Sharjeel Imam, the left’s blue-eyed boy, though he says it has seldom loved him back, is in the news again. Not, this time, because a court has refused him bail, but because of what he has to say. In written answers relayed to The Quint, Imam, who is yet to be tried, counts nationalism among the “branches of shirk”, the sin of setting up rivals to God. Then he builds a nation of his own.
His critics, Imam complains, judge him on a ten-second clip. Fair enough. Let us read him in full.
Start with the nation he rejects. India, Imam writes, rests on “the myth of the existence of an ancient Indian nation”, and secularists and Hindutva share the same sin: a “myth of uniformity”.
Now the nation he prefers. Imam draws his lineage from Allama Iqbal, the national poet of Pakistan, whose ideas, he says, “are of central importance to my understanding”. He quotes Iqbal with approval: Islam has a “peculiar concept of nationality” based on faith, and India’s Muslims are “far more homogeneous than any other people in India… and are the only people who can be described as a nation in the modern sense of the word”.
Homogeneous, says Imam. Yet elsewhere in the same interview, he demands “Muslim reservation (with share for backward castes)”. The nation he calls uniform turns out to need caste quotas.
Nationalism, it seems, is shirk only when someone else commits it.
On this foundation, Imam builds. South Asia’s Muslims, he writes, “were the largest Muslim nation, and hence required specific constitutional arrangements to ensure their autonomy”. And “Partition was forced on Muslims”. Imam would say the League wanted safeguards, not separation; Jinnah did, after all, accept the Cabinet Mission’s federation in 1946. But the League had fought that year’s election on Pakistan, and captured “a decided majority of Muslim seats”, as Tribune reported in April 1946. Imam himself calls that vote an ijma, a consensus, that “still carries weight”. A consensus for Pakistan, then, but Partition forced on the people who voted for it?
Imam needs his nation to be harmless, so he redraws the map. “Two nations,” he writes, “never meant two geographical nations in these discussions, but two religious nations dispersed across South Asia.” Iqbal, his own authority, saw it otherwise. In his 1930 Allahabad address he said: “I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State.” Self-government, he added, “within the British Empire, or without the British Empire”. Iqbal wanted a territory, not just a faith.
Imam’s hero is Jinnah, whom he calls “a great democratic leader of Indian Muslims in British India”. It was Jinnah’s League that called Direct Action Day in August 1946, “for the achievement of Pakistan”. In Calcutta, the day became the Great Calcutta Killing. A year earlier, at the Simla conference, Jinnah had demanded that the League alone name every Muslim member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council; no Muslim outside it could sit there. That is a claim to dominance, not participation.
Having redrawn 1947, Imam turns to the present. Muslims, he writes, must “start from where the reformist and democratic project was paused in 1947”. His demands: “Decentralisation, proportional representation, autonomous institutes, recognising Dalit Muslim and Christian, Muslim reservation (with share for backward castes)”. Each word belongs to democracy’s vocabulary. Together they make an old programme. Jinnah’s Fourteen Points of 1929 asked for a federal constitution with residuary powers in the provinces, at least a third of the seats for Muslims in the central legislature, and an adequate share of government jobs. Imam’s paused project is Jinnah’s, resumed.
For all this, the Constitution stands in the way. It is, Imam writes, “a roadblock to dignified existence of Muslim community and other religious minorities”. His politics belongs to “religious people like me whose politics is derived from, and deeply enmeshed with their faith”.
Tawhid, the oneness of God, is in Imam’s creed the “source of liberty, justice, equality and a just political order”. Once released, he means to “work out the meaning of Tawhid for our age and generation as we fight against both ancient and modern idols of oppression”. Nationalism, we know, is one of those idols. Imam has spent the interview building another.
Imam asked to be read in full. We have. Now the left should read its “historian”.
