Face to face with the Indian Muslims

The writer's name quoted in this article was spelled incorrectly by the translator. It should be Dr.Firoz Mahboob Kamal. To read more articles from this author visit,

www.firozmahboobkamal.com

To read more articles from this author visit,
www.firozmahboobkamal.com

To # 108,

``Confidence is shaken`` ... it`s very sad that in India many people discriminate because of religion. My family is from Hyderabad, and, as you probably know, there is a large Muslim population there. I had a girl once ask me if there were actually any Indians living in Hyderabad. I was like, ``are you crazy? Hyderabad is India so DUH Indians live there`` I find out later she meant hindus by ``Indians`` ... go figure that. Who is Shahrukh khan then, or Abdul Kalam? Aliens?

But don`t pity the muslim case too much. At least don`t pity discrimination against muslims. What is the worst is the Shari`at Law in India... I feel so much for muslim women in India. Even though they live in a secular democratic country, they are still plagued by polygamy, instant divorce and discrimination in the name of their religion. I find it so interesting that many people cite rape as the worst degradation of women... Actually it`s not. What`s worse than Hindus parading naked muslim women on streets and raping them is the Hindu politicians raping the integrity and secularity of India by holding up biased laws (such as the Sharia). I mean, I would much rather be paraded and raped and killed than live a full life devoid of basic human rights, be susceptible to divorce simply by uttering talaq 3 times, or have my husband beat me to pulp, or be considered I am always inferior because I am a woman. Yes, it sounds harsh, but it`s the naked truth.

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Thursday, April 11, 2002

To

I have read the article written by Dr Malik. I don’t agree with you fully. If in your country if any state demands indipendence ,would you be able to comply it. (For eg Karachi where the sindhis are demanding Indipendence) even Baluchistan. Even now the Shias are attacked & their places of worship are not spared. If tomorrow the Shias demand a separate country what you will do.

During the 1971 war in Bangladesh many innocent people were tortured, killed & burned by the military ruler Yahya Khan (Butcher of Bangladesh).Your country should hold an indipendent inquiry & punish the culprits. Your country (Pakistan ) talks of gross violation of human rights in India , What about human rights in Pakistan.

What a clean record Pakistan is having.

In every country it is the minorities who are at the receiving end. In Pakistan minorities do not have voting rights. You only talk of TADA & POTO law in India. What about Blasphemy Law in Pakistan which is used to prosecute Non – Muslims. Why are you silent. For eg In Pakistan so many Hindu Temples were descreted, idols stolen. A Hindu leader who was protesting was shot dead. His house was looted & his wife raped. The recent grenade attack on church should server a eye opener. Foreigners are thinking twice if not thrice to enter Pakistan after the Church episode.

When mosques are attacked you protest, condemn. But when Muslims attack religious places of Non-Muslims. You Celebrate.

Awaiting for an early reply

Rajesh

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The Muslim discrimination is a fantasy

Omar Khalidi

http://www.expressindia.com/ie/daily/19990825/iex2

5059p.html

Most Pakistanis think that Muslims in India are discriminated. Here`s an article which says much about it.

Every so often one hears of discrimination against Indian Muslims in state employment, particularly with regards to civil service, police and the armed forces. Around election time, ``minority cells`` of all political parties surface through the newspapers demanding ``justice`` and fair treatment to the minorities by the Indian state. Is there real discrimination against Muslims just because they are Muslims? Can the alleged discrimination be established in a court of law? Or is this merely a case of fantasy versus reality?

More on Omar Khalidi

Omar Khalidi an Islamic Studies scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a Agha Khan scholarship.Email: okhalidi@MIT.EDU http://libraries.mit.edu/people/okhalidi.html

Fareed Zakaria - Indian Muslim

Editor of Foreign Affairs, the publication of New York`s influential Council on Foreign Relations, Fareed Zakaria, 36, is somewhat gloomy about India`s future. ``It is sad that Indians succeed in every country except their own,`` he says. ``It says a lot about political institutions and economic policies, and about getting the state right. You can have talented, motivated people, but if you don`t put them in the right environment and give them the right incentive structure, you are not going to see the same achievement.``

