When godless Marxists and religious Islamists got together to hate America

by Tavleen Singh

Of all the objections to the nuclear deal the most mystifying and intriguing is that the Prime Minister should desist from going ahead with it because it offends Indian Muslims. First information of this came from of all people a supposedly godless Communist MP by the name of M K Pandhe. Commissar Karat was quick to disown his comrade’s comment, but by then it had been picked up by other people, including the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and the Indian Union Muslim League whose representative in Dr Manmohan Singh’s government is E Ahamed, Minister of State in the External Affairs ministry.

This newspaper quoted one of his party colleagues as saying, “The Muslim community is worried about the deal. The IUML would ask the Congress to consider the community’s concerns while going ahead with the deal”. If you surf the net, as I did to research Muslim sentiments on nuclear matters, you will come upon various Islamic organisations who state that they do not approve of the deal. This has nothing to do with some ancient injunction in the Quran or the hadith, thereby above the realm of debate, but to do with the more modern phenomenon of anti-Americanism.

The world’s Muslims hate America, the argument goes, because the American government has been killing Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, for the Indian Government to get close to America in civilian, military or strategic terms would be seen as a direct affront to Indian Muslims. The Muslim organisations who take this view appear not to have noticed that Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan are Muslim countries and all very close to the United States. How do they explain this? They do not. Just as Commissar Karat does not feel the need to explain why he hates America so much that he was ready to blow the only chance the Communists have ever had or will have to control a government in Delhi.

He and his comrades have said on more than one occasion that it’s not just the nuclear deal that is a problem for them, it is that they see it as a cover for India and the United States to come to a secret strategic alliance. So? So what? Commissar Karat’s personal hatred of the United States is so intense that during one of his angry press conferences last week he sneered at the Prime Minister for being an ‘admirer’ of America. As if the very idea was strange and incomprehensible. It is not.

If he stepped out of his politburo and wandered through the streets of Indian cities and towns the Commissar would discover that the average bourgeois Indian is a huge admirer of the United States. The old anglophile brown sahibs with their phony Oxford accents that were a leftover of the Raj have disappeared except perhaps in West Bengal. Everywhere else they have been replaced by a new generation of Indians who generally think of America as a good country. They watch American films and TV shows, eat American food, wear American clothes, go on American holidays and stay on if they can find a job. And the first chance they get they send their children to study in American universities. Oxford and Cambridge are no longer the first choice they once used to be.

Personally, I think the war on Iraq will go down as the worst strategic mistake made by an American government, but most polls in India reveal that the average Indian does not think of Iraq as a burning issue. Nor are there strong feelings about the attack on Afghanistan. Mention the Taliban, though, and you are likely to provoke a torrent of abuse. Mention anything to do with Islamism and jihadi terrorism and strong feelings surface.

Islamism is hated because it has directly affected the lives of so many ordinary Indians in the form of terrorism. Last week, days before the second anniversary of the train bombings in Mumbai, the Indian embassy in Kabul was attacked. Two months ago, nearly a hundred people lost their lives in the attack on Jaipur’s bazaars and temples. Two days after the attack, I wandered through the bazaars in which the bombs had gone off and the anger against Bangladeshis, who may or may not have been behind the bombings, was frightening.

So, if Muslim politicians and community organisations are encouraging anti-Americanism they need to be careful because they could well be laying the grounds for a dangerous divide: A divide in which the only people on the side of anti-American Muslim groups would be Marxists with an ideological hatred of America. Politics makes strange bedfellows as can be seen from the new alignments in Delhi. But godless Marxists and passionately religious Islamists? How strange can bedfellows get?

[The article was originally published at Indian Express. The original article can be accessed here]