The Doll’s House

veeresh: ``India is one country where Muslims have it better than in other countries.`` In some ways you are right: Certainly shias can say their prayers without the fear of being blown to pieces by the opposition (sunni extremists).

On the other hand, in many ways you are wrong (so, what else is new?): there is that little matter of Gujerat that I must bring to your attention one more time; furthermore, the indians (muslims/hindus) from India in the middle east demonstrate by their actions that what you wish was true is not the case; indonesian muslims and malaysian muslims would never dream of migrating to india (and they live much better than the average indian - as i have seen for myself in indonesia).

sorry to keep correcting you - but hey, that`s friends are for (friends dont let friends drive drunk - whether they are driving in a car - made in India marutis, of course - or taking a spin around chowk posting their wishful fantasies as if they were real). :-)

FV: I skimmed through your article and saw this line ``I wake up not to the sound of the azaan but the dhin-chik, dhin-chik from some Hindu pandal or the other. `` This gave me an idea - Why dont you take all these damned maulvis in Pakistan and give them a place to stay in your neighborhood. You will then wake up to the sound of the azaan, and people in Pakistan will get rid of the maulvis. What do you think?? Deal??

sadna says, ``As for exhorting Muslims to `join the mainstream`- why is that such a crime. When we are told that Muslims are doing worse than Hindus, in terms of education, income, employment, health, wanting Muslims to be part of the mainstream means wanting them to do as well or as badly as other Indians in these matters.``

............ i never realized indian muslims were kind of like inner-city african americans ........ shame on you guys !

re:#103 by ali_1
Question:
What kind of men, supposed to provide justice, would order a woman to be gang raped in front of others?
Why, Pakis of course?
I am told, this happens not infrequently in the tribal belt.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/29/opinion/29kris.htm?oref=login
1. (In June 2002, the police say, members of a high-status tribe sexually abused one of Ms. Mukhtaran`s brothers and then covered up their crime by falsely accusing him of having an affair with a high-status woman. The village`s tribal council determined that the suitable punishment for the supposed affair was for high-status men to rape one of the boy`s sisters, so the council sentenced Ms. Mukhtaran to be gang-raped.

As members of the high-status tribe danced in joy, four men stripped her naked and took turns raping her. Then they forced her to walk home naked in front of 300 villagers.)

2. (A girl in the next village was gang-raped a week after Ms. Mukhtaran, and she took the traditional route: she swallowed a bottle of pesticide and dropped dead.)
Moral of the above story:
Neither is India a paradise, nor is Pakistan. Accept the reality and work towards betterment of human life. Or else, buzz off.
Sridhar

re:#101 by simran
First of all, i do not live in India.
Last time i did (12 years ago), Khalistan was fresh in people`s memories and people talked about it freely. Sikhs just decided that they are better off throwing their lot with India. I think they are smart. Since i assume u are a sikh (the name suggests you are a Sikhni!), remember sikhs have thrived on 2 things: agriculture and small businesses. Their small businesses are spread all over India. I grew up in Delhi near a Gurudwara and woke up to the bhajans in the morning but when i was in Madras (doing my PG studies) i saw second and third generation sikh children in Don Bosco school speaking chaste Tamil.
Imagine confining this vibrant community to a small geographical area called Khalistan, limiting their business entrepreneurship and prospects. Khalistan was a political thing that i am glad fizzled out. Now-a-days, with a Sikh PM, u are free to talk about Khalistan but people will think u are crazy. As i said, it is a hot topic only in Canada and some parts of California (where rich Punjabi sikh farmers, flush with money, have nothing better to do).
Heck, i heard even Jagjit Singh Chauhan wants to come back (or may be he is back already) to India.
Sridhar

re:#126 by sadna
A nice post.
I would add a few things.
Farzana is mad about the Gudia incident but says nothing about the abuse of young muslim women by Arbas who come and marry them for a price and then divorce them. This is kind of a porno racket. Someone was caught recently in Hyderabad. What is the muslim community doing here? Would it be wrong to expose the culprits over Zee TV then?
You talked about polio. It is indeed rampant among the muslims in India. You did not mention how a OPV (Oral Polo Vaccination) compaign failed in UP (?) some time ago because someone spread the rumor that the govt was trying to sterilise the muslim community! Such paranoia!
It is a long march for the muslims of India but i have been pleading for quite sometime that they need to join the mainstream for starters. Morons like Farzana do not get it.
Sridhar

Ref stuka #98

Where did you dig up this picture of Jinnah? With one half of his hair white, he looks like Cruella DeVille of ``101 Dalmatians``! Is this a subtle dig at FV`s article on Jinnah?

