Why not rediscover? I say. Why not revisit? I add.
It was many centuries ago, in 2020.
We had enough free time to contemplate co-morbidities, herd immunities, man made disasters, ogle at blood-stained railway lines and vomit-soaked railway berths, hand-beat Dalogona Coffee, shed emoji tears for the plight of the working-class, and still had some free hours left. It was the infinite gift of Lockdown time that kept on giving. Some even kept calling it ‘unlocking time’.
It was many centuries ago, in 2020. We implored to stop the all-around irresponsible ha-ha-hee-hee. We said, please. Respectable, renowned people were dying. The phoren-returned pillars of our society were falling like macheted banana tree trunks. The shit hit the ceiling fan. How to clean? Even jharu-pochha mops were listed as non-essential commodities. But we all knew one thing for certain, mullahs like the Sharjeel Imam fellow (#tablighi), pesky chhota aadmis with sweat-stains under their armpits, unpadh aurat-s with permanently stupid expressions on their faces, those Chinki-types (those NE ones who eat cockroaches and bats like the Wuhan Maoists) were the literal, actual, human Corona virus.
We blessed ’em, Lysol-sprayed them, panopticonized them. We double crossed our hearts. We tried our best not to send too many bloody buses or trains to bring’em back. Because the bare minimum did just fine.
Amen.
And on top of that, there were those Hijras making a racket about how lockdown was bad for them and all. As if we didn’t know that already. Our circadian rhythms were all effed up because of it.
It was many centuries ago, in 2020.
But we are not locked down any more. We are free! Free! Seven into ten plus five times free! Seven seventy eleventy fifty times free!
So let’s rediscover some vintage issues, Mitron. Dangerous wristwatches we won’t fear, no!
Vintage is cool, you know? As cool as ‘Kashmir Ki Kali’ postcards. Or like mango salsa or onion pakodas (Summer is gone, Monsoons are on, Winter is coming). Vintage, sane and sorted issues like NRC-NPR-CAA are also v.v. Cool. They are also back in fashion. Vintage anti-nationals like Sharjeel Imam can be refried, reheated, and re-served chatpata-spicy, because Indian Corona Death count is down from page one to page four to page eight and Monkey Pox Death Count is, you know, just not there yet.
Sharjeel The Monster
Zizek-Ji ka Chutkula #1: “Chhotu, go and get me a chai without Nationalism.”
“We’ve run out of Nationalism, Saab. I will get you a chai without Secularism.”
Shrajeel Imam, barely thirty, IIT plus JNU, Shaheen Bagh hyphen AMU, non-Ashrafi yes-Mallik bloody Bihari, was, is, and will be a monster. If you don’t believe me, ask the ABVP demonstrators during his walk of fame- shame to the police custody. These vidhyarthis are usually right about everything. Shut your sickular gob and pay attention.
First things first, his 40 minute speech at AMU did not go ‘viral’ as the Libtard Media fake news-ers would have you believe. His video once had 578 thumbs up and 579 thumbs down (before Youtube stopped displaying thumbs down count) a balanced, liberal thumb count. (As balanced as sweet-bhi-salty-bhi Britannia 50-50 you are having right now with your Masala Chai.)
But by Gawd, the Imam Boi had studied much too many books (these JNU-types, let me tell you!). It’s a sadful matter that he uses this knowledge to peddle his fake news. Fake news with a disgusting Tablighi shade of green. Like the dirty bottom of our Tiranga. Not the clean good colour on top.
First of all, he seems to think India is supposed to be a Secular Country. There’s no shame in making this common mistake. We all keep doing it. Even yours truly, my dear readers, is not above it. And once you fix that mistake, there’s no reason to be so loudly angry for 40 minutes straight. Or being charged in five states. Or avoid being taken into interrogation again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. Really, what a bother! Almost as bothersome as reading the transcript of the entire forty minutes of his speech. Sheesh, who has that kind of free time any more? In households with power cuts, it often takes up to 15 minutes to make one single glass of Dalgona Coffee. Loading Tik Tok takes forever (#MeraBharatMahanTeraChinaKiyaBan). Instead of paying close attention to Sharjeel’s rant, in those precious forty minutes, you can make this Biryani. It’s a family heirloom recipe from the Imam household. Thank me later. Oh already you’re thanking! So sweet of you. Welcome Aunty-ji. No I don’t have a Raita recipe to go with it. Stop it Aunty! We are talking serious seditious stuff here. Go back to you kitchen like our great leader tells you to and don’t come out until lunch time. Also, India has never been a Secular Country.
