The latest kerfuffle on social media over l’affaire Sharjeel was touched off by an article in ThePrint where a writer with the pseudonym, Ibn Khaldun Bharati, launched a polemic against liberals for not hauling Sharjeel Imam over the coals for his dangerous “Islamist” views that were presented in the course of a detailed interview that Imam published in The Quint. ‘Bharati’ summed up Imam’s ideas as “unapologetically anti-liberal, anti-secular, anti-democracy, anti-Constitution — in a word, anti-national”.
One can hardly begin without noting the Kafkaesque nature of the whole affair. This is a man who has now been behind bars for six years ostensibly for a speech advocating a chakka jam without any call for violence alongside the even more absurd charge of conspiring to incite the Delhi riots that took place a month after he was already in jail.
In the interview, Imam argued (quite convincingly) that his continued incarceration is nothing more than punishment meted out by a majoritarian State for his role as a key architect of the Shaheen Bagh agitation, which snowballed into the nationwide anti-CAA/NRC protests and forced the rollback of the NRC.
The charge of Imam being “anti-national” is nonsensical. But is Imam “anti-liberal, anti-secular, anti-democracy, anti-Constitution”?
It is perhaps fair to say that Imam would not describe himself as either liberal, or secular, or a constitutionalist in the conventional sense in which these descriptive labels work in India. But is he a democrat? Absolutely. And is there space for a person like Imam in a radical democratic project that strives for equality and liberty for everyone? Again, yes.
To understand the positions Imam has taken in the interview as well as in his pre-prison writings and speeches, one must decode them through the lens of his personal background. As he himself says to those who find his views “incomprehensible”: “I have spent my life studying the Muslim problem in India; as a son of a rural politician in Bihar, then as a rare Muslim IITian, then as a part of the corporate world, then as a researcher and historian of organised violence against Muslims and the genesis of Partition.”
The passionate support that Imam garners among young, educated Muslims on social media also stems from what the German historian, Reinhart Koselleck, called a shared “space of experience”. By this, Koselleck referred to the layers of memories of an accumulated past which are remembered and interpreted by particular communities in order to make sense of their present. The space of experience for Muslims like Imam includes not only their personal experiences of discrimination but also of what they have learnt about the history of recurrent communal pogroms, the framing of Muslim men in terror cases, the brutalities by policemen and so on.
One need not have spent years absorbing this grim history through books, as Imam has, to imbibe the lessons of this accumulated past. Anyone who has pored over the gruesome accounts of cold-blooded massacres of Muslims by Uttar Pradesh policemen during the 1980s in cities like Meerut and Moradabad, such as those found in M.J. Akbar’s Riot after Riot, would hardly baulk at Imam’s descriptions of the majoritarian nature of the old Congress regime or the incapacity of the constitutional arrangements to protect the life, liberty and property of Muslims. To date, no policeman has been punished for the Jallianwala Bagh-style massacre at Moradabad’s Eidgah ground on August 13, 1980 when policemen opened fire on Muslim worshippers during Eid prayers.
Much of what Imam claims in the interview would hardly strike a discordant note to anyone familiar with the academic scholarship on the Muslim experience in India. On the allegedly partial imprint of the Indian Constitution, given the lack of safeguards given to the political representation of Muslims, one can read Rochana Bajpai, Faisal Devji or Pratinav Anil. On the role of the Congress leadership and its majoritarian political strategy in fomenting anti-Muslim riots in the Hindi belt during the 1980s, you can read Steven Wilkinson and Kazuya Nakamizo. To understand that it was not the force of the Constitution or its institutions which halted the train of anti-Muslim riots in the 1990s but the rise of Mandal politics and the consequential increase in political options for Muslim voters (hence leverage), you can, once again, read Wilkinson’s Votes and Violence.
On why secular politics alone does not advance the material interests of Muslim communities, read Dwaipayan Bhattacharyya’s account in Government as Practice — on the Left Front’s persistent neglect of Muslim political representation and its detrimental impact on Muslim communities’ educational and developmental outcomes in West Bengal. For a contrasting case of how an autonomous Muslim political leadership can help Muslim communities leverage their voting power into public goods, read James Chiriyankandath on the IUML’s role in advancing educational opportunities and upward mobility among Muslims in Kerala’s Malabar region.
We can, and should, take issue with Imam for his warped presentation of the competitive politics of colonial India, one where the Congress is the repository of elite interests of zamindars and businessmen and not the Muslim League (which was equally so); where the Congress’s nationalism is an artificial construct unlike the well-rooted Muslim nationalism (all nationalisms are projects of imagination); where Partition was primarily the fault of the Congress for not acceding to the legitimate demands of the Muslim League (elites in both parties were at fault for instituting a competitive communal dynamic, as Paul Brass has explained); and, lastly, where Gandhi is fascist and Jinnah is a great democratic leader. All of the above is a grossly distorted mirror-image of nationalist myth-making Imam wants to deconstruct.
Such objections on Imam’s readings of history should however be no reason to debar him from a future democratic project. Imam envisages a role as the head of an intellectual pressure group of middle-class Muslim activists displacing the clerical establishment as the principal voice articulating a “positive” agenda of “Muslim demands”: “decentralisation, proportional representation, autonomous institutions, recognition of Dalit Muslims and Christians, and Muslim reservations with adequate shares for backward castes”. Second, this group would help develop strategies for collective organisation between elections (based on the Shaheen Bagh model). Third, it would advise Muslims on maximising their electoral leverage through coordination with parties sympathetic to these demands such as “Dravidian parties, Lohiaites, communists and other regional and democratic forces”.
All of this falls within the realm of a radical and plural democratic project, as explained by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their book, Hegemony & Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. For Laclau and Mouffe, democratic agents participating in the construction of a counter-hegemonic project are not called upon to conform to any prior universal standard of “common concern” or “common good”. Instead, they must first articulate and struggle for particularised demands rooted in their identities and capable of mobilising support within their own communities before negotiating their differences with other struggles. It is only through this iterative process of dialogue and negotiation within a shared democratic struggle that these various democratic agents are able to forge a “commonality” of identity and interests without erasing their particular identities.
This conception of democratic struggle stands in stark contrast to a degraded Gandhian liberalism in which the pursuit of harmony and consensus becomes an end in itself. It also departs from the kind of secular politics practised by the Left in Bengal which treats particular communitarian demands as anathema while failing to interrogate the upper-caste Hindu preferences embedded in its own political agenda.
“Follow an idea through from its birth to its triumph,” the philosopher, Bertrand de Jouvenel, wrote, “and it becomes clear that it came to power only at the price of an astounding degradation of itself.” That is a fitting description of Gandhian-liberalism and secularism of the post-Independent Congress Establishment. Above all, it emphasised the consensual values of tolerance and moderation while ignoring all structural questions of inequalities in power, wealth and cultural capital. Not only did the Congress ruling order tolerate the growth
of Hindu nationalism but after the 1980s it also turned to fomenting communal riots as a strategy to preserve its rule.
We need a radical democratic politics that expands the horizon of our future possibilities, one in which equality and liberty for all become the ends of democracy rather than the mere preservation of an institutional system. Activists like Sharjeel Imam ought to be included in that struggle.
Asim Ali is a political researcher and columnist