Multiculturalism, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, means a view that cultures, races, and ethnicities, particularly those of minority groups, deserve special acknowledgement of their differences within a dominant political culture. In practice, however, as we shall see, it translates into appeasement of minorities; accentuation of existing fault lines; moral degeneration; and perpetuation of ‘islands of darkness’.
The ulterior motive of invoking culture
The culture of a community derives largely from and depends for its sustenance heavily on the religion or denominations within religion in that community. There is no way one can dissociate the culture of any group from its religious roots. To talk of multiculturalism without any reference to religion is sheer chicanery. Since they do not have the moral or intellectual courage to face the complexities that have arisen out of historical inter-religion differences and conflicts, they invented the façade of culture so as to be seen as people who have dissociated themselves from what they regard as ‘divisive’ things like religion.
Appeasement Through Backdoor
As far as Canada and the UK are concerned, it is well-known that multiculturalism is a fraud used for political gains or for simply buying ethnic votes. It even became a state-financed marketing programme, where public money was used to buy photo ops with ethnic leaders. In the USA, multiculturalism amounts to a dubious and foolish attempt at assimilation by stealth.
In his article, ‘Crisis in Europe’, Bruce Bawer, an American author living in Norway, notes that Europeans, especially in the Netherlands, Denmark, UK, Norway, Sweden, Austria and Germany are now increasingly realizing that multiculturalism creates unwarranted friction within society. Despite receiving worldwide praise for her pro-refugee policy, in December 2015, the then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel was categorical, “Multiculturalism leads to parallel societies and multiculturalism thus remains a living lie.” She called multiculturalism a ‘sham’ and said that ‘we want and we will reduce the number of refugees noticeably’. She was clear that the concept of living side by side and being happy about it simply did not work. I must add that multicultural groups do not constitute just parallel societies; they become parallel competing societies where, for political reasons, some of them get appeased to the detriment of others. According to a poll in 2010, one-third of Germans believed their country was overrun by foreigners.
How It Imports and Widens Existing Fault-Lines
Most readers would be able to recall the attacks on Indian missions in London and San Francisco by Khalistani activists. We also know how Canadian PM Trudeau and his party openly take the support of Khalistan sympathizers amongst their Sikh voters. The very idea of Khalistan, with whatever limited number of supporters they had once, has been stamped out in India for good. The last of them, Amritpal Singh and his associates, who had grabbed headlines for some time, are now languishing in jail. In effect, it means that even as a dangerous, divisive, criminal idea has been stricken dead in India by the government, it has been allowed to thrive abroad in the name of multiculturalism. Similarly, in August-September 2022, religious and ethnic clashes between British Hindus and British Muslims took place in Leicester.
Leads to Moral Degeneration: Tedford Sex Scandal
In Britain, a three-year-long independent inquiry (2022) into child sexual exploitation, headed by Tom Crowther, Queen’s Counsel established that over a thousand children in Telford were methodically sexually exploited by gangs. It was set up following a report to the effect by Sunday Mirror in 2018. The key findings of the report shockingly disclose that exploitation was not investigated because of nervousness about race and that investigating concerns against Asian men, in particular, would inflame racial tensions. It also found that offenders were emboldened by the absence of police action.
Though the British did not use the term ‘Love Jihad’, the report found the commonest way children were exploited was through a ‘boyfriend’ model, where he would persuade them to become his girlfriend, enticing them further through gifts, buying them food, alcohol or cigarettes, etc. It led to sexual activity with the men as a return favour for the gifts. Thereafter, the kids were raped, humiliated and degraded—witnesses described even a ‘rape house’ in the Wellington area. Eventually, they were thrown into sex trafficking and prostitution. They were subjected to violence and their families were threatened.
It was actually the prevalence of child prostitutes in the area that led the police to launch Operation Chalice, following which seven Muslim men were convicted in 2013 and three more in 2019. And yet, the alarm bells did not ring. Unlike India, the BBC report on this even published the photo of Lucy Lowe who was made pregnant at just 14 years of age by taxi driver Azhar Ali Mehmood. According to The Guardian, speaking on behalf of the local police after the shocking disclosures, a high-ranking official merely said sorry! So much so for multiculturalism! Societies which, in the name of multiculturalism, let ‘islands of darkness’ thrive within them are doomed to crack due to contradictions inherent.
A Pseudo-Intellectual Fraud
American scholar Russell Kirk points out that multiculturalists derive their power from nothing but political manipulation. They are animated by envy and hatred. Multiculturalism very cleverly avoids discussing the extent and consequence of interaction between various cultures as they co-exist in the same society. It does not have the intellectual honesty to examine whether various groups are actually prepared to adopt anything from each other’s culture. After all, what is the point of different cultures living together if they have to live in airtight compartments? Hitherto, there is no evidence of any meaningful exchange anywhere in the world.
