By Yoginder Sikand, TwoCircles.net,
The Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat series
Maulana Ismail and the Meos
Even though the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) as we know it today took off in Mewat only in the late 1920s under Maulana Ilyas, it was actually the Maulana's father, Maulana Muhammad Ismail (d.1898), who first made contact with the Meos. Ismail came from a family of Siddiqui Shaikhs of Jhanjhana in the Muzaffarnagar district of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh). This family, which claimed descent from Abu Bakr, the first khalifa, of the Sunnis, had for generations been renowned for its piety. Ismail is said to have been a very learned and pious Islamic scholar. So deeply engrossed in his spiritual quest was he that it is reported that he would often go for days on end without any food, forgetting that as a result his own little children had to remain hungry (Ferozepuri n.d.c:6). In Tablighi hagiography he is even credited with having possessed certain miraculous mystical powers, besides having been vehemently opposed to the British for having dispossessed the Muslims of political power (Baliyavi n.d.:38-39).
Ismail is said to have been the heir to a vast estate in Jhanjhana. According to one source, besides 4,000 bighas of agricultural land, he owned over 400 houses, all of which he had given out on rent. However, he is said to have completely renounced his wealth and taken up residence in a semi-abandoned mosque, the Banglewali Masjid in Delhi's Basti Nizamuddin, which today serves as the global headquarters of the TJ. It is said that when Ismail first got to Basti Nizamuddin, he found to his consternation that he had no one else to join him in a jama'at for congregational prayers. He did not give up hope, however, and went out onto the main road, hoping to find some fellow-Muslims. Just then, a small group of people, who, from their external appearance, seemed to be non-Muslims, passed by. Seeing them, Ismail called out to them, asking them who they were. In reply, they said they were Muslim Meos from Gurgaon, and that, owing to a severe famine in their part of the country, they were heading towards Delhi in search of work.
Curious to know more about them, Ismail asked them what they would earn if they were to work as labourers in Delhi. They answered that at the most they would earn two annas a day. On hearing this, Ismail asked them if they would be willing to work for him for the same wage. They readily agreed to his proposal. To the utter amazement of the Meos, the work that the Maulana asked them to perform every day was simply to learn how to pray in the Islamic way and to memorise selected verses from the Qur'an. At the end of each day they were paid two annas each. For the simple-minded Meos, Ismail appeared to be nothing less than a spiritually exalted wali (friend) of God, a recipient of great divine grace. Among themselves they remarked:
He seems to be Allah's wali since he not only teaches us about religion but even pays us for it. He does not tell us to press his feet, to fill water in the drums or even to sweep the mosque, all of which he does himself (Baliyavi op. cit.:43).
After a few days, the Meos returned to their homes, promising Ismail that they would soon come back to him along with their families. On their return to Mewat they excitedly spoke to their fellow-villagers about Allah's wali whom they had personally encountered, exclaiming:
He is, indeed, true and we have seen all the signs and qualities of a wali in him. He is not greedy at all. In fact, he is actually helping us both materially as well as spiritually. Truly, he is an extraordinary wali (Baliyavi op. cit.:44).
So much were these Meos awed by Ismail's kindness towards them that they sent a group of children to the madrasa that he had opened at the mosque at Basti Nizamuddin. This is dated, by one source, to around 1880 (Mahdi 1985:6). Soon, regular batches of Meo children begin being sent to the madrasa. After completing their studies they would go back to Mewat to preach Islam and a fresh batch would be admitted (Bijnori n.d.:25). There, they were given free education, food, clothes and a place to stay. Meo elders now began paying visits to Ismail at Basti Nizamuddin. He would pay for their travel and would serve them food (Baliyavi op. cit.:44).
After Ismail had been able to win the confidence of the Meos, he, along with some Meo disciples, began to undertake short tours of their villages. As a result of these efforts, he is said to have made 'nearly five hundred real servants of God, some of whom became huffaz [memorisers of the Qur'an], religious scholars and missionaries who strove to spread the name of Allah throughout the world' (Baliyavi op. cit.:46).
Ismail died in 1898 and was succeeded by his eldest son, Muhammad, as the head teacher of the madrasa at Basti Nizamuddin. Muhammad continued with his father's work among the Meos, including extensive tours of Mewat, making many followers and attempting to spread Islamic awareness in the area. After having worked among the Meos for several years, Muhammad died in 1917. His mantle was then taken up by his younger brother, Muhammad Ilyas, who was to go on to found the TJ.
Bangle Wali Masjid in Basti Hazrat Nizamuddin
Beginnings of TJ
Maulana Muhammad Ilyas, originally Akhtar Ilyas, was born in 1885 at his maternal grandfather's home at Kandhla, in the Muzaffarnagar district of the United Provinces. The youngest son of Maulana Ismail, he was brought up in a strict Islamic environment. 'The stories of Hazrat Shah 'Abdul 'Aziz and Sayyed Ahmad Shahid were constantly on the tongues of the men and women of the family', says one source, and the womenfolk 'would tell the children not stories about parrots and mynahs but about these brave and great leaders' (Baliyavi op. cit.:15).
Ilyas memorised the Qur'an at an early age. He received his primary education from his father and, at the age of 11 or 12, went to Gangoh, then an important centre of Deobandi influence. There he stayed for nine long years, studying various Islamic disciplines from Rashid Ahmad Gangohi (1829-1905), a leading Deobandi 'alim. Thereafter, in 1908, he proceeded to Deoband itself to study the traditions of the Prophet under the renowned scholar, Shaikh-ul-Hind Maulana Mahmud-ul Hasan (1851-1920), from whom, it is said, he took an oath of jihad against the British (Baliyavi op. cit.:24). While at Deoband he also came into contact with such other renowned Deobandi 'ulama as Ashraf Ali Thanawi and Shah Abdul Rahim Raipuri (d. 1919), of whom he was to declare that they were his Very body and soul' (Baliyavi op. cit.:24). From Deoband Ilyas proceeded to Saharanpur to study under the supervision of Khalil Ahmad at the Mazahir-ul Ulum, a sister institution of the Deoband madrasa. In 1910, he was appointed as a teacher at the Saharanpur madrasa (Baliyavi op. cit.:22). He probably intended to make this his career for the rest of his life, but this was not to be.
Following the death of Maulana Muhammad, a group of Meos proceeded to Saharanpur to request Ilyas to take up his late brother's position at the Basti Nizamuddin madrasa. Initially, Ilyas seems to have been reluctant to leave Saharanpur, but the Meos pleaded in desperation, saying,
Your father and brother gave us duniya and din [worldly and spiritual blessings] ... before which we were completely ignorant. You must come to Nizamuddin. [If you so desire you can even] merely sit at the Banglewali Masjid. That itself will be enough for us and we will be reformed thereby, for the entire Meo community loved and respected your brother and father (Baliyavi op. cit.:48).
Ilyas finally relented and agreed to go to Delhi to take up the responsibility of the madrasa there, but laid down one condition—that the Meos would have to send their children to the Islamic makatib (elementary schools) that he would set up in Mewat.
The Makatib experiment
After making two unsuccessful tours of Mewat, in the area near the township of Nuh, Ilyas finally seems to have managed to induce some inhabitants of the village of Ferozepur-Namak, a Meo village in Gurgaon with which his brother and father had established close ties, to send their children to the makeshift Islamic school that had already been set up there (Bakhsh 1995:43-50). Over time, as Ilyas made tours of Mewat with increasing frequency, he set up several such schools in other villages. Elementary Islamic education was provided in these makatib, supplemented with occasional lectures delivered by touring 'ulama which Ilyas arranged for (Bakhsh 1995:37). Besides, the number of Meo students at the main madrasa at the Banglewali Masjid also rose considerably. Ilyas had now succeeded in establishing a fairly extensive network of religious schools, both in Delhi as well as in Mewat, through which he thought he would be able to mobilise the Meos to Islamise themselves more fully. Some of these were simply makeshift structures, consisting of a sackcloth spread under a shady tree, with arrangement for cold drinking water and bukkahs. Teams of Ilyas' disciples sat there waiting for passersby to preach to, 'each time', it is said, 'adapting their call to the needs of particular listeners' (S.A. Haq 1972:152).
According to one writer, Ilyas soon managed to set up in Mewat, 'quite a few hundred makatib in which the Qur'an was taught', hoping thereby to spread awareness of Islam as widely as possible (Hasni 1989:201). However, a single event so deeply shocked him that it made him realise the futility of these efforts, forcing him to adopt, instead, the novel means of missionary communication that has become the single-most distinguishing feature of the TJ.
It is said that three years after the setting up of the first Islamic school in Mewat by Ilyas, its first batch of students completed their course of study. Ilyas was invited to preside over the graduation ceremony. There, he was presented with a young Meo man who had just passed out of the maktab as a hafiz, having memorised the entire Qur'an. In his appearance, this man was indistinguishable from the other Meos as well as from the local Hindu peasants. He 'had a thick, long moustache but had no beard. He wore a dhoti, the dress of the non-Muslims, and his mannerisms, too, were just like theirs'.
Ilyas was stunned beyond belief on seeing this hafiz. He 'clasped his head in his hands and began sobbing', crying out,
Oh Allah! What should I do? My life and my money have been completely wasted producing a hafiz of the Qur'an like this one!
Ilyas is said to have been so greatly pained and shocked at seeing that a hafiz of his maktab still 'appeared as a non-Muslim' despite so many years of Islamic education that he reportedly, 'nearly fell unconscious' and, in fact, 'just missed having a heart attack', but 'Allah rescued him', for 'he had chosen him to accomplish great things' (Baliyavi n.d.:52). It then dawned upon Ilyas that the makatib that he had set up had proved to be ineffective in bringing about the Islamic reform that he desired, since both the teachers as well as the students of the makatib lived in a generally un-Islamic environment from whose cultural influence they could not possibly remain immune.
Central to this narrative account is the importance that is placed on the role of apparel and facial hair as external markers of identity dividing Meos ('Muslims') from non-Meos ('Hindus'), from whom in most respects they were almost wholly indistinguishable. Religion, here, is seen not simply as an inner spiritual experience. One's religious identity must be publicly expressed and announced through the display of visible symbols that dramatically set apart one religious 'community' from the others. 'Islamic' external appearance was just one among the large ensemble of symbols that were now seen as integral to Muslim community identity. Most Meos, even those who were not particularly pious or committed Muslims, would respond enthusiastically to these calls. It seems that this probably had much to do with an urge to differentiate themselves from the Hindus, who, as we have seen, were now increasingly being seen as the oppressive 'Other'. A shared and separate external identity provided by 'Islamic' external appearance helped strengthen this sense of Meo cohesion, an identity defined essentially in opposition to the Hindus, a response to what were seen as the growing Hindu onslaughts on the community.
