Majlis and the roots of its ideology

Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen is an extremist right-wing political party. The party has attracted national attention recently because of a speech made by one of its leaders, Akbaruddin Owaisi, a third-generation dynastic leader of the party. While Owaisi’s comments have rightly attracted widespread condemnation lately, they are based on a longstanding historical tradition of extremist ideology that has never been far from the leadership of his party. This article explores the history and ideology of the MIM.

The party has its beginnings during the reign of the last Nizam of Hyderabad, an autocratic ruler of a princely state under British Raj. Hyderabad was the largest princely state in the Raj, and its ruler was the world’s richest man. He amassed a wealth that far outstrips the wealth accumulated by other extravagantly rich “princes” of the Raj; the rulers of large states like Mysore and Travancore had slightly smaller states, but their personal fortunes were orders of magnitude smaller. This despite the fact the territory that the Nizam ruled over was less productive and its people were poorer than those of the other large princely states of southern India. Even as the rulers of Mysore, Travancore and other states modernized their governance, allowed organized political activity and considered a more constitutional form of government, the Nizam steadfastly resisted any constitutional restrictions on his absolute power. There were no elected bodies at any level, from the village to the state. He ruled by fiat, issuing firmans and appointing his Prime Minister at his sole discretion.

Nationalist sentiment was growing in British India proper, and the winds of change began to be felt in Hyderabad. The Nizam decided that he needed a bulwark against forces calling for more representative government. In 1927, he encouraged the formation of a new organization called Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen – literally, gathering for the unity of Muslims – to “bolster the support of the Muslim masses to his kingdom, on the plea that ‘Muslims are the rulers’.”1 Soon after, the party adopted as one of its objectives, “to develop loyalty to the king and his government.” The party’s ideology was based on the notion that the Muslims were divinely ordained to rule over the people of Hyderabad state. Echoing Nazis and white supremacists, they believed that Muslims were the hakim kaum (“ruling race”). They used a modified form of the theory of Divine Right that western monarchs relied on. They propagated the idea that the Nizam was zill-ul-lah, or the Shadow of God of earth. The party was formally opposed to representative government, and was in favor of absolute power to the monarch.

Over the next two decades, the Ittehad, as the party was commonly known, became the Nizam’s primary political vehicle. The Nizam chose people for senior administrative positions from the Ittehad, and the Ittehad ensured the support of the Muslim masses to his regime. When the Nizam’s government banned the singing of Vande Mataram in Hyderabad state, the Ittehad actively supported the government. In much of British India, the song was sung at Congress meetings routinely; but in the Nizam’s state, anyone caught singing the song was liable to arrest and prosecution. The Ittehad leadership vocally and actively supported the creation of Pakistan, and sought to increase the proportion of Muslims in Hyderabad state by encouraging Muslims from the Central Provinces (today’s Madhya Pradesh) to immigrate to Hyderabad state, and through conversions. By the early 1940s, as the eventual independence of India and the departure of the British looked certain, the symbiotic relationship between the Nizam and the Ittehad was at its strongest. Both were worried about the impending loss of their power. Bahadur Yar Jung, the head of the Ittehad on whom the Nizam had bestowed title and land, came up with the slogan “Ana’al Malik” (“we are the rulers”) to mobilize Muslim masses on the core ideology of the party: that Muslims are the rulers and that every Muslim had a stake in the continuation of the Nizam’s state.

The Ittehad’s biggest moment on history's stage came with India’s independence. This article is not the place for a detailed account of the history of the Razakars, the Telangana liberation struggle, the Police Action, and its aftermath. My purpose here is to trace the ideology of the current MIM back to its origins. As a party wedded to the ideology of divine right of Muslims to rule over Hindus, the Ittehad was determined to do everything in its power to prevent the integration of Hyderabad into the Indian Union. Party leaders talked about independence and joining Pakistan as the only two options for Hyderabad. In this, there was some divergence with the Nizam’s interests; the latter much rather preferred independence, which would protect his powers. But the Nizam needed the Ittehad more than the Ittehad needed the Nizam. So he appointed Mir Laik Ali, an Ittehad leader, as its Prime Minister. He also provided active assistance from his government to the Razakar ("volunteer") private army that the Ittehad organized in order to terrorize restive villages. The activities of the Ittehad were dangerous enough for the government of the Union of India to ask the Nizam to ban it and disband all its organs (including the Razakars)2.

