Omar on Umrah: Optics in the Desert

Looks like National Conference decided to perform Umrah. Good. But it is not parties that perform a certain worship it is persons that connect to the divine. Umrah is an obligation for an individual not for a party, much less a political party.

God in any case knows all, sees all; who are we relaying these pictures and videos to! When light falls on a worshipper it doesn’t illuminate, it fades. But this is not something specifically true for Omar and his team. We see almost all people doing it these days. A selfie with Ka’ba is becoming a profile picture of our journey to Mecca. Well, commenting on individuals is not a nice thing to do. It is not desired and it has a moral side to it. One can never peep into someone’s heart. What is between an individual and his God is only between the individual and his God. Others should shut their mouth. I shut my own.

But here the pictures weren’t about an individual, they were nothing less than party postcards. Given the political background, it carries a certain message. It’s akin to drawing on the religious sensibilities of the people back home. National Conference has carried this contradiction in brazen ways, though they might presume it as their mastery over a craft. One the one hand, the National Conference takes pride in it being a secular party that made a Muslim majority state, J&K, join a Hindu majority country, India, at a time when the whole sub-continent was divided on the basis of religious identity. The party still boasts of it being pluralistic in its application of power by carrying along all faiths and regions of the J&K in the government. At a time when Indian politics is completely polarised along religious lines, the National Conference repeatedly talks about the secular recovery of India, and then a place in it for a Muslim majority like J&K. If that is the essential character of the National Conference, the pictures viraled from Mecca don’t fit in the frame. That is one.

Two, this time rightwing politics is on the throne. It looks like not just a dust-up on the surface but even underneath the rightwing drills are lifting the earth upside down. The answer to this situation is not to create another communal symbolism. We don’t need to tell the community that we are a party that is embedded in you. What we need is to rise above this strain of politics and work for the principals that are applicable in the larger frame of humanity. We can be rooted in our faith, tied to our community, yet do a politics that transcends parochialism. That is two, but the third one is more important when it comes to National Conference.

And that is the political character of this party. In a changed situation where the elections reflected a clear division along religious and regional lines, National Conference needs to revisit its history, and determine what is the political character, and political limits, of this party. When it comes to talking to Delhi or the people outside Kashmir, this party always underlines its ‘secular’ character. It even, at different points of our political journey, wanted to convince the Muslims of Kashmir of the ‘virtues of secularism’. After all that is the only way it could explain its decision to join the Union of India. Where has that landed the Kashmiri Muslims as a political collective is something this party needs to seriously debate over. The pictures sent from Mecca may do little to compensate the damage that National Conference did to the Kashmiri Muslim community, as a political collective, by robbing it of its democratic value. On this, someone like Omar Abdullah needs to think seriously. An even more profound thinking is needed to apply the lessons in a changed situation.

One wouldn’t expect it from a person like Omar Abdullah to play such photo-op that can easily be labelled as theatrics. Besides, it has a political undertone and that is not what the Muslims of Kashmir need in the name of political identity. Our problems are rooted in real difficulties and it needs an approach that is equally rooted in reality. We cannot, and should not consolidate our community in the name of a superficial sense-of-identity, but the deeper appreciation of the content-of-community.

Tailpiece: Jinnah and the current politics in India cannot sit together. That is like fire and fire. But may be National Conference for a while, in the changed circumstance, can. Jinnah was spotted in his car by a group of Muslims standing by the road side. They started raising slogans, and one of them chanted, Maulana Jinnah. The man accused of communal politics drove back the car, and addressing the pack of people sternly dropped a message: “ Mr. Jinnah, I am plain Mr. Jinnah.” In a politics that was driven by community anxieties, he didn’t want to take any advantage from Muslim symbolism.

Any lessons for today’s politicians?