The method of Tabligh
While the incident involving the 'un-Islamic' looking hafiz prompted Ilyas to discontinue with his makatib in Mewat, it is not clear what made him see the jama'ats of roving missionaries as the most appropriate means to spread awareness of Islam among the Meos. There seem to be four different accounts concerning this. One, which understandably finds particular favour with Muslim opponents of the TJ, has it that Ilyas simply devised his method of tabligh work on his own and then claimed that it was divinely inspired. A variant of this thesis is that, faced with the shuddhi onslaught of the Arya Samaj, Ilyas, after considerable thought, devised a means by which he could mobilise the Meos to struggle in the path of Islam while offering this to them as an incentive to work for their own salvation in the hereafter (Habib 1996:72). Tablighi sources, however, stress that the method of tabligh was not of Ilyas' own making and that it was actually inspired by God. According to one Tablighi account, Ilyas was so upset with the failure of his makatib that he considered migrating to the Hijaz for good and actually proceeded to Mecca for his second haj in 1925—26. Though he had planned to settle down in Arabia he actually stayed just five months there, before returning to India. Apparently, at the Mosque of the Prophet at Medina, where he spent three days in silent contemplation, he saw the Prophet Muhammad in a dream, who addressed him saying, 'Oh Ilyas! Go back to India where God shall take work from you.’
Overwhelmed with fear, Ilyas approached one Maulana Qutbuddin of Mecca to interpret this dream for him. In reply he was told, 'Do not fear. Do not do anything. God shall do all through you. You cannot do anything through your own mind or intellect.'
After this, Ilyas returned to Delhi in 1926, immersing himself in prayer, continuously pleading with God to tell him 'what work he would take from him'. Then, at last, it is said, 'Allah, through a dream, taught him the tariqa-i-tabligh [the method of preaching]' (Baliyavi n.d.:52-53).
Notable in this account is that the tariqa-i-tabligh is portrayed as being of divine inspiration, it being suggested that it was taught to Ilyas by God himself. Consequently, any critique of it, or of Ilyas' own project, could possibly be interpreted as questioning the divine will itself. Since it was claimed that God had appointed Ilyas 'to take work from him', any challenge to him and his movement, then, could be capable of being construed as a challenge to God and to His din. This claim to divine inspiration seems to have been a crucial factor in building up the image of Ilyas as a charismatic figure in direct communication with God, and over time, an increasing number of Meos began to see him as such. Thus, according to one Meo writer:
Irreligiousness had become so widespread that Allah in his mercy selected Hazrat Maulana Muhammad Ilyas Sahib and illumined in him [munkashf armaye] the principles for the guidance of the people of this age. The name of this method of guidance is now famous as the Tablighi movement ... All its principles are divinely inspired [iske sare usul ilhami hain]. That is why it is necessary for Muslims of all classes to join in this work. It is, in fact, the demand of the hour (Ferozepuri n.d.c:4).
This author goes so far as to invest Ilyas' birth itself with great divine significance, as a major event in God's plans for the world. Thus, he announces:
Allah, the honourable cherisher, had selected Hazrat Maulana Muhammad Ilyas, may the mercy of God be upon him, on the day of creation [roz-i-azl] itself for the reformation and guidance of the Muslim community of this age, and so, from the very beginning had put this soul in him (Ferozepuri n.d.c:38).
Contrary to the above account which attributes the tariqa-i-tabligh to divine guidance, the same writer suggests another account later on, according to which Ilyas may have learnt the method of preaching from the Meos themselves. Thus, he writes that one Hafiz Muhammad Ishaq of Ferozepur-Namak, son of Munshi Nur Bakhsh, a Meo disciple of Ilyas' elder brother Muhammad, had first formed a jama'at composed, among others, of Nambardar Mehrab Khan, Munshi Umrao Khan, Munshi Nur Ali, Hafiz Abdul Rahman, Miyanji Suleiman, Patwari Nasrullah, Chaudhri Namaz Khan and himself—all, with die exception of the last, inhabitants of Ferozepur-Namak. They would pray, cook and sleep together and would go in a group around Ferozepur-Namak calling people to the mosque to pray.
At the time when the Aryas were spearheading the shuddhi campaign among the Malkana Rajputs in neighbouring Bharatpur and Agra, the members of this jama'at approached Ilyas. They told him that his visits to Mewat, for the most part only of Ferozepur-Namak and only for one or two days, were far too short and that he needed to spend at least a week each time he came to Mewat if the shuddhi onslaught were to be effectively prevented from spreading to the region. Ilyas himself was greatly troubled at the prospect that, like their neighbours, the Malkanas, the Meos, too, might fall into the Arya trap, for they also were Muslim only in name. This thought is said to have so pained him that:
He completely lost his sleep. He would cry out in anguish and would beseech God for help. He did not know what to do because he had tried the conventional way [of attempting to spread awareness about Islam through setting up makatib], but that had been a complete failure (Ferozepuri n.d.c:13).
In reply to the request of the Meo jama'at, Ilyas is reported to have said that Ferozepur-Namak was an educated village that could take care of itself. At this the Meos said to him, 'Yes, we are doing some work here. We go about enrolling children in the madrasa and, through gasht, we bring people [to the mosque] for worship.'
Ilyas was apparently greatly intrigued when he heard the word gasht (tour) mentioned and he asked the Meos what they meant by it. They explained that it involved forming a group of five to seven persons that went from house to house inviting people to the mosque. On hearing this, Ilyas said that he would like to personally witness their gasht. When he saw for himself the way the jama'at performed gasht, he was very pleased but offered some suggestions for its improvement. Among these were the appointment of an amir to lead the groups and a mutakallim or speaker; doing gasht in villages other than Ferozepur-Namak alone; and, in the gasht, not restricting the content of the speech just to the importance of prayers but also teaching and stressing the importance of the kalima (Ferozepuri n.d.c:16). This is how, according to this account, the tariqa-i-tabligh of the TJ came to be developed.
According to the fourth account, the tariqa-i-tabligh was partly divinely inspired and partly fashioned by Ilyas himself. Thus, Rahim Bakhsh, a close Meo disciple of Ilyas, writes that when the Maulana returned from his second haj he went into solitary meditation in order to learn from God the method of 'doing his work'. At last, in a dream he was told that just as the first lesson that Muhammad had given to his people was to 'recite the kalima and attain felicity', he, too, should make the kalima his first principle. Ilyas then decided that his second principle should be ritual prayers, the 'emperor of worship' (sultan-i-'ibadat). Thereafter, he pondered over what aspect of Islam his own Deobandi elders had left untouched which he could take up—religious instruction was already being done at Deoband and Saharanpur; Ashraf Ali Thanawi had taken up the task of writing Islamic books; Sa'eed Ahmad was propagating Islam through his lectures; and Hussain Ahmad Madani was serving Islam in the field of politics. He found that besides the kalima and prayers, the other four of what were to become known as the 'six principles' were not being given the attention that they deserved by the 'ulama of his day and so decided to focus on them as well.
Having drawn up his scheme of tabligh based on the 'six principles', he began his work among the Meos. Later, his Meo followers pressed him for an instructional text about the principles of tabligh. Ilyas was apparently very reluctant to prescribe any such book, because, he argued, in the Prophet's day there were no printing presses and the companions had engaged in the tabligh of Islam simply by word of mouth. However, later bowing to the repeated requests of his followers, he instructed the commissioning of three texts—the first, a slim booklet, Musalmano ki Pasti ka Wahid Ilaj ('The Sole Remedy for the Plight of the Muslims') penned by his relative, Ehtisham-ul Hassan Kandhalawi; and the other two, the Faza'il-i-Tabligh and the Faza'il-i-Namaz, compiled by Muhammad Zakariyya. This is how, says Rahim Bakhsh (1995:62-63), the unique tariqa-i-tabligh of the TJ came to be developed.
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1. See E.H. Kandhalawi (1382 A.H.) for full details. A genealogical table of the family appears in Husn-i-Ikhlaq, September 1995, pp. 45-46.
2. This figure must be treated with caution. Apparently, over time almost all the tenants managed to register these houses in their names. Ismail, however, remained unconcerned because God, he said, would give him far more luxurious mansions in heaven instead (Baliyavi op. cit.:47).
3. This school had been set up by Munshi Nur Bakhsh and Ilyas later expanded it, giving it the name of Madrasa Khaliliya, after his teacher at Saharanpur (Ferozepuri n.d.a:53).
4. As for the quality of education that was imparted in these early makatib, the example of one of the first of them to be started, at the village of Rupdaka, is instructive. After laying the foundation stone of the maktab, Ilyas told the villagers to search for a teacher. They managed to find one Karim Bakhsh, a ploughman in the service of one Miyanji Amanullah. Karim Bakhsh knew just some odd parts of the Qur'an. Ilyas appointed him as the teacher of the maktab on a monthly salary of ten rupees (Bakhsh 1995:50).
5. Ilyas himself seems to have suggested this, as for instance, when he declared that,
“The manner and magnitude in which, participating in this movement one receives the agreement, the closeness and the help and blessings [of God] is not to be found in the case of other methods [of working for the cause of Islam]. This movement of da'wat and tabligh is really a great blessing from God. Not to respect it is a sure invitation to danger” (quoted in Hafizullah n.d.:22).
6. Ferozepuri (n.d.c:40) quotes Ilyas as having announced, with regard to the supposed divine origins of the tariqa-i-tabligh, that,
I have not made the principles [of tabligh] of my own accord. Rather, they have been bestowed upon me [by God], and I have been ordained to work according to them.
7. According to Ferozepuri, once one Qari Sayyed Raza Hussain asked Ilyas if he were the mujaddid (renewer) of the age. Ilyas replied that he was not the mujaddid but the Imam, and that he had tried to keep this fact concealed so that 'thete should be no dissension among the friends (auliya) of God' (quoted in Ferozepuri n.d.a:21).
8. Ferozepuri writes that it was this group of Meos, along with some others, who had approached Ilyas at Saharanpur to request him to take up the responsibility of the Nizamuddin madrasa (Ferozepuri n.d.a:ll).
9. According to one report, by May 1923, half of the Muslim population of the Bharatpur state had been converted to Hinduism (see Aligarh Gazette, 4 May 1923). The Pratap of 29 April 1923, reported that all the Malkanas of Bharatpur had undergone shuddhi and that Shraddhanand had announced that he was shortly going to resume shuddhi work among the nau-Muslims of Gurgaon. According to the Milap of 18 January 1924, the Bharatiya Shuddhi Mandal of Agra had, from February to December, done shuddhi work in some 50 villages in Gurgaon, 16 in Bharatpur and a few in Alwar. Mayaram writes that the Aryas had made sporadic efforts that the shuddhi of the Malkanas and the Meos of Bharatpur and Alwar before the Mapilla revolt, but it seems likely that organised attempts at this started only after mass shuddhi of the Malkanas began in 1923 (Mayaram 1997:64-65).
http://twocircles.net/2010apr16/tablighi_jamaat_mewat_part_2.html
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
The Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat— Part 1
By Yoginder Sikand, TwoCircles.net,
This 6-part series of articles provides a detailed account of the historical origins and development of the Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat, focusing in particular on the social multiple roles that the movement has played in the region, which accounts, in large measure, for its deep-rooted popularity among the Meos. A sociological study of the development of Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat can provide interesting insights and parallels to understand the success and appeal of the movement in other contexts as well—Editor
The Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) is today the single largest Islamic movement in the world, in terms both of number of activists as well as geographical spread. No study of the history of the TJ would be complete without an account of the people among whom it first took root—the Meo peasants of Mewat, a culturally distinct region in northwestern India. Much of that which is unique to the TJ, particularly its method of tabligh or Islamic missionary work and its approach to and understanding of the process of Islamisation, seems to have been moulded largely by the social context of early twentieth-century Mewat. Mewat also provides an interesting case of shifting socio-political contexts within which the TJ has been able to establish strong roots in a local environment.
