The "Gay Girl in Damascus" Hoax: Some Reflections

It's been not 24 hours since the mystery behind detained Syrian lesbian blogger Amina Abdallah Arraf Al-Omari has been solved. What began as an international outcry over the arrest of a popular blogger giving voice to the queer side of the "Arab Spring" quickly turned into a frenzy of Internet investigations, carried out by journalists and bloggers, that has reached a sad and predictable end - there was never an Amina in the first place. The blog, and even more disturbingly, an entire online identity going back almost four years, was the creation of a 40 year-old American man from Georgia now studying in Edinburgh, Tom MacMasters, and his wife Britta. In what follows I'll quickly recount the story, from first suspicions to this morning's denouement, then offer a few thoughts on what this might mean in the larger context of queer politics and the Middle East.

It all began with this post detailing Amina's capture by Syrian security forces, ostensibly put up by Amina's cousin Rania Ismail. The response was swift, with several newspaper reports and a flurry of "Free Amina" facebook groups, like this one and this one, mobilising concerned people around the world. But within a few days, as reporters and State Department officials in Syria attempted to contact Amina's family, doubts began to emerge. No one, it seems, had ever met or spoken to Amina, not even her girlfriend in Montreal, Sandra Bagaria (they had only communicated via e-mail). One of the first to publicly question the story was NPR's Andy Carvin, who was sceptical yet cautious to declare that she didn't exist. Maybe she was simply very good at concealing herself, as all activists living under repressive regimes must be. But then a Croatian woman living in London, Jelena Lecic, noticed that the photos of Amina being circulated were actually of her. There were hundreds, including all the photos on Amina's personal facebook page, all apparently stolen from Jelena's facebook. Troubled, she went on the BBC to prove her identity, and wonder how all this had come about. The evidence was increasingly pointing to an elaborate hoax.

I began following the controversy at Liz Henry's blog, where commenters took to the Internet to uncover as many details about Amina as could be found. The mass of details was confusing, and involved an extensive cast of characters, some real and some fictional. Amina had stated she was born in Virginia and went to high school and college in Georgia. She had a previous blog where she declared her intention to mix fact and fiction; she had also been active in posting on alternate history Yahoo mailing lists, declaring her interest in medieval Byzantium. There were several online dating profiles, one in which she listed her language as Hebrew. Some used pictures of Jelena Lecic, some of another woman. Her cousin Rania Ismail's facebook page turned out to be a likely fake; no one had been able to contact her either. Anything seemed possible. Was she the creation of Rania, a married Syrian woman looking for an escapist fantasy? Did Rania even exist? Was Amina a creation of Sandra Bagaria, the Canadian girlfriend? Or perhaps it was Jelena Lecic herself, whose first statement to the media was released through a suspicious P.R. agency? These theories may seem ridiculous in retrospect, but only through this kind of free-thinking exercise could all options be considered. The truth, when it came out, was perhaps stranger still.

Parallel to Liz Henry's and Andy Carvin's efforts, which later turned out to involve e-mail communications with someone likely to be the person behind the hoax, the website Electronic Intifada and the Washington Post were putting together a story based on two concrete leads. One came from Paula Brooks, an editor at the website LezGetReal (which was the first to introduce Amina's blog to a wide readership). She provided two IP addresses used by Amina, both in Edinburgh. The other came from Scott Palter, a moderator on the alternate history boards, who had once gotten a mailing address from Amina in Stone Mountain, GA. This, it turned out, was Tom MacMaster's home. Suddenly all the pieces fell into place: MacMaster was born in Virginia, had lived in Georgia, currently studies in Edinburgh, and plans to write a thesis on medieval Byzantium. He is a pro-Palestinian activist, and his wife Britta, a Quaker, was involved in organising events on Syria and Israel. Britta is a fellow at St. Andrews in the Centre for Syrian Studies, writing a thesis on the Syrian textile industry. She had posted pictures of her travels in Damascus, the same ones also used by Amina. The game was up.

