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It concerns us all
WHEN President Bush introduced his wife to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, he said here was a person who had more Muslims than any other country except Indonesia, but none of them was the Al-Qaida type. Subsequently, at a function in Washington, the prime minister said with pride that not a single Muslim from the 150 million in India was either part of Al-Qaida, the Taliban, or any other terrorist group.
This fact may have remained obscure from Indians. But foreigners, particularly those from the media, have singled out the nation for praise whenever they have traced terrorism to Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iran. Indeed, no Indian Muslim is reported to have participated in jihad or any "holy" war that the fundamentalists have relentlessly fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya, or Palestine. Even in India, there has never been a Muslim from Moradabad, Patna, Coimbatore, or elsewhere joining the "liberation war" in Kashmir.
It shows how, over the years, the Muslim population, even alienated and dismayed, has fashioned itself
in such a way that it has instinctively felt in the manner the rest of the population has. The Muslims are convinced that the ethos of the country is secular. They have seen many storms of communalism gathering and disappearing to face the reality of day-to-day living and the demands of give-and-take in a pluralistic polity. They have come to terms with India as it is emerging.
The demolition of the Babri Masjid made the Muslims realise for
the first time since independence that their assumption of safety of mosques, other religious places, and graveyards was wrong. They still feel perturbed. But the strong reaction to the demolition that
swept across the country has
assured them that their trust was not misplaced. They know that
there cannot be forcible construction of the temple on the site where the Babri Masjid stood. They have the same conviction about the mosque-temple complex at Mathura and Varanasi.
The blow which had them staggering is the massacre in Gujarat. They had never imagined such carnage after 58 years of partition.
The brutality with which the media and the intelligentsia tore the involved government apart has sustained the Muslims' faith in the country. What has made them despondent is the state's reluctance to rehabilitate the victims or to make amends for the wounds it has inflicted on them with its partisan attitude.
An educated woman in Delhi told me the other day that she never felt any difference between one Indian
or another in the last 30 years, but Gujarat had made her realise that she was Muslim. True, the constitution guarantees minorities equality. Yet they have suffered most at the hands of law and its guardians. The Muslims have seldom seen any Hindu instigator of communal riots being punished. It has been the same sordid story from Bhiwandi to Meerut. Instances of police connivance are unending.
Even the Congress party is not all that secular. One of its former chief ministers has confessed in his autobiography that the Bhagalpur rioting was the doing of his party chief minister at that time. The party has not taken action against any
Bihar member till today. Different probe commissions have felt that "the alienation of Muslims is 100 per cent." They have confirmed the distance between the Muslims and the rest of the country. The commissions have given the government their recommendations. But, practically none of them have been implemented.
Some desperation in the Muslim youth is discernible. Some have joined the underworld. A few
instances of bomb blasts in the country testify to the feelings of anger and religious propaganda. Most madrasas continue to belch forth the fundamentalists. Still none of them has gone the way of Al-Qaida or other terrorist outfits. It indicates that they, however brainwashed and misguided, want the countrymen to realise that their problem is economic. With the limited kitty, the problem has got aggravated further.
It is a pity that the BJP, which looked like realising the futility of stark Hindu line, has surrendered to the RSS, an organisation of fundamentalists, lock, stock, and barrel. The party seemed to be trying to
separate culture and religion from politics. The question that L.K. Advani raised at Karachi was not whether the post-Pakistan speeches by Qaide-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah be recalled but whether the philosophy of secularism he adumbrated in a Muslim state was worth supporting by the BJP that equated Hinduism with secularism. He and his ardent supporters Atal Behari Vajpayee and Jaswant Singh lost courage. If
they had only chalked out a different path, the BJP might have been split but would have found an alternative from the RSS-supported BJP and the Congress.
Had the two-month-long crisis in the BJP been related only to the resignation of Advani as party president things would have been sorted out long ago. He is not a person who would have stuck to the office if not wanted. Observations by some of the BJP leaders must have hurt him really badly because they were practically his creatures. The question was whether the BJP had any entity of its own or whether it was at the end of a telephone call from Nagpur, the RSS headquar-
ters. For the first time, many occupying senior positions in the BJP showed guts. Differences were not ideological as the RSS was trying to project. In many years, George Fernandes talked sense for the first time when he wrote a letter to the RSS to stick to its socio-cultural agenda and not to dabble in the internal affairs of what is essentially its own political outfit. Fernandes was not speaking the language of Advani or Vajpayee. He was groping for a line which the NDA, sullied due to the links with the BJP, could take in the forthcoming elections in Bihar. But all was over when Vajpayee and Advani went to RSS chief Sudarshan and assured him that they would recede into the background in due course.
The Sangh parivar's violent segment, Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), has gone to the Minorities Commission to give vent to its anger. The complaint is that Muslim leaders did not adequately condemn the attack on the Ayodhya temple. The commission, in turn, has conveyed VHP's angry comments to important Muslim religious leaders and the community's intellectuals at a meeting. They have attacked the media for not reporting their criticism of terrorism.
Both sides will soon meet at the instance of the commission to discuss the differences between the two communities. It's a good move. But it seems their leaders have yet to wake up to the diversity of India and to the futility of dividing the society on religious lines. This is not the concern of Muslims alone, but that of the entire nation.
Kuldip Nayar is an eminent Indian columnist.