As a religious minority, Muslims of India enjoy quite an unparalleled liberty when compared with the state of minorities in other countries. In India Muslims can build their place of worship without any special permission. They can have prayer calls or Azan 5 times a day on the loudspeaker no matter how much inconvenience it causes to others. Muslims can perform prayers on the main thoroughfares near mosques on Fridays and on their festivals stopping and diverting the entire road traffic. They can have religious gatherings without any restriction on the crowd. They get Haj subsidies. They have provision for a special law called the Muslim Personal Law. But these benefits do not help Muslims uplift their lives. There is one vital thing Muslims do not have here, and that is, safety and security of their lives. Communal tension or any untoward incident in any part of the country is enough to make Muslims fear for their safety. It is not only the life, but the brutal and inhuman manner in which they are targeted in the name of religion is feared the most. In any communal violence, mass murderers go house to house and door to door killing, looting, raping in front of the eyes of the other family members. Of course, the violence does not occur every now and then, but the fear is persistent. This fear is reduced up to a greater extent if one lives in the pockets of the major Muslim-majority neighborhoods. This has made the ghettoization and the exclusion of the Muslim community a grim reality in India.
In my opinion, Muslims do not need any of the benefits as mentioned earlier. The most pressing need of the Muslims or for anyone for that matter is to feel safe. As per the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Muslims are still stuck with their second level of need, i. e. “Safety” after the first one “Physiological (food and shelter)”. And as the theory goes, unless this ‘Safety’ need is addressed, the needs lower down the hierarchy doesn’t mean much for them.
Some organisations create fear in the minds of majority community that if the Muslim’s percentage increases beyond a certain point in India, they will create more problems. People make a mistake of looking only at the Arabs when they want to know about Muslims. Muslims are approximately 94% in Senegal which is a secular state. The first president of Senegal was a Christian, it may appear unbelievable to us in this region, but it is a fact. If you are anxious about the population growth of the Muslims, look for the reasons for that growth. The primary one is, their miserable socio-economic and educational status.
Like all religions, Muslims too are not a single, homogeneous group with similar thoughts and beliefs. There are progressive and modern Muslims, and of course, there is a tiny proportion of fundamentalist and hardliners. Unfortunately the act of these hardliners and radicalized are more spectacular, grabs more headlines, which make them appear to be holding a sizable chunk of the population, but it is not true. The communal riots do not affect those who live with large Muslim populations. Those who get affected are the liberal ones who live in a mixed neighborhood, relatively better-off in terms of socio-economic and educational parameters. They want themselves and their children to become a part of the mainstream. But unfortunately, after every communal riot, hundreds and thousands of such progressive Muslims shift their homes to the Muslim-dominated ghettos. These riots in a way help the fundamentalist kind of Muslims increase their strength and influence. The strategy of the government and the nationalists should be to bring Muslim population from exclusion to the mainstream consistently, but in fact, the communal riots in one place or the other, perpetually push those who are already in mainstream, towards the margin and exclusion. And that is not good for the nation.
We understand the plight of Kashmiri Pandits. We know how it feels to be a Hindu or any minority for that matter in Malaysia, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh and other middle eastern countries. We have to come out of this mindless hate towards another human being just because the other person follows a different faith. This act must be despised, hated and removed from the planet earth. Religionism should be no lesser crime than Racism. It also brings a very bad name to the country. A bill in the Parliament must be passed to ensure communal violence is treated in such a way that it never happens ever again. In this age, hardly anywhere mass murders happen by the rioting mobs on the basis of religion, not even in those countries where there is no religious freedom. Allowing the communal violence to continue for days and weeks only shows the inability of the government to govern. Nothing can be more criminal or anti-national than damaging the brand India in the eyes of the other countries. The ruling dispensation can never shrug off the responsibility for the violence that occurred during their tenure. The authorities must not only stop the violence as soon as it happens, but they must proactively take measures to prevent it from happening in the first place.
I am not discussing the social, economic and educational condition of Muslims as reported in Sachar commission where Muslims are far behind SCs and STs on many parameters. Though, this glaring fact refutes the idea of Muslim appeasement, generally put forward by few political parties. I am not asking for reservation for Muslims. I am talking about more basic and fundamental here. It is “right to life”, where ever one chooses to live.
Who benefits from the communal riots? Politically, the communal riots have helped certain political parties, as the votes get polarized after each communal disturbance. Other than politicians, I can’t think of anyone who gets benefited by the communal riots. And India becomes the biggest loser in all this communal politics. I do not have any doubt in my mind, had our house been in order, no one could have denied India’s leadership position in the world by now. We cannot progress, keeping the Muslim population living in fear for their lives in ghettos in helplessness, in poverty, in negativity as a victim of one communal violence or the other. We already have a huge population of Dalits and so-called backwards castes, this along with Muslims if not taken along in the progress and development, the real progress of the whole of India will be hard to achieve.