The genesis and early development of the TJ in Mewat is particularly worthy of attention. Mewat, which is seen in Tablighi circles as the movement's most successful 'experimental ground' (Ishaq 1972:4), poses a seemingly insoluble sociological paradox. The Meos had for centuries been only the most nominal Muslims as the 'ulama saw them. After three decades of Tablighi efforts among them they appear, at least in the literature, to have transformed themselves into such committed Muslims that many leading 'ulama went so far as to exclaim that they had undergone a veritable 'revolution' (Falahi 1996:301). This chapter will address this apparent paradox by tracing the origins and development of the TJ in Mewat in terms of the many social roles that it came to play in the lives of the Meos in the context of major social changes that Mewat has had to contend with starting from the last years of the nineteenth century.
Background
Extending southwards from the township of Sohna, some 65 kilometres south-west of Delhi, and covering large parts of the districts of Gurgaon and Faridabad in the present-day Indian state of Haryana and the former princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur in Rajasthan, is the region of Mewat, the land of a peasant caste known as the Meos. The Meos are Muslims who have retained many of their earlier cultural and religious traditions.1 It was estimated in 1983 that they numbered around 800,000, of whom a quarter resided in present-day Pakistan and the rest in India (Shams 1983:17).2
Many Meos claim high-caste Hindu Rajput or warrior descent, and while it may well be the case that some of them are indeed of Rajput stock, it seems likely that the majority are descendants of 'low'-caste converts who, either prior to or alongside their gradual Islamisation, laid claim to Rajput ancestry to enhance their social standing (Harris 1901:23; Channing 1882:28). Evidence for this is provided by the names of many gots or exogamous lineages which the Meos have in common with such lower status Hindu castes as the Minas, the Jats and the Gujjars who live in their vicinity. It thus seems likely that, 'the Meos belonged to many different castes and not just to the Rajputs' (Aggarwal 1978:338).
Little can be said with confidence as to how Islam managed to take root in Mewat.3 Living in the vicinity of Delhi, the Meos were, from at least the twelfth century onwards, in constant conflict with the Muslim monarchs of the imperial capital (Sikand 1993:10). Ravaged by regular drought and famine, bands of Meos would often swarm into Delhi for loot and plunder, provoking violent reprisals from the Delhi Sultans. Formal acceptance of Islam often followed military defeat at the hands of the imperial army. With Mewat coming under the control of the Muslim rulers of Delhi, various Sufi orders entered the region, as a result of which, over the centuries, the Meos seem to have undergone a process of gradual, though very partial, Islamisation, in the course of which they adopted several practices associated with Islam, while retaining many of their local religious and cultural traditions. From time to time, 'ulama and Sufis attempted to do away with some of what they saw as their more glaring Hindu practices (Mewati n.d.). In the second half of the nineteenth century these included numerous 'ulama of the Waliullahi tradition (Shakur 1974:381-84).4 They were, however, unable to reach beyond a narrow circle of followers. The time was not yet ripe, it seems, for the Meos to give up their popular religious traditions and to take to scripturalist, shari'at-centred Islam instead.
The Islamisation of the Meos through the agency of the Sufis and as a result of political exigencies was, as we have observed, partial and nominal. Thus, writing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Major Powlett, the settlement officer of Alwar state, remarked:
The Meos are now all Musalmans in name, but their village deities are the same as those of the Hindus and they keep several Hindu festivals. Thus, the holi is with the Meos a season of rough play and is considered as important a festival as Muharram,, Id and Shabibarat, and they likewise observe the Janam Ashtami, Dashera and Diwali. They often keep Brahmin priests to write the note (pili-chitthi) fixing the date of marriage. They call themselves by Hindu names, with the exception of Ram; and Sinh is a frequent affix, though not so common as Khan. On the Amawas, or monthly conjunction of the sun and moon, the Meos, in common with the Hindu Ahirs, Gujjars, etc. cease from labour; and when they make a well the first proceeding is to erect a platform to Bairuji or Hanuman. Meos, in their customs, are half Hindu. In their villages there are hardly any mosques [...] The Meo places of worship are similar to those of their Hindu neighbours, as for example, Panchpira, Bhaiya and Chahund. Chahund or Khera Deo is dedicated to Mahadevi to whom sacrifices are made (Polett 1878:38).
In their dress, too, the Meos were indistinguishable from the other peasant castes of Mewat. Meonis (Meo women) wore the Rajasthani skirt and blouse and heavy silver jewellery. Men wore the dhoti, and also put on various ornaments. Most Meo men grew the choti or tuft of hair as was the general Hindu custom.
As for the Meos' observance of the externals of Islam, it seems to have been restricted largely to male circumcision, nikah (the Islamic form of marriage) and the burial of the dead, though even these were recast in a Hindu mould (Aggarwal op. cit.:339). Most Meos knew but little about Islam. As Powlett observed, 'As regards their own religion [Islam] the Meos are very ignorant. Few know the kalima, and fewer still the regular prayers, the seasons of which they entirely neglect' (quoted in S.A. Haq 1972:105).
According to another observer, 'Reading of the Qur'an was less popular than reading the Hindu epics Ramayan and Mahabharat. Hindu shrines far outnumbered mosques in Mewat. Few Meos prayed in the Muslim manner, but most of them performed the puja—worship at the shrines of the Hindu gods and goddesses' (Aggarwal op. cit.:339).
The popular religious tradition of the Meos appears to have proved a rewarding strategy. As cultivators of most of the agricultural land in Mewat, the Meos were a local dominant caste, at least in terms of numbers. Retaining their local, non-Islamic customs and institutions, such as their got-pal system5 and the practice of untouchability towards the 'low'-castes, enabled them to maintain their claim to a dominant status in the local social hierarchy even after having undergone a degree of Islamisation. The non-Muslim artisan and service castes as well as the Brahmins thus carried on serving their Meo patrons in return for a share in the agricultural produce. As long as their economic and social life remained undisturbed, these client castes of the Meos were quite willing to overlook their ambiguous religious identity. The Meos therefore felt, says a Meo scholar, 'no pressing need to bend in either direction [Hindu or Muslim] because their position in Mewat was secure. None of the other caste groups in Mewat questioned the Meo dominance' (Shams op. cit.:35).
On the other hand, as the Meos were often in conflict with the Muslim rulers of Delhi, their popular religious tradition provided them with a sense of unity, an identity clearly opposed to that of their imperial foes. Interestingly, the local feudal elite in Mewat, the Khanzadas6, close allies of the Muslim rulers of Delhi, were considerably more Islamised than the Meos, keeping their women in strict pardah and observing other ashraf practices. Mewati history is replete with stories of wild bloodletting between the Khanzadas and the Meos, and it is, therefore, not surprising that until the early twentieth century, when Khanzada supremacy in Mewat began to erode rapidly, the Meos do not seem to have displayed much interest in emulating the religious culture associated with a class of people whom they viewed with great hostility.
The popular religious tradition of the Meos faced little internal challenge until the closing decades of the nineteenth century. At this time, developments brought about by wider social changes began to make themselves felt in the Mewati countryside. These were to have important consequences for Meo self-perception and religious identity. Rapid social change in Mewat in the early decades of the twentieth century resulted in what may be termed a pervasive social crisis. It was this that provided the context for the emergence of the TJ among the Meos.
Socio-economic profile
Although the Meos cultivated most of the land in Mewat, barring some chaudhris (local community leaders), there were very few large landowners among them, the vast majority being small owner-cultivators, most of whom were greatly impoverished (Gibson 1909:13). The productivity of the land was low and modern irrigation facilities were minimal.7 Consequently, Mewat had to face spells of severe drought at regular intervals, driving the Meos deep into debt at the hands of Jain and Hindu Bania moneylenders.8 Their dismal economic conditions in the early twentieth century, far from improving, actually seem to have fast deteriorated. As the annual administrative report of the government of the Punjab (1916) noted:
The condition of the Meos is rapidly becoming hopeless. They live so literally from hand to mouth, carelessly contracting debt for marriages, funerals and petty luxuries even in average years that when a year of drought comes they are thrown on the moneylender who can make with them what terms he likes (Rathee 1971a:43).
According to one source, the Banias would charge an exorbitant rate of 5 per cent per month on their loans to the poverty-stricken Meos, the equivalent of an astounding 60 per cent per annum (W. Khan 1988:34). Many Meos simply could not repay their loans, as a result of which much of their land began passing into Bania hands. By 1910, nearly 40 per cent of Meo land was under mortgage to the Banias (Rathee op. cit.:43). This increasing land alienation was a direct consequence of the new conception of land ownership that the British had introduced, in which land was now seen as a commodity and as private property, capable of being bought, sold and mortgaged. Meos could now pledge their lands, and not just their crops as before, to the Banias for credit. This is precisely what their rapidly growing impoverishment was forcing them to do.
As the Meos sank deeper into poverty, they increasingly saw the Banias as not only gaining from their plight but also as the very cause of it. Insofar as the Banias were looked upon as the local repositories of 'high'-caste Hinduism, increasing resentment against them gradually translated into a distancing from Hindu religious traditions, making the Meos more receptive to Islam. This was further facilitated by the fact that, despite the Meos' claim to Rajput status, the Banias actually looked down upon them and refused to take food cooked by them, deeming them to be a source of ritual pollution.9 In this changed situation, it was no longer the Mughals or other Muslim rulers who were seen as the threatening 'Other' against whom the Meos would seek to define themselves. Rather, this role was now increasingly taken over by 'high'-caste Hindus. The emphasis that the Meos, as participants in the TJ, were to lay on their Muslim identity was in large measure a strategy to solidify community boundaries by marking off 'insider' Meos from 'outsider' Hindus.
