Grumblings of a ‘Ghuspaithiya’

So who proposed the name of India’s 11^th president, APJ Abdul Kalam, for a stint at the Rashtrapati Bhawan? It was the BJP top leadership of that time.

And who hugged fast-bowler Mohammad Shami in the Indian cricket dressing room after their loss at the World Cup, in which the pacer was brilliant all through the games, and unplayable? It was Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Only two examples. There are not too many similar instances in the BJP’s originally scripted hate text book of their life and times in Indian politics! After all, they don’t have a single Muslim minister in their central cabinet, nor one MP. Like the Nazis. No Jews were allowed.

The question is: was President Kalam, our Pokhran man, a ghuspaithiya? An infiltrator?

Was Kalam and other celebrated Muslims of India, part of the totally crude ‘Hum paanch hamaare pachchees’ and ‘baby-producing factories’ discourse first initiated by Modi in Indian secular politics, when he was the at the helm after the State-sponsored massacre in Gujarat 2002, when Muslim citizens of India were butchered, gang-raped, and burnt alive, women and children included, while the entire law and order machinery of Modi aligned with the mass murderers, all of them Sangh Parivar leaders and cadres?

Remember: Dosti bani rahe. Karan Thapar TV show, in which Modi wanted a desperate glass of water when asked about what? Has anything changed? Nothing.

Is Shami, with his Wasim Akram-like incredible reverse swing, a ghuspaithiya? An illegal infiltrator? Is Mohammad Siraj, another brilliant pacer in the current Indian cricket team, an infiltrator? Is budding fast bowler Umran Malik from Kashmir an infiltrator?

Are Mohammad Azharuddin, Syed Kirmani, Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, Salim Durrani, Abbas Ali Beg, hockey forward Zafar Iqbal, multiple grand slam lawn tennis international champion, with a powerful forehand, Sania Mirza, boxing champion Nikhat Zareen, among scores of other Indians – are they all infiltrators?

It is said that like thousands of other Muslims, Shahrukh Khan’s father refused to stay in post-independent Pakistan and chose to relocate in India. Those days many Hindus and Muslims who left their homes in Pakistan, locked their doors with tears streaming from their eyes, their neighbours, Muslims, crying, as they were compelled to leave their sweet, ancient homes with strong community ties, which they loved – due to the damned bloodshed and communal carnage all over during the Partition. Read The Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh, among other books. Read Tamas by Bhisham Sahni, brother of great actor Balraj Sahni, both from the Lahore College in pre-Partition India. Watch this great cinematic adaptation, still in the Doordarshan archives, enacted by another great filmmaker and cinematographer, Govind Nihalini.

They would carry their home keys thinking that they would come back and open the lock to their musty, rusty, old, open-to-sky courtyards one day again, with the smell of the familiar and unforgettable past, still stuck on the walls, with the old, faded black and white family pictures and the eternal cobwebs. They never thought they would never come back. You must surely read great writers – Rajinder Singh Bedi, Ismat Chugtai, Sadaat Hasan Manto, and even Gulzar. Find out a heart-rending story of a dead child travelling on a bridge over the turbulent river Sutlej in partitioned Punjab, the refugees on top of a packed, rickety bus. It’s called Raavi Par, written by Gulzar. Your heart will die with the end of the story.

It’s like the people of Palestine. In millions they went through the exodus after Israel took over their beautiful olive tree homeland under the protection of rogue, imperialist States like the US and UK, who are still accomplices in the genocide in Gaza; the blood has not dried on their hands since the 1940s. The Palestinians, now in huge refugee settlements in Lebanon, have still preserved their keys to their homes.

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Shahrukh Khan’s father came back because he did not want to live in an Islamic theocracy. He wanted to live in a pluralist, secular, modern, democratic India! Thousands of other Muslims who returned, or chose to stay back, they would have shared his deep intimacy with the language of Jawaharlal Nehru’s secularism, and the ideals of the freedom struggle.

Did any RSS leader participate, or sacrifice his or her life, in the freedom struggle – like Ashfaqullah Khan, again from UP, who was hanged?

No. Instead, they were glorifying Adolf Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust. They were toeing the ethnic-cleansing line of their biggest original ideologues, Guru Golwalkar, who was celebrating the mass murder of six million Jews in the concentration camps of Poland and elsewhere in Europe. Read his Bunch of Thoughts.

So who sang the majority of Hindu bhajans in the Bombay cinema of old? Remember the song Man tarpat hari darsan ko aaj from Baiju Bawra? So who performed aarti and puja around an early dawn tulsi tree in old Hindi films? Remember them, yes. Legends of great secular cinema! Mohammad Rafi and Meena Kumari. Were they ghuspaithiyas?

Rafi saab sung many eternal romantic songs. Do they ever listen to romantic songs with their warped, pracharak, ghettoized minds? Did they ever watch that magical moonlight spectacle of a magical love song in a rebellious film with a Muslim backdrop – Pakeeza? Chalo dildaar chalo chand ke paar chalo… says the man. And Lata Mangeshkar sings so beautifully for the ostracized Muslim woman: Hum hain tayaar chalo…

Have they never ever have watched the sublime, exotic beauty, and brilliance of Madhubala and Waheeda Rehman? Did Bismillah Khan not play his legendary shehnai on the ghats of Benaras, the PM’s constituency? For which goddess of the Hindu pantheon did he play his shehnai? Saraswati. The goddess of education, knowledge, enlightenment.

Who was the guru of sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, since he was a raw teenager of 18? Baba Allauddin Khan. Who made sublime music in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali? Did they ever see Ravi Shankar touching his guru’s feet, and hugging him, and his humble wife in a humble home, his wife crying, while Ravishankar says, Shorir bhalo toh? Meaning, are you in good health?

I tell you, the PM must watch yet again the action-replays of the magnificent ‘catches behind the wickets’ by ace wicket-keeper Syed Kirmani. And the silken strokes of Azharuddin, an ace fielder as well, hanging out at the crease, like an eternal, tired, traveler. The PM must watch his multiple debut centuries, every block at middle-stump, and every divine, offside stroke, reminding him of how Azharuddin was not a ghuspaithiya – one of the greatest captains of Indian cricket team, like Saurav Ganguly.

Chino arab hamaara… Hindostan hamara… rehno ko ghar nahi hain… saara jahan hamara… After his vitriolic speeches and the mythical 18-hours hard work as the Prime Minister, only if Modi could listen to this song written by Sahir Ludhianvi, enacted by Raj Kapoor, and sung by Mukesh, depicting the homeless in Bombay’s nocturnal, dark streets. He could even listen to Sahir’s utopian song, which is not about Hindu Rashtra: Woh subah kabhi to ayegi…

Ghuspathiye?

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