Author: Rajeev Srinivasan
Publication: Rediff
on Net
Date: September 9, 2000
The Supreme Court has
spelt out a few home truths to the Government of Karnataka: in effect,
if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen, as in the case of elephant-poacher
and kidnapper Veerappan.
I personally believe
the Veerappan saga is a blot on India's record as a civilized society.
There is no question that if our beloved 'leaders' weren't in cahoots with
him, he would have been caught years ago.
I applaud the Supreme
Court for its sagacity in accepting the special leave petition of Abdul
Kareem, former deputy superintendent of police and father of Sub-Inspector
Shakeel Ahmed, who was killed by the outlaw in 1992. The Honorable
Justice S P Bharucha spelt out what the average Indian feels: annoyance
at incompetence.
The religion of the petitioner
struck me too. A Muslim brought to a grinding halt the sorry spectacle
of Chief Ministers M Karunanidhi and S M Krishna grovelling before a common
criminal. That is a remarkable fact. It is even more remarkable
that this is not remarked upon by anybody. Why? Because it is not
news. Muslim Indians are full-fledged citizens of India. They
have full rights: this is taken for granted.
Compare this with the
situation in Pakistan. It is supposed to be the 'land of the pure'.
It is supposed to be the refuge for the Indian subcontinent's Muslims.
Sadly, the reality is a little different. A long and apparently factual
article in The Atlantic Monthly by Robert Kaplan demonstrates how little
Muslim lives are worth there: they are casually butchered on the whim of
some warlord. There is the military-mullah nexus that is ravaging
the country. And there is the total dehumanization of women.
Kaplan goes further to
suggest that the core issue of the Indian subcontinent is the "institutional
meltdown of Pakistan". He speaks of the "accumulation of disorder
and irrationality" that strikes the impartial observer; and he predicts
that Pakistan's "annual population growth rate of 2.6 per cent will make
it the third most populous nation by 2050, behind India and China -- if
it still exists". Not a pretty picture.
An article in The Telegraph
talks about a fatwa (Islamic ruling) by one Maulana Zia ul Haq (no relative,
I presume, of their late lamented military dictator) in Pakistan's North-West
Frontier Province. This fatwa wants Pakistani women working for a
British-funded aid agency to be kidnapped and forcibly married to "keep
them at home, where they belong". Barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen,
I imagine: women are walking wombs, useful for producing plenty of little
Muslims, that is about all. Another article talks about the socially
accepted murders of women to "protect the family's honour".
The above for Muslim
men and women. The few hundred Hindus in Pakistan (those not yet
forcibly converted or murdered) are immeasurably worse off. The Indian
Express wrote about Lahore resident Shyam Sharma who now goes by the name
of Peter Joseph to avoid the usual vicious attacks on Hindus. He
changed his name on December 6, 1992, the day the edifice (structure or
mosque according to your lights) in Ayodhya was demolished.
"I did not convert to
Christianity. I just changed my name and it saved my life...
I saw my brothers being killed in front of me. Many people in this
area, mostly Hindus, have adopted Christian names to protect themselves,"
he said. There is not a single temple left in Lahore. And this
used to be a Hindu-Sikh majority city before Partition!
This is the reality of
life in Pakistan. Compare this with what Muslim Indians experience.
They are free, they have equal rights (they are more equal than Hindus,
thanks to Nehruvian idiocy), they are citizens of a nation that is in the
initial stages of a dramatic lift-off to economic stardom.
I received emails from
a couple of Muslims (Indians, I presume) who brought up incidents in Bhagalpur,
Meerut, Bombay, etc. where Muslims have been traumatised. This,
they said, meant that Muslims are regularly ill-treated in India in an
institutionalised fashion. Personally, I think this is hogwash: there
is no such institutional behaviour.
I don't deny that there
are instances where Muslims have been victimised. But this doesn't
have much to do with their religion. Because, for every incident
in which Muslims were brutalised, I can provide ten incidents where Hindus
were brutalised equally. It is just an unfortunate fact of life in
a poor country where human misery has no limit.
They went on to suggest
that Muslims were generally under-represented in all walks of life in India.
If true, I suspect this is primarily due to two facts: first, educated
and wealthy Muslims took off for Pakistan on Partition, leaving mostly
the illiterate lower classes. Second, Muslims often insist on teaching
their children only in religious schools, where they do not learn the skills
needed to thrive in the modern world. These are internal problems
they have to fix themselves: outsiders cannot do much for them.
If I were a Muslim Indian,
I would shout from the rooftops that Indians were the leaders in a peaceful
and forward-looking Islam. Indian Islam (minus mad mullahs like Syed
Shahabuddin and hypocritical harpies like Shabana Azmi), along with the
versions in Indonesia and Malaysia, is the future for Islam if it is to
survive. Otherwise, it will destroy itself in medieval blood lust,
as the Pakistanis and Afghans are demonstrating.
I do wish Muslim Indians
would take a lead role in the affairs of Islam, assert themselves and rescue
their religion from the poisonous grip of the Pakistani Army. They
would do themselves, their religion, and the world at large, a favour by
forcefully denying the claim made by the Pakistanis and the Wah'abi/Deobandi
school of extremists that they represent the true Islam. This version
is a cult of blind dogma.
Most Hindu Indians, even
one as vocal as I am, find it difficult to demonise Muslim Indians.
But let's be clear: I make no concessions for Pakistanis. Why should
I? They are foreigners who have generally been brainwashed into hating
India and Hinduism. I know this first-hand from the Pakistanis I
have known in New York and California.
Lest you think all this
has something to do with the BJP's crass and pathetic pandering to Muslim
vote-banks after their Nagpur session, let me disabuse you of that notion:
I have no connection with the BJP, and never have had any. The closest
I have ever come to them is that I once interviewed the late K L Sharma
for a magazine.
No, I cannot demonise
them because I have been conditioned to view them as human beings.
My family has many Muslim friends, decent people whom we honour and respect.
I have Muslim friends, like young IIT graduate Anwar, medical student Wasim,
and others. They are people to me, not caricatures. And they
are infinitely better off in India than in that unfortunate Pakistan where
their co-religionists are being massacred and their religion is being distorted.