Educated at the prestigious Cathedral school in Bombay, Zakaria went to Yale at age 18. ``I felt more intellectually and culturally at home at Yale than I did in India,`` he says. In the last stages of completing his bid for U.S. citizenship, Zakaria has no plans to live in India again. ``I didn`t come here for the money,`` he says. ``My parents were quite comfortable, and in fact, I actually took a drop in living standards.`` The attraction of the U.S. was its intellectual environment. ``I had grown up in a vanishing India that had been a product of English liberalism,`` he says. ``I had to move in one direction or the other: I either had to get back to India and learn more about its indigenous literature and culture, or I had to go the other way and Westernize. For most of the kids in my school, Westernization meant technology, rock music and films. They had lost the language of their parents, and yet their relationship with English was essentially as a business language. So they were in a weird world in which they had no access to any culture on a deep level. That troubled me.``

Zakaria believes India could dominate the next century, but only if it changes dramatically. ``The system in India still responds very slowly to the rest of the world,`` he says. ``You can have software companies and a booming economy, but in the end, you cannot modernize a society without modernizing the state. India needs massive deregulation and a withdrawal of the state from the economic sphere. You still have massive government expenditures in all the wrong areas, unthinkable in most of the Western world and East Asia. The Indian government is poor and it needs all the money it can get for infrastructure, basic health and education. The government is still wasting money, building steel mills and dams, subsidizing cement prices.``

How Indian Muslims Can Be More Successful

Syed Amir, Ph.D. - Pakistan Link

I am writing in reference to Mr. Kaleem Kawaja’s letter (Pakistan Link, March 3, 2000), “Indian Muslims are Patriots”. Mr. Kawaja has been politically active in the Indo-Pak community in the Washington area for a long time, and normally is an exponent of communal harmony. In his letter, he equates his criticism of Indian Government policies, aired in Pakistani-American media, with that of expatriates living in the U.S. who feel free to express their critical views of the administration. I believe the analogy is not quite appropriate. While criticism of Indian policies as they relate to Muslims living there may be legitimate, his choice of the medium of delivery may have been unwise.

In order to appreciate this apparent incongruity, we have to consider the background of the contemporary Indian politics. Muslims living in India, larger in number than in Pakistan, carry the unique burden of a thousand years of history. More importantly, they are held in some degree responsible by many in the majority community for the success of the Pakistan movement in the forties that culminated in the creation of Pakistan. Then, there is the unfortunate legacy, spanning half a century, of acrimony and hatred between India and Pakistan. These special circumstances place the Muslim community in India in a very vulnerable and delicate situation, even though the generation, which spearheaded the Pakistan movement, is no longer around. It follows, therefore, that any expressions of glowing love and friendship for Pakistan by a member of the Indian Muslim community, at this time of heightened tensions, may not be taken in the same spirit as the Lahore declaration made a year ago by Prime Minister Vajpayee.

It does not take a great amount of insight to recognize that Indian democracy at its current state cannot be equated with that of America in its generosity towards and concern for minorities. There might be some historic reasons for it, though they do not fully justify the long-standing neglect of minority rights in India. For centuries, religious and communal passions prevalent on the Indian subcontinent have generated a culture of hate, extremism and bigotry. Traditionally, loyalties have not been based on national identity, but rather on religious affiliations that often transcended national boundaries. This has especially been true of the minority Muslim community. During most of the twentieth century, the Indian Muslim politics was centered on supporting causes affecting other Muslim countries, a policy that was rarely reciprocated. As far back as the first quarter of the twentieth century, for example, the Indian Muslims leadership was agitating for the restoration of the Ottoman Caliphate in Turkey, while there were no strong sentiments for it in Turkey itself. Finally, unconcerned with the opinions of outsiders and to the dismay of Indian Muslims, Mustapha Kamal Ataturk abolished the institution altogether.

Indian Muslims have been living for half a century under the cloud of their perceived sympathies for Pakistan. However, slowly and progressively they are shedding their sense of despair, gaining self-confidence, and demanding their rightful place in the economic and political setup of their homeland. It is critical that the process should be allowed to blossom and mature. Pakistan can help only by staying out of this equation, both directly and indirectly. Indian Muslims are likely to be much more successful in the quest for recognition of their rights, if the majority community accepts the thesis that religious and national identities are not incompatible, and that the loyalty of Indian Muslims to their country is beyond question.

