Politicians From India

"The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience."

"To this convention you must re-state as clearly and as strongly as possible, the political objective of Indian Muslims as a distinct political unit in the country. It is absolutely necessary to tell the world both inside and outside India that the economic problem is not the only problem in the country. From the Muslim point of view the cultural problem is of much greater consequence to most Indian Muslims. At any rate it is not less important than the economic problem."

"AND yet it was strange, the Arab tilt of Pakistan: the little boy in Arab clothes, the Pakistan Steel project given the name of the Arab conqueror. The poet Iqbal, putting forward his plan for an Indian Muslim state in 1930, had said that the Islam of India was special, “a people-building force … at its best.” “I therefore demand the formation of a consolidated Muslim state in the best interests of India and Islam,” Iqbal had said. “For India, it means security and peace …; for Islam, an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian imperialism was forced to give it.” But the world had changed since 1930; Arabia had some say in the world again. Pakistan had changed since 1947. Seeking more than Iqbal’s Muslim polity now, seeking in failure an impossibly pure faith, it called up its Arabian origins, mystical but at the same time real. At Banbhore, a remote outpost of the earliest Arab empires, you walked on human bones."

"Iqbal is buried in the grounds of the Shah Jehan Mosque in Lahore; and soldiers watch his tomb. Rhetoric or sentimentality like that is invariably worrying; it hides things. And the tomb, with its Mogul motifs, would be a kind of artistic sacrilege if, just across the way, the great Mogul fort of Lahore (the emperor’s window there recorded in some of the finest Mogul pictures) wasn’t falling into dust; if, in that same city of Lahore, the Mogul Shalimar Gardens and the tombs of the emperor Jehangir and his consort were not in absolute decay; if, going back four centuries, the delicately colored tiled towers of the thirteenth-century tombs of Uch in Bahawalpur, one of the finest Islamic things in the subcontinent, were not half washed away; if, going back further still, the land just around the Buddhist city of Taxila, known to Alexander the Great, and with once fabulous remains, wasn’t being literally quarried; if Pakistan, still pursuing imperialist Islamic fantasies, hadn’t been responsible for the final looting of the Buddhist treasures of Afghanistan. In its short life Iqbal’s religious state, still half serf, still profoundly uneducated, mangling history in its schoolbooks as well, undoing the polity it was meant to serve, had shown itself dedicated only to the idea of the cultural desert here, with glory—of every kind—elsewhere."

"Iqbal is one of the eminent personalities in the history of Islam. His is such a profound and sublime personality that it cannot be described and measured by only one Dimension of his life. Iqbal was a scholar and a philosopher, but at the same time other dimensions of his life are also so bright that if we consider him to be just a philosopher and a scholar, we feel that we have belittled him. Undoubtedly Iqbal is a great poet and is reckoned among the greatest. Those who know Urdu very well and have written about Iqbal’s Urdu poetry maintain that Iqbal's Urdu poems are among the best in Urdu. Of course this may not be a great tribute to him as the poetic Tradition of Urdu is not so rich. But it cannot be disputed that his Urdu poetry made a great impact on large numbers of people, on Hindus and Muslims equally, living in the Subcontinent during the early decades of the twentieth century, and motivated them to participate in the struggle (for freedom) that was reaching its climax."

"This is not a letter on Pakistan. If it were, I could have written a small book entitled "Glimpses of Pakistan's history". Time does not permit it. The nation is gripped in her worst crisis, standing in the middle of the road between survival and disintegration. Since the birth of Pakistan, crisis has followed crisis in rapid escalation. Millions of lives were sacrificed to create this country. Pakistan is said to be the dream of Mohammad Iqbal and the creation of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Quaid-e-Azam. Was anything wrong with the dream or with the one who made the dream come true? Opinions have differed and continue to differ. The next few years will most probably decide the issue, perhaps once and for all, and not without bloodshed. This process is not inevitable but the present policies of the ruling junta are driving this country towards a sad inevitability"

"Let the lament of this lonely bulbul pierce the hearts of all, Arouse the hearts of the sleeping, with this my clarion call. Transfused with fresh blood, a new compact of faith we'll sign. Let our hearts thirst again for a sip of the vintage wine. What if the pitcher be Persian, from Hejaz is the wine I serve. What if the song be Indian, it is Hejazi in its verve."

"You tell us who were they who pulled down the gates of Khyber? Who were they that reduced the city that was the pride of Caesar? Fake gods that men had made, who did break and shatter? Who routed infidel armies and destroyed them with bloody slaughter? Who put out and made cold the 'sacred' flame in Iran? Who retold the story of the one God, Yazdan?"

