Dear Mr. Poonawalla,
Your post yesterday appeared in my feed. Normally, I’d scroll on, wondering why and how the algorigthm decided that my eyes must suffer this spectacle. But I read it. Perhaps I was bored. And I realised that this sort of virtue-signalling nonsense should not go unchallenged, or unanswered.
So, here is my response:
Your family, you tell us, chose secular India over Islamic Pakistan in 1947. Chose Bharat. Chose wisely, one must concede. Good for you.
But here is what you seem not to have noticed: so did approximately 35 million others. 35 million Muslims who made exactly the same choice, without, if I may point out, a press release. And without feeling the need to announce to the world that their ‘culture is Hindu’, whatever that means (unless you are referring to Savarkar, but then, if you have read him, which I assure you I have, you would realise you do not have the right to that word, ‘Hindu’, at least according to him, because your holy places lie outside the borders of this country).
Anyway, coming back to the 35 million. You see, they did not choose India and then spend the next seven decades making a virtue of it, telling anyone in earshot how they need to be thanked by a grateful nation. They simply got on with life. With being Indian. Side-by-side with their Hindu neighbours, their Sikh neighbours, their Christian and Parsi and Jewish and atheist neighbours. In the magnificent, unremarkable, everyday ordinariness of a plural society that was built precisely for that purpose. Those 35 million families have since grown, through nothing more dramatic than the ordinary passage of time and the ordinary business of living, into nearly 200 million Indians. 200 million people who never asked to audition for belonging. 200 million people who are finding, with each passing year, that the country their grandparents quietly chose is being made, with increasing noise and aggression, a little less theirs.
Your family did not do India a favour, Mr. Poonawalla. They made a choice, as millions did, by voting with their feet, and their conscience, and their faith. Not, if I may point out the obvious, faith in the people you bow & scrape to and perform for today, but faith in giants they could see clearly and whom your current employers and paymasters can never even aspire to equal. Those 35 million families placed their trust in Gandhi, in Nehru, in Azad, in the idea that this country would be large enough, and generous enough, and sure enough of itself, to not need its minorities to audition for belonging. You have taken that quiet, dignified act of conscience and turned it into a press release. In doing so, you have not honoured your family’s choice. You have diminished it.
And then you credit the government under PM Narendra Modi for the security and stability you enjoy today!! Here is where I must pause, just to note, with your permission and with the gentlest possible touch, that Narendra Modi was born in 1950.
The India your family chose in 1947 was not Modi’s India. It was Gandhi’s India. It was Nehru’s India. It was Sardar Patel’s India. It was Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s India. It was Zakir Husain’s India. It was Rafi Ahmed Kidwai’s India. It was Asaf Ali’s India. It was B.R. Ambedkar’s India. It was the India of countless unnamed, unremembered men and women who fought, bled, debated, argued, and dreamed a secular, pluralist republic into existence against every conceivable odd. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Jews, Parsis, Tribals, atheists. सभी का खून है शामिल यहां की मिट्टी में, Mr. Poonawalla. किसी के बाप का हिंदुस्तान थोड़ी है?
That Constitution you mention with such reverence (‘Holy’ you called it)? Drafted under a government led by the party your current employers have spent a decade calling synonymous with dynasty, appeasement, and anti-nationalism. The Army that guards those borders? (Re)built (after independece), institutionalised, grown, maintained, and nurtured under the same dispensation. The foreign policy that kept India out of great-power conflicts for seven long decades (yes, those सत्तर साल)? Nehru’s Non-Aligned Movement, that much-mocked policy your party faithful love to sneer at over their evening Gomutr cocktails and WhatsApp forwards.
Which brings us to that other beloved bhakt chorus: the nothing-happened-in-70-years clowns. Yeah, nothing. 70 years of darkness, sloth, and Congress perfidy, and then, lo, the light. Except, Mr. Poonawalla, if nothing happened in 70 years, what exactly are you feeling grateful for? The Constitution that protects you was written in those 70 years. The Army that secures your borders was built in those 70 years. The institutions, the foreign policy insulation, the secular framework inside which a Shia Aga Khani Muslim can thrive and become a BJP spokesperson without irony, all of it, every last brick of it, was laid in those 70 years. You cannot simultaneously spit on the inheritance and ask the pawn shop owner how much cash you’ll get for it.
And now, here we are. The studied neutrality that kept us above the fray, that gave India the diplomatic room to be friends with everyone and therefore targets of no one, is being traded in for the intoxicating pleasure of being seen as a great power with a great leader. You watch the Iran-US-Israel situation with equanimity, Mr. Poonawalla. I do not. Because the foreign policy tradition you are unknowingly celebrating is precisely what is currently being dismantled by the government you are cheerleading.
But let us step away for a moment and appreciate the poetry of the thing. A man (I refer to you, kind Sir) whose ideological ecosystem has spent years hollowing out institutions, undermining the judiciary, throttling the press, rewriting textbooks, and making certain categories of Indian feel rather less secure than others, writes a paean to Indian pluralism and credits it entirely to the present dispensation. It is, in its way, a masterpiece. Surreal. But fascinating. Like watching a train wreck.
Then comes your signature line. “My religion is Islam, my culture is Hindu, my ideology is Bharatiya.” One is meant to find this stirring. One does not. Because what does “my culture is Hindu” actually mean? Does it mean the Urdu-English you presumably grew up hearing at home? The devotional music at your family’s Jamatkhana? The biryani, the architecture, the poetry, the entire magnificent, mongrel, syncretic civilisation that is the subcontinent’s actual culture, which was never the exclusive property of any single religion and was built, brick by loving brick, by Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs and Christians and Parsis and Jews and people who couldn’t be bothered with any of it? That culture was never just Hindu. Calling it so is not a celebration. It is a surrender. You are not embracing Hindu culture. You are disavowing your own, and doing it with a smile, as the price of admission. The BJP bouncer at the door nods you through, and you mistake the nod for acceptance.
Those 35 million Muslims who stayed in India at Partition did not need to perform their patriotism. They did not need to declare their culture Hindu. They did not need a signature line or slogan. They needed, and were promised, and for a long time largely received, a country that did not ask them to prove anything. Your party has spent the better part of a decade dismantling that promise, making nearly 200 million of their descendants feel like guests in their own home, demanding that they prove, repeatedly and loudly, that they belong. And now here you are, one of the lucky ones with a party card and a television presence, telling them, by implication, that this is what belonging looks like. This is the price. Pay it with a smile.
The families that stayed in India in 1947 did so because extraordinary people promised them this would be their home, equally, fully, without asterisk or footnote or any T&C being applied. That promise was not made by the BJP. It was made, at considerable personal cost, by precisely the people the BJP has spent years attempting to erase from national memory.
You feel safe in India, Mr. Poonawalla. Good. So you should. But you might, in a quiet moment, between the Vande Mataram and the Jai Hind, spare a thought for the nearly 200 million who inherited that original quiet choice, who never made a song and dance of it, and who are finding, with each passing year, that the country they belong to is being made a little less theirs.
My family did not choose India. We were always of it. My father fought two wars for this country. My brother gave his life in uniform. My mother spent her years making the institution that protects your borders better than she found it. I am an atheist, a former Hindu, and I have no party line to offer you.
I have only this letter. And my integrity.
Jai Hind, Jai Jagat,
Kedar Gadgil
