The iftar watch

Signals of so many kinds can be sent out from and read into the iftar party. The attendance, thin or large, of ministers, babus, diplomats, and other VIPs is seen as a measure of the waning or increasing clout of the host in circles that matter. The presence of certain politicians and the staying away of others is deemed a useful pointer to which way the political wind is blowing and may yet blow. Most of all, though, competitive iftaring is minority politics by a more festive name. In the television age, iftars provide an instant and entirely painless way of demonstrating solidarity with the minority community. They offer a ready-to-use platform from which to posture to the Muslim Votebank. Basically, throwers of the Capital8217;s high-profile iftars are creatures of a reified, incestuous world. They are not overly bothered by cumbersome questions such as these 8212; is there even such a monolith out there which goes by that name? Is it influenced at all by politics of such an obviously symbolic kind?

In all this, though, there are those who rue that the iftar itself has transformed beyond recognition. Time was when in the month of Ramzan, the fast was broken after the evening prayer with a light meal, to be followed later by a heavier dinner 8212; the empty stomach had to be given time to readjust. They were essentially private and intimate occasions in which relatives and friends sometimes participated. Delhi8217;s political iftars, on the other hand, are unwieldy, impersonal affairs that lay out rich designer feasts. In a larger sense, the escalation in the number and scale of iftars also marks the passing of an older way of living. The lifestyle of unselfconscious participation by communities in each others8217; concerns and affairs has given way to an ostentatious tokenism. The moment of breaking the fast as a community has mutated into a PR exercise in which the togetherness is a contrivance of the political kind.