MacMaster's so-called apology on the blog, posted this morning, is a remarkable display of narcissism, self-delusion and self-righteousness. He declared, "While the narrative voice may have been fictional, the facts on this blog are true and not misleading as to the situation on the ground," with the exception, of course, of all the key facts on the blog - that a gay woman, living in Damascus, was experiencing the revolution and had been detained by security forces. He had the gall to claim that, "I do not believe that I have harmed anyone." Let me count the ways:
1) Closest to home, it was Sandra, the Canadian girlfriend, who had been privately lied to for months. Reading her tweets from before the abduction story, one is struck by the sincerity and passion with which she speaks of Amina. She had to endure constant media questioning, when it became clear just how deep the deception went. Interestingly, the abduction story was posted only a few days after Sandra attempted to call Amina at home in Syria and got no answer. That day Amina wrote about security forces visiting her family and her subsequent need to go underground. It may be that this is the point at which Tom and Britta freaked out and looked for a way to take their character off the stage, at least temporarily.
2) Everyone else who had an online relationship with Amina, and who has been affected by the investigation. The website LezGetReal, for example, was subjected to intense scrutiny because Paula Brooks and other editors, who have families working for the federal government and do not wish to be outed, write under pseudonyms; they, too, were suspected of being fake.
3) Finally, most obviously and most importantly, this is a devastating blow to queer activism in Syria and everywhere else in the Middle East. These furious reactions from actual Syrian activists give a sense of the damage. Not only does the hoax make it more difficult for Syrian bloggers to be heard in the future without undue suspicion, but it puts LGBT activists currently in Syria under the spotlight of the authorities. In every way, MacMaster has done about as much harm to the Syrian revolution as could be imagined from a computer in Scotland.

It is, however, the following sentence that deserves the greatest outrage: "This experience has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism." Not only is MacMaster not apologising, he is in fact blaming everyone else for the very sin he has committed. In a sense, "A Gay Girl in Damascus" was the perfect instantiation of liberal Orientalism, wherein Western audiences are enjoined to sympathise with a young, attractive, Westernised and courageous individual battling against the forces of dark, oppressive Islam. If Amina didn't exist, one would have had to invent her. MacMaster's twisted activist vision piled on all the desirable characteristics for what he thought the West should know of the Middle East, but didn't bother because of the biased, Zionist media. The cruel irony is that in not finding a real Syrian who could represent some or all of these things, he confirms the very fantasies he set out to dismantle are just that, fantasies.

It is also troubling, it must be said, how those sceptical of Amina's story from the start have slipped into the same traps of Orientalist fantasy. One of the earliest arguments for the hoax was that, "No one in Syria would ever kiss their girlfriend in public," or speak so freely, etc. Though this may be in a very general sense accurate, it further adds to the erasure of the public presence of LGBT Syrians. Another argument from a commenter on one of the investigating blogs was that MacMaster had wished to show that being gay in Arab countries is not so bad, when in fact he had proved the opposite. There could be no one as free as Amina in Syria; but, the commenter added for good measure, there could be in Israel. It was MacMaster's anti-Israel bias that made him paint such a rosy picture of an Arab country. Both Amina's blog and the arguments of the sceptics are symptomatic of a wider set of highly debilitating discourses. In effect, it is becoming impossible to speak of what being queer in the Middle East is like without falling into one extreme or the other.

All of this brings to mind Jasbir Puar's extraordinary theoretical work Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, in which she tracks the complex ways in which queer activism in the West has become implicated with imperialist projects and mindsets. One effect is the erasure of Muslim queer sexuality, and its converse -Israel's propaganda efforts to brand itself as the only "gay-friendly" country in a homophobic region (known as "pinkwashing"). One of her tasks is to affirm the voices of queer Muslims and queer Arabs speaking out against state violence, against religious intolerance, and against US and Israeli colonialism all at once.
This is the kind of person whom MacMaster, no doubt familiar with this literature, wished to concoct. Two of Amina's blog posts, for example, were on the phenomenon of "pinkwashing." What this odious, despicable individual has managed to do instead is produce the perfect mockery of queer scholarship and activism, a farce that feeds right back into the very discourses he sought to resist, feeding them to the brim and sustaining them for years to come.



EDIT: On point #2 above, regarding the website LezGetReal and its editor, "Paula Brooks," evidence came to light one day after I posted that this person, too, was a man masquerading online as a lesbian blogger. After providing the information that helped expose MacMaster, a 58 year-old man from Ohio named Bill Graber was forced to admit that he had been involved in several online communities using the persona of a deaf lesbian woman. This raises many, many further questions about a possible widespread effort to infiltrate progressive movements, and reminds us once more of the need for vigilance and careful verification in online activism. The indefatigable Liz Henry has a summary of the whole sordid Bill Graber affair here.

Identity versus Subjectivity

The realisation that "we all have multiple identities" at some point in one's scholarly and personal development promises a lot but delivers little. Faced with a global political context in which serious cases of violence and inequality operate along the axis of "identity," and in which exclusivist claims acquire the negative epithet of "identity politics," a recourse to a more indeterminate notion of the self can point the way "out" to a more tolerant, pluralist and cosmopolitan path. Unfortunately, several unhelpful conflations between terms are thrown up in the process, obscuring the dynamics of the lived experience of recognition.