"Would we have played with our lives for nothing but worldly gain? If our people had run after earth's goods and gold, Need they have smashed idols, and not idols sold?"

"Why must I forever lose, forever forgo profit that is my due, Sunk in the gloom of evenings past, no plans for the morrow pursue. Why must I all attentive be to the nightingale's lament? Friend, am I as dumb as a flower? Must I remain silent? My theme makes me bold, makes my tongue more eloquent. Dust be in my mouth, against Allah I make complaint."

"The history of the preceding Muslim dynasties had taught Aurangzeb that the strength of Islam did not depend ... so much on the goodwill of the people of this land as on the strength of the ruling race."

"[Iqbal elaborated that nationalism came into conflict with Islam] only when it begins to play the role of a political concept and claims to be a principle of human solidarity demanding that Islam should recede to the background of a mere private opinion and cease to be a living factor in the national life. ... In majority countries, Islam accomodates nationalism, for there Islam and nationalism are practically identical, in minority countries it is justified in seeking self-determination as a cultural unit."

"O water of the river Ganges, thou rememberst the day When our torrent flooded thy valleys..."

"China and Arabia are ours, India is ours, Muslims we are, the whole world is ours..."

"Our India is the best of all countries in the world."

"Overflowing with the wine of Truth is the cup of India All philosophers of the Western world have acknowledged India It is the result of the elegant thinking of Indians That higher than the sky is the position of India This country has had many people of angelic disposition On whose account world renowned is the name of India India is proud of the existence of Rama Spiritual people consider him prelate of India This alone is the miracle of this light of righteousness That brighter than world’s morning is the evening of India He was expert in sword craft, was unique in bravery Was matchless in piety and in the enthusiasm of love."

"Shah Alamgir, that high and mighty king, Pride and renown of Gurgan Timur’s line, In whom Islam attained a loftier fame And wider honour graced the Prophet’s Law, He the last arrow to our quiver left In the affray of Faith with Unbelief ; When that the impious seed of heresy, By Akbar nourished, sprang and sprouted fresh In Dara’s soul, the candle of the heart Was dimmed in every breast, no more secure Against corruption our Community Continued ; then God chose from India That humble-minded warrior, Alamgir, Religion to revive, faith to renew. The lightning of his sword set all ablaze The harvest of impiety ; faith’s torch Once more its radiance o’er our counsels shed."

"Heart – “It is absolutely certain that God does exist.” Head – “But, my dear boy! Existence is one of my categories, and you have no right to use it.” Heart – “So much the better, my Aristotle!”"

"Every land which belongs to God is our land."

"Nations are born in the hearts of poets; they prosper and die in the hands of politicians."

"Human intellect is natures attempt at self criticism."

"Democracy is a system where people are counted but not weighed."

"I am not a big banyan tree; I am a less green bush, the more you cut, the more I grow"

"Pandit Ami Chandra was Fiji's most distinguished Indian trade unionist, possessing high intelligence and a quiet but convincing personality. He strongly opposed any participation of the trade unions in politics; and he also used his powers of gentle persuation to bring about multi-racial trade unionism."

"Our main plank is Veer Savarkar’s message which he preached at the Calcutta session: ‘Equal rights for all citizens and protection of the culture and religion of every minority’."

"We are wholeheartedly anti-Fascist. Every anti-Imperialist must be anti-Fascist."

"“Political Misfits are as dangerous as Quislings.”"

"“It is the subtle scheme of political propaganda to describe the Hindu as pro-Fascist. It is a cruel calumny which has been spread in America and other countries. The Hindu Mahasabha stood for Savarkar’s policy of militarization and industrialization. We recognized that Fascism was a supreme menace to what is good and noble in our civilization. Due to Veer Savarkar’s call thousands of young men joined the Army and Navy and Air Force and shed their blood for resisting Nazi tyranny and for real friendship with China and Russia. But as the Hindus had the temerity to ask for National Independence and took the lead in rejecting the Cripps offer, they were maligned and the subtle forces of organized British propaganda were let loose to blackmail the Hindus.”"

"The Hindus in this supreme crisis of humanity never wanted to shirk the responsibility to fight the Axis powers. Our leaders took a realistic view of the political situation. Veer Savarkar’s clarion call to the Hindus had met with a ready response and the Hindu boys had rushed forward and joined up in thousands. On every front our boys have demonstrated their valour and discipline, and the African Campaign, if faithfully recorded, will put the Indian in the forefront of the noble heroes who decimated the Fascist [hordes].”"

