Naseeruddin Shah in an interview to
Karawan-E-Mohabbat 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
the last few years, there was an angry response to Shah’s response 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’s mouth piece
Organiser carried an 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 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 Minister 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
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. 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
(eight thousand million dollars) and heavily armed (Seven thousand 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 popularized 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 demonized
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
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 organizations, 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 lynchings in the name of cow-beef have
created massive insecurity. We can see a correlation between rising insecurity
and rise in ghettoization, 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. 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!
