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The Frontier Post, Updated on 3/12/2002
9:38:52 AM
Hindutva may hasten
India’s disintegration
Karamat Khan
That religiosity is India’s nemesis is what was recently
confirmed by the manner in which a trivial matter turned into
lugubrious Hindu-Muslim clashes that left more than 1,000
innocent people dead in Gujarat.
A recent version of the events reveals that some Hindu passengers
refused to pay for their food at the Godhra station, and some
Muslim boys among the vendors stormed the train which caught
fire, killing 57 Hindu passengers.
In retaliation, mobs of enraged Hindus attacked Muslims across
Gujarat, and thus began the deadly cycle of violence, the worse
in a decade.
Even though no one had imagined, as a police officer asserted,
that all this would turn into such a big tragedy, the culmination
of the incident in religious conflict is not surprising
altogether, especially given the way religion is being dragged
into Indian politics.
After all India is being ruled by a party, the BJP, which is the
political wing of 70-plus Hindu organisations, known as the Sangh
Parivar.
The Sangh Parivar led by the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, or
RSS, and which finds, in the words of a French researcher,
Christophe Jaffrelot, a rapport with the fascist movements in
Europe that stressed discipline and a martial spirit, is strongly
committed to converting India into a theocratic Hindu state,
based on the philosophy of Hindutva.
The philosophy of Hindutva is derived from Savarkar’s thesis
that asserts that a Hindu is he who looks upon the land that
extends from the Indus to the seas, as the land of his
forefathers and addresses this land as his holy land.
Savarkar explains that “all the apparently different
religious groups are racially, nationally and culturally a polity
and a people, one and indivisible most fitly and from times
immemorial called Hindus.
Hindutva is concerned with the racial, national and cultural
aspects of a state system, distinguishing individuals not on the
basis of their moral stature but their roots and love for the
fatherland.
So those who may have other holy lands, Mecca or Rome, are
automatically excluded from being the true children of the
fatherland even if they are born there.” The ideology of
Hindutva promotes an agenda that seeks the obliteration of all
non-Hindu relics and the implementation of a uniform Hindu
culture.
As Romila Thapar, one of India’s eminent historians, said in
her book ‘History and Beyond’, in India, caste,
regional and other identities are replaced by religious identity,
which irons out diversity and insists on conformity, for it is
only through a uniform acceptance of the religion that it can
best be used for political ends.
In all its manifestations, Hindutva, in the words of Christopher
Jaffrelot, underlies an ideology that aims to dominate others, in
terms of prestige as well as on a concrete socio-political plane.
It comes as no surprise to see Muslims becoming victims of such
an ideology.
The way Hindu religious groups are behaving reveals that their
strategy of imposing Hindutva revolves around Muslim-bashing.
To quote a Hindu nationalist, S P Attri, “The bold reckoning
and the tough-tackling of the Moslem population transfer out of
India is a job that should have been done decades ago.
It has not been done and is still the unfinished business of
partition.” Poor Hindus are jockeyed into believing that
only the expulsion of Muslims would address their growing poverty
and social ills.
Special emphasis is put on the higher birth rate of Muslims.
Raking up how the Muslim rulers destroyed Hindu society, S P
Attri warns gullible Hindus that, “In 1800 AD, the
Hindu-Muslim ratio was 7:1, in 1850 AD, it was 6:1, and now it is
3:1.
As Moslems reach and exceed 50 per cent of the population in
India, there will be riots and open cries in the bazaars of
India, to declare India as an Islamic Republic.
And when that happens, Hinduism will be finished off in short
order, exactly as it has been finished off in Pakistan and
Bangladesh, no exceptions possible.” Not surprisingly, most
Hindus have accepted the logic behind such anti-Muslim rhetoric
and behaved accordingly.
This way of thinking, as a matter of fact, was the sole
motivating force behind the anti-Muslim actions.
All the inquiry commission reports, including Justice Jagmohan
Reddy Commission (Ahmedabad 1960), Justice Madon Commission
(Bhiwandi-Jalgaon 1970), Justice Joseph Vithayathil (Tellicherry
1971), the inquiry commission into the Jamshedpur riots (1979)
and Justice Shrikrishna Commission (1992-93) have shown more or
less that these atrocities were perpetrated by those who were/are
paranoid about converting India into a Hindu theocratic state,
namely the Sangh Parivar and its affiliates.