"In the conflict of ideologies the Hindus have made their position perfectly clear. We hate Nazism and Fascism. We are the enemies of Hitler and Mussolini. We are longing and struggling for our own emancipation and we want to repel any dictator who would try to reduce sections of humanity to slavery to serve the whims of his own megalomania."

"Our passionate adherence to democracy and freedom is based on the spiritual recognition of the Divinity of man. We are not only not communal but we are nationalists and democrats. The Anti-Fascist Front must extend from the English Channel to the Bay of Bengal."

"We shall suspend judgment unless we know what exactly he has to offer and we only wish that artificial minority problems will not be exploited to dilute democracy and to injure Hindu interests."

"[He too had taken the habit of loosely labelling hostile forces as “fascist”, e.g. in his opposition to a 1939 Muslim League proposal to communalize the municipal elections in Calcutta:] “We must resist these reactionary measures which are founded on the principle of communal Fascism.”"

"Thus, there are two points to remember. First, our friends are not just Marxists, they are also Macaulayites. Second, they are Marxists in a special sense. They are Marxists in the sense that they have thought of themselves as Marxists, in the sense that they repeatedly regurgitate a handful of Marxist phrases and assertions. But more than being Marxist historians, they have been establishment historians. Their theories and ‘theses’ have accorded not just with the ‘classics’ of Marxism-Leninism, they have accorded with the ideology of, which in terms of their theory means, the needs of Congressite rulers."

"When Shourie's articles first appeared, they aroused great emotions and savage attacks. He quoted from the Bible and the Quran extensively on the question of co-existence. Many were shocked.... Shourie has called his book, Religion in Politics; someday he should bring out another book, Politics in Religion....The first book discusses politics complicated by religions factors; the second would discuss religions which are essentially political..."

"As for Shourie, Mukhia is hardly revealing a secret with his information that Shourie “does journalism for a living”. The greatest investigative journalist in India by far, he has indeed unearthed some dirty secrets of Congressite, casteist and Communist politicians. His revelations about the corrupt financial dealings between the Marxist historians and the government-sponsored academic institutions are in that same category: fearless and factual investigative journalism. Shourie has a Ph.D. degree in Economics from Syracuse University in U.S.A., which should attest to a capacity for scholarship, even if not strictly in the historical field. When he criticizes the gross distortions of history by Mukhia’s school, one could say formally that he transgresses the boundaries of his specialism, but such formalistic exclusives only hide the absence of a substantive refutation."

"It is clear that Witzel himself has a political agenda: note his resentment of the “present Indian (right wing) denouncement of the ‘eminent historians’ of Delhi” (§9) – some of these “eminent historians” actively collaborated with Witzel and Farmer in their recent media-blitz in the Indian press. The reader is invited to go carefully through Arun SHOURIE’s book “Eminent Historians” (1998), which is being referred to here, and see the kind of political scholarship to whose defense Witzel has no compunctions in rushing!"

"I thank particularly my friend Arun Shourie because we need people like Arun Shourie to challenge us so that we can rectify our mistakes and all together collectively move towards the creation of a new India, a new humanity."

"Just then Shourie was sacked as its editor. The reason was not so much the article, but, apparently, his entire policy of including columns by Hindu communalists like Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel, and his own articles that debunked some of the prevalent secularism, such as Hideaway Communalism."

"He dismisses Arun Shourie by pigeon-holing him as ‘post-modern’. He does not know that Hinduism has its own view of Time, and that a person who serves Sanatana Dharma cannot be dated. Scholars like Arun Shourie belong neither to the past, nor to the present, nor yet to the future. They belong to a timeless span."

"The only ray of light in this encircling gloom was Arun Shourie, the veteran journalist and the chief editor of the Indian express at that time. On February 5, 1989, he frontpaged an article, Hideaway Communalism, showing that while the Urdu version of a book by Maulana Hakim Sayid Abdul Hai of the Nadwatul-Ulama at Lucknow had admitted that seven famous mosques had been built on the sites of Hindu temples, the English translation published by the Maulana’s son, Abul Hasan Ali Nadwi (Ali Mian) had eschewed the “controversial evidence”. He also published in the Indian Express three articles written by me on the subject of Islamic iconoclasm. This was a very courageous defiance of the ban imposed by Islam and administered by Secularism, namely, that crimes committed by Islam cannot even be whispered in private, not to speak of being proclaimed in public."

