'Despite being a Muslim' Kalam's home is a compliment for Mahesh Sharma

Whataboutery may be the favourite weapon of Modi government's cheerleaders, but occasionally it can score a goal for the other side as well. You know the side of the protesters - writers, artists, scientists, academics, students - and all those who practically produce the very "culture" of which Mahesh Sharma has been for some time the "Union minister".

Reports claim Sharma has been allotted the government bungalow formerly occupied by the late president APJ Abdul Kalam, who died on July 27 this year, and who was, fittingly enough, given a state farewell with supermassive fanfare. Since Indians have a peculiar talent of mourning well and hard, often with spectacular song and dance which wipes off every nuance from the now dead public figure's lived life, Kalam's ceremonial send-off was a compact thesis on which way the national narrative is headed. It definitely included India's ballistic future, mixed with Kalam's lovely credential as a "Muslim steeped in Hindu culture", a vegetarian to boot. In other words, a model minority who rose through the ranks and attained India's topmost nominal post through sheer grit and determination (with a generous sprinkling of "selective silence" when required, a particularly stony one after Godhra 2002). It was a charade that only a lynchmob, having freshly hanged Yakub Memon, is truly capable of.

That said, APJ Abdul Kalam - India's original "missile man", with a much-loved mop and a heart that beat for the children, with ears that warmed up to Carnatic music and out-Brahmined the crème de la crème career Brahmins of Tamil Nadu - was a much-loved man. So loved was he that people and politicians at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum competed with each other to express how they loved and respected and adored the late president. He was Secularism 101 for everyone; an embodiment-turned-museum of India's "inherent tolerance" and as Mahesh Sharma duly pointed out, this was "despite [his] being a Muslim".  

Sharma, to his credit, has been managing Indian culture exactly as had been expected of him, without adding a slither of surprise here and there. A doctor by profession, with his umbilical cord firmly attached to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Sharma has meandered through the student days of ABVP, and in 2014 Lok Sabha election became a BJP MP from Gautam Buddha Nagar. Now with a secure foothold as the minister of state (independent charge) for Culture and Tourism, and Civil Aviation, in the Modi government, Sharma is lending a strong hand to the long drawn process of India's "Acculturation 2.0", as per the RSS/VHP blueprint.

Although many of us are frequently expressing our "outrage" at Mr Sharma's suitably controversial and telegenic pronouncements, in the eyes of the present dispensation, he's a superlative culture minister, who is doing exactly as is required of him. So while we squirm at his comment on "cultural contamination", and talk of the "culture germs in Sharma's lab", the Union minister doesn't bat an eyelid. While he expresses a piously cavalier attitude to the ongoing writers' protest, saying "let the writers stop writing", we cringe in helplessness and write furious editorials condemning his words and actions. Yet Sharma, expectedly unmoved, shares his two cents on #DadriMurder in these many words: "the nature of injury shows no desire to lynch [Mohammad Akhlaq], 17-year-old daughter wasn't touched". He seems to almost enjoy the delicious irony that one of the most heinous attacks on Indian secularism and religious harmony, in which a Muslim was lynched and killed on the mere suspicion that he had stored/consumed beef, happened in a village that falls within his parliamentary constituency.  

Yet, it is a tad unfair to put Mahesh Sharma and Sangeet Som (MLA, Sardhana, UP, and an accused in Muzaffarnagar 2013 riots) under the high-resolution microscope, while our own prime minister fearmongers in Bihar that Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav "would give away OBC and SC/SC quotas to another community", indicating Muslims. Both PM Modi and BJP national president Amit Shah have rambled on about "pink revolution" and the holy cow, even as Union finance minister Arun Jaitley, president Pranab Mukherjee have paid lip-service to the constitutionally enshrined secularism and religious tolerance that have been national ideals since 1947.

Although Amit Shah has "chastised" Mahesh Sharma (along with Haryana CM Manohar Lal Khattar, Sakhshi Maharaj, Sangeet Som and other "motormouths"), the party and the government have been at the good-cop-bad-cop game for so long now that not even their staunchest supporters in news and social media are buying it any more. So this latest heartburn over Sharma getting Kalam's sprawling bungalow is really misplaced, since it's quite unnecessary.

If our "Proud Indians", who readily change their display picture in tricolour to honour Modi-Mark's vision and mission of Digital India, are upset that Mahesh Sharma has been rewarded the huge Type VIII bungalow despite his "despite being a Muslim" remark on Kalam, then it exposes their own hypocrisy and half-baked hypernationalism. For them, Kalam's nationalism, like the Caesar's Wife, is beyond a doubt because Kalam was/is remembered to have been more Hindu than the armies of Internet Hindoos flooding Indian public sphere. That this suitably Hindufied example of Indian culture is being tarnished by a relatively lesser figure (Hindu or no Hindu) is really the problem. Yet, they seem to forget that they, in fact, AGREE with Mahesh Sharma. For them, Kalam's nationalism lay in precisely his erasure of his Muslimness and embrace of so many things supposedly Hindu, including the much-hyped love of Bhagavad Gita, the meat-free diet and, of course, the nuclear bomb.

The only bone to pick with the allotment of the bungalow at 10, Rajaji Marg, standing on an expansive 7367-sq mt plot in Lutyens' Delhi, is technical - Mahesh Sharma is only an MoS, a first time minister, with several senior cabinet ministers before him who perhaps deserve better. Yet, in the visibility and utility quotient, the Union Culture Minister is a perfectly deserving candidate, who has simply pulled the lid off the spurious secularism that Kalam represented and "proud Indians" can accept. Only, unwittingly.