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The most unpredictable election

The Kashmir Monitor





By Kumar Ketkar

Far too many times, journalists experience a sense of déjà vu in their career.

Eight years ago, in April, Anna Hazare had begun his indefinite fast to demand a Jan Lokpal bill. His “Main Anna hoon” campaign began the end of the UPA rule. The charge against the Manmohan Singh government was corruption and the need for a “Congress-mukt Bharat”. In 2019, we have PM NarendraModi and the BJP’s“Main bhichowkidar” call. The accused remains the same.


The only major difference is that the Congress was in power at Anna’s time, but now it is a weak opposition. And yet, PM Modi begins and ends every speech by condemning the Congress and the ‘Nehru dynasty’.

Nobody can predict what the result of the election would be on 23 May, but the mood in the country is paradoxically anti-Congress and anti-Modi government at the same time. That has made the 2019 LokSabha elections most unpredictable.

The mood was similar during the 2014 elections, but there was an element of hope, and frustration with the UPA. Now aspirations have disappeared, only apprehensions remain.

The illusions generated by NarendraModi’s aggressive campaign had mesmerised the corporate class in 2014. The economic reform-seekers, the urban middle classes, the media, the first-time voters and the entire non-Congress mass of people all welcomed Modi.

Now the corporate class is worried. They talk in hush-hush tones about the concerns they have if NarendraModi is elected again. While they do want a stable BJP government, they are not happy with PM Modi’s style of governance and feel scared at the rise of party president Amit Shah. At the same time, this class is convinced that Modi is not winning with his own majority. So, it will have to be a coalition led by him or a coalition by someone else in the opposition. That is what scares them.

Although the BJP won 282 seats, it could get only 31 per cent of the vote share (38 per cent for NDA) in 2014. Indira Gandhi won 283 seats in 1967 but had almost 41 per cent of the vote share. In the case of the BJP in 2014, almost 69 per cent of the voters chose to opt out of the frenzy. And yet, the overall mood of the country had been captured by NarendraModi.

In the last five years, Modi virtually had hegemony over electronic and print media. He was everywhere – addressing NRIs in New York or attending party meetings in Nagpur, or hugging several heads of states. Modi was flying kites in Ahmedabad, sweeping with a broom in New Delhi, and he was even lecturing students before their exams.

In the mid-1980s, when Doordarshan showed footages of Rajiv Gandhi (there were no private channels), the channel was criticised and condemned as “Rajiv-Darshan”. Now that we look back, Rajiv Gandhi had hardly occupied any audio-visual space.

All the macro level assessments of the 2019 results vary wildly and widely. The BJP is predicted to win anywhere from 150 to 300 seats on its own. The Congress gets anywhere between 75 to 135. The rest of the opposition, divided into various regional-caste-language identities, get the rest. Surely, no other election has flummoxed election experts and the media like this.

Yet, the sense of déjà vu is not because of the unpredictability of the elections, but because of the collective psychological state of the people. There is no common ideological thread, or acceptability of one leader, or an agenda or organisational base. The BJP flaunts its so-called network of RSS karyakartas, but everyone knows that the network loses connectivity in various parts of the country. Even the frenzied Hindutva chest-thumping does not attract voters everywhere.

The spectre of anarchy and chaos looms not only because of the divided opposition, but also because of the anxiety and nervousness felt by people who fear a comeback of the Modi-Shah-Doval troika.

We have entered a political vacuum, and like Alice in Wonderland, do not know the direction or the pace at which we are falling, or the nature of the free fall.




Easter Sunday Massacre in Sri Lanka

The Kashmir Monitor



By Lukman Harees









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Faith and Enlightenment Should Go Hand In Hand

The Kashmir Monitor



By Zafar Aziz Chaudhry

In the early part of this month, during my sojourn to the Holy Land, the question which perplexed me most was whether there was a real connection between enlightenment and faith, and whether in their genesis these two are all-embracing or mutually exclusive. My deep reflections on various texts of the Holy Quran, and some references gathered from history did reaffirm my belief that they are mutually inclusive and do not conflict with each other. In fact for the future survival of Muslim nations with grace and dignity in competition with the rest of the world, it should be clearly understood that there is no schism between these two concepts. Rather an enlightened world-view is likely to rub off the accumulated centuries-old rust on the other-wise pristine fabric of Islam.

