In The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru recollects his last meeting with poet Mohammed Iqbal a few months before the latter’s death in Lahore in 1938. Nehru says that an ailing Iqbal, comparing him with Jinnah, had remarked: “Jinnah is a politician and you are a patriot.” While that should have silenced Iqbal’s critics in India who continue to blame him for coming up with the idea of Pakistan, the poet who paid tribute to India’s multiculturalism, called Ram Imam-e-Hind (Leader of India) and celebrated its eternal beauty through numerous poems, including Sare Jahan Se Achcha Hindustan Hamara, is still a pariah in India. How else does one explain the country’s collective amnesia about him on his birth anniversary (November 9)?
While the government has completely forgotten Iqbal, the public at large also seems to be abandoning him, complains a report in a national English daily. Barring Dongri-based think-tank Urdu Markaz, which is planning to celebrate an Iqbal Week through lectures, mushaira and singing of Iqbal’s poetry, Mumbai too is choosing to ignore the poet’s birth anniversary. Ignorance combined with doctored history has misled even many educated Indians to believe that the once great patriot later turned fanatical and chose Islamic Pakistan over secular India.