One distinction has been helpfully framed by Dipesh Chakrabarty as identity vs. identification. His critique of Amartya Sen's Identity and Violence shows that the assumption that recognising "multiple, contextual identities" can prevent sectarian violence is misguided because what counts is, in fact, "the external and surface signs by which I or others might identify myself as a member of a particular group: my skull cap, my turban, my beard, my name, my clothes, my circumcised or uncircumcised penis." Thus, during the Gujarat riots Muslims would conceal their real names, and Hindu shopkeepers would take care to paint images of Hindu gods on their storefronts to avoid being targeted. While the "complex sense of identity" that marked their "normal everyday life" did not disappear, it became less relevant than the largely symbolic conventions of identification.
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a918280932&fulltext=713240928 [in South Asian History and Culture, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (January 2010): 149-154]

Chakrabarty's argument is welcome, but it understates the particularised nature of the identity discussion itself. When we speak of identity, we have been led to speak exclusively of an elective affinity. I am Indian because I say I am, but I am also a Sikh, schoolteacher, city-dweller, parent, and so on. In fact, only some of these "identities" merit the name. Whether we like it or not, there is something immutable about identity that all the multi-culti well-wishing in the world cannot make go away. Chakrabarty and Sen would both refuse to acknowledge the dark secret that what makes a Muslim a Muslim, much like what made a Jew a Jew, is not just an uncircumcised penis as a "sign" or an assumption of the name. An entire history, place-based and kinship-based, made one known as a Muslim or Jew. Escaping this complex of material and symbolic factors entails either a radical and never-quite-possible displacement (moving far away where one's new neighbours don't know you or your relatives, and carry no prejudices to boot), or a multi-generational process of re-signification. Of course I am not claiming that identities are stable, and that people take on the attributes of the natural communities into which they are born. But moving from one identity to another is hard work in the real world, and may never be complete. Presumed alterities (being a Jew or Muslim "within" the "body of a nation"), once configured, persist through time.

Moments of crisis like 1947, 1984 or 2002 expose the impossibility of simply assuming the identity one likes. A Muslim hacked to death cannot appeal to "also being a schoolteacher and a father" to save his life. This is Chakrabarty's point. But my explanation for this phenomenon would be that "schoolteacher" is less of an identity than a subjectivity. Most of the categories by which we identify ourselves and recognise others share the common characteristic of being more amenable to being "worked on." I make myself, rather than am, a schoolteacher -- through repetition of certain meaning-making activities. To an extent, this is Foucault's point about categories like "homosexual" (the result of distinct ethical projects), and it can be applied to religion (Saba Mahmood thinks Muslim-ness works this way, through cultivation of the self). I am not claiming that identity and subjectivity are hermetically sealed concepts; they do lie on a continuum and sometimes a category can fall under one or the other. But I do maintain that those categories which are the least malleable and the more susceptible to being "coded" in the signs of identification proposed by Chakrabarty should be seen as more identity than subjectivity. This also means that, for a pluralistic and tolerant future, we need to start thinking in general about subjectivity more than about identity.

In my own case, my identity can be approximated as something like, a Romanian (with some mixed ancestry) child of professionals from Bucharest. This can be dispelled only with great difficulty. My name, my life history, and my education all conspire against easy adoption of other identities -- American, Indian, rural (should I choose to live in a village), labouring (should I choose to start working with my hands). However, being a graduate student, an intellectual, someone interested in Indian history -- all these things are subjectivities, which I carefully work on every day. They are less open to being challenged, but also less politically powerful. When I am concerned with the security and mobility of my person, nationality and class background come into play. This is partly why I would prefer to bypass the reduction of debates about forms of being and belonging to the terrain of identity, and to refuse both its privileges and challenges.

That Was the Revolution That Was: 1989 at 20

In post-communist Romania, history repeats itself as farce every winter, when talking heads and gray beards congregate on television to re-hash, ostensibly as a form of public service, what exactly happened in 1989. The stale, hours-long "debates" revolve around a set of questions that are both uninteresting and ultimately unanswerable, when those with the most at stake in covering up the truth are the ones being asked. First, there is the "coup d'etat vs. popular revolt" dichotomy, with its faithful subplot: the degree of outside involvement, mainly Gorbachev's and the KGB's. Second, the admittedly important problem of the mysterious "terrorists" whose rumoured presence in the capital led to thousands of deaths. Third, a more expansive chronology argument: was the revolution "stolen," and if so, when and by whom? What were its precise turning points, and how did contingency and conspiracy interact?