The European intellectual movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries emphasized reason and individualism rather than tradition. It was heavily influenced by philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Newton, and its prominent figures included Kant, Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Adam Smith. It was a revolt against Man’s self-imposed tendency not to use his own understanding and only to follow tradition. It stressed reason, logic, criticism, and freedom of thought over dogma, blind faith, and superstition. In a broader sense, Enlightenment applied scientific reasoning to politics, science, and religion. Its followers were typically humanists who supported equality and human dignity, and it is wrong to suppose that enlightenment is in any manner opposed to religion. On the other hand, it acts as a bulwark against superstition, intolerance, and bigotry which have brought bad name to religions.


Despite their different approaches, science and religion are also complementary. It is said that science can help you diagnose and treat your cancer, but it cannot touch the despair and dismay and terror you feel when you get the diagnosis, nor can it help you to die well. For that people turn to religion, which answers the deeper questions of our human predicament.

The survival of religion in the 21st century, according to Karen Armstrong, largely depends on its capacity to create compassion for the fellow human beings which is the ultimate object of religion.

But unfortunately religion is mostly misunderstood in our time due to our inability to take historical perspective of the social, cultural, intellectual, and emotional settings that shaped people’s lives and actions in the past. Such an understanding which is often termed as “historical empathy” helps us to understand the vast differences between us in the present and those in the past. Compassion also teaches us to transcend our limited world-view and place ourselves in the cultural and social environments of the past.

The Holy Prophet by his conduct and precepts has been admittedly one of the greatest and most influential personages in history and we Muslims believe that the Holy Quran, his revealed message to humanity, is a marvel of wisdom for the mankind. But the fate of Muslims everywhere is most pathetic, the responsibility for which can be traced in Islamic history.

The first shock after the death of the Holy Prophet on the question of his succession resulted in the tragic split between the Sunnies and Shias which also in due course divided the Islamic countries into two blocks.. The next significant setback which reversed the Islamic clock occurred during the Abbasid period when philosophers like al-Ghazali (1058-1111 AD) fiercely opposed the Mu’tazilites practice of subjecting Islamic theology to rationalism which led the Abbasids to ban the Mu’tazilites. Islam’s vitality and appeal was gravely affected by the resurgence of literalist interpretations of Sharia (that treats man-made laws as divine) and the worsening of sectarian cleavages within Islam which has set in motion a perpetual cycle of violence that directly endangers the lives of ordinary Muslims everywhere.

Within a century of Holy Prophet’s death his followers had built an empire that stretched from Spanish Europe to Central Asia. The Rashidin caliphate can be credited for military expansion, but It was not until the Umayyad Dynasty-from 661 to 750-that Islamic and Arabic culture began to truly spread. The Abbasid Dynasty-from 750 to 1258-intensified and solidified these cultural changes.

The Golden period of knowledge in Islam began during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786 to 809) when he invited scholars from various parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds and mandated them to gather and translate all of the world’s classical knowledge into the Arabic language. This resulted into an astonishing growth of philosophers and scientists such as IbneRushd (translated Aristotle, and wrote books on Islamic jurisprudence) Al-Kindi (discovered rules of astronomy and optics) Khwarizmi (Father of Algebra and mathematics) IbneSina (Father of Medicine, astronomy and Logic) who ushered in a golden era of knowledge.

Ironically the dark age of Europe coincided with golden age of Islam. But it was the most tragic turn in the history of Islam that the fruits of hard labours of these philosophers and scientists could not reach the Islamic society because of the opposition to rational thought by the jurists and clergymen of the day and lack of wisdom and vision of their rulers who opposed a rational underpinning of Islam – analogous to St. Thomas Aquinas who lent rationality to Christianity in the Middle Ages. The theologians like Al-Ghazali and IbneTaimiyya refused to accept scientific change and discoveries and forced the Khalifa to ban Mu’tazilites who were advocates of rational thought. It was contrary to the teachings of the Quran and precepts of the Holy Prophet who had made no such restrictions on the acquisition of knowledge. According to the saying of the Prophet, Muslims were to seek knowledge even if they had to go to China.

The Islamic state also failed to patronize these polymaths by refusing them enough funds for their research etc under fear of reaction from the reactionary forces. But most importantly, contrary to the injunctions of the Holy Quran, the local jurists divided the concept of knowledge into two broad and disjunctive categories as “Ilm Ad-Din” (= religious knowledge) and “Ilm Ad-Dunya” (= worldly knowledge). Neither in the Quran nor in the authentic books of Hadith was there any such division allowed in the acquisition of knowledge. Islamic sources declare knowledge as an indivisible whole.

The Golden period of spread of knowledge ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate due to Mongol invasions and the Siege of Baghdad in 1258 AD.