Ed West in his book, The Diversity Illusion (2013), points out that all the arguments for multiculturalism—that people feel safer, and more comfortable among people of the same group, and that they need their own cultural identity—are actually arguments against immigration, since English people must also feel the same.
Robert D. Putnam of Harvard conducted a decade-long study on how diversity affects social trust, surveying 26,200 people in 40 American communities. He found that the more diverse a community is, the greater the loss of trust. People in diverse communities don’t trust the local mayor or the local paper, and they don’t trust institutions. He concluded that the effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined—in diverse communities; they don’t trust people who do look like them.
Muslims in the West: Refusal to Integrate
Now it is being increasingly argued that immigrants must not be granted all rights on a par with the native citizens, and yet allowed to follow their own culture, language, customs, and practices—that is, maintain their own ‘islands’ amidst the majority. They can’t remain ‘eternal outsiders’ in a society that has sheltered them. In April 2018, an Algerian Muslim woman refused to shake hands with an official for religious reasons at a citizenship ceremony. As applicants must demonstrate being integrated into society as well as respect for French values, officials considered her not ‘integrated’ and denied her citizenship application.
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Muslims have been found to place their communal identity above any other consideration. According to a poll by Institut Français d’Opinion Publique in 2020, 46% of Muslims maintained that their religious beliefs were more important than the values and laws of the French Republic. Among Muslims under 25 years of age, a large majority (74%) considered their religion more important than French laws and values.
How Multiculturalism Has Failed In India?
The very fact that serious communal issues have continued to beset modern India in 2023 also; 1,311 years after the first invading Muslim armies set foot on Indian soil in 712 AD, proves that something so deep, so powerful is at work, which has resisted all the attempts of whitewashing and window-dressing the ugly realities of Hindu-Muslim relations through contrived slogans of composite culture and Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb etc.
It means that historically, there have been such irreconcilable differences between the two communities, which prevented any intermingling beyond the most superficial. Over the course of the centuries of forced coexistence in the same land, Islam and Hinduism could never really meet at heart; nothing could make them cross the ‘bridge too far’.
School kids are taught that the so-called exchange reflects in respect of language, music, art, architecture, dress, food, etc. The question is, how significant this ‘exchange’ was—did it make any difference in those things of the life that really mattered? After all, ‘choodidar pyjamas’ and mutton biryani are not critical to life! As the illustrious historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar says, this exchange did not result in the slightest change in the attitude of the rulers, the nobility, the soldiers and the ulama towards the Hindu subjects. That was the only thing, which could have made any difference to the lives of the Hindus or alleviated their miseries to any extent. Hence, there is no justification for exalting them unnecessarily or exulting in them. If we ask the question “Did the mutual interaction of the two communities result in anything significant?” the answer is a resounding no! Famous historian Dr R.C. Majumdar categorically maintains that the reciprocal influences were too superficial in character to affect materially the fundamental differences between the two communities in respect of almost everything that is deep-seated in human nature and makes life worth living.
Precisely for this reason, even in today’s India, 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. Most people try to avoid social intimacy at the level of the families and visits to their respective houses dining together, etc. Social avoidance of the other community is mutual and cannot be helped in the least by gimmicks like ‘biryani festivals’; sponsored Iftar parties; some Muslim woman liberal journalist tweeting ‘Hori khelungi kah kar bismillah’ on Holi; or some Hindu liberal journalist going to a Muslim journalist friend’s house for eating sewiyan on Eid.
We will have to first accept the harsh social realities of our inter-community relations. In mutual interest, we must decide how we want to live together. Do we want to live in airtight compartments, practising a sort of mutual de facto apartheid? If not, we must figure out how much interaction we can have without inviting conflict over the most trivial thing.
An Absurdity Carried To Its Logical End
The US State Department runs a program called Diversity Immigrant Visa. This is actually a lottery system for a limited number of people from countries with low rates of immigration to the USA, apparently under the supposition that the USA is not yet culturally diverse enough. Under this, even people from those ‘cultures’ can be a part of the USA who have established cultural traditions of horrible practices like slavery, honour killing, blood money and exoneration from the crime of rape if the perpetrator marries the victim!
For the sake of argument, it can be said that all cultures are equal expressions of the variety among different human groups. However, it is malicious to accuse all those of majoritarianism, communalism, racism, or supremacism who may point out that some cultures uphold values and beliefs that are in conflict with the values espoused by the constitution and laws of a country. In the Indian context, for example, child marriages are a case in point. While the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, of 2006 applies to every other community making it punishable to marry a child, in respect of Muslim girls, the marriage of a minor who has attained puberty, defined as 15 years in the case of Muhammad Ibrahim Rashid (1912) is considered valid. A judgment on this anomaly from the Supreme Court is still awaited.