Qasim Rizvi was an Ittehad leader who headed the infamous Razakars. His words from 1947 have an eerie resonance to those of Akbaruddin Owaisi. He said in 1947: “A Hindu is a kafir, who worships stones and monkeys (laughter), who drinks cow’s urine and eats cow-dung in the name of religion (renewed laughter), and who is a barbarian and wants to rule us!”3 Owaisi disparages Hindu religious beliefs to the laughter of his audience in much the same manner as Rizvi did. And Owaisi establishes the connection to his predecessors in that manner of thinking. In his speech, Owaisi refers to his late father as “Salar” (Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi was also known as Salar-e-Millet or “general of the community”) and recounts how the latter used to mock the Hindu religious belief in multiple gods. Qasim Rizvi’s speeches 65 years ago had the same essential elements as Akbar Owaisi’s speech a few weeks ago: threats to break up the Indian Union, derision at Hindu religious beliefs, dismissal of Hindus as weaklings, bombastic expressions of strength, and copious references to god and his prophet.

After the success of Operation Polo and the Nizam’s signature on the Instrument of Accession in September 1948, the government banned the Ittehad. The bombastic claims of strength, determination and sacrifice that Rizvi and his associates had routinely made to the Muslim community of Hyderabad were not matched by the actions of the Razakars in the face of the Indian Union forces. Indian Union forces did not encounter much opposition at all on their invasion of Hyderabad. The Nizam had surrendered without a fight, with an eye on the large privy purse that the Indian government granted all princely rulers. Hyderabad’s Muslims had been told that they were the ruling race, but their ruler had faced an ignominious defeat and had taken the mercenary route. They now faced the reality of life as a minority in a democratic society, in a state where horrible atrocities had just been committed in the name of their community by the Razakars. Membership of the Razakars was never a significant proportion of the Muslim population of Hyderabad, and popular support for the Ittehad was always much smaller than the influence it had in the polity mostly thanks to the Nizam’s support. Let down by the Nizam and his Razakars, and faced with democratic rule for the first time, the Muslim community’s support for the Ittehad evaporated. Qasim Rizvi was sent to prison, where he stayed until 1957 when he was released to go to Pakistan on asylum. Ittehad leaders were driven to the political fringes, where they operated for the next few decades.

Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen was revived as a political organization in 1957, this time choosing the word Majlis for its popular name, to overcome the stigma that the name Ittehad still had in the popular mind. Qasim Rizvi sought a strong, well-known leader to take over the party from him as he was leaving for Pakistan; but he found no prominent takers. He eventually settled on Abdul Wahid Owaisi, a maulana (Islamic scholar) at the Jamia Nizamia (“Nizam’s school”), an Islamic seminary known today for its regressive fatwas4. Owaisi rewrote the party constitution to comply with the Constitution of India, and over the next two decades turned it into a family business.

The handover of the reins of the party from Qasim Rizvi to Owaisi was more than just a formality; in ideology and practice, the party retained its pre-independence characteristics. Two significant changes did take place. First, the lionization of the Nizam was replaced by the lionization of the Owaisi family line. Through three generations of Owaisi family leadership of the party, the family has amassed over Rs. 2,000 crores in weath. Much as the Nizam had enriched himself at the expense of his desperately poor subjects, the Owaisis enriched themselves at the expense of their constituents who remain some of the poorest and least educated people of the state. Second, the sudden loss of Muslim monopoly on power, and its minority status in an imperfect democracy turned the tables on Majlis cadres. By and large the perpetrators of state-sanctioned communal violence during the Nizam’s reign, they were now by and large victims of communal violence, which the state was largely apathetic to and its political elites often sanctioned.