Even during the Ottoman Empire, nothing was done for promotion and development of science and technology, perhaps because the Emperors thought that it would be a threat to the opulence of the monarchs. On the other hand, a blunder was done through a wretched Fatwa, which banned the printing press in the Empire which remained in force for over 200 years. This left Islamic world in the dark when West sailed away with renaissance and enlightenment.

Thus there are enough grounds to believe that for the survival of Islamic civilization, faith and enlightenment should go hand in hand.

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Losing Hope in God’s Mercy

The Kashmir Monitor



By Ejaz Naqvi


I would hear multiple times ‘the correct way’ to greet, the correct way to bathe, the correct way to step into the bathroom, the correct way to enter the mosque, the correct way to offer Salat and fast and so on. If I didn’t, I was risking having all my good deeds deleted. If I erred a little, I would face the anger of God. The “right path” was so narrow that it would be impossible not to stumble and fall out of the mercy of God.


It is true that the Qur’an is full of warnings for the wrongdoers. But it is also full of the good news. In fact the prophets, including Prophet Muhammad, are often referred to as Basheer (bearer of good news) and Nazeer (the warners). For some reason, the clerics got stuck mostly on the Nazeer part.

Growing up, I thought I would never ever be able to make it and be on the good side of the Lord. No matter how hard I worked, if I stumbled a little, all my good deeds would be washed away. It was as if God had his finger on the ‘delete’ button and ever so ready to use it. The truth is that He does have his finger on the ‘delete button’, but it is our sins and wrong actions that He is so willing to delete!

To be perfectly honest, I still don’t know if ‘I made it’. Only God knows that. Only God is the Judge.

However, I am actually much more hopeful of God’s mercy. I realize the most commonly repeated attributes of God in the Qur’an are Rehmaan (the Most Gracious) and Raheem (the Most Merciful).

And in terms of God deleting the good deeds, the fact is that the Qur’an is full of passages on God’s Mercy and His Forgiveness. This verse says it all.


We tend to forget that in Islam, one of the biggest sins is to lose hope in God’s mercy! The exegetist differs in their opinion if this verse was revealed in reference to a particular group of Muslims or a larger group or the entire humanity. Many do believe it is addressed to all ‘servants’ and all humans are considered His servants.

And whoever does evil or acts unjustly to his soul, then ask forgiveness of Allah, he shall find Allah Forgiving, Merciful. 4:110

There are other passages that clearly state that everyone will be rewarded for even an atom’s worth of good deed.

‘Acting unjustly to his own soul’ or ‘transgressed against their souls’ refers to the fact that if we do wrong, we only hurt ourselves.

One way I look at the Qur’an is that it gives us plenty of information and education on the consequences of breaking the law, as well as obeying the law.

I realize the Day of Judgment is also called the Day of Reckoning (Yaum e Hissab), so I am accountable for my actions (and inactions). It is also very true that the Qur’an’s description of the punishment for the wrongdoers and deniers of God’s signs is rather graphic but its description of the reward and mercy for those who believe AND do good work is also repetitive and I would argue more prevalent. The Qur’an acknowledges that humans are not angels and that we are prone to sin, and therefore calls for us to repent and ask for forgiveness. The greatest sin in Islam is considered to be associating partners with God. That sin cannot be forgiven, except when one repents.

Surely God does not forgive that anything should be associated with Him, and forgives what is besides that to whomsoever He pleases; and whoever associates anything with God, he devises indeed a great sin. 4:48

Many of the ’99 Names of God’ refer to His forgiveness.

Al-Wadud: The Loving One
Al-Ghaffar: The Forgiving
Al-Ghafur: The Forgiver and the Hider of Faults
Al-Afu: The Forgiver- this refers to forgiving as in ‘rubbing off’ or in deletion of sins as if they never occurred!

Al-Rau’f: The Clement (Lenient)/Kind

Like the Qur’an, the Old Testament is also sometimes viewed as a bearer of a wrathful God, ready to set everything ablaze. But it too makes many references to God’s forgiveness and mercy.


Similarly the Gospels make references to forgiveness on numerous occasions- even more so then the Old Testament. Salvation and forgiveness are integral part of Christianity. The Gospels add another element- to forgive each other so God can forgive us- something that is part of the revered ‘Lord’s prayer’ as taught in Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:2-4

….and forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. Luke 11:4 and Matthew 6:12

Of course I don’t want to ‘take advantage’ of Lord’s forgiveness and continue to wrong myself. But I do realize we are all humans and that I will err. When I do, I will never lose hope in his immense mercy and His forgiveness. That’s the biggest hope out there no matter what they say!

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