"Or take A Secular Agenda by Arun Shourie, PhD from Syracure NY and stunningly successful Disinvestment Minister in the AB Vajpayee Government, when India scored its highest economic growth figures. It was a very important book, and it left no stone standing of the common assumption among so-called experts that India (with its religion-based civil codes and its discriminatory laws against Hinduism) is a secular state, i.e. a state in which all citizens are equal before the law, regardless of their religion. Though the book deconstructs the bedrock on which the “experts” have built their view of modern India, they have never formulated a refutation. Instead, they just keep on repeating their own deluded assumption, as in: “The BJP threatens India’s structure as a secular state.” (Actually, the BJP does not, and India is not.) They can do so because they are secure in the knowledge that, among the audiences that matter, their camp controls the sphere of discourse. Concerning the interface between religion and modern politics, the established “academic” view is not just defective, it is an outrageous failure."

"Arun Shourie was sacked as Indian Express editor, apparently under government pressure, after revealing that, in October 1990, Prime Minister V.P. Singh had aborted his own compromise arrangement on Ayodhya under pressure from Imam Bukhari, prominent member of the BMAC."

"The problem of book-banning and censorship on Islam criticism is compounded by the related problem of self- censorship. Thus, when in late 1992, the famous columnist Arun Shourie wanted to publish a collection of his columns on Islamic fundamentalism, esp. the Rushdie and Ayodhya affairs (Indian Controversies), the publisher withdrew at the last moment, afraid of administrative or physical reprisals, and the printer also backed out. Earlier, Shourie had been lucky to find one paper willing to publish these columns, for most Indian newspapers strictly keep the lid on Islam criticism. Hindu society is a terrorized society."

"Mani Shankar Aiyar totally condemns one of Arun Shourie's books, and then goes on to declare that he has decided not to read it : "Shourie gave the final touches to the manuscript of his book on Islam, a work so vicious and perverted that every English speaking Muslim I know was outraged... I decided then to show my solidarity with secularism by not reading the book." (The book he refers to, is apparently Shourie's Religion in Politics, a very sane and sober look at several Scriptures in the light of reason.)"

"Arun Shourie had shown great courage. But he had counted without the secularist crowd which had access to the owner of the Indian Express. He told me on the phone that there was some trouble brewing. I have never talked to him about the nature of the trouble, and do not know if my articles had anything to do with his ouster from the Indian Express next year. All I know is that he had to slow down the publication of my next two articles."

"[Arun Shourie's article 'Hideaway Communalism'] had violated a taboo placed by the mass media and the academia on any unfavourable narration of the history of Islam since the days when Mahatma Gandhi took command of the Indian National Congress and launched his first non-cooperation movement in support of the Turkish Khilafat."

"Muslim leaders and Stalinist historians were raising a howl about Hindu chauvinism when it came to the notice of Arun Shourie, the Chief Editor of the Indian Express at that time, that some significant passages had been omitted from the English translation of an Urdu book written long ago by the father of Ali Mian, the famous Muslim theologian from Lucknow. He wrote an article, Hideaway Communalism, in the Indian Express of February 5, 1989 pointing out how the passages regarding destruction of Hindu temples and building of mosques on their sites at Delhi, Jaunpur, Kanauj, Etawah, Ayodhya, Varanasi and Mathura had been dropped from the English translation published by Ali Mian himself. This was a new and dramatic departure from the norm observed so far by the prestigious press. Publishing anything which said that Islam was less than sublime had been taboo for a long time. I was pleasantly surprised, and named Arun Shourie as the Gorbachev of India. He had thrown open the windows and let in fresh breeze in a house full of the stinking garbage of stale slogans."

"Anyone who thought India had dismantled its notorious system of bureaucratic controls when it embarked on economic reform in 1991 ought to consult Arun Shourie. As cabinet minister (at various times since 1998) for privatisation, administrative reform, information technology and telecommunications, Mr Shourie's observations are close to the bone. The Hindu nationalist-led government in which Mr Shourie was the most prominent economic reformer was thrown out last May. Franz Kafka would have had difficulty dreaming up some of the examples cited in Mr Shourie's book. ... But it is what India's bureaucracy is like under normal conditions that matters and Mr Shourie does a depressingly thorough job in chronicling it. One can only hope that India's senior civil servants find the time to read this book - and have the grace to wince."

"In the end, India had to wait till 1998 for Arun Shourie’s Eminent Historians to be published. This book uncovered in detail after ghastly detail, this multi-layered assault on the national psyche that has disfigured the minds of at least three generations regarding the vital truths of their own nation. And thanks to this seminal contribution, “Eminent Historian” has fittingly become a swearword in the Indian public discourse."