Not all of these lines of inquiry are relevant; indeed, keeping the focus on these mostly superficial formulations has allowed Iliescu & co. to spin a lot of yarn in weaving a veil of deceit over an exhausted public's eyes. Every so often, someone comes out of the woodwork claiming to hold the key to the whole highway; this year, it was Gen. Victor Stanculescu, former defense minister during the revolution and immediately after, now in prison for giving orders to shoot before his miraculous conversion to the revolutionary cause. He claims it was all a Soviet plot, and the "terrorists" were partly KGB agents. Provocative, and virulently anti-Iliescu on the surface, yet still not the story. Too much agency is handed over to the best-laid plans - for historians, this cannot do.

The long-term dynamics of Ceausescu's fall are not hard to track: since the 1970s Iliescu was his anointed heir, and his long exile in the wilderness proves the old man was aware of the danger. The "Letter of the Six," reformist communists who in March 1989 publicly challenged Ceausescu, represented but a small opening in the shifting tectonics of Party structures under the Leader. Indeed, the crucial question that no one directly asks the eminent revolutionaries is how and why were they so ready to form a new government hours after Ceausescu's flight? Where did Iliescu and the FSN (National Salvation Front) come from? Such a body does not form overnight; instead, it had probably been busy consolidating itself for most of the 1980s, making connections and building up support. The Letter was a kind of testing of the waters, and Ceausescu's loyal Securitate elements were quick to repress; yet who knows how much of the apparatus was quietly shifting its loyalties? As for the Soviets, they did not need to directly intervene. Gorbachev was certainly against the hard-line regimes of both Ceausescu and Honecker, personally and politically. He saw his own attempts at reforming socialism stymied by the intransigence of Moscow's old-style erstwhile allies. Iliescu's own penchant toward a perestroika-type society is well documented. Believing Ceausescu to have "sullied the ideals of socialism," the FSN was confident at first in its public proclamations to appeal to a vision close to Moscow (and even, in a telling but brief moment, to direct Soviet military support). Gorbachev's silent policy of non-intervention emboldened the growing second-rank communist movement that became the FSN to act; they waited for their opening and seized the day in December '89. They did so because they were convinced that the country was doomed under the status quo, that socialism had to be saved - in this they were close to Gorbachev's ideas. Yet Ceausescu himself held on to a hard-line position for the very same reason, and was paradoxically proven right by history. Once the iron grip was loosened, the game was up and socialism did crumble. Perhaps no one was more aware of the fragility of the regime, both economically and politically, than Ceausescu in his final days. His stubbornness was the sign not of a man who had lost the plot, but simply of one who had run out of options. This also explains his summary trial and execution, by any account a clear perversion of justice. Iliescu & co. tend to stress the necessity of such a move to "reassure" the population in those heady and uncertain days. While this may have been true, what did Ceausescu know and say publicly about those who had pulled the rug out from under him? The point is, we'll never find out. In the end, Soviet involvement is a great canard. Gorbachev may not have even foreseen or approved of the events of 1989 as they unfolded, but he certainly enabled and inspired them. The revolution was neither a coup nor a popular uprising, but a structural re-aligment: a complex, factional transfer of sovereignty involving different elements of party cadres, the Securitate, and the army. The only certainty is that the FSN was left standing as a solid, powerful entity with the will, capacity and legitimacy to govern as 1990 began.

On the second question of the "terrorists," there are many competing theories, ranging from KGB agents to loyal internal Securitate men to, well, nobody - merely a confused population who had been given arms to defend itself against an invisible enemy and had ended up shooting each other. A bombshell revelation, if it were to help resolve anything, would be needed here. But it may not matter all that much, despite the horrific death toll. It seems callous to say, but the greatest tragedy of the revolution has been the seeming irrelevance of its victims' sacrifice. For what did people die in the streets of Timisoara and Bucharest? Violence was a manifestation of a moment of suspended sovereignty, a kind of state of exception (where would we be without Agamben and Schmitt?) that allowed the new structures of power to consolidate. The price of the new regime was exacted in blood, not once but several times until the end of the following year.

If there was indeed a true opening for revolutionary action, it was not in the confusion of 1989 but in the growing discontent of 1990, when breakaway elements of the FSN -mainly former dissidents- and returned expatriate parties staged protests against Iliescu's decision to contest the first elections. This led to the infamous mineriads, when Iliescu repeatedly called on miners to march on the capital and beat up the "intellectual" protesters, condemning them as fascists and foreign agents. We are not necessarily dealing either with a genuine popular revolution that was "stolen," nor with an all-powerful coup methodically eliminating its enemies. Indeed, the extraordinary and naked violence of the mineriads, conducted unashamedly and out in the open (unlike 1989), should be read as a recognition by Iliescu's FSN of its limits: a serious crisis of incipient sovereignty. Provoking violent inter-class conflict was the only language with which Iliescu could face this challenge. The story since, wherein by 2009 Iliescu is an elder statesman and ex-FSN members form the backbone of all the major political parties left standing, does make a rigged game seem like the most logical frame. The answer is more subtle. Most remarkably of all, the structures of power put together by second-rank communists in the 1980s were able to outmaneuver both Ceausescu and the few dissident voices from the other side and creatively respond and adapt to the events of 1989-90, including the overthrow of the communist system (which they may not have anticipated, at least so suddenly) and electoral politics, to constitute themselves into an ever-expanding and tightening oligarchy. Such an analysis takes both contingency and large-scale determinants into view, stressing their mutual influence and constitution.