Baamdev Baba Ka Vedic Maths Formula #1 = Nationalism + 1947 = Secularism
Sharjeel द मोहरा The Pawn
Zizek-Ji ka Chutkula # 2: Mohant-ji looked towards the east and said to the idol : ” O Bhagwan! I am Nothing in front of you.” Rambani Bhai was depositing gold coins to the puja thali. He chimed in: “Oh. I am Nothing too, God.” The Fakir outside the temple looked to the west and said, “O Allah, I have nothing. I am nothing.” Rambani Bhai whispered to Mohant-ji : “Suna baat Katuey ka? He claims to be ‘Nothing’ too. Like you and me. How rude!”
Solidarity statements are noble things. If you work hard at it, Comrade, you can write three such statements in one day only (excluding meal times). Three solidarity statements on three diverse topics, in up to seven colours. But the problem is, once you start copy-pasting one to two to three and back to one, they all become Confucius, I mean, confusing. And when the bad guys come to beat your anti-national friends up, you might be busy being a solidarity-wallah some place else. But the next morning, when he angrily Whatsapps you about being a no-show, you can immediately send him the solidarity statement you prepared in advance. Also tell him that that’s what your were writing when the goons were breaking his nose. He is reasonable. He will understand. Tell him you already knew that goons would come and attack him. Your dialectical spidey senses were tingling (*Ting Ting Ti Ting*).
OK now let me explain our solidarity with Indian Muslims with a nice Hindu example. It is a 5000 years old example (That’s how we do it). You know Ardhanarishvara? Like half Shiva plus half Devi? Like the Shiva-God and Devi Goddess in full solidarity, half-half, fifty-fifty, all in it together, all equality, same-same, pachash prati shat each, Britannia 50-50 (I am already stress-eating the second packet)?
What did you say? You don’t? You bloody don’t know our Virat Akhand Indian Culture only! Aapka Facebook wall ko IT Cell lag jaye! Now I will take a deep breath and try not to be angry at you, as Jaggi-ji tells me to. So after all this fifty-fifty Shiva-Devi business, Ardhanarishvara remains Shiva only, you know? I mean philosophically fluid-gendered and stuff, but practical-practical mein Shiva only. Shiv Bhagwan. Only. No Devi-shevi. Pure Shiva. Shivoham Shivoham. Pure Lingam. Like Secular Democratic Republic of India alias Hindu Rashtra alias Akhand Bharat alias Ulti-Pakistan alias Saare Jahan se Achchha Hindostan Hamara Hamara.
Now you apply this formula to all the ‘Hum Sab Ek Hai‘ video, ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara‘ fillum, Muslim karigars making Hindu Murat news items, our constitution preamble, our riot history, etc. etc.
Did Sharjeel Imam know this? Or was he busy playing Farmville when this lesson was being taught (he used to play Farmville; ma kasam I’ve been to his hostel room.)? But he found out soon enough. His solidarity franz, his middle-class mitron, his liberlalia lollypop buddies, his chaddi (not that kind) chums turned out not very unlike his enemies. Solidarity went to the oil mill for freshly cold-pressed organic varieties. He was pwned.
Baamdev Baba Ka Vedic Maths Assignment #1 = If there has been ‘n’ number of riots in India from 1952 to 2002, how would you express the spectacular-secular power of Indian political public sphere as a function of ‘n’?
Sharjeel The Beardo
Kaleen Aajiz ka Poem # 1:
‘Ye pukar saare chaman mein thi
wo sehr huyee wo sehr huyee
mere aashyaan se dhuaan utha
toh mujhe bhi iski khabar huyi’
(‘The whole garden was shouting that the morning has come
I came to know of it only when my house started burning.’)
