The AIMPLB Is Just Not Relevant Anymore

If Prime Minister Modi has to have a meaningful engagement with the Muslim community, he must look beyond obsolete groups like the AIMPLB

The only prominent politician who figures on the website of All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) is former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Mr. Gandhi died nearly 24 years back but it is very appropriate of the AIMPLB to still find him worthy of this pictorial prominence. No other politician in Independent India has done the AIMPLB’s professed mission so much of service as Rajiv Gandhi. He used his brute majority in the parliament to pass, in 1986, the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights in Divorce) Act (MWA) that severely subverted the liberal and humanitarian purport of the historic Shah Bano judgment delivered by the Supreme Court of India. 

The MWA was a misnomer—it was not meant to protect the Muslim women’s rights. On the contrary, it deprived Muslim women of the right to file a maintenance petition under the Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC). The Rajiv Gandhi government passed an Act that virtually undermined Muslim women’s equal rights as citizens of India and put them back at the mercy of the Muslim personal law that the AIMPLB avowedly seeks to protect. (It is to the credit of the liberal, intelligent, and deft interpretative jurisprudence of the Indian judiciary that almost three decades after the MWA was passed, a divorced Muslim woman can still file a petition under the CrPC or the MWA. In short, the Indian courts have interpreted the MWA liberally and intelligently though that was not the intention of the Act.) 

Liberal Muslims, especially women, were aghast at this surrender of a young, bright, and ‘secular’ Prime Minister to the fundamentalist streak among the Indian Muslims. There was a certain Arif Mohammed Khan, a Congress MP, who argued passionately against this political surrender. Khan was sure that that move by Rajiv Gandhi was not only regressive but also had the potential to breed fundamentalism on the other side. His was a lone voice. Later that year, Khan left the Congress. The Muslim constituency in India lost yet another moderate voice to the essentially conservative lobby represented by the likes of AIMPLB.

Last week the AIMPLB dismissed Zafar Sareshwala, the Chancellor of Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU), from its general body meeting at Jaipur, on the pretext that Sareshwala was not a board member. While that may be technically true, what clearly angered a majority of AIMPLB members is the fact that Sareshwala is a close confidante of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and that he had come to the meeting as a representative of the Prime Minister. The AIMPLB also rejected Sareshwala’s proposal for the AIMPLB members which asked them to engage with the Prime Minister. At its conclusion, the AIMPLB criticised the Prime Minister for his ‘silence’ over the ‘resurgence of Hindutva forces’.

One of the curious outcomes of the meeting was conveyed to the media by Zafaryab Jilani, an AIMPLB executive member. He said the AIMPLB had resolved to fight for the protection of India’s Constitution from the Modi government.  The AIMPLB, Jilani said, would reach out to like-minded Muslims and Hindus to create awareness about their rights, and even move the apex court to protect their constitutional rights.

Now, contrast this zeal to protect the Constitution with the furore over the Shah Bano judgement. The judgement did precisely that—protect Muslim women’s human rights. Yet, the AIMPLB protested against it and wanted the government of the day to intervene to stop the Supreme Court’s ‘interference’ in Muslim personal law. The Rajiv Gandhi government did intervene. By doing that it sent out the message that it cared more for the few retrograde voices like those of the AIMPLB than for the larger liberal interests and rights of Muslim women as citizens of India. What the AIMPLB and its like-minded associates effectively did in 1986 was to defy the Constitution and protect the Sharia from the constitutional jurisprudence. Now, nearly three decades later, the AIMPLB suddenly remembers the Constitution and even wants to protect it from the Hindutva forces.

It is high time Sareshwala, and his political boss Prime Minister Modi, acknowledged one simple truth about the Muslim community in India. The AIMPLB and likes are not the wholesale representatives of the Muslims or custodians of Muslim rights. The NDA government needs to find better interlocutors to establish a two-way dialogue with the community. There is a structural and fundamental reason why engaging with the community via the channels like the AIMPLB may not yield positive results.

The AIMPLB is a mechanism that very clearly does not even seek to work for the social, economic, and political interests of the Muslim community. Take a look at the AIMPLB aims and objectives listed out on its website. It very clearly seeks ‘to take effective steps to protect the Muslim personal law in India and for the retention and implementation of the Shariat Act’.  The next objective is ‘to strive for the annulment of all such laws passed by or on the anvil in any State Legislature or Parliament, and such judgments by courts of Law which may directly or indirectly amount to interference in or run parallel to the Muslim Personal Law or in the alternative, to see that the Muslims are exempted from the ambit of such legislations’.

