The Edited Conscience of Naseeruddin Shah

I read that the Uttarakhand government has abolished the Madrasa Board. As usual, reactions fell into two tidy compartments: reform versus repression. In India, no decision is allowed to remain administrative; it must carry the burden of civilisation itself.

Almost at the same time came another story: Naseeruddin Shah is unhappy. Not about inflation, unemployment, or the slow suffocation of serious theatre, but because he was invited to a “Jashn-e-Urdu” programme at Mumbai University and then, rather inelegantly, disinvited.

Inviting someone and then cancelling the invitation is bad manners. There is no defence for that. What converted a social discourtesy into a political controversy was the reason reportedly offered for the disinvitation: Mr Shah frequently writes and speaks against India and shows no inclination to praise the current leadership, including the much-referenced “56-inch” variety.

Mr Shah’s response followed a familiar trajectory. A personal slight quickly became a civilisational lament. “This is not the country I grew up in,” he said — a sentence now so frequently repeated that it has acquired the comfort of ritual.

Which raises the obvious question: what kind of country was that?

Mr Shah has repeatedly spoken about lynching, particularly incidents linked to cows, and on principle he is right to do so. Mob violence is barbaric, regardless of who commits it. But context matters if one is to claim moral seriousness. Many of these lynching cases involved allegations of cow theft or slaughter for meat — crimes in themselves under existing law. This does not justify violence; nothing does. But it does complicate the picture, something outrage prefers not to do.

More importantly, moral consistency demands breadth, not selectivity. Loud condemnation of lynching sits uneasily beside silence on other brutal acts. The beheading of a tailor in Udaipur, carried out in the name of faith and proudly recorded on video, did not elicit the same sustained anguish. Nor did the communal violence in Sambhal. These events appear to fall outside the circle of preferred outrage.

Conscience, it seems, has its favourites.

The lament inevitably circles back to “Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb” — a phrase invoked whenever the present feels morally inferior to memory. It evokes harmony, refinement, and effortless coexistence. What it omits is hierarchy. Harmony existed, yes — but under order. Courtesy flowed freely, but always upwards.

The Mughal court is often cited as the pinnacle of this composite culture. Yet hierarchy there was unmistakable. Raja Man Singh, one of Akbar’s most trusted Hindu generals, stood behind the emperor, while lesser courtiers enjoyed greater ceremonial proximity. Everyone bowed. Everyone performed loyalty. This was not equality; it was imperial discipline, later repackaged as tolerance.

Lineage becomes relevant when such memories are romanticised, not as an accusation but as context. The Shah family traces its roots to Sardhana in western Uttar Pradesh, historically associated with Jan Fishan Khan — an Afghan mercenary who arrived in India in the late eighteenth century, aligned himself with the British, and was rewarded with jagirs and authority. Power, in this narrative, was something granted by rulers, not negotiated with society.

Families shaped by such arrangements developed a courtly idea of culture and a managerial idea of harmony. Authority was to be navigated, dissent to be expressed elegantly, and mass assertion viewed with suspicion.

Mr Shah often describes himself as secular, even post-religious. There is nothing objectionable in that claim. But secularism, like charity, is best judged by practice rather than proclamation. One mildly uncomfortable question presents itself: if religious identity matters so little, why do symbolic choices matter so much? Mr Shah married outside his faith — entirely his personal choice — yet all his children carry distinctly Islamic names. 

Contrast this with Ustad Allauddin Khan, who named his daughter Annapurna Devi, rooting identity in culture rather than religious signalling. That was secularism lived quietly, not announced loudly. The issue is not what names one chooses, but why cultural accommodation is expected only from others.

None of this is a moral crime. But it does explain why certain kinds of violence provoke passionate outrage while others are met with awkward silence; why some victims become symbols and others remain inconvenient facts.

Criticism of the government is not the problem. Democracies need critics. The problem is selective indignation. When lynching over cow theft for meat is condemned — as it should be — but religiously motivated beheading and communal violence are quietly bypassed, moral authority begins to look less like principle and more like preference.

India is not a fragile poem meant only for polite readers. It is loud, argumentative, uneven, frequently unjust — but alive. It was never the refined drawing room that memory now mourns.

If this is “not the country it once was”, perhaps that is because the country has stopped allowing selective conscience to pass as moral clarity.

And if outrage today is carefully rationed — loud for lynching tied to cow theft, quiet for beheading, selective about communal violence — then the real question is not who was disinvited, but whose suffering is deemed worthy of remembrance.

Jai Hind.