The party’s rhetoric and practice ever since have grappled with this newfound victimhood, even as it has retained the belief that Muslims are the ruling race that god intends to rule over this land. The cognitive dissonance produced by observing disproportionately high Muslim casualties in clashes, while believing at the same time that Muslims are the ruling race more adept at warfare, results in the thinking that the police are the only reason for this dissonance. This is why Abdul Wahid Owaisi’s grandson taunts India to “remove the police for 15 minutes and then see what happens.” The idea that the 25 crore Muslims of India can overpower the 100 crore non-Muslims and rule over them pervades Akbar Owaisi’s hate speech, and it has its origins in the times when the Nizam still ruled Hyderabad by decree. It is not just Owaisi who believes this; the reaction of his audience to the “15 minutes” comment illustrates how this perception is widely shared within his party’s base.

MIM’s ideology makes it perhaps the most extreme political party with representation in Parliament; I certainly cannot think of another. Right-wing Hindu parties like the Shiv Sena and the BJP have their own share of hate-mongers (remember Varun Gandhi, who like Owaisi’s Ellayya and Mallayya talked about Karimullah?) but they maintain a façade of moderation – e.g. Vajpayee the mukhota (“mask”) – while the MIM’s senior-most leaders merrily spout hateful rhetoric. The Dravidian parties and the Akali Dal once sought to divide India, but they no longer do. The communist parties once sought to foment violent revolution, but they no longer do. I cannot imagine the top leader of any other party with representation in Parliament gleefully and publicly threatening the Republic of India in 2012 the way Owaisi does. It is this hateful ideology of MIM, rooted in the Nizam’s despotic rule, that makes it a curse on Hyderabad its Muslim population.

---------
1. Telangana People’s Struggle and its Lessons, Puchchalapalli Sundarayya
2. The Story of the Integration of the Indian States, V.P. Menon
3. The End of an Era, K.M. Munshi
4. Jamia Nizamia's fatwas include: allowing a man to marry up to four women in one sitting, banning Muslim actors from performing Hindu pooja on screen or getting their heads shaven.

Do they have strongmen that were bad in the beginning and did bad things in youth but subsequently wrote and did good things as a token? If so I got a willing blushing bride for them.

We are still waiting for the good things to be written and done in later years. I hope the blushes can be withheld in anticipation of the good deeds and writings.

Now that Akbar Owaisi has been arrested on sedition charges, he uses a familiar excuse... that the voice on the CD was not his! So much like Varun Gandhi before him. In the meanwhile, additional cases surface against him.

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/owaisi-says-hatespeech-cd-doctored-sent-to-judicial-custody-till-jan-22/316147-3.html

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/ap-courts-in-medak-nizamabad-seek-owaisis-presence/articleshow/18052267.cms

Looks like KCR is learning from the Owaisi family's way of making money! Him and his son go around talking about the glorious days of the past! They also tell the coastal guys to get out of Hyd.

Vakavaka Pakapaka wrote:Looks like KCR is learning from the Owaisi family's way of making money! Him and his son go around talking about the glorious days of the past! They also tell the coastal guys to get out of Hyd.

KCR has certainly copied the Majlis and Owaisi methods. Goondaism plus making money. KCR also praises the old days under the Nizam, when in fact most of the people of Telangana had an awful time. He thinks by lying about the past, he can make the people of Telangana believe that their future will be better under him than in a united Andhra Pradesh state.

Telangana will be heavily dependent on Hyd for revenue, at least for the next 10-15 years. If Hyd becomes the common capital for the next 10 years (as has been suggested), Telangana will have tough time to develop (unless MT promises central funds earmarked for Telangana). Kosta will be alright as long as the river waters don't become a big issue (Telangana, however, will make it a big issue).

panini press wrote:Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul Muslimeen is an extremist right-wing political party. The party has attracted national attention recently because of a speech made by one of its leaders, Akbaruddin Owaisi, a third-generation dynastic leader of the party. While Owaisi’s comments have rightly attracted widespread condemnation lately, they are based on a longstanding historical tradition of extremist ideology that has never been far from the leadership of his party. This article explores the history and ideology of the MIM.