None of the total 9 aims and objectives, including these two, mention a word about the larger social, economic, and political well-being of Muslims in India. There is no mention of the Constitution of India either. Rather, the AIMPLB mission statement is to hold, maintain, and protect the supremacy and sanctity of the Muslim personal law over and above any other law of the land, including the Constitution.

Indeed, the AIMPLB mandate empowers it to not only challenge  but even annul any law passed by the parliament which in its opinion interferes with the Shariat. It precisely acted out this mandate to pressure the Rajiv Gandhi government to subvert the Shah Bano judgment.    

So there cannot be a greater irony than the AIMPLB talking about protecting the Constitution of India from the Hindutva forces. The AIMPLB is least qualified to sermonise the Modi government, or for that matter any democratically elected government in India, on Constitutionalism, jurisprudence, and the rule of law. 

There are other dangers too in engaging the Muslim community via the likes of the AIMPLB. By deputing Sareshwala to attend the AIMPLB session as a representative of the Prime Minister, the Modi government has ended up conferring more dignity and privilege on the AIMPLB than it actually deserves.

What is the proof that the AIMPLB represents all or even an overwhelming majority of Muslims in India? When it thinks of the Muslim community, why must the Modi government fall prey to the stereotypes? Why can’t it bring in a fresh approach? How effective has the AIMPLB been in exploiting the good offices of even the professedly Muslim-friendly political dispensations for the genuine welfare of the Muslim community? What qualifies the AIMPLB and the likes to lead the dialogue from the Muslim side? The Modi government needs to find answers to these questions before it deploys its valuable interlocutors like Sareshwala.

The NDA government also needs to acknowledge the visceral hatred the so-called representatives of Muslims harbour for the BJP, for Modi in particular, and for the Sangh Parivar in general. In this context, it would be instructive to re-read the trajectory of the relationship between Muslims in India and the different ruling dispensations right from the British era.

It has been established by renowned historians and scholars—including none other than Dr Ambedkar in his great treatise ‘Pakistan or the Partition of India’—that the 1857 War of Independence was actually a jihad fought by the Muslims against the British Rule in India. The Muslims who led this jihad from the front wanted to re-establish the Islamic rule in India. It was not a Hindu-Muslim mutiny, as has been wrongly projected by Veer Savarkar and several other scholars. The Muslim leaders who provided the ideological framework and justification for the 1857 jihad considered India under the British Rule as an un-Islamic entity that had to be re-converted into ‘Dar-ul-Islam’. Dr Ambedkar has written in his magisterial but largely ignored study.

The 1857 war failed and the British power identified Muslims as the chief instigators, masterminds, and executioners of the mutiny. A brutal crackdown on the Islamic centres of faith and power ensued post 1857 but, from 1870 onwards, the colonial power revised its anti-Muslim policy. While it still considered the Muslims the single biggest threat to the continuance of the British rule in India, the Raj decided to deploy a policy of appeasement and indulgence towards Muslims to keep them in check. 

Decades later, the Muslim discomfort with an India ruled by a non-Islamic power (this time the majority Hindus) was manifest in the exposition of the two-nation theory which led to the creation of Pakistan. But the Congress party, which has ruled India for the longest time post-Independence, took a leaf out of the British policy of appeasement and co-option to placate the Muslim community. While this policy did not bring the social, economic, and political goods to the community as has been established by the Sachar commission appointed by the UPA itself, it certainly created a captive constituency for the Congress to bank on. This captive constituency bred, grew, and promoted its own spokespersons including the likes of the AIMPLB and the other ‘usual suspects’ who would not only readily pander to the conservative tendencies among the Muslims but also develop an ever-complaining and self-serving grievance industry of the community to ensure that the Muslims never ask the right questions about their socio-economic status.

If the Modi government chooses to indulge this grievance industry that has delivered no real goods to the community and has kept the Muslims in a perpetual ghetto psyche, it would lose an historic opportunity to identify the new voices among the Muslims. An opportunity to lend credibility to those few voices, and deploy them as the real interlocutors who could speak a new idiom, would be lost.

Zafar Sareshwala is just one of those new voices the Modi government so badly needs. It is just that the Modi government, if it wants to create history, needs to create a new architecture and apparatus for the likes of Sareshwalas to enable them to know who among their co-religionists they should talk to. Sareshwala was right when he said the AIMPLB would become politically irrelevant if it continued to reject every chance to talk to the Modi government. But Sareshwala and the Modi government must identify what forces and voices are socially, economically, and politically relevant to the larger Muslim community and their interests.

That would probably be the beginning no Prime Minister before Modi has ever made. While this may not guarantee Modi a mention on the AIMPLB website, won’t that be an honourable absence? And if Modi, the great communicator, does not deliver this message, who else would ?