Social dislocations by themselves do not automatically generate mass movements. For a charismatic leader from outside a community to be able to mobilise people in such a situation, there must be at least a few socially significant individuals within the community who can understand, and are receptive to, his message and who can help transmit it to their own people in their own idiom. In the case of the TJ in Mewat, this was made possible by an expanding chain of Islamic madaris as well as by the network of primary schools that the British began setting up from the late nineteenth century onwards in the Meo territory under their rule. Urdu, the language in which a large number of Islamic texts were readily available, was the medium of instruction therein. This enabled a new generation of literate Meos to gain access to Islamic literature. By the early 1910s, there were enough Meo boys who had received a primary education to call for the setting up of a high school in the region. Mewat's first secondary school, named after its founder, Frank Lugard Brayne, the then deputy commissioner of Gurgaon, was founded at Nuh in 1923. In the years that followed, a number of students of this school went on to pursue higher studies at Muslim institutions such as the Jami'a Millia Islamia at Delhi and the Aligarh Muslim University. Thus, by the time the TJ was launched in Mewat, there were Meos who were in a position to identify culturally with the message of Muslim brotherhood. Some newly educated Meos were to play a significant role in relaying this message to the wider Meo community. Ilyas was himself to come to rely, among others, on such Meos who had received a modicum of education and held important posts in the village administrative hierarchy—such as nambardars, zaildars, munshis, chaudhris—as well as madrasa students in galvanising the TJ in the Mewati countryside. Most of these, however, had not obtained high secular education, but were largely the products of the new chain of Islamic schools that had begun to appear in the region by this time.
Education gradually brought in its wake an increasing redefinition of Meo identity, an awareness of their increasing marginalisation, and a growing familiarity with Islam. Thus, commenting on the ignorance of the Meos of even the kalima, a British administrator observed that, 'this, however, applies only to the Alwar territory; in British India the effect of the schools is to make them more observant of [Islamic] religious duties' (S.A. Haq 1972:105). The Hindu ruler of Alwar had declared Hindi, instead of Urdu, to be the language of instruction in the schools of his state. At that time Islamic literature in Hindi was almost totally non-existent, the' language being seen as specifically 'Hindu'. Thus, Meos in British territory were now exposed to Islamic influences to a considerably greater degree than their brethren in the Hindu-ruled states of Alwar and Bharatpur, and in the years that followed, the Gurgaon Meos were to take the lead in spreading the message of the TJ in the rest of Mewat.
Meo peasant rebellions
Developments in the Meo countryside towards the end of 1910s, then, all pointed to a growing agrarian crisis (for details, see, M.H. Siddiqui 1986:442-67). This, combined with the gradual emergence of a class of educated men who could articulate the grievances of the peasants, provided fertile ground for the outbreak of a series of peasant uprisings in Mewat in the 1932-34, in which successful efforts were made to link up specifically Meo economic demands with a wider pan-Indian Muslim agenda, facilitating, in the process, a greater identification with Islam on the part of the Meos. The rise of the TJ in Mewat cannot be properly understood without taking into account these uprisings which broke out immediately prior to the sudden spurt of Tablighi activities in the region in the early 1930s.
Hostility towards the Muslims in the ruling circles of Alwar and Bharatpur appeared intermittently in the nineteenth century interrupted by periods in which Muslims were allowed to play a significant role in administrative affairs. Hostility surfaced again in the early decades of the twentieth century, and this time with greater intensity (Mehta and Mehta 1985:399). The ruler of Alwar, Maharaja Jai Sigh (1892-1937), introduced several policies clearly aimed against his Muslim subjects. This went alongside a deliberate Hinduisation of the Alwar administration itself. The Maharaja began to flaunt his Hindu credentials in public and established personal ties with several top leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Arya Samaj, organisations whose extreme antipathy for the Muslims was well known.10 Soon after it had launched its shuddhi campaign among the Malkanas of the United Provinces, the Arya Samaj extended its missionary activities to Rajputana, attempting to convert back to Hinduism the local Muslim Rajputs, Jats, Gujjars and Meos, and in this is said to have received the official backing of the rulers of Bharatpur (Mayaram 1991:10-12).11
The marked Hinduisation of the Alwar administration and its consequently growing anti-Muslim orientation had less to do with religion than with the increasing challenge by the state's subjects, both Hindus and Muslims, to the Maharaja's heavy taxation of the peasantry and fiercely autocratic rule.12 By the mid-1920s, peasant revolts had broken out in several parts of the state. One of the most serious of these occurred in 1925, in which the Alwar forces gunned down scores of Hindu Rajputs in the village of Nimuchana protesting a sudden rise of 50 per cent in the land revenue. In these uprisings both the Meos as well as the Hindu peasantry were involved. Faced with such determined opposition to him, the Maharaja appears to have felt that a policy of cultivating a fiercely pro-Hindu image for himself would help create a homogeneous Hindu community and postpone the demand for democratisation.13 Targeting the Muslims as the menacing, threatening 'Other' and fanning the flames of Hindu-Muslim rivalry would help divert the attention of his largely Hindu subjects from the oppression they were undergoing under his rule.14
It was in this communally surcharged climate that in 1932-34 the Meos of Alwar rose up in violent revolt. It seems that it was the particularly harsh and oppressive conditions under which they were labouring that ignited the sparks of rebellion. Their plight is portrayed by a Meo historian thus:
The Meo tracts in Alwar and Bharatpur were victims of the extreme authoritarianism and ruthlessness of their rulers. Government servants would do nothing without extorting heavy bribes. The peasants were being grossly overburdened with ever increasing taxes. Like birds of prey, the guards of the forest department and the sepoys of the customs department would swoop down on the hapless peasants and rob them of the paltry income that they earned through shedding their sweat and blood. The rights of the people were being mercilessly trampled upon. The Mewatis were being treated like goats and sheep, as nothing better than mere dumb animals (Haye n.d.:10).
Having already subjected the peasants to a heavy tax burden, in 1932 the Maharaja of Alwar suddenly decided to raise the revenue levy four-fold. This proved to be the last straw for the peasants, and they decided to stop paying their taxes. Soon after, the All-India Meo Panchayat, a group of Meo leaders headed by Yasin Khan (1896-1970),15 a lawyer-turned-politician, began galvanising support for the uprising, seeking to turn it into a broader struggle for the establishment of democratic rule in the state. As the rebellion gained in radicalism and strength and spread over much of Mewat, spilling across even into British tetritory, where the Meos now refused to repay their loans to the Banias, the Maharaja of Alwar decided to crush it with all the force he could command. Thus, in January 1933, when thousands of Meos had gathered at the village of Govindgarh for a demonstration, the Raja's soldiers indiscriminately opened fire, as a result of which scores lost their lives. Mewat was now in flames. Martial law was clamped in the four Meo-dominated nizamats of Ramgarh, Lacchmangarh, Kishangarh and Tijara, and reports started flooding in of widespread clashes between Hindus and Meos. Meos are reported to have attacked Bania-owned shops at many places and to have forcibly collected subscriptions from them. The violence, rooted in the economic grievances of the Meos against the Banias and the Alwar state, rapidly took on an overtly religious hue. Hindu temples were attacked and the panic-stricken Hindus, egged on by the Hindu Mahasabha, issued an urgent appeal to the Raja, 'the descendant of Raghu' (the Hindu god-king Rama), to rush to their rescue, to defend them from the Meo 'rakshasas' (demons).16 The writ of the Alwar state seems, in fact, to have ceased to run in the Meo-dominated nizamats, where the Meos managed to establish their own effective control.17
Some weeks later the situation in northern Alwar had turned so serious that the government of India was forced to intervene. British soldiers entered Alwar in January 1933 and in May the government of India forced the Maharaja to abdicate and go abroad into exile. The administration of the affairs of state was entrusted to a British officer, many of the demands of the peasants were conceded and normalcy was gradually restored.
In the course of the revolt the Meos came to establish strong ties with several Muslim leaders and organisations from outside Mewat for the first time, and it was this newly established bond with the wider Indian Muslim community that latter eased the entry of Islamic ideas among them through the missionary efforts of the TJ. It was from these outside Muslim leaders and organisations, besides some local activists, that the Meos sought leadership for their movement against the Maharaja and a means to bring their plight to the notice of the Indian public and the British authorities. Among the Muslim organisations that came to the rescue of the Meos in their uprising were the All-India Alwar Conference, the Anjuman-i-Ahrar of Bombay and Delhi, the Jami'at-ul 'Ulama-i-Islam of Budaun, and the Rajputana Muslim League, Ajmer. Several Muslim Urdu newspapers of Delhi and Lahore, too, took up and championed the Meo cause (Mayaram 1991:40-41). Significantly, the Meos received almost no Hindu support. It was only the Muslims who came to their rescue at this time of crisis.
Although these external Muslim organisations and leaders were not responsible for creating the Meo rebellion themselves, it was through their networks that, 'Meo demands received an immediate publicity' (Mayaram 1991:40). Linkages were established with the larger Muslim community of north India only after the movement had already started, and so it would be misleading to suggest that it owed itself to external Muslim instigation. Significantly, it was also only after the rebellion had taken off that the activities of the TJ really began to spread in the Mewati countryside. Moreover, at this time, the preaching teams of the TJ were by and large active only in British Mewat and had little presence in either Alwar or Bharatpur (Mayaram 1997:35). It would appear, then, that the sudden growth of the TJ in Mewat at around this time was a fallout of the agrarian crisis and the oppression which followed rather than a cause of this crisis.18 The Islamisation of the Meos through the TJ, Mayaram remarks, 'does not precede agrarian unrest as much as it is the consequence of agrarian tension and state policy'. This process cannot, then, be understood 'merely as [the introduction of] an external religious ideology', unrelated to the social conditions prevailing in Mewat at that time (Mayaram 1991:8).
Mayaram contends that the labelling of the Meo peasant uprising by the Alwar state and by Hindu organisations as an Islamic revolt was probably intended to rob it of legitimacy, to divide the peasantry on religious lines and, thereby, to divert the wrath of the Hindu peasantry away from the Maharaja's unpopular rule and towards the Meos instead. This policy, however, had the unintended consequence of making the Meos more fiercely conscious of their Muslim identity, which was now being reinforced by the state itself. The same happened in neighbouring Bharatpur, where, in 1933, the Meos rose up in revolt against the repressive measures taken by the Jat ruler, Kishan Singh.
It was thus this combination of agrarian crisis, the growth of a newly educated class among the Meos, the peasant rebellions in Alwar and Bharatpur and their brutal suppression, and the fraternal links that were now established with outside Muslim groups that provided the ideal conditions for a movement such as the TJ to emerge in Mewat at this time.
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1.'The Meos', writes a leading Tablighi ideologue, 'were even unaware of the appearance of namaz' itself. If perchance, a Muslim entered their territory and read namaz there, they would all gather together in amazement and wonder what he was up to, thinking that he might have a pain in the stomach or that he had lost complete control over his senses, because of which he was repeatedly standing up and sitting down (Numani 1989:21).
2. For details of the Meo population distribution within India, see Hashim Amir Ali (1970:6-16).
3. For some interesting insights, see Marwah (1979:85
4. Some Meos regularly attended Shah Ismail's lectures in Delhi and attempted to spread his message in their own villages (A.R. Nadwi and M.A. Khan n.d.:63-64).
5. Gots are lineages while pals are generally territorially-based groups of one or more gots. The Meos have 52 gots and 12 pals, along with a minor pal, called pallakra.
6. For more on the Khanzadas, see Makhdum (1989: 2-3).
7. For a general overview of agrarian conditions in Mewat, see Brayne (1927).
8. This process, a consequence of the imposition of British rule, seems to have occurred not just in Mewat, but in the Punjab more generally as well (Thorburn 1983).
