I speak, for my survival

Last Independence Day, a friend was anxious to end our conversation over the phone. He said he had to get to the flag-hoisting ceremony of h...

Last Independence Day, a friend was anxious to end our conversation over the phone. He said he had to get to the flag-hoisting ceremony of his housing society. I told him that a few minutes’ delay wouldn’t make a difference, but he answered: ‘‘When one has a name like Salman, it matters a great deal. You wouldn’t know.’’

And in truth I did not know. To me, an ordinary citizen, a flag-hoisting was a ritual to which one could reach late or not go to at all. Why should anyone bother what one did? But I saw immediately that I had not taken into account the considerations important to the second-class citizen, the pariah, the man constantly under observation, the man with no rights, the man assumed to be guilty unless he proves otherwise every waking moment.

I must now accept that this man, a friend for 32 years, together with whom I have put away gallons of tea, with whom I have argued endlessly but never exchanged a word of anger, whose children I look on as my own — this being seemingly no different from me — indeed is very different: for I can breathe freely while he cannot.

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My friend, like me, is not the flag-waving kind of patriot. He merely chose long ago, again like me, to return to India rather than make a home in the West. His love of things Indian, of his own little corner of his own country, was decisively greater than the attractions of an alien land.

But, according to the rootless nationalism that Sangh Hindutva would force on us, he is an enemy, a born outsider. India Equals Hindu is the spurious equation which these enemies of reason seek to make us accept. No one who is not a Hindu can be an Indian, they shout.

Who taught me ‘Jana Gana Mana’ when our republic was just seven years old? It was Professor Syed Muzaffar Ali, the geographer. In the evenings we kids would recite the words after him. When we had learnt them, he taught us to sing them. With great patience, he explained their meaning. We could not have imagined that nearly half a century later, there would be people who could howl, ‘‘Ali? A Muslim? Why did he not go to Pakistan?’’ Can this species have any notion of what love of one’s land is? Are they capable of rising even to the lowest abstractions? No, they are not: ideas like nation and patriotism are entirely out of their reach.

What is my interest in speaking of this? I do not wish the rest of the world to think ill of my country, to see it as a primitive land whose ideas belong to a time before the mediaeval. Thus my interest is patriotic. I do not wish my Muslim friends, whose intelligence and company I have long valued, to become so habituated to looking over their shoulder, that they cease to speak freely even to me. Our conversations then would be empty, without meaning and I would gain nothing. Thus my interest is selfish.

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Finally, if my friends are suspect, their friends too will be suspect. I am their friend — and I do not wish to be treated with suspicion in my own land. My prime concern, thus, is with my survival as a free human being. I can see and feel it being threatened. Bare survival.