The Place of Debate

Ref AAmir #: 319

[I did not accept British designed Partition,nor do i have to live by it .]

I do. Don`t tell me you are a closet Akhand Bharat type. I certainly wouldn`t want those crazies back. (I shall make exceptions for anNy and Semipreciousme.... and a few others such as Hamidm provided he brings cases of Macallen along.)

[You cannot tell Muslims in India to go to Pakistan.... ]

I don`t. In fact, I suggested only Afghanistan as a place of abode for our one and only Farzana Versey. I wouldn`t wish Pakistan on my worst enemy. At least Afghanistan has gone through hell at the hands of Islamist thugs and knows not to let them back into power again. Pakistan hasn`t been through that ordeal yet.

[...nor have they done anything to be less of a citizen than there forefarthers like your forefathers have been for 1000 yrs or even more for some, if you take hindu converted to muslims.]

I would say they have done MORE by simply remaining in India despite all the false propaganda of the Muslim League and Jinnah. It takes a lot more guts to stay on and I have never asked that Indian Muslims prove their loyalty to India.

There is this 12-headed hydra that has used a handle similar to yours who usually labels India the `belly of the beast`. I thought I was responding to him.

Ref Zafar Al-Talib #: 315

[Not an edge, but a level playing field (once they get the hell out of those damn madrassahs). Vaisai, perhaps you have a point (!!!) because a relatively high proportion of the small karigar types (masons, carpenters, etc.) at least in Delhi are Muslims. (Also brass workers in Muradabad, weavers – and murthi producers!!!! - in Benares...) So there’s been a move into micro-businesses already.]

The WORST thing that has happened to Muslims is learning a trade. Once you learn a trade, as economic circumstances make it difficult to make ends meet, these guys force their kids into the trade at an early age and perpetuate the cycle of poverty. Thus a mason`s son starts carrying bricks, a metalworker`s son starts beating out metal sheets into utensils, and a weaver`s children start weaving silk sarees or carpets; all at the expense of going to school. Just ask how many GENERATIONS of workers have stayed in the same trades as their parents. I bet these guys haven`t done one thing different in their lives since Aurangzeb`s time.

Take instead even a clerk`s son. What can the clerk teach his son except to go to school and get a college degree? If the kid is reasonably attentive to his studies, he will get an education and make something of himself.

Trade and craftsmanship are not valued in India because you can always find cheap manual labor and of course we have been taught NOT to value excellent craftsmanship but to go for the lowest price. That poor guy making brass utensils in Moradabad is going to lose his livelihood to factories churning out aluminum and stainless steel utensils by the millions. And the truth is, that poor Muslim weaver in Benares is dependent on a Hindu trader to sell his sarees and that damned bania is making more money than the weaver.

The Indian Army is a darn good place for Indian Muslims just like the US Army has been good for American Blacks. Soldiering is an honorable profession and the guys come out with much more self-confidence than they went in with. They could also get into automotive or electronics maintenance, trades that will pay more and will grow in demand.

Don`t sit on your haunches and bemoan fate. Get out and get an education. Above all, leave your hometown. That is the way you will be prevented from being sucked into your dad`s trade.

PS. I remember an ad from IBM some 15 years back. The ad was for computers of course but the text talked about the beauty of creating something that exists only in the imagination and having it come alive on the computer as in a computer simulation. The picture to go with the text was a copper pot commonly used in Gujarat for carring water from the wells and identified as such. Man, what a beauuuutiful shape! There is a LOT to be said for craftsmanship!

Ref dost-mittar #: 308

[The second point is your statement that the exodus did not start until 14th August. I do not have access to the newsfiles of that period, but I will do one better for you; I am going to take you on a personal historical tour of that time and place.]

The First Rule in arguments with YLH: if it is not in Wolpert`s Jinnah, it is not true.

The Second Rule is: Jinnah is above Allah when it comes to secular politics in Pakistan. The realities don`t matter.

Ref dost-mittar #: 311

[BTW if it were up to me (my dream would be most people`s nightmare!), I would abolish quotas and reservations of all types and at the same time abolish all private/religious/army schoos and replace them with State schools, which have been sorely neglected as the middle class parents have taken their children elsewhere.]

It is obvious you haven`t seen how the various state governments have royally fcuked up the education system or you have just chosen to forget it.

Every state government, ever since the linguistic reorganization of the states in 1956, has tripped over its feet in its rush to implement college-level education in the vernacular. Now, imagine the utter stupidity of a state like Tamil Nadu, with very few local employment opportunities within the state except for smuggling from Sri Lanka and tapping toddy from the palm trees, saying that its students will have to learn their lessons in Tamil! If their graduates learnt all their college-level coursework in Tamil, how well will they speak English which was a reasonable common language in India? What is their chance for success in All-India examinations like the IAS, IFS or IPS or entrance exams to IITs, IIMs, and the AIIMS?

