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Maulana Azad’s Profound Legacy in Education at Ranchi Facing Extinction

January 21, 2025EducationAnjuman e Islamiya - Ranchi, Anjuman e Ulema e Bihar, Ashrafiya Muslims of Ranchi, Bihar State Madrasa Education Board - BSMEB - Patna, Haji Ibrar, Haji Nesar, Hasib Akhtar, Hasib Akhtar - CEO - Jharkhand Waqf Board, Imarat e Shariah, Indian Muslims, Jharkhand Waqf Board, Judge Nur Ul Hoda, Kalaal Muslims of Ranchi, Khanqah e Mujibiya, Khanqah e Rahmaniya, Madrasa Alia - Calcutta, Madrasa Islamia - Ranchi, Madrasa Shams Ul Hoda, Maulana Azad, Maulana Azad College - Ranchi, Maulana Azad Research Centre, Maulana Azad Research Centre - Tagore Hills - Ranchi, Maulana Sajjad, Mohammad Sajjad, Muslim Higher Education Society - Ranchi, Muslims of India, Muslims of India - Positive News, Muslims of Jharkhand, Muslims of Ranchi, Najma Heptullah, Nur Ul Hoda, Paighaam - Urdu Weekly, Positive News of Indian Muslims, Positive News of Muslims of India, Positive Stories of Indian Muslims, Positive Stories of Muslims of India, Prof Manzar Husain, Prof Rizwan Qaiser, Rahmaniya Musafirkhana - Ranchi, Rizwan Qaiser, S Irfan Habib, Shams Ul Hoda, Sheikh Safdar Ali, Sheikh Safdar Ali - Gaya, Syed Sulaiman Nadvimpositiveone@gmail.com

Ranchi, JHARKHAND :

It is ironical that, just in the year of its centenary, the historic Madrasa Islamiya of Ranchi, founded by Maulana Azad (1888-1958) in 1917, is facing extinction. The BJP government of Jharkhand is reportedly contemplating to strangulate it to death by withdrawing its affiliation/recognition as well as fund. Much of the land of the institution has either been encroached upon or been sold out, by the self-serving Muslims, influential in the management of the Anjuman-e-Islamiya, which runs almost 12 subsidiary institutions, including the Madrasa Islamiya. In 1987, it formed a subsidiary called, “Muslim Higher Education Society”, which added a degree college named after Maulana Azad. This Muslim minority college is recognised and funded by the government of Jharkhand. It has got around 500 students.

The management of the Anjuman-e-Islamiya stands divided between two warring factions, respectively by Haji Ibrar and Haji Nesar. The latter is supposed to be making too much of interferences into the functioning of the Anjuman-e-Islamiya. Sections of local population admire Haji Ibrar for having done a lot for the Anjuman; they are supposed to have recently purchased a land few kilometres away from Ranchi, where the Azad College is likely to be shifted.

Because of this dispute, mainly around composition of the electoral college of the Anjuman, election for the managing committee of the Anjuman has not been held since last November. According to the bye-laws of the Anjuman, every three years elections are supposed to be held. Convenor for the election from the provincial government is the Chairman, Jharkhand Waqf Board. The government has not appointed any Chairman since 2014. In its place, an ad hoc CEO is there for the Waqf Board. He has not shown much interest in resolving the dispute, and convening elections, as per the bye-laws of the Anjuman-e-Islamiya. There are various petitions lying before the CEO regarding the composition of the electoral college. The factionalism is also around caste (Biradri). Haji Ibrar is supposed to be representing the Ashrafiya Muslims, whereas Haji Nesar is supposed to be representing Pasmanda (mainly the community of Kalaal) Muslims.

The property (including the buildings) of the Anjuman-e-Islamiya, located in the commercially significant, prime location of the city of Ranchi, has got around 200 shops. Because of self-serving factionalism within the Anjuman-e-Islamiya, the rent of the shops is kept so very nominal and unrealistic that the Anjuman deprives itself of huge revenue. The Anjuman-e-Islamiya also runs a 60 bed, relatively better-furnished, hospital, besides the Rahmaniya Musafirkhana, existing since the days of Maulana Azad. This is a separate (now a four-storey) building. Few years ago, with some fund from the Local Area Development Scheme of the local Parliamentarian, this building has been renovated. It has added a library, a study circle, etc.

There has been some efforts towards getting the main building of the Anjuman-e-Islamiya declared as National Monument, but to no avail, as yet.

