I’m pleased to welcome you to the latest episode of Whitewashing Islamism by Martha Nussbaum. Because her earlier episodes were such monster hits, we’ve got some additional airtime to pepper today’s show with sanctimonious whining. Oh but before we start, to those who are new to Nussbaum, she is renowned more as the textual collaborator of that Maoist economist, Amartya Sen.

Nussbaum’s latest piece shows that she has finally come of age by shedding the last pretence to objectivity right at the beginning when she says

As it became clear that Pakistani Muslims perpetrated the horrendous terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November, many feared a wave of violence against India’s own Muslim community.

As much as it betrays a shocking lack of her understanding of the Indian scene, it simultaneously earns her the rightful title of Armchair Pipedreamer. Somebody please give me exactly one instance where Hindus attacked Muslims in the wake of a Pakistani terror attack on Indian soil. Exactly one. But Nussbaum’s hallucinogenic logic tells us that post 26/11, Indian Muslims weren’t attacked because:

…India’s Muslim community strongly condemned the terrorist acts and immediately took steps to demonstrate its loyalty to the nation.”

If our fortitude impels us to inflict further self-torture, we find ourselves at the threshold of four paragraphs of cloud-like prose to finally get to what Nussbaum wants to say: essentially a regorging of her stillborn theory that Indian Muslims are:

• discriminated against by the State in all spheres
• a peaceable lot
• as nationalistic as the dreaded Hindu Right
• routinely victimized for no fault
• not cared for by the media

Nussbaum goes to incredible lengths to “prove” this amorphous piece of fiction. She abuses, distorts, molests, misquotes, and violates every known principle of objectivity. In a peculiar manifestation of factual sadism, she draws from blatantly partisan and politicially-motivated “official” reports like the Sachar Committee and Lalu’s Kangaroo-court-like Banerjee Commission to conclude that Muslims are living a daily nightmare in “Hindu” India. But then she needs a brawnier foundation for you can’t go too far with these “reports,” which have already become joke books. And so she relies on anecdotal evidence, which is roguish to say the least.

Enter Mushirul Hasan. Prodigal academic. Eminent Historian. Current Vice-chancellor of the Jamia Milia Islamia (JMI).

The rest of her piece suddenly transmogrifies itself into a serpentine, sleep-inducing tautology of Mushirul Hasan.

…Hasan’s story shows that there is a distinctive and genuinely Islamic form of liberalism, long–lived and drawing inspiration from religious texts and their central concepts.

For a scholarship worth a few decades, Nussbaum interestingly doesn’t quote a single line from Islamic texts to back her vacuous claim. In fact, “Islamic liberalism” is an oxymoron that has no place either in fact or fiction. If Islam’s “central concepts” do contain liberalism, why do we see so much of internal strife, suffering, violence, and unrest in “pure” Islamic nations like Pakistan? But why bother with facts when you have anecdotal evidence? Continuing her euology, here’s how Nussbaum paints Hasan’s life-sketch.

Hasan received a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge University in 1977 and quickly became one of India’s most accomplished and respected historians of the nationalist movement and the modern nation. At the age of thirty–one, he was the youngest historian ever named to a professorial chair in India. He took a teaching position at Jamia Millia Islamia and has published a dozen or so well–regarded books on the nationalist struggle, the Nehru family, and the ideas of Gandhi, Nehru, and the liberal Muslims who joined with them.

Martha Nussbaum couldn’t be more telling or more ignorant or more partisan than this. She cleverly suppresses the fact that he is a Marxist historian. Understandable because Marxism is both dead and a dirty word. But back in his heydays, Mushirul and his mob of eminent historians took fierce pride in calling themselves “progressive” historians. We know what “progressive” means. Which brings us to the other side of Hasan’s personage, which Nussbaum carefully conceals.

Mushirul Hasan is not merely a false historian. More significantly, he is a common crook who was part of a clique that swindled public money.

.in 1972…a project was launched to collect and publish a record of the Freedom Struggle from the Indian point of view…the project was to be based on Indian documents. Its budget was to be a few lakhs. Ten volumes were to be brought out in five years. The scholars who were to undertake the job? Yours forever: S. Gopal, Bipan Chandra, Ravinder Kumar, Sumit Sarkar, Parthasarthi Gupta, Mushirul Hasan, K. N. Panicker etc. — in other words, the same lot of like-minded friends!

Twenty seven years [Arun Shourie's damning expose was published in 1997] have gone by. Not a few lakhs, instead two crores of Rupees have been spent. The project is lost in the wilderness — one of the major scandals of Indian academia.

