Janab Asaduddin Owaisi, the head of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen and member of the Lok Sabha from Hyderabad, has, over the years, said things I cannot be in agreement with. And there is much about his politics which rather mystifies me. But he said last week something I am not just in agreement with but which resonated with the admirer of Sardar Patel in me.
Referring to the trolls targeting the foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, following the government’s announcement of the ceasefire with Pakistan, Owaisisahib said, “Mr Vikram Misri is a decent and an honest hard-working diplomat working tirelessly for our Nation. Our civil servants work under the Executive. This must be remembered and they shouldn’t be blamed for the decisions taken by the Executive or any political leadership running Watan-e-Aziz.”
As our first home minister, Sardar Patel, in the October of 1949, spoke in the Constituent Assembly on draft Articles 311 and 314 of the Constitution, which afforded a modicum of protection to the civil services. Some members had spoken harshly of the role of the ICS under the raj, terming it as unpatriotic. Said Sardar Patel: “I wish to record in the House that if during the last two or three years most of the members of the Services had not behaved patriotically and with loyalty, the Union would have collapsed. If you have done with it and decide not to have this Service, I will take the service with me and go. They will earn their living. They are capable people.”
The foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, had been trolled viciously, his patriotism brought into question, the privacy and sanctity of his homelife threatened. It was a shameful thing. And why? Had Misri not done India, Indian diplomacy, and India’s spokespersonship proud with the maturity and high impact with which he reported developments in the four days’ undeclared war impeccably? Had he not spoken in a splendid combination of exceptionally good English and equally deft Hindustani? But above all, in the language of truth? I do not know if anyone in Pakistan was allowed to watch and hear Misri and his two outstanding companions — Sofiya Qureshi and Vyomika Singh — speak from their briefing panels. If they were, they would have got a sense of India’s tenacity and more: India’s veracity. And it would be no surprise if warmongers and India-haters in Pakistan had pitched into these three stunning spokespersons. But it was not some sour Pakistani but some Indians who trolled Misri, and then a minister in Madhya Pradesh, letting his discretion fly, made an unacceptable comment on Sofiya Qureshi! Our diplomats and civil servants doing ‘wartime duty’ are civil warriors, non-uniformed soldiers, who, along with our uniformed bravehearts, strengthen the nation’s resolve to defend its integrity.
Civil service and foreign service associations lost no time in raising their voice of dismay and protest at the way the foreign secretary has been attacked and the courts of the land, no less, called upon the minister to apologise, which he did very quickly.
Had Jawaharlal Nehru as prime minister and Patel as deputy prime minister heard a member of their secretariat spoken of in the terms used by fellow Indians for Misri, or the way Qureshi had been described, they would have risen to the person’s defence reflexively and memorably in and outside the legislature. For much more than a person’s credentials are involved in such a slander. The ethos of the civil service, of our administrative and diplomatic structure, of our defence forces, is involved. To take a swipe at them at a time like this is to weaken our defence, our preparedness, our solidarity. It is to amuse and please those who want India weakened.
And so I found Owaisisahib’s statement admirable. His use of the phrase of Persian origin used equally in Arabic, Watan-e-Aziz, meaning Dear Motherland, was also something I warmed to.
That our Dear Motherland is mother to all her children, irrespective of caste and creed, should be obvious to the plainest intelligence. But the plainest intelligence unfortunately keeps company, in our Watan-e-Aziz, with the meanest of minds such as extends the trolling mechanism to a person in unspeakable grief like Himanshi Narwal, whose 26-year-old husband, Vinay Narwal, a naval officer, was among the victims of the barbaric terrorist shootout in Pahalgam on April 22. The couple had been married for less than a week and were on their honeymoon. Himanshi, through her grief, urged people not to target Muslims or Kashmiris and was she hailed? No, she was trolled! She was saying what the wisdom of India was saying, namely, do not play into the hands and the designs of terrorism, which wants India to break out in communal combustion, burning our national equilibrium. Get at the terrorists, not innocents, get at the perpetrators of the evil who chose their victims, one by one, religion-wise, and kill them in cold blood. Do not copy those vile beings, spot and get the terrorists, each of them, and their masterminds, not innocents, show the world India is a giant not just in weaponry but in its intelligence and integrity. It is a behemoth, it is not a brute. It is a civilisation, not the caricature of a nation.
Also unspared was Neeraj Chopra, our precision-prince, the javelin-genius, whose freedom from bigotry irritated some.
Our defence forces have done us proud, our political leadership and administrative-diplomatic services have raised our flag sky-high. And we the people of India, described in the Sanskrit version of the Constitution of India’s Preamble lyrically as Vayam Bharatasya Janaaha and in the Urdu as Hum Hind/Bharat ki Awaam, have shown the very restrained responsibility, the measured focus, like Neeraj’s javelin, that are needed to tell terrorists that their gory days are numbered. India can and will ferret terror out with its arms and soldiers in action, not as some wild beast but with the precision pointedness of Neeraj Chopra’s unbigoted and un-deflected javelin.
I will conclude with what Margaret Bourke-White, the great photographer who was in India at the time of Partition, has written on a martyr of martyrs, Maqbool Sherwani (1928–47): “Mir Maqbool Sherwani had been a co-worker of Sheikh Abdullah in the democratic movement, and like Abdullah, he had preached the need for religious unity in the fight for people’s rights… When the tribesmen invaded Kashmir and terrorized the countryside, Sherwani, who knew every footpath in the Valley, began working behind the lines, keeping up the morale of the besieged villagers, urging them to resist and to stick together regardless of whether they were Hindu, Sikh, or Muslim, assuring them that help from the Indian Army and People’s Militia was on the way. Three times, by skilfully planted rumours, he decoyed bands of tribesmen and got them surrounded and captured by Indian infantry. But the fourth time, he was captured himself. The tribesmen took Sherwani to the stoop of a little apple shop in the town square of Baramulla, and the terrified townspeople were driven into the square in front of him with the butts of rifles. Knowing Sherwani’s popularity with the people, his captors ordered him to make a public announcement that joining Pakistan was the best solution for Muslims. When he refused, he was lashed to the porch posts with ropes, his arms spread out in the shape of a cross, and he was told he must shout, ‘Pakistan Zindabad: Sher-i-Kashmir Murdabad.’ It was a curious thing that the tribesmen did next. I don’t know why these savage nomads should have thought of such a thing unless their sight of the sacred figures in St. Joseph’s Chapel on the hill just above had suggested it to them. They drove nails through the palms of Sherwani’s hands. On his forehead, they pressed a jagged piece of tin and wrote on it: ‘The punishment of a traitor is death.’ Once more, Sherwani cried out, ‘Victory to Hindu-Muslim unity,’ and fourteen tribesmen shot bullets into his body. Gandhi’s diligent biographer Pyarelal writes in his biography of the Mahatma, The Last Phase, ‘But within 48 hours of the cold-blooded murder, his dying prophecy was fulfilled, and the raiders were driven out of Baramulla with the Indian troops in hot pursuit.”
And with pride in every Indian soldier, diplomat and civilian who was engaged in the war for justice, and will, whenever called upon to do so, let us say with Sardar Patel that their patriotic duty that what is keeping our Union from collapse and keeping our ill-wishers in firm check.