An Unconditional Commitment to Pluralism

Re:mohar#1

Mohar, the root cause of Indian muslim backwardness is the deliberate policy of "minority appeasement" of the so called secular parties like Congress. Its all about encouraging their religious preferences, providing a muslim personal code, allowing them to marry 4 wives, encourage madrassah education, haj subsidies etc. As a result, a muslim in India can practice his religion and life style to the fullest, but cannot compete in the overall society for livelihood.

My opinion is that this is a deliberate congress policy even from before partition when Gandhi formed a nexus with the deobandis during the khilafat movement. Perhaps the objective was to encourage muslims to look backwards all the time and eliminate competition for hindus. In modern India, this policy is a hindrance to the development and growth of India.

I would give credit to the ordinary Indian who is far more tolerant and broadminded than people elsewhere. The fairly significant integration of muslims into the national mainstream has happened due to the common people living together in peace rather than any government policy. Muslims in India are far less alienated than muslims in any other non-muslim country. The problem is that as they get educated and join the middle class they are realizing how backward their community is. That creates resentment and even attraction to jihadi ideology. The recent jihadi incidents show the involvement of professionals like doctors and engineers.

The answer lies in completely ditching minority appeasement in favor of modern education and rapid integration into the mainstream, but that may not be possible due to vested interest. For instnace, if the government withdraws haj subsidies, the mullahs will take to to the streets. Maybe the approach should be to do both - focus on the past and the future. That will keep the mullahs happy while the ordinary folks can pursue a better livelihood.

Re: # 6

Premji is a living example of why Madarasas should be closed down because they only provide fodder to create strife and hatred against idolators.

"n accordance with this paradigm, instead of labeling difference by the terms seen in the worst forms of identitarian politics—for example, idolaters, invaders, infidels, fanatics, the uncivilized, heathens, pagans, zealots crusaders, etc. — our discussion of otherness would move to a different kind of discourse."

The worst of the horrible , revolting and barbaric discourse of mono theistic one moon god supremacist ideology is already enshrined in the constitutions of these "Islamic" countires.
To expect them to understand the issues of pluralism and 'tolerate' idolators like me is like making a horse drink the water.
When the moon god wants them to slay me whetever these faith fuls find me then how can you expect them to let idolators like me live in peace with me.

rohit bhai, consider removing the mention of your professional assocations from your introductory blurb. Then many people might feel freer to abuse you without feeling they are also putting down babson college and emory university, both of which, we are sure, are institutions of acceptable quality.

By the way, for an article on pluralism, read one of Mantolives own articles. That was probably a few hundred times better than what you have presented here.

O Hindus we saw your commitment to pluralism in kashmir, gujarat, bombay, ayodhya and also saw ur great pluralism in the secular gift you gave us:

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Magazine| Sep 17, 2007

Review

One Word, Many Meanings

Such was the polysemy of Partition in the minds of those who lived through the transfer of power

MUSHIRUL HASAN
Qurratulain Hyder died a fortnight ago. Her novel Mere Bhi Sanam Khane portrayed the sparks of Partition blowing up the pathways of a composite culture, leaving a yawning gap of burning dust. Some of the writings of Intizar Husain, now in India as a Sahitya Akademi guest, reflect how an ongoing cultural process was stalled in "a very unnatural way" by a few Muslims and Hindus who, with their puritan frame of mind, contributed to the tragedy of Partition.
To survey the making of Pakistan as a whole, to discover trends in the Partition movement and to seek out its meanings, Yasmin Khan is not the first to make the attempt. Why, then, another tome? Partition, she writes, deserves closer attention as one of 20th century’s darkest hour. It is a loud reminder of the dangers of colonial interventions, and the profound difficulties that dog regime change; lastly, it is "a testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken...unknowable...paths".

Readable and insightful in parts, Khan’s book neither sheds much light on the protracted negotiations between the Congress, the Muslim League and the British, nor does it seek out and punish the ‘guilty’. Instead, it challenges the one-dimensional versions of the past, the "messy ambiguities" of Partition, and the uncertain meanings of Partition and Pakistan in the minds of the people living through the transfer of power. The book’s merit lies in introducing the various vocabularies of freedom in circulation in the late 1940s.

