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A Singapore journalist says both major parties in India must abandon
increasing communalism
"Some countries are united by a common language; India has
around fifteen major languages and numberless minor ones. Nor are its people
united by race, religion or culture…Does India exist? If it doesn't, the
explanation is to be found in a single word: communalism. The politics of
religious hatred." —Salman Rushdie in "The Riddle of
Midnight: India,
August 1947" in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism
1981-91
If I were a regular Indian Hindu, I would not find it difficult to
believe that the country today is threatened by the forces of Islamic
terrorism— no matter what the Muslims say in their defense.
Further, I would add that the terrorizing Muslims and the evangelizing Christian
missionaries are creating grave threats to India's progress, a country that is
rediscovering its destiny as a superpower in the world stage.
I'm saying this because the recent terrorist bombings in many Indian
cities have changed our lives. We live in fear of being blown away while
shopping or traveling. How can we not blame the Muslims when members of their
community have created this atmosphere of terror in the nation of peace-loving
Hindus?
I know what I am talking about. I read newspapers. I watch TV. Lest you
should believe that I am a dehati,
I am
not. I could be a government official, an IT professional, an employee
of an MNC, a businessman or even a member of the diaspora.
I could be anyone.
I am using the term 'regular Indian Hindu' as a classification for those
Hindus in India who are not
liberal (or communists or atheists or pseudo-secularists) or have not acquired
liberal education in India
or abroad and who are conscious of their Hindu identity. Our liberal brethren,
the so called 'pseudo-secularists' (whoever invented this term must be a Indian
Hindu and I want to give him shabashi for
this innovative coinage) might even object to the phrase "Indian Hindu" as a
contradictory duality—an Indian is an Indian, end of the matter, they'd say—but
I wouldn’t have thought the worst of it.
For me it wouldn't have been difficult to bask in the glory of a
resurgent India as a member of 'Hindu India' —an India that is waking up from
its thousand year old slumber of inertia and slavery— first by the murderous
Muslim invaders, followed by the wily British, who between them, ruled us for
nearly a millennium.
But there are many who want to prick my balloon of pride. For instance,
take the recent terror attacks in various Indian cities and the Muslim response
to it. Let us keep our discussion confined to this topic and not get
side-tracked by the issue of conversion of dalits and adivasis by the Christian
missionaries, an issue that equally infuriates me.
If
I were a regular Indian Hindu, I would feel the police action
justified in the Batla House, Jamia Nagar police-terrorist encounter
cases, no
matter what people like Arundhati Roy have to say on this matter. When
scores
of innocents died in terrorist-planted bomb blasts in Maharashtra,
Gujarat and Delhi, what is the big deal if the Delhi police killed two
Muslim terrorists in an
encounter?
Some Muslims are finding holes in the manner the police conducted the
encounter and arrested the terror suspects. I give two hoots about it! I have
my own problems to solve, my own life to live. But if I did care about the
issue, being a newspaper reader and TV news watcher type, I would have felt the
demands of inquiry into the whole episode by the Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity
Group or Delhi Union of Journalists unnecessary, nothing more than an act of
minority appeasement.
Why demoralize our police force, I would have asked them? After all, we
lost one of our own brave policemen in the encounter, didn’t we? I would have
damned the conspiracy theories circulated by these doubters and gossip mongers.
They do nothing or just shed crocodile tears when bombs go off in crowded
bazaars and kill scores of innocent Indians. But when one of them is killed,
they ask for enquiry and provide legal aid to those terrorists? How unpatriotic!
But they are not alone in what they do. To make matters worse, (I would
have thought it a matter of shame) some of our own, the pseudo-secularists, are
party to the game being played by the Muslim intelligentsia and some
publicity-hungry liberal minded media persons. The same way that they did after
the Gujarat riots—they could not appreciate
the fact that what had happened was a natural reaction to the dastardly act of
burning our holy men alive on the Sabarmati Express. What did they get after
doing all those exposes and investigations? All they could achieve was that
they kept Narendra Modi bhai from visiting the US. That’s it. Was it worth all
that muck-racking?
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