wrested a huge chunk of land from the jurisdiction of India, not in law, but in practice, but also the homes of thousands of our Kashmiri brethren.
Then, we have rats like Sharjeel Usmani and Sharjeel Imam opposing CAA, a law to help similarly aggrieved non-Muslims in three of our neighbouring countries. Not just that, these people then issue calls to other, completely unaffected hitherto, Muslims to hit the streets and protest? And not just protest, but actually fight the police? Imam also asked for Assam to be cut off from the rest of India. How dare he!
Some other examples
Anyway, not to stray from the topic, how about one more slogan? “Kashmir maange aazadi”. This was another slogan used by secessionists and terrorists alike, to rally support and cut off Kashmir from the rest of India. And our scholars of JNU did not feel a moment’s trepidation in appropriating that slogan for their own political purposes. And it does not stop there. These aazadi slogans were again raised during the anti-CAA riots of both Dec 2019 and Feb 2020. Even slogans like “Kaafiron se aazadi” were heard.
In this case, you, the readers, tell me, who really speaks the language of terrorists? Do people like Sharjeel, either of the two, have any moral standing whatsoever to lecture you or me on how Jai Shree Ram is a terror slogan? And do not get me wrong, I do not think he does not have the right to question Hindus. He absolutely does. But, feel no obligation to answer his questions. After all, Shree Ram himself was asked if his act of shooting Vaali in the back was becoming of a Kshatriya of such descent. He retorted with a simple remark, he reminded Vaali of his own wrongdoings towards Sugreeva and said that he had no moral standing to question Shree Ram.
This is not to say that since Usmani has no leg to stand on, one must go on and justify lynchings in the name of Shree Ram
A general sense that I get from a lot of these self proclaimed faces of the Muslim resistance, is that they do not dissociate themselves or their “struggles and resistance” from their violent elements any more. They do not call them fringe elements or “bhatke hue naujawan”, as they used to. In fact, they now co-opt and encourage them. For example, Arfa Khanum Sherwani spoke about how Muslims should not get deterred by propaganda of the “right wing Hindus” and must continue to assert their Muslim identity because it is a Muslim struggle, in a speech last year.When Sharjeel Imam asked for cutting off of Assam and the North-East from the rest of India, not one of these Muslim activists condemned his statement. In fact, they kept issuing clarifications and wishy-washy explanations. And not just now, there have been several attempts, previously, at whitewashing the religious zeal behind a lot of terrorist acts. Here is an example where Barkha Dutt tried to cover up the religious motive of a Kashmiri insurgent.
Umar Khalid, during the infamous JNU row of Feb 2016, was involved in sloganeering, asking for secession of Kashmir from India. There has so far, in more than 5 years since, been no condemnation issued. He and his coterie have in fact doubled down on their stance with equal, if not more, vigour.
In his 3 page long verbal diarrhoea, even Usmani accuses “liberals and centrists” of not being proactive enough to include more Muslim voices in their resistance (he insists on calling it a resistance, against what, your guess is as good as mine). He, at one point, even says that secularism in India has failed to produce good results. I fail to understand, and not for lack of trying, believe me, what he is implying. Is he saying that secularism has failed and therefore we should be moving away from it? If that is so, towards what? More communalism? Is that why they are not even bothered to draw the line between fringe elements among them and the more reasonable ones? That is extremely scary and I am not sure it will lead to anything positive for the country. We have already been seeing some dog whistles from some people about how various places in India are venturing into rough waters, as far as demographics and radicalisation are concerned. Although these claims are not yet as strongly backed by evidence for India overall as one would hope, they are not entirely devoid of merit.
Final Remarks
Many people on Twitter actually called for the arrest of Usmani under IPC Section 295A, for hurting religious sentiments, when he called Jai Shree Ram a terror slogan. As many of you may know, I stand against such restrictions on free speech, I do the same in this case as well. Usmani must have the right to make that claim, no matter how baseless and nonsense it is. In fact, more such people must continue to speak up and make themselves be known to be possessed by such thoughts. Not because I want Hindus to Kamlesh Tiwari them, even though, if the shoe were on the other foot, it would be the case, but so that we can identify such extremist thinkers and ideologues and discredit them in public, in the hope, however naive it may be, that there may be a genuine reconciliation. After all, I am a hopeless optimist that way.