Throughout all this drama and harrssment, Sharjeel’s perfectly kempt beard kept shining. How odd! Further proof that he is truly evil. Dear reader, try to remember, where have you seen this kind of unnatural Clinic Plus Shampoo shine before? Yes, you are right. Alhamdulillah! On the face of the Khilji of Padmavaat. And darhi is always the pehchan of bad guys. The beard is a big giveaway. Remember remember the Patiala House harrasment of Kanhaiya Kumar. Or the Ramjas College harrasment of Umar Khalid. Did they get to keep their beard perfectly organised through all that scuffle? Did their beard get to shine – all unmolested – during the whole scuffle? Were they as lucky as this Imam ? ‘Uff ho!’ you say. ‘How stupid!’ you say. They don’t have beards only. Yes yes I know. They are very progressive- secular non-Hindu-non-Musalman bright boys. Why on earth will they sport beards? Who does Sharjeel think he is? Is he more Leftist than Kanhaiya? And more Progressive Musalman than Umar Khalid? What nonsense! Agreed that Sir Marx had big beard but he shaved it too, like a good non-Musalman boi. All this beard business is just…I can’t even bring myself to say the word.
Now what is this Pa-pa-pa-Pan-Islamism, Mitron? Ask a completely non-communal Hindu ( choose the Secularvadi ones, they seem to know eveything the best) and you’d know. It’s like you know, like, no matter how divided Muslims are, you know, like, by class, geography, gender, race etc., they become united when it comes to being Muslim. Like they eat and shit here but meet secret-secret in mind with all their Muslim brotherhood on other-other sides of other borders. Very bad. But getting RSS funding from the Hindus across the American boders is another matter altogether. That’s called ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam‘. Very different from Pan-Islamism. And the half-mast ‘Internationalism’-walla erection you get when you listen to the Youtube recording of ‘Marxist Internationalism Song‘ is yet another matter. Very, very different from Pan-Islamism again. How different? I can tell you but you won’t understand. You have not gotten proper education, mera bachchha. You don’t even have the right PDFs in your laptop in the ‘To Be Read’ folder. Even worse, you might not have a laptop even. And you might be reading this from the mobile phone screen of your generous friend. You poor thing. Revolutionary Blessings to your generous friend. Tell your friend to Whatsapp us. We need funds from generous people.
OK, where was I? Yes. Those bloody pan-islamist Musalmans will gang up and beat you with their Unity if you are not careful enough and maintaining shudh Khaki neighbourhood watch. What kind of Unity, you ask? Not the Unity-in-Diversity-walla Unity yaar, the really real Unity. The Sword and Hockey-stick-walla Unity. Or photo-op-walla unity. Ask a Hindu, I mean a non-religious Secular person, in Boston (MA) or a Basti in Manmad. The answer would be same. That conclusively proves that anti-Pan-Islamism of progressive Hindus is not a hoax or prejudice (as some slit-dicks would tell you). It’s the truth. Truth (‘T’ in caps).
And look at what Gandhiji got when he tried to make franz with the Khilafati Pan-Islamists.
Look what the Islamic solidarity whipped up by that evil J-man had done to Bharat Mummy of ours.
Imagine if all Musalmans of the India get together what will happen to Bharatbarsha? They will make it Hindustan again. Scarier than the Delhi Cyclone, I mean Indraprastha riots.
Baamdev Baba Ka Pikchar Puzzle #1 = If Bharat Mummy was cut in half during Pakistan-Partition in 1947 then how does the 2020 Corona-nashini Bharat Mata is in full form body?
Sharjeel The Tuchh Praani The Nothing
Zizek-Ji ka Chutkula # 3: There was once a Musalman who had a mental disoder. He thought he was not a full man, just a tiny Musalman. So he was taken to a sarkari mental institution where Dr. Anti-Communalism and his team worked lovingly and caringly (and free-ly) on his mental disorder to make him feel like a full man again. One day he was cured. And he was released. He stepped out slowly and afraid-like. While he was crossing the beautiful green lawn of the sarkari mental institution he sighted something, started screaming, ran back inside the institution. “What happened? What’s wrong?” The kind doctor asked to the breathless, terrified ‘full man’. “I saw the giant Indian Democracy, tiny Musalman-eating Democracy…crouching outside!” “Oh, you silly!” Smiled Dr. Anti-Communalism indulgently. “You know you are a full man, not just a tiny Musalman.” “Yes. But da..does the Democracy know?”
