Muslims in India: Communalism vs. Backwardness-Minority Syndrome

Has Sameerjb`s nick been hijacked by Jay? Because I have a strong feeling that it has been... He is no longer the balanced sane and rational Pakistani that I had come to admire for his realism...

Can someone update me on this development...

-YLH

Who invented the Two nation theory ?

To the gentleman who oddly claims that Jinnah somehow invented the two nation theory... Jinnah (ironically the only politician in the history of South Asia to be called `Best Ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity`) didn`t become convinced of the two nation theory untill 1939 ... and when he was convinced he saw it more of an unfortunate fact than an ideal situation hence his retraction after the creation of Pakistan. Iqbal, Rahmat Ali, Agha Khan 3 and Syed Ameer Ali had been talking of the two nation theory years ago.

In the Hindu community Savarkar had spoken of the two nation theory as early as 1923... an when he did, he didn`t speak of a right of self determination of his `MAJORITARIAN` community but as a tool to suppress the Muslim minority. In the Muslim Community the reformist and modernist Sir Syed Ahmed Khan had become convinced of the unfortunate Two Nation theory/fact as early as 1867... but even he was not the first one to speak of it... Chatterjee`s ``Anandmath`` and Ram Mohan Roy`s reformism all were various manifestations of this theory and preceded Jinnah by atleast 200 years..


These are the facts... but sadly the gentleman (if one can call him that) has a rather skewed view of history based on his self righteousness and some deep sense of insecurity... Hence instead of a constructive response one can only expect accusations of `sectarianism` and comparisons with Bal Thackerey from him... Ah well, when one comes across the likes of Qazi Hussain Ahmed, and Mullah Diesel in one`s own society, one learns to forgive people like P-Mishra for their obstinate bigotry. All one can do is counter their stinking farts of untruth with the air freshner of the truth!

Atleast people like Khushwant Singh are a breath of fresh air... atleast they have always called a spade for a spade, when it comes to matters pertaining to the partition of India. Thanks to providence there are many like him in India...

Long Live Jinnah`s Pakistan
Long Live Khushwant`s India

It is true that we keep discussing Indo-Pak or Hindu Muslim issues at Chowk. The reason is that we need to make sense out of the chaos, and discussions help in this regard.

No sane person will believe in the creation of another Pakistan. The Indian Muslims have rejected the TNT for good. That`s why we are in India. We live here and we will die here. The politicians always want to divide the people to run their shops. The Hindu Nazis are doing the same.

Hatred can never be won over by hatred. Love is the answer.

It is true that we keep discussing Indo-Pak or Hindu Muslim issues at Chowk. The reason is that we need to make sense out of the chaos, and discussions help in this regard.

No sane person will believe in the creation of another Pakistan. The Indian Muslims have rejected the TNT for good. That`s why we are in India. We live here and we will die here. The politicians always want to divide the people to run their shops. The Hindu Nazis are doing the same.

Zafar
Hatred can never be won over by hatred. Love is the answer.

Hindus to pray at Bhojshala on Tuesdays, Muslims on Fridays
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Bhopal: The Centre has allowed Hindus to worship at the controversial Bhojshala-Kamaal Maula mosque in Dhar on Tuesdays while Muslims would continue to offer Friday prayers as suggested by the Madhya Pradesh government, Chief Minister Digvijay Singh said here on Thursday. Singh said he had receieved a letter to this effect from Union Culture and Tourism minister Jagmohan on Wednesday allowing the Hindus to pay obeisance at the Wagdevi temple for the whole day on Tuesdays and carry rice and flowers as prayer offerings.

Singh said this was in modification of his government`s recommendations suggesting that Hindus worship for two hours on Tuesdays and not carry any pooja material inside the ASI-protected shrine. The Muslims will continue to offer namaz at the adjacent mosque on Fridays. On other days the shrine would be open to public as a tourist spot for a token entry fee.

The chief minister said the letter from the Centre had been forwarded to the Dhar district administration for making arrangements accordingly. The recommendations for holding prayers had come to the state government from the Dhar district administration after an all-party meeting held in Dhar on February 19 last.
/////There is a similar arrangement in pakistan also, the sunnis goe to shia mosques ( sorry that word is not allowed for the ahmadias asw well) on one friday and the shias goe to the sunni ,osques the next, of course armed with Ak47s, one funded by the ISI and the other by the iranians. Perfect model for the great vision of a two nation theory.

I say Hamid-M #20 . . . that was truly not honest an oxymoron or two . . . ``I like them less than I like `orrible `indoos`` . . . I am now digging out that slide-rule hidden somewhere and am going to try to figure out what that means . . . and yes, that red paste is nothing but colour thrown on to foul things, somehow that red paste has now found its way on to simple tandoori food also which is sad, no?

Also, Hamid-m, don`t knock the wide wide range of non-veg (Hindu?) dosas & idlis currently ruling the planet, at a subcontinent near you . . . they may be called by other names like ``Ceylon Paratha``, ``keema newspaper`` (this is really really cool), ``Chinese dosa`` . . . and my favourite ``Egg-gosht hoppers``.

I got a strong feeling that if somebody had the brains to start a non-veg Chettiyar cum Malwani food restaurant, use meats not usually found in India, then call it something like ``Ye Olde Malabari Moplah via Zanzibar Revenge`` in Pakistan then that somebody would make a big BIG sum of money. (In dollars?)

Much better then this business of Muslim leadership as far as being a commercial proposition goes. Look at Rooh-Afza or Jhandu Balm, I tell you!!

re # 27 nazarhayatkhan

There`s no point in wishing these hate-mongers would go away. I think most of them don`t have very `happening` lives in any case so all they do every day, day in and day out, is write hate messages to each other. Maybe it makes them feel full-filled, satisfied, superior..I don`t know...but whatever it is, it won`t go away, so don`t even bother asking them to talk about ``flowers, rainbows and love.`` This hate talk, unfortunately, has become a regular feature of Chowk, where people resort to insults instead of rationally talking about the real issues and problems.

Sadna at # 19:

LOL, except for the last para.

Your last para is a bit emotionally written.

I will say this with great deal of conviction that here on Chowk, our posts get abnormally hateful due to posters from opposing views. General belief in Pakistan is that the Muslims of India will fare well by assimilating themselves into India economically, but not at the cost of their religious identity. That is why I liked some of the suggestions given to Indian Muslims by the writer. I am also positive that Indian Muslims are generally quite happy being just that, except that they do express their concerns at anti-Muslim hate being created by Indian leadership as evident from Gujrat.

However, I still have my strong concernes in a long term perspective, if the seculars of India are not able to check the current wave of fundamentalism.

This is a well written article.

Hamidm ji

Sach sach bataye, Aapki biwi Hyderabadi hai? Aapki knowledge South Indian khaane ke baare maiN normal se kuchh zayada hai.
Keep posting your pearls of wisdom.

Regards

to Nasah and other Indian muslims

Don`t feel bad about what these silly pakis write about Indian muslims or abt Hydrabadi language or aboutt dosa-idli. Mmmmm don`t we Indians love dosa idli as well as paraantha.
It is our India..man..great India...where Mohd Kaif and Zaheer khan are adored as much by the public as Harbhajan singh and Tendulkar or Dravid. Where Hindu Prime minister utterly respects and consults the Muslim President in his day to day work

What do Pakis know about the joy of multiculturalism...the vastness and variety of Indian food, languages and culture.
They formed their pure land based on one religion, one language and one kind of food. They shun any variety in life, have no respect for anything that looks, tastes or speaks different from their set Paki standard.


We Hindus are with Indian muslims and cannot let anyone insult you whether you are from Hydrabad or Lucknow or elsewhere..we are all Indians first. We might have had troubles which is rather sad but I am sure we will sort out things and be closer than ever, uniting India further, this is what an average Hindu wants.

Zafar,
Nice article. I think the shahbano verdict was a good verdict and it should never have been overturned. It was a big mistake, the moderate Muslims should have taken on the fundoos at that time. As a community Indian Muslims have to stop tolerating the hardliners. The best approach to dealing with BJP/VHP is by opening up more as a community.

Regards,

Faruk

Veeresh # 22
The people who claim to represent the Muslim community in India were never elected, we get a bad press. The press likes a bunch of freaks and what we have is tabloid journalism at best. There is no muslim leadership in India and I don`t there should be. Just good Indian Leadership.

Regards,

Faruk.

This is a worthwhile read:
http://www.hinduonnet.com/stories/2003022801381000.htm

Freedom and secularism

By Pratap Bhanu Mehta

The proper antidote to majoritarian politics is the cultivation of a love of individual freedom that rejects the thought that any community, majority or minority, can define the identities and circumscribe the possibilities of any of the individuals that compose it.