Ref jang #93

[in high-school essay writing class, we always got a 10 extra points for quoting a white guy in the essay. does white chick count as well?]

Absof@#$inglutely! Why do you think we have Sonia Gandhi as head of the Congress party?

Sigh......

Was Gudiya`s fate decided in front of a television audience because she was Muslim or because Zee TV smelled a juicy story and decided to broadcast it? Perhaps even paid some of the members of the village panchayat? Would the same thing have happened if the soldier released by Pakistan was named Bhagwan Das instead of Mohammad Arif? And where was the outrage that a POW was held against all conventions for almost 5 years after the war ended and prisoners and bodies were exchanged? Why no outrage from Pakistanis that a MUSLIM was imprisoned with no charges brought against him except that he did what he was paid to do: fight for the army that employed him?

As to Hindu mainstream being thrust upon Muslims, wasn`t it the Islamic Sharia that was used as the law? Weren`t the maulanas and mullahs who were pontificating on the situation all Muslims? Is this a case that justifies the Uniform Civil Code under which Gudiya would have been declared as still being married to Mohammad Arif (a person needs to be missing for 7 years before he is declared dead), her marriage to Taufiq would have been declared null and void, and she would still have recourse to civil courts for a divorce from Mohammad Arif if she wanted to stay with Taufiq, in which case she would not be eligible for alimony the minute she married Taufiq thus saving female Islamic souls from eternal damnation because the Sharia forbids alimony beyond 3 months after the divorce?

If FV thinks that this is an attempt by Zee TV and the Hindu media (thank God the Indian media is NOT considered to be controlled by the Jews!) (isn`t Zee owned by Rupert Murdoch?) to denigrate Indian Muslims, she should watch the Jerry Springer Show the next time she visits the US. She would find similar stories where one woman is being fought over by two men except that the woman in question was cheating on her husband! Human drama (if the Jerry Springer Show can be called that) isn`t Divine Comedy.

Re Star Hunt and the young Muslima wearing revealing clothes: Some thirty years ago, Zeenath Aman (the Bollywood actress) was referred to in a Tamil magazine as Zeenath Ammanam (Zeenath the Nude) presumably because of her attire! And for a thousand years, Hindu women observed the purdah in North India so that they could blend in with the ruling Muslim culture. So what is new?

If you are being woken up by some dhin-chik from some Hindu pandal, is that a year-round affair or something that happens during certain Hindu festivals such as Ganesh Chaturthi as opposed to my peace being disturbed by the call to morning prayers in the early morning throughout the year?

If your household provisions come from Deepak, mine for the last 21 years has come from the Rolex Departmental Stores (owned by a Muslim) on Lattice Bridge Road in Chennai. My medicines (all allopathic) come from Om Medicals because I extort a 5% discount from them and I am not willing to subject myself to some quack just because he has the appropriately-named BUMS degree but then I don`t go to someone practicing Siddha medicine either.

However, this article did open my eyes in the many ways I have been subjecting my Muslim Driver to the Hindu mainstream. I realize that keeping a dog in our house is an imposition of non-Islamic practices on him. Do I now get rid of the Muslim Driver, the dog or, in a Solomonic decision (aaaargh! a Jewish approach!) both?

sadna, you`re back?
Please advise omar jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, he was looking for you.
Farzana, why are you answering all the extremists and not the others?

