Wishing you and all your family members all the very best and a prosperous 2008
Wishing you and all your family members all the very best and a prosperous 2008
Wishing you and all your family members all the very best and a prosperous 2008
Wishing you and all your family members all the very best and a prosperous 2008
Indian Muslim’s dilemma
Ather Farouqui
Following cataclysmic events such as 9/11 and the Iraq invasion that followed, the questions facing Muslims globally face Muslims in India as well. Of course, some of these questions are justified. They are relevant from the point of view of a fast-changing world where many in a community are blamed for being static, backward-looking and atavistic.
But many of the questions being raised are also stereotypical in that they seek to straitjacket Muslims everywhere regardless of their variegated conditioning. In the process, even those Muslims who have done nothing to deserve the epithet of being backward-looking are stigmatised; the fact that they might be as normal as others in the common civic space is ignored.
Being Muslim in today’s world often means carrying a special burden of suspicion and prejudice on the one hand and social, political and religious conservatism on the other. The ordinary Muslim is caught between the increasingly stringent anti-Muslim propaganda of the West and equally strident religious fervour of the jehadi Muslims wherever they exist in the Islamic world.
Both sides are pushing ordinary Muslims towards making a clear choice between being either anti-Muslim or projehadi. However, this is not a choice every Muslim wants to make. Many Muslims want to maintain the religious identity of their birth without being part of its fringe extremist elements. To these Muslims, religion is private and truth is divisible.
After the advent of Islam in India and until the time of British conquest, Muslims were the ruling community in the subcontinent. However, through conversion and inter-marriages, Islam did not remain confined to the upper echelons of society and permeated every aspect of Indian life and culture. The British conquest resulted in a cultural upheaval among the Hindus, which was termed a renaissance in Bengal. It, however, failed to create a change in the Muslim psyche.
The Indian Muslim, in addition to this recent burden, has had to carry the baggage of the very complex process of partition and its aftermath where he is seen as a suspect by civil society.
Of course, it doesn’t help his cause that various contemporary Muslim groups subscribe to violence and advocate militant Islam one way or the other. What is more alarming is that they are finding a growing constituency of adherents and supporters. Ironically, no one can define the Islamic culture for which these Muslims are supposedly fighting.
This ideology, besides being obviously destructive and suicidal, has plenty of contradictions. It aims at destruction, carnage and upheaval in the modern world. These Muslims want to destroy the modern, civilised world, to the development of which they have contributed little while enjoying all its comforts.
However, there has never been one model of Islam even in the past and certainly not in the modern pluralistic world. It’s difficult to imagine that these militant Islamic groups are advocating a world compatible with a desert culture of 1,400 years ago. Even in those times Islam was already divided, the concomitant intrigues and hatreds leading to the murder of three caliphs out of four after Prophet Mohammad!
Thus, the entire cause of Muslim antagonism against all other groups, religious, cultural and social, might be said to be ideological confusion among various sects of Muslims and unresolved contradictions and conflicts within Muslim society from the very time of the advent of Islam. It is apparent that no exclusivist culture, especially the ‘Muslim’ culture dreamt up by Islamists, would be able to survive in the free market economy that dictates contemporary geopolitics. This economy is completely in the hands of Jews and Christians against whom Muslims have declared a war without having prepared themselves for this cultural conflict.
Besides, Muslims are also participating in and enjoying every kind of global activity and comfort — social, cultural, economic, both IT- and diaspora-driven. Thus, the quest for an exclusive Muslim society or culture with supposedly Islamic characteristics defies all logic.
The entire civilised, cultured, affluent and educated world is in the hands of those whom militant Muslims consider their enemies and they have nothing practical to offer as an alternative to the things they want to destroy.
The writer is a political commentator .
Hindus should ask why people convert
The outbreak of communal violence in Orissa has disturbing implications. The state, with a 22 per cent tribal population, has been largely peaceful since the gruesome murder of Graham Staines, a Christian missionary, and his two children in 1999. As in the case of the Staines’s murder, Hindu fundamentalists were held responsible for triggering unrest during the Christmas season.