The party has its beginnings during the reign of the last Nizam of Hyderabad, an autocratic ruler of a princely state under British Raj. Hyderabad was the largest princely state in the Raj, and its ruler was the world’s richest man. He amassed a wealth that far outstrips the wealth accumulated by other extravagantly rich “princes” of the Raj; the rulers of large states like Mysore and Travancore had slightly smaller states, but their personal fortunes were orders of magnitude smaller. This despite the fact the territory that the Nizam ruled over was less productive and its people were poorer than those of the other large princely states of southern India. Even as the rulers of Mysore, Travancore and other states modernized their governance, allowed organized political activity and considered a more constitutional form of government, the Nizam steadfastly resisted any constitutional restrictions on his absolute power. There were no elected bodies at any level, from the village to the state. He ruled by fiat, issuing firmans and appointing his Prime Minister at his sole discretion.

Nationalist sentiment was growing in British India proper, and the winds of change began to be felt in Hyderabad. The Nizam decided that he needed a bulwark against forces calling for more representative government. In 1927, he encouraged the formation of a new organization called Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen – literally, gathering for the unity of Muslims – to “bolster the support of the Muslim masses to his kingdom, on the plea that ‘Muslims are the rulers’.”1 Soon after, the party adopted as one of its objectives, “to develop loyalty to the king and his government.” The party’s ideology was based on the notion that the Muslims were divinely ordained to rule over the people of Hyderabad state. Echoing Nazis and white supremacists, they believed that Muslims were the hakim kaum (“ruling race”). They used a modified form of the theory of Divine Right that western monarchs relied on. They propagated the idea that the Nizam was zill-ul-lah, or the Shadow of God of earth. The party was formally opposed to representative government, and was in favor of absolute power to the monarch.

Over the next two decades, the Ittehad, as the party was commonly known, became the Nizam’s primary political vehicle. The Nizam chose people for senior administrative positions from the Ittehad, and the Ittehad ensured the support of the Muslim masses to his regime. When the Nizam’s government banned the singing of Vande Mataram in Hyderabad state, the Ittehad actively supported the government. In much of British India, the song was sung at Congress meetings routinely; but in the Nizam’s state, anyone caught singing the song was liable to arrest and prosecution. The Ittehad leadership vocally and actively supported the creation of Pakistan, and sought to increase the proportion of Muslims in Hyderabad state by encouraging Muslims from the Central Provinces (today’s Madhya Pradesh) to immigrate to Hyderabad state, and through conversions. By the early 1940s, as the eventual independence of India and the departure of the British looked certain, the symbiotic relationship between the Nizam and the Ittehad was at its strongest. Both were worried about the impending loss of their power. Bahadur Yar Jung, the head of the Ittehad on whom the Nizam had bestowed title and land, came up with the slogan “Ana’al Malik” (“we are the rulers”) to mobilize Muslim masses on the core ideology of the party: that Muslims are the rulers and that every Muslim had a stake in the continuation of the Nizam’s state.

The Ittehad’s biggest moment on history's stage came with India’s independence. This article is not the place for a detailed account of the history of the Razakars, the Telangana liberation struggle, the Police Action, and its aftermath. My purpose here is to trace the ideology of the current MIM back to its origins. As a party wedded to the ideology of divine right of Muslims to rule over Hindus, the Ittehad was determined to do everything in its power to prevent the integration of Hyderabad into the Indian Union. Party leaders talked about independence and joining Pakistan as the only two options for Hyderabad. In this, there was some divergence with the Nizam’s interests; the latter much rather preferred independence, which would protect his powers. But the Nizam needed the Ittehad more than the Ittehad needed the Nizam. So he appointed Mir Laik Ali, an Ittehad leader, as its Prime Minister. He also provided active assistance from his government to the Razakar ("volunteer") private army that the Ittehad organized in order to terrorize restive villages. The activities of the Ittehad were dangerous enough for the government of the Union of India to ask the Nizam to ban it and disband all its organs (including the Razakars)2.