The question here is what would be the fate of India if the
Hindutva agenda were fully implemented.
Given the demographic composition of Muslims and their importance
as Indian nationals, any attempt to dislocate them is more likely
to trigger India’s disintegration.
Though the exact number of Indian Muslims is a matter of
conjecture, a careful estimate places them between 130 to 140
million.
They are spread throughout India, constituting 25 per cent
population of West Bengal, 33 per cent of Assam, 24 per cent of
Kerala, 20 per cent of Uttar Pradesh, 16 per cent of Bihar, 14
per cent of Karnataka, 12 per cent of Gujarat, Rajasthan and AP
and 11 per cent of Delhi.
The present composition of Muslims is no different from that in
the 1940s when, because of perceived injustice at the hands of
majority Hindus, the Muslims fought a struggle for separation
from the Hindus.
If the Hindu extremists remain obsessed with implementing
Hindutva at the expense of Muslims, one might see a repetition of
what happened in the 40s.
It is worth recalling that the Congress yielded to partition only
after communal violence reached the point where Sardar Patel saw
it instructive to quickly remove the poisoned limb lest the
entire organism suffer irreparably and where Nehru felt that
cutting the head was better than suffering from the irreparable
headache.
As far as perceived difference between the wishes of the Muslims
in the 1940s and the present is concerned, one might argue that
in the 1920s no one would have imagined that a man, M A Jinnah,
who grew hostile to the Indian National Congress because of its
resorting to religious politics, would one day rush to demand
partition solely on religious basis.
But yet that happened.
If a more secular Muslim community in the 1940s could be
distracted from a more decent and secular Hindu polity of that
time, one sees no compelling reason not to sense the
disenchantment of relatively more orthodox Indian Muslims with
the far more fanatical Hindus of the BJP.
What is imperative to note is that the peculiar mixture of
religion with secular politics, which Robert Wirsing and Debolina
Mukherjee described as both deeply religious and deeply Hindu,
led to the partition of India in 1947, and this very factor now
seems to play its role once again if the churlish BJP goes along
with its anti-Muslim agenda.
Here one sees no reason to disagree with Khushwant Singh who, in
an article published in The Hindustan Times, February 20, 1999,
said, “ Religion and politics should never be mixed because
put in the same bottle they become lethal,” adding,
“One is like saltpeter, the other like sulphur; what remains
to be added is charcoal to become gunpowder; Then the most
trivial of incidents can ignite it and it will blow.” But
despite visible signs of the dangers underlying the process of
religious politics, the ruling BJP and its ideologues are out to
construct an Indian nation on the basis of a religion about which
one can’t quote even Hindu scholars for fear of being blamed
for religious stereotyping.
What Dr Chatterjee’s book, “Oh You Hindu Awake!”
tells us about the Hindu religion beggars all description.
But the remarks of Dr G Srivatsa about the book in its preface
that he would not read the religious stories to his mother,
daughter and sister, suffice to show how difficult it would be to
erect the edifice of an Indian nation on the basis of such a
religion.
Thus, one may conclude that the Hindutva agenda of the ruling BJP
is strewn with serious threat to the non-Hindu population in
general and to the Muslims in particular, which, when effected,
would also jeopardise India as a nation itself.
Before this nauseating trend proves to be India’s nemesis,
the progressive elements of Indian society need to reverse the
trend by advocating that nothing short of an absolute separation
between religion and politics would address the crises India is
passing through.
The Frontier Post, Updated on 3/11/2002
1:41:09 PM
India: Beginning of the end?
Tariq Saeedi
Destruction and death were waiting to happen in the tinderbox
called India.
Since the last few days, Hindus and Muslims are dying like flies
and property is being destroyed in a mad frenzy.
The carnage will stop and the property will be rebuilt in due
course of time but the process that has begun cannot be
terminated until it reaches its logical end.
This could be the beginning of the end for India.