Shrajeel went to IIT Mumbai and finished M Tech there. So what? He was merely one of the 15 Muslims in a class of 600. 2.5%. So what? Only the cream rises to the top. And the creme-de-la-creme rises to the Topper. The percentage of Muslims in Indian Population is much more than 2.5%. So what? Then he joined JNU. Mon Dieu! In Social Sciences, not Computer Sciences. WTF! I mean So what? He finished his Mphil in record time, his thesis was described by historian Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay as “immaculate” in presentation and written expression. Elite Bastard! So what? Nachu Kya? ” His dissertation titled ‘Exodus before Partition: The Attack on Muslims of Bihar in 1946’ astutely showed that nationalism and communalism in Bihar around the time of Independence were mutually constitutive processes. He looked at three particular aspects – the patterns of rioting in 1946 in Benibad, Kako, and Telhara in Bihar; the government response in containing the riot and in handling the post-riot refugee crisis; and the representation of the riot in both metropolitan and local presses.” English please! What language is this? I thought Muslims write in Urdu only. Sharjeel thinks : “Our history has been written entirely by pandits. And some Muslims who think the same way as pandits. Even somebody like Irfan Habib is like that. He has worked on medieval history but he finds it necessary to interfere in modern history as well. Nation, nationalism, Tipu Sultan, etc. If your expertise is in medieval history, stick to that. Why do you have to talk of stuff you probably don’t even know about? Maybe to gain some political traction or get favours from the Congress when they were in power. It can never become acceptable for scholars like him to support the nation of India. It is clearly a fascist project, the biggest in history, and you are calling it good things. I will repeat, our history has been written by pandits and the time has come when we write our own history. It takes a lot of hard work to write history, you can’t just do it superficially. You have to research and write about the same thing ten times over for it to become a respectable thesis that can be accepted. Take the example of the 1937 elections or the 1946 elections. None of us remember the results. We don’t even know how many males voted, how many females voted, what party got how much of the vote share. We are told that in 1946 Muslims voted for the Muslim league and the illusion is thus born that before that the Muslims voted for the congress. But the truth is that even in 1937 the Muslims did not vote for the Congress. If you know anything about the elections, you must know that regional parties got votes everywhere. In Bengal, there was the peasant party, called Krishak Praja Party. Muslim Independent Party in Bihar. Muslim Nationalist Party in UP. The Unionist Party in Punjab which was the party of landowners. Ittehad party in Sindh. Congress only got votes in North West Frontier Province because of the Khudai Khidmatgars. Muslim League got votes only in two provinces in 1937, Bombay and Madras presidency. Bombay was Jinnah’s home ground. And in Madras as well he had some influence. In 1946 the other parties merged. These are small things but no one knows about them. Muslims never voted for the Congress. Then why do we say today that the Congress is secular? We never voted for congress unless partition happened and even then we only voted for them because we were forced to. We were forced to because the politicians from the Muslim League also went to the Congress. They didn’t want to go to Pakistan. They were sitting idle, didn’t have any work, so they went to the Congress. That’s where the lines between friend and foe started getting muddled.” What? He also thinks: “Muslims never gained independence. An enemy community was forced upon the Muslims. This is an important point and if we can’t understand that, we can’t do anything. Both executive and judiciary have been our enemies since 1950. The English were lesser enemies of Muslims. I am talking about the last 50 years of British rule. I am not talking about the British since 1757. From 1757 to 1857, it was the East India Company. Government of India was made after 1858. That’s when it started directly reporting to the Queen and to the British parliament. These are the last 100 years. Even within that, I am talking about the time period after 1890, when industrialisation had set in completely and India had become a market for them. The last 60–70 years of British rule. After World War 1, their difficulties increased further and they had to give local capitalists some leeway as well to set up factories, etc. Tata was given an iron factory. In western India, several textile mills opened. After World War 1, the English were not powerful enough to use ships to carry people, arms and products. You can see these breaks in history. The last fifty years, from 1905 to 1947, you can see that the British government is impartial towards Muslims compared to what comes after and what had happened before. What comes after 1950s has been clearly more colonial than the last fifty years of colonial rule. We should say this without any hesitation. We haven’t got independence. We have been put in a new and more severe slavery. Some people are not affected by it, like some big landowners and big businessman, people who were rich then and are rich now. They can take Canadian citizenship if they so wish. People who have money can take themselves and their families away from this when they need to. But for the common Muslims, across communities, the period after 1950 has been more troublesome from the point of view of communalism. We shouldn’t talk about independence like we do. If scholars speak clearly about all this, the masses will follow us or they will kill us, both outcomes are preferable to remaining silent.”
