[Reader-list] Iconoclasm and a quest for hired limousines

[shuddha at sarai.net]

Dear Rashneek, Dear All on the List

Happy new year. (so what if it is a few weeks old !)

I have watched with dismay our list degenerating from the heights it
ascended to with Rashneek Kher's riposte to my annotations on the history
of iconoclasm in Kashmir. The current volley of invective unleashed by
Oishik, Chanchal Malviya, Radhikarajen, We Wi and Pawan Durani is sad, and
I hope we can climb out of it, as we did momentarily when Arnab, Sadan,
Prem Chandravarkar and others were discussing archives, personhood and
other things that make this list more worthwhile. I hope I can attend to
some of those fascinating questions in coming days. I also hope (in
agreement with Ravi Agarwal's response to Aarti, that matters other than
those that concern our resident Hindu patriots can get a hearing. It would
be tragic if this list were to be monopolized by a bunch of time serving
fanatics intent on the destruction of conversation with their hatred filled
agenda. The arts, environment, technology, culture, contemporaneity, the
making of images and words, philosophical speculation and debate, - all
these are part of the mandate of this list, and need vigorous cultivation.
The best way to deal with right wing lunacy is to ensure that it does not
drown other voices. I appeal to everyone on this list to ensure that this
does not happen. Please write, and write about a lot of other things as
well.

But this post takes us back to the issues raised by Rashneek Kher on
iconoclasm on Christmas day last month.

I read with interest your (Rashneek's) long posts in reply to my
annotations on iconoclasm in Kashmir, posted almost exactly a month ago .
And I appreciate the hard work that Rashneek has put in. Thank your for all
the notes and references. They are useful.

I do however have some issues with the contents of Rashneek's argument. i
do not wish this to be a very detailed post, so I will keep my arguments as
brief as possible.

FIrstly, it is disingenuous on your part to say that you had not said that
Hindu kings had not undertaken acts of Iconoclasm. The question of
iconoclasm was raised by you in a response that you wrote to my reply to
Pawan Durani about genocide by Communist rulers. In my reply, I had said
that I am willing to atone for the genocidial violence that stains the
record of regimes that have used the name Communist to describe themselves,
and asked, whether Pawan Durani would be similarly prepared to grieve and
atone for those killed in order to defend the Indian nation in Kashmir. In
your reply to my willingness to atone, you invoked what you implied was
another history of violence in Kashmir, where you focused, or chose to
focus on instances of (solely) Muslim iconoclasm. You made it appear in
your post as if iconoclasm and temple destruction and Islam had some
special relationship, and you did not mention non Muslim iconoclasm and
temple destruction in Kashmir. Had you wanted to be objective, you could
have mentioned that non Muslim rulers also destroyed temples. You chose not
to.

Secondly, the implications of your argument about the relative merits of
different acts of iconoclasm and temple destruction based on a reading of
the motives behind them are interesting. In your conceptual and moral
universe, greed, lust for wealth and power (which for you are the motives
of the acts of iconoclasm of the non-muslim rulers of Kashmir) seem to be
somehow preferable to the iconoclasm that derives its energy from faith and
proselytization alone (which you attribute solely to the three Muslim kings
you mention).

The iconoclasm of non-muslim Kings, though reprehensible, is in your view,
less damaging in the last instance, because it is not accompanied by a
faith based fanaticism.

I am not interested (and never have been) in furnishing a differential
framework of justification for any act of destruction. I condemn,
unequivocally, acts of violence by ruling powers, no matter which ruling
power perpetuates them, and for what reason. Not because I view them
through the lens committed to the hierarchical and differential ordering of
their motives but because I view them in terms of their consequences. The
consequences, unvaryingly, are tragic, no matter what the declared, or
retrospectively unveiled 'motives' may be.

It matters little to me as to whether those who witness and recount such
acts condemn these motives as base (as Kalhana does) or glorify them as
exalted (as some of the Muslim chroniclers you mention do, though others,
like Kalhan, are prepared to call them base). What matters to me is that
these instances were acts of wanton destruction, and need to be recognized
as such.

But let us leave the absured question of whether it is 'better' to destroy
for greed or the so called greater glory of god aside for the moment.

As far as the attribution of motives to acts of state terror are concerned,
(and the killing of people, and the destruction of their property by forces
partisan to the state are acts of state terror, no matter who orders them,
or when they occur) I am less than willing to accept the motives ascribed
to them (which you accept without hesitation) by court chroniclers.