Elsewhere, I had argued that people had no sense of the newly demarcated frontiers, and little or no knowledge of how the Mountbatten Plan or Radcliffe Award would change their destinies, and, moreover, uproot them from their familiar socio-cultural moorings. "The English have flung away their Raj like a bundle of old straw," an angry peasant told a British official, "and we have been chopped in pieces like butcher’s meat." This was the meaning a ‘subaltern’ attached to the Partition movement.

Did Panipat’s Muslim weavers plan to set up home in Pakistan? No, said Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, the writer-filmmaker. Expectations of what Partition would be were mixed. Some longed for Lahore’s inclusion in India; others hoped the boundary in Punjab would be drawn to include Delhi. "For millions of people like myself," wrote Pakistani writer Shaista Ikramullah, "a Pakistan without Delhi was a body without heart."

Khan holds out much promise in her introduction. Thereafter, her narrative comes alive. She juxtaposes ‘high politics’ and popular mobilisation deftly. The picture is irresistibly suggestive and the prose elegant. She takes a dim view of British pride and conceit, and indicts officials for their hypocrisy and failure in dealing with Partition violence. Her account does not work in a void; she has a sense of the factual.

In describing the horror stories, there is always the great danger of repetition—more trains full of dead bodies, more hacked limbs. At the same time, there is also the redeeming repetition of a strong sense of hope and optimism in these tales of despair. According to Prof Amrik Singh, the Muslims from a village in Rawalpindi district did not want to send the non-Muslims away. Nor did they want to kill them. Those who caused mayhem did not belong to his village but were brought in from far away. Many ordinary people rose above the macabre and sinister politics to help the ‘other’ at the risk of their own lives. In a nutshell, small enclaves of humanism and sanity existed in the surrounding bloodshed.

In a thoughtful epilogue, Khan raises important questions about "a deeply ambiguous, transitional position between empire and nationhood".She asserts, "there was nothing inevitable or pre-planned about the way Partition unfolded". Indeed, "the history of Partition has suggested that modern nation-states had to be crafted out of a chaotic...situation in which myriad voices made their claims and counter-claims".

Saadat Hasan Manto, the enfant terrible of Urdu literature, refused to accept Partition’s bloody consequences for long, but did so in the end, without self-pity or despair. It’s time we did the same.

There over 910 million indians for whom the bar is too high and they wil never beome Premjis.
Besides there is no school even for primay schools for millions living in villages and ghettoes of metro regardless of community .
Yes premji is right poverty is no monopoly of few but indian masses and one should not see as only minority problem

Senna yaar, this is less about premji but about premjis and non-premjis.

Who cares if Prem ji has billion or Gazzilions .After a millioners life every thing is Excess fat

PAGE ONE


SECULAR ENGINEER
How a Muslim Billionaire
Thrives in Hindu India
Mr. Premji Has Wealth
And Clout as Wipro Chief;
The Imam Disapproves
By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV
September 11, 2007; Page A1

BANGALORE, India -- The world's richest Muslim entrepreneur defies conventional wisdom about Islamic tycoons: He doesn't hail from the Persian Gulf, he didn't make his money in petroleum, and he definitely doesn't wear his faith on his sleeve.

A native of Mumbai, Azim Premji has tapped India's abundant engineering talent to transform a family vegetable-oil firm, Wipro Ltd., into a technology and outsourcing giant. By serving Western manufacturers, airlines and utilities, the company has brought Mr. Premji a fortune of some $17 billion -- believed to be greater than that of any other Muslim outside of Persian Gulf royalty.


Such success, Mr. Premji says in an interview, shows that globalization -- a force Islamist activists decry as Western neocolonialism -- is turning into "two-way traffic" that can bring tangible benefits to developing countries.

Mr. Premji's rise is already inspiring some Indian Muslims to embrace the modern, globalized world. "He's an icon. He shows that excellence has no caste and no creed, and that if one has excellence, one can make it to the top," says Mohamed Javeed, principal of Bangalore's predominantly Muslim Al-Ameen College. One of the students, Mohammed Nasseer, enthuses, "I'd love to become like Premji one day."

A role model like Mr. Premji might seem to be what India's Muslims need. Though the country's economy is growing at 9% a year, the vast majority of India's estimated 150 million Muslims -- the largest Islamic population in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan -- remain socially marginalized, badly educated and mired in deep poverty. By and large, they're left out of the social transformation that is propelling millions of their Hindu compatriots into prosperity, as barriers of caste disappear and India's new corporate giants provide opportunities that never existed before.