ONE OF the more revealing oddities in the Indian debate over secularism is that a defence of individual freedom rarely figures prominently in defences of secularism. While many different conceptions of secularism dot our political landscape, none of them makes individual freedom explicitly a political value. For some, secularism is simply synonymous with communal harmony: the peaceful and possibly respectful coexistence of different religious groups. For others, secularism is a view about the state`s relationship with religion. All secularists agree that the state should, in some sense, be impartial amongst different religions. But some take the view that the best expression of this impartiality is that the state, as far as possible, disentangles itself from all religious arguments and identities. Others argue that this impartiality is best expressed by equal treatment of all religions, but that this equal treatment does not necessarily require the state to distance itself from religion. For still others, the debate over secularism is largely a debate over the asymmetric authority the state exercises over different religions. Does it have the authority to interfere with the practices of some communities but not with the practices of others? But whatever the nuances of these positions, none of them seems to give individual liberty its due moral weight.

Few articulations of secularism are directly concerned with the value of individual liberty. Those who advocate the disentanglement of the state from religion as far as is possible are clearly motivated by a concern for freedom. They believe, rightly, that the coercive power of the state should not be used to advance the cause of any religion; that such use of coercive power violates fundamental freedoms because it forces adherents of other religions to go along with practices that they have, given their beliefs, no reason to go along with. But mere disentanglement cannot avoid the thorny problem that historically religious communities can exercise coercive power over its members as well. These communities can deny their members basic freedom and equality and the state will have to massively intervene in ``religious`` practices to ensure that freedom and equality are enjoyed by all individuals. Principled distance is never an option for any state interested in securing the rights of its citizens, sometimes against the traditions of particular religious communities. The principled distance metaphor is misleading insofar as it suggests that the state can lay its hands off religion. But the state should be principled all right. It is justified intervening only insofar as these interventions secure the conditions of individual liberty and equality.

The other versions of secularism, secularism as communal harmony, secularism as respect for all religions and secularism as a project for giving different groups their own space to collectively define their identities are even less motivated by a concern for individual liberty. Of course they are motivated by other high ideals: peace, sometimes solicitude for pluralism, sometimes a genuine piety towards the diversity of our society. But none of them makes freedom a central value. These invocations of secularism are quite compatible with many sentiments that ought to worry those who care about freedom. These versions of secularism are not averse to using state power to advance religious ends provided some kind of parity between different communities is maintained. So, on this view, it is all right for the state to ban practices offensive to Hindus so long as it does the same for Muslims and so forth. So long as the state demonstrates equal treatment for communities secularism stands vindicated. But casting secularism in terms of communal parity is itself misleading. The parity model produced an untenable politics. Governments established their secular credentials by giving one concession to a particular religious community and then offset it by granting concessions to other communities in a process of competitive bidding that left all communities feeling that they had lost. The charge of pseudo-secularism is essentially a charge framed within the discourse of the parity model, and all attempts to answer the charges of pseudo-secularism simply reinforce the dominance of this model. This parity model was suffocating insofar as it put respecting religion or collective identities above the cause of protecting individual freedoms. It is disingenuous in minimising the potential conflict between established religions and individual liberty, and it rests on the illusion that all religions are essentially harmonious with each other so that respecting all of them is indeed possible. To say that the state should use its coercive powers to express ``respect`` towards all religions equally is by no stretch of the imagination the same thing as saying that each individual ought to have as much freedom as is compatible with a similar freedom for others.

In the whole thicket of issues that are wrecking secularism, from the debate over conversion to cow slaughter, very few protagonists stake the simple and obvious claim: each individual has as much liberty as is compatible with a similar liberty for others. This claim has three large implications for secularism. First, secularism is not about respecting this or that religion and granting them due recognition. It is about giving individuals the freedom to realise themselves in whatever way they choose to do so, in whatever religion or without religion at all. The state is not in the business of saving anyone`s soul; it is not in the business of advancing any particular religious conception or conceptions. Its primary function, other than securing security and a minimum of well being for all citizens, is protecting their liberty as individuals.

Second, the state has an obligation to ensure that this freedom is secured for all individuals, sometimes even against the prohibitions that religious communities impose upon them. Third and most importantly, no majority can override the basic rights of individuals, not matter how strong their sentiments. When the state uses the sentiments of the majority as an argument to impose restrictions on what people may think, what they may eat and so forth, it violates the fundamental tenets of freedom.

