In a modern marriage, Swami Dayananda Saraswati once observed, two individuals come together as nouns, but after the ceremony, one becomes an adjective, most usually the woman. Metamorphosing from say, ‘Saraswati’ to ‘Saraswati Ramakrishna,’ she is reduced to an adjective qualifying the noun ‘Ramakrishna.’ Yet there are times, the sage added, when ‘Ramakrishna’ becomes the adjective. If the first scenario is a tragedy, the second one is a disaster.
This is the misfortune of Amitav Kumar, an Indian teaching at an American University who, at the height of the Kargil War in 1999, married a Pakistani, Mona Ahmad Ali, and metamorphosed into Safdar Ali. In subsequent writings seeking public recognition on this count, Kumar fails to explain why – despite warnings by a Hindu and a Muslim friend that the Toronto-based family was forcing him to convert – he was powerless to resist the deracination involved in defecting from his native faith and even unable (or unwilling) to confide in his parents.
The excuse proffered by the bride’s mother was that marriage between a Muslim and a non-Muslim was illegal in Pakistan. I cannot understand why the nuptials of a US-based girl with Canada-based parents needs recognition in Pakistan. Amitav-Safdar, however, felt powerless to resist, and despite a civil ceremony underwent conversion and nikaah. His hapless parents discovered this atrocity through a puerile article in Outlook.
Kumar was clear from the beginning that his unusual union would be his ticket to fame. Self-aggrandizement is evident in the claim that his marriage was “unusually symbolic” and would help bring peace to the subcontinent as an Indian Hindu was marrying a Pakistani Muslim, thereby opening “a new track for people-to-people diplomacy.”
His mother disabused him of these pretensions after reading Outlook, saying there was nothing special about the union of a Muslim with a Muslim. She spiritedly pointed out that while she had graciously accepted his choice of life partner without asking the daughter-in-law to accept Hindu dharma, she could not understand why Muslims never gave others the same freedom of religious choice. Her tolerance contrasts sharply with the crude insistence of the Ali family to not merely convert, but also indoctrinate Kumar on the core tenets of Islam, and to loudly proclaim in Canadian and Pakistani society that the marriage had engendered the conversion of a Hindu boy to Islam.
Perhaps the implacable insistence on conversion as part of the marriage deal disturbed Kumar somewhere in his being. He dare not apostatize from Islam, much less ask his wife to do so. Husband of a Fanatic (Penguin 2004) is his attempt to rationalize his lapse from dharma, using puerile Western, Islamic and Left-secular critiques of Hindu society as an alibi. Handsomely abetted with grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and Penn State University, he engages in a fulsome diatribe against contemporary India, aimed at winning applause from a non-Hindu and anti-Hindu audience.
In fairness, his style is engaging, and avoids the shrill notes of most Indian toadies of the West or Islam. But sadly for him, as a convert, he is ineligible to lead the new diplomacy of which he so fondly dreams. His extensive travels through India in the guise of a Hindu, and his emphasis on his conversion to secure a visa to visit Pakistan, taint his book with intellectual dishonesty. In a deeper sense, Husband of a Fanatic is a remarkably adept portraiture of a Hindu who does not know his own history and culture, and is so brainwashed by secular rhetoric that he can be sucked into a conversion deal without protest or resistance. And like a good “naya Mussalman,” Safdar (Kumar) has no qualms about pontificating against Hindu dharma and culture.
The post-Godhra riots of March 2002 provide Kumar the greatest justification for his 1999 marriage. Traveling to the Shah-e-Alam relief camp with Shama, a social worker whose organization he chooses not to identify, he observes the huge sums of money she had probably received from a political party in Delhi, for disbursing relief. It appears she is equally skilful in indoctrination, telling Kumar: “This is the beginning of another Bosnia.” Shama had somehow acquired a CD which purportedly contained a pirated video allegedly made by men killing and raping Muslims. When viewing it with Kumar, however, she was disappointed to discover it was merely a documentary of corpses in a morgue or hospital.
This explicit zeal for Hindu culprits is not matched with compassion for the Hindu victims whose grisly carnage sparked off modern India’s worst communal conflagration. Referring to the 28 February torching of the Sabarmati Express, which resulted in the roasting of fifty-eight pilgrims returning from Ayodhya, Kumar lamely states: “The act was believed to be the work of Muslims (italics mine)…” May we say the subsequent riots were believed to be the work of Hindus?
Kumar is reproachful of former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee for his statement before the BJP national executive at Goa: “wherever Muslims are they do not want to live with others peacefully;” and that countries with a Muslim population live under threat of militancy and terrorism. Unfortunately for Kumar, the brutal assault on school children at Beslan has provoked intellectual outrage even in the Arab world, and highlighted Islam’s notorious inability to tolerate the existence of non-Muslims. Incoming reports suggest that not only was the siege pre-planned, but that the assailants may have molested some children. Television footage of the victims and their grieving families have removed the veneer of Islam as a religion of peace (sic), and as President Vladimir Putin is no secular namby-pamby nor apologetic nationalist, Russia may well emerge as the true leader of the international rebuff to Islamic fundamentalism.
Inspired by an unverifiable news report in a major national daily that a Hindu woman had been brutally murdered in the Ahmedabad riots because she had married a Muslim, Kumar tried in vain to speak to such mixed couples. He falsely projects himself as a partner in such an enterprise, conceals his conversion and lambastes Hindu “fundamentalists” for not respecting the religion and human rights of others. The forceful attempt to equate Hindu and Muslim fundamentalism exposes Kumar’s work as callow and dishonest, for nowhere in the world have Hindus armed and conspired to destroy other groups and nations.
The apology for Islam, however, never ceases. Equally consistent is the sanctimonious talking-down to the Hindu community, telling them what they are supposed to be like. There is the startling claim that: “Hindu children learn to believe that in the Muslim ghettoes in India, men wave green Pakistani flags and burst fire-crackers every time India is beaten by Pakistan in a cricket or hockey match…” Kumar sermonizes: “On the one hand is the division between communities inside India, and, on the other, the division between the two nations, but in the neurotic imagination of the anxious nationalist, the two are identical.”
Actually, Pakistani flags and firecrackers were well documented in Indian newspapers. And recently there was tension in Sonepat, Haryana, after some young men hoisted the Pakistani flag. Secondly, it was the division of communities inside India that led to Partition, and the deceitful dissembling of post-Independence politicians and intellectuals inhibited an honest recognition of this reality. No meaningful bridges can be built without this acknowledgement.
The Pioneer, 7 September 2004