Recently some members of Progressive Students Forum of TISS, Mumbai along with a prominent student union member have equated Fraternity to RSS. The recent arguments rooted in traditional leftist discourse, were made in the wake of the ongoing movement against CAA and NRC. This appears to take a direction that favours the RSS propaganda for building a Hindu monarchy. BJP government’s legislative/legal/political moves for Muslim extermination is very visible and the Muslims and others in the country have now come forward together to resist this extermination. This fight is nothing less than the one for the very existence of the muslims in this country and thus they are raising slogans of allahu akbar and insha allah to assert and express their identity, not to mention thousands of other powerful slogans.
Hannah Arendt’s popular words resonate here — “if I am attacked as a jew I must defend myself as a Jew, not as a German, not as a world citizen, not as an upholder of the rights of man or whatever”. It is not a novelty to point out that when a muslim or a dalit is targeted for their very identity, a fight by asserting their identity becomes the most poetic-political response. It is on these grounds that Ayesha Renna and Ladeeda Farzana, the students of Jamia Millia Islamia who have become the face of CAA, NRC protest, were targeted by the Left Savarna and Liberals. Recently Ayesha Renna participated in a protest gathering at Kondotty, Malappuram district, Kerala where she criticised Kerala’s left government for arresting and remanding six young Muslim youth who were part of the anti-CAA protest in Kerala. This arrest and remand clearly reveals the double stand of Kerala’s Left government and their all-time hate towards muslims who assert their political identity. After the speech the comrades of Kondotty dramatically turned against her for speaking up for the release of the activists. Using strong words in asking Renna to shut up that resounded with patriarchal and misogynistic hate, the comrades unleashed their fear through a huge propaganda against Muslim politial assertions. The recent moves from the Activists of Progressive Students Forum of TISS need to be understood in this context.
When campuses like Jamia, AMU are in midst of struggling to resist the fascist regime, the so-called progessive left in TISS stands invested in theses-making on how RSS and fraternity are two sides of the same coin. Thus, they make sure they retain their share in the economy of islamophobia which was otherwise assumed to have been monopolized by the right wing Hindutva.
It is by now clear as to how the politics of Indian left followed by PSF of the TISS keep failing to capture the complexity of the debates that define the heterogeneity within the Muslim community. Often falling within the larger strata of conventional imperialist/orientalist discourse of Islam, contemporary left secular discourse is proven to be ill-equipped and theoretically null and void. Why are their reading techniques less nuanced when it comes to Islamic and Islamicate life worlds? Why are they suddenly shifting to flimsy social analysis when it comes to Muslim social movements? Do they ever consider the fact that being a reader their position is also important in shaping their approach to the ‘object’-of reading/analysis?
The notion of religion being a singular category that subsumes traditions of belief/non-belief, theism/atheism, spiritual/material has been challenged in many ways. The argument about religions being endowed with different categories and predicates in terms of its socio-political histories is often dismissed in polemics as the ones disseminated by organizations like PSF. Hence, to equate an Islamic movement that operates in India under a tyrannical Hindu majoritarian rule — with a well-organized / fascist/ totalitarian organization like RSS is an inherently flawed as well as a jerry-built approach that often turns a blind eye towards the historical trajectory of both secularism and religion in India. This, thus, frequently takes a horrible shape of victim blaming as well.
Another favourite pastime of SFI (the so called progressive left) is to attack certain Islamic scholars by employing the categories that are anachronistic in nature. Abul A’ala Maududi for instance has been a target of left academic political anxiety. It is amply clear that the interrogation of Maududi has nothing to do with a genuine scholarly inquiry but instead is often meant to construct a “monsterised bad Muslim” figure so as to malign and marginalize forms of Muslim assertion in campus politics. The aim, as it has been quite obvious, is to freez Muslims to a certain historical context and divert the attention from the actual struggle against Muslim genocide.
Serious scholarship on Maududi by scholars like Irfan Ahmad, Masood Raja, Roy Jackson, etc., has been side-lined and replaced with few “Google searches” to find statements to feed the desire of Islamophobia which is nothing short of academic political cowardism couched in pure hatred.
The vilification of Maududi is obvious an agenda that was programmed by the left propaganda machines in order to silence and suppress the burgeoning political agency of Muslim students. This is already proven to be doomed in the face of serious and honest political and scholarly engagements among the Bahujan students of Indian campuses like JNU, HCU, etc. One of the instances of this could be seen in the social media sharing’s of PSF activists in the campus in which Munir Commission report, a report of judicial inquiry submitted in the wake of anti-Ahmadiyya riot of 1953 in Punjab, was cited to argue that for Maududi the potential anti-Muslim atrocities under Indian government are deemed to be justifiable by dint of their choice to stay in India. But Maududi himself made clear that he did not make such a statement and explained how his words were deliberately distorted and misrepresented in the report in the wake of certain political circumstances (Khalidi 2003)[1].
To get Muslim activists embroiled in such infelicitous engagements would also add up to the onus of loyalty that is only reserved for Muslims in India.
We urge the members of progressive student’s forum to stop spreading false information and educate yourself first. We extend our warm solidarity with the anti-CAA/NRC movement and we stand with the student communities across the universities, residents of Shaheen Bagh, people of Uttar Pradesh, North-East communities, etc., in their fight for actualizing freedom and dignity to all.
[1] Mawlana Mawdudi and the Future Political Order in British India The Muslim World • Volume 93 • July/October 2003
