Topic started by Mustafoyev (@ 203.115.213.2) on Tue Apr 9 19:58:56 .
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Communal parity will aggravate crisis
Sandhya Jain
A Hindu fanatic may burn himself on a pyre, but he will never light the fire of Inquisition under another being. Swami Vivekananda
A people who have traditionally been strangers to the idea of religious persecution are now at the end of their tether, unable to control their passions and end the spiral of violence in Gujarat. In the face of an extremely adverse national and international media, respectable Hindus are seeking to protect their personal images by expressing shame or anger at the continuing bloodshed. Certainly the killings are reprehensible, and must stop.
At the same time, we need to understand that what distinguishes Gujarat from previous communal riots is that Hindus have felt so affronted by the initial provocation that they have been unable to rein in their emotions. Rather than condemning the entire community, we should ponder why the civilisationally pacifist Hindu has been goaded to this pass.
Much of the problem lies with the real and perceived bias of the media, justice-dispensing bodies, and politicians. As a result, minorityism has run riot. As former Supreme Court judge Mr Kuldip Singh has said, "Indian secularism has been reduced to apologetic communalism. The minorities must realise that they cannot disown the culture, heritage and history which happen to be in sync with the Hindu way of life. Minorityism cannot and should not be allowed to become a sub-text of anti-nationalism". (India Today, April 8).
Eminent citizens are beginning to realise that there is need to look at some issues from a Hindu viewpoint. For instance, post-Godhra, children playing Holi accidentally split colour on the wall of a mosque situated in a Hindu locality in Akola, Maharashtra. This was not the first time this had happened, and the nine Muslim families there said the communities lived amicably. The violence reportedly began after the new maulana made angry gestures and brought a mob and a local corporator from an adjoining locality; six persons died and several were injured in the ensuing incident (Indian Express, April 2).
The news report is balanced, with all sides quoted or at least contacted for comments. The paper also reported another Holi riot in Shirpur, Vidarbha, with maturity. Unfortunately, this intolerance of Hindu cultural festivals is not considered wrong or unacceptable by newspaper editors or politicians. Not a single article or editorial, or comment from a political party or leader, has factored this in while sermonising on Gujarat.
Then, the National Human Rights Commission was certainly duty-bound to visit the state and record the testimony of victims. Yet the chairman, Mr JS Verma, conducted himself poorly by grandstanding about his personal feelings to the media. As an ex-judge, Mr Verma should know that justice cannot be done unless the judge conducts himself dispassionately. Sadly, Mr Verma has reinforced the false impression that barring Godhra, all eight hundred victims were Muslims, and that State Government obduracy was encouraging Hindus to keep battering the minorities, which is untrue.
The NHRC can redeem its credibility by visiting Jammu, where ten persons were gunned down in a terrorist attack on the Raghunath Temple. In fact, it is high time the Commission showed up in the interiors of Kashmir, from where seven lakh Hindus have fled (and are still fleeing) from death and ethnic-cleansing. Certainly there is no excuse for the continued neglect of refugee camps in Jammu and elsewhere; the Government would do well to consider an advisory to the Commission in this regard.
Finally, we have politicians, political parties, and the utterly destructive concept of secularism. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's lament that "becoming refugee in one's own country is something that pierces the heart virtually indicted the majority community. More unfortunate was his Nehruvian assertion that minorities alone need protection. In India, the sad truth is that the majority has always been at the receiving end, and is in fact today the special target of trained, well-equipped and richly funded Islamic terrorists.
Police investigations reveal that the Godhra plot initially targetted the entire train, but a five hour delay compelled the culprits to change their plans. Anyway, it is to be hoped that Mr. Vajpayee's concern for domestic refugees will now extend to Kashmiri Hindus; that he will visit the refugee camps and launch measures to send them back home with full security and dignity.
I believe the time has come for the nation to question Jawaharlal Nehru's fake secularism, which never envisaged a genuine separation of religion and politics. It gave backdoor weightage to the Muslims and kept Congress in power for over four decades against the wishes of the majority of the electorate.
Most commentators have failed to appreciate why the minority votebank has agitated Hindus. Pointing to the economic and educational backwardness of Muslims, they lament that the community has been betrayed by its leaders. They fail to understand is that there is an intimate relationship between political power and faith in Islam. The ummah (community of believers) acquired political power at the same time the Prophet launched his religious mission; since then the two have moved in unison.
Thus, Islam needs power to keep its flock together and to expand the faith. In contrast, the Jews never had a state until the middle of the twentieth century, while Christianity was without political power in the early centuries of its existence. Both these creeds, therefore, knew how to survive without political power; in early modern times, they could accept (even fight for) the separation of religion and politics. Hinduism separated political and religious power from the beginning, and thus had no problems in embracing democracy and adjusting to the values of the modern age.
Islam has failed to make such a transition anywhere in the world; in India it had little compulsion to change. The decline of the Mughal empire led to numerous smaller polities, which struggled to assert their supremacy in different areas. By the time the East India Company established control over major parts of the country, the Mutiny led to direct Crown rule, and the British soon realised the value of pampering the Muslim community. The story of Partition is well-known.
By refusing to introduce a common civil code and allowing minorities to maintain their personal laws, Nehru bestowed the Islamic clergy with unprecedented power over the lives of the community. Muslim backwardness was hardly accidental. It was built into the script of secular India and cannot be reversed without a common civil code. It should be obvious that in this sense, the surrender to the clergy in the Shah Bano case was a logical outcome of Nehruvian politics.
For the ulema, the Hajj subsidy was chicken-feed. Its real power came from the minority rights enshrined in the constitution. This gave it free access to funds from rich Muslim countries, especially petro-dollars after the oil blackmail of the nineteen seventies. This heady sense of economic power made it undertake the Meenakshipuram conversions, the first serious warning bell that the nation's core culture was in danger.
Since then, minorityism has led to increased Muslim infiltration from Bangladesh and illegal inclusion in the voters list; foreign funding of madrasas which are blooming in border districts; extreme radicalisation of the community, and its willful bondage to Islamic fundamentalism. In such a scenario, Hindu reluctance to be treated as cannon fodder should not be difficult to appreciate.
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