Muslims of India love their country. They don’t want to go anywhere, and of course not to Pakistan. Muslims of Indian subcontinent historically had been inspired by the teachings of the Islam brought by saints such as Khwaja Moinuddin Chishtee and the like. These saints were popular and loved by the followers of all religions. It is only 1970 onward, as a result of large revenue from oil exports, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia began to spend billions of dollars throughout the world to promote the movement of Islam favored in their country. We can see a testimony as it happened in Afghanistan and the product of which is Taliban. India is still out of the grips of those elements. The government has an option to bring the Muslims back to the mainstream or exclude them from all the development and make them easy prey for the vultures of fundamentalists and extremists. It is not about Hindus and Muslims. Liberal Hindus and Muslims are on one side against extremist Hindus and Muslims. The priority of the government should be to bring back the trust in the minds of every Indian including minorities that “I have all the rights here, I feel safe here, and therefore, I will work towards the betterment of India”.
In my opinion, Muslims do not need any of the benefits as mentioned earlier. The most pressing need of the Muslims or for anyone for that matter is to feel safe. As per the Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Muslims are still stuck with their second level of need, i. e. “Safety” after the first one “Physiological (food and shelter)”. And as the theory goes, unless this ‘Safety’ need is addressed, the needs lower down the hierarchy doesn’t mean much for them.
Some organisations create fear in the minds of majority community that if the Muslim’s percentage increases beyond a certain point in India, they will create more problems. People make a mistake of looking only at the Arabs when they want to know about Muslims. Muslims are approximately 94% in Senegal which is a secular state. The first president of Senegal was a Christian, it may appear unbelievable to us in this region, but it is a fact. If you are anxious about the population growth of the Muslims, look for the reasons for that growth. The primary one is, their miserable socio-economic and educational status.
Like all religions, Muslims too are not a single, homogeneous group with similar thoughts and beliefs. There are progressive and modern Muslims, and of course, there is a tiny proportion of fundamentalist and hardliners. Unfortunately the act of these hardliners and radicalized are more spectacular, grabs more headlines, which make them appear to be holding a sizable chunk of the population, but it is not true. The communal riots do not affect those who live with large Muslim populations. Those who get affected are the liberal ones who live in a mixed neighborhood, relatively better-off in terms of socio-economic and educational parameters. They want themselves and their children to become a part of the mainstream. But unfortunately, after every communal riot, hundreds and thousands of such progressive Muslims shift their homes to the Muslim-dominated ghettos. These riots in a way help the fundamentalist kind of Muslims increase their strength and influence. The strategy of the government and the nationalists should be to bring Muslim population from exclusion to the mainstream consistently, but in fact, the communal riots in one place or the other, perpetually push those who are already in mainstream, towards the margin and exclusion. And that is not good for the nation.
We understand the plight of Kashmiri Pandits. We know how it feels to be a Hindu or any minority for that matter in Malaysia, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh and other middle eastern countries. We have to come out of this mindless hate towards another human being just because the other person follows a different faith. This act must be despised, hated and removed from the planet earth. Religionism should be no lesser crime than Racism. It also brings a very bad name to the country. A bill in the Parliament must be passed to ensure communal violence is treated in such a way that it never happens ever again. In this age, hardly anywhere mass murders happen by the rioting mobs on the basis of religion, not even in those countries where there is no religious freedom. Allowing the communal violence to continue for days and weeks only shows the inability of the government to govern. Nothing can be more criminal or anti-national than damaging the brand India in the eyes of the other countries. The ruling dispensation can never shrug off the responsibility for the violence that occurred during their tenure. The authorities must not only stop the violence as soon as it happens, but they must proactively take measures to prevent it from happening in the first place.
I am not discussing the social, economic and educational condition of Muslims as reported in Sachar commission where Muslims are far behind SCs and STs on many parameters. Though, this glaring fact refutes the idea of Muslim appeasement, generally put forward by few political parties. I am not asking for reservation for Muslims. I am talking about more basic and fundamental here. It is “right to life”, where ever one chooses to live.
Who benefits from the communal riots? Politically, the communal riots have helped certain political parties, as the votes get polarized after each communal disturbance. Other than politicians, I can’t think of anyone who gets benefited by the communal riots. And India becomes the biggest loser in all this communal politics. I do not have any doubt in my mind, had our house been in order, no one could have denied India’s leadership position in the world by now. We cannot progress, keeping the Muslim population living in fear for their lives in ghettos in helplessness, in poverty, in negativity as a victim of one communal violence or the other. We already have a huge population of Dalits and so-called backwards castes, this along with Muslims if not taken along in the progress and development, the real progress of the whole of India will be hard to achieve.
Muslims of India love their country. They don’t want to go anywhere, and of course not to Pakistan. Muslims of Indian subcontinent historically had been inspired by the teachings of the Islam brought by saints such as Khwaja Moinuddin Chishtee and the like. These saints were popular and loved by the followers of all religions. It is only 1970 onward, as a result of large revenue from oil exports, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia began to spend billions of dollars throughout the world to promote the movement of Islam favored in their country. We can see a testimony as it happened in Afghanistan and the product of which is Taliban. India is still out of the grips of those elements. The government has an option to bring the Muslims back to the mainstream or exclude them from all the development and make them easy prey for the vultures of fundamentalists and extremists. It is not about Hindus and Muslims. Liberal Hindus and Muslims are on one side against extremist Hindus and Muslims. The priority of the government should be to bring back the trust in the minds of every Indian including minorities that “I have all the rights here, I feel safe here, and therefore, I will work towards the betterment of India”.
