Dr S Y Qureshi, former Chief Election Commissioner, author of a celebrated book that explains with great clarity that the rate of growth of the Muslim population in India, is now on the downward trend as people, especially women, get more educated. The same has happened in the population of other communities.
The raw data is not being out here because this piece is not about comparative religious populations, but about dialogue, and about Dr Qureshi, a senior at college, and an old and dear friend, who was among five former top government bureaucrats or generals who met Mohan Bhagwat, the supreme leader of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh and his Delhi offices and raised a very opaque cloud of dust on just about who can meet an aggressive adversary, and what exactly can such a group then discuss with him.
It is not that the RSS is in dialogue with religious minorities. They are, and almost on a continuous basis, presenting their point of view and working at others to collaborate with them. It is not Bhagwat who carries on such a dialogue. He does receive senior ambassadors and people of the highest rank at the Sangh’s headquarter at Nagpur.
Those who have met him in recent times, and made international headlines for doing so, have been the Ambassadors of Germany and of the United States of America. Of course, they did not meet him together. Each met him alone – barring that ubiquitous camera crew – and at different times.
Each later went to some length to explain that as diplomats and plenipotentiaries for their respective countries, such meetings were in the like of duty.
The one senior Indian to meet Bhagwat was retired President Pranab Mukherjee, who passed on not too long thereafter. Mukherjee’s visit made big headlines. He had been President of the country, nominated to the post by the then ruling party, the Indian National Congress.
Mukherjee did not explain very much why at near the end of his life, he had sought to not just go to the RSS Headquarters, but pay floral tributes to the memory of its founding fathers. It was their ideology of majoritarianism that he had fought all his life as a member of the Congress where he, a small college lecturer, had risen steadily to become a confidante of prime minister Indira Gandhi, her trouble shooter of sorts, but more than most, one of the most important members of her cabinet.
For all we know, Mukherjee was making his peace with friends and foes, balancing the books much as he was wont to do in his long stints as the Union finance minister. There would be a philosophical logic to even, even a tinge of the spiritual.
In that meeting, the gain was almost entirely that of the RSS. The photo-opportunity was immense.
It remains unclear if the Five Muslim Gentlemen, as someone called the group, had sought the appointment or they had been invited. Looking at their collective ranks, it is clear, much thought had gone into the crossing of the five. Few better sons of the community who had risen to the very top, living examples of the opportunity Mother India gives to all its sons and daughters irrespective of their station.
The news of the meeting was leaked on the eve of the government’s crackdown on the Kerala based Popular Front of India. People are making much of this co-incidence. I am not.
Writing in the Indian express, Qureshi says of the meeting, “Of course, we could sense that Bhagwat was speaking from a position of authority. He emphasised three things: Hindutva is an inclusive concept in which all communities have equal room. The Indian Constitution is sacrosanct, and the entire country has to abide by it. He sought to dispel the fear that RSS is seeking to abandon the Constitution at the first opportunity. And, that Muslims will be disenfranchised.”
Twenty-two years earlier, the then RSS supremo had met the head of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India, Archbishop Alan de Lastic. This was in the wake of the infamous burning alive of Australian leprosy mission worker Graham Stuart Staines and his two young sons Timothy and Philips in Orissa on January 22, 1999 by Bajrang Dal activist Dara Singh.
Earlier, on Christmas eve of 1998, three dozen village churches had been burnt in the Dangs district of Gujarat. Then Prime Minister Vajpayee had flown down for a personal inspection of the situation. On his return, he wanted a national dialogue on conversions.
Kuppahalli Sudershan, the RSS chief of the time, sought an appointment to meet the CBCI officials at their headquarters. He came accompanied by his secretary, a Narendra Modi. I was part of the small Christian delegation. Sudershan said his group was for harmony and peace, but they were opposed to conversions.
I can’t say Sudershan was listening very hard when the archbishop explained there were no conversions by force or by fraud in a Hindu majority country. But people indeed had a Constitutional right to choose their faith.
The bishop spoke of the Dialogue of Life. Hindus and Christians, and Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Communists, lived a normal everyday life in towns and villages. They lived not in the sort of ghettos one has come to link with Palestine where villages walled in with stone and barbered wire.
Most wore the same dress as their neighbour, almost always spoke the same language, their children went usually to the same government or private schools.
This dialogue of life was the haven that made India what it was. Despite the occasional riot and the fiery election speech, neighbour trusted neighbour. There was no need to look over the shoulder.
Dialogue, specially a return to that peaceful and continuing dialogue of life, is the substance of any conversation between friends, and with foes.
(John Dayal is an
occasional documentary film maker and activist)
