The Vice President of India Shri M. Hamid Ansari delivered “Khuda Bakhsh Memorial Lecture” on the theme “Identity, Citizenship and Empowerment”at Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library at Patna today .Following is the text of the Vice President’s lecture :

 Identity, Citizenship and Empowerment”

 
“I am privileged to be invited here to deliver the Khuda Bakhsh Lecture in the year of its Golden Jubilee. My thrill at the honour bestowed is subdued by the realisation of my own inadequacy. Maulavi Mohammad Bakhsh and his son Khuda Bakhsh are known to us by their simplicity, dedication to a cause and single mindedness of purpose. The institution whose Golden Jubilee is being celebrated this year is amongst a handful of its kind in the world. It is a unique collection of Persian and Arabic manuscripts, described by a visitor as “an enclosed garden of precious things.” These testify to the richness of the civilisation of Islam to which India and Indians contributed in no small measure.  One characteristic of it is the diversity of the cultural dialogue conducted over centuries between peoples of diverse stocks and traditions and the interaction between Islamic values and the historical experience of Muslim communities. 

The late Professor Mohammad Mujeeb concluded his monumental work The Indian Muslims, published in 1967, with what he termed “a note of warning”. “Generalisations about the Indian Muslims”, he wrote, “can only be partial statements of truth and would, therefore, be misleading.” Commenting on the inadequacy of prevailing historical perception, he added that “the Indian Muslims are judged by the non-Muslims and, vice versa, the non-Muslims by the Muslims, as if the historical record of one party could be separated from the record of the other, and each party answerable only for itself.” [1]

 
Equally relevant is Richard Eaton’s observation about the “diverse variety Indian Islamic traditions” that reflect “both the dynamism of Islam and the fluidity of Indo-Islamic identities.” [2]

 
Both judgements signal uniqueness. They were arrived at after encyclopaedic surveys of a thousand years of political, intellectual and cultural history in which the past journeyed into the present. Every stage of this journey was marked by debate and dissent, reflective of what were perceived to be prevailing challenges. It is therefore of critical relevance to India of today that counts 160 million Muslims amongst its citizens who constitute 13.4 percent of the population of the country.

There is also an external dimension to this identity. India is not a part of the ‘Muslim World’ but is not away from it; not a Muslim majority state in statistical terms yet home to the third largest community of Muslims in the world; not a society focused on Muslim welfare only but one in which the Muslims, as an integral part of a larger whole, constitutionally claim the attention that every other section does. The Indian Muslim community also has a history of engagement with the larger Muslim world and has contributed in intellectual, cultural and material terms to its enrichment. 

My endeavour today is to explore two aspects of the interaction that has characterised the Indian experience:

 
    * Have the Muslims allowed their parameters to be frozen in time and taken too much for granted?
    * Have they been sufficiently critical? Is there a need of newer impulses to respond to new situations?

Both relate to the debate within the community as also to interaction with the wider national and international community. Both have a contemporary relevance. Both are emotive and could be evaded if the instinct of caution were to prevail:

 Udhar mashkook hai meri sadaqat
Idhar bhi badgumani kam nahi hai

The effort, nevertheless, must be made.     

The discussion needs to be posited in the contemporary Indian reality. Ours is a plural society, a secular polity, and a state structure that is democratic and based on Rule of Law. Plurality is an existential reality; responding to its imperative, the Founding Fathers of the Republic crafted the Constitution endowed with the values enunciated in its Preamble: a sovereign, socialist, secular, and democratic republic dedicated to the achievement of justice, equality, liberty and fraternity. Each of these enunciates a comprehensive agenda; some objectives have been achieved; others remain work in progress. These political virtues are in essence interlinked and inter-dependent and cannot be considered as replacements or substitutes. Some are of older vintage, other are of recent origin.