Fatwa against Bharat Mata ki jai: Both Darul Uloom and RSS missing the point

When Lok Sabha MP from Hyderabad and chief of All India Majlis Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM), Asaduddin Owaisi, declared that he wouldn't chant "Bharat Mata ki jai" even if someone held a knife to his throat, Mohan Bhagwat-led RSS and the assorted "luminaries" from the Hindutva brigade must have jumped in joy for getting the Hindu Rashtra script so awfully right. 

Owaisi's argument, exactly what Darul Uloom Deoband has parroted today in issuing a full-scale fatwa against the slogan, was that deification of country (as a mother figure) was against the tenets of Islam. And though Owaisi got both bouquets and brickbats (particularly from poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar, who, interestingly, proclaims to be an atheist) for his public statement, the AIMIM leader was after all speaking for himself.

To Owaisi's credit, he didn't ask fellow Muslims to say or not say Bharat Mata ki jai. Though he pointed out in no uncertain terms that this "nationalism test" was yet another bogus attempt by the RSS-BJP combine to force a one-size-fit-all definition of patriotism and majoritarianism down our collective throats.

Almost in cue, Maharashtra MLA and AIMIM leader Waris Pathan was suspended from the state assembly for not chanting the slogan, that too hounded out by Congress MLAs high on pseudo-patriotism steroids. There were reports of madrassa students being beaten up for refusing to say "Jai mata ki", a common North Indian Hindu chant, often seen as car stickers. A colleague narrated how a recent parents-teachers meet at a reputed Delhi school turned into a sloganeerning contest amongst patriots.

In this climate of religion-specific persecution, how does Darul Uloom Deoband's fatwa help the cause of Muslims across India? To quote the Uttar Pradesh-based seminary:

"We love our country, but it is not our god. In Islam, we believe in only one God and hence it is against the faith of a Muslim to chant the slogan. In the past too, a similar controversy emerged about the chanting of Vande Mataram in schools. That song was made mandatory for students. Now, Bharat Mata Ki Jai is being made compulsory. Both the issues are the same. India is without doubt our country. We and our ancestors were born here. We love our country, but we do not think it is our God."

Darul Uloom Deoband further said:

"Bharat Mata, according to a section of Hindus, is a goddess and they worship her. For Muslims, participating in the worshipping of that goddess would be apostasy and against Islam. No government or organisation can force such unlawful activities on other people if it contradicts their faith."

Beyond the veneer of the reasonable-sounding secular explanation, that of being true to its core religious beliefs, Darul Uloom is just playing to the gallery by bringing in "apostasy" and "unlawful" in the argument against Bharat Mata ki jai.

Just as forcing Bharat Mata ki jai and proclaiming it "beyond debate" (like BJP national president Amit Shah recently declared) is an overt ploy to install an informal Hindu theocracy, a fatwa, which is an official edict and involves everyone under Sharia law, whether enforceable or not, codifies and calcifies the response to this latest form of oppression under the garb of patriotism.       

Yes, most Muslims would, expectedly enough, have huge issues with saying Bharat Mata ki jai. But so would a number of Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and those of indeterminate religious category, those who have steered clear of organised religion of any kind, those who are atheists, those who simply do not care enough.

Hence, the moot and complex argument AGAINST Bharat Mata ki jai is not only that it is a code word for Hindu Rashtra, itself a straight lift from colonial deification of the British Empire as the body of the then Queen.

Yes, the original Bharat Mata was Queen Victoria.

Actually, the argument against making Bharat Mata ki jai a mandatory chant and turning it into a password for patriotism is exactly that: pure fascist coercion.

The goalposts for proving one's nationalism have an ugly tendency to be forever out of reach for those who fall outside the narrow definitions of nation traced along the axes of religion, language, caste and other differentials.    

The point was never about successfully turning Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and non-believers into a well-trained battery of Indians unquestioningly screaming whichever latest mantra that the engineers of patriotism dream up to be nationalist enough for the day. The point has always been to keep the climate of persecution at boiling point levels, so that fear and jingoism become the top distractions in an artificially bipolarised country.

The unIslamic argument against Bharat Mata ki jai is not only an inadequate one; it's a dangerous one.

Every religion needs reforms. Hinduism, premised on Manusmriti, casts women away from certain "sacred spaces" such as Shani Shingnapur temple, and does not have women in its priestly classes. Roman Catholicism has failed to address the elephant in the room by unseeing homosexuality among its rank and file. Buddhism, a religion with non-violence as its foremost message, is metamorphosing into a brutal doppelganger of itself in Burma.    

Islam itself is reeling under many a woefully out-of-date law that discriminate against women in particular: the triple oral talaq being the most obvious one.

In such a situation, being merely un-Islamic must not become the fulcrum of the necessary opposition to something as enormous as the present regime's political project - that of turning India into a utopia of a blindly consumerist, doggedly technocratic Hindutva.

Yes, it is extremely important to secure and conserve the secular fabric of the multicultural, multireligious, multilingual India. But that fabric too needs repairs and mending in places where gaping holes are staring us in the face.

Bharat Mata ki jai has been stripped of its once religion-laced revolutionary meaning and is now an empty phrase signifying the omnipresent coercion in India today. Let's all stand up to rejecting it, or any other slogan, as an answer to questions of nationalism/s.

But let's also not lose focus of the fact that hiding behind any particular religious obduracy to do that would be tantamount to walking into the very trap set up by exactly those making this imposition.

Why let the fascists, of every shade, win?