Soviet revolutionary Karl Radek, “a sparkling writer, with an equal flair for synthesis and for sarcasm”, as author Victor Serge would introduce him in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, had been associated with a number of political jokes surrounding Joseph Stalin. Long before he was killed in a scripted labour camp scuffle with another inmate at Stalin’s behest, Radek — as the story goes — was one day standing naked at the Red Square. A well-wisher soon approached him and asked if he wasn’t afraid of the police.
Radek stared at him and shot back: “Police? Where are the police?” The man pointed towards a number of policemen all across the Square and said: “There’s a policeman. There’s another. And yet another… Why, the whole place is crawling with policemen.” To this, Radek replied, “You can see them. I can’t. I am a party member. I am not supposed to see them. For party members there are no police anywhere in the Soviet Union.”
Today, when one looks at the way the Nuh violence in Haryana is being analysed, explained and reported all across, it instantly reminds of Radek and his selective blindness. For, in all this arson, mayhem, and worse, the killing of five people, including two policemen, the Left-‘liberal’ commentariat and intelligentsia fail to see any Islamist connection to it. The predominant narrative is that Nuh was a “spontaneous” outbreak which happened because one controversial person named Monu Manesar decided to join the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) procession on Monday.
The ‘spontaneity’ of the violence can be gauged from the fact that it happened despite Manesar not being a part of the procession. The ‘impulsiveness’ of the mayhem can be gauged from the fact that stones and iron rods were already in store for the event. The ‘extemporaneity’ can also be explained through the fact that the violence began within 10 minutes of the start of the VHP procession, with a mob of around 200 people descending from nowhere, fully armed and well prepared. The Hindu side initially fled, but then reportedly regrouped and retaliated, as media reports say.
Manesar is no doubt a controversial man with a dubious record. He has been booked for the murder of two Muslim men whose charred bodies were found in Bhiwani district in February this year. If he is guilty and still out of jail, it showcases the failure of the police and judicial systems to put him in his place. But to normalise the violence, whose every aspect points towards the fact that it was pre-meditated and pre-planned, by linking it with the presence of an individual is a dangerous trend. For, tomorrow, the same perverted logic can be applied by the other side when someone like Asaduddin Owaisi joins an event in some other place.
The fact is the Nuh violence was a well-planned, well-executed terror incident — and it should be seen like that. It’s also the failure of the police and the state administration to comprehend the scale of conspiracy when there were enough indications pointing towards that direction. Nuh is the manifestation of the utter failure of the state apparatus to take a pre-emptive action.
The most dangerous aspect of Nuh and other such incidents is the normalisation of Islamist violence, first by explaining it through the presence of an individual, Manesar in this case, and then by coming up with all sorts of excuses — the most common being how people were provoked into violence through loud music and incendiary sloganeering.
This normalisation of violence, especially of the Islamist variety, is not an uncommon phenomenon. It’s being witnessed with greater regularity and higher intensity with each passing year during Ramnavami and other such Hindu processions, especially in ‘sensitive’ (read Muslim-majority) areas. Incidentally, those who normalise Islamist violence keep a steadied silence when Muharram processions pass through a temple area and do a similar kind of sloganeering.
This, however, isn’t an India-centric phenomenon. Christopher Hitchens, in his ‘Foreword’ to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel: My Life, writes, “Across the intellectual spectrum of the West, voices are raised to say that the problem is not the exorbitant demands made by Muslim bullies… No, the problem is that of people like Ayaan, who upset and ‘offend’ the ‘faith community’ of Islam.” Daniel Pipes, in The Rushdie Affairs, calls it the “Rushdie Rules”, where “editors, newspapers, publishers, and academic teachers abide by a new set of rules (new to modern Westerners at least) which limit the freedom to discuss Islam with the same methods, terminology and frank inquisitiveness which are considered normal in discussing Christianity or Hinduism”.
This phenomenon baffled English writer Neil Gaiman when he saw six prominent authors pulling out of the 2015 PEN Awards gala — just because among those awarded were the surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo. The six dissenting authors included Francine Prose, a prominent American novelist who found the narrative of white Europeans killed in their offices by Islamists, feeding neatly into the “cultural prejudices”. Like many of her Left-‘liberal’ ilk, she criticises the killings, but qualifies it with a “of course… but maybe” rider, as enunciated by American stand-up comedian Louis CK.
This is how the narrative works: Of course it was a heinous act to kill the French cartoonists, but maybe they should have been less provocative… Of course their death was a setback to liberal forces, but maybe they should not have crossed the line and offended the ‘faithful’. In her hurry to defend Islamists in the name of “cultural prejudices”, Prose didn’t realise that one of the victims of jihadi terror was one Mustapha Ourrad, Hebdo’s copy editor.
In India, this phenomenon gets magnified and more pronounced because there’s a strong, well-entrenched bogey that senses the ghost of Hindutva at the sight of a Hindu waking up to the civilisational idea of India, but is absolutely unbothered by the ghettoisation of Muslims. This may, in some way, explain why the Jai Shri Ram chants make most of our ‘liberals’ uneasy and squeamish, but when a girl in Karnataka shouts “Allah hu Akbar”, as was the case during the hijab controversy, the same set of people sees it as an “act of defiance against Hindutva patriarchy”!
This may be primarily because of the failure of the Left-‘liberals’ to comprehend a religion that divides humanity into two irreconcilable groups of believers and non-believers. It’s a religion in which “a wrong theology is worse than wicked deeds”, as Ram Swarup, one of the profoundest thinkers of the 20th century writes in Understanding Islam Through Hadis. This may explain why Mahatma Gandhi, for all his saintliness, remained “from the point of view of religion”, as per a senior Khilafat leader, “inferior to any Mussalman though he be without character”. This may also explain why the Khilafat movement culminated in the Moplah massacre of Hindus in the Malabar region of Kerala.
The failure to grasp the idea behind communal flare-ups such as Nuh may be out of the Radek-like ideological commitment. One cannot completely deny intellectual ineptitude, too. But an equally potent reason may be the “fear of the sword”. When Gaiman decided to participate in the PEN Awards gala, despite six prominent authors refusing to be a part of it, his wife asked him with concern: “Will you wear a bulletproof vest?… Remember, I’m pregnant,” she said pointing towards her belly in case Gaiman had forgotten. “Our child will need a father more than a martyr.”
It’s a smart strategy: Of not becoming a martyr while pretending to take the moral high ground, as Francine Prose unscrupulously did by skipping the PEN Awards event in 2015. Now, that’s called having the cake and eating it too — Left-‘liberal’ style!
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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