India (55 page)

What Ilyas did not mention was the pressure within the Muslim community to avoid civil courts, and that the judgements of the darul qazas were often reactionary. He did not want Muslim law to be codified in the way Hindu personal law had been in the 1950s, saying it would give power to Parliament rather than to the judges, the qazis. I asked him why Muslims could not rely on a system that was acceptable to Hindus and to many others. “Hindu core belief is not based on a particular scripture. Our laws are based on the Quran and the Sunnah. Nobody can touch these laws. Everything there is eternal. To say there should be a uniform civil code is like saying
there should be a uniform religion.” Ilyas’s point was absurd: numerous countries have universal laws on matters like marriage and inheritance, but still guarantee religious freedom.

Politically, his case was unanswerable. He knew, as Madani and others knew too, that if any government sought to implement a uniform civil code, it would give men like himself a platform to display their strength as community leaders. It would not be difficult to mobilize the community, many of whom were poor and uneducated, by saying the foundations of Islam were under attack from the Hindu majority. The situation was a fudge between the proclaimed secularists of Congress and other parties, and the Muslim leaders who benefited from the existing situation. So the latter-day Nehruvians colluded in an arrangement that kept Indian Muslims in a socially regressive position and bred resentment among conservative Hindus, who could see no reason why they should not be given a similar separatist privilege. “There is a common agreement in the community,” Ilyas said, “that we are opposed to any changes.”
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Attempts by reformist voices in Muslim India to codify personal law, arguing that in doing so they would be bringing it closer to the Quran, which had an emphasis on women’s rights that had been lost in later legal accretions, had not yet been successful. Despite all of this, puritanical or extreme voices within Islam in India had little chance of gaining mass support: there was no popular mood running in their favour. When I visited mosques in different parts of the country, I almost always received a sense that the community’s concerns were little different to those of Hindus and others in the same locality. For most people, religion was far from being the defining interest in their life. At the Jama Masjid in Bangalore, within the coolness and beauty of the mosque with its thick white walls, Faisal Dawood spoke of educational projects and computer courses. He had retired from a government factory, where he had worked on a machine line making aeronautical parts. Now, his time was devoted to the practical improvement of the lives of Muslims in the suburbs of Bangalore. “I have helped to build schools and mosques, and I arrange the marriage of poor boys and girls, who do not have any family.”
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When a Muslim students’ association sought to prevent a Valentine’s Day dance from taking place in Aligarh in 2002, citing fears of “obscenity” because Muslim girls would be wearing jeans and dancing to Western music, they were ignored. When they told the Muslim owners of local Internet cafés to block access to pornographic websites in order to avoid a descent into immorality, the owners agreed—and promptly did nothing.
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If Indian Muslims engaged in political violence, it was usually in response to a specific threat or after attacks such as the destruction of the Babri Masjid or the killings in Gujarat in 2002. An organization like Jamaat-e-Islami Hind (in its original Indian avatar, as opposed to its transmuted Pakistani form, which was encouraged by General Zia) stressed the importance of fighting for state secularism as a means of protecting Muslims. Although in the decades immediately after independence the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind had stuck with the philosophy of its founder, Abul Ala Maududi, who held that secularism and democracy were “haram,” the movement had over time evolved and moved towards moderation in response to the fluid demands of the wider community it sought to represent.

For poor or vulnerable Muslims (in most places in south India, their position was more integrated and less fraught) the choice was often between turning to a leader like Maulana Madani, or to a more aggressive community representative like the mafia don Mukhtar Ansari. Political parties liked to communicate with Muslims through male religious leaders, who were usually conservative, in a way that would not have been considered with Hindus. Come election time, the assumption was that if you wanted Muslim votes, you needed to secure the support of a cleric by any means necessary. In such a situation, it was logical that Muslim leaders held on to power by maintaining outdated traditions, as well as their own positions on assorted influential outfits like minority commissions, Haj committees (official bodies to send Indian Muslims on a subsidized pilgrimage to Mecca) and wakf boards (trusts that look after Muslim property).
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Wakf boards owned an estimated 600,000 acres of land in India, most of which had been endowed to the community in perpetuity many generations ago, but this property was often leased or sold off to developers. Mukesh Ambani’s 27-storey house in Mumbai was built on land originally owned by the Wakf Board of Maharashtra.
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The greatest threat facing Indian Muslims was practical: it was poverty. An official report in 2006 investigated their representation and employment in different sectors. Although nearly 14 percent of the Indian population was Muslim, in security-related areas like the police, fire service, prison and court staff, they made up only around 6 percent; in the railway, post and telegraph services, 5 percent; in public sector banks, 2 percent. More than any other community, including the Scheduled Castes, Muslims tended to have jobs which lacked a written contract or a regular salary. There was not a single state government which employed them in proportion with their share of the population. In many industries it was hard to obtain accurate
data, but in the highly competitive cadres of the Indian Administrative Service (civil servants), Indian Foreign Service (diplomats) and Indian Police Service (senior police officers), the authors of the official report had guessed religion from a list of names, since Muslim names are usually distinctive. Out of 8,827 entrants to these services in 2006, the figures for Muslim representation were a paltry 3 percent, 2 percent and 4 percent respectively.
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The results had improved slightly since then. The “topper” in India’s 2010 civil service entrance examination was Shah Faesal, a young Kashmiri Muslim who specialized in public administration and Urdu literature, and whose father had been murdered by militants in 2002.
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The position of people like Hemant from the CRPF, and poorly equipped jawans who were killed with alacrity by Maoists, showed the failure of the state to take care of its own people. During the 26/11 attacks in 2008, when Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists from Pakistan arrived by boat in Mumbai to seek blood and death, the poor suffered along with the rich at the Taj and Oberoi hotels. Television viewers could watch as policemen in khaki uniforms at Chhatrapati Shivaji railway station used antique .303 rifles to try to pick off the attackers, who were shooting members of the public with machine guns. One policeman even threw a plastic chair at the gunmen in frustration. The Taj hotel went up in flames, and a terrorist in a fake Versace T-shirt strolled through the streets with a gun and a rucksack of grenades. Even senior officers lacked proper bulletproof vests, and it took half a day for specialist commandos to arrive from Delhi. More lives were saved by ingenuity than by security planning: an announcer at the railway station, Vishnu Zende, crouched in his booth overlooking the concourse even as his viewing window was sprayed with gunfire, redirected passengers as they alighted from trains. “I made sure I didn’t mention a terror attack in my announcement,” he said later, “as that would have created panic.”
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The phone conversations between the Mumbai gunmen and their handlers back in Pakistan, intercepted by the Indian police, were chilling and warped. Coming from poor village backgrounds, these men were awed by the grandeur of the Taj hotel.