The violence was one-sided in the past, but no longer. There is resistance on the part of Christian groups to acts of vandalism, including destruction of churches, allegedly by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other sangh parivar groups. The government should ensure that fundamentalists, irrespective of their faith, do not disrupt law and order.
At the root of the trouble is competition among various religious and political groups to convert tribals to their cause.
The issue is not limited to Orissa. It is alive in the tribal areas of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. A struggle is on to reap a harvest of tribal souls. Christian missionaries were the first to arrive, followed by sangh parivar outfits like Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram.
Maoists are the latest force in the region. Each of these groups wants adivasis to convert to its belief. Their task has been made easier by the government’s misplaced tribal policy that sought to protect tribal culture and lifestyle from modern establishments, including schools and hospitals. The church became a much-needed substitute for the state, building schools, colleges and hospitals. Hindu missionary activity, with political undertones, is also devised along similar lines.
These ‘missionaries’ have stepped into a vacuum created by the government.
The Constitution guarantees the freedom to convert and be converted, even though some states, including Orissa, have enacted laws to regulate religious conversion. However, Hindu groups which constantly seek a ban on conversions rarely ask why they happen in the first place. Is it because Christian missionaries offer material inducements to tribals as the VHP and other similar groups claim? Or, is it more than that?
The biggest inducement to convert, particularly for tribals and Dalits, seems to be the promise of self-respect. It is not surprising that religious conversion takes place mostly among tribals and Dalits. A change of faith promises a reprieve for these people from a still oppressive caste system.
Conversions have always been a powerful instrument of dissent from religious institutions that refuse to be inclusive and accommodative. The way forward is for these institutions to introspect and change.
Violence in the name of religion can have no place in this country. India cannot and should not turn into a Nazi Germany, Pakistan or Arabistan.
Religious riots must be controlled with utmost severity. Reasons for the riots must be enquired into impartially. It is understood that the root cause was the demand of converted Christians to be declared as SCs/STs.
Demand for Relegation to backward castes has been the bane of our populist democracy. Politicians have been dividing the people into castes and more castes for votes. This must stop immediately.
I N ORISSA, Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik has ordered a judicial inquiry into the violence against Christian institutions. At the same time State Minister of Steel and Mines, Padmanabha Behera, has resigned owning “moral responsibility” for the Christmas carnage. These actions were taken after a curfew and after the presence of paramilitary forces proved to be no deterrents to the criminal elements who continued on their hate campaign. The minister’s resignation was one of the demands of the tribals in the district, who were opposing a proposal to grant Dalits the status of a Scheduled Caste. This hadn’t much to do with the attacks directly. So, the issuance of caveats by all parties to not “make this a political issue” rings hollow.
If this is not politics, nothing is. The state response leaves much to be desired.
The matter-of-fact acceptance that the attacks were likely in response to an assault on a VHP leader is shameful and tiring. As there had already been an attack on an ‘anti-conversion’ activist, which in turn had inspired the VHP to call a bandh, surely the state machinery should have been alerted to the possibility of such a ‘response’? C
ommunal vandalism and violence have been played out with almost meticulous precision. It is incomprehensible how 15 churches and in stitutes were targeted while there was no intelligence on the ground about any such activity Or did the state machinery . simply not bother?
Communal tension has festered in Orissa for years. One of its worst manifestations was the 1999 Graham Staines case, where the Australian missionary was burnt to death along with his two young sons.
While the murders shocked the nation, the case ended finally with a judgment that exposed the wide chasm between a deterring penalty and the ground realities. While the lower court sentenced the main perpetrator, Dara Singh, to death and 12 others to life imprisonment in September 2003, the Orissa High Court ended up commuting Singh’s death to life sentence and acquitted 11 of the others. The gap in the severity of the penalty , slashed to mere tokenism, cannot have sent the right signals to those inciting such hate crimes.
And clearly little has , been done to address the basic welfare issues involved in such communal divides. This is a politically-motivated crime and the upkeep of law and order is an issue that the state machinery alone can address.
Yet, the moves have been tactical and little is yet being done to grapple with the ground reality that Orissa may be becoming a cesspit of intolerance.
The rot must be stemmed now, Mr Patnaik’s reassurances notwithstanding.