So this Sharjeel fellow (with another Sharjeel fellow ) apparently also organised the Shaheen Bagh sit-in. But? But what? So the man has a very impressive or a very degenerate curriculum vitae (depends on where you are standing). But so what? Is he a He-Man or what? His dimaag is tez like Chacha Chowdury or what? Yes, and he also has the Shaheen Bagh-sized organisational skills like Sabu. He is the…he is the…Student Man!
The Student Man… howmuchever he hates the Leftie way of doing things, believes the Leftie way of supremacy of the University student (JNU. Preferably) as the ultimate Messiah of social ‘poblems’.
And student-man had a contact plan, until, erm, you know what…”If 1000 students from Aligarh and 1000 students from Jamia form a group together, they can reach every household in India. Students have the responsibility to educate themselves and then to educate others. We shouldn’t waste our time sitting inside campuses. The same amount of time you take to sensitise 3 people inside the campus can be used to sensitise 3000 people among the masses. If you go to the masses and tell them that you neither want votes nor money, then the masses will listen to you, this I say from experience. You haven’t gone to ask them for anything. You say what you have to say, they might even abuse you and tell you to go away but if you go back there, they will again come and listen to you. Unless they have some vested interest in the Indian system, there are lots of people like that as well. You have to stay away from the people with vested interests. And not just stay away, you have to talk to them harshly. ” In short, deliverence of critical pedagogy and enlightenment in arrow-headed shafts of light till everybody just runs revolutionary and sets things straight, you know? You don’t? You still stay ‘so what’? That’s what. That’s why you are so effed-up dude…Not a dude you are, you say? Even worse…tsk tsk…Because you don’t have that special thing between your legs therefore can’t have any special knowledge between your ears. Tubelight you are. Goodbye. Miltey hain break ke baad... If Christos Tsiolkas, a Greek-Australian queer author and Left activist met Sharjeel Imam, he would have dunked his Student-Man messianism in a lot of salt. “In 1968, the student replaced the worker as the subject of history. For a generation or more, left-wing theorists have privileged the university over the workplace, and in doing so their thinking has become increasingly obtuse and disconnected from the lived experiences of the majority. I’m not suggesting a turning back of the clocks, a reinstating of the “noble worker”. But if one of the challenges of liberalism is to argue its case against the identity politics that is seeing people turn increasingly to the simplistic and xenophobic solutions of the far right, an equally important challenge is for it to refute the narrowness and narcissism of a left-wing politics dominated by the concerns and priorities of the student. I don’t want to live in the monocultural and racist world of the right-wing identitarian, but I certainly don’t think that means I have to settle for the victim-obsessed politics that now defines the left: who the fuck wants to live in a twenty-four-hour crèche?”
But even when his great revolutionary pyramid scheme of mass enlightenment of student-man fails (each thousand teach thousand) he toh sala gets to be a proper proper topper Shahid and anti Left-but-not-Dalit-anti Left icon with thousands of words of l’homage (this piece is nearing four thousand five hundred word count). He is at least not like that loser girl Safura Jardar. Safura who? My point, exactly. Sala achchha Deshdrohi banney ke liye bhi kitna kuchh qualifications mangta hai! To be a proper Anti-National is no child’s play, silly! Girl childs, beware and be aware (the pregnant ones, especially).
Baamdev Baba Ka Caste Political Science #101 = If a student he-man is communalism-free, then most likely what his caste would be?