Respect for other religions

Anees Jillani -The News , April 5, 2000

There lives even now a Hindu owner of a middle-sized Hotel in New Delhi who has a Muslim wife. She was married at the time of partition, was abducted, raped but later rescued by the armed forces. Her Muslim husband who had by then migrated to Pakistan was contacted by organisations handling repatriation of such women but he refused to take her back. She was lucky that she came across her present husband while living at one of the rehabilitation centers in early 1948. The young Hindu businessman married her and rescued her from the centre. He insisted that she could retain her religion. Wife of a prominent Pakistani was similarly abducted during partition. Many years later, she came into contact with a Pakistani who had gone to a tailor`s shop in Delhi. Working almost as a slave and without any access to the outside world, she stitched her husband`s name on a piece of cloth and secretly gave to the Pakistani. The latter managed to contact the husband in Pakistan but the husband, who had by then remarried, refused to have anything to do with her wife.

Karan Thapar, a conspicuous Indian Journalist, who recently interviewed General Musharraf on Door Darshan and who was given the general`s tie for praising it, narrated another interesting experience in one of his columns. He was watching an open-air theater about the Kargil war (Indians have nothing better to do than harp on this theme for the past one year now) when he started hearing two Indian jawans disapproving of a scene. Two Pakistani jawans had been captured by the Indians and after a thorough interrogation, they were shown as criticising Pakistan, its leadership, and its military. The Indian jawans sitting in the audience, who themselves had participated in the Kargil war, told Thapar that such a thing can never happen. Jawans even of an enemy can never criticise their own country, military and its leadership. The Indian media, and even some of the senior Indian army personnel, can routinely be seen praising the valiant performance of some of our soldiers during the Kargil war.

The moral of the story from the above three anecdotes is that not all Hindu Indians are rascals and villains; and not all Pakistani Muslims are angels going straight to heaven via Lahore. Both India and Pakistan are big nations in terms of their populations; and thus comprise all sorts of people. If India has produced Bal Thakeray, then it also has Nirmala Deshpande who led a 36-member women peace mission to Pakistan from March 25 to 31. We all know of similar contrasts in our country.

What, however, distinguishes Pakistan from India in this respect is the presence of a Muslim community almost the size of Pakistan living within India. It simply cannot be ignored in a democratic-cum-secular setup. I first visited India in 1985 and found quite a few Muslims still cheering the Pakistani cricket team in a match against India. Not anymore. When asked now about their plight in a Hindu-dominated India, they say that they are fine; worry about your own self. Most of them are more perturbed about the state of mohajirs in Karachi than Hindu-Muslim riots in India.

This is, of course, not to say that India is a perfect example of secular model in the comity of nations. Far from it. It is a country where forces preaching Hindutva are in power and where the Babri mosque was demolished on December 6, 1992. However, what goes to the Indian system`s credit is the fact that the same Hindutva forces had to tone down their rhetoric and even their agenda to remain in power and win elections; construction of Ram mandir is no longer on NDA`s (National Democratic Alliance`s, of which BJP is a constituent) agenda and manifesto. The Indian premier himself called the day of destruction of the mosque the saddest day of his life and there are criminal cases pending against none other than the home minister himself for being involved in the destruction.

Since we have a selective memory, few would recall that some Pakistanis demolished many temples as a reaction to the mosque demolition. Have you heard of any Pakistani ever arrested for destroying those temples or attacking the Hindus? There is a BJP government in power in the state of Gujarat that permitted its civil servants to join Kuppahali S Sudarshan-led RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh); the state government justified its action on the ground that RSS is not a political but a cultural outfit. This permission led to such an uproar in the Lok Sabha and such condemnation by the print media that the BJP eventually bowed to public pressure and withdrew the authorisation on March 8, 2000.

The above anomalies may not be written or talked about in Pakistan but the world community is not deaf, nor is it dumb. They see India as a Third World country attempting to maintain democracy and secularism; they all wish it well because this is the system that most of them also subscribe to. On the other hand, ours is a country which is gradually shifting into the hands of mullahs who talk of Islamic bombs and missiles and who wish to rule the whole world. What an irony because, at present, they cannot even rule themselves. They see India as a country where even the minority communities surpass the population of their own nations and then there is Pakistan where even a single conversion of a Hindu or a Christian is reported in all the major dailies, including the English ones.

We can no longer have it both ways. We cannot aspire to be a fortress of Islam and wish Clinton and Tony Blair to be our best friends. If we want to be Green Fortress, then we will have to content ourselves with Afghanistan`s Mulla Omar and survive like Afghanistan. No one in the world is asking us to change our religions. Islam, in fact, is the second largest belief in many of the countries. All that the world asks us to do is to respect other faiths as well. It is not good enough to say that minorities enjoy full protection of the state. The minorities in Pakistan cannot vote with us; they cannot be elected with us; they cannot become ministers; they are almost non-existent in our armed forces and civil service and the judiciary.

