“Fear not, comes the message from
the direction of the rising sun,
Those that will give
life to the last throb
will diminish not, never.”-Rabindranath Tagore
On May 8th in 2011, on the occasion of Biswa Kabi Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th Birth Anniversary, a prominent Tagore singer Rezwana Choudhury Bannya was invited to join the celebration in New Delhi. The program was inaugurated by H.E. Dr Manmohan Singh, Honorable Prime Minister of India. At the New Delhi function in 2011, Bannya was introduced as one of the “most popular artists of Rabindra sangeet.” Along with Dr Manmohon Singh, Congress President Sonia Gandhi, and Bangladesh Planning Minister Air Vice Marshal (Retd.) AK Khandker as the chief guest was in attendance.
At the function Rezwana sang: Borisho dhara- maajhe shantir bari/ Shusko hridaye loye aachee daraiy/ Urdhomukhe naronari/…Keno e hingsadesh, keno e chhadmobesh, keno e maan- obhimaan/Bitaro bitaro prem paashano hridaye/Jayo jayo hok tomari. The English translation that I happen to like is done by Ratna De. “With thirsty eyes looks up the human race/Let all darkness disappear; let no sin of undue attraction exist/Let there be no sorrow, no repentance/Let the heart be pure, let life be strong/Why is there so much envy, so much pretense?/Why so much misunderstanding?/Pour out your love into the stony-heart/And let victory be yours.”
Rezwana is a Bangladeshi citizen but as a Tagore exponent she belongs to both Bangladesh and India. She attended Bisva Bharati in Shantiniketan. She received her musical training under the tutelage of Smt Kanika Bandyopadhyay (Mohor di to her students.) Subsequently, for the year 2024, on the eve of India’s 75th Republic Day, Bannya was one of the recipients of the Padma Shri award in the field of art by the Indian government. The award was presented to her by the president of India, President Droupadi Murmu. During this time Prime Minister Narendra Modi continued at the helm.
Due to the current political climate in India, somehow it is hard to visualize that Rezwana is rendering the same song in front of PM Narendra Modi and BJP politicians. Since the celebration in 2011, the political climate in India has changed. In fact, it has taken a turn for the worse with the amendment and implementation of Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) on (March 8, 2024) into the Indian Constitution.
One has to wonder whether such an invitation to sing just for art’s sake, will be extended to a Muslim singer, a devotee of Rabindranath without repealing CAA. Same sentiment applies to the National Register of Indian Citizens (NRC) as well. Does the government of India have some other agenda to prove? Indisputably, Rezwana is deserving of the award from a friendly neighboring country. One should not be labeled a cynic for posing a justified question about the real reason behind Bannya receiving the Padma Shri award. Was it given to conceal the fact that the Modi government is not anti-Muslim? Or is this government really an art and culture aficionado? Which one are we to believe? I suppose it depends on which side of the political spectrum you are looking at.
India’s political temperament was quite different during Manmohan Singh’s premiership. After his departure, Narendra Modi with his Hindutva ideology and BJP entourage enters New Delhi to govern India, a nation of 1.417 billion (2022). Things in secular India started to change with the amendment of CAA. It became a priority for the BJP government; it had faced a lot of criticisms from former and current Congress leaders. Manmohan Singh himself has blamed Modi for the “climate of fear” and lack of economic stability. Unlike Singh, no one in the business and private sectors has been so vocal in articulating it so clearly. A lot of the business tycoons including Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani are in Modi’s corner as they have been doing deals with his government. In all fairness, Adani and Ambani were giving more money to Congress before thinking if Congress Party wins, they need to be in its good graces. Business tycoons everywhere are known for following this trend.
In 2019, Indian citizens in thousands had organized protests against the Government of India’s Citizen Amendment Act. “The base had remained confined to the groups that were already opposed to the BJP government: the largest number has been provided by Muslims, along with liberal middle-class professionals, leftists, and dissenting students.” Some of the protest organizers had opposed Muslim exclusions. And others had objected to “broad welcome” for other minority groups. The protesters are asserting that they are Indians first, and everything else, including their religion comes second. The mass students’ protests were also joined by grandmothers and housewives, which proves that the movement was not going to be limited to Indian college campuses alone. The secular India also pushed back as they feared religion can become a dominant force when the government implements CAA.
Seeing the violence, economist Amartya Sen at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi had said, “Citizenship should be granted on a fair basis, not on the basis of communal discrimination against one religion.” The JNU students had led a protest march on campus against violence in which many people were injured. The students welcomed popular actor Deepika Padukone when she went to JNU campus to offer her support. The government thus far has not paid much attention to the people’s movement and to all the technical and legal issues. They only had deployed police on campuses to conduct a flag march in order to prevent further chaos. Protesters came in thousands and from all religious backgrounds after seeing something morally wrong which goes beyond the legal framework in a democracy. Then to their surprise they had to find out how such a historical antecedent is met with atrocious police brutality.