M N Roy, Indian ambassador in Turkmenistan, sounded sad and
perplexed when he phoned me on Friday, March 1.
Earlier in the morning, I had faxed him a condolence message
about the sad incident of Godhra in Gujarat state where 57
karsevak passengers were burnt alive in the Sabarmati Express.
He phoned to thank me for the condolence message and expressed
the hope that violence would be contained soon.
As a reflex action, certain elements in the Indian government and
the press raised an accusing finger at Pakistan.
Daily Milap of India, which doesn't hide its pro-Hindu biases,
reported on March 2, quoting Indian home ministry sources, that
"initial investigations indicate involvement of the ISI in
the Godhra incident." To leave no doubts in the minds of its
readers, the paper added "[ministry] officials already
suspected that such an incident was in the offing and the modus
operandi carries an ISI signature." Daily Pioneer of India
carried a statement by D Swami, the Minister of State for Home,
on March 1 that "involvement of the ISI could not be ruled
out." The minister also added that, "Gujarat is a
communally sensitive place and a border state.
It is next door to Pakistan, which is the epicentre of
cross-border terrorism.
There is something beyond what meets the eye in the Godhra
incident.
In the present scenario, the involvement of ISI cannot be ruled
out." As is usual in such cases, armchair pundits have come
up with half-baked theories.
Some ascribe the whole thing to ISI and some blame the Indian
government (both federal and state) for this bloodbath.
These are both wrong assumptions.
ISI certainly did not have anything to do with it and the Indian
government surely did not engineer this massacre.
To identify the reasons for the Godhra phenomenon and to forecast
its overall effects on India, we must go back to 1992 and then
travel back and forth in time to connect various developments.
If we have to determine the datum line of the present problem, it
is the destruction of Babri mosque in Ayodhya in 1992.
To maintain strict objectivity, I would avoid commenting on the
Babri mosque incident in my own words.
Instead, here is a quote from a dispatch of Luke Harding, The
Guardian correspondent in India.
Harding writes: "The attack on the Babri mosque was
well-planned. After months of secret preparation, a group of
Hindu zealots climbed the three domes of Ayodhya's most famous
Muslim place of worship and set to work. Using sledgehammers and
chisels, they started to demolish the elegant 16th-century
building. They were watched by cheering crowds — and by
politicians who are now in India's coalition cabinet, which is
led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The
demolition on December 6, 1992, changed everything in Indian
politics. For most Indians, the destruction marked one of the
bleakest days in the country's history. But for India's
increasingly strident Hindu rightwing, it meant unfinished
business."
To cap his observation, Harding declares
unambiguously, "Underlying the party's objectives was a
darker theme: India was a Hindu country which had no place for
Muslims." Having established this basic premise, let's go
back to 1948 — the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.
Gandhi was also from Gujarat state, the seat of present bloodshed
in India.
His assassin Nathuram Godse and co-conspirators Narayan Apte,
Vishnu Karkare, Digambar Bagde, Shankar Kishtaiyya , Gopal Godse,
Veer Savarkar, D Parchure and Madanlal Pahwa all belonged to the
same extremist group whose ideological descendants are now ruling
(or misruling) India in the shape of VHP (Vishwa Hindu Parishad),
BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), Shiv Sena and Bajrang Dal.
For an ideological group that can resort to the murder of Mahatma
Gandhi, nothing is off limits; no blood is sacred except Hindu
blood.
The idea, as pointed out by Luke Harding, is: Hindustan is for
Hindus.
All others should either leave India or convert to Hinduism.
Shudhi and Sanghatan movements, featuring forcible conversion to
Hinduism, are a part and parcel of BJP and VHP.
Let's see, very briefly, what happened and then try to analyse as
to what went wrong and why.
Sabramati Express, carrying mostly Hindu pilgrims from Ayodhya
stopped at the Godhra railway station for about five minutes on
February 27 and then left for its next destination.
The passengers were mostly pilgrims returning from Ayodhya where
a coalition of Hindu hardliner parties is trying to start the
construction of a Ram temple on the site vacated by the
demolition of Babri mosque.
The devotees traveling in the train were shouting slogans to the
effect that Ram temple would be built and down with Muslims, etc.
