Author: Tavleen Singh
Publication: India Today
Date: September 11,
2000
The BJP must be careful
before it talks about changing its policy vis-a-vis the Muslims
The BJP's first Dalit
president says in his first major speech that he would like to see his
party examine why Muslims dislike the BJP. He urges his party to
stop ignoring the Muslims simply because they do not vote for it.
"We have somehow taken it for granted that our party will not receive any
significant support from them. This preconceived approach has not
helped our party either. We cannot afford to allow this situation
to continue. If we do so, we shall be hurting our own future prospects
and the Muslims will continue to be used as vote banks by our adversaries."
It should have warmed
every secularist heart in India that our main "Hindu fundamentalist" party
was showing signs of change. So it is interesting that Bangaru Laxman's
words seem to have had the opposite effect. Secular editors sneered,
secular cartoonists lampooned BJP leaders and secular politicians huffed
and puffed. How dare you, was, oddly enough, the general reaction.
Puzzling? Not when you remember that secular political parties have long
used the RSS, thereby the BJP, as a bogeyman to frighten Muslim voters
into "secular" arms. Not when you remember that the Congress has
told us for 50 years that secularism was something Jawaharlal Nehru invented.
In all fairness, he did
invent his own version of the secular idea. It was affirmative action
of the most generous kind. In the name of Nehruvian secularism we
have allowed Muslims their own personal law without asking why they should
not also have Shariat punishments; hands snipped off for thievery, stoning
to death for adultery, etc. But Indian Muslims were choosy about
the Islamic law they wanted and we indulged them. The net effect
was only to make it possible for Muslim men to have more than one wife
and impossible for divorced Muslim women to get alimony.
We spend taxpayers' money
to send Muslims on Haj without extending similar privileges to Hindu pilgrims
travelling, for instance, to Manasarovar. We have even banned books
they disapproved of, banned Salman Rushdie from coming to India because
they detested him. But, most dangerously, we have closed our eyes
to what has been going on in Muslim educational institutions.
SACROSANCT SECULARISM:
It is common knowledge that the nature of Islam changed in the Kashmir
Valley mainly because of the spread of madarsas, and that a new breed of
Islamic militant was "educated" in these madarsas just as it happened with
the Taliban in Peshawar. But so sacrosanct is secularism in India
that we are now allowing the same thing to happen in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya
Pradesh and even distant Tamil Nadu.
So when Laxman talks
about understanding Muslim fears, we can only pray the BJP is not going
to adopt Nehruvian secularism. If only because it has not helped
the Muslims, who remain mostly poor and illiterate, and it has not helped
the Hindus who resent being forced to negate their own civilisation and
culture in the name of secularism.
In the process of making
the Muslims feel at home we have allowed our historians to lie blatantly
about Muslim rule in India. To anyone who doubts this I recommend
a book called Arise O India by French journalist Francois Gautier.
Gautier points out that
eminent Indian historians like Romila Thapar have helped perpetuate a negation
of what really happened under Muslim rule. So, of Aurangzeb she writes,
"Aurangzeb's supposed intolerance is little more than a hostile legend
based on isolated acts such as the erection of a mosque on a temple site
in Benares." The truth, Gautier says, is Aurangzeb, according to his own
court records, ordered the destruction of all Hindu temples because as
a good Muslim he considered these places of worship pagan.
Hindus and Muslims know
Islam is the very antithesis of Hinduism but our political leaders have
perpetrated the lie that all religions are the same. In a largely
illiterate country this causes confusion and inevitably tension and violence.
If we confront the differences but ensure Muslims have the same rights
in India as Hindus, we will begin to start solving the problem.
Laxman needs to think
carefully about what he would like to change. He certainly needs
to dissociate his party from organisations like the Bajrang Dal and to
work towards giving more Muslims BJP tickets at election time. But
he needs to stay as far away from Congress-type secularism as possible.
He needs to remember
it has become such a distorted thing that during the Kargil war the Congress
had more to say against our own Government than against Pakistan's intrusion.
Equally inexplicable was the Congress demand for a judicial inquiry into
the recent massacre of Hindu pilgrims in Kashmir. Does the Congress
believe, as Pakistan does, that it was Indian soldiers and not Muslim militants
who were responsible?
