Prophet row: India must learn to self-correct
The BJP could possibly have avoided the negative fallout from the controversy by removing Nupur Sharma and Naveen Jindal immediately after what they said about Prophet Mohammed
Cancelled meetings in Indonesia, enhanced security in Pakistan, protests in Turkey, as a team of Indian bureaucrats arrived for different meetings, and a rising crescendo of protests from 20 Muslim nations and counting.
Let no one underestimate the impossible situation Indian diplomats find themselves in, all because of the coarse insensitivity of now-suspended Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokeswoman Nupur Sharma (and now-expelled spokesperson Naveen Jindal) and the television news media that enables this kind of hate-mongering night after embarrassing night.
For Indian Foreign Service officers who are trained to manage crises and proudly play the big league of nuance and sophistry — for instance, explaining India’s complex position to the world on Russia and Ukraine — to now have to handle this scale of blowback over piffling TV mudslinging must feel so egregious.
Despite the fact that TV channels birthed this tamasha, they have continued to embarrass themselves — and India — with invitations to random saffronites and mullahs (clerics) to “analyse” the fracas. Worse, they are now peddling the narrative that this is a giant conspiracy puppeteered by our adversaries.
Of course, hostile countries will fish in troubled waters and try to milk this kerfuffle to their advantage. But to suggest that this is all smoke and mirrors, with a hidden force directing an anti-India campaign, is ludicrous, especially when what was said has been caught on camera for all time to come. So, frothing at the mouth in faux-outrage at an imaginary foreign hand is ridiculous.
Yet, I agree with the discomfort that so many have expressed at being lectured to by nations that don’t have the best record on either democratic rights or religious diversity. It is also true that their outrage is theological, not political. In other words, what Sharma and Jindal did, as the representatives of the world’s most prominent political party, in the world’s largest democracy, was incredibly tone-deaf, bigoted, and frankly, shortsighted. And the geostrategic consequences are real.
But if you think this outrage will change the deep sense of marginalisation that Indian Muslims are going through, think again. This was also the week where we now know unequivocally that by July 7, the BJP will have no Muslim representative in Parliament after the terms of three incumbent Rajya Sabha members — Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Syed Zafar Islam and MJ Akbar — end in June and July. The party has 301 Members of Parliament (MPs) in the Lok Sabha, but none are Muslim, and there are no elected Muslim Members of Legislative Assembly (MLAs) from the party in the assemblies. Protests by Islamic nations over the insult to Prophet Mohammed will not change this worrying gap in representation. Not even if there is a Muslim president, as the whispers have suggested about the governor of Kerala, Arif Mohammed Khan, who is, of course, known for taking on former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on the question of alimony for Muslim women in the 1980s.
The challenge with the Gulf nations apart — and it cannot be wished away given the billions of dollars in trade, dependency for oil and energy and strategic imperatives at stake — the questions we must ask of the government is this: Given how much the BJP prides itself on muscular nationalism and given how quick its Twitter armies are to use the phrase “anti-national” for anyone who disagrees with them, how on earth did 10 days pass without any action against Sharma and Jindal? Why did it take the Arab world to nudge us into a response? How is it nationalistic to respond only to foreign countries, but dismiss the hurt expressed by your own Muslim citizens? And how does a proud nation place its vice-president in a situation where the host country issues a statement of protest only as his plane touches down in Qatar? I am told the potential fallout was flagged within the government, but perhaps hate-mongering on TV is now so normalised that no person of significance stepped in to shut it down before an external force could call it out. Simply put, India would not have been in this place if Sharma and Jindal had been removed immediately after what they said.
No proud Indian likes being told off by another country. Whether that criticism is coming from open societies or theocracies is honestly academic. Our instinct is to want to handle our issues on our terms. But then you would hope that India will always remain, to borrow the words of veteran diplomat KP Fabian, “a self-correcting democracy.” That we failed to self-correct in this instance before being admonished by other nations is what should make us pause.
Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and authorThe views expressed are personal
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