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The News International, Friday, April 12, 2002
On Pakistan's obligations
Mahdi Masud
While the Ahmedabad skyline darkened with a thick pall of smoke rising from thousands of torched homes, industrial establishments and shops belonging to the Muslim community, the world's conscience slept. The genocidal massacre accounting for around two thousand dead even according to some Indian press reports and involving the burning alive of most of the Muslims killed evoked no more than the lowest-key, perfunctory response from the US, EU states and other members of the proclaimed civilised world.
However, if there was truly a deafening silence it was in the Islamic world itself, embracing the OIC comprising of fifty-five independent states and a worldwide community of one billion and a half. Never perhaps in the history of Islam was such apathy and indifference displayed and the face so quickly averted from the brutal tyranny inflicted upon a small, beleaguered Muslim minority.
This is how one of India's strongest admirers in the US journalistic community, Selig Harrison (who represented the 'New Republic' in New Delhi for several years) wrote sometime back in an article on South Asia in the Foreign Affairs Quarterly. "The seven hundred year rule of the Muslims has left deep wounds in the Hindu subconscious. In 1947, they were hoping that they in turn would lord it over the Muslims and were shocked to find that a majority of them escaped their appointed fate" (through absorption in Pakistan).
The way independent India seems to carry history as a burden on its shoulders is reflected yet again in the latest round of genocidal massacres in India stemming from the controversy over the centuries old Babri Mosque. However, the scale and ferocity of the anti-Muslim killings and the widespread discrimination practiced since independence, cannot be de-linked whether we in Pakistan like it or not, from the hostility aroused during the movement for Pakistan involving the leading role that the Muslims of the minority provinces played in the struggle for Pakistan.
The killings and destruction have become such a predictable part of the Indian scene that even in Pakistan they do not evoke the reaction they once did. Not many seem to spare a thought for those millions who, without any prospect of inclusion in the state of Pakistan, contributed at least as much to its establishment as those of us who happen today to be citizens of Pakistan, by birth or migration.
Of historic magnitude, the sufferings undergone and the sacrifices made by the Muslims of undivided India for the establishment of Pakistan, is also a matter of historical record. The sheer human tragedy of the mass killings, destruction and migration have been recorded by scores of Western and other writers including, to name a few, Hudson, Penderel Moon, Leonard Mosley, General Tucker and many others.
The Muslims of the minority provinces played a pivotal role in the Pakistan movement, in spite of the fact that there was no possibility of more than an infinitesimal number of them being able to migrate to Pakistan. They knew that there was no question of the areas where they lived being included in Pakistan.
The dangers attending the impassioned support for the establishment of Pakistan by the Muslims of the minority provinces were not lost on the Muslim leaders aligned to the Congress. This is what Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, one of the ablest Congress leaders, said to a delegation of Muslim Students in Lucknow in 1946: "I have never opposed the establishment of Pakistan. What I oppose is the leading role played by the Muslims of the minority provinces, for they will suffer for this. As for the Muslims of the majority provinces, if they have decided upon separation, it is their prerogative and right to strive for it". Notwithstanding such warnings, the Muslims of the minority provinces did not break ranks with the unified movement of Muslim India, which could not have achieved its goal of a separate state on the shoulders of the Muslims of the majority province alone.
What is at stake in India, following Ayodhya, is not the denial to the Muslims of their right to worship but the right of the Muslims and other minorities to live as equal citizens, in safety and dignity, in a secular, democratic polity, irrespective of what happened in the past; the mythological past, the legendary past or the real past. The issues are thus secular, though the symbols are religious.
The on-going Babri Mosque dispute may become a test case for the future. According to Indian published accounts, in two provinces of UP and Gujarat alone, there are at least fifty such allegedly disputed mosques. If 1947 is not accepted as the cut-off point beyond which no change is to be accepted in the religious character of known places of worship, the floodgates of communal anarchy would be opened.
In the light of the new climate of world opinion on human rights, Pakistan should not be inhibited by the question of India's domestic jurisdiction in raising the matter at the forthcoming meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission. World human rights bodies should be mobilised to bring world pressure to bear on the Indian authorities whose culpability in the massacres is testified to by Indian journalists and human rights bodies themselves.
Concern for the minorities in India, including the Muslims as the largest minority, does not constitute interference in India's internal affairs; it is a legitimate subject of global concern. It may also be emphasised that the Indian Muslims have long and rightfully recognised that their problems can only be solved in India and it is to India alone that they have been looking up to.
The OIC as an organisation and the member states individually have a solemn duty to use their good offices firmly, with the Indian government, to urge on unexceptionable humanitarian grounds, a civilised treatment of the Muslim minority. If the Islamic states have the expected consideration for the barbarous destruction of their co-religionists, the Indian government should be made to realise the possible effects on their vital interests in trade, employment opportunities, energy sources and political and economic cooperation in the Arab and Islamic world.
That the world community, however, is no longer prepared to turn a blind eye to the genocide or mass brutalisation of groups of citizens of a country in spite of the domestic jurisdiction concept enshrined in the Charter as has been illustrated in Rwanda, Burundi, Kosovo and other places. In the case of Indian Gujarat, however, the world community has done little more than expressing perfunctory regrets largely due to the perceived interests of influential world powers in India.
The international community should realise that intra-state conflicts could develop into threats to regional peace and order as inter-state conflicts do. A system should be worked out which regulates international intervention in domestic situations such as the Gujarat genocide as part of a formal justice system.
In 1947 Sardar Patel had alleged that the UP Muslims, although forming only thirteen per cent of the province's population, comprised as much as half of the province's police force. Today the Indian Muslim community does not account for more than two per cent of the posts, India wide, in civil services, banking and other private and public sectors, although constituting about thirteen per cent of the country's population. In the armed forces, the percentage is barely above one percent. Even in provinces like the Uttar Pradesh, which had pioneered the spread of education in Indian Muslims, starting from Sir Syed's institutions in Aligarh, the community today sees its children well-versed in Sanskritised Hindi but without the ability to write in Urdu.
If a handful of Muslims are given high posts for cosmetic or other reasons, this does not reflect the general position of the community. Needless to say, that any improvement in the fortunes of the Indian Muslims would and should be a matter of the highest possible satisfaction for the people of Pakistan and a source of strength for the Indian Union itself.
A known Indian columnist, Kuldip Nayyar has stated in a recent article in a national daily that "most of the Hindu intelligentsia has become part of the anti-Muslim movement, one way or the other. This dishonesty, if not the animus, of the majority is more visible than ever before. It is a pity that those who were once the supporters of a secular India are now apologists for a policy, which is communal in context and ruinous in objective".
Several Indian judicial commissions have accused the police force in India of taking an active role in anti-Muslim attacks and of the utmost animosity towards the Muslims community. These include the Justice Srikrishna Commission on the Mumbai riots of 92-93, the Justice Jagmohan Reddy Commission report on the Ahmedabad riots of 1969, the Justice DP Maddon Commission on the Bhiwandi, Jalgaon and Mahd carnage of 1976, the Justice Joseph Vithyathil Commission on Telaicherry riots 1971. All these and other reports by international and Indian forums, portraying the police force in India as being an active participant in the anti-Muslim pogroms, illustrate the impossible situation in which the Indian Muslims are placed.
The writer is a former ambassador of Pakistan