Over at the Jewish centre in Nariman House, other militants were torturing and killing Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivka, who was five months pregnant. The irony here was that none of the young Pakistani men would ever have met a Jew, but had been conditioned as part of their training, or indoctrination, to hate them. The handler told them over the phone that a dead Jew was worth 500 others, and that it was especially important they themselves died as martyrs, rather than being taken alive. They must go out and die when they were surrounded by commandos.

(Soon, Indian commandos stormed the building.)

A survivor—Shameem Khan, a Muslim—described how six members of his extended family had been shot dead. Still in shock, he said, “A calamity has fallen on my house. What shall I do?” His neighbours helped to pay for the funerals. Mumbai’s Muslim Council refused to let the terrorists be buried in its graveyards. A senior mufti said this was “to show they will never get any support from Indian Muslims, even in the slightest possible terms. As for their burial or last rites, their bodies should be sent back to the place from where they came.”
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The bodies could not, however, be sent back to where they came from, because Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the assassinated Benazir Bhutto, denied they were Pakistani. This was part of a pattern of constructive denial in modern Pakistan, where facts were not
allowed to stand in the way of the idea that terrorism always originated elsewhere. The only surviving gunman, Ajmal Kasab, came from a decrepit village south of Lahore, and a senior retired bureaucrat popped up on one of Pakistan’s many wacky TV channels suggesting he could not, therefore, have known his way around Mumbai—and must be an Indian plant. “Why would young Muslims from Pakistan be interested in Mumbai?” asked a lawyer on the same show. “They don’t know the language there, and surely they wouldn’t have gone there to ogle Bollywood actresses.”
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When terrorists attacked and injured the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore the following year, there were suggestions from a government minister that India was to blame, rather than homegrown militants. Comments of this kind were underpinned by the assumption—which was rooted in the events and consequences of the 1970s—that India had nothing better to do than plot the break-up of Pakistan.

Following the contemporary style of terrorism, the Mumbai attackers made no demands and outlined no agenda. This was done on their behalf by commentators who deduced they were fighting on behalf of the people of Palestine and Kashmir. Ajmal Kasab was a day-wage labourer and petty criminal who was recruited by Lashkar-e-Taiba (part of the International Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and Crusaders—the al-Qaeda franchise). His handler, judging by the phone conversations, had military training. Behind them stood the leader of the organization, the pinguid Hafiz Saeed, a “professor” who lived on a ranch outside Lahore and went about his business with minimal interference from the Pakistani government. The literature of Lashkar-e-Taiba was much concerned with establishing a caliphate in Central Asia and murdering those who insulted the Prophet.

Saeed’s hatreds were catholic—his bugbears included Hindus, Shias and women who wore bikinis. He believed suicide attacks were “in accordance with Islam,” and he had a wider strategy which involved the capture of parts of central India he felt belonged to Pakistan: “At this time our contest is Kashmir. Let’s see when the time comes. Our struggle with the Jews is always there.” It is possible that when he made remarks of this sort, Saeed was paying lip service to anti-semitic or transnational jihadi causes so as to continue to obtain Arab financing, but as he told his followers in Karachi at a rally in 2000: “There can’t be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them—cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy.”
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Even if India were to do the right thing and improve the situation in Kashmir, and offer truth and reconciliation to the Kashmiri people, there
was no sane reason to believe Lashkar-e-Taiba and similar organizations would shut down. Like most terror groups based in Pakistan, the organization combined unemployed Mujahideen fighters, the later protégés of the ISI who were sent over the border to Kashmir and activists from the global jihadi movement of the early twenty-first century, which itself arose from a collision between the austere traditions of the Arabian Desert and a rush of oil money. Al-Qaeda believed the only pure form of Islam was that which was practised by the prophet Mohammed and his followers many centuries before. It used the tools of modernity—television, aeroplanes, plastic explosives, the Internet—to try to destroy modernity. The present global threat came from the spread of this ideology, and its success depended on the fertility or otherwise of the ground where it fell.

In India, with its 140 million or so Muslims, jihadism had achieved little success so far, which was in part the consequence of the modern idea of the nation instilled after 1947. Ironically the ideology of religious absolutism was finding more takers in Britain—a consequence of the refusal of successive postwar governments to promote the active integration of immigrants. Such a move would have required social adjustments the British themselves did not want to make, and it was easier to present this liberal evasion as an accommodation of other cultures. It was seen as somehow un-British to demand that people should become “British” if they wanted to hold a British passport. The American tradition of integration was rejected. A similar policy of detachment had been practised in other European countries with a large postwar immigrant population, such as France and Holland. Words like “nationalist” or “patriot,” which in India had a positive connotation, were in Europe often tainted with implications of racism and the legacy of a brutal colonial past.