Communal harmony is not a one-way street. The responsibility of promoting communal harmony cannot rest upon the shoulders of a single community alone. Others too have to play their part in it. The standard line of the Left-Liberal cabal is that the entire responsibility of maintaining communal harmony and peace is that of the Hindus or else they will be accused of majoritarianism.
Nupur J. Sharma, editor at OpIndia, points out that, even before the Ayodhya verdict was pronounced, Hindus were asked to keep calm. Hindus were asked to not offend the Muslim community. Hindus were asked not to celebrate the culmination of a five-century-old battle for a piece of land to which their faith was inextricably tied. Hindus were asked to not consider this a victory. Essentially, Hindus were told that any celebration would mean a direct instigation of the Muslim community. As she asks, “Did it help?” Not really. We had Asaddudin Owaisi spew venom and reject the Supreme Court verdict. We had him take to Twitter and claim that he wants his masjid back. Not one ‘liberal’ who had been pontificating to Hindus before the verdict, came forward to condemn the utterings of Owaisi.
If Hindus could organize Iftar parties for the Muslims, why cannot the Muslims host functions on Ram Navami or Ganesh Chaturthi and why they cannot welcome Shobha Yatras by showering flower petals upon them or offering them sweets like sewiyan? Prof. Makarand Paranjape advises that instead of remaining aloof, Muslims must proactively take part in activities that could promote communal harmony. They must wean themselves away from the notion drilled into their mind by the Left-Liberal cabal and the political parties living by appeasement that everything will come their way automatically as if it was their birthright, or by fighting, either on the streets or in the courts. Muslims must learn to behave like equal stakeholders in society.
I do not see any reason why should they have any reluctance or shame in admitting their common, native Indian roots or their inherent ‘Indian-ness’. As Minhaz Merchant, editor and publisher, had written, they will have to forego the habit of ‘Muslims first’ developed over the past decades. Why should they always insist on a ‘separate’ if not preferential treatment in everything?
In fact, they harped on the victim card so much that the Hindus have been made to suffer from a guilt complex for the lack of communal harmony as if the Muslims do not have any responsibility at all towards that. Hindus were made to feel as if the entire load of morality and abiding by the law rested upon their shoulders only and the Muslims, as the younger brothers, had a license to commit mischief, violate the laws, and demand special treatment for themselves everywhere.
If today’s Muslims are found ‘relishing the relics of a brutal past’, such as their purposefully offering namaz in those old, dilapidated mosques also, which scream to have been built after demolishing revered temples and using the same material so as to hurt the Hindus all the more, is resented deeply by the Hindus and is one of the major stumbling blocks in ‘Historical Closure’, or a ‘reset’ of the relationship between the two communities.
Appeasement So Blatant
Former prime minister Man Mohan Singh is on record as having said that the Muslims had the first right to national resources. You must therefore suffer silently but you must let them enjoy.
Speaking at the 52nd meeting of the National Development Council (NDC), he said, “We will have to devise innovative plans to ensure that minorities, particularly the Muslim minority, are empowered to share equitably the fruits of development. These must have the first claim on resources.” He was speaking as the Prime Minister of the country in one of the highest forms of governance. It cannot be passed off as the sentimental outburst of some grand old man pontificating to the elder, well-earning brother in a joint family that he must surrender an undue share of the parental property in favour of the younger, poorly-earning brother. Surely, he did not mean to say that all the plans and policies of the governments of his party in the past decades had been utterly unable to bring the benefits of development to the Muslims? If so, who is to be blamed? There is little doubt that his statement was a classic example of a Freudian slip that gave away his party’s ever-present, ever-active appeasement of Muslims.
The Opportunity the Muslims Missed in Respect of Ayodhya
The legal battle for Ayodhya was a classic example of how the Hindus fairly fought a patently unfair fight and yet emerged victorious in the end. The Ayodhya case took decades of a legal battle for the Hindus to get back what was historically, culturally, religiously, sentimentally and legally their rightful heritage. The way the Muslims contested it in the courts with arguments contrary not only to facts but common sense as well, went on to exacerbate the existing bitterness between the two communities.
As the HC and the SC held, the structure in dispute did not have its own foundation but it was raised on the existing walls—it was not raised on a virgin, vacant, unoccupied, open land. If a building had not existed before the construction of the subsequent building, the builder might not have been able to use the foundation of the erstwhile building without knowing its strength and capacity of bearing the load of the new structure. The floor of the disputed building was just over the floor of the earlier building. The existence of several pillar bases all show another earlier existence of a sufficiently bigger structure, if not bigger than the disputed structure then not lesser than that also.
It would have helped the cause of communal harmony greatly had the Muslims accepted the Hindus’ title to the disputed land and not contested it to the end. Let us be frank. What did the Muslims gain by it? The new mosque, which they are going to build in Ayodhya on the land allotted as per the Supreme Court judgment, will pale before the grandeur of the Ram temple and, after some time, will be forgotten that it even exists. On the world map and in tourism promotion literature of the world, Ayodhya will be known for the Ram temple and nothing else.
Reciprocity, the Bedrock of Communal Harmony
What we witness in India is actually a case of social avoidance, social isolation or social compartmentalization and not social exclusion. In simple terms, it means that both Hindus and Muslims try to avoid each other to the extent possible. If circumstances force them, they would even work together or do business together, but they keep the relations at the bare minimum necessary level—usually, quite like what it used to be in the medieval era, most people try to avoid social intimacy at the level of the families and visits to their respective houses and dining together, etc. The Left-Liberal cabal is, of course, excluded from this. Social avoidance of the other community is mutual and exists because of a historical dislike of the other community.
The Left-Liberal cabal usually tries to sugar-coat tear-jerker stories of exemplary individual conduct of some Muslims—and pass them off as examples of group conduct! This is a farce. There is a great difference between individual and group conduct. Individuals are neither responsible for nor they can influence group behaviour. The goodness of individuals is no guarantee of the goodness of a group. Innumerable instances are recorded from riots across the world when the very people who, individually, used to crack jokes and share a cup of tea with their neighbours, killed them brutally or raped their women, in spite of their pleading fervently that they used to address them as bhaiya, chacha or mama until yesterday.
As a result of such machinations, Hindus have all along been denied a level playing field. Period. It is not acceptable that the Hindus must be forced to become ‘liberal’ while the Muslims must be allowed to revel in their orthodoxy.
Also Read: Hindu-Muslim relations – the unsolved puzzle
If we want to reduce social avoidance or compartmentalization, social interaction between the communities must increase. The misgivings both communities harbour about each other can be removed only if they get to know each other better. That is why concrete steps according to genuine acceptance of more inter-faith marriages are necessary. It will not be helped by gimmicks like a Muslim woman journalist tweeting ‘Hori khelungi kah kar bismillah’ on Holi, or a Hindu journalist going to a Muslim journalist friend’s house for sewiyan on Eid. Before we do anything, we must first accept the harsh social realities of our inter-community relations. ‘Undesirable’ social attitude cannot be addressed either by legislation or wailing on social media. Since the communities dislike each other for religio-socio-cultural or historical reasons, we must address those, instead of vitiating the communal atmosphere further by making noise about them on social media.
In mutual interest, we must decide how we are going to live together. Are we going to live in airtight compartments, practising a sort of mutual de facto apartheid? If so, the degree of compartmentalization will have to be defined by consensus. If not, we must figure out how much interaction we can have without inviting conflict.