9. Orthodox 'high'-caste Hindus throughout India considered Muslims ritually polluting. Chaudhri Afzal Haq devotes his entire Pakistan and Untouchability (1941) to this little-understood issue. In this book, he traces the demand for Pakistan to this practice.
10. For Jai Singh's increasing public identification with Brahminical Hinduism, see Joshi (1939:79-95).
11. This conversion drive of the Arya Samaj is said to have goaded some Muslim groups into action to protect their flock. Thus, Mayaram (ibid.:13) quotes a British administrator as saying, 'When 1 met Dr Ziauddin and other Muslim leaders in March, 1933, they frankly confessed to me the fear of a revival of the shuddhi movement drove them to seek to organise the Meos and turn them into better Mahommedans'.
12. The Raja was said to have been excessively devoted to wine and women, among other luxuries. The celebrations of the silver jubilee of his reign in 1929 consumed the entire annual revenue of the state, estimated at around Rs 3,000,000 (Mayaram 1997:55-61).
13. It is interesting to note in this regard that, according to one source, the Maharaja began adopting an increasingly pro-Hindu stance after 1929, when the silver jubilee of his coronation was celebrated with much fanfare Great stress was laid during the celebrations on the public display of his newfound commitment to Brahminical Hinduism. Through this, apparently, ‘the Maharaja wanted to wash away the bad name that he had earned for himself as a result of the Nimuchana massacre’ (Gahlot 1966: 285-86).
14. For more details on the Maharaja’s growing unpopularity among his Hindu subjects, see K.S. Saxena (n.d.: 188-89).
15. The Brayne Meo High School, Nuh, Mewat’s first high school that Yasin Khan had been instrumental in setting up, emerged as the centre from which the Alwar revolt was directed. Interestingly, Maulana Ilyas, founder of the TJ, and some of his followers reportedly fiercely opposed the school, warning the Meos of the ‘evil influence’ of what they called a ‘satanic institution’ (M.H.Siddiqui, 1986: 449-50).
16. Letter from G.D. Oglive, agent of the Governor-General in Rajputana to Sir Charles Watson, Political Secretary to the Government of India, 4 January 1933, in L/P&S/13/1377 Political [Internal] Department Collection, D.O. No.15-P, India Office Records, London, p.174.
17. Letter from G.D. Oglive to Charles Watson, 13 December, 1932, ibid., p.1.
18. Interestingly, the TJ later came to be seen as instrumental in controlling, rather than instigating, Meo ‘lawlessness’ and ‘rebelliousness’ against state authorities both by the British as well as by the Alwar and Bharatpur states (Maududi, quoted in Vellori, n.d.: 59).
http://twocircles.net/2010apr13/tablighi_jamaat_mewat_part_1.html
This 6-part series of articles provides a detailed account of the historical origins and development of the Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat, focusing in particular on the social multiple roles that the movement has played in the region, which accounts, in large measure, for its deep-rooted popularity among the Meos. A sociological study of the development of Tablighi Jamaat in Mewat can provide interesting insights and parallels to understand the success and appeal of the movement in other contexts as well—Editor
The Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) is today the single largest Islamic movement in the world, in terms both of number of activists as well as geographical spread. No study of the history of the TJ would be complete without an account of the people among whom it first took root—the Meo peasants of Mewat, a culturally distinct region in northwestern India. Much of that which is unique to the TJ, particularly its method of tabligh or Islamic missionary work and its approach to and understanding of the process of Islamisation, seems to have been moulded largely by the social context of early twentieth-century Mewat. Mewat also provides an interesting case of shifting socio-political contexts within which the TJ has been able to establish strong roots in a local environment.
The genesis and early development of the TJ in Mewat is particularly worthy of attention. Mewat, which is seen in Tablighi circles as the movement's most successful 'experimental ground' (Ishaq 1972:4), poses a seemingly insoluble sociological paradox. The Meos had for centuries been only the most nominal Muslims as the 'ulama saw them. After three decades of Tablighi efforts among them they appear, at least in the literature, to have transformed themselves into such committed Muslims that many leading 'ulama went so far as to exclaim that they had undergone a veritable 'revolution' (Falahi 1996:301). This chapter will address this apparent paradox by tracing the origins and development of the TJ in Mewat in terms of the many social roles that it came to play in the lives of the Meos in the context of major social changes that Mewat has had to contend with starting from the last years of the nineteenth century.
Background
Extending southwards from the township of Sohna, some 65 kilometres south-west of Delhi, and covering large parts of the districts of Gurgaon and Faridabad in the present-day Indian state of Haryana and the former princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur in Rajasthan, is the region of Mewat, the land of a peasant caste known as the Meos. The Meos are Muslims who have retained many of their earlier cultural and religious traditions.1 It was estimated in 1983 that they numbered around 800,000, of whom a quarter resided in present-day Pakistan and the rest in India (Shams 1983:17).2
Many Meos claim high-caste Hindu Rajput or warrior descent, and while it may well be the case that some of them are indeed of Rajput stock, it seems likely that the majority are descendants of 'low'-caste converts who, either prior to or alongside their gradual Islamisation, laid claim to Rajput ancestry to enhance their social standing (Harris 1901:23; Channing 1882:28). Evidence for this is provided by the names of many gots or exogamous lineages which the Meos have in common with such lower status Hindu castes as the Minas, the Jats and the Gujjars who live in their vicinity. It thus seems likely that, 'the Meos belonged to many different castes and not just to the Rajputs' (Aggarwal 1978:338).
Little can be said with confidence as to how Islam managed to take root in Mewat.3 Living in the vicinity of Delhi, the Meos were, from at least the twelfth century onwards, in constant conflict with the Muslim monarchs of the imperial capital (Sikand 1993:10). Ravaged by regular drought and famine, bands of Meos would often swarm into Delhi for loot and plunder, provoking violent reprisals from the Delhi Sultans. Formal acceptance of Islam often followed military defeat at the hands of the imperial army. With Mewat coming under the control of the Muslim rulers of Delhi, various Sufi orders entered the region, as a result of which, over the centuries, the Meos seem to have undergone a process of gradual, though very partial, Islamisation, in the course of which they adopted several practices associated with Islam, while retaining many of their local religious and cultural traditions. From time to time, 'ulama and Sufis attempted to do away with some of what they saw as their more glaring Hindu practices (Mewati n.d.). In the second half of the nineteenth century these included numerous 'ulama of the Waliullahi tradition (Shakur 1974:381-84).4 They were, however, unable to reach beyond a narrow circle of followers. The time was not yet ripe, it seems, for the Meos to give up their popular religious traditions and to take to scripturalist, shari'at-centred Islam instead.
The Islamisation of the Meos through the agency of the Sufis and as a result of political exigencies was, as we have observed, partial and nominal. Thus, writing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Major Powlett, the settlement officer of Alwar state, remarked:
The Meos are now all Musalmans in name, but their village deities are the same as those of the Hindus and they keep several Hindu festivals. Thus, the holi is with the Meos a season of rough play and is considered as important a festival as Muharram,, Id and Shabibarat, and they likewise observe the Janam Ashtami, Dashera and Diwali. They often keep Brahmin priests to write the note (pili-chitthi) fixing the date of marriage. They call themselves by Hindu names, with the exception of Ram; and Sinh is a frequent affix, though not so common as Khan. On the Amawas, or monthly conjunction of the sun and moon, the Meos, in common with the Hindu Ahirs, Gujjars, etc. cease from labour; and when they make a well the first proceeding is to erect a platform to Bairuji or Hanuman. Meos, in their customs, are half Hindu. In their villages there are hardly any mosques [...] The Meo places of worship are similar to those of their Hindu neighbours, as for example, Panchpira, Bhaiya and Chahund. Chahund or Khera Deo is dedicated to Mahadevi to whom sacrifices are made (Polett 1878:38).
In their dress, too, the Meos were indistinguishable from the other peasant castes of Mewat. Meonis (Meo women) wore the Rajasthani skirt and blouse and heavy silver jewellery. Men wore the dhoti, and also put on various ornaments. Most Meo men grew the choti or tuft of hair as was the general Hindu custom.
As for the Meos' observance of the externals of Islam, it seems to have been restricted largely to male circumcision, nikah (the Islamic form of marriage) and the burial of the dead, though even these were recast in a Hindu mould (Aggarwal op. cit.:339). Most Meos knew but little about Islam. As Powlett observed, 'As regards their own religion [Islam] the Meos are very ignorant. Few know the kalima, and fewer still the regular prayers, the seasons of which they entirely neglect' (quoted in S.A. Haq 1972:105).
According to another observer, 'Reading of the Qur'an was less popular than reading the Hindu epics Ramayan and Mahabharat. Hindu shrines far outnumbered mosques in Mewat. Few Meos prayed in the Muslim manner, but most of them performed the puja—worship at the shrines of the Hindu gods and goddesses' (Aggarwal op. cit.:339).
The popular religious tradition of the Meos appears to have proved a rewarding strategy. As cultivators of most of the agricultural land in Mewat, the Meos were a local dominant caste, at least in terms of numbers. Retaining their local, non-Islamic customs and institutions, such as their got-pal system5 and the practice of untouchability towards the 'low'-castes, enabled them to maintain their claim to a dominant status in the local social hierarchy even after having undergone a degree of Islamisation. The non-Muslim artisan and service castes as well as the Brahmins thus carried on serving their Meo patrons in return for a share in the agricultural produce. As long as their economic and social life remained undisturbed, these client castes of the Meos were quite willing to overlook their ambiguous religious identity. The Meos therefore felt, says a Meo scholar, 'no pressing need to bend in either direction [Hindu or Muslim] because their position in Mewat was secure. None of the other caste groups in Mewat questioned the Meo dominance' (Shams op. cit.:35).
On the other hand, as the Meos were often in conflict with the Muslim rulers of Delhi, their popular religious tradition provided them with a sense of unity, an identity clearly opposed to that of their imperial foes. Interestingly, the local feudal elite in Mewat, the Khanzadas6, close allies of the Muslim rulers of Delhi, were considerably more Islamised than the Meos, keeping their women in strict pardah and observing other ashraf practices. Mewati history is replete with stories of wild bloodletting between the Khanzadas and the Meos, and it is, therefore, not surprising that until the early twentieth century, when Khanzada supremacy in Mewat began to erode rapidly, the Meos do not seem to have displayed much interest in emulating the religious culture associated with a class of people whom they viewed with great hostility.
The popular religious tradition of the Meos faced little internal challenge until the closing decades of the nineteenth century. At this time, developments brought about by wider social changes began to make themselves felt in the Mewati countryside. These were to have important consequences for Meo self-perception and religious identity. Rapid social change in Mewat in the early decades of the twentieth century resulted in what may be termed a pervasive social crisis. It was this that provided the context for the emergence of the TJ among the Meos.
