Postcards from an Exile

Back in November, the government’s decision to revoke writer Aatish Taseer’s Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card caused a brief media kerfuffle. Taseer, a prominent writer, is the son of veteran columnist and Lutyens insider Tavleen Singh and Pakistani politician Salman Taseer, a former governor of Punjab whose criticism of his country’s blasphemy laws precipitated his assassination by his own bodyguard. The product of a fleeting affair, Taseer wrote over a decade ago about his secular upbringing in India and his infrequent contact with his father and extended family in Pakistan. Taseer now lives in New York with his husband Ryan Davis.

The reason provided by the government for revoking his OCI card was his apparent failure to disclose his father’s Pakistani nationality. The 39-year-old suspects the decision taken by the Narendra Modi government was motivated by a story he wrote, in the midst of India’s general election, for Time magazine, its cover emblazoned with the headline-‘India’s Divider in Chief’.

For over a year before the Time article was published, Taseer had been working on a documentary-portentously titled In Search of India’s Soul-for Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based English-language news channel. The first of the two-part film was aired on February 6, with both parts now available to watch on the network’s YouTube channel. It is a thoughtful exploration of the Indian Muslim’s fear of Modi’s ‘New India’. Taseer invokes the secular underpinnings of India, the idealism and perhaps naivety of a country that hoped a kind of benign historical amnesia and the sheer scale of India’s irrepressible plurality would be enough to heal the gaping wounds of Partition.

Indeed, Taseer, like his mother, was an early proponent of Modi, or at least the hope he represented of an end to a certain kind of sclerotic elitism, the cynicism of equal opportunity appeasement as practised by Rajiv Gandhi, in which leadership meant giving in to the worst elements of conservative Muslim and Hindu ‘sentiment’. But, as In Search of India’s Soul shows, from the very start of Modi’s time in office, the sectarian worldview of the Sangh Parivar rode roughshod over the development-driven promises that swept him to power. What had seemed a bracing honesty about old India and the smug entitlement of its ruling class was little more than a fig leaf for the paranoia and animosity towards Muslims that is the catalysing force of Hindutva. Towards the end of the film, Taseer says he is “pleasantly surprised to find how intact Indian life still is, how integrated, how assimilated”.

Even this brief note of Pollyannish optimism is made discordant by Taseer’s sense of Muslim disillusionment, of “a deep feeling of disenfranchisement”. He may have “left India feeling encouraged and hopeful”, but says Indian Muslims feel a fetid breath on the back of their necks, the miasma of an existential threat.

Speaking on the phone, Taseer doesn’t “hold out hope” for a favourable resolution to his standoff with the government. He says he is “determined to exhaust every opportunity”, to see the process through to its ‘logical’ conclusion. What he will not do, though, he adds, is be cowed, submit to the double whammy of being deprived of his claim to India-where his mother and grandmother live-and “being silenced”.

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