The Madrasa Islamiya, at present, has got 900 students, some of them are boarders too. This is an educational institution recognised and funded by the government of Jharkhand’s body, the Jharkhand Academic Council (JAC). Before the creation of the province of Jharkhand in 2000, this was recognised and funded by the Bihar State Madrasa Education Board (BSMEB, Patna), a statutory body of the government of Bihar. There were 126 such madrasas falling in what became Jharkhand. All the 126 madrasas continue to get fund from the Jharkhand government.

After the creation of the province of Jharkhand in 2000, the Anjuman-e-Islamiya, with its ‘autonomy’, has been functioning under the administrative supervision of the Jharkhand Waqf Board.

A Proud History of Anti-colonial Assertion

It is worth re-visiting the historical context in which the Madrasa Islamiya was founded and the ideal objectives its founder envisioned. For this, let us benefit from some historians, such as S. Irfan Habib and Rizwan Qaiser.

For his revolutionary activities, he was into, right since his early ages, Azad was externed from Calcutta in March 1916 under the Defence of India Regulation. In April 1916 he was sent to Ranchi. Influenced with Shyam Sundar Chakravarty (1869-1932) and Aurobindo Ghosh (1872-1950), the Maulana was involved in revolutionary struggle and was preparing for a violent overthrow of British rule. His “continuous exhortation of the Muslims towards education including political education which essentially meant building up self-confidence to resist British rule”, was inviting anxious watch of the colonial regime on him, says Qaiser.

During his internment at Ranchi, for nearly four years (1 April 1916-31 December 1919), Azad established an organization Anjuman-e-Islamiya in August 1917 which started the Madrasa Islamiya. In a list of thirty one donors, headed by Rai Saheb Thakur Das, Rais-i- Ranchi and Babu Jagatpal Sahai, vakil, were also there, among other people, from all walks of life, including Sheikh safdar Ali of Milki (Gaya), informs Prof. Rizwan Qaiser, in his research on the subject. He says that behind all these activities of Azad, the guiding motive was to spread the Islamic education among the less fortunate co-religionists at Ranchi and to mobilise his co-religionists towards the freedom movement. According to Qaiser, Maulana Azad had been thinking around the issues of education in sciences, and also on the medium of instruction, since as early as in 1902, as it comes out of some of the correspondences of Azad.

For the Madrasa Islamiya, a 200 page long document of curricula was prepared by the Maulana Azad; the subjects such as English, mathematics, Indian geography, Indian history, history of Islam and sciences had to be introduced to bring it at par with the government run schools. Azad was very clear about the fact that no system of education could be complete unless the elements of Government University system were also to be introduced. Maulana Azad highlighted the importance of producing more educationists (Mutallemeen), rather than teachers (Muallemeen) alone. The education had to inculcate mazhabi ham-aahangi (mutual religious understanding) and rawadari (tolerance). He addressed from the Jama Masjid on every Friday, teaching them in Hubb-ul-Watani (patriotism), qaumi yekjahti (integration of nationalities), and Mushtareka Wataniyat (composite nationalism). The curricula were actually a part of the one prepared by Maulana Azad for the Madrasa Aliya of Calcutta (established in 1780 by Warren Hastings, mainly to study Arabic, Persian and Muslim Law; during 1826-36, it also taught medical sciences till the Calcutta Medical College was established in 1836; in 2007 it was upgraded as University)

S. Irfan Habib tells us that under Ibn Khaldun’s influence, unquestioning acceptance of theology was something Azad wanted to rectify. Azad found the curricula in the pre-existing Islamic madrasas fundamentally narrow. Its significant omission was mathematics, which is the basis of science and technology. Azad agreed with Rousseau in his advocacy of the children’s necessity and ability to grasp the truth through their own insight.

Another significant influence on Maulana Azad, in the context of science and education was Sir Syed Ahmad Khan Bahadur (1817-98), which attracted Azad towards modern education and modern science for the Muslims, as admitted by Azad, in his very eloquent convocation speech (February 1949) in the Aligarh Muslim University. This is another matter that on political questions, Azad had sharp differences against Sir Syed.

By way of recollection and re-dissemination, Azad’s profound contributions were put together when the National University of Education Planning and Administration (NUEPA), New Delhi, convened a seminar in 2009, and the essays were published in 2010. In the seminar, the then Speaker, Lok Sabha, Somnath Chatterjee, had described that Maulana Azad had re-emphasized the fivefold programme for the expansion of education in the country: These were (a) Universal compulsory basic education for all children of school age, (b) Social education for our adult illiterates, (c) Measures for improvement in the quality of and expansion of facilities for secondary and higher education, (d) Technical and scientific education on a scale adequate to the nation’s needs, and (e) Measures for the enrichment of the cultural life of the community by encouraging the arts and providing facilities for recreation and other amenities.