Socio-economic profile
Although the Meos cultivated most of the land in Mewat, barring some chaudhris (local community leaders), there were very few large landowners among them, the vast majority being small owner-cultivators, most of whom were greatly impoverished (Gibson 1909:13). The productivity of the land was low and modern irrigation facilities were minimal.7 Consequently, Mewat had to face spells of severe drought at regular intervals, driving the Meos deep into debt at the hands of Jain and Hindu Bania moneylenders.8 Their dismal economic conditions in the early twentieth century, far from improving, actually seem to have fast deteriorated. As the annual administrative report of the government of the Punjab (1916) noted:
The condition of the Meos is rapidly becoming hopeless. They live so literally from hand to mouth, carelessly contracting debt for marriages, funerals and petty luxuries even in average years that when a year of drought comes they are thrown on the moneylender who can make with them what terms he likes (Rathee 1971a:43).
According to one source, the Banias would charge an exorbitant rate of 5 per cent per month on their loans to the poverty-stricken Meos, the equivalent of an astounding 60 per cent per annum (W. Khan 1988:34). Many Meos simply could not repay their loans, as a result of which much of their land began passing into Bania hands. By 1910, nearly 40 per cent of Meo land was under mortgage to the Banias (Rathee op. cit.:43). This increasing land alienation was a direct consequence of the new conception of land ownership that the British had introduced, in which land was now seen as a commodity and as private property, capable of being bought, sold and mortgaged. Meos could now pledge their lands, and not just their crops as before, to the Banias for credit. This is precisely what their rapidly growing impoverishment was forcing them to do.
As the Meos sank deeper into poverty, they increasingly saw the Banias as not only gaining from their plight but also as the very cause of it. Insofar as the Banias were looked upon as the local repositories of 'high'-caste Hinduism, increasing resentment against them gradually translated into a distancing from Hindu religious traditions, making the Meos more receptive to Islam. This was further facilitated by the fact that, despite the Meos' claim to Rajput status, the Banias actually looked down upon them and refused to take food cooked by them, deeming them to be a source of ritual pollution.9 In this changed situation, it was no longer the Mughals or other Muslim rulers who were seen as the threatening 'Other' against whom the Meos would seek to define themselves. Rather, this role was now increasingly taken over by 'high'-caste Hindus. The emphasis that the Meos, as participants in the TJ, were to lay on their Muslim identity was in large measure a strategy to solidify community boundaries by marking off 'insider' Meos from 'outsider' Hindus.
Social dislocations by themselves do not automatically generate mass movements. For a charismatic leader from outside a community to be able to mobilise people in such a situation, there must be at least a few socially significant individuals within the community who can understand, and are receptive to, his message and who can help transmit it to their own people in their own idiom. In the case of the TJ in Mewat, this was made possible by an expanding chain of Islamic madaris as well as by the network of primary schools that the British began setting up from the late nineteenth century onwards in the Meo territory under their rule. Urdu, the language in which a large number of Islamic texts were readily available, was the medium of instruction therein. This enabled a new generation of literate Meos to gain access to Islamic literature. By the early 1910s, there were enough Meo boys who had received a primary education to call for the setting up of a high school in the region. Mewat's first secondary school, named after its founder, Frank Lugard Brayne, the then deputy commissioner of Gurgaon, was founded at Nuh in 1923. In the years that followed, a number of students of this school went on to pursue higher studies at Muslim institutions such as the Jami'a Millia Islamia at Delhi and the Aligarh Muslim University. Thus, by the time the TJ was launched in Mewat, there were Meos who were in a position to identify culturally with the message of Muslim brotherhood. Some newly educated Meos were to play a significant role in relaying this message to the wider Meo community. Ilyas was himself to come to rely, among others, on such Meos who had received a modicum of education and held important posts in the village administrative hierarchy—such as nambardars, zaildars, munshis, chaudhris—as well as madrasa students in galvanising the TJ in the Mewati countryside. Most of these, however, had not obtained high secular education, but were largely the products of the new chain of Islamic schools that had begun to appear in the region by this time.
Education gradually brought in its wake an increasing redefinition of Meo identity, an awareness of their increasing marginalisation, and a growing familiarity with Islam. Thus, commenting on the ignorance of the Meos of even the kalima, a British administrator observed that, 'this, however, applies only to the Alwar territory; in British India the effect of the schools is to make them more observant of [Islamic] religious duties' (S.A. Haq 1972:105). The Hindu ruler of Alwar had declared Hindi, instead of Urdu, to be the language of instruction in the schools of his state. At that time Islamic literature in Hindi was almost totally non-existent, the' language being seen as specifically 'Hindu'. Thus, Meos in British territory were now exposed to Islamic influences to a considerably greater degree than their brethren in the Hindu-ruled states of Alwar and Bharatpur, and in the years that followed, the Gurgaon Meos were to take the lead in spreading the message of the TJ in the rest of Mewat.
Meo peasant rebellions
Developments in the Meo countryside towards the end of 1910s, then, all pointed to a growing agrarian crisis (for details, see, M.H. Siddiqui 1986:442-67). This, combined with the gradual emergence of a class of educated men who could articulate the grievances of the peasants, provided fertile ground for the outbreak of a series of peasant uprisings in Mewat in the 1932-34, in which successful efforts were made to link up specifically Meo economic demands with a wider pan-Indian Muslim agenda, facilitating, in the process, a greater identification with Islam on the part of the Meos. The rise of the TJ in Mewat cannot be properly understood without taking into account these uprisings which broke out immediately prior to the sudden spurt of Tablighi activities in the region in the early 1930s.
Hostility towards the Muslims in the ruling circles of Alwar and Bharatpur appeared intermittently in the nineteenth century interrupted by periods in which Muslims were allowed to play a significant role in administrative affairs. Hostility surfaced again in the early decades of the twentieth century, and this time with greater intensity (Mehta and Mehta 1985:399). The ruler of Alwar, Maharaja Jai Sigh (1892-1937), introduced several policies clearly aimed against his Muslim subjects. This went alongside a deliberate Hinduisation of the Alwar administration itself. The Maharaja began to flaunt his Hindu credentials in public and established personal ties with several top leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha and the Arya Samaj, organisations whose extreme antipathy for the Muslims was well known.10 Soon after it had launched its shuddhi campaign among the Malkanas of the United Provinces, the Arya Samaj extended its missionary activities to Rajputana, attempting to convert back to Hinduism the local Muslim Rajputs, Jats, Gujjars and Meos, and in this is said to have received the official backing of the rulers of Bharatpur (Mayaram 1991:10-12).11
The marked Hinduisation of the Alwar administration and its consequently growing anti-Muslim orientation had less to do with religion than with the increasing challenge by the state's subjects, both Hindus and Muslims, to the Maharaja's heavy taxation of the peasantry and fiercely autocratic rule.12 By the mid-1920s, peasant revolts had broken out in several parts of the state. One of the most serious of these occurred in 1925, in which the Alwar forces gunned down scores of Hindu Rajputs in the village of Nimuchana protesting a sudden rise of 50 per cent in the land revenue. In these uprisings both the Meos as well as the Hindu peasantry were involved. Faced with such determined opposition to him, the Maharaja appears to have felt that a policy of cultivating a fiercely pro-Hindu image for himself would help create a homogeneous Hindu community and postpone the demand for democratisation.13 Targeting the Muslims as the menacing, threatening 'Other' and fanning the flames of Hindu-Muslim rivalry would help divert the attention of his largely Hindu subjects from the oppression they were undergoing under his rule.14
It was in this communally surcharged climate that in 1932-34 the Meos of Alwar rose up in violent revolt. It seems that it was the particularly harsh and oppressive conditions under which they were labouring that ignited the sparks of rebellion. Their plight is portrayed by a Meo historian thus:
The Meo tracts in Alwar and Bharatpur were victims of the extreme authoritarianism and ruthlessness of their rulers. Government servants would do nothing without extorting heavy bribes. The peasants were being grossly overburdened with ever increasing taxes. Like birds of prey, the guards of the forest department and the sepoys of the customs department would swoop down on the hapless peasants and rob them of the paltry income that they earned through shedding their sweat and blood. The rights of the people were being mercilessly trampled upon. The Mewatis were being treated like goats and sheep, as nothing better than mere dumb animals (Haye n.d.:10).
Having already subjected the peasants to a heavy tax burden, in 1932 the Maharaja of Alwar suddenly decided to raise the revenue levy four-fold. This proved to be the last straw for the peasants, and they decided to stop paying their taxes. Soon after, the All-India Meo Panchayat, a group of Meo leaders headed by Yasin Khan (1896-1970),15 a lawyer-turned-politician, began galvanising support for the uprising, seeking to turn it into a broader struggle for the establishment of democratic rule in the state. As the rebellion gained in radicalism and strength and spread over much of Mewat, spilling across even into British tetritory, where the Meos now refused to repay their loans to the Banias, the Maharaja of Alwar decided to crush it with all the force he could command. Thus, in January 1933, when thousands of Meos had gathered at the village of Govindgarh for a demonstration, the Raja's soldiers indiscriminately opened fire, as a result of which scores lost their lives. Mewat was now in flames. Martial law was clamped in the four Meo-dominated nizamats of Ramgarh, Lacchmangarh, Kishangarh and Tijara, and reports started flooding in of widespread clashes between Hindus and Meos. Meos are reported to have attacked Bania-owned shops at many places and to have forcibly collected subscriptions from them. The violence, rooted in the economic grievances of the Meos against the Banias and the Alwar state, rapidly took on an overtly religious hue. Hindu temples were attacked and the panic-stricken Hindus, egged on by the Hindu Mahasabha, issued an urgent appeal to the Raja, 'the descendant of Raghu' (the Hindu god-king Rama), to rush to their rescue, to defend them from the Meo 'rakshasas' (demons).16 The writ of the Alwar state seems, in fact, to have ceased to run in the Meo-dominated nizamats, where the Meos managed to establish their own effective control.17
Some weeks later the situation in northern Alwar had turned so serious that the government of India was forced to intervene. British soldiers entered Alwar in January 1933 and in May the government of India forced the Maharaja to abdicate and go abroad into exile. The administration of the affairs of state was entrusted to a British officer, many of the demands of the peasants were conceded and normalcy was gradually restored.
In the course of the revolt the Meos came to establish strong ties with several Muslim leaders and organisations from outside Mewat for the first time, and it was this newly established bond with the wider Indian Muslim community that latter eased the entry of Islamic ideas among them through the missionary efforts of the TJ. It was from these outside Muslim leaders and organisations, besides some local activists, that the Meos sought leadership for their movement against the Maharaja and a means to bring their plight to the notice of the Indian public and the British authorities. Among the Muslim organisations that came to the rescue of the Meos in their uprising were the All-India Alwar Conference, the Anjuman-i-Ahrar of Bombay and Delhi, the Jami'at-ul 'Ulama-i-Islam of Budaun, and the Rajputana Muslim League, Ajmer. Several Muslim Urdu newspapers of Delhi and Lahore, too, took up and championed the Meo cause (Mayaram 1991:40-41). Significantly, the Meos received almost no Hindu support. It was only the Muslims who came to their rescue at this time of crisis.
