Good Indian
In the English magazine Sunday, issue dated November 19-25, 1995, a detailed interview with Mr. Arun Shourie was published. The interviewer was Mani Shankar Aiyar. In this interview, one of the things Mr. Arun Shourie said was that it is very difficult for a good Muslim to be a good Indian as well.
After reading the interview, I called Mr. Arun Shourie on the phone. I said, “Tell me, am I a good Muslim or not?” He said, “Who can say that you are not a good Muslim?” I said, “Then listen: I am both a good Muslim and a good Indian.” While saying this, the words spontaneously came out of my mouth—“If I am not a good Indian, then Mahatma Gandhi also was not a good Indian.”
A few days after this incident, Dr. Mahesh Chandra Sharma (Member of Parliament) came to my office to meet me. I narrated this conversation to him. After listening to it, he said, “Maulana Sahib, you do not need Arun Shourie’s certificate to be a good Indian. You are a good Indian even without such a certificate.” (Hind-Pak Diary)
After that comes another incident. From November 23 to December 1, 1996, I was in Pune. One night, before Fajr, I woke up at 4 a.m. I made ablution and offered two rak‘ats of prayer with long recitation. After that, I sat in my room, and suddenly I remembered that Shri Guru Golwalkar and Mr. Arun Shourie had written that a good Muslim can never be a good Indian.
Thinking about this, tears flowed from my eyes involuntarily—that such people know so little about a human being. Much more aware of human nature was the 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman, who said:
I am large enough to contain all these contradictions.
I was saying this and crying: By God, I am a good Muslim, and at the same time, I am a good Indian. To say that I am not a good citizen of the country I was born in is an insult to my human dignity.
Love for one’s country is a purely natural emotion. And that which is rooted in human nature can never be absent from any human being.
I said in my heart: Even if Mahatma Gandhi were to be born again and say, “I give you a certificate of being a good Indian,” I would refuse to accept it. I would say: Does a son need a certificate from someone else to prove he is a good son to his mother? By God, I am a good Indian without any certificate from Guru Golwalkar or Gandhi.
The tears that flow in solitude out of love for India—unseen by anyone—are in themselves enough to confirm that I consider myself, in the fullest sense, a good Indian. (Pune Ka Safar, November 1996)