Perhaps Nussbaum isn’t aware that the fastest route to get closest to political patronage in India is to write some form of hagiography of the Nehru dynasty. Whether they are well-regarded or no is subservient to the career-threatening question of who regards them well? Mushirul Hasan’s record shows that his books were well-regarded by the eyes that matter. On his “history” of the national struggle, we’ll examine this very instructive passage, starting with the 27 years bit again:

Twenty seven years have gone by. Not a few lakhs, instead two crores of Rupees have been spent. The project is lost in the wilderness — one of the major scandals of Indian academia. Not just that. These were leftists. At various stages, the leftists had done their best to thwart the Freedom Movement. Salivating at the thought that by doing so they would attract Muslim youth to their fold, the Communist Party had supported the demand for the Partition of India. And so, the dedicated historians who had been conveniently handed the project, did everything to suppress documents, and derail volumes which could not but have brought the facts about the left on record.

Doesn’t the underlined sentence illuminate Hasan in a completely new light? But Nussbaum lets nothing taint her saint. Her Shining Fakir of Islamic Liberalism has made Jamia Islamia the Nalanda of today, a bastion of true learning, which doesn’t discriminate against anybody, fosters pluralism, encourages debate, and practices inclusiveness.

Today about 60 percent of Jamia Millia Islamia’s students and 75 percent of its faculty are Muslim, but inclusiveness is the watchword (as it often is not in Hindu–majority institutions, where both Muslim and lower–caste students routinely suffer stigmatization and harassment).

While it is both futile and superfluous to elaborate on Nussbaum’s perversions within the brackets, it is enlightening to learn that JMI’s inclusivness has thrown up stellar examples like Burkha Dutt. But a pleasant surprise awaits us. Writing about JMI’s shameful conduct in the aftermath of the Delhi shootout, Nussbaum actually justifies Hasan’s decision to provide legal aid to the apprehended students.

With no hesitation, Hasan said that the university would pay for their legal counsel. The university had done this in other cases, just as it pays students’ medical fees. No one objected on those earlier occasions. … The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political wing of the Hindu right, decided to make an issue of the legal support. Accusing Hasan of misusing public money (Jamia, like all Central Universities in India, is government–funded), they demanded his resignation.

Offstumped’s excellent piece on this is enough to answer Nussbaum’s mind-boggling (lack of) logic. If you believe her, giving medical fees is the same as offering legal aid to people suspected of waging war against the Indian state. While I’ve not followed up the case, here’s a question: what if the apprehended students actually enabled the terror attack? Here’s some interesting food for thought: Offstumped justifiably demands JMI’s prosecution for exceeding its brief while Nussbaum blames the BJP for protesting against Hasan’s attempt to brazen it out. Time for the pleasant surprise: this is when we discover that Martha Nussbaum is U R Ananthamurthy’s cousin in the geography of ideology. Recall Ananthamurthy’s fervent, heart-wrenching appeal at the same JMI premises? While he stopped at praising merely the JMI, Nussbaum has outpaced him by elevating its Vice-chancellor to sainthood. Her child-like hero-worship of Hasan as a saint tends beyond Gandhi where sainthood is a function of pseudosecularism.

Unlike Gandhi, however, Hasan is thoroughly secular, a bon vivant who has a great interest in Urdu poetry and literature. Mushirul Hasan follows Gandhi’s program. In fact, I am tempted to say, somewhat hyperbolically, that virtually the only place in today’s India where Gandhi’s ideas are being duly honored is on the campus of Jamia..

This is a classic example where education is sacrificed to passion. If anything, Gandhi’s ill-understood conception of Hinduism unwittingly laid the foundation stone for today’s sleazy secularism. As we can see, Martha Nussbaum and her ilk exploit this sleaze with great skill. The Acorn insightfully observed elsewhere that It’s no accident that India is secular. At least 3000 years of history and culture have some bearing on the present. And I agree. What sustains secularism (it’s a term of abuse today given India’s Hindu tradition) today is not the contribution of Nehru or fellow-dimwits but this selfsame 3000 years of culture.

Nussbaum could have at least been upfront that she’s writing a piece that asks us to willingly suspend our disbelief. At worst, her piece is poorly-written fiction, and at best, it is a salivating euology dedicated to Mushirul Hasan.

Tags: Commentary, Covering up for Islamists, Fake Muslim Victimhood, History, Indian Politics, Islam Watch, Jamia Milia Islamia, Martha Nussbaum, Mushirul Hasan, Nussbaum on Mushirul Hasan, Nussbaum’s Fantasy, Politics, Pseduo-history, Pseudosecularism, Pseudosecularism Hall of Shame, Secularism, Society & Culture, Whitewashing Islamic Terror