Yet, to many in India's Muslim community, Mr. Premji's enormous wealth, far from being inspiring, shows that success comes at a price the truly faithful cannot accept. They resent that Mr. Premji plays down his religious roots and declines to embrace Muslim causes -- in a nation where people are pegged by their religion and where Hindus freely flaunt theirs. "If you are a Muslim and want to be rich in India, you have to show you are very secular," says Zafarul Islam Khan, secretary-general of the All-India Muslim Majlis e Mushawarat, an umbrella group.

RELIGIOUS DIVIDE


• The Issue: Wipro executive Azim Premji has inspired other Muslims in India to embrace the modern world -- but not all Muslims approve of his secular ways.
• Behind the Debate: Muslims are among the poorest and least educated groups in India.
• Hiring Prospects: Technology giant Wipro says it seeks to hire regardless of creed, but relatively few Indian Muslims meet its standards because they lack English skills and engineering degrees.A Muslim school a half-hour's drive from Mr. Premji's Bangalore home reveals the chasm between this globalist success story and the country's Muslim masses. Students sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Masjid e Takwa madrassa spend their days memorizing the Quran in Arabic -- a language that neither they nor their teacher understand.

The classes are taught in Urdu, a tongue that's largely confined to Muslims and uses the Arabic script. There is no science in the curriculum. Neither is there English, the language in which Wipro conducts business and interviews job applicants, as it looks for Westernized staff who can deal with international customers.

The madrassa's imam, Munir Ahmed, says that for his students, a future as self-employed shopkeepers or peddlers is preferable to seeking formal work at a large company. "A job is like being a slave," Mr. Ahmed chuckles, adding that his graduates are in great demand as teachers in other madrassas. Schoolboys in the streets nearby, asked about Wipro, say they've never heard of it or of Mr. Premji.

The condition of India's Muslims is rooted in the partition of the subcontinent along religious lines in 1947. Amid horrendous massacres, millions of Muslims fled to the newly formed Muslim-majority state of Pakistan, just as most of Pakistan's Hindus and Sikhs escaped to India.

The Muslims who abandoned India included large numbers of the most educated and successful. Those remaining after partition have become "economically, socially, educationally...India's most backward community," says Mahmood Madani, a Parliament member who is secretary-general of India's leading Muslim religious organization, Jamiat Ulema e Hind. By some economic and social measures, Muslims are even losing out to Dalits, the erstwhile "untouchables" who are at the very bottom of the Hindu caste hierarchy.

Illiteracy is higher among Muslims than among Dalits in the key 6-to-17 age group. Although Muslims account for more than 13% of India's population, they make up only 1.7% of undergraduates in India's version of the Ivy League, the seven Indian Institutes of Technology. The underrepresentation is just as severe in the nation's bureaucratic elite: Muslims make up 3% of staff in the Indian Administrative Service and 1.8% of the diplomatic corps.

Only a few of the Muslims who stayed behind in India after partition have managed to prosper, including some Bollywood stars and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, who until recently held the largely ceremonial post of Indian president. "The Muslims we have in India are mostly the poor and the laborers, and a few very rich people like Premji," says Ramachandra Guha, a prominent historian.


With the country regularly rocked by bombings carried out by radicalized Muslim groups, such as the twin attacks that killed 42 people in the technology hub of Hyderabad in late August, even many Hindu politicians and academics see an urgent need to bridge the economic divide between the Muslim minority and the Hindu majority. The Indian government is considering measures to extend to most Muslims the affirmative-action benefits that have long reserved a large share of government jobs and university places for Dalits and other underprivileged groups.

Unlike those observers and Muslim community leaders, Mr. Premji bristles impatiently when the plight of the broader Muslim populace is cited. "This whole issue of Hindu-Muslim in India is completely overhyped," the 62-year-old executive says.

Mr. Premji has mentioned his Muslim background so rarely in public that many Indian Muslims don't even know he shares their heritage. None of Wipro's senior managers aside from Mr. Premji himself are Muslims. The company maintains normal working hours on Islamic high holidays. Among its 70,000 employees, there's only a "sprinkling" of Muslims, according to Sudip Banerjee, president of a division that accounts for a third of revenue.

Mr. Premji's private philanthropy is dispensed through a foundation that's managed by a Hindu former Wipro executive and cuts across religious lines. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, U.S. officials asked the Aziz Premji Foundation to help start an education program that would instill moderate values in Islamic schools. The foundation declined the religion-focused project, according to its chief executive, because "we are working for all."