It is not without any reason that Nehru preferred to take Azad along, as his Education Minister, where he served with great distinction till his death in 1958. It is a lesser known fact that ever since Gokhale proposed in 1910 for right to compulsory free education, it was Azad who pursued it in the Constituent Assembly. Though, it was only as late as in 2009-10, that such a legislation (RTE) could actually be enacted.

During the colonial period unlike Uttar Pradesh, in Bihar, essentially speaking, there was not much of a difference between the votaries of modern education and those of the traditional learning. The Muslim elites of both the streams in Bihar cooperated with each other in imparting both kinds of education. Thus, a modern educated elite, a judge, Nur-ul-Hoda (1854-1935; son of Shams-ul-Hoda) set up the Madrasa Shams-ul-Hoda, at Patna in 1912. It endures till date with buildings constructed in colonial architectural styles, and have got good hostels too. It was recognised by the Government of Bihar in 1919, which affiliated Madrasas across the province, in the capacity of serving as the Bihar State Madrasa Education Board, BSMEB, Patna; the Board was made a statutory body by the Karpuri Thakur led government during 1977-79 ). In 1927, it affiliated the Madrasa Islamiya, Ranchi as well. Ever since then, this Madrasa remains a government recognised and funded institution.

Its syllabi, till Fauqaniya (class X), has all the modern subjects of Natural Sciences, Mathematics, Social Sciences and Literatures of Indian and English language. It has board examination at Middle (Wastania) level as well, which is class VIII. After Independence, this Board became a statutory body.

Interestingly, both the Madrasas (of Patna and of Ranchi) had one person in common, in preparing the curriculum—-Syed Sulaiman Nadvi (1884-1953). The Madrasa Shams-ul-Hoda of Patna produced many students and teachers who participated in the Quit India Movement; after independence some of its students joined the Indian Administrative Services and Indian Police Services.

Another Gift of Maulana Azad’s Stay at Ranchi

Besides the Madrasa Islamiya, another enduring gift of Azad’s stay at Ranchi is the foundation of Imarat-e-Shariah (in 1921, at Phulwari Sharif, Patna) in collaboration with Maulana Sajjad (1880-1940), and the Anjuman-e-Ulema-e-Bihar (founded in June 1917), a precursor of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Hind. The Sufi shrines—Khanqah-e-Rahmaniya (Monghyr) and Khanqah-e-Mujibiya (Phulwari Sharif, Patna) extended its support.

Maulana Azad elaborated upon this scheme of mobilizing Muslims against the anti- colonial struggle in his Urdu weekly, Paighaam (November 25, 1921).

The Imarat-e-Shariah went on to unwaveringly resist the communal-territorial separatism of the Muslim League. Azad’s protégé, Maulana Sajjad, also talked of confining religion into private spaces, and wrote many letters to Jinnah raising serious questions against his divisive [Pakistan] Resolution of Lahore, 23 March 1940.

He consistently remained in touch with the masses and also edited an Urdu weekly, Naqeeb, (after its fortnightly Imarat was gagged by the colonial state during the Civil Disobedience Movement 1930-34). On 14 April 1940, he wrote in Naqeeb against Jinnah’s scheme of dividing India, Muslim India aur Hindu India Ki Scheme par Ek Aham Tabserah (reprinted in the Naqeeb, 10 January 1946). The Patna historian, Papiya Ghosh (1953-2006), wrote an elaborate academic essay (1997) on the history of Imarat-e-Shariah, 1921-47.

Maulana Sajjad wrote letters to Jinnah asking pertinent questions. Jinnah never responded back. Sajjad, therefore, brought the letters in public circulation, specifically of 26 December 1938 and of 23 January 1939.

Maulana Sajjad also advocated the idea of confining the religious processions and rituals into private spaces rather than a public display of it causing disharmony and group violence. His pamphlet to this effect was captioned, Firqa Warana Ma’amlaat Ka Faisla Kin UsuloN Par Hona Chahiye? (Naqeeb, 20 February 1940)

He launched a political outfit, Muslim Independent Party (MIP) in 1936, with agrarian issues being its chief concern. In 1937, in collaboration with the Congress it contested the provincial elections and emerged second largest party. As the Congress, the largest party refused to form ministry on certain issues of discretionary powers vested in the Governor according to the Act of 1935, it was MIP which formed a provisional ministry, which ran for four months (April-July 1937). Barrister Md. Yunus (1884-1952) was the premier. In its short tenure, it performed very well on all counts, including its agrarian concerns such as irrigation facilities, soft loans, river embankments, etc.