Although these external Muslim organisations and leaders were not responsible for creating the Meo rebellion themselves, it was through their networks that, 'Meo demands received an immediate publicity' (Mayaram 1991:40). Linkages were established with the larger Muslim community of north India only after the movement had already started, and so it would be misleading to suggest that it owed itself to external Muslim instigation. Significantly, it was also only after the rebellion had taken off that the activities of the TJ really began to spread in the Mewati countryside. Moreover, at this time, the preaching teams of the TJ were by and large active only in British Mewat and had little presence in either Alwar or Bharatpur (Mayaram 1997:35). It would appear, then, that the sudden growth of the TJ in Mewat at around this time was a fallout of the agrarian crisis and the oppression which followed rather than a cause of this crisis.18 The Islamisation of the Meos through the TJ, Mayaram remarks, 'does not precede agrarian unrest as much as it is the consequence of agrarian tension and state policy'. This process cannot, then, be understood 'merely as [the introduction of] an external religious ideology', unrelated to the social conditions prevailing in Mewat at that time (Mayaram 1991:8).
Mayaram contends that the labelling of the Meo peasant uprising by the Alwar state and by Hindu organisations as an Islamic revolt was probably intended to rob it of legitimacy, to divide the peasantry on religious lines and, thereby, to divert the wrath of the Hindu peasantry away from the Maharaja's unpopular rule and towards the Meos instead. This policy, however, had the unintended consequence of making the Meos more fiercely conscious of their Muslim identity, which was now being reinforced by the state itself. The same happened in neighbouring Bharatpur, where, in 1933, the Meos rose up in revolt against the repressive measures taken by the Jat ruler, Kishan Singh.
It was thus this combination of agrarian crisis, the growth of a newly educated class among the Meos, the peasant rebellions in Alwar and Bharatpur and their brutal suppression, and the fraternal links that were now established with outside Muslim groups that provided the ideal conditions for a movement such as the TJ to emerge in Mewat at this time.
-------------------------
1.'The Meos', writes a leading Tablighi ideologue, 'were even unaware of the appearance of namaz' itself. If perchance, a Muslim entered their territory and read namaz there, they would all gather together in amazement and wonder what he was up to, thinking that he might have a pain in the stomach or that he had lost complete control over his senses, because of which he was repeatedly standing up and sitting down (Numani 1989:21).
2. For details of the Meo population distribution within India, see Hashim Amir Ali (1970:6-16).
3. For some interesting insights, see Marwah (1979:85
4. Some Meos regularly attended Shah Ismail's lectures in Delhi and attempted to spread his message in their own villages (A.R. Nadwi and M.A. Khan n.d.:63-64).
5. Gots are lineages while pals are generally territorially-based groups of one or more gots. The Meos have 52 gots and 12 pals, along with a minor pal, called pallakra.
6. For more on the Khanzadas, see Makhdum (1989: 2-3).
7. For a general overview of agrarian conditions in Mewat, see Brayne (1927).
8. This process, a consequence of the imposition of British rule, seems to have occurred not just in Mewat, but in the Punjab more generally as well (Thorburn 1983).
9. Orthodox 'high'-caste Hindus throughout India considered Muslims ritually polluting. Chaudhri Afzal Haq devotes his entire Pakistan and Untouchability (1941) to this little-understood issue. In this book, he traces the demand for Pakistan to this practice.
10. For Jai Singh's increasing public identification with Brahminical Hinduism, see Joshi (1939:79-95).
11. This conversion drive of the Arya Samaj is said to have goaded some Muslim groups into action to protect their flock. Thus, Mayaram (ibid.:13) quotes a British administrator as saying, 'When 1 met Dr Ziauddin and other Muslim leaders in March, 1933, they frankly confessed to me the fear of a revival of the shuddhi movement drove them to seek to organise the Meos and turn them into better Mahommedans'.
12. The Raja was said to have been excessively devoted to wine and women, among other luxuries. The celebrations of the silver jubilee of his reign in 1929 consumed the entire annual revenue of the state, estimated at around Rs 3,000,000 (Mayaram 1997:55-61).
13. It is interesting to note in this regard that, according to one source, the Maharaja began adopting an increasingly pro-Hindu stance after 1929, when the silver jubilee of his coronation was celebrated with much fanfare Great stress was laid during the celebrations on the public display of his newfound commitment to Brahminical Hinduism. Through this, apparently, ‘the Maharaja wanted to wash away the bad name that he had earned for himself as a result of the Nimuchana massacre’ (Gahlot 1966: 285-86).
14. For more details on the Maharaja’s growing unpopularity among his Hindu subjects, see K.S. Saxena (n.d.: 188-89).
15. The Brayne Meo High School, Nuh, Mewat’s first high school that Yasin Khan had been instrumental in setting up, emerged as the centre from which the Alwar revolt was directed. Interestingly, Maulana Ilyas, founder of the TJ, and some of his followers reportedly fiercely opposed the school, warning the Meos of the ‘evil influence’ of what they called a ‘satanic institution’ (M.H.Siddiqui, 1986: 449-50).
16. Letter from G.D. Oglive, agent of the Governor-General in Rajputana to Sir Charles Watson, Political Secretary to the Government of India, 4 January 1933, in L/P&S/13/1377 Political [Internal] Department Collection, D.O. No.15-P, India Office Records, London, p.174.
17. Letter from G.D. Oglive to Charles Watson, 13 December, 1932, ibid., p.1.
18. Interestingly, the TJ later came to be seen as instrumental in controlling, rather than instigating, Meo ‘lawlessness’ and ‘rebelliousness’ against state authorities both by the British as well as by the Alwar and Bharatpur states (Maududi, quoted in Vellori, n.d.: 59).
http://twocircles.net/2010apr13/tablighi_jamaat_mewat_part_1.html
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
Karzai threatens to join Taliban
By IANS,
Kabul : Afghan President Hamid Karzai has reportedly threatened to join the Taliban if he continues to come under "outside pressure" to reform, a media report said Tuesday.
Karzai made the unusual comments at a closed-door meeting Saturday with select lawmakers, just days after kicking up a diplomatic row with remarks alleging foreigners were behind the fraud in the 2009 disputed elections, the China Daily website reported.
"He (Karzai) said that 'if I come under foreign pressure, I might join the Taliban'," said Farooq Marenai, who represents the eastern province of Nangarhar.
Marenai said Karzai appeared nervous and repeatedly demanded to know why parliament last week rejected legal reforms that would have strengthened the president's authority over the country's electoral institutions.
Two other lawmakers said Karzai twice raised the threat to join the insurgency.
The lawmakers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Karzai dismissed concerns over possible damage his comments had caused to relations with the US.
The Taliban has become increasingly aggressive in Afghanistan amid reports that the US was preparing to pull out after a Pakistan-brokered deal with the "good Taliban".
Kabul : Afghan President Hamid Karzai has reportedly threatened to join the Taliban if he continues to come under "outside pressure" to reform, a media report said Tuesday.
Karzai made the unusual comments at a closed-door meeting Saturday with select lawmakers, just days after kicking up a diplomatic row with remarks alleging foreigners were behind the fraud in the 2009 disputed elections, the China Daily website reported.
"He (Karzai) said that 'if I come under foreign pressure, I might join the Taliban'," said Farooq Marenai, who represents the eastern province of Nangarhar.
Marenai said Karzai appeared nervous and repeatedly demanded to know why parliament last week rejected legal reforms that would have strengthened the president's authority over the country's electoral institutions.
Two other lawmakers said Karzai twice raised the threat to join the insurgency.
The lawmakers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Karzai dismissed concerns over possible damage his comments had caused to relations with the US.
The Taliban has become increasingly aggressive in Afghanistan amid reports that the US was preparing to pull out after a Pakistan-brokered deal with the "good Taliban".
BJP hints at snapping ties with AGP in Assam
By IANS,
Guwahati : The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Tuesday almost put an end to the year-long honeymoon with Assam's main opposition Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) by hinting to fight the 2011 assembly elections on its own and take power in the state.
"If they (AGP) want an alliance we can talk, or else we are ready to fight the 2011 elections on our own," BJP president Nitin Gadkari told journalists at the end of a two-day visit to Guwahati.
On Monday, the BJP president was even more vocal about snapping ties with the AGP.
"We have asked our party cadres to work towards having a BJP chief minister in Assam by next year," Gadkari told a public rally in the city.
The BJP and AGP had an electoral understanding during the 2009 Lok Sabha election although the AGP in recent months has maintained a distance from the former.
The electoral tie-up proved disastrous for the AGP, which won just one of the 14 Lok Sabha seats. The BJP bagged four seats.
The AGP-BJP tie up in the 2001 assembly elections also did not work out, with the combine routed by the Congress party.
"We are concentrating on strengthening our grassroot level workers in the state to make the party strong and vibrant," the BJP president said.
Gadkari was also critical of the Congress.
"Corruption is rampant in Assam and yet the government claims all is well. The people of Assam would never accept such a corrupt government," he said.
Guwahati : The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Tuesday almost put an end to the year-long honeymoon with Assam's main opposition Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) by hinting to fight the 2011 assembly elections on its own and take power in the state.
"If they (AGP) want an alliance we can talk, or else we are ready to fight the 2011 elections on our own," BJP president Nitin Gadkari told journalists at the end of a two-day visit to Guwahati.
On Monday, the BJP president was even more vocal about snapping ties with the AGP.
"We have asked our party cadres to work towards having a BJP chief minister in Assam by next year," Gadkari told a public rally in the city.
The BJP and AGP had an electoral understanding during the 2009 Lok Sabha election although the AGP in recent months has maintained a distance from the former.
The electoral tie-up proved disastrous for the AGP, which won just one of the 14 Lok Sabha seats. The BJP bagged four seats.
The AGP-BJP tie up in the 2001 assembly elections also did not work out, with the combine routed by the Congress party.
"We are concentrating on strengthening our grassroot level workers in the state to make the party strong and vibrant," the BJP president said.
Gadkari was also critical of the Congress.
"Corruption is rampant in Assam and yet the government claims all is well. The people of Assam would never accept such a corrupt government," he said.
Monday, April 05, 2010
Terrorist fall-out of Israeli rigidity over Jerusalem
BY SUNANDA K. DATTA-RAY
It looks as if Israel will again get away. The Palestinians will again be thwarted, which will mean more recruits for Al-Qaeda and intensification of Islamic militancy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir, Chechnya and in non-Islamic areas where jihadis have struck. The world may have to pay a high price for Israel's recalcitrance
The Moscow metro bombings are a warning of the intensified Islamist terrorist attacks that might be expected partly because of Israel's latest demonstration of rigidity. It bears noting, too, that Israeli forging of British, French and German passports to murder the Hamas leader, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai has incurred greater Western displeasure than the crime itself did. As long as such double standards prevail, Israel knows it can get away with literally and metaphorically murder.