Freedom is admittedly a complex notion, but making it basic has certain advantages. It better defines the goals of our collective arrangements. Our collective project is to create a free society, where only those interdictions on freedom can be justified that serve the cause of freedom itself, not the cause of this or that community. Second, taking freedom seriously does not require us to make contorted distinctions between the secular and the sacred; it does not enjoin us to view our identities or our histories in any particular way. All it requires is a commitment to the idea of freedom itself, the freedom to define ourselves in whatever way we please, the freedom to think our own thoughts, secure in the belief that no collectivity, however deep its sentiments, can violate the rights of individuals. The proper antidote to majoritarian politics is the cultivation of a love of individual freedom that rejects the thought that any community, majority or minority, can define the identities and circumscribe the possibilities of any of the individuals that compose it. True, swaraj can flourish only when each of us, as individuals, is given the conditions to realise ourselves in whatever way we choose to do so. Genuine diversity can flourish only where there is a love of individual freedom. It is a pity that liberty no longer appears to be our primary political passion.

(The writer is Professor of Philosophy and of Law and Governance, JNU.)

pmishra #21 you write ``Could you please explain why Savarkar is a bad guy and Jinnah is a good guy? The two together invented the TNT which lies at the heart of the Pakistan concept. ``
Excellent question. Here is my view on this: they differ on the MEANS they sought.
Jinnah`s means (like Nehru`s and others of the time) were firmly grounded in the British parliamentary tradition - i.e. you argue, you air your views, but you NEVER EVER resort to violence, nor do you demean communities of people.
The means employed by Savarkar were the opposite - Godse (Gandhi`s convicted murderer) is known to have visited Savarkar`s house, and (as the WP article indicates), although that assasination could not (at least in many people`s mind) have taken place without Savarkar`s blessings. Also, Savarkar maligned muslims and christians (by declaring them guilty of not not looking towards India as their spiritual homeland). Finally, the followers of Savarkar (the JSS) continue to resort to violence and harassment of muslims and christians, whereas Jinnah`s legacy (the Muslim League) is generally recognized as a mainstream party. Savarkar`s equivalent was not Jinnah, but the maulvi extremists who first opposed Jinnah, and now are providing a hindutva equivalent vision for Pakistan that is directly competing with Jinnah`s vision of Pakistan.
I do agree with you in that both had similar ends, but here again: When Jinnah started his political career, he came to be known as the ``Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity``. Without getting into the events and attitudes (of which Savarkar and JSS provide an extreme example), I think it is correct to say that it takes two to tango, and divorce is never a black and white affair (except in the eyes of the two individuals concerned).
Sadly, fifty years after the British left, politics in the subcontinent have steadily moved South - into greater extremism, greater violence. As I wrote earlier - the dream of a peace and goodwill and social progress in the subcontinent seems to move further away with each passing year. Economic progress without accompanying progress in civil conduct of politics is I think a recipe for disaster. I just hope that we dont learn this lesson the hard way (like the Japanese and Germans did).

harimou: You had a similar question I think, and I had provided a similar answer but looks like it did not make it properly to chowk. All that I see of it is a heading with my name on it on post #18 and no text. I hope therefore that you will consider the above to be a response to your question as well.

Zafar

It seems that a lot of hate is floating around. India-Pakistan & Hindue-Muslim seems to be the favourite topic of Chowk. And we have made Qeema (ground beef) of this issue. Lets also talk about flowers, rainbows and love.

It is all politics. India needs an enemy Pakistan to stay united. Pakistan needs an enemy India to justify its creation.

Whereas, the best option may be:

To have a South-Asian Union like EU
Let Kashmir stay where it is and as it is
and lets go togather into a golden peaceful future.

“”as far as i am concerned, most indian muslims are a bunch of fundamentalists who are constantly turning up their silly noses at the pakis for not being ``good`` muslims and accusing us of letting our women run loose”(hamidm2)

are u sure? – I thought it was the other way around– with those gracious Lashkariyas:-

“on top of that, they eat dosas…. that would make your stomach turn”

– ah those dicey, daring, delicious dosas! – it’s surely not for the sissy stomachs --

surely not for those who love to grind their worn out teeth – on the horses favorite grain: the chickpeas choleys!!

now i feel better...