The revolt against this was the establishment of private primary and secondary schools where the medium of instruction was English. Initially, primary and secondary education was always in Tamil with English being taught as a second language and English becoming the language of instruction in colleges. But now you had a set of students who did not ever learn a word of Tamil after elementary school, this being an absolute minimum requirement by the government. As usual, the politicians who used to re-name themselves as Anbazhagan, Nedunchezhiyan, etc., (by the way, one called himself Tamilkudimagan; with a short `u`, it meant Tamil Citizen, but with a long `u` and softening of the `d` as in the word `doodh`, it meant Tamil Chut -- I kid you not!) sent their kids in droves to English-medium schools and colleges while condemning the ordinary citizens to Tamil-medium instruction.

The whole thing was compounded by the idiots from UP and Bihar (thank God we got rid of quite a few of them when they migrated to Pakistan but not enough!) who insisted that Hindi would be the sole link language of India. These states that had produced people like Gobind Ballabh Pant and Rajendra Prasad descended into such nadirs of decline in their determination to eliminate English that they are now wondering what the reason for the success of the southern states in IT is and why they are clubbed with Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Of course, they attribute it to the ``smart Madrasi`` forgetting the fact that these guys are just able to read and converse in English.

The one thing that the government has demonstrated is its ability to FUBAR (Fcuk Up Beyond All Recognition) anything it touches. Let education be the commercial marketplace that it has become in India: you have the choice of paying nothing and going to municipal schools of dubious worth, paying good money to get into private English-medium schools and convents, or paying top dollars to go to Lovedale or Mussoorie and come out speaking butler English. You even have the choice of schools following the state curriculum, the Central curriculum, the Cambridge Examination Syndicate, etc. The result is you have the odd dozen students who absolutely ace the SAT tests and come to the US for undergraduate education on a full scholarship. The rest fight it out for IITs, RECs, the better local colleges, etc., with the dregs ending up doing their BA in History in the vernacular.

Keep your cotton-pickin` hands out of the private schools!

re: veeresh

{{b) When did he buy this tie and from where?}}

my guess is Hermes

SameerJB & nasah,

The two of you seem to be brutally ``honest`` in that you dont pull any punches. If your posts were written by hindus, there would be a howls of outrage. You sure youre not hindus posing as muslims on Chowk?:)

I`ve put the word ``honest`` in quotes cos I`m not in a position to judge if those statements are factually correct or not.

Judging from the situation in England, I would venture a guess that there may be some merit to your arguments. The S.Asian immigrants in England started roughly at the same level. Is it true that the hindus & sikhs have achieved a higher economic & educational status, as compared to their S.Asian muslim counterparts? The recent riots by ``Asians`` in England suggest that they were primarily disaffected & unemployed muslim youth.

Also, it seems educated muslims in England (some, at least) have become very enamoured by the preachings of radical mullahs. They are getting that very dangerous ``we are oppressed, we are victims of a world-wide anti-Islamic conspiracy`` mentality. Classic example is that Sheikh Omar.

Another interesting fact is that NONE of the WTC suicide bombers were illiterate peasants. Almost all of them had a college degree (or so I think). OBL has a degree in ``civil`` engineering. Jeeze, what a waste of a degree!

So, just education isnt the answer. I wonder what is? anybody?

re: Zafar # 315

Certainly. I have noted the same pattern in Lucknow.

It is fascinating to watch societies change, even if that change unfolds at a glacial pace.

Wgy should not Muslims be worse off than Hindus or even neanderthals, if they had to be living together? What else is new? Muslims were worse off even before partition. They were even worse off in Punjab in education and business. Muslims were worse off even before British Raj in India. Were Muslim better off or equal during Akbar? who knows? Because there were so few Muslims before Alamgir outside the royal court and military.

Indonesia is 88 percent Muslim and Malatsia is 60 percent Muslim, yet Muslims are backward in education and business compared to Chinese. In Malaysia, top three or five richest businessmen are Chunese with one Indian. In Nigeria, about 50:50 christian Muslim ratio, Muslims are totally absent from the list of Nigerian writers, they are much behind christians in education and business. In Senegal with even 94 percent Muslims, the other 4 percent are running the country because of widespread illiteracy among Muslims. Same is the case all over west Africa, Burkina Faso, Benin, Cameroon, you name it. Within former Yugoslavia, Kosovo was the poorest region with highest crime rate and highest birth rate also.

Muslims do well when there is no competition as in almist 100 percent Muslim countries because there is nobody to compare against. The comparison there is against zero baseline.

There may be some truth to discrimination against Muslims in some places but by far their backwardness is of their own making.

Within Muslim communities even those families who do not take religion seriously usually succeed more than families with Islamic inclinations and Islamic tutors for their kids.

