By Ram Puniyani
In an interview to Karawan-E-Mohabbat, actor Naseeruddin Shah expressed his anguish and anger at the killing of Subodh Kumar Singh, the police inspector. Shah’s interview brought forth the issue of insecurity particularly of the religious minorities in India.
While this did remind the nation about the direction in which India has been heading during last few years, there was an angry response to Shah’s observations from intolerant sections of society who left no stones unturned in calling him names and in humiliating him in social media.
At the same time RSS’ mouthpiece Organiser carried and interview by Shah’s cousin, Syed Rizwan Ahmad. Ahmad is introduced as an Islamic scholar.
Ahmad in the interview says that Muslims are unsafe only in nations where Muslims are in a majority and that in India intolerance is the birth child of Muslim incompatibility to exist peacefully with other faiths. He goes on to blame the Indian Muslims for their plight in this country as they failed to play a proactive role in cases like Shah Bano and Kashmiri Pundits. It is due to this that Hindus have started feeling that they are getting a raw deal. As per him, intolerance is the pseudo narrative of pseudo seculars and intolerant Muslims.
As far as Muslims and other religious minorities are concerned it’s good to introspect about their plight. It is not correct to have the feeling of victimhood. But can we understand the broad political global phenomenon in such a superficial way, where Muslims are blamed for their own plight? Can we present Hindus as a uniform community pitted against the uniform Muslim community?
Globally it is true that the Muslim majority countries in the West Asia are witnessing more civil wars and more insecurity. Let’s also note here that while from Indian side we blame Pakistan for the acts of terror, the number of deaths of innocent civilians is many times higher in Pakistan than in India, and let’s not forget Pakistan lost its Prime Minster Benazir Bhutto in a terror attack. Again we see the civil wars, wars and terror attacks have been more in the oil rich zone. The coming up of up of Mujahideen, Al Qaeda and Taliban in that sequence in the region began the acts of terror and violence in these areas.
Has this been due to Islam? Why this phenomenon was not there during cold war era or prior to that?
This violence in West Asia has been promoted primarily by the American policy of controlling oil wealth. In the wake of Russian occupation of Afghanistan, America was not able to counter it by sending its own army as the American army was writhing under the breakdown of its morale due to the humiliating defeat in Vietnam War. The US, by clever machinations, started promoting fundamentalist groups in these regions, promoted brain washing of Muslim youth in few madrassas in Pakistan and richly funded ($8,000 million) and heavily armed (7,000 tons of armaments, including latest weapons) these groups, which came up through this process. This sowed the seeds of violence, terrorism and led to insecurity in the region.
Mahmood Mamdani’s book ‘Good Muslim-Bad Muslim’ gives the accurate count of the process, which was employed by the mighty super power to prop up the terrorist groups. To add salt to the wounds, after the 9/11 2001 twin tower attack, American media popularised the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’ and laid the foundation of global Islamophobia. The wealth of Muslim majority countries, the oil, became its biggest handicap!
Islam came to India with Arab traders and later many embraced it due to reasons not the least of which was the wish to escape the tyranny of caste system. One recalls that Muslim kings like Akbar promoted inter religion interaction and even the most demonised Aurangzeb’s many top officers were Hindus.
In India while the impression is being created that Muslims are intolerant, the fact during medieval period Hindu-Muslim interactions created Ganga Jumna tehjeeb, well presented in Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘Discovery of India’ and beautifully captured in the Shyam Bengal’s immortal serial ‘Bharat Ek Khoj’, based on this book.
During the freedom movement, majority of Muslims were with Indian National Congress and were equal partners in freedom movement. This gets well reflected in the Muslim freedom fighters like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Khan Abul Gaffar Khan, and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai among others. Partition was the clever move of British Empire to weaken India and to have a subservient state in South Asia in the form of Pakistan.
The communal poison was spread here by communal organisations, Muslim League; Hindu Mahasabha and RSS. Sardar Patel goes to the extent of saying that it is due to the communal poison spread by RSS that murder of father of the nation Mahatma Gandhi could take place. The rising communal violence, later arrest of innocent Muslim youth on the pretext of acts of terror, then lynching in the name of cow-beef have created massive insecurity. We can see a correlation between rising insecurity and rise in ghettoisation, rise in fundamentalism and rise in use of burqa among other parameters of orthodoxy.
It is nobody’s case that mistakes have not been done from the side of Muslim community. The section of Muslim community, which stood to oppose the Supreme Court verdict on Shah Bano pushed the whole community back. The section of leadership highlighting Babri mosque demolition also has not been good for the large section of community.
No doubt the Babri mosque issue has been doctored to show that it was a place of birth of Lord Ram still Muslim leadership should focus more on the issues related to livelihood than these identity issues. The Muslim leadership does need to focus on issues of equity. Now dominant communal discourse as by this so called Islamic scholar is trying to put all the blame of plight of Muslim community on Muslims themselves! Nothing can be farther from truth, it’s like blaming the victim for the crime!
(Former IIT Bombay professor Puniyani is one of India’s leading campaigners for human rights and communal harmony)
