‘Certain sections attempting to treat Muslims as others’: Hamid Ansari
Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, February 10
Former Vice President Hamid Ansari on Wednesday said a concerted effort was on from certain quarters to regard the Muslims as others.
He was speaking during a discussion on his recently released autobiography “By Many a Happy Accident: Recollections of a Life”, organised virtually by the Centre for Policy Research.
Attended by former ministers and Congress leaders P Chidambaram and Shashi Tharoor, former MP Pawan Verma and former foreign secretary Shyam Saran, the discussion veered into nuances of secularism and Muslim identity.
Chidambaram was the first to speak of what he described as the vanishing class of Muslim icons, such as Hamid Ansari, from public life.
“I am a resident of Delhi and meet a number of people but I am not meeting enough Muslim people. I don’t find them. Are they being ostracised? Are they withdrawing? I can count Muslim icons of Delhi on my fingers. I think Hamid Ansari is politely agreeing with me and is as pained as I am that developments of the last several years are threatening those who are Muslims,” said Chidambaram.
The Congress leader accused the ruling BJP of targeting the Muslim identity.
“Muslim identity is being deliberately targeted in India and the current dispensation is targeting them viciously,” said Chidambaram.
Ansari later added that there was an effort from a section of people to treat Muslims as “others”.
The former VP said, “Yes I am pained because there is a concerted effort by some to regard Muslims as others. Am I a citizen or not? If I am a citizen I have the right to be a beneficiary of all things that flow out of citizenship. For me all my life the Preamble of the Constitution and its four principles, justice, liberty, equality and fraternity sum up the discussion of what we would want to be like.”
Noting that a plural society is an existential reality in India, Ansari recalled the 2015 episode where he was questioned for not saluting the Tricolour during the Republic Day celebrations.
Another time he was questioned by BJP’s Ram Madhav for skipping the Yoga Day event.
Ansari said those exercises in targeting him were “rigged exercises”.
“I know what protocol etiquette is. Yoga is a private business. I do yoga every morning. Why should I go around parading it. I was not invited to the Yoga Day event and I did not go to the function. When the PM is the chief guest, President and VP are not invited. Those who primed the controversies later apologised in some way or the other,” said the former vice president.
Ansari also defended separate personal laws in times when the ruling BJP is steadily moving towards a uniform civil code.
When asked by Pawan Verma why a secular Congress government overturned a progressive SC judgment in the Shah Bano case, Ansari said, “Politicians make judgements. You can examine in hindsight if those were the correct judgements.”
To another question by Verma about why post Independence no attempt was made to change personal laws of other religions barring the Hindus, Ansari argued that Muslim laws of criminal jurisprudence had been dropped during British times.
Ansari asked, “Can marriage, divorce, inheritance laws be uniformed in Indian society? The argument that Muslim law was not touched is not factual. Everyone was touched to the point it suited political convenience.”
