Let me remind you of an ugly episode of history. Such has been the feeling of “otherness” in the Muslims that for the Third Battle of Panipat, Shah Waliullah Dehlavi, a prominent Muslim scholar of the age had ‘invited’ Ahmad Shah Abdali to restore effective Muslim rule in the country by exterminating the Marathas and the Jats who had established their domination in central Hindustan. For this battle, Abdali was joined by Najibuddaula, Ahmad Khan Bangash, Saadullah Khan and all the other Ruhela chiefs of Ruhelkhand.
For those Ruhela Afghans whose generations had been born in this land; the bones of whose ancestors had been interred here; who had eaten the grain of this land and grown into what they were; Abdali, the foreigner who had raped Hindustan was still ‘one of their own’ and they got prepared to fight the very Hindus of Hindustan they had been living with for over a millennium. On the other hand, the Marathas were obliged to fight all alone.
This incident brutally exposes the reality of Hindu-Muslim relations in India in all its ugliness and completely strips the veneer of falsehood created by the Left-Liberal-Muslim Right cabal.
Communal identity versus national identity
It has been observed over the past 150 years that for some Muslims (we need not bother about their percentage, as it does not matter), their communal identity is more important than their national identity and that has been the source of many a tension and problem in the society and the nation. If some Ashraf Muslims (again, their percentage does not matter) still take some sort of pride in tracing their DNA back to people of foreign origin—Arabs, Turks, Afghans, Persians, Mughals, Pathans, Sayyids, Sheikhs, Uzbegs, etc.—it is unfortunate. Their moral sustenance must come from this land, not from foreign shores. They do not have to submit any proof of their loyalty to anybody but they must stop behaving like ‘eternal outsiders’.
Nothing epitomizes the alleged ‘transnational identity issue’ of some Indian Muslims better than the Khilafat movement. Even if it is a century-old affair, it has poignantly brought out all that has been wrong with those Indian Muslims. Why in the world Indian Muslims had to bother about what was happening to the Sultan in distant Turkey defying common sense?
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The Muslims wanted the British to solve the problem of Turkey in a manner satisfactory to the Indian Muslims! Lest we forget, I must remind readers that, as pointed out by Dr R. C. Majumdar in ‘Struggle for Freedom’, Gandhi ji went to the length of placing the Khilafat problem on the same level of political importance as the Home Rule for India! Not surprisingly, Gandhi ji was elected the President of the All-India Khilafat Conference on November 24, 1919! Dr Majumdar asks, “Whether England’s treatment of Turkey was a greater degradation and humiliation to India than England’s treatment of the Indians during a century and a half, or even the recent atrocities in Punjab (including the Jallianwala Bagh massacre on April 13, 1919)?”
Gandhi ji had taken that line apparently in the name of Hindu-Muslim unity. However, as Dr Majumdar points out, he failed to realise that if a hundred million Muslims were more vitally interested in the fate of Turkey and other Muslim States outside India than they were in the fate of India, they could hardly be regarded as a unit of the Indian nation. If Gandhi ji admitted that the Khilafat (that is, the Caliphate) question was a vital one for Indian Muslims, it meant that he accepted that they formed a separate nation; they were in India, but not of India. What was the reason for this obsessive ‘love’ of some Indian Muslims (again, irrespective of their percentage) for Turkey? Was it their ‘Turkish DNA’ calling or the commonality of their religion? Neither those Indian Muslims nor the Congress ever came clean on this.
In recent times, all those Indian Muslims who lent support to ISIS and Al Qaeda and went to the extent of fighting in foreign countries, for them, it was a duty imposed upon them by their religion which transcended any other consideration of family, society, nation, the law and the Constitution—clearly, a case of trans-national loyalties in the name of religion being stronger than national loyalties and national identity.
I am not demanding some sort of affidavit of patriotism or commitment to the nation from Indian Muslims in general. I am only saying that they must feel in the very core of their beings that their primary identity is that of Indians and not as a subset of the global ummah. They will have to abandon any vestiges of a transnational mindset.
