Maulana modern

Mahmood Madani, general secretary of the Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind, hadn8217;t till now betrayed any apprehensions about diving into the heart of key national issues. The 39-year-old maulana has gone against the tide in saying just this month that Muslims do not need minority status and should get equal rights. On Nandigram, the West Bengal unit of the Jamiat has taken a point of view. It has in the process called the CPM8217;s bluff. The party leadership had written off the Jamiat8217;s protests as being at the behest of the presumably imperial US. But as Madani pointed out in the 8216;Walk the Talk8217; interview telecast this weekend, it is on the Jamiat8217;s platform that communist leaders held forth against the India visit of US President George W. Bush last year. This newspaper has made amply clear its reservations about the emotive tenor of the Jamiat8217;s foreign policy orientation. But the manner in which the Jamiat under Madani is opening itself to questioning and thereby getting drawn into the national conversation is wholesomely welcome.

There are no spaces of purity in a modern political economy from where interventions can be made by diktat. Certainly, the Jamiat has for most of its history understood that, and has not been self-effacing about its political alignments. It is perhaps this sense of a stake in national affairs that8217;s taken the Jamiat beyond the kind of abstract anti-development rhetoric of the rest of the non-political party coalition at Nandigram. The Jamiat, says Madani, is not against industrialisation or even the SEZ policy per se, only the attendant requirements of land acquisition and rehabilitation.

But just as Madani tries to bring his organisation more meaningfully to national issues, he has to open the Jamiat to social modernisation. The consensus at Deoband, to which the Jamiat is aligned, remains too untouched by reform. Education, says Madani, is the cornerstone in the Jamiat8217;s aspirations. On this the organisation8217;s interventions will be so much more forceful if they are strung together with a forward-looking vision. The Jamiat would find it so much easier to tap into its founding history if it casts itself as an agent of modernisation.