The second partition of India
WHEN the ‘Cabinet Mission’ asked the Quaid in April 1946, why there should be a separate Pakistan, he replied:‘—The Muslims have a different conception of life from the Hindus.
—A Hindu will wash his hands after shaking hands with a Muslim. No Hindu will let Mr Jinnah have a room in his building. Hindu society and philosophy are the most exclusive in the world—-’. These and other cogent arguments convinced the British about the 1947 Partition.
In 2002, when a thousand Muslims were viciously murdered and another two thousands injured in Indian state of Gujarat (with Modi as CM), a prominent Indian author, diplomat and politician, Khushwant Singh, noted in his book titled ‘The end of India’: ‘—with — the ruling coalition openly supporting the divisive and retrograde agenda of the fundamentalists, it is the very idea of India that is at stake ——-‘Unless a miracle saves us,’ ‘the country will break up.
It will not be Pakistan or any other foreign power that will destroy us; we will commit hara-kiri’— those who feel secure because we are not Muslims or Christians are living in a fool’s paradise’.
After ten years of procrastination, the team investigating the Gujrat carnage, absolved Modi of all blame and the pliant Indian Supreme Court, granted bail to the 14 criminals involved in the case in Jan 2020.
Today 33 percent of the Indian minorities belonging to the Muslims and Dalits are multi-dimensionally poor; majority of prisoners in Indian jails are also from these two minorities and more than 55 per cent of under trials in India are Muslims, Dalits according to official Indian data’. Similar instances and concerns are cited by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, which gave India its lowest rating in its reports for 2020.
Today, BJP and its affiliates have demanded that ‘India’s Muslims should reconvert to Hinduism—and hand over various mosques and shrines to the Hindus. The symbols of Muslim identity like beards, caps and head scarves — invite suspicion, scorn and even violence in India and the scariest trend has been the murdering of Muslims suspected of possessing beef’.
A BJP leader, Subramanian Swamy recently told a foreign news agency that ‘They (Muslims) are not in an equal category (among Indian citizens’).
Arundhati Roy observed: ‘—the social and economic boycott of Muslims has pushed them further down the societal ladder and made them unwelcome in public spaces and housing colonies.
For reasons of safety as well as necessity, in urban areas, many Muslims, including the elite, are retreating into enclaves that are often hatefully referred to as “mini-Pakistan.”…A frequent war cry of the murderous— mobs that have overrun India’s streets is “Mussalmankaek hi sthan, kabristanya Pakistan!”—Only one place for the Mussalman, the graveyard or Pakistan. In the IOJ&K, eight million people are struggling to survive under the heaviest military occupation in the world.
Here the internet is continuously shut, fire walled and weaponized for nearly a year, and what has been recently allowed is known as a white list—a handful of regime sanctioned websites that excludes social media platforms.
The CAA is also manifestly discriminatory against Muslims and could create unprecedented statelessness and is comparable to the Nazis who could decide who was a rightful citizen and who wasn’t.
Thus in December 2019—the first to react were the students of Aligarh Muslim University and Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia. In response, police attacked them with teargas and guns.
In Delhi’s iconic Shaheen Bagh protest, — tens of thousands, and sometimes a hundred thousand people, — blocked a major road for almost two months. This spawned mass protests across the country—with millions— on the street—The anthem of this new uprising— (was) freedom from caste and repression.
To the Hindu fascists—Muslims are the “internal enemy” whose real loyalties lie outside India— Many Indians, especially the poor Muslims, lack documentary evidence of when and where they were born; even birth certificates have become widespread only in recent decades.
While non-Muslims would not be bothered, undocumented Muslims would abruptly bear the onus of proving that they are Indians’. Shashi Tharoor, a prominent Indian parliamentarian lamented the CAA: ‘India’s — soul stands divided —’. Totaling around 201 million (2018 estimate), India’s Muslims constitute the world’s third-largest and biggest Muslim-minority population.
But their share in Parliament is currently at a 50-year low. In the 1980 election, almost 10 percent of those elected were Muslims. In 2014, it was less than 4 percent. Although Muslim population in India is 14.2 per cent, their portion in elite government services is less than one percent, while over 38 per cent of Muslims continue to live in poverty in urban areas.
Islamophobia in India is also mainstream, since the rulers have declared Muslim citizens subservient to Hindus. They are lynched on suspicion of storing beef and forced to chant the Hindu slogan “Jai Shri Ram”.
Further, since the fall of Kabul in August, the hashtag #GoToAfghanistan targeting Muslims trended on Indian social media, a repeat of the perpetual ant-Muslim #GoToPakistan campaign launched by the RSS. This is part of the BJP strategy for political gains and those who dare to challenge it are labelled foreign agents, trolled through media and jailed.
In 2020, the Indian Supreme Court legalized, without evidence, the construction of a Hindu temple, on the site of a 470-year-old mosque at Ayodhya. To erase Muslims heritage in India, BJP lawmakers desire renaming the Taj Mahal as Ram Mahal.
The Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh (UP), (with 45 million Muslims), who ‘is the founder of the Yuva Vahini, a Hindu terrorist organization— has stated that he wouldn’t stop until he turns UP and India into a Hindu state.—In February 2015 he commented: ‘If given a chance, we will install statues of — Hindu deities —in every mosque.’’ This year, ‘Genocide Watch’ ‘warned of an impending massacre of Muslims in India’. So what can the Indian Muslims do for their redemption? —Continued.
—The writer is the former President of NDU.