Historians of Romania (I am not one of them, though I could be considered a Romanian historian) face two urgent and monumental tasks in the years ahead. The first, to re-write the history of the revolution "from above," namely: working with Romanian and Soviet archives to trace the relationships between the Ceausescu regime and the outside world; assessing the strength of party structures in the 1980s, especially the development and internal conflicts of different Securitate and army factions - a utopian project, at least until Iliescu and his acolytes are dead or significantly marginalized; above all, explaining how the FSN and other forces became revolutionaries against, and heirs to, Ceausescu's regime. A range of methodologies, from diplomatic history to economics to political science approaches, would have to all be applied in concert. The second angle would make progress on the revolution "from below," namely establish a comprehensive history of popular protest against communism and its effects. One mostly neglected subject of research is the 1987 Brasov workers' revolt, one of the most important moments of resistance against the state. It is not enough to argue for simple causality or prefiguring, nor is it plausible to suggest that people ventured out into the streets out of the blue for the first time in 1989. The successes and failures of these movements, as well as their connection to the institutional story told above, must be carefully built up from still-restricted official documents and popular memory. Indeed, a great work on the genealogy of popular protest under communism going back to the mountain fighters of the early 1950s still remains to be written. Romanian historiography needs its own Ranajit Guha to write an Elementary Aspects of peasant and worker insurgencies. The day when all these levels of analysis can be integrated into a definitive account is far off, and may never come if political conditions in Romania remain as unfriendly to serious historical thinking as they are today.



*FURTHER READING:
The exhaustive blog of tireless researcher Marius Mioc collects video recordings, transcripts, and many other sources on the revolution and is a good place to start piecing it all together:
http://mariusmioc.wordpress.com/
See also Richard Andrew Hall's excellent dissertation:
http://romanianrevolutionofdecember1989.wordpress.com/

The Lesson of Gujarat, or How to Talk about Events

That the recent tragedy at Fort Hood should raise the spectre of anti-Muslim hysteria in the U.S. is by now commonplace. But the real stakes of the debate, namely the precise consequences of a certain way of thinking about events and their repercussions, are obscured by placing the focus of the debate around "how much Islam has to do with it." Framing the shootings of U.S. servicemen by this individual Hasan in the language of "terrorism" or "Islamic fundamentalism" is undoubtedly problematic. But to respond, those of us who wish to re-frame the issue are inevitably forced into a kind of obscurantist cul-de-sac that allows no discussion of Islam or Muslims whatsoever: that this is an isolated act of a "mentally unstable" person, that religion has "nothing to do with it." What we grapple with, in essence, is the singularity of the act and its relationality to a wider field of discourses, or ways of talking about things (in this case, Islam and Muslims).

Here is what I mean: whenever such events occur and are disseminated through the media, as they inevitably will in our globalised age, we should avoid the temptation of seeing them as exceptions, as acts that stand alone in the world, infinitely contingent. Instead, we should accept from the start that they will immediately feed into a vast discursive terrain of things being said, worked out and worked over, about macro-categories we are uncomfortable with, yet ignore at our peril. We should follow this event through the discursive terrain and see where it lands, and thus make visible the consequences of its particular path. The relational consequences of singular events are often so jarring that they might yet enable many (with the exception of those who are willing to pay the price), to look at the terrain anew and be made aware of the treacherous channels through which information travels and is re-directed, of how events acquire meanings.

I will use the example of the 2002 Gujarat massacres to make my point. Here, a much-disputed and yet very "real" event, the burning of 58 Hindus in a train coach in Godhra, happened in all its garish and horrifying singularity. Whether it was deliberate arson by a mob or something else, whether the categories of Hindu victims and Muslim attackers should be deconstructed, are all important yet tangential issues. Trying to disentagle religion and politics, local contexts and broad phenomena etc. etc. from the charred remains of this event, though ethical and honest in a scholarly sense, is mere impotence in the face of what happened next, when as many as 2,000 Muslims were massacred while the state not only stood by, but actively aided and encouraged the violence. A confrontation between certain individuals at a certain point in time was a spark to a fire that burned along the axes of Big categories, "Hindu" and "Muslim," all across Gujarat. In Amitav Ghosh's novel The Shadow Lines, the traumatic riots in Calcutta and Dhaka of 1964, which so decisively shape the characters' lives, can be traced back to an incident in far-away Kashmir over a stolen relic. Singular events become relational to contexts far distant in time and place. If we have a truly political, indeed moral, task in our complicated world, where information travels at once faster and more insidiously than ever, it is to break the links that are formed in this way.