Cultural roots and cultural assimilation
For Muslims to discover their ‘cultural roots in this country do not amount to surrendering their distinct identity. They must not think that they cannot be true Indians and true Muslims at the same time. As Najmul Hoda also, a serving IPS officer and himself a Muslim, advises, Muslims must shun the false binary between belief and belonging.
Indian Muslims must understand that integration and assimilation with mainstream society do not demand surrendering their identity as Muslims. They will not become any less of the devout Muslims they think themselves to be if they do not insist on legally untenable things (like hijab in schools, namaz at public places, azaan over the loudspeaker, etc., which are expressly forbidden by several judgments of the Supreme Court). It only goes on to ‘expose’ them and their intentions.
In the end, the contrived controversy over hijab was reduced to an amateurish attempt to once again assert their ‘separate’ religious identity—essentially a reflection of the desire to keep away from integration into mainstream society. In the matter of offering namaz at public places, Hindus do feel that the stubbornness, obduracy and intransigence of the Muslims in insisting upon doing something which is plainly illegal, leads to a perception that it is a ‘proof’ of the Muslims’ desire to ‘impose’ their religion upon others or to practice it irrespective of the objections from others as the Muslims used to do in the medieval era—basically, a desire to establish the supremacy of their religion over others. In the matter of the use of loudspeakers for azaan, the only inference possible from an irrational insistence upon illegality is that, as in the matter of namaz on public places, this is also driven by a desire to establish the supremacy of their religion over others.
No law or judgment prescribes the playing of music before mosques. The position has been repeatedly held in several judgments starting in 1924 that it can only be regulated, not banned! Dr B. R. Ambedkar wrote in his book ‘Pakistan or the Partition of India’ in 1940: “Music may be played before a mosque in all Muslim countries without any objection. Even in Afghanistan, which is not a secularized country, no objection is taken to music before a mosque. But in India, the Musalmans must insist upon its stoppage for no other reason except that the Hindus claim a right to it.” Muslims do not have any right to get provoked by music before mosques. Yet, the Left-Liberal-Muslim Right cabal maintains that getting provoked over a legally permitted thing is regarded as a ‘right’ of the Muslims that absolves them of all the ensuing consequences. There is no reason that Muslims should not accommodate the Hindu tradition.
India’s misfortune and the font of its communal problems are that the ‘cultural assimilation’ Samuel Huntington has talked about, has not been allowed to take place in India—first by the Muslims’ own arrogance during the medieval period when they were inflated with the ego of being the co-religionists of the rulers of the theocratic States in the country; and later by the motivated machinations of the Left-Liberal-Muslim Right cabal and the political parties living on appeasement of the Muslims. Otherwise, it was not so difficult.
By making the Indian Muslims live perpetually under the shibboleths of victimhood and majoritarian aggression; by drilling it constantly in their minds that they are ‘fundamentally different’ from the majority and therefore necessarily need special and privileged treatment every time and everywhere; and by making them resist ‘assimilation’, the Left-Liberal-Muslim Right cabal has caused incalculable harm to communal harmony in the country.
Hoax of victimhood
Arif Mohammad Khan, presently Governor and former union minister, ruthlessly busted the hoax of victimhood in an interview with A. K. Sherwani of The Wire. On the future of Muslims, he said, “Whatever is the future of India is the future of people who live in India. That includes Muslims too.” On the alleged concern over India moving from a secular democracy to a Hindu Rashtra, Khan retorted, “Did you ever oppose those countries which are Islamic?” On the apprehension that minorities could become second-class citizens in India, Khan replied that Hinduism does not have a concept of second-class citizens—no one becomes a zimmi and no one is asked to pay jizyah. Citing Deoband, which discouraged Muslims from taking up modern education, Khan maintained that the primary cause of backwardness amongst Muslims was the regressive religious beliefs they harbour and the clergy who kept people ignorant. It has been pointed out that the fact that the Muslim Right was rattled so much by Arif Mohammed Khan shows that he indeed touched a raw nerve, primarily about the problematic beliefs of the Muslim community itself.
