Opinion Ali Khan Mahmudabad — an arrest and its sub-stories

Acknowledge, and then address, the criminal acts that have been perpetrated — lynchings, murders, the broadcast brutalities. And beyond that acknowledgment, there is need to abjure the strategies of exclusion, whereby a significant demographic of the national population is disenfranchised and crippled. This is, incidentally, a suicidal strategy from the point of view of the great god Vikas. Any strategy that produces a permanent state of sub-critical civil war can only be bad economics, and it amazes me that the corporate sponsors of the present dispensation cannot see this.

Meanwhile, we are dealing with the scandalous business of the arrest of Ali Khan Mahmudabad — ostensibly for saying merely that which has to be the common response of all moderately sentient people, Muslim as well as Hindu: That Muslims contribute more to our national life than merely to make tactically inspired appearances in press conferences. And it is time that “we” started to make amends for the shoddy and even criminal ways in which “they” have been, and are being, treated — and not remain content with mere tokenism. To say this — and Mahmudabad seems, on a bare reading of his posts, to have not done much more — is not, as the honourable Supreme Court says, “doing communal politics”. It is offering, as a responsible citizen, friendly advice to the state, to recover the secular credibility that it has squandered.

As I see it, there are two clear villains that may be identified in this sorry and still unfolding episode. The first of these is, appropriately, Jawaharlal Nehru. After all, it is because of the Nehruvians’ insistence on universal suffrage in the Constituent Assembly, and because of the consequent deepening of the reach of democracy — in a country that was, sceptics argued, largely illiterate — that the problem has cropped up in the first place. We are confronted by the Nehruvian generations’ — our — failure to create the cultures of democratic citizenship in a constitutional republic that is gambling with universal franchise in a postcolonial country that is barely literate, and riven with deep social fractures. Time and again, we are made conscious of this absent culture, particularly when it appears joined together with widespread access to political and state power. However, let me quickly add, for fear of being misunderstood, that the remedy for this defect is not less democracy, but more education in democratic citizenship.

The other clear villain is English. Mahmudabad is damned by his very fluency, correlated as it inevitably is with immense class privilege. While Bhatia grapples with “optics”, the sarpanch claims to have overheard something of which we have only his garbled version. Certainly, there is nothing offensive or incriminating in Mahmudabad’s published words. And since my distinguished lords of the Supreme Court also seem to suspect some linguistic skullduggery, I suggest with all respect that some English language experts be inducted into the investigative process. It was suggested that Mahmudabad had indulged in “dog whistling”. Dog whistling is used to describe speech that conveys meanings to select demographics at frequencies that are inaudible to most people. But in Mahmudabad’s particularly straightforward words, I was hard put to identify either the dog or the whistle. Unless, that is, Mahmudabad’s words conveyed something that was audible only to Bhatia and the sarpanch of Jathedi.

As against those who argue that English — relatively widespread English competence — is a great national asset, I have long argued that the presence of English in India is, at best, a mixed curse. English is, unquestionably, strongly correlated with power and privilege. It is, for that very reason, a locus of suspicion and anxiety for those who lack it. But for all that, the English-deprived still have access to real power, occupy positions of influence — as indeed they should.

The most innocent explanation for the matter currently at hand — the alleged “offence” for which Mahmudabad is to be investigated — is that it is simply a linguistic misunderstanding, easily cleared up by people who are competent in English, even if they are not senior IPS officers. But if his offence, in the eyes of some people, is that of merely being the kind of person who is fluent in English, that is an “offence” he cannot undo. Indeed, as someone who has been an English teacher for over 40 years, I am crushed by a sense of the “offenders” I might have produced over the decades.

(The writer taught at the Department of English, Delhi University)