Let us take a contemporary example to try and understand what I mean. If we
follow the debate on Nandigram, which has occurred on this list and
elsewhere, we will see that several people (myself included) have no
hesitation in seeing the violence that has been unleashed in West Bengal by
the ruling CPI(M) as being symptomatic of the avarice, greed, lust for
wealth, influence and power that has completely turned the heads of the
leadership of the CPI(M) led government in that state. While on the other
hand, the people I would consider to be the 'court chroniclers' and
apologists of the CPI(M) have insisted that in fact the CPI(M)'s actions
are actually evidence of its commitment to the pro-people development
policies that it claims to uphold. Substitute a commitment to  what our so
called Communist Parties call 'people's democracy' with what the 'court
chroniclers' of the Kashmiri Salatin's called 'Islam' and you will see
exactly what I mean. Or, better still, if you read the writing on Army, BSF
and CRPF bunkers in Kashmir and Srinagar, which often declare that the
Indian Armed Forces are protecting the 'Freedom' or 'Azaadi' of the
Kashmiri population then too you will see what I mean.

Every ruling power attempts to dignify its base violence with the sanctity
of an exalted purpose. In Marxism we call this exalted purpose 'Ideology'.
So, when the court chroniclers of the Salatins say that the purpose of loot
and the destruction of property is the advancement of Islam, I am quite
willing to bet that what we see is as much 'ideology' in operation as when
someone like Prabhat Patnaik exhorts the CPI(M) faithful that whatever is
happening in West Bengal is happening for the benefit of the people there.
In both cases, the greed and lust for power are given a suitably exalted
'cover' by intellectuals who also happen to be courtiers.

Strangely, if I were to accept your logic that the actions of Muslim rulers
in Kashmir can be glossed only in terms of their commitment to their faith,
then we have to arrive at another paradoxical conclusion - which is as
follows - that the pre-eminence of Kashmiri Pandits throughout the history
of medieval Kashmir, the fact that their religion and rituals remained
intact, that new temples were also built and that Sanskrit scholarship
continued to exist in Kashmir, is also indicative of the strength of the
piety of those Muslim rulers who ensured that all this could happen.
Because, the Qur'an explicitly states ' To you your faith, and to me mine',
or 'that there can be no compulsion in matters of religion'. In other
words, just as (following your logic) those Muslim rulers who persecuted
Pandits and destroyed temples were acting as per the injunctions of their
faiths, those other Muslim rulers who did not persecute Pandits and did not
destroy temples were also acting out of their 'Islamic' religious
motivations. In other words the 'bad' Muslims were bad because they were
Muslims, and the 'good' Muslims were good because they were Muslims. I do
not see how this line of reasoning can help us to understand anything,
because it is internally contradictory.

I have heard and read many Muslim and Islamist ideologues argue that the
historical record of Islamic rule in the pre-modern world is indicative of
its higher tolerance of diversity, (which is empiricially true if we take
into account the broad contours of the cultural and religious histories of
the Ottoman, Abbasid, Fatimid, and Mughal empires), and that this is
because, Islam itself is the 'most tolerant' and peace loving of all faiths.

Now, let me make it abundantly clear that I think that this line of
reasoning is absolute rubbish. It is Islamist propaganda that I do not buy
at all. Islam per se is neither more nor less tolerant than other faiths.
And Muslim rulers are not tolerant or intolerant because they are 'Muslims'.

Muslim rulers were tolerant, or not, because it was expedient for them to
be so, because tolerance, or highly selective but non discriminatory forms
of intolerance were effective and pragmatic instruments of rule. Similarly,
I do not think that Narendra Modi organizes pogroms, and arranges for the
massacre of Muslims in Gujarat because he is a good Hindu. I think he does
so because this is a means by which he can rule through terror and fear. To
give his actions a 'Hindu' gloss, despite the spin and representational
excess with which it is surrounded, (including by him and his courtiers)
would be succumbing to the error of mistaking reality for ideology, the
concreteness of the deed for the slipperiness of the word.

Similarly, to say, like the court chroniclers you mention that 'temple
destruction' was motivated by the cause of furthering the agenda of Islam
is about as meaningless, in my opinion, as saying that the tolerance and
liberality of Muslim rule existed in order to further the agenda of Islam.
What you are saying, and what Islamist apologists of the principle of the
so called 'just caliphate' say actually amount to the same things, though
you come to them from different ends and from different purposes - namely
that the acts of Muslim rulers must only be seen in terms of their
provenance in the sacred tenets  of Islam, while the acts of non Muslim
rulers can be explained by mundane motivations. This amounts, actually to a
theory of 'Muslim exceptionalism' that can be used to justify and/or
describe anything and everything when it is attached to any entity that is
nominally Muslim, from the Islamo-Fascism of bin Laden and Ahmedinijad to
the liberality and openness of Jalaluddin Rumi, even to the playful
heresies of Ma'arri and Rushdie.