What would it mean to think of Godhra, minutes or hours after it happened, with the bodies of 2,000 innocent people in mind? What would it mean to follow the contention that an individual Hasan stands in for a "Muslim problem" that must be faced, to its logical conclusion, to a widespread and concerted effort by individuals and the state to "deal" with it? The consequences of thousands of lives lost when so many minds are fixed (or being fixated) onto a category, in this case of the problematic Muslim that must be dealt with, are not worth the mental leap. There are those who will say that such violence is the inevitable result, or collateral damage, of whichever side they think is to blame acting wrongly. Yes, 2,000 Muslims died, but that's because they started it. This is, I would hope, only a small minority of those who are engaged in the conversation. The task for scholars, activists, and all of us concerned about these issues is to show that the price to pay, of creating a climate for civil violence, is far more de-stabilising to the security and internal peace of communities than a singular act unavenged, or a problematic category not properly dealt with. This is especially true in the United States, where the potential for reprisals is always high yet, with almost no exceptions, since September 11th no serious and sustained civil violence has occurred. India's lessons, from the Sikh massacres of 1984 to Gujarat and on, are vital in this regard. Communal bloodshed on general lines, visited upon individuals whose only connection to singular events from another place and time lies in the relation with those events constructed in people's minds, is a price too steep to ever pay. To suppress this urge to relate the singular, to think of unrealised consequences instead of the real and visceral event that has just happened, is admittedly difficult but it is also urgent.

The Trouble with Jinnah

On this topic, I will live up to the blog's title (which, by the way, is only 10% a pun based on the assumption that what I have to say is "just," and 90% straightforward, as in an honest admission that what I am offering is merely speculative). I don't know much about Pakistan, even less about Jinnah, and nothing at all about senior now-ex-BJP politician Jaswant Singh's new book on Jinnah that has caused so much controversy, because I haven't read it. From what I've heard, he has proposed that Jinnah was a sincere nationalist with a liberal, secular vision for Muslims whose best efforts at maintaining a united India were stymied by the intransigence of Congress leaders Nehru and Patel. Much has been made of the fact that such an argument at once united Congress and the BJP in outrage, and Narendra Modi banned his book in Gujarat not because he praised the creator of Pakistan but because he insulted the Gujarati hero Patel!

Why would a senior BJP leader praise Jinnah? For that matter, why did L.K. Advani, cheerleader of the Babri Masjid demolition and current head of the party who expelled Jaswant Singh, get into similar trouble four years ago for travelling to Karachi and saying nice things about the Quaid-e-Azam of Pakistan? The easy answer is that Jaswant is a "moderate liberal" member of the BJP who has always been interested in better relations with Pakistan, also the momentary goal of Advani on that particular trip. We can note that Singh is a scholar with a genuine interest in history who simply couldn't deny a valid explanation of Partition based on evidence (his points are not new in the literature, having been first articulated with great force and originality by Ayesha Jalal in her 1985 book The Sole Spokesman). But is there a Hindu nationalist case for Jinnah? What rhetorical moves can be made to arrive at such a position?

Here I want to repeat that I am not speaking of Jaswant Singh's beliefs per se, since I haven't read his book and don't want to put words into his mouth. He may very well be a liberal man who simply wants to build bridges; I wish to perform an imaginative exercise that would explain how Jinnah fits into a certain kind of Partition narrative.
Let's start with the fact of the division itself. The RSS and BJP have forever been utterly opposed to the very idea of Pakistan's existence. Indeed, one of the things that got Advani into hot water after he came back from Karachi was his assertion that Partition was "irreversible" and should be accepted. I read this statement, together with his comments about Jinnah being secular, as deeply melancholic. The old RSS man Advani is saying, "I don't like the fact that this country exists, but we have to deal with it, and anyway if it should have existed in the first place it would have been better off under secular Jinnah than as it turned out."
What Hindu nationalists don't like about Pakistan as it exists today is 1) its perceived Islamic fundamentalism (they obviously oppose the very notion of an Islamic state, and the threat of terrorism hangs heavy on their minds) and 2) its militarism (they perceive Pakistan not as a neighbor but as a permanent adversary). The distinction of an Islamic state vs. a state for Muslims is a subtle one, and for the average Hindutvavadi there may be no difference. For a sophisticated thinker like Jaswant and even for Advani, the "secular" promise of Jinnah, which included protection of Hindu minorities in Pakistan (Advani is a Sindhi Hindu born in Karachi), is a counterpoint to what they see as today's dangerous Pakistani state. The trick is that Pakistan itself is a story of failure, a grievous error that has ended badly for everyone (but especially for Hindu India, which now has to deal both with a problematic Muslim minority and with a troublesome Muslim state, two if you count Bangladesh). Where this Hindu nationalist thought differs from a liberal Pakistani intellectual in lamenting the difference between Jinnah's vision and reality is that, while it prefers Jinnah's secular Pakistan to actual Pakistan, the best thing of all would have been no Pakistan.