Today, the Imarat-e-Shariah runs charitable institutions of education and health. In its self-proclamation, its jurisdiction extends to Jharkhand and Orissa as well. Should not it look upon the Madrasa Islamiya, Ranchi, in order to resuscitate and revitalise it?

However, this is also a puzzle for the local population that ever since Maulana Azad left Ranchi in 1920, he never looked back towards it. It is something like Gandhiji’s visit to Champaran in 1917. Even though he did re-visit, yet, the three schools established by Gandhiji in Champaran could not survive. As against this, the Madrasa at Ranchi did survive and endures till date.

The Maulana Azad Educational Foundation (MAEF) of the Union government in its existence of about three decades (founded in 1988 to commemorate Azad’s birth centenary) is doing a lot in the stated direction of education. Should not it make an intervention into it to rescuing this wonderful legacy facing extinction? Recognizing the historical significance of Azad’s stay at Ranchi, the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, had inaugurated Maulana Azad Research Centre, on the Tagore Hills, Ranchi. It subsequently disappeared with no traces even of the stone plaque testifying the inauguration by Rajiv Gandhi. In January 2015, however, the then Chancellor (of the Ranchi University) cum Governor of Jharkhand, took note of it and persuaded the Ranchi University to establish Maulana Azad Research Centre. Its incumbent Director, Prof. Manzar Husain, has now made it functional, with a library in its building. Besides, the Senate Hall of the University is also named after Maulana Azad, as a token of gratitude.

In 2009-10, Qaiser had also highlighted the sorry state of the institution and gross negligence of the Madrasa by the Muslim dominated management. Yet, it continues to languish in disarray. Qaiser concluded, “There are people who swear by Maulana Azad and his association with Ranchi but have not been able to accord the level of respect that an institution such as Madrasa-i-Islamia deserves”.

Mention may be made specifically of Najma Heptullah, claiming to be a descendant of Azad. Till very recently she was the Union Ministry of Minority Affairs in the cabinet of Narendra Modi. Shall she really make a meaningful intervention to draw attention of the provincial and the Union governments to rescue this dying institution? The then Chairman, Jharkhand State Minority Commission, had approached the minister, Najma Heptullah. She sent her emissary to obtain first-hand knowledge about the state of affairs and requirements of the institution. Nobody knows what really happened to this. Then she no longer remained the minister. People have also been approaching Najma Heptullah’s successor, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi.

The problem afflicting the Anjuman-e-Islamiya is not convening election of its management committee. The government of Jharkhand and its ad hoc functionary, Hasib Akhtar (CEO, Jharkhand Waqf Board, who is by rules, Convenor of election for the Anjuman-e-Islamiya), rather than convening election, is now contemplating to just withdraw the funding (and recognition) of the historic educational institution, Madrasa Islamiya, sources in the ministry of education, confide.

It is worthwhile recalling that delay in granting affiliation by the government of Jharkhand had compelled the Muslim minority managed Kabir Women’s Degree College (Jamshedpur) to close down. It had more than sufficient infrastructure in comparison to most of the other constituent colleges in the state. But it was forced to pull its shutter down, after having functioned for over two decades.

The local Muslims feel helpless at this attitude of the BJP government of Jharkhand. With a sense of hopeless-ness, they say, ‘this is the kind of era we are living in’. Local media, particularly, ETV Urdu, has been exposing all these details, which fall on the deaf ears of the government of Jharkhand. Let it be said that even the Union government of BJP is keeping such bodies head-less. For instance, the National Commission for Minorities, had become defunct, owing to vacancies. It is only few weeks ago that the Chairman and its members have been appointed. The National Commission for minority Educational Institutions (NCMEI) has got no Chairman, with vacancy of one member too. Yet another testimony that the dominant political wisdom of the day believes in peripheralising the minorities!

(This article was first published in August 2017. It is being republished because of PM Modi’s Madrasa modernisation push)

source: http://www.beyoundheadlines.in / Beyond Headlines / Home> History / by Mohammad Sajjad / June 19th, 2019

Nehru, Muslims and India’s Freedom Movement

February 25, 2023Community Involvement / Social Issues, Freedom Fighters (under research project)Book - Claiming Citizenship and Nation - Muslim Politics and State Building in North India - Author - Aishwarya Pandit, Book - Urdu Memoir - Karwan e Zindagi, Book - Wings of Destiny - Author - Fasihur Rahman, Maulana Abul Hasan Ali Miyan Nadvi, Mohammad Sajjad, Momin Conference, Ziaur Rahman Ansarimpositiveone@gmail.com

INDIA:

A new book questions political wisdom about competitive communalism before and after Independence.

**Former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Image Courtesy: PTI**

The prevailing political wisdom of the day is to chastise Jawaharlal Nehru, his Congress party, and their inclusive vision for the republic. Given this, one is caught in a fix if a published work subjects the Congress-Nehruvian performance to criticism. The republican and constitutional vision of India, and its plans and goals were outcomes of a prolonged anti-colonial mass agitation, which multiple ideological and identitarian political formations joined, complemented and contested.

Besides the aligned or contending forces, intellectuals and activists of various 19th and 20th-century hues also provided inputs. Privileged Muslims articulated some strands, including the exclusionary right-wing politics of communal separatism. Though represented by the Muslim League, and its sole spokesman MA Jinnah, they straddled nearly every shade of political articulation, ranging from Left to Centre, from those who advocated separatism to its vociferous opponents.

Unfortunately, the academic and popular domains popularise Muslim separatism more than their resistance to separatism. Academic studies also focus too much on Uttar Pradesh (earlier the United Provinces of Agra and Awadh). Gyanesh Kudaisya (2002) characterised this province as India’s heartland in terms of population and geographic size but also narrative-making for the Indian polity.

The former landed elites of the Muslims of this region, whom David Lelyveld (1978) called the “Kutchery Milieu”, were in the forefront and mainstay of the Muslim League. An important Muslim League leader from Lucknow, Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman (1889-1973), candidly and proudly proclaimed this in his 1961 memoir, Pathway to Pakistan. Quoting Maulana Azad, he writes, “All students of Indian politics know that it was from the U.P. that the League was reorganised. Mr Jinnah took full advantage of the situation and started an offensive which ultimately led to Pakistan.” Interestingly, in the late 1930s, Khaliquzzaman was the mayor of Lucknow and allied at least once with the Hindu Mahasabha. After Partition, it took him a long time to migrate to the other side of the border.

Against this backdrop, Aishwarya Pandit’s Claiming Citizenship and Nation: Muslim Politics and State Building in North India, 1947-1986, published by Routledge in 2021, is a critical intervention. She writes, “Given the demographic dominance of U.P. Muslims in some constituencies, the threat of revival of ‘Muslim communalism’ continued to impact their politics. In the colonial period, the United Provinces had remained central to Muslim politics around issues of representation, minority safeguards and language.”

Pandit disagrees with Kudaisya and proposes in her introductory chapter that the Uttar Pradesh Congress opposed the Centre’s move to “introduce minority and cultural safeguards after 1947”. Her book examines the intersections of law, identity and property and notes region-specific Muslim—and anti-Muslim—politics and articulations. Notably, she includes in her work the tensions that prevailed within the Muslim community over contemporary concerns.

Pandit says the new Muslim leadership that emerged after independence articulated the weaknesses of Nehruvian secularism, particularly concerning their religious, cultural and identitarian concerns. Further, from the mid-1970s onward, “Fatwa and Ulema politics acquired the centre stage”. Her study ends in 1986, a period that, according to her, “signaled the continuation of Hindu counter mobilisation, which set in the 1950s around the [Babri] Masjid-[Ram] Temple issue [of Ayodhya], the issue of minority appeasement and personal law and also coincided with the dipping fortunes of the Congress party in Uttar Pradesh”.

In her effort to discover reasons for the Congress party’s decline in Uttar Pradesh, she argues that Muslims here [and in Bihar] “made some surprising alliances including those with the Jan Sangh in the 1960s and 70s”. Pandit attempts to absolve Muslims of the responsibility for this, and “challenges the widespread view that Muslims acted as a secure and stable ‘vote-bank’ for the Congress after independence”.

This is where the book would provoke many to raise a few questions that have been left unasked or unanswered. Terminating the study in 1986—and not a few years later—may have excluded the author from raising some crucial questions. Hindu counter-mobilisation got massive support from the Shah Bano issue that raged from May 1985 to April 1986, other than the ‘nationalisation’ of the local Ayodhya dispute, which Pandit chooses not to examine. Scholars, even those not inclined to the right, often sidestep Muslim contributions to communalising narratives that fed Hindu majoritarianism, weakening India’s fragile pluralist secularism.

On 15 January 1986, at a Momin Conference session at the Siri Fort Auditorium in Delhi, then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi announced his intention to amend the law to nullify the Supreme Court’s April 1985 verdict in favour of Shah Bano. Driven out of her home in 1975, 43 years after her marriage, Bano had approached the courts seeking maintenance. Given instant triple divorce in 1978—inside a trial court in Indore—the case moved from the High Court to the Supreme Court. In May 1986, the Rajiv Gandhi-led government passed the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act following strident Muslim protests in January that year against the progressive judicial verdict that granted Shah Bano alimony. The law passed in Parliament reversed the maintenance the court had said she was entitled to.