They had been chanting these slogans at every railway station
where the train stopped.
After the train left the Godhra railway station, it was stopped
about a kilometer away from the station.
The reason for the halt is not known.
Some reports indicate that the outer signal post displayed a red
signal, and some say that someone inside the train pulled the
emergency lever.
Whatever the reason, the train stopped in the vicinity of a mob
of about 200 Muslims who were chanting counter-slogans.
In the ensuing melee, the train passengers and the mob clashed
with each other and some persons set a few bogies of the train on
fire that caused 57 deaths.
This is the core incident around which the present Indian tragedy
is built.
It raises certain questions.
If one were to believe the statements of the Indian government
that ISI was involved in this hideous act, the question arises:
why no action was taken to prevent this? A mob of 200 is not
exactly a needle in a haystack.
An angry mob, waiting suspiciously along the railway tracks,
should have attracted the attention of the law enforcement
agencies.
Moreover, who informed the mob that the train would arrive on
time and would be carrying pilgrims chanting anti-Muslim slogans?
It takes some time to collect 200 angry young men.
Did the mob start assembling in the early afternoon or did they
assemble in some secret place and emerge all of a sudden near the
railway train? According to some reports, some agitators in the
mob were carrying firebombs in their pockets.
This indicates no spontaneous action.
In a sensitive state like Gujarat, at a time when Ram temple is
the hot issue, the ignorance of the law enforcement agencies
about such plans and their total absence from the scene of the
crime seems mighty suspicious.
When this crime happened, an analyst friend of mine sent me an
e-mail message.
Part of his message forecast that the Gujarat government would
stay put for a day or two to provide the Hindus an opportunity to
'get back.' Unfortunately, his forecast was only partially true.
The Gujarat government not only provided opportunity for Hindus
to 'settle the score' but also extended wholehearted support to
the general massacre.
In an article titled "Curfew ties victims, frees
killers", published in The Hindustan Times on March 1, Vinay
Menon informs that: "In the mayhem that they have unleashed
in Ahmedabad over the past 48 hours, the VHP's hoodlums have had
an important ally — the city's police force.
There are allegations that curfew was imposed selectively over
the city — pinning the Muslim population of the walled city
inside their homes, even as Hindu mobs were allowed to run amok
elsewhere." Daily Inquilab, in its editorial of March 2,
clearly spelled out that, "It is not necessary to
investigate as to which individuals and organisations are
responsible for this carnage.
The Gujarat strike [which resulted in mass murder of Muslims] was
called by VHP and was officially endorsed and supported by the
state government of Gujarat whose chief minister Narinder Modi is
a protégé of L K Advani.
In other words, the strike [and accompanying carnage] was
organized by VHP and the Gujarat government." Prime Minister
Vajpayee, who is known as 'right man in wrong party', admitted
this much when he issued an official statement that the eruption
of the Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat state was a
"disgrace to the nation".
In all honesty, it can be said that the state government of
Gujarat is fully responsible for the massacre.
As for the long term effects of this catastrophe, we can see
various roads opening out of this quagmire, some short and some
circuitous, but all leading to one final conclusion: total
destruction of India as we know it today.
The Union Government of India is also responsible, though
indirectly.
By deploying its armed forces along the borders, it has created
war hysteria.
The rhetoric of L K Advani, Fernandes and others has sprayed
gasoline on the flames.
Immature and irresponsible Indian politicians have continuously
been pumping their voters to hate Pakistan.
The hate, when the chance arose, was automatically directed at
the most convenient group of people who can be associated with
any image of Pakistan.
Another factor that led to the high death toll is that most of
the army units who were familiar with local terrain and geography
were deployed along the borders.
Gujarat was practically empty of army troops.
The government had to reassign army units from other areas who
were not familiar with the geography or terrain.
A survey conducted by The Hindustan Times concludes that more
than 60 per cent of readers blame the Gujarat government for this
tragedy.
Another survey by The Hindustan Times informs that more than 67
per cent participants opine that Vajpayee should order
unconditional suspension of the construction of a Ram temple.
This sudden change of opinion is only the tip of the iceberg.
