Last year on my trip to India, I subscribed to the Indian Journal of Secularism. Yesterday, I received four issues of the journal. The
journals will keep me busy for some time. While browsing through one of the
issues (Volume 19. No. 1. April-June 2015), I came across a paper by Prof.
Monirul Hussain titled ‘When Nehru Died: Excavating the Response of Muslim
Minority Citizens in a Small Town of Assam.’
While most
of the paper describes the reaction of the people in North Lakhimpur (in Upper Assam) to
Jawaharlal Nehru’s death in 1964, and especially the devastation stemming from
fear that Prof. Hussain’s maternal grandfather experiences, towards the end, he
narrates his own efforts to make sense of an event that obviously had a great
personal and public impact.
Prof. Hussain narrates: “When we all went to bed at night I
was very much disturbed. As a 12 year old child I was thinking of life after
death. What would happen to Nehru in the aftermath of his death in the court of
invisible Allah/God?
“Our Moulvi Sahib told us earlier that only Muslims will go
to heaven. Next morning when our Moulvi Sahib came to teach us how to read the
Holy Quran, I raised a question before him. The Moulvi had quite hard opinions
about religion. I asked him whether Nehru is going to heaven or not? The Moulvi
was somewhat embarrassed. He wanted to avoid the question I raised. He asked me
to concentrate on reciting the Quran. However, I was not relenting I raised the
question again.
“He paused for a while and said, “Nehru will go to heaven Insa
Allah.” I reminded him that it was he who told me on an earlier occasion that
only Muslims will go to heaven after death. He paused for a while again, and
then asserted very firmly: “Don’t you know the Muslims all over India are
praying for him hence Nehru will go to heaven Insa Allah.”
“As a 12-year-old
child I was relieved that Nehru will go to heaven! Later in the day I saw the
Moulvi Sahib attending the Sarba Dharma prayer along with the priests of all
other religions at the local Gandhi Maidan.”
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