URL - http://mikeghouseforindia.blogspot.com/2014/04/for-every-muslim-ass-there-is-hindu-ass.html
Secularism will not die; it will be upgraded to Pluralism; India’s heritage.
Most Indians agree and support this statement, "let every Indian, pray, eat, sleep, drink, wear, think or believe whatever the hell he or she wants to do, but not impose his ideals onto others."
Indeed, a majority of Muslims, Hindus, and others mind their own business, taking care of the family, getting kids to school, having a job and thinking of comfortable retirement.
It is time to scream at the rascal individuals be it in Congress or BJP who talk divisiveness. Anyone who does not care about the others is not good for the society.
Indeed, for every Muslim ass, there is a Hindu ass, (or other assess). For every Azam, there is a Togadia, for every Bukhari there is an Amit Shah… and many more popping by day.
The purpose of police, criminal justice and law is to protect Indians from these men who incite hatred.
Modi or Indira, they come and go, but India has been there and will always be there with its pluralistic ethos. If they do any damage or did not control the damage like the Sikh Genocides, Gujarat Massacre, Mistreatement of Dalits, Destruction of Babri Masjid, it will hurt for a long time, but will heal. India is too big for these temporals. I like that old song from Bombay to Goa - Na koi raha hai, no koi rahega, mere desh azad ho ke rahega.
We are deeply a pluralistic people and our heritage is loaded with pluralistic ethos. Men who are divisive are an insult to Hinduism and Islam’s pluralistic ethos. Remember men in all traditions have been violent, despite their religion teaching otherwise. It is not the religion; it is the selfishness and insecurity in men that drives them to be rotten pigs.
And, “Hinduism is the “Ellis Island of religions”. Pluralism and diversity are deeply ingrained in it, “the lines between different beliefs and practices are permeable membranes”
And, “India gave itself a secular, liberal constitution because a vast majority of all its people, in fact almost unanimously, determined that this was the finest formulation for nation-building in a land as diverse and complex as ours. The Constituent Assembly had participation from across the many ideological divides. The document it drafted has now acquired the status of scripture and nobody in mainstream politics dares to question it. The man credited with leading that process, Ambedkar, has been added to our pantheon of all-party gods.”
Now coming to deal with the extremism- a part of every society, every religion, every ethnicity and language.
The politicians want to label it religious, but in reality it is the arrogance of one over the other. Each group is deviating from the religious teachings of humility and chosing arrogance, ahankar etc.
I fully endorse the theme of the article " Secularism is dead" by Shekhar Gupta at Indian Express.
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Mike Ghouse is a speaker, thinker and a
writer on pluralism, politics, peace, Islam, Israel, India, interfaith, and cohesion at work
place. He is committed to building a Cohesive America and offers
pluralistic solutions on issues of the day
# # #
Secularism
is Dead
This anti-Modi battle cry is lazy,
illiberal and an affront to Muslims — and to Hindus.
Shekhar Gupta | New Delhi | April 18, 2014 11:52 pm
The
“secular” group, led by the Congress is pitchforking India’s Muslims into this
unequal fight against the BJP.
This
anti-Modi battle cry is lazy, illiberal and an affront to Muslims — and to
Hindus.
If
the opinion polls turn out to be generally correct, and Narendra Modi comes to
power, it will unleash an angry flurry of obituaries of Indian secularism. Last
week, some of India’s most respected public intellectuals signed a joint appeal
to save the idea of India from Modi. That his rise is a crucial turn in the
Hindutva project that began with the Babri Masjid demolition. That nobody and
nothing will be able to resist this wave of saffron communalism. Not the
liberals among the majority Hindus, not our great institutions and, least of
all, Muslims.
Nothing
could be lazier, more cowardly, illiberal or unfair to all three. Let me try to
explain.
I
said in a television discussion on NDTV 24×7 last week that India
was not a secular country because only its minorities wished it to be secular.
India is secular because its Hindu majority wants it to be so. I
said, also, that if I were an Indian Muslim, I couldn’t be faulted for thinking
sometimes that both sides on the secular divide in this election were hell bent
on fighting their ideological battle to the last Muslim. It drew quite a bit of
comment and I think it deserves a more detailed elaboration than a sound bite
would allow.
This is how the picture would look to an
Indian Muslim. First, the BJP, it would seem, has accepted that Muslims won’t
vote for it, and it couldn’t care less. It would simply contest this election
with, to take liberties with a golfing metaphor, a handicap of 15 per cent. The
BJP is therefore not even bothering to address Muslim concerns and fