A Brief History of the Present: Muslims in New India review: The fault lines in secular fabric

In one stroke, the electorate stunned Narendra Modi, a political actor who had been portrayed as an undefeatable icon. Modi’s own poor winning margin from Varanasi and the BJP’s dramatic rout in Ayodhya showed, in a manner not seen earlier, that it will be near impossible for a Hindutva championed by the state to overcome the ingrained strength of eclectic Hinduism and the Indian society’s wider secular values.

Ahmed, who is with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, argues that Hindutva as a political force has been accepted even by the non-BJP parties as a serious point of departure. He also feels that the non-BJP parties have been clueless about Hindutva since 2014. He repeatedly accuses the opponents of Hindutva of intellectual laziness besides being clueless and confused. And he says the non-BJP parties do not have the courage to take a principled position based on historical sensitivity and political pragmatism on issues like the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi. He also hurls other charges at the non-BJP parties and groups.

How Hindutva came to dominate

It is no one’s contention that political parties ranged against the BJP have not made mistakes and blunders. There have been many over the decades. Some of these — like Rajiv Gandhi’s pandering to Muslim fundamentalists on the Shah Bano affair — are widely known and the others are not so well-recognized. Indeed, Rahul Gandhi, amid the Lok Sabha campaign, boldly and publicly accepted that the Congress has made its share of mistakes. It is not wrong to claim — and Ahmed points this out — that all these created a conducive environment for the growth of Hindutva.

It is a fact that Modi’s sweeping victory in 2014 unsettled a political elite that was used to certain political and constitutional norms. Slowly and steadily, Hindutva politics was unleashed with a vehemence whereby, over time, making gross communal remarks about Muslims in public and spreading hate on social media was no longer seen as unusual or abnormal. Ahmed, too, underscores this.

The one reason why Hindutva became so dominating in social and political life and became difficult for the BJP’s opponents to take it head on was the hijacking of the dominant mainstream media, particularly the electronic media, by the ruling party, virtually obliterating a wide variety of opposition voices. This made every electoral contest in the country a brazenly unequal affair. It naturally took the non-BJP parties varying degrees of time to come to grips with a situation they were never used to. It is in this context that the 2024 Lok Sabha election result makes sense — a long and difficult path had to be covered. Indeed, there are BJP critics who maintain that the party would not have won even 200 seats this time if there had been a free and fair media, print and electronic.

Aggressive Hindutva politics has hit saturation point

It is unfair on the part of Ahmed to say that the non-BJP parties are not showing any interest in the liberal Muslims’ version of secularism and that these parties fear that any direct reference to Muslims or secularism or minority rights will affect Hindu sentiments. While the non-BJP parties earlier vocal championing of secularism has certainly waned (the Left still remains loudly committed to it), they never stopped opposing aggressive Hindutva, especially its violent and anti-Muslim manifestations, a point Ahmed accepts. Indeed, the 2024 verdict proved that people at large are sick and tired of stinking communal outbursts and would vote for those loyal to political, economic and social ideas that were supposed to have been buried by the so-called New India.

All this doesn’t take away the strengths of Ahmed’s academic intervention to make sense of the post-2014 Modi’s India. The book is focussed on northern India since the contours of Muslim political discourse, as he says, are always determined by north Indian political developments. As a Muslim researcher, Ahmed does not want to give up his Islamic identity and does not want to speak only as a Muslim either. He rightly warns that the evident demotion of the intelligentsia in the BJP will affect its institutionalised thinking culture and the growing tendency to disrespect and even ignore the autonomy of national institutions will prove counter-productive to the BJP in the long run.

The book makes a case that Islamic religiosity is not always governed by the logic of Hindutva politics. He makes some interesting revelations: one is that the Muslim middle-class increasingly employs Hindi for mass religious mobilisation. This is a significant development in a region where Muslims have been, rightly and wrongly, identified with Urdu. Also, according to him, communalism and Hindu-Muslim strife need not imply the failure of secular experiments; political elites and common Muslims find it difficult to embrace Mughal emperor Aurangzeb as an Islamic icon; Muslim heritage in contemporary India must be separated from the foreign origin of Islam thesis. He also demands to know why a fairly educated section of Indian Muslims admire a majoritarian regime in Turkey while opposing a Hindutva-drive majoritarian idea in India.

Ahmed makes a telling point: aggressive Hindutva politics has reached its saturation point. Writing before the Lok Sabha battle, he says that the BJP needed a positive social narrative for the 2024 election campaign. If only the BJP had understood this, it may have charted a different course — and, who knows, the June 4 electoral disaster could have been avoided.