In social matters, most religious parents end up marrying their daughters some other beardo or clean shaved musla khota wearing sherwani over 44 inch waist with skinny cigarette like legs rather than aggressively persuing the best mate for their daughters. And the cycle starts all over again. Alhamdolillah!!!

Hamzad Afaqui #296

Sorry about that. A tired attempt at humor. Apologies for having subjected you to it. (Can we risk a smiley here?) :)

Sincerely,

Aamir

Shammi # 297

“The best way would be to break the peasants` dependence on land as a means of production, by moving to either an industrial or a post-industrial, knowledge economy.”

This is a more daunting task than you think. The literacy rate in Sindh, Baluchistan and NWFP is less than 40 % . It will take these people a while to march into a knowledge based economy.

Ref :: http://www.accu.or.jp/litdbase/stats/pak/index.htm

Regards,

Faruk

Reply ylh # 268

“No matter how many ways Indians come up to obscure the facts, but facts will be facts. They committed ethnic cleansing of the worst kind of Muslims throwing them out of India and into Pakistan to wreck Pakistan at its inception.”

Yasser if the rulers of Pakistan at that time felt they could not afford to absorb the Muslims of the subcontinent I can only say that it was IMMORAL for a country created in the name of Indian Muslims to try and avoid giving Indian Muslims entrance to it. This frankly looks like the worst kind of opportunism – using the “Muslim minority” issue to grab some real estate where Muslims were already a majority, then turning around and saying that really, this new country would be destroyed if it accepted subcontinental Muslims from areas where they genuinely were a minority. In the words of Ulrike Meinhof: creating a crisis and refusing to honour its price. Dishonest.

Also note: Karachi contributes more than its fair share of money to running Pakistan’s institutions. Immigrants from India didn’t do anything like wreck Pakistan, they made it (and continue to make it) viable.

“That is where all the communal killings business started.”

Yasser, no matter who comitted the first communal killing, the people who committed the second were still criminals. This “they started it so our behaving like animals is ok and understandable” is just not a moral position to take.

“Those killed at partition (and most of them were heading to Pakistan) are the martyrs of Pakistan, those who have spilt their blood to make our great country. Unlike the pseudo intellectuals I have no desire to `heal the common wounds of partition` for the wounds we sustained are deeper and much more serious...”

More accurately, you are unwilling to let them heal. Why is this?

Reply tvarad # 278

“I think you re-inforced my views with the last sentence. We should ensure that the disposessed have access to the corridors of power which is the surest way to reach an equitable distribution of national wealth.”

Yup. I agree with you re: institutions being necessary. My (tangential) point was more that we are comfortable discussing the institutional aspect, because it is essentially sound, and slowly bearing fruit. We all of us (me included) have less to say about the remaining (noninstitutional?) obstacles, and India is shy of discussing them – witness the Government’s reaction to the inclusion of untouchability on the agenda of the Durban (?) Conference on racism and discrimination based on descent or occupation.

Reply Dost Mittar # 281, Nasah #284

Janaabs,

“The first thing is to recognize that the disadvantage exists and then to look for the causes for the disadvantage, not for merely explaining away the disadvantage but to work on removing it.”

Agree. IMHO there are a variety of causes for this disadvantage – some of them can only be substantively addressed by some groups in society, others only by other groups. Sometimes comment is harmful – eg the Sangh Parivar talking about a Uniform Civil Code does NOT promote it among Indian Muslims, in fact quite the opposite.

“The comparison with the blacks in America is valid but not to the same extent as it is for the scheduled castes in India.”

Yes and no. Scheduled castes in India have more of a history of oppression than Indian Muslims (except when Indian Muslims are converts from these castes…as usual, in India the facts are complex :-)). On the other hand, at least in the Metros, SCs do not run up against the wariness that Muslims sometimes do – and I think it is this wariness (a product of ?? Partition?? VHP prop?? Dunno?), although waning, is a definite factor. (All bets are off when we discuss Bihar, however, and some other areas.)

My point (finally, hain?) is: most jobs in the US (they tell us) are generated by small businesses. Most small businesses are owned by White Americans. Many White Americans are wary (because frightened) of African Americans, and do not hire them. (I know, I know, many do – these are GROSS generalisations) This puts a drag on African American participation in the private sector, which is a major engine powering economic advancement. There is a similar situation in India wrt Muslims (in addition to ALL THE THINGS THE INDIAN MUSLIM COMMUNITY MUST DO ITSELF – EDUCATION, EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN….I agree with Nasah Mian here, I think that internal change is more effective and far more needed, if one had to rank these things. But actually, internal dynamics and external perception both have to change, and they can change together, or at least follow each other closely.)

Also note: Middle Class Muslims in India do not experience much discrimination, because in India CLASS remains far more important than almost any other defining factor (including, often, gender). My point is to do with the majority: ie the poor.