In an interview at Wipro's sleek Bangalore campus, which had just been visited by a group of Israeli businessmen, Mr. Premji scoffed at the idea he should display his Muslim identity or champion the cause of Muslim advancement in India. "We've always seen ourselves as Indian. We've never seen ourselves as Hindus, or Muslims, or Christians or Buddhists," he said.

These secularist values came to him naturally. There was no madrassa in Mr. Premji's own education. He attended a Mumbai Catholic school, St. Mary's, and then studied electrical engineering at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

As a prominent Muslim businessman in the 1940s, Mr. Premji's late father, M.H. Premji, faced repeated requests for support from Pakistan's fiery founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who offered the father a cabinet-minister job in the new Muslim country. But the Premji family didn't believe in a religious state, and refused to move. "We did not think in these terms," Mr. Premji says. "There were roots in India, there were roots in Bombay. Why should one in any way dislodge these roots?"

While India's Muslim groups complain about facing daily discrimination, Mr. Premji says the only time he has been singled out because of his Muslim heritage wasn't in India but at a U.S. airport shortly after 9/11. In doing business in India, he maintains, "I don't think being a Muslim or being a non-Muslim has been an advantage or disadvantage. It's just been based on the merits of the opportunities."

He's been adroit at seizing those. After the death of his father in 1966, he took the helm at Wipro at the age of 21, against the wishes of board members who wanted seasoned management. Long publicly traded -- although controlled by the Premji family with 81% of the stock -- the company then had annual sales of only $2 million. It was known as Western India Vegetable Product Ltd. and mostly produced a kind of sunflower oil called vanaspati, a staple of Indian cuisine.

Mr. Premji set out to diversify, and a break came in 1977, when a coalition of Hindu nationalists, Socialists and others displaced the ruling Congress party. The new government clamped down on multinationals, prompting the exodus of corporate giants like International Business Machines Corp. and Coca-Cola Co. Mr. Premji stepped in, beginning to manufacture computers and other electronics.

"The space was opened because imports were banned into India, or imports were very expensive because of duty tariffs," he recalls. He set up shop in Bangalore, a southern city whose dry highland air is well suited for assembling electronics. He hired managers and engineers from India's large military industry. Wipro became a major manufacturer of technology hardware.

The bonanza ended in the early 1990s as a different Indian government, seeing capitalism rise in former Eastern-bloc nations, abandoned socialism and eased import restrictions. This created something of a crisis for Wipro and other electronics manufacturers. "The goods and services that we produced were no longer needed because customers could buy what's best and available on the global market," says Wipro's Mr. Banerjee.

While many of Wipro's peers didn't survive the change, Mr. Premji spotted another opportunity in the upheaval. Wipro went to the foreign companies with which it did business when it was a manufacturer, such as General Electric Co. and Sun Microsystems Inc., and offered a new relationship. At relatively low cost, its high-quality engineers could take on outsourced work such as design, research and testing.

Wipro's outsourcing business now spans the gamut. It has simple call-center management, but it also designs mobile phones for leading international brands. It runs the computer systems of European utilities and does full-service business consulting. In the fiscal year ended March 31, Wipro's profit surged 44% to $677 million, as sales climbed 41% to $3.47 billion. The shares, which are also traded on the New York Stock Exchange, have tripled in value over the past five years, giving the company a market value of some $20 billion.

As Wipro becomes a global powerhouse, company officials say they seek to hire the best regardless of creed. They say that among the reasons few Indian Muslims meet Wipro's stringent standards is that they often study in Urdu rather than English, and rarely pursue engineering degrees. Urdu, which is also the official language of Pakistan, is intertwined with Islamic identity on the subcontinent. In southern India, where most of the country's technology industry is based, Hindus speak a number of regional languages and are more likely to study English.

"All our hiring staff are trained to interview in English," Mr. Premji says. "They're trained to look for Westernized segments because we deal with global customers." Out of every 100 résumés received, only one or two usually come from Muslim applicants, according to a former manager in Wipro's human-resources department.

Yet, as outsourcing giants like Wipro and Infosys Technologies Ltd. have grown and hired, the attitudes of some Muslims toward education are slowly beginning to change. Bangalore's Al-Ameen college is run by a movement that seeks to modernize the Muslim community. About 360 graduate and undergraduate students, both men and women, are currently studying for computer-science degrees. Most are Muslims, including pious young men with long beards and women with an Islamic hejab that covers their hair, though not their faces.