The Urdu memoir, Karwan-e-Zindagi, published in 1988 by Maulana Abul Hasan Ali Miyan Nadvi (1914-1999), makes the conservative Muslim approach to this issue pretty clear. In Volume 3, Nadvi triumphantly writes about how he persuaded Rajiv Gandhi not to accept the proposition that many Islamic countries had reformed their personal laws. He rejoices in accomplishing his effort to stymie similar reforms in India. He says his arguments had a particular psychological impact on Rajiv Gandhi—“Woh teer apney nishaaney par baitha—My arrow hit its target”. Nadvi includes a candid confession: “Our mobilisation to protect the Shariat in 1986 complicated the Babri Masjid issue and vitiated the atmosphere in a big way—“Iss ney fiza mein ishte’aal wa izteraab paida karney mein bahut bara hissa liya,” he writes.

Nadvi admits in his memoir that he had promised to Rajiv Gandhi he would persuade the Waqf Boards to make an endowment available to maintain abandoned women. But this issue remains unaddressed until today. Aishwarya Pandit, rather than exploring the clergy politics of Lucknow’s Nadvi, jumps over to Delhi’s “Imam” Bukhari and his demagoguery and rhetoric.

Nadvi’s politics of 1985-1986 needs to be read with Nicholas Nugent, who writes in his book, Rajiv Gandhi: Son of a Dynasty, published by BBC Books in 1990, that the Congress High Command decided in early 1986 to play the Hindu card like the Muslim women’s bill played the Muslim card. Nugent writes, “Ayodhya was supposed to be a package deal…a tit for tat for the Muslim women’s bill…Rajiv played a key role in carrying out the Hindu side of the package deal by such actions as arranging that pictures of Hindus worshipping at the newly unlocked shrine be shown on television.”

On 1 February 1986, within an hour of the Faizabad district court judgment, the lock of the Babri Masjid was opened. The “deal” between the Prime Minister, the Muslim clergy and the Momin Conference’s Ziaur Rahman Ansari, who died in 1992, had been struck a month earlier. Ansari’s biography, Wings of Destiny, written by his son Fasihur Rahman and published in 2018, refers to this series of events. Yet, nagging questions remain: who wanted the locks opened and why? After all, elections were four years away, and Rajiv Gandhi did not have a direct electoral stake in the event, except for a few reverses in by-elections for the Congress party.

A sizeable section of Hindus was peeved after Nehru reformed, though more symbolically than substantively, Hindu Personal Laws in the 1950s, but left out Muslim Personal Laws. This aspect is brought out by Reba Som in February 1994, in “ Jawaharlal Nehru and the Hindu Code: A Victory of Symbol over Substance ?”

Put another way, what the votaries of Hindutva call Muslim appeasement is the State appeasing the conservative and patriarchic Muslim clergy. Quite often, liberal and left scholars and activists hold the position that reforms must emerge from within the Muslim communities. Nevertheless, competitive communalism adversely affected the Congress party in the electoral sphere. First, the ex-Socialist forces, comprising the backward classes and Dalits, replaced Congress with the Bharatiya Janata Party. Pandit disappoints on this count in her sixth chapter despite delving into primary archival sources on all issues raised in her immensely readable book.

In the third chapter, Pandit discusses Hindi-Urdu battles and blames the ruling Congress for the deficits in State support for Urdu. She misses out that the protagonists of Urdu in Uttar Pradesh also share some blame for the idioms and methods of political mobilisation they didn’t employ for the Urdu cause. Selma K. Sonntag (1996) provides a more informed comparative assessment of the Urdu politics of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

Besides Urdu and personal laws, another central controversy has been the minority status of the centrally-funded Aligarh Muslim University. Pandit touches upon this subject but leaves out too much. She does not concern herself with the academic performance or research at the university, which has refrained from examining Muslim concerns such as communal strife, caste among Muslims, patriarchy, and Muslim under-representation. Just a few months before his unfortunate death in 2010, Omar Khalidi candidly raised these issues. Could these deficits possibly have contributed to the disjunctions between State and society as also between India’s Muslims and the Aligarh Muslim University?