Btw, to those Indians who would dispute my take on whether poor Indian Muslims face prejudice in finding employment or not, I’m happy to be proved wrong, but here’s a quick test: in India many Middle Class people hire servants, and these servants are not always the same religion as the employer. I bet you can count on one hand, however, the number of Hindu families you know who have hired a Muslim servant. What’s going on here? If the issue is not religion, or even meat eating, per se (the proportion of Middle Class Hindus who have Muslim friends of their own class, with whom the quite happily shop and eat, is quite high) then what is it?

“Tell me if I am wrong but I do not think that the Indian Muslim has the same inferiority complex that the black American does”

I do not think that African Americans’ problems mostly stem from their not liking themselves (anyway, I think that they DO like themselves). I believe that they overwhelmingly stem from a history of oppression/discrimination (that started with slavery but continues in other forms) and a paucity of opportunities for advancement (which leads to some severe social dislocations. For example it is profoundly distorting for young people when many of the people in their community who have any of the goodies associated with success are people who went into *cough * the parallel economy.) I also think this is changing – and having lived in DC, I think I can say from experience that the Af-Am Middle Class is growing (both in numbers and in influence within African American culture), and that it is just not that different (for good and for bad) from the White Middle Class. (I’d say the same about Middle Class Indians of different religions – not much difference in culture, if any, no social segregation, and far far far more intermarriage.)

“…nor does the black American have the proud history of being part of the ruling class in the not-too-distant past”

They do not suffer from the Displaced Mughal thing (AfroCentric Education notwithstanding, and btw I like ebonics :-))…an extreme example of which is: “hamari ladkiyan padhthi nahin…” from some paan vaalaa because of having the same religion as Shah Jahan….(See Nasah Mian’s post for further discussion of this tragic mental condition.) I mean, to be honest, most of us have absolutely nothing to do with the rulers of India (of any religion)…MOST of us are descended from untouchables and low class Persian soldiers (with a bow in the direction of all the Rajput and Brahmin Converts on line, of course, and not that caste matters in Islam anyway, to be sure).

“The Muslims clinging to their own archaic past and ways -- are largely responsible for what they have done to themselves in India -- as a MINORITY – and what they have done to themselves in Pakistan – as a MAJORITY.”

Nasah Mian, beautifully said, if perhaps a little severe.

Best wishes to you both,

Zafar

Reply Prem # 288

“A random thought: With salaried jobs becoming scarce, and small/micro business being the new salvation of India`s lower-middle class, is it possible that the Muslim community might have a small edge?”

Not an edge, but a level playing field (once they get the hell out of those damn madrassahs). Vaisai, perhaps you have a point (!!!) because a relatively high proportion of the small karigar types (masons, carpenters, etc.) at least in Delhi are Muslims. (Also brass workers in Muradabad, weavers – and murthi producers!!!! - in Benares...) So there’s been a move into micro-businesses already.

ylh # 292 . . . ````Indians, So tell me when is your next petition coming up? against the president of the US?````

a) What does this question mean, please?

b) Are you sending reply paid post-cards for all 1-billion Indians to respond to you?

Vaise, if you ask me, the good President Bush-ji of the US is already wearing a saffron tie when he is meeting the equally good President Musharaf-ji of Pakistan, so I personally think that this was a very, very strong statement by the US establishment.

If I were you, Yasser, I would start working on :-

a) How many times in the past has Bush-ji worn a saffron tie.

b) When did he buy this tie and from where?

c) What DID Sophia Loren actually whisper to her husband in the final scenes of ``Sunflower``?

Warm regards,

Veeresh

``Indian``

All of you decrying the dearth of Muslims in IITs, IIMs, etc. When I went to college in Kerala, we had plenty of classmates from all three major religions: Christians, Muslims and Hindus. In fact, when I checked on the faculty during my last visit to the college, there were quite a few Muslim lecturers and assistant professors on the faculty, several with PhDs.

I guess if you don`t have any of the psychosocial babble associated with the Muslim angst, then Muslims do quite well for themselves, thank you very much. The Kerala Muslims are quite proud of the fact that thay are Malayalees, Indians and Muslims, all rolled into one. They don`t learn Urdu, they learn Arabic so that they can read the Koran. All of you dispossessed nawabs of UP can bemoan the loss of primacy of Urdu. The Malayalee and Tamil Muslims had and still have no use for that coarse language of the army camps.

The Kerala Muslims are also proud of the fact some of them have connections to famous personages. The most recent one was a guy in Calicut claiming to be the fourth cousin of Muhammad Aidid, the warlord of Somalia. When you compare that to the fact that most Pakistanis like to claim direct descent from the Prophet or from Taimur Leng, you start appreciating the Malayalee Muslims for keeping their feet on the ground, their nose to the grindstone, and achieving side by side with their Hindu and Christian neighbors.