The present deployment of Indian army along the Indo-Pak border
is not child's play.
Keeping an army in a state of readiness is expensive business.
The Indian economy cannot sustain it for more than six months at
most.
Internal troubles warrant extraordinary vigilance on the part of
law and order agencies — another expensive undertaking.
The present trouble is costing Rs. 500 crores loss per day in
terms of lost business in Gujarat alone.
It is difficult but not impossible to imagine as to what kind of
havoc is being wreaked on the Indian economy by Hindu extremists.
When the economy weakens, the state becomes vulnerable to
internal and external threats.
In India's case, external threats will not be necessary because
internal troubles are enough to split the country into 21 or more
independent states.
It may happen sooner rather than later.
This is the brainchild of high caste Hindus who are a minority in
their own country.
Muslims are about 14 per cent of the population, whereas Dalits
are about 40 per cent.
Add to that Sikhs and Christians and you are talking of almost 78
per cent of India.
The Sikhs have found a peaceful way to promote their cause.
Over the years, they have managed a sizeable lobby in the
American Congress and Canadian government.
The Dalits are also working slowly but surely on these lines.
The Kashmiris have suffered a temporary setback but their moral
advantage remains as strong as ever.
The Hindu middle class is now disenchanted with BJP and their
honeymoon with the hardliners is over.
Even the original architect of this carnage, L K Advani, is lying
low at the moment.
Whether it happens in one year or five or 50, the Balkanisation
of India is going to happen.
The Frontier Post, Updated on 3/10/2002
10:43:59 AM
Hindu, Muslims massacre
vindicates the two-nation theory
Syed Atiq ul Hassan
So far, the Hindu extremists have killed more than 500 Muslims in
the recent horrific anti-Muslim riots in India.
A country that claims to be the world’s largest democratic
secular state has miserably failed to provide safety to its
largest minority of 200 million Muslims.
More than 50 years have passed, but the Muslims who opted to stay
in India still have to chafe and fret against innumerable odds in
every sphere of life.
They are still drowned in the scourge of poverty and
backwardness.
They have to fight at the moment the ever-haunting spectre of
communal violence and threats to their religious and cultural
identity.
The sense of insecurity experienced by the Indian Muslims in the
post partition period has been compounded in recent years by the
state repression and terrorism under the draconian Terrorist and
Disruptive Activities Act (TADA).
Under this Act, 7,9332 people, mostly Muslims, were detained and
tortured during 1990-95 across the country.
Though the Act has been repealed, yet about 5000 persons, mostly
Muslims, are still in jails.
As the international community condemns all sorts of extremism in
the world, the Hindu fanaticism flourishes under the sanctuary of
the much-vaunted biggest democracy of the world - the Indian
government, its draconian agencies and fundamentalist ruling
parties.
Time and again, massacre of the Muslims in India has unveiled the
secret agenda of the extremist Hindu leadership against Muslims
in the so-called secular India.
Today, the Muslims of India, one of the largest Muslim
populations in the world, find themselves as an oppressed and
unsafe nation with no hope of improvement in their status and
nowhere to go.
As a matter of fact, the Muslims of India have been victimised
for the last 50 years in all facets of life.
Since the BJP came into power, the situation has crossed all
limits of tolerance.
There is no security for Muslim lives, properties and religious
and historical assets.
The recent carnage of Muslims by Hindu fanatics under the
protection of ruling parties must make the world understand why
each and every Kashmiri, from children to old-aged, are prepared
to sacrifice their lives for their freedom.
It explains why they prefer death over living under the Indian
oppression.
My Indian colleagues, in the West, always tried to convince me to
change my impression about the social and economical conditions
of the Muslims of India until I personally witnessed their
depressing conditions during my first visit of India to cover
General Musharraf’s visit for the Agra summit.
Over the last 50 years, the Muslims have been systematically
segregated from the mainstream life in India.
The prejudiced systems, such as quota (system) on basis of
religion and sect, have closed the doors on Muslims in education,
jobs and other sectors.
Their civilian rights have been limited to bare survival.
The Muslim history and Islamic literature have been either
excluded from the textbooks or moulded against Islamic thought
and Muslims way of life.