As the largest democracy in the world, India used to take pride as being secular in its belief. India’s very existence and its fundamental principles were being questioned by the protesters in 2019. Students kept on chanting that they will not be silent, nor will they be violent. Protesters were beaten, taken to jail but they did not stop. The students wanted to have a dialogue with the government’s representatives on the issues of CAA and NRC. They believed a dialogue is a way out of the current predicament. But it did not happen. I had read an opinion piece in one of the Indian dailies that said, “The widespread protests will not be a turning point for the Modi-Amit Shah government until ordinary Hindus join it in large numbers.”
A student uprising of such magnitude had caused a lot of impact, and momentum. TheSupreme Court of India had made a ruling to put a stay on the CAA implementation. It gave the government 4 weeks to reply as it found constitutional issues in implementing CAA. This was a major blow to the government and this setback was being debated on television between the BJP-RSS and Congress politicians.
Hindu-nationalist BJP politicians talked about article 19 of the Indian Constitution and argued that a protest cannot take place by disturbing the peace and flow of everyday life. They repeated that Muslim minority rights will not be taken away by conducting the CAA. The Congress leaders pointed out that protest in a democracy is the right of citizens and they were not causing any inconvenience to others. They emphasized that when the protests are nonviolent, the government must listen to the young people as they will be the future leaders. One politician became very irate and had said that BJP must give up their idea of “pseudo secularism” as no one is buying their act. Another pointed out that the protests by minority groups will bring in more Hindu votes during the Delhi Assembly election 2020 that took place on February 8.
Those discussions often turned into shouting matches. Such debates and protests across India will continue until the government hears people out. Sadly, the Supreme Court gave its decision to implement CAA. “The widely criticized Citizenship Amendment Act was enacted in 2019 and was operationalized this week by virtue of the new rules notified by the Ministry of Home Affairs on 11 March 2024.”
“The operationalization of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) 2019 is a blow to the Indian constitutional values of equality and religious non-discrimination and inconsistent and incompatible with India’s international human rights obligations,” said Amnesty International.
“The Citizenship Amendment Act is a bigoted law that legitimizes discrimination on the basis of religion and should never have been enacted in the first place. Its operationalization is a poor reflection on the Indian authorities as they fail to listen to a multitude of voices critical of the CAA – from people across the country, civil society, international human rights organizations, and the United Nations,” said Aakar Patel, chair of board at Amnesty International India.
‘The CAA removes barriers for acquiring Indian citizenship for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from the neighboring countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who arrived in India on or before 31 December 2014. While the 1955 Citizenship Act prohibited all undocumented migrants from acquiring Indian citizenship, the 2019 amendment fast-tracks the citizenship pathways for some and provides them legislative protection from deportation and imprisonment with the exception of those living in the tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura and the areas under the ‘Inner line’ special permit zones.”
In light of the recent steps the Modi government has taken (in terms of Citizenship and NRC), these demonstrate that Tagore was romanticizing about India being a secular nation. Tagore wrote his songs and poems under British occupation. During that time under the guidance of Mohondas Gandhi, Subhash Chandra Bose, Pandit Nehru, Abul Kalam Azad and prominent Muslim League leaders like Mohammad Ali Jinnah, India united despite ideological differences and deep divides between the Hindus and Muslims.
India’s other minority also played a significant role during the movement, “What is relatively unknown is the fact that it was not the dominant Sunni Muslim leadership of India that was keen on seeking a separate homeland for Muslims. It was leadership from minority sects within the Muslim community who were at the forefront of this demand. These Muslim minorities — such as Shiites, Ahmadis, Sufis, and Ismailis, others —feared that the imminent withdrawal of the British from the region would turn them into a perpetual minority in a Hindu-majority India, and only a separate Muslim homeland could guarantee them the right to worshipwithout any fear.”
“Armed with this belief that a separate Muslim homeland would be an ultimate solution to their apprehensions and fears, these Muslim minorities played a critical role in India’s Partition. The first president of the All India Muslim League, the founding political party of Pakistan, was Sir Agha Khan III, an Ismaili. It was his financial support that helped the Muslim League become an important voice for Muslims in the region. The founder of Pakistan, Mr Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a Shiite belonging to the Asnae Ashri sect of Shiite Muslims. Raja Sahab of Mahmoodabad, an ultra-rich landlord whose fortunes helped Mr. Jinnah to successfully pursue his political ambitions, was also a Shiite Muslim.” —– The Washington Times
When rising levels of violence and intolerance had threatened peace and security throughout the Indian subcontinent, Tagore had imagined the rain of peace to fall on earth — to wash away all violence, darkness, sorrows, malice, and deception. Out of intense love for his fellow citizens, in 1884, at the age of 22, he wrote and composed the Bhairavi, Borisho dhara maajhe shantir Bari in raag trital. As a mystical writer, Tagore wrote about purity of heart, hate, jealousy, egotistical pride, peoples’ safety, social rights, elimination of all forms of discrimination, religious freedom, and most importantly, about our minds to be without any fear in spreading the joy of love. He often wrote about an idyllic place where all cultures and religiously different ideologies can seamlessly co-exist in mutual harmony.