Murder is not only of individuals. It is the murder of the Palestinian dream of a sovereign homeland, small and drained of all resources though it be, in the West Bank and Gaza with its capital in Jerusalem. Above all, it is the murder of the belief that Jews had drawn some worthwhile lessons from their centuries of wandering and terrible suffering at Hitler's hands. All that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appears to have learnt is that the successful victim emulates his oppressor.
Though now basking in the uncritical support of the US Congress, he must know that Congressional endorsement owes much to the persuasive funding power of American Zionists. The AntiDefamation League of Bnai B'rith constantly lobbies members of both Houses; and Fortune magazine once described the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as Washington's second most influential lobby. But the means probably interest Netanyahu less than the end, and the expectation is that no matter what President Barack Obama might have said at their recent one-on-one meeting in Washington, he will sooner or later quieten down and toe the line like his predecessors.
By all accounts the protracted discussion was a disaster. The usual trimmings of a state visit were cut out. No joint statement was issued. The two leaders were not photographed together, grinning or scowling. Even the public handshake that often goes on and on was omitted. Netanyahu's departure from America's shores was twice postponed, presumably because of hopes that extra time would allow something to be salvaged.
Next came Britain's decision to expel though couched more politely than that the head of the Intelligence services at Israel's embassy in London. This was retaliation for the 12 members of the Israeli hit team that murdered Mahmoud al-Mabhouh using forged (the preferred term is "cloned" because they were copies of genuine originals) British passports. Other Israeli assassins used similarly cloned French and German passports. They were all copied from the genuine passports of travellers at Israel's Ben Gurion airport. "Such misuse of British passports is intolerable" says Mr David Miliband, Britain's Foreign Secretary, warning that any British subject who visits Israel runs the risk of similar abuse. "The fact that this was done by a country which is a friend, with significant diplomatic, cultural, business and personal ties to the UK, only adds insult to injury." The wording of that not particularly harsh censure bears analysis. There is no condemnation of the murder. There is no reference to the heart of the matter Israel's refusal, despite the show of prolonged negotiations, to hand back conquered land that it has occupied for 43 years.
Miliband didn't even denounce the criminal act of forgery. All he asked in anguish was in effect "How can they do this to us?" Presumably, there would have been no cause for surprise or pain if Iran or Zambia or some other unfriendly country had cloned British passports. Presumably, too, there would have been no cause for complaint if Israel had cloned Iranian or Zambian passports.
Indignation arose because Miliband believed Israel had betrayed its special bond with Britain. That is not likely to worry Israel too much. Its operations to rescue Ethiopian Jews, kidnap former Nazis or destroy Iraq's nuclear capability demonstrate indifference to considerations of legality. It is convinced that survival justifies every action and that the European Union is hypocritical.
Also, the Israeli attitude to the surrounding Arabs is condescendingly European. Europe may have treated its Jews like vermin but that does not stop those Jews and their descendants from identifying with Europeans when it comes to Asians and Africans. There must also have been a special satisfaction for Israeli operatives in cloning German passports and masquerading as Germans.
The present controversy centres on Jerusalem. It makes sense for the ancient city, sacred to three of the world's great religions, to be joint capital of Israel and Palestine. But Israel wants all of Jerusalem, which reinforces the suspicion that it does not want an independent Palestine at all.
Even the moderate President Shimon Peres always wrote of a "Palestinian entity", never a "Palestinian state". The most Israel seems willing to concede is something like the "Bantustans" that apartheid South Africa created to cordon off its black population.
That view was further strengthened when Israel announced, while American Vice-President Biden was visiting the country, that it would build 1,600 more homes for Jews in Arab East Jerusalem.
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton called the decision an "insult to the US" that deliberately sabotaged American efforts to restart the stalled peace negotiations. Mrs Clinton had not forgotten that during his previous tenure as prime minister, Netanyahu did everything possible to extend Jewish settlements in the West Bank, consolidate Israel's military control and obstruct the peace process. The question now is not whether Britain is piqued but whether Israel can afford to antagonize the US which is its main diplomatic and financial supporter and arms supplier. Israel would not exist without heavy US backing. But a strategist like Netanyahu also knows that Israel's strongest card is the American Zionist lobby. Going back in history, Fraklin Delano Roosevelt promised King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia an independent Palestinian homeland. But when he died suddenly, the new president, Harry S. Truman, bluntly told State Department officials that he had to answer to hundreds of thousands of people who were anxious for the success of Zionism but did not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among his constituents.
Netanyahu's far-right ruling coalition would collapse if he yields to American pressure. He might be able to put together another coalition with the centrist Kadina Party, but that would not be to his liking. Moreover, he knows that with the mid-term Congressional elections due in November, Obama might find his hand forced by his Democratic supporters who fear that the powerful Zionist lobby mentioned earlier will finance their Republican opponents.
Netanyahu has an external card too: he can attack Iran's nuclear facilities. The Americans have built up the Iranian bogey and whatever Mr Obama's feelings, he can hardly criticize an attack too much in public.
So it looks as if Israel will again get away with its gamble. The Palestinians will again be thwarted, which will mean more recruits for Al-Qaeda and further intensification of Islamic militancy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir, Chechnya and in non-Islamic areas (New York, London, Madrid, Moscow) where jihadis have struck. The world may have to pay a high price for Israel's recalcitrance.
It looks as if Israel will again get away. The Palestinians will again be thwarted, which will mean more recruits for Al-Qaeda and intensification of Islamic militancy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir, Chechnya and in non-Islamic areas where jihadis have struck. The world may have to pay a high price for Israel's recalcitrance
The Moscow metro bombings are a warning of the intensified Islamist terrorist attacks that might be expected partly because of Israel's latest demonstration of rigidity. It bears noting, too, that Israeli forging of British, French and German passports to murder the Hamas leader, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in Dubai has incurred greater Western displeasure than the crime itself did. As long as such double standards prevail, Israel knows it can get away with literally and metaphorically murder.
Murder is not only of individuals. It is the murder of the Palestinian dream of a sovereign homeland, small and drained of all resources though it be, in the West Bank and Gaza with its capital in Jerusalem. Above all, it is the murder of the belief that Jews had drawn some worthwhile lessons from their centuries of wandering and terrible suffering at Hitler's hands. All that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appears to have learnt is that the successful victim emulates his oppressor.
Though now basking in the uncritical support of the US Congress, he must know that Congressional endorsement owes much to the persuasive funding power of American Zionists. The AntiDefamation League of Bnai B'rith constantly lobbies members of both Houses; and Fortune magazine once described the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as Washington's second most influential lobby. But the means probably interest Netanyahu less than the end, and the expectation is that no matter what President Barack Obama might have said at their recent one-on-one meeting in Washington, he will sooner or later quieten down and toe the line like his predecessors.
By all accounts the protracted discussion was a disaster. The usual trimmings of a state visit were cut out. No joint statement was issued. The two leaders were not photographed together, grinning or scowling. Even the public handshake that often goes on and on was omitted. Netanyahu's departure from America's shores was twice postponed, presumably because of hopes that extra time would allow something to be salvaged.
Next came Britain's decision to expel though couched more politely than that the head of the Intelligence services at Israel's embassy in London. This was retaliation for the 12 members of the Israeli hit team that murdered Mahmoud al-Mabhouh using forged (the preferred term is "cloned" because they were copies of genuine originals) British passports. Other Israeli assassins used similarly cloned French and German passports. They were all copied from the genuine passports of travellers at Israel's Ben Gurion airport. "Such misuse of British passports is intolerable" says Mr David Miliband, Britain's Foreign Secretary, warning that any British subject who visits Israel runs the risk of similar abuse. "The fact that this was done by a country which is a friend, with significant diplomatic, cultural, business and personal ties to the UK, only adds insult to injury." The wording of that not particularly harsh censure bears analysis. There is no condemnation of the murder. There is no reference to the heart of the matter Israel's refusal, despite the show of prolonged negotiations, to hand back conquered land that it has occupied for 43 years.
Miliband didn't even denounce the criminal act of forgery. All he asked in anguish was in effect "How can they do this to us?" Presumably, there would have been no cause for surprise or pain if Iran or Zambia or some other unfriendly country had cloned British passports. Presumably, too, there would have been no cause for complaint if Israel had cloned Iranian or Zambian passports.
Indignation arose because Miliband believed Israel had betrayed its special bond with Britain. That is not likely to worry Israel too much. Its operations to rescue Ethiopian Jews, kidnap former Nazis or destroy Iraq's nuclear capability demonstrate indifference to considerations of legality. It is convinced that survival justifies every action and that the European Union is hypocritical.
Also, the Israeli attitude to the surrounding Arabs is condescendingly European. Europe may have treated its Jews like vermin but that does not stop those Jews and their descendants from identifying with Europeans when it comes to Asians and Africans. There must also have been a special satisfaction for Israeli operatives in cloning German passports and masquerading as Germans.
The present controversy centres on Jerusalem. It makes sense for the ancient city, sacred to three of the world's great religions, to be joint capital of Israel and Palestine. But Israel wants all of Jerusalem, which reinforces the suspicion that it does not want an independent Palestine at all.
Even the moderate President Shimon Peres always wrote of a "Palestinian entity", never a "Palestinian state". The most Israel seems willing to concede is something like the "Bantustans" that apartheid South Africa created to cordon off its black population.
That view was further strengthened when Israel announced, while American Vice-President Biden was visiting the country, that it would build 1,600 more homes for Jews in Arab East Jerusalem.
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton called the decision an "insult to the US" that deliberately sabotaged American efforts to restart the stalled peace negotiations. Mrs Clinton had not forgotten that during his previous tenure as prime minister, Netanyahu did everything possible to extend Jewish settlements in the West Bank, consolidate Israel's military control and obstruct the peace process. The question now is not whether Britain is piqued but whether Israel can afford to antagonize the US which is its main diplomatic and financial supporter and arms supplier. Israel would not exist without heavy US backing. But a strategist like Netanyahu also knows that Israel's strongest card is the American Zionist lobby. Going back in history, Fraklin Delano Roosevelt promised King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia an independent Palestinian homeland. But when he died suddenly, the new president, Harry S. Truman, bluntly told State Department officials that he had to answer to hundreds of thousands of people who were anxious for the success of Zionism but did not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among his constituents.
Netanyahu's far-right ruling coalition would collapse if he yields to American pressure. He might be able to put together another coalition with the centrist Kadina Party, but that would not be to his liking. Moreover, he knows that with the mid-term Congressional elections due in November, Obama might find his hand forced by his Democratic supporters who fear that the powerful Zionist lobby mentioned earlier will finance their Republican opponents.
Netanyahu has an external card too: he can attack Iran's nuclear facilities. The Americans have built up the Iranian bogey and whatever Mr Obama's feelings, he can hardly criticize an attack too much in public.
So it looks as if Israel will again get away with its gamble. The Palestinians will again be thwarted, which will mean more recruits for Al-Qaeda and further intensification of Islamic militancy in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir, Chechnya and in non-Islamic areas (New York, London, Madrid, Moscow) where jihadis have struck. The world may have to pay a high price for Israel's recalcitrance.
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