Article by Samina Mishra

This is a piece I wrote for India Today but the version that has
appeared in the magazine is an edit that I did not agree to. It's not
clear to me how that happened since I edited the longer article down
to this final version and sent it in to them. But the magazine is out
and I am both angry and saddened at their careless editing of ideas
that are particularly under siege at this point of time.

So, here is my edit and I would be glad if it was circulated widely on
the net - more widely than the magazine!

Samina


Not far from L18, in the posh part of Jamia Nagar, is a house on a
tree-lined avenue that will always be home to me. But my life, with
all its easy privileges, could not be more different from Atif and
Sajid's, the two young men shot as alleged terrorists at L18. I
contain multitudes, Whitman so eloquently said. But we live in a time
when even multitudes are forced to lay claim to a singular label. And
so by writing this, perhaps, I will forever be labelled the voice of
the liberal secular Muslim. A voice that is accused of not speaking
up. Ironically, it is this very tyranny of labels that grants me this
space in a mainstream national magazine.

As someone with a Muslim first name and a Hindu surname, I suppose I
have always swung between labels - a poster girl for communal harmony
or a confused, rootless individual, depending on who was doing the
labelling. I went to a public school and have never worn a burkha. I
might escape being thrown in the big cauldron with "Islamic
Terrorists" but I will certainly be added to the one for "misguided
intellectuals". While there is no mistaking that it is zealous
nationalists who seek to light the fire under the first cauldron, the
other is a bone of contention between those who seek to define for me
how to be Indian and those who seek to define for me how to be Muslim.
My condemnation of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Imrana's rape
or the media circus around Gudiya will always be seen in the context
of my privileged background, my gender, my religious identity.
Perhaps, it can be no other way.

In this rhetoric of binaries of "us and them", it is difficult to find
the space to create a new paradigm of discussion. And so, in
conversations that throw up Islamic terrorists, rigid religious
beliefs, Pakistan and madrasas, the response is inevitably another set
of questions - why is the Bajrang Dal not labelled a terrorist outfit,
why is the growing public display of Hindu festivals like Navratras
and Karva Chauth not considered rigid religious beliefs, why should
Muslims in India be answerable for what goes on in Pakistan, what
spaces other than madrasas are available for thousands of believing
Muslims who choose to get educated and still retain their Muslim-ness.
As a Muslim in India today, not only are you fighting to shrug off the
label of fundamentalist- if not terrorist - but you are also
succumbing to a paradigm of dialogue which has been set for homogenous
communities with clear markers of identities.

But how does one fight that when shared cultural spaces, other than
those created by the market, shrink? How does one speak of the
diversity of being Indian when Diwali is celebrated in schools and Eid
just in Muslim homes? How does one avoid a singular label for
experiences that are diverse and yet have a common thread running
through them - the experience of a tailor in Ahmedabad whose Hindu
patrons have stopped giving work to, the butcher in Batla House who
couldn't get a bank loan, the software professional who will now have
to watch every single byte that leaves his computer.

Being Muslim in India today means many things to many people. But how
easy it is to forget that one fundamental reality. How easy it is to
say, as someone said to me after the Delhi blasts - "These are all
educated Muslims. Don't they know that their bombs can also kill their
own?" As if everyone with a Muslim name is a terrorist's very "own".


Samina Mishra / October 2008