RajeshA wrote:
Rudradev ji,
As I see it, you are saying that a class of '{poor} Backward Pure Muslim' can be fairly stabilized, if we can eliminate the interference of foreign interests through the 'Agencies'.
Rajesh A-ji, that's not quite what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that bifurcation exists. Most Indian Muslims fall into the two Categories... Pure and Backward, or Upwardly Mobile Dharmic Muslims. Between these two exists a more-or-less stable dynamic, a gradient if you will, along which Pure and Backward Muslims can migrate to the Upwardly Mobile Category, and as an ancillary effect, become less pure and more Dharmic in their Islam. It is this gradient that is stable, and contributes to the relative stability of the two Categories.
The causes of this dynamic are manifold. Among them are the accommodationist Congress management of the Muslim polity, from the Khilafat movement to Shah Bano and onwards; the nature of Indian society at large, with its Hindu ethos; and the universal laws of economics and sociology.
Is this stable dynamic an optimal solution, a guarantor of peace and harmony? No. But under the circumstances, given India's limited resources and democratic ethos, it is a reasonable approximation of the best we can do. What counts is ensuring that Agencies (as I have described in my earlier post) are not able to interfere with it. Otherwise, the equilibrium is one that has come about almost naturally... not as a result of some forced social engineering as we might see in say China.
So: as long as bifurcation and its associated gradient are allowed to continue without interference, we are on as good a wicket as we can be, internally in India. Abrogating interference is a big caveat, but interference by Agencies is the only source of instability.
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But isn't that the nature of the beast!
Poor means susceptible to handouts, financial support, dependence, from any willing donors.
Backward means susceptible to unfiltered propaganda, from the above mentioned donors.
Pure Muslim means especially open to donation and propaganda from donors, with whom one shares a cultural context, in this case Pure Islam, e.g. the Saudis.
I don't think it is quite that simple. If you look hard, the myth of poverty being directly linked to Islamic extremism doesn't really apply to many Muslim societies, and applies even less in India's case. It is not the poorest, most backward Muslims who are necessarily the jihadis. No doubt the poor backward Muslim will come out and fight in riots and so on, but on the whole, his lot is so wretched that he has other priorities than going to Pakistan and becoming trained as a suicide bomber. In fact, most Indian Muslim jihadis have been tapped by foreign Agencies by coaxing them along a diversionary path between the two Categories. En route from pure backward Islam to advanced Dharmic Islam, it is a proportion of middle class Muslims that end up going the jihadi way. Mahdani for instance was not from a poor background, neither are the Bhatkal brothers. It is Muslims on the way up out of poverty... be they the Ashraf Ansaris responsible for the 2003 Gateway of India blasts, or the Kerala/Konkan Muslims who have gone to the Gulf... that are targeted by jihadi recruiters.
This is with good reason. It is en route between the Categories that Muslims are most vulnerable to jihadi recruitment... because that is where their Islamic identity and their economic aspirations come most violently into conflict. The Muslim who goes to jihad is compelled by his frustration at not reaching his economic goals fast enough, possibly, but also by the guilt he feels at shedding the pure Islamic identity for a more dharmic one.
There is a connection between poor, pure backward Muslims and jihadi recruitment, but it does not stem directly from economic hardship. Jihad is not an economically-engendered mass struggle movement among pure backward Muslims of India like it is among Muslims of Pakistan. Rather it stems from the recruitment in poor neighbourhoods by gangsters of the Muslim underworld, the temptation of quick riches, and the connections of that underworld to Islamist politicians and ultimately the ISI. But that again is the diversionary work of an Agency. And it is systemic dysfunction and corruption in India that makes this possible... not the poverty of pure backward Muslims per se.
The pure backward Muslim has a way out (difficult though it is, in a country with such few resources, large population and desperate competition as India.) He can eschew the madrassa for his children and send them to a municipal school. Muslim children going to government schools may still get a bit of that pure-ness, of the "us-vs-Kaffirs" worldview at home and in their mohallas; but every day at school, they recite a pledge which says "India is my country and all Indians are my brothers and sisters." As they proceed through their education they socialize with Kaffirs and make friends. All these things influence them as well, and finally they graduate equipped with the resources to make it in Indian society... but in the process, the pure Islamic worldview has become tempered into a more personal, spiritual, Islam that is consonant with Dharma. That is the gradient which Agencies are trying to divert.
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I don't see the problem lying in the incompleteness of the Bifurcation; except that there is perhaps an ensuing unclarity in the choice in front of the individual; as much as the problem that one category of Muslims would stabilize in such a way, that the elimination of foreign interest Agencies cannot be implemented.
The existence of a diversionary path, leading off from the gradient between the two Categories, which can be utilized by Agencies inimical to India, is the problem. Bifurcation implies two ways... the third way leads to jihad. That is why I bring up the completeness of the bifurcation.
