Whose tune are you playing?

Why are Muslims ambivalent on Afghanistan” my friend, an editor asked me. I was a little puzzled. Afghanistan can be discussed in different phases. Was he talking of the Talibanisation of Afghanistan, on which he found the Muslims ambivalent? Or was he referring to the topic of the day: US airstrikes against Afghanistan? He was talking of the latter. “But are you yourself not ambivalent?” I asked. “Last night they dropped cluster bombs on a civilian population near Herat; earlier, they hit a hospital. I doubt if there is a significant difference between a Hindu, Muslim or a Christian response — a poor people are being hit and that is tragic.”

But the editor had made up his mind. He planned to do a story on the Muslim mind in this context. And for the exploration of the Muslim mind what better location for field research than Delhi’s Jama Masjid where on the theme of the Afghan airstrikes the Shahi Imam was reportedly singing like a thrush.

In my days as a reporter on the beat I had met the senior Bukhari once or twice. He acquired some political prominence when Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna and later V P Singh sought him out for his presumed hold on the Muslim mind. This was the beginning of what eventually turned out to be an apotheosis of the bogus. The old Imam Bukhari was a simple, even an innocent fellow with a bark far in excess of his bite. But his son, the man currently (and temporarily, I promise you) in the news, has been reared in an atmosphere charged with politics: he has been successfully wooed by embassies plus the government. Give it some thought; which embassy or political party would be interested for him to strike a high profile on the issue at this juncture? Who is interested in the controversy? Let me add in parenthesis: he has no authority to issue fatwas and he was roundly defeated in the last two elections in which he played a direct or indirect hand. But the media’s inexhaustible desire to reach the deepest recesses of the Muslim mind continues, particularly on how it is poised on the Afghan airstrikes.

The strange assumption on this occasion appears to be that any criticism of the three-week-old bombing by the majority community (the ranks of critics are swelling) is motivated by humanitarian considerations or by increasing insights into realpolitik. The Muslims, on the other hand, are critical of the Americans because they are Osama bin Laden sympathisers. An even more alarming fact is that everyone is skeptical of bin Laden’s culpability but Muslim disbelief differs from Hindu disbelief because it is infused with sinister conspiratorial colours. So the suspicion goes.

During my stay in Teheran last week I met a Sorbourne educated official who furnished, what I thought was interesting information. Iranian air pilots had testified that it was impossible to successfully aim for the Twin Towers unless the pilot had landed at New York “at least four times” on a plane the size of the one used in the September 11 atrocity. Are we living in times where it is subversive to ask sensible questions?

In this mood the Belgian foreign minister should be throttled because he dared to suggest that the coalition in operation was more Anglo-Saxon than global. A senior Home Ministry official told me that there was more evidence to blame Lashkar-e-Taiba for the Red Fort atrocity than the Americans have produced to pin blame on Osama bin Laden for the Twin Towers. The point I am making is that there is a question mark in everybody’s mind on the Afghan action even as script upon script and scenario upon scenario is furtively hinted at in this capital and unveiled in that one.

The remarkable thing about the US is its ability to create a menace, and within days, its exact antidote. For days the media allowed itself to be used for propaganda and lies and now from within the media ranks has begun the soul-searching, the skepticism. Some such self-doubt must swiftly take hold of our editors as well who are otherwise walking blindfolded into a trap laid by someone else.

Four days after the attack on the Twin Towers, a senior BJP leader leaned back into his sofa and said not without a touch of glee, “Osama bin Laden has become a Muslim hero; that much is certain”. In UP an important leader has echoed, “Polarisation is sarp (his way of pronouncing ‘sharp’) swaying his shoulders from side to side. We thought September 11 would persuade the Americans about our case against Pakistan’s ‘cross border’ terrorism. The BJP prepared itself instantly for two game plans — one for Pakistan, the region and the globe and another for UP where ‘sarp polarisation’ would help. The regional game changed with Pakistan’s high profile role in the coalition. But the party already committed to a stroke for ‘sarp polarisation’ in UP went ahead with the full swing of the bat, bringing into the arc the SIMI arrests, and sourcing some of the Kashmir militancy to UP. The new TADA, likewise, will facilitate ‘sarp polarisation’ in UP.

The editors (and TV producers) I dare say have walked into the trap for creating this polarisation, imagining they have good copy and in any case the universal law of journalism is to publish and be dammed.

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