Most important of all, we wish all of them ideally to convert to Islam for their spiritual salvation. I am not so worried about theirs as our own religion because our scale of corruption increases manifold just before Eid during the holiest of holy days in Islam.

I think you are grossly exagerrating the situation to the extent that muslims are having a wonderful time in pakistan. for yoou kind information only a selct group of people the upper middle class above are ok in pakistan and it is same in India in many ways. There is by and large peaceful co-existence and people such as yopourself are the root cause of inciting people`s emotions. It is far better to get your own house in order first and set an example before traversing the rocky path to philosophising. The hindus from lower castes are far far worse off than anybody else in India, I hope this is enough proof for you to understand that it is not a state decision but a way of indian society

`` Why Muslims are uncomfortable in India ? ``

Please read some of my experience::

I live in a town famous for Hindu-Muslim riots

Most of the time riots are initiated by Hindus

and then we have to retaliate( and You bet we

will if we are attacked first , c`mon gotta save my ass).

This statement is supported by the facts like

(1) Bombay riots--refer sarkaria commissions Retaliation -- BOOM BOOM , Burn Baby Burn !!! ,

(2) Meerut-Maliaya riots-- read finding of the inquiry. that bastar# Meerut S.P is still not being convicted--( Of Course Tolerant India ;-) )

(3) Coimbatore genocide-- Read frontline magazine

story around oct98 --( retaliation BOOM BOOM very close to Advani , I think he should

live forever to keep our motivation live )

I can give you more examples but I think its

enough to support my argument and beside this there are evidence and commission reports already

out there.

Some of commission findings gives a detail gruesome account of police brutalities , planned riots and damage to muslim properties , Rape and

video filming of nude muslim womens in surat

(

BTW can anyone give me a single incident

where hindu women were stripped nude and

raped on the streets during 800 years of

muslim rule ?

)

and so it goes....

My experience in Bombay ( Yes I will not call it

Mumbai just because a third grade crimnal read

thakre want it to be )

After I finished my degree , I went to Bombay

to try for a job in Gulf.So here I am sitting

in a office in Andheri , an office employee

took my resume and asked me to wait , and then

I heared

Emp :Sir , He( refering to me ) is a muslim as the

Arab delegation want it.

Sir : Hmm.. I know , these m.f * * * * * Arab wants muslims.

Emp :yes sir and that`s how these Bast$%# muslim

are able to go to Gulf so easily.

Sir :Tell him (me ), to leave his resume and I will try to convince delegation that we couldn`t

find any muslim candidate.

Its exactly what I have heard through my ears belive me..

Experience in Delhi :

I was in Delhi to collect my H1 visa papers

for a job in U.S from a local post office .

when I reached there an employee asked my name and

asked me why I wanted to go to U.S etc

his exact remarks were `` Tuh umreka jake

desh ki gand par laat marega ``

So You want to kick your country`s Ass by accepting job in USA.

I just thought I should contribute something

here from my experiences too, I am an indian

muslim and love my contry but if things like

these happens then your confidence is shaken.

Re: Mjaved

Mr Omar says while answering Goyal

``Goyal’s questions were succintly answered and parried earlier, aye, if the FOOL could only read! But not quite the way he was hoping.:) What does he think he is? A trial lawyer? :) ``

-- Would you not agree with me that Mr Omar`s labelling of Goyal as a FOOL is also uncalled for.

Anyways, I agree with you that my remark of calling him an Idiot too is uncalled for. I apologize.

About not getting obsessed with OMAR, i agree. Which is why i never read his posts, more than the first three lines. And i am pretty sure that i will not read his replies even those three lines at all. It simply is not worth the effort.

Iconoclast

Do you know that in fact there is a very good reason for that fact that there are no universally accepted theories of International Relations? They remain just that, theories. Now mine was mainly about India, and that it remains.

Omar Mirza

Re Truth:

The Medium IS the message.

Marshal MacLuhan

Re: ICON

I also said, `Gladys Stains is a Saint, I`m not.`

So now the new tactic `n chorus is arguing that i`m not coherent. If thats the case, why are you and Goyal so hot and bothered by the message? :)

OMAR MIRZA