Sharjeel The Tiresias
Zizek-Ji ka Chutkula # 4: The brave sting journalist was finally ready to infiltrate the lockdown land, while under cover. Before leaving, he told his editor that: “I will mostly be put in prison the moment I cross the border. But the state is democratic, so I can write letters from the prison. But each letter will be censored. If I write in blue ink , that means I am writing convenient lies to pass the censor. If I write with red ink, that means the letter has been able to bypass the censor and it has the uncensored truth”. The first letter arrived, written entirely in blue ink. “All’s well in Lockdown Land. Freedom is everywhere it should be. The Viraat Hindus are ruling with peace and might. Communalism and Casteism are things of distant past. Communism is fighting Fascism relentlessly (becuse who else can, dummy?). Revolution is imminent. But red ink is not available anywhere.”
(This is the last joke, folks!)
At the very moment of writing this sentence, the Youtube video Sharjeel’s speech has the exact same numbers of likes and dislikes. (This is the last link, folks!) It is as rare a phenomemon as a Googlewhack or planets aligning. Especially in a video that is supposed to be controversial. If we look at the chatter, hrrumphing and op-eds around this speech, we will see the same confusing ambivalence and pernicious fence-sitting. In our era of acute polarisation, where every communication has to be either laudable or condemnable (without reservations), this deep ambivalence about the content of Sharjeel’s message is indeed something! What thing exactly it is, is the matter. The state has made all efforts to make it clear to everybody that whatever Sharjeel has had to say is very, very, very bad and let the rest of the country ‘debate’ endlessly about North Eastern chicken-neck recipes for revolution.
One of the temptations is always putting Sharjeel on a pedestal as a matryred prophet who spoke searing Truth to the power. That way we can wrap him up, and explain him away. He is almost permanently locked away anyway. Or another way of wrapping him up, as is the current norm, with thousand ‘intersectional’ pecks, slowly chip the cumulation of new meanings away, dissolve the gathering storm. Is his anger against the Left the same as those of Dalits? Is his castelessness counter-revolutionary? What are his policies for Feminism? In the fashion – ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone’ logic without asking the vital question who judges what is exactly ‘without sin’ and how the judging of ‘without sin’ is done.
Even if one agrees that he has offloaded too much contrarian information too soon to the inured and unwilling ears – bearing too much faith on the pedagogical power of persuasively-argued and intricately edited pieces of text (not to mention his firm conviction that the University students are the ‘delivererers of the masses’), he has, successfully opened up the secret stash of red ink. Instead of misguided and convenient categories of ‘secular’ vs. ‘communal’, ‘democratic’ vs. ‘radical’ – his speech has summarised the gathering discourse over the last six years of Hindu Rashtra-making, an anti-Musalman Rashtra that was being built anyway, much before 2014, much before Modi 1.0, under the banner of ‘Secularism’. The current regime has merely expedited and updated the process. Whether Sharjeel will bring the dawn of ‘New Constitutionalism’ or not, he has done one thing for sure.
After the partition, the ‘M’ word is not a taboo any more. Muslim issues. Muslims. Not Muslims who have to Secular first to be good Muslims (Hindus are always already secular, Hinduness is their culture) but just Muslims. All Muslims. Muslims.
The Last Poem : “Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, / Rains from the sky a meteoric shower / Of facts … they lie unquestioned, uncombined. / Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun; / but there exists no loom / To weave it into fabric” – Edna St. Vincent Millay, Huntsman, What Quarry?
Sharjeel The Virus
What can the S-Man do while existing in an almost erased state, locked up inside a lockdown. Something similar to what the COVID 19 virus can do by simultaneously being dead and alive. Playing dead to sneak around in the discourse and coming alive whenever a sizeable niche is found, the slightest chink in the armour of the immunity the manufactured content provides. Then it can bloom and wreak havoc. Hazaron kaliyon ka gulchaman. A pandemic of ‘the other’. Inshallah. He is already in possession of a prohibited, dangerous item inside his cell. A wristwatch. It’s just a matter of time.
Sourav Roy previously on gaanpaar
gaanpaar English
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