Apart from subjecting them to suffer a host of political,
cultural and economic inequalities, the Muslims have often been
subjected to a systematic campaign of interference with their
religion.
It usually takes place in the form of slanderous attacks on Islam
made in the school textbooks, or in the press, desecration of
mosques and shrines, or deliberate incitement of feelings of
religious hatred against the Muslims.
In most of the Hindu dominated Indian states, Hindu religious
beliefs, philosophy and methodology have been introduced into the
textbooks in the name of Indian culture.
This indoctrination has gone to the extent that just a glance
through the officially prescribed school text books convinces the
reader that their authors regard India (a multi religious
country) as the home of Brahmins and attach value only to their
deities, temples, religious customs and practices.
The Muslim heroes in medieval Indian history have been treated as
‘aliens’ and ‘strangers.’ The book
‘Hamara Parwaj’ prescribed for classes VI, VII and VIII
in the state of Uttar Pradesh is a perfect example of this kind
of discrimination and unfair treatment of the Muslims.
A textbook on history approved by the Bihar state government
entitled ‘Gayania Uday Basic Itihas’ states that the
Holy Quran was written by the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) himself,
which is not only contrary to the Muslim belief but also an
adverse propaganda against Islam.
Textbooks prescribed in schools in Rajisthan area also contain
derogatory references against the Holy Prophet (PBUH).
The Director of education at Rajisthan issued instructions to
authors to see that the “lessons about India and other
subjects deal with the importance of cow at all stages in a
suitable manner.” The content of prayers recited in state
schools is also very objectionable, grossly violating the
constitutional guarantee of religious freedom so far as the
Muslims are concerned.
Countless incidents of the desecration of mosques by the Hindu
communalists can be cited to have happened during the last few
decades.
The 16th century historic Babri mosque was razed to the ground by
thousands of Hindu fanatics in Ayodhya, (UP) on 16th December
1992.
Hindu fundamentalists openly announced that they would,
“cleanse India of Muslim remnants.” It was during 1949
when Babri Masjid was first raided.
A group of vandals entered the mosque and placed the idol of
Ramlallah.
Successive Indian governments patronised the Hindu
fundamentalists under different garbs, which ultimately turned
into an uncontrollable demon.
Instead of saving the mosque from destruction, a number of
government officials were reported to have watched the scene
gleefully, inciting the mob to deliver a final blow to bring down
the structure.
The reluctance of government to either call in the army or
Central Reserve Police to protect the mosque, speak volumes of
understanding between Shiv Sena and the Union government of the
Congress.
An Indian journalist, Yuvraj Mohite, while recording his
statement in the court of Mumbai said, “Bal Thackeray,
founder of Shiva Sena ordered the massacre in December 1992 after
the demolition of Babri Mosque.
The Muslims rulers of the past are now being projected as
barbaric warriors, dacoits and robbers in the history books.
The young Muslim generation is being indoctrinated with the
thoughts that their forefathers were Hindus and they were
converted Muslims by force.
The idea is to revert them to Hinduism.
The effectiveness of the indoctrination is to the extent that
many of the Muslims have stopped eating beef.
They don’t take beef even if they are abroad.
It has become almost impossible for the Muslims to have a
government job.
According to 1991 nationwide census, the Muslims constitute 12.60
per cent of the total Indian population.
However, the representation of Muslims in the parliament, state
legislatures, administrative services, armed forces, police and
paramilitary forces, educational institutions and the private and
public sectors is far below their proportion.
The percentage of the Muslims in the civil and foreign services
is less than a quarter of their population.
According to a white paper, prepared by All India Milli council
(AIMC) and presented to Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral, on the
performance of Indian Union during the last 50 years, there were
only 116 Muslims out of a total of 3883 administrative officers
(2.98%), 45 out of 1433 police service officers (3.14%) and 57
out of 2159 foreign service officers (2.64%).
In central government, Muslims constitute 1.6% of all class I
officers, 3.9% of all class II officers and 4.4% of the technical
supervisory staff.
If one can find a few Muslim politicians on provincial or
national platforms, they have no option except to serve the
purpose of Hindu majority for their survival.
