For the past few years, every time I have travelled overseas, or foreign friends have come calling, they inevitably ask me, “How is it to be Muslim in India?” I, always civil, hesitate. I point out that I am privileged by wealth, position, and generational privilege and cannot speak on behalf of the vast majority who are not. I do not live in a place like Mohammed Akhlaq, where my neighbours would batter in my doors to look for meat in my fridge. I am not a farmer like Pehlu Khan was, to be murdered for transporting cattle on which his livelihood depended. I will never be in the place of Bilkis Bano, to have to plead that her rapists, the murderers of her family, were not deserving of early remission of their sentences because the Gujarat government considered them men of good character. I am not Kashmiri Muslim, to be perpetually denied anything resembling democracy and rights simply because I come from a place where Muslims are a majority community, and this is intolerable to the Indian state.
I cannot speak on behalf of these people, cannot appropriate their grievous hurts when I have not suffered as they have. And yet to use that excuse to remain silent is not an option. Even if I am not personally attacked, I see those that are, and it is impossible to ignore the conclusion that this country hates Muslims.
What other conclusion can we draw when a man murders and burns alive a construction worker, gets his 14-year-old nephew to shoot a video proudly declaring his actions, and is then considered by a political party as a candidate for national elections? What can we understand from a photographer jumping up and down triumphantly over the corpse of a man shot dead as they dispossessed him from his land? What do we conclude when police officers kick Muslims when they pray, or single them out to murder them in a railway coach?
Under the shadow of government
This is a short list, one easy to pluck out of memory. The real number of victims is far longer and continues to lengthen day by day. And all of it happens under the shadow of a government that is happy to not just nod at the hate, but to actively stimulate it. As journalist Samar Harlankar argues about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s latest hate-filled speech against Muslims, the government believes that this is not just acceptable to the country, but it is actively desired by millions of his ardent supporters.
And yet – even as I find it hard to dispute the facts of the gory deaths, the sight of cheering mobs, the valorisation of murderers that has become our daily bread – my heart is not in it. My own experience is something I cannot dispute either. Whether it is the multiple friends of all faiths (or none) who throng our house during Eid, the neighbour who presents us with dates and food for iftar during our fasts or the chap from whom I buy my cigarettes saying, “You disappeared after Eid!”, the friends who phoned me on the day Modi performed his rites at an uncompleted temple to ask for advice about a mosque or Muslim school that they could donate to, in order to show solidarity – my life is filled with people who say, through their every action, “No, we do not hate Muslims and we reject this tide of inhumanity.”
The Judas goat?
But just because my life is filled with love and support does not mean much for the general experience. There is a term called the Judas goat. This is the animal that is led through the slaughterhouse and kept unharmed, and it pacifies the other animals because they see it untouched, and so they are marched, unresisting, to their deaths. Exceptions are exceptions and they often prove the rule.
Thus, I argue with myself, my head telling me that this country hates Muslims, my heart saying, not so, not so, and I do not know whether the hope that remains is my greatest victory or my greatest betrayal.
Omair Ahmad is an author and journalist.