Quite often, the ruling party had to yield to pressures from Muslim conservatives and reactionaries, perhaps because despite massive funding to the university, it did not foster enough progressive Muslim opinion-makers and leaders. If true, this would limit the university’s contribution to resisting competitive communalism and can explain why the support base of the ruling Congress deserted it, eventually leading to the rise of what scholars such as Edward Anderson, Christophe Jaffrelot and Deepa Reddy call Neo-Hindutva.

Possibly because of this omission, this book does not help figure out why Uttar Pradesh Muslims could not throw up the kind of ‘Pasmanda movement’, or the short-lived Left-inspired gender movement Tehreek-e-Niswan, which emerged in adjacent Bihar in the 1990s.

Why Muslims in Uttar Pradesh failed to strengthen post-independence movements for citizenship rights and confined themselves to emotive religious, cultural and identitarian issues is a vital but unanswered question. Thus, this book ignores this pertinent question: to claim citizenship, and for the secularization of the state and society, how to strike a balance with rights for religious communities? This approach of the author doesn’t allow her to deal, even when discussing Muslim assets, with why Uttar Pradesh Muslims did not employ their wealth for capacity-building of their community, as South Indian Muslims did and still do, in the spheres of education, and health? Why did they remain highly dependent upon the State?

Notwithstanding these limitations of perspective, Pandit’s considerably well-researched book delves into untapped and under-tapped primary sources. Her analysis of a wide range of evidence and her articulation is lucid. True to its claim, it is a valuable contribution toward understanding post-independence Uttar Pradesh.

The author teaches modern and contemporary Indian History at Aligarh Muslim University. The views are personal.

source: http://www.newsclick.in / News Click / Home> India> Politics / by Mohammad Sajjad / February 20th, 2023

Remembering Syed Shahabuddin – Muslim Heart, Indian Mind

March 22, 2017Arts, Culture & Entertainment, Community Involvement / Social Issues, Leaders, World OpinionKalimuddin Ahmad, Mohammad Sajjad, Mohammad Sajjad-Associate Professor-Aligarh Muslim University, Mohsin Ahmad, Mushirul Hasan, Syed Parwez, Syed Shahabuddin, Syed Shahabuddin - Indian Diplomat, Syed Shahabuddin - Indian Muslim Magazine, Syed Shahabuddin- IAS, Syed Shahabuddin-Editor-Muslim India, Syed Shahabuddin's Autobiography 'Muslim Heart Indian Mind', Uma Kaurampositiveone@gmail.com

Ranchi (JHARKHAND) formerly BIHAR / NEW DELHI :

His arrival on the political scene as an articulate Muslim leader was no ordinary event in the journey of the Indian republic.

Syed Shahabuddin, 1935-2017. Credit: Youtube

Writing an obituary of the writer, diplomat and politician Syed Shahabuddin is actually an exercise in writing of the journey of Muslims in the Indian republic. The much maligned gentleman was somebody who could never be ignored. As a very bright student of physics in the academically brighter phase of Patna University in the first decade of India’s independence, he drew the attention of his teachers. The memoirs of his professors, Mohsin and Kalimuddin Ahmad, describe Shahabuddin’s promise in glowing terms. Soon thereafter, he became known for the leadership he provided to a student movement in 1955, including leading a 20,000-person march to wave black flags against Jawaharlal Nehru when he visited Patna – in protest against police firing on students.

He managed to get a job as a lecturer at the same time as qualifying for the civil services in 1957. He ranked second among all the aspirants, with a particularly high score in the interview section, and joined the Indian Foreign Service. Many delicious legends were fabricated around the kind of questions he was asked and his witty responses. His success not only inspired many students, but also helped overcome the trepidation among Muslims about their place in India after Partition.

While a section of Hindus looked upon Muslims as potential fifth columnists, a section of Muslims was also not very confident of the inclusionary-pluralist democracy that was being built up under Nehru. Notably, even as a student, Shahabuddin too was contributing towards this task of nation-building. With some ‘socialist’ leanings, though not formally with any party, his activism allowed certain critiques of the Nehruvian consensus to be heard.

He paid a price for this activism, though a minor one. Owing to Shahabuddin’s involvement in the student agitation of 1955, he had to wait for police/intelligence clearance and therefore could join the services a little later than his other batchmates. Legend has it that Nehru himself finally cleared the file.

In the late 1970s, the hegemony of the ruling Congress came be challenged by the socialists, Shahabuddin became restless within the confines of bureaucracy. He decided to quit government service and join politics.