Here the second interesting twist happens, involving the attack on Nehru and Patel. Jaswant Singh himself has asked, "What part of the ‘core belief’ has been demolished by my book? What is core about Patel? He was the first leader to ban the RSS and imprison its leaders...but he didn’t ban the Muslim League.” This is perhaps the most un-subtle yet overlooked aspect of the whole story. The BJP in all its incarnations over time, from the BJS to the Janata Party, has first and foremost been suspicious of Congress-walas. To rehabilitate Jinnah is to redistribute the blame for Partition unto Nehru and Patel's shoulders, men who were actively hostile to the "right" kind of Hindu nationalism. After all, they were the ones who "let" the country fall apart and didn't "deal" with Jinnah properly.

To sum up, the feeling one gets is that there is a strand of Hindu nationalist thought that wishes more was done to prevent the creation of Pakistan, though at the cost of keeping more Muslims within a united India. This seems paradoxical, since the Hindu right has been trying for years to intimidate, and sometimes violently suppress, Muslims in India. But deep in the psychological recesses of that hateful chant aimed at the Indian Muslim, "Go to Pakistan!" lies this very frustration with India's division. "You have your state," they are saying, "now go to it."
What would have been the fate of Muslims in a united India? Do Hindu nationalists who oppose Partition believe they would have been swamped by numbers or "kept down" in their appropriate place?

More importantly, from "our" perspective (as scholars concerned with minority interests), how should we interpret the creation of Pakistan from the standpoint of what should be, in my view, the all-important question: what was/is best for Muslims in the Indian subcontinent? On the one hand, we decry Partition and its loss of life, and may wish that Muslims could have found a place in a united, secular India. But then what of Pakistan's intended purpose, as a safe space for Muslims? In the 1973 film Garam Hawa, Balraj Sahni's character is an aging Muslim shoemaker living in Agra who sees his family gradually disintegrate and, shunned, disempowered, even physically attacked at home, decides to make the move. The director, M.S. Sathyu, ends the film with the character changing his mind and staying in Agra to participate in a protest march. The conclusion affirms the possibility of a secular, socialist future in India that includes Muslims, and Sathyu never shows what happens on the other side of the border. Here Pakistan can appear as an option, a refuge from worsening conditions for Muslims in India. But the plight of the muhajir in Pakistan, as well as that country's turbulent history more generally, question such an assessment.
Pakistan is therefore a difficult subject for the historian, and there is no final verdict that can be rendered on a country so large and complex. Does it even make sense any longer to view Pakistan through the lens of "Muslims as a whole in the Indian subcontinent?" Separated by years of violence and miles of barbed wire, are Pakistani Muslims and Indian Muslims now two separate entities, like two species of Darwin's finches evolving on adjoining islands?

Netaji and the Naxalities: Violence, Politics and History

A few days ago, I was sitting on a bench in a small park behind the Jama Masjid in Delhi on a beautiful afternoon. I was talking to a young man named Mohammed Khan, a schoolteacher from the town of Jhansi in U.P. I looked up at a martial statue in the middle of the park and asked him who the figure was. Subhas Chandra Bose, came the reply. I asked my new friend what he thought of him. He nodded energetically, "Very great man." "You are a Muslim," I said, "and he is a Bengali Hindu." It didn't matter one bit. Netaji was a great man to all Indians because he fought for his country.