Plats8
this is no urban legend infact when I googled for it on the net i discovered this happened repeatedly including worse things, which i shall not repeat.

hamidm2 #144
``............ i never realized indian muslims were kind of like inner-city african americans ........ shame on you guys ! ``

Indian Muslims are more literate than Pakistani Muslims. Shame on you guys!

``The country`s two main religious communities, Hindus and Muslims, are separated by a mere six percentage points. Hindus, seven years and older, are 65.1 per cent literate, 59.1 per cent of Muslims are literate. The national rate is 64.8 per cent.

In 15 states and union territories, the Muslim literacy rate is more than 70 per cent. In Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Daman and Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry and Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Muslims are doing better than Hindus. In Chhattisgarh, the Muslims are ahead by 17 percentage points.

In most other states however they lag behind Hindus, and at the national level their literacy rate is the worst among the six major religious communities.``

hindvi/147 - inspite of your professed services background, and with the self-confessed fact that you dont` know much about Muslims in State politics or daily life in India, I don`t blame you for thinking that I am communal when all I did was quote other Muslims in India. And as for Jhandewalan, what`s wrong with the place?

tahmed32/146 - I am indeed glad that you bring up Gujarat every now and then, and hope that you are well and also that you are keeping yourself up-to-date on how the law is following its course on the matter. I wish those who were rightly upset about the riots and murders are now going to write about the post-facto correctives also?

Aberrations apart, that`s what I mean when I say India is a safer place for Muslims of all sorts - women, Ahmediyas, Aga Khanis, Sunis, Shias, liberals, progressives, orthodox, Dawoodis, Memons, Bohras etcetc.

But then, tahmed32, we get back to that old topic:- define Muslim?

Despite a whole lot of venom and emotions, this is really educational. First, we see so much pent up emotions about the welfare of the community that a measly TV program brings out a desperate rejoinder that we see here. I doubt that the TV producer had some hidden agenda besides winning some rating or popularity battle based on such a dramatic story. I simply refuse to accuse Zee based on the show itself. Though, it does appear from watching Zee occasionally that it does tilt toward BJP more than the Congress but is there any media outlet in the world that does not have biases? People manage media and if someday people are free of biases then the media would be too.

In Pakistan, we don’t have a history of such communal partisanship. In the central parts of India this bickering is going on for more than a century now and that brings out emotions that simply baffle Pakistanis who, cannot connect to communal strife that appears to be part of the North Indian culture. Punjab, in Pakistan saw worst communal riots in 1947 but history shows that before 1947 carnage, there perhaps, was some acrimony but it never really translated into physical lack of security. After 1947, once the cleansing on both sides was complete, and after so many years Indian and Pakistani Punjabis are more comfortable with each as the emotions have subsided in the last 57 years.

In UP, CP, Bihar and other central Indian provinces communal riots were a fact of life even before 1947. Communalists on both sides tapped into morbid emotions and what we see in India now is the perpetuation of the same politics.

FV is an emotional writer. Such artists end up playing into the hands of mischief mongers. She perhaps wanted to bring out Muslim grievance and I hope most of the Indian, as it appears from the posts here, would not have any problem with that but when she turns grievance into an emotionally charged response to a TV show, the retort form Indians of the other community is even more expressive. I doubt that this kind of heated exchange would change anything on the ground, where Muslims would be Muslims and would continue to go their way and the Hindus would continue to do what they are doing for a long time. What this exchange does is to allow India dirty linen to splash allover the face of Indian democracy.
The new government is attempting to address the Muslim grievance in Gujarat. That process along with some more open heartedness by mainstream educated Indians would help the situation even further.

The other element that would change the situation on the ground would be spending some resources to help the Indian Muslim community in education and meaningful employment. I know some would object to that and would call it pandering to the minorities but the reality is that unless the majority community helps the minority community, integration of the minority into the mainstream would be well nigh impossible.

India is a poor country and expecting that it will spend the kind of resources that were spent in the US to uplift the minority black community, would be expecting too much. The Muslim community will have to accept some responsibility instead of crying wolf all the time.

It`s funny that somebody would rather complain about an atrocity being shown on TV than the atrocity itself.

Hindvi,

Which part of veeresh`s post was communal?