- As relevant as ever
Was it a coincidence that the Indian Supreme Court chose to announce the Babri Masjid verdict on Allama Iqbal’s 142nd birth anniversary? It would appear to be so, for it was probably merely an attempt on the part of the Indian establishment to steal the limelight away from the Kartarpur Corridor opening by suddenly announcing the verdict a few days earlier than scheduled. Be that as it may, it vindicated, once again, Iqbal’s vision of a separate homeland for Muslims; that too on Iqbal Day. Talk about unintended consequences. Iqbal has this way of becoming current on a regular basis, much to the chagrin of his many detractors.
From the very beginning, there has never been any dearth of Iqbal’s critics. Even today, we have all sorts, and plenty of them. From those who start foaming at the mouth on the mere mention of him; to those liberals who try to paint him as a dangerous influence; to those who love to make fun of him as something old-fashioned, or merely an irrelevance. Despite this very concerted effort on the part of these classes to consign it to the dustbin of history, the phenomenon of Iqbal has refused to die down. It’s just too resilient.
Of course, the earliest detractors of Iqbal were the mullahs, the conservatives and the religious types. He had the courage to write a hundred years ago something like shikwa; and dared to suggest that probably the religious thought in Islam needed a reconstruction. Unsurprisingly, he was told to repent by some clerics, and declared out of the fold of Islam by others. This is not to say that one does (or should) agree with everything he wrote; but he had the character to swim against the tide. For the conservatives, Iqbal is too liberal and unorthodox; for the liberals, too conservative and retrospective. On this evidence alone, he must have done something right.
Then there are the laymen who haven’t read his works (most of them haven’t read anything else either), but who love to criticise him regardless. Of course, the source of most of the things that this group finds objectionable about him is none other than Iqbal’s own son Javed. A son, who was secure enough not to want his father turned into some sort of a saint. And that’s precisely the problem with some of the more religious minded simpletons amongst us: we settle for nothing short of saints. The solution: either reject Iqbal as somebody who didn’t have his money where his mouth was; or transform him into a saint. It’s not easy to say which is more unfortunate.
It’s true that there have been long periods in our history when it was fashionable among the ruling elite to quote Iqbal; when the PTV made it a point to air his poetry many times every day. But they were always very careful about their selection. Anything remotely appearing to support Marxism, or anything else that went against the government policy, was never selected. The genius of Iqbal never needed the crutches of government patronage in the first place; and Iqbal is too great for his significance to be affected by the selective treatment he got from such ‘patrons’.
The ideas of separate electorates and autonomy for Muslims underwent a long evolution, but it was Iqbal who first visualised Pakistan with such concrete clarity, which brings us back to where we started
There are those who maintain that Iqbal was nothing more than a poet (a good one at that, they grudgingly acknowledge); certainly not a philosopher as he is made out to be by some. Even if one agrees with this (for the sake of the argument); was he just another poet? He was a poet with an ideology – albeit an ideology with which one may or may not agree. What do we know of such poets? History has seldom been kind to them. This is because their poetry depends, for its relevance, upon conducive environments and times. Iqbal is the only poet (certainly in our part of the world, and probably globally too) with an agenda (if you like) who has stood the test of time. There’s something in his message, in addition to its literary merit, that still resonates with the reader. Of course, Iqbal has many other facets to his personality as well: a thinker, a man with a sense of history, a politician, a lawyer.
And then there’s the small matter of Pakistan. The ideas of separate electorates and autonomy for Muslims underwent a long evolution, but it was Iqbal who first visualised Pakistan with such concrete clarity, which brings us back to where we started. Whether it’s annexation of Kashmir, the perpetual human rights atrocities there, the destruction of the Babri Masjid, the Bombay riots, the general state of minorities (and not just Muslims either) in India, the Gujarat massacre, the abrogation of articles 370 and 35A, or the recent Supreme Court verdict on the Babri Masjid destruction, there have always been regular and stark reminders that Iqbal was right. Don’t cross your fingers for things to change any time soon.
And it’s not just a matter of the BJP being in power currently. The Congress has attributed its own irrelevance and the rise of BJP to the latter’s appeal to the baser emotions of Hindus. After decades-long Congress rule, this is an admission of, on the one hand, the overpowering strength of the pervasive Hindu supremacist sentiment across India; and, on the other, the futility of the secular façade of the Congress spanning over those decades. If this is not a vindication of Iqbal’s political vision eight decades after his death, I don’t know what is. It’s abundantly clear that Iqbal has not been outdated at all. He is as relevant as ever and thank God for that.