This conversation reminded me of another talk I had with a friend in Berkeley, who astutely complained that the problem he had with the Subaltern School historians, many of them Bengali bhadralok (I assume he was speaking of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty et.al.), was their romanticization and glorification of violence. This meant they were prone to expressing at least some degree of affection toward the ongoing Maoist Naxalite rebellion in West Bengal, Orissa and Chattisgarh, but also admired that far more mainstream revolutionary, Subhas Chandra Bose (conveniently ignoring his alliance with the Axis and his un-democratic aspirations for India). In one sense, Netaji and the Naxalites are far apart on any spectrum, whether political, ideological or even from the standpoint of Bengali history. The Naxalites are leading a peasant revolt that seeks to destroy that stratum of middle-class life and culture so carefully built up by the bhadralok over the last two hundred years. They are even fiercely against the Communist government of West Bengal, who they accuse of readily capitulating to bourgeois interests (the Nandigram massacre of two years ago represents only the most visible and shocking aspect of the growing divide between peasants and the CPI(M) elite in Calcutta). Bose, while not entirely de-coupled from a kind of authoritarian socialist philosophy by his Axis alliance (a marriage of convenience), represents something totally different: he was the last vessel into which the bhadralok placed their hopes and dreams, the final attempt to rescue the leadership of the nationalist movement from its westward drift to Gandhian ashrams in Gujarat and Nehru's parliamentarianism in New Delhi. Bose, an educated, cosmopolitan, and charismatic leader, shares with the low-class Naxalite agitators only the principle of an ethics of organised violence as the solution to a political claim.
Indeed, Bose is often viewed as Gandhi's counterpart, the other side of the conventional wisdom that India's freedom was won by non-violence. He is also the alternate examplar to emerge from the freedom movement. A recent obituary in the Economist of the Tamil Tiger leader, V. Prabhakaran, tellingly noted that his hero was "not Gandhi but Subhas Chandra Bose."

While having these thoughts, I happened to be reading Ramachandra Guha's collection of essays, The Last Liberal. Guha is one of the most (and few) popular historians in India, and he has undergone something of a transformation in his scholarly career. He made his name by writing a detailed sociological analysis of Chipko, the famed environmental protest movement in the Himalayas. This great book, hitting all the right notes in the "history from below" category, gave way to an increasing focus on individuals and a shift to politics Guha himself describes as "liberal." Aside from withering criticism of Marxist academics and the Communist political establishment in Calcutta, Guha calls himself as a Nehruvian and tries to establish the Congress leadership of newly independent India as the "Founding Fathers" of a democratic, secular and liberal country. This is all well and good, but it raises the most interesting questions when considering the relationship of the historian to social protest and resistance.

For one thing, as Guha points out, historians often confuse their scholarly methodology with their political beliefs. Someone who works on peasant rebellions in Bengal is quite likely to be sympathetic to the Naxalites, while someone who condemns the Indian Left is more likely to view history not as struggle and resistance but as other kinds of narratives, most notably a modernising and democratising trajectory that views violence and "identity politics" as obstacles to be overcome. For the Subalternists and those who Guha quite uncharitably calls "so-called feminists," it's hard to be ideological allies with bands of terrorists who have repeatedly expressed their desire to do away with intellectuals altogether. For those Subalternists working in well-funded academic establishments in the United States, the contradiction is even more glaring. On the other hand, it's hard to be a convincing critic of caste and patriarchy while reflexively reacting against any form of political organisation of the oppressed classes. Guha may have activist clearance on the environmental front, but he dismisses Dalit parties and the "so-called feminists" all too easily.

This brings us to the Indian election of 2009. The defeat handed to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in U.P. by the Congress was seen by many Western-oriented, modernising observers as a defeat of the "politics of caste" by the benign and rational considerations of economic development. Mayawati, while easily hailed by leftist historians as a hero (a Dalit woman in charge of India's most populous state), is considered by urban liberals to be a corrupt gangster. Lalu Prasad, formerly chief minister of Bihar and railway minister, is a garish thug, who presided over the most backward and violent of all Indian states. The greatest difficulty lies here for the historian: as well-meaning and anti-caste as one can be, there is simply no way to justify or even excuse the rise of a man like Lalu in Indian politics. No amount of caste oppression can adequately explain the arrogance and venality of such a figure. On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to take on caste without a radical challenge to the establishment - which may involve the rise of Mayawatis and Lalus in the bargain. Dismissing them as "identity politics" isn't very useful when caste or regional identity in India cannot simply be made to go away by being wished away, or not thought of at all.

The historian of India today has few options. One can always be a card-carrying communalist, writing textbooks about Muslim invasions and finding a safe home in the arms of the BJP. One can be a righteous leftist going on about protest and resistance while the backyard burns from Naxalite murders and bombs. Or, one can try and walk the middle path, conscious that most historians are middle-class people working in that bastion of middle-class respectability: the university. If, however, one decides to forge this happy compromise and label oneself as "liberal," more questions are raised about what gets left out in such a definition, and whether there is any serious message to the contemporary world of politics left to offer.