I prefer a more simple and simutaneously more complex explaination - which
sees actions and motives rooted in everyday contexts,  and especially views
Kingship, statecraft and the exercise of political power of any kind as a
complex intersection of different kinds of motives, mainly base and
mundane, mainly to do with the accumulation of wealth and the maintenance
of patterns of domination by different ruling classes in different epochs.

Finally, lets turn our attention a little to the manner in which you have
read your sources. I notice, that the actual substantive 'temple
destroyers' that you mention are none other than the familiar Sikandar
But-Shikan, whose name you drag out like a cheap magic trick, again and
again.

You list 49 references from Jia Lal Kilam's book, forgetting to mention
that temple destruction are mentioned very few times in these references.
The bulk of these citations have to do with the persecution of pandits (and
others) for reasons that have to do with expediency, court politics, greed
for wealth and a host of other mundane factors. The few instances were
Muslim fanaticism is at play are also those that are also corrected and
resisted by other Muslim claimants to power. But we hardly find any 
specific mentions of temple destruction. This makes it difficult to believe
that the quantum of temple destruction in Muslim rule was substantially
different from what might have occured earlier.

Generally, the behaviour of oppressive Muslim kings is just as base, just
as banal, just as reprehensible as their non-Muslim predecessors. Just to
give an example, (because I do not want to bore our readers with an excess
of detail, an achoholic king like Haider Shah ('given to drunken orgies' in
Kilam's words) makes for as good and devout a Muslim as the pork eating
Shiva worshipping crypto Muslim pioneer called Harsha - whom you are happy
to claim is Muslim because Kalhana uses the word 'Turushka' for him. S

You conveniently cite Abdul Qayoom Rafiqi (Sufism in Kashmir) mentioing
Syed Ali Hamadani's list of injunctions agains 'Zimmis' without mentioing
that the term 'Zimmis' (the protected) refer to Jews and Christians, not to
Hindus. The word used for Hindus is Kafir, and Rafiqui whom you cite,
actually refers to Hamadani's verses stressing the equality in God's eyes
of the Momin (Muslim) and the Kafir. This actually really damages your
argument, as does the fact that Rafiqui explicitly mentions the fact that
the fanatical excesses of his successor, Mir Mohammad Hamadani were also
resisted, and defeated by another Sufi

Thank you once again for the energy with which you have attempted to
marshall evidence for your arguments, I am afraid, that after a
dispassionate reading of your arguments, I am forced to conclude that they
make up in shrillness what they lack in coherence and cogency.

Keep trying, 

regards

Shuddha

PS. As long as non Kashmiri Indian soldiers continue to occupy and harass
Kashmiris in Kashmir, I am afraid you will have to deal with the likes of
me, commenting on the situation in Kashmir. I do this, not because I have a
particular interest in what you call the 'pain' of Kashmir. I am not
Kashmiri, and have no interest in giving further purchase to Kashmir self
pity, regardless of the denomination that it speaks in the name of. Rather,
I am interested in understanding and resisting what a prolonged period of
military occupation does to the occupying power. Let the last non Kashmiri
Indian soldier leave the valley, and I too, will 'cease-fire'. Until that
is done, I am afraid, the skirmish will continue.

Finally, at the end of your multi part missive, you exhort Pawan Durani
with the words, "Be not despaired of these,limousine liberals oh my friend
Pawan Durani,poor in means,we maybe,but aren't poor in passion and zest."

While it is interesting to think of people who brandish their 'blackberry
fuelled' enthusiasm as being 'poor in means', I must point out that all my
life I have wanted at least a brief ride in a limousine on Delhi's streets.
A liberal, I am not, but I really would not mind an occasional spin in a
hired limousine . Alas, I have never really enjoyed the delights of one. I
did notice, that on 'Homeland Day' which was celebrated with a major bash
by the Panun Kashmir organization I noticed a long line of expensive
automobiles outside the Chinmaya Mission Auditorium on Lodi Road in Delhi
where Panun Kashmir was pledging itself anew to its homeland. I noticed in
particular the several shiny grey and black Toyota Innovas, which though
not limousines, are handsome vehicles. Perhaps our Kashmiri Pandit Patriot
friends were there in person too. Would any of them care to lend me, or any
other anti-national automobile fanatics, a nice big car for a day?