Qasim Rizvi was an Ittehad leader who headed the infamous Razakars. His words from 1947 have an eerie resonance to those of Akbaruddin Owaisi. He said in 1947: “A Hindu is a kafir, who worships stones and monkeys (laughter), who drinks cow’s urine and eats cow-dung in the name of religion (renewed laughter), and who is a barbarian and wants to rule us!”3 Owaisi disparages Hindu religious beliefs to the laughter of his audience in much the same manner as Rizvi did. And Owaisi establishes the connection to his predecessors in that manner of thinking. In his speech, Owaisi refers to his late father as “Salar” (Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi was also known as Salar-e-Millet or “general of the community”) and recounts how the latter used to mock the Hindu religious belief in multiple gods. Qasim Rizvi’s speeches 65 years ago had the same essential elements as Akbar Owaisi’s speech a few weeks ago: threats to break up the Indian Union, derision at Hindu religious beliefs, dismissal of Hindus as weaklings, bombastic expressions of strength, and copious references to god and his prophet.

After the success of Operation Polo and the Nizam’s signature on the Instrument of Accession in September 1948, the government banned the Ittehad. The bombastic claims of strength, determination and sacrifice that Rizvi and his associates had routinely made to the Muslim community of Hyderabad were not matched by the actions of the Razakars in the face of the Indian Union forces. Indian Union forces did not encounter much opposition at all on their invasion of Hyderabad. The Nizam had surrendered without a fight, with an eye on the large privy purse that the Indian government granted all princely rulers. Hyderabad’s Muslims had been told that they were the ruling race, but their ruler had faced an ignominious defeat and had taken the mercenary route. They now faced the reality of life as a minority in a democratic society, in a state where horrible atrocities had just been committed in the name of their community by the Razakars. Membership of the Razakars was never a significant proportion of the Muslim population of Hyderabad, and popular support for the Ittehad was always much smaller than the influence it had in the polity mostly thanks to the Nizam’s support. Let down by the Nizam and his Razakars, and faced with democratic rule for the first time, the Muslim community’s support for the Ittehad evaporated. Qasim Rizvi was sent to prison, where he stayed until 1957 when he was released to go to Pakistan on asylum. Ittehad leaders were driven to the political fringes, where they operated for the next few decades.

Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen was revived as a political organization in 1957, this time choosing the word Majlis for its popular name, to overcome the stigma that the name Ittehad still had in the popular mind. Qasim Rizvi sought a strong, well-known leader to take over the party from him as he was leaving for Pakistan; but he found no prominent takers. He eventually settled on Abdul Wahid Owaisi, a maulana (Islamic scholar) at the Jamia Nizamia (“Nizam’s school”), an Islamic seminary known today for its regressive fatwas4. Owaisi rewrote the party constitution to comply with the Constitution of India, and over the next two decades turned it into a family business.

The handover of the reins of the party from Qasim Rizvi to Owaisi was more than just a formality; in ideology and practice, the party retained its pre-independence characteristics. Two significant changes did take place. First, the lionization of the Nizam was replaced by the lionization of the Owaisi family line. Through three generations of Owaisi family leadership of the party, the family has amassed over Rs. 2,000 crores in weath. Much as the Nizam had enriched himself at the expense of his desperately poor subjects, the Owaisis enriched themselves at the expense of their constituents who remain some of the poorest and least educated people of the state. Second, the sudden loss of Muslim monopoly on power, and its minority status in an imperfect democracy turned the tables on Majlis cadres. By and large the perpetrators of state-sanctioned communal violence during the Nizam’s reign, they were now by and large victims of communal violence, which the state was largely apathetic to and its political elites often sanctioned.