Until then, Indian politics lacked a pan-Indian Muslim leader with well informed and articulate views. Although Maulana Azad had occupied an important position, he was part of the Nehruvian consensus and did not challenge it. Nor were academics looking at the worrying economic and educational locations of Muslim communities and their disproportionately inadequate share in the structures and processes of power. A few exceptions existed, such as the volume on castes among Muslims edited by Imtiaz Ahmad in the late 1960s and the works of Uma Kaura and Mushirul Hasan looking at the marginalisation of Muslims by the Congress under majoritarian pressures in 1970s, but these were rare.

None of the important dissenting voices in Indian democracy, whether Ram Manohar Lohia (1910-67), the defender of the lower castes, Jai Prakash Narayan (1902-79) nor the Left were paying attention to this issue.

Shahabuddin saw this vacuum in Indian politics and adventurously jumped in to fill it. His arrival on the scene as an articulate Muslim politician was no ordinary event in the journey of the Indian republic. As he stormed in, with his enviable articulation and abilities invoking constitutional values and spirit, he was almost matchless. He could not be dismissed, but he could be maligned as a sectarian, conservative and even communal reactionary. Often, he gave his critics grounds to do so. His stand on the gender issue in the Shah Bano case, where he stood on the side of the clerics, and on free speech, by asking for Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses to be banned are particularly problematic as the repercussions continue to play out today. On the issue of caste among India’s Muslims too, he was dismissive of pasmanda activists, although unlike many ‘reactionary’ Ashraaf, he never denied the reality of caste-based oppression and discrimination in Indian Islam.

His critics had little time for complexities and he was frequently clubbed with people like Maulana Bukhari, the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid in Delhi, despite there being little to compare the two in either democratic legitimacy or point of view.

Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Shahabuddin, through his English monthly, Muslim India, a journal of “Research, Reference and Documentation”, kept articulating and disseminating the concrete (as well as emotive) issues of concern to Indian Muslims, besides contributing extremely powerful, informed and passionate editorials. Putting together news reports and views from across periodicals, the magazine also carried parliamentary speeches, interventions, government reports, book reviews, personality profiles and statistical data demonstrating the under-representation of Muslims in various sectors of the economy and employment, and many other crucial areas. This was done with candid, coherent, persuasive prose, laced with facts and figures, and at times beautified with apt Urdu couplets.

The title of the monthly he had chosen turned out to be provocative, as this expression is said to have been used in certain documents of the Muslim League in late colonial India. But the sharp (and cunning, if I may say) mind of Shahabuddin had a very strong defence in the English grammar. He explained that in the expression ‘Muslim India’, the former is an adjective and the latter a noun. Thus, ‘Muslim India’ would grammatically put emphasis on the Indian identity of someone just happening to be Muslim. It was more patriotic than the expression ‘Indian Muslims’, wherein more emphasis was on Muslim (who happened to be Indian). Hence, he preferred ‘Muslim Indian’ to ‘Indian Muslim’.

Besides making interventions in a range of journalistic and academic periodicals, including even the ‘provocative’ English monthly, Debonair, Shahabuddin’s Muslim India carried very powerful editorials on almost every issue which touched the Muslim segment of Indian democracy. Nobody before and after him could muster that much of courage, conviction, energy and determination to do all these, that too all alone. Yet, he found enough time to reply to all the letters he received. He religiously wrote and dispatched letters.

The editorials that had particular impact are worth recalling. In July 1994, he wrote on Lalu Prasad Yadav’s brazen Yadavisation in Bihar at the expense of his core and unflinching support base – Muslims. The argument was well made, even by the standards of Shahabuddin’s characteristic articulation, with so much data damning the Lalu regime on almost every aspect of governance. Predictably, soon after, he left the Janata Dal. In July 2000, he published another editorial on the problems of governance at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and their possible remedies. This was meant as advice from a senior IFS officer to a junior one, Hamid Ansari, who had joined as the vice chancellor of AMU. Yet another important editorial was on the 1988 Act making Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) a central university. He called the Act a “swansong” for JMI. He later expanded this editorial and wrote a long essay, ‘How to revive the spirit of Jamia Millia ‘, in the Milli Gazette in 2010. Focussing on the AMU Act 1981, the lawyer in him kept arguing that the legislated Act did not provide AMU with minority status, though it did have minority character.

In the final years of his life, many of his projects remained unfinished. The tragic and mysterious murder of his only son Parwez (an IIT alumnus and a promising scientist) in the US in 2005 had perhaps broken him from within, even though he did carry on with his life as bravely as ever. He never got around to finishing it but the title he chose for his autobiography was Muslim Heart, Indian Mind. Perhaps that is the best way to remember him by.

Mohammad Sajjad is an associate professor at the Centre of Advanced Study in History at Aligarh Muslim University and the author of Muslim Politics in Bihar: Changing Contours.