Rabindranath Tagore wrote about a different kind of India where all men and women would have enjoyed equal rights. He envisioned a country where sectarian violence would have diminished with India coming of age. “While Whitman is the singer of American-Jeffersonian democracy, Tagore is the singer of the Indian Renaissance and his country’s struggle for political freedom. The sentiments of Whitman’s Civil War poems bear a close resemblance to the emotions in Rabindranath’s intensely patriotic poems inspired by the threatened partition of Bengal in 1905-09. Thus, Tagore is indirectly influenced by the ideas and feelings of Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and Shelley, while being directly connected to his peculiar Eastern sensibility,” wrote Arka Mondal in a 2013 essay at the IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science.
The stories of pre-partition India in the Secondary and Higher Secondary School in Indian history had captivated me. In those books I had learned how under the stifling ethos of the caste system “lower caste” Hindus and the minority Muslims lived their lives in India. My parents once were part of that history. My late father was a product of English education who happily gave up practicing law in favor of a job at civil administration in Calcutta. (He also shunned western attires in order to support Gandhi’s nonviolence movement.) On the contrary, my maternal uncle, a religious scholar, and a graduate of Aligarh Muslim University, could not see himself living in British India without joining the Muslim League. All these facts coupled with the political climate of then India, the Muslims from East Bengal made choices that were right for them and their families. After the Partition, a different kind of class struggle started.
Now, 77 years after the Partition — with tension rising, the minority Muslims in India are facing further intolerance, insecurity, and fear that my father’s generation in British India had felt. India’s treatment of the minority Muslims continues to remain harsh, biased, and cruel. Those Muslims who decided not to migrate to West or East Pakistan were never given the full status of Indian citizens. Yes, on paper they are Indian citizens, but in every sector, they continue to live like second class citizens. They were never fully embraced into the big cosmos that makes India whole with all the people in it.
Minority Muslims are under-represented in every arena including government jobs, foreign scholarships, and other lucrative positions. Those mostly go to the Hindus. The Muslims in India have been living a life of ill-treated minority ever since the independence of the Indian subcontinent. Now Modi’s government has added insult to injury by implementing CAA, and by creating NRC.
Populist leaders like Narendra Modi rely on the support of the “silent majority.” In a nation of 1.417 billion people, the right-wing Hindus in India have intense dislike towards the Muslims simply because of the fact that for centuries, the Muslim Mughal emperors ruled India. Under the Modi government, the rise of Hindu fundamentalists has given the BJP a whole new image of how India ought to be a Hindu state. As a result, the Muslims in India have been facing further persecution and discrimination.
With more violence looming on the horizon, the Muslims are not taking it lightly. They refuse to prove their identity and birthright as Indians. The younger generation across India had risen. In the 2003 Citizenship Amendment Bill, Manmohan Singh did not talk about leaving anyone out of citizenship based on religion. However, BJP keeps on harping about it, and it is a contention that the Congress has with BJP. The fight is not going to end anytime soon from the looks of it. Opposition Indian leaders have joined this protest to protect the rights of the minority Muslims.
Rabindranath, a “versatile genius” and a complex personality believed “The worship of God for them (meaning a tiller who is tilling the ground and a path maker who is breaking the stones) becomes true and real only through men’s love of his fellow men.” In tune with the English romantic poets Shelley and Byron, “Tagore celebrates the idea of liberty. Whereas Shelley in ‘Prometheus Unbound’ rejoices over the downfall of tyranny, Rabindranath visualizes a world: Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; where knowledge is free; where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; (Tagore, 1912)”
One hundred and forty years after writing the invigorating song, Borisho dhara maajhe shantir Bari, Tagore’s vision has not fully transpired in India. With hollow hearts, men and women are still waiting for the metaphorical rain of peace. People still have to find that tranquil place where barriers between people are removed and intolerance does not spiral out of control. People and the government of India need to establish what the true meaning of secularism is — without censoring the thoughts of others or making the free-thinkers submit to fear and intimidation.
Rabindranath’s call to his fellow countrymen for a ‘universal humanity,’ “undercuts religious, social, and cultural barriers by standing against colonialism, discrimination, and dehumanization. His new religion appeals for the spiritual unity of man through removal of mental stress and restoration of inner peace. Tagore remained a pioneer of the intellectual union of East and West and his romantic ideas will play a significant role in reshaping modern individuals in particular and society at large.”
Secular India is still hopeful that with pure hearts and resilient souls, they will remove the obstacles where there would be no need for hatred, which is often disguised in ideological warfare. One can hope love will enter people’s uncharitable hearts and everyone will be triumphant as Tagore had imagined, ‘Pour out your love into the stony-hearts/And let victory be yours.’
Zeenat Khan writes from Maryland, USA
