The more things change for India's Muslims, the more they remain the same thanks to their leaders who are forever stuck in a time warp. It's more than six decades since the country earned independence from the British. Meanwhile the world has dramatically changed. India is incredibly different today from what it had been 62 monsoons ago.
Its priorities and concerns have changed. Its people have changed and their attitude to life has undergone a watershed transformation. And India has truly arrived in every sense of 
the word.

If anything hasn't changed in this land of mindboggling contradictions, it is the Indian Muslim. He remains where he had been in 1947. His concerns, issues and priorities remain what they had been at the time of Independence. Apparently, his religious freedom is perpetually threatened. One day, he sees his Sharia under attack. At other times, either his religious places are threatened or there's a clear and present danger to his religious sensitivities. And when he gets some time to breathe after all this, he has to fight for protection and justice. Most of these issues are recurring in nature. They fade away from time to time only to come back with a vengeance, like a mutating deadly disease. Look at this Vande Mataram business. This is not the first time we are debating it. It has been there since as long as I can remember. In fact, it precedes the Partition and goes right back to the early years of the independence struggle, which once had the Hindus and Muslims fighting the British together-shoulder to shoulder.

Bengal's militant nationalist poet Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's song celebrating Mother India has been around for over a century. And controversy surrounding it is almost as old as the song. The all-embracing, magnanimous Hindu who sees the divine in every manifestation of Nature easily identifies with Vande Mataram. Originally part of a novel and play, Anand Math (1882) by the same author, the song has the poet addressing India as the divine mother or mother goddess and bowing his head in total submission before it.

Look at this stanza from the popular English translation by Sri Aurobindo:

Thou art Durga, Lady and Queen,

With her hands that strike and her

swords of sheen,

Thou art Lakshmi lotus-throned,

And the Muse a hundred-toned,

Pure and perfect without peer,

Mother lend thine ear,

Rich with thy hurrying streams,

Bright with thy orchard gleams,

Dark of hue O candid-fair

While this makes perfect sense to the liberal Hindu majority, who find this marriage of the divine and the temporal in the motherland rather appropriate and convenient, Muslims have always baulked at treating the motherland as a divine power.

This does not mean they love their country any less than fellow Indians. It's just that their faith doesn't allow them to replace God with the motherland. Perhaps no monotheistic religion emphasises and celebrates the unity and oneness of God as Islam does. It doesn't tolerate any imitation of God. It strictly forbids visual portrayal of the Prophet and even images of his disciples, lest they are deified by overzealous followers. This is something that Muslims have always found hard to explain to their Hindu brethren. This is a predicament that has always been there. The issue over Vande Mataram was ostensibly resolved after the Independence. In view of the Muslim sensitivities, India's founding fathers decided to adopt ‘Jana Gana Mana,' another great song by another Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore, as the national anthem. Vande Mataram, however, was designated a national song and remains widely popular.

(Personally, I believe nothing can beat Iqbal's Saare Jahan se Achcha Hindustan hamara! It brings out goose bumps all over, especially when played by the army band on special occasions. Ironically, it was penned by someone who's been adopted by Pakistan as its national poet. But visionaries like Iqbal can't be imprisoned by the fragile walls of nation states. They are the collective heritage of the mankind.)

That decision on the national anthem by the Constituent Assembly should have put an end to the controversy. But it didn't. Given the cynical, exploitative nature of our politics, the issue continues to pop up from time to time. The politics of patriotism has been the bane of this great country.

The Supreme Court ruled long ago that singing Vande Mataram is totally optional and that nobody can be compelled to join in the collective crooning. However, desperate politicians being what they are continue to flog this dead horse whenever they run out of more original ideas. And Muslims have always played into their hands. Predictably, they get all worked up and come out on the streets-only to walk, eyes wide shut, into the trap laid by their enemies. Look at this new fatwa issued by the Jamiatul Ulema-e-Hind at its convention at Darul Uloom Deoband. JUH is an organisation of eminent religious scholars that had been in the forefront of India's independence movement 
and vehemently opposed the Partition. And Darul Uloom Deoband is arguably the most respected and influential Islamic university in the world after Al Azhar in Egypt.

The 30th convention of the Jamiat during which the fatwa was issued had been attended by federal interior minister Chidambaram, where he emphasised that protection of minorities was the duty of the majority and the first golden rule of democracy.

So what was the need for this fatwa, especially when there already exists one, issued by Darul Uloom Deoband in 2006, which argues that parts of Vande Mataram go against Islam's monotheistic philosophy?

Although I understand why most Muslims have qualms in saying, Vande Mataram, what really beats me is why Muslim leadership-if there's such a thing-is constantly obsessing over frivolous, non-issues at the cost of far bigger problems and serious challenges facing the community.

I mean this is not a life-and-death issue. Why do we have to get bogged down in such never-ending controversies and debates that haven't solved anything over the past hundred years?

I have great respect for our Ulema and religious leaders. But is there no way of ignoring such stupid, totally irrelevant nonsense such as this to focus on the real concerns and problems of India's Muslims?

My generation grew up in the 1980's and 1990's on a heavy dose of the oppressive, all-consuming mosque-temple politics. The Muslim leaders played right into the hands of the Hindu extremists throughout those turbulent years, helping the very forces they claimed to fight. And they continue to play the same game of nihilistic reaction politics. They haven't learnt a damn thing all these years!

Is it any wonder then this new fatwa has given a new lease of life to the saffron clan, which had been licking its wounds sustained during the recent electoral battles with Sonia Gandhi's Congress? Suddenly, all sorts of nuts are crawling out of the woodwork threatening to drive over 200 million Muslims into Pakistan.

Who should we thank for this? As if Indian Muslims do not already have enough problems, our leaders and Ulema are bent on inventing new ones. India's Muslims are, according to the findings of a government appointed commission led by Justice Rajinder Sachar, worse placed than the lowest of the low caste in every respect. From education to employment to representation in power, the world's largest minority is right at the lowest rung of social-political-economic hierarchy.

What are our leaders doing to change this shameful state of affairs? How long will they keep us the prisoner of our past? Isn't it time for India's Muslims to move on?

Posted here with permission of author Aijaz Zaka of Khaleej Times