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Perhaps the way out, is if India can establish either an 'Agency' or a 'System of Agencies' attending to "Backward Pure Muslims", which ascribe to pure Islam, possess the capacity to finance the welfare programs in the community, pursue no anti-Constitutional political agendas, and furthermore strictly reject interference from outside agencies.
That of course, is something which, to a limited extent, already takes place in India and comes under the heading "Muslim appeasement"! Would a richer India be willing to finance the "Backward Pure Muslim" to an extent, building up the capacity of the local "Agencies" which enable them to break free of dependence on foreign donations?
You are right here, to some extent. What has to happen is that the gradient has to be "helped along", by social and economic means. It is difficult to do this without being hijacked by yet more Agencies that serve narrow communal, and in-effect anti-national agendas, but it can and should be attempted, even while the activities of local and foreign Agencies inimical to the gradient are ruthlessly and immediately suppressed.
But I agree with you that some amount of positive social engineering to stabilize the gradient is a good thing. A stable gradient that has been established more or less by accident and by the laws of nature, represents the natural tendency of a system in equilibrium; so that is indeed a strength of Indian society that should be augmented.
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I think, previously I have once or twice advised on banning all direct foreign donations to religious bodies inside India, on the grounds that religion is a very impressionable social activity, and foreign donations and involvement in this domain make it susceptible to being hijacked by foreign agendas not in conformance with the Indian ethos and can result in disturbance of communal harmony and in anti-national activities. As such all foreign donations should be channeled through the Indian Govt. which would distribute the the money amongst the community as it deems fit. Nor should individuals or organizations act as middlemen for channeling of foreign donations.
I could not agree with you more on this. After all, Hindu temple trusts are government managed, and welfare funds collected by Muslim socio-religious organizations should be as well. In fact, such a ban will cause the employees of Agencies to stand up and show themselves in the clear light of day when they howl in protest.
The reason I posted all this on this thread here, however, is the question of how to extend this dynamic to Pakistan. Ultimately it is the only solution, whether Pakistan remains one state or splits up into several successor states or folds back into the Indian union. We have to do something about all those people.
The pure-backward Muslim of Pakistan actually becomes an asset here, because he already has a counterpart in India, one of our two Categories, and can be co-opted into the Gradient with relatively less resistance.
It is the other categories of Pakistani Muslims... the P-type Muslims as I have referred to them... who pose a problem. They are the ones who deliberately opted out of India, and the inchoate bifurcated system which was already beginning to establish itself, at the time of independence. Pakistan gives them an option of rejecting the gradient which, in the absence of partition, would have applied to all subcontinental Muslims. As I have explained, the third way beyond Bifurcation is Jihad... and Pakistan is that third way, Jihad, manifested in the form of a State. And true to its nature, it has spawned Agencies like the Taliban and the Lashkars for whom jihad is an agenda that threatens to dominate Pakistan to the exclusion of everything else.
P-type Pakistani Muslims thought they could have their cake (hold on to the ideals of Islamism and Islamic supremacism, even if not "pure" in their own lives) and eat it too (maintain a status of wealth and power.) They wanted to be rich, socially advanced and yet Islamist. But the dream is blowing up in their faces, quite literally.
When we look at Pakistani "liberals" , as Shiv ji and Arun Gupta ji have been doing, we identify a curious phenomenon. We see P-type Muslims who regret the catastrophic failure of Pakistani Islamism... in other words, Indian Subcontinental Islamism of which they are the legatees. They fear the pure radicals who have transformed jihad from a neat little weapon they could turn on unbelievers to an ogre that looms at their very doorsteps. Yet these same P-type Muslims cannot reconcile themselves to the idea that the two-nation theory was wrong... they spend reams and reams of webspace in intractable sophistry trying to justify that what Jinnah wanted was really not what he said, which was not really what he meant. To me this is a symptom of their resistance to the inevitable bifurcation and gradient dynamic to which Indian Muslims have naturally adjusted. In India it is possible for a pure, backward Muslim to become an advanced Muslim by shedding his pure-ness for a more Dharmic Islam. In Pakistan, the only thing possible for a pure, backward Muslim is to become a jihadi. At least in an India-like system he would have another option, a gradient to lift him out of his lot.
Ultimately, the process of managing Pakistan's failure is not going to be determined by the tactics of politics and diplomacy, or military operations of war and counter-insurgency. Those are important steps towards an ultimate goal, but when discussing them we should not lose sight of the goal itself. That goal is to bring Pakistani Muslims within the Indian system... impose upon them, willingly or unwillingly, the dynamics of bifurcation and a stable gradient which enables the poor to become better off while simultaneously shaping their religious identity into one more consonant with Dharma.
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