The party’s rhetoric and practice ever since have grappled with this newfound victimhood, even as it has retained the belief that Muslims are the ruling race that god intends to rule over this land. The cognitive dissonance produced by observing disproportionately high Muslim casualties in clashes, while believing at the same time that Muslims are the ruling race more adept at warfare, results in the thinking that the police are the only reason for this dissonance. This is why Abdul Wahid Owaisi’s grandson taunts India to “remove the police for 15 minutes and then see what happens.” The idea that the 25 crore Muslims of India can overpower the 100 crore non-Muslims and rule over them pervades Akbar Owaisi’s hate speech, and it has its origins in the times when the Nizam still ruled Hyderabad by decree. It is not just Owaisi who believes this; the reaction of his audience to the “15 minutes” comment illustrates how this perception is widely shared within his party’s base.

MIM’s ideology makes it perhaps the most extreme political party with representation in Parliament; I certainly cannot think of another. Right-wing Hindu parties like the Shiv Sena and the BJP have their own share of hate-mongers (remember Varun Gandhi, who like Owaisi’s Ellayya and Mallayya talked about Karimullah?) but they maintain a façade of moderation – e.g. Vajpayee the mukhota (“mask”) – while the MIM’s senior-most leaders merrily spout hateful rhetoric. The Dravidian parties and the Akali Dal once sought to divide India, but they no longer do. The communist parties once sought to foment violent revolution, but they no longer do. I cannot imagine the top leader of any other party with representation in Parliament gleefully and publicly threatening the Republic of India in 2012 the way Owaisi does. It is this hateful ideology of MIM, rooted in the Nizam’s despotic rule, that makes it a curse on Hyderabad its Muslim population.

---------
1. Telangana People’s Struggle and its Lessons, Puchchalapalli Sundarayya
2. The Story of the Integration of the Indian States, V.P. Menon
3. The End of an Era, K.M. Munshi
4. Jamia Nizamia's fatwas include: allowing a man to marry up to four women in one sitting, banning Muslim actors from performing Hindu pooja on screen or getting their heads shaven.

Very well written, PP. Thank you for helping us understand the origins of this organization and the jokers heading it.

Vakavaka Pakapaka wrote:Telangana will be heavily dependent on Hyd for revenue, at least for the next 10-15 years. If Hyd becomes the common capital for the next 10 years (as has been suggested), Telangana will have tough time to develop (unless MT promises central funds earmarked for Telangana). Kosta will be alright as long as the river waters don't become a big issue (Telangana, however, will make it a big issue).

You bet river waters will be an issue. One of the constant complaints from Telangana people is that they don't get enough water from the Godavari and Krishna systems, even under samaikya Andhra Pradesh. So if the states separate, we can expect acrimony of the Kaveri variety on those two rivers as well. This is another reason I think a united AP state is better for Telugu people on the whole.

What needs to be examined, is how these people have been able to push through this message of god given right of Muslims to rule. It is the doctrine of political Islam with racist overtones, where they are able to quote their scriptures Hadith and Quran.

Because they quote their scriptures, common folks (Muslims) are not able to question them, because anybody questioning them is attacked as questioning the Quran and the Political islamic doctrine aspect of it.

This is probably the chief cause of trouble in over 50 countries and in Kerala, West Bengal, Assam , UP, J&K.

Once you allow them, they legitimize power in a variety of ways, and entrench themselves, controlling the population through Mullahs.

Kerala is becoming a very bad, and there are reports of an armed force being trained. The new recruits are asked to kill dogs with a machete, as a right of enunciation, to ensure that they can handle the blood and gore. They zoom in Motorbikes and kill a dog mercilessly. We all know why they choose dogs and not cats or snakes for example.

In one night, so many were found killed.

Edmund Burke said "All that's necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing."

Muslims not taking on the vile, racist , political Islamic doctrine is a classic example of it. It is a very worrisome, and future could see very grave problems starting from these areas.