The Frontier Post, Updated on 3/11/2002
1:41:09 PM
Hindu, Muslims massacre
vindicates the two-nation theory—II
Syed Atiq ul Hassan
Consequently, the Muslims are totally debarred in all the
departments.
One cannot see any ominously evocative counsel for Muslims from
any Muslims' leadership to get them out from their systematic
annihilation by Hindu rulers.
They are in a state of dilemma.
They don't know whether to accept humility in the form of Indian
nationalism (based on secular ideas) or to preserve their Islamic
faith, culture and history.
The Hindu desire to absorb the Muslims into Hinduism through
Indian nationalism still persists.
They have already done this with Jainism and Budhism and they are
working on other communities living in India as well.
The injustice in social and civil rights is not confined only to
the Muslims; the situation is equally dangerous for Anglo-Indian,
Christians, and other minorities as well.
Moreover, the people in Manipur, Nagaland and other remote areas
are also struggling for their civil and social rights.
One must admire today the great vision of the founder of
Pakistan Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his fellow leaders
about the two-nation theory.
Quaid-e-Azam understood the Hindu mentality quite long ago.
In 1934, in an address, he said: "The Hindu sentiment, the
Hindu mind, the Hindu attitude led me to the conclusion that
there was no hope of unity." "We (Muslims) are a
Nation" he asserted, "with our own distinctive culture
and civilisation, language and literature, art and architecture,
names and nomenclature, sense of value and proportion, legal laws
and moral code, custom and calendar, history and tradition,
aptitude and ambitions; in short, we have our own distinctive
outlook on life and of life. By all canons of international law,
we are a nation."
Then on the resolution day, 23rd of March, while addressing to the annual Muslim League convention in Lahore, he said, "Hindus and the Muslims belong to two different religions, philosophies, social customs and literature. They neither inter-marry nor inter-dine and, indeed, they belong to two different civilisations, which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their concepts on life and of life are different. They have different epics, different heroes and different episodes. Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other, and likewise, their victories and defeats overlap. To yoke two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state."
One can see the validity of these
statements.
Even after 60 years, the ground realities remain unchanged.
The policies of ethnic cleansing and the systematic destruction
of Muslims culture in India today lead one to the conclusion that
the demand for an independent Muslim state for the Muslims was
the only option left for the Muslims in early 20th century.
In the light of today's realities, if the Hindu
fundamentalist parties, like BJP, Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal and
so on, remained in power and the atrocities against the
minorities continued - the time is not faraway when not only the
people of Kashmir will get their independent state but India will
further disintegrate into many independent states.
However, this is the time for Muslim Ummah in general and
Pakistanis in particular to show solidarity and cohesion with the
Indian Muslim brothers.
At this stage, if we can not find any way to assist them
practically, we must not forget that a powerful and strong
Pakistan will provide them greater support.
The Pakistanis need to make Pakistan viable and stronger and keep
on stressing the Indian rulers to provide total protection and
safety to the Muslims of India.
For Pakistanis, the month of March is a month to commemorate the
Resolution Day (23rd of March, 1940).
This day, the Muslims of India had passed the resolution for an
independent Muslim state, which came true on 14th of August 1947,
when Pakistan, under the great leadership of Quaid-e-Azam
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, appeared on the world map.
Even after 50 years of independence, the Hindu majority has not
accepted Pakistan.
They could not do anything against Pakistan except torturing and
grilling the remaining Muslims in India.
Pakistanis must feel the pain of their Muslim brothers in India
and pass another resolution to make Pakistan stronger and
stronger not only to defend its boundaries from the enemies but
also to provide full moral support to their neighbouring Muslim
brothers on all international forums.
This is the time for the Muslim Ummah to raise the voice for
their Muslim brothers in India.
Much of the responsibility lies on the shoulder of Organisation
of Islamic Council ( OIC) to take serious action against India.
Much of Indian economy depends on its foreign labour force
working in the Middle East.
The heads of these countries must feel the misery and pathetic
conditions of their Muslim brothers in India and force India to
provide them all sorts of safety, security, social freedom and
human rights.