Many graduates have already gotten jobs at companies like Wipro and Infosys, says the college's principal, Mr. Javeed, and have started to earn salaries well above those offered outside the booming technology industry. "This has brought awareness to the Muslim community about the need to pursue higher education," he says. "People are beginning to realize that education is power, that education is money, that education is an opportunity."

#3
Mohar
[...Unconditional pluralism, so defined, means accepting others in their otherness, accepting them according to the terms by which they define themselves...]

Which is exactly what has been done for most part of the 60 years... RSS revisionism is only a recent occurrence, that too their theory has never been widely accepted outside their own little areas of influence...

But there is a downside of leaving people to their own device,particularly in case of muslims - it's very clear that while every other communities have made progress in sync with national progress, muslim have not, largely because they have been "accepted as they define themselves" - they have defined and confined themsevels to be orthodox, hyper-religious, hyper-sensitive towards "

Its Musima apeasment which they (majority) gave instead of uniform code for all in plural society .
Danm with what what 15 % of people want in democracy .
Its not minority what it may want but what is made them to want. its the govts perogative to do what it THINKS is RIGHT

My be there is vested interest counter balance the minority for its own good

to not care about its own subject as equal

So instead of parroting the same old tired cliches and peddling already failed paradigms - we need to come up with a solution needed for this situation... problem is NOT lack of pluarlism...

For example - if hindu community been left to their own device, then hindu soceity would still be ridden with the rigid caste system, full of all sorts of superstition and backward practices...But instead, hindu leaders and well-wishers took to reform, they rejected the terms by which hindus defined themselves, they rejected backaward mentality, traditional practices that worked to the detriment of the community... and it worked...

Pluralism to work well needs a basic platform, a minimum undserstanding and acceptance of pluralistic principles from ALL constituent groups... if one group profess a tribalistic, ghetto mentality then it won't work - that sort of mentality is antithesis of pluralism itself...

[...Unconditional pluralism, so defined, means accepting others in their otherness, accepting them according to the terms by which they define themselves...]

Which is exactly what has been done for most part of the 60 years... RSS revisionism is only a recent occurrence, that too their theory has never been widely accepted outside their own little areas of influence...

But there is a downside of leaving people to their own device,particularly in case of muslims - it's very clear that while every other communities have made progress in sync with national progress, muslim have not, largely because they have been "accepted as they define themselves" - they have defined and confined themsevels to be orthodox, hyper-religious, hyper-sensitive towards triviality, have stayed away from concepts of secularism, pluralism, education and most other secular speheres of national life...

And that's not a problem just in india - it's problem in other pluralistic socieities in europe - britain, germany, france, denmark... so much so that the multi-culturalism that was being promoted for a long time has come under strain in these countries... people have started re-evaluating their options - there are increasing demands for assimiliation of insular muslims into larger national framework... leaving them to their own device has not worked...

So - in case of muslim minorities across nations - the prevailing natioanl plural framework has actually worked to the detriment - their own and to the nation at large...

Think about that...

ylh - I understand your predicament - if pakiland had not happened, you would have been an lowly peon but remained a muslim... in pakiland you got a better job, but you have been forced to be non-muslim... irony, huh?...

Nevertheless - pakiland was supposed to be - it was an idea whose time had come at the right moment in history... congress recognized that and they had no desire or reason to resist the idea whose time has come: pure-land for pakis and plural-land for everybody else... :)

stop crying over spilt milk... :)

A very good article...

I'd like to re-quote this:

"By definition, pluralism must be unconditional to be genuine, within, of course, the boundaries of consistency with human rights principles. Unconditional pluralism, so defined, means accepting others in their otherness, accepting them according to the terms by which they define themselves and not force-fitting them into one's own framework. It means accepting a Hindu as a Hindu, a Muslim as a Muslim, a Jew as a Jew, an atheist as an atheist, an unbeliever as an unbeliever and it means respecting that choice. Indian Muslims and Sikhs are not Hindus as Hindu nationalist doctrine will have it. They are Muslims and Sikhs and should be recognized and respected as such. Hindus are not people of the book. All Hindus are not monotheists. Hindus should be recognized and respected as they define themselves. Atheists and agnostics are not inferior to believers and should be recognized and respected as such."


Had the leaders of the Congress Party been willing to accept this definition of pluralism.... the best ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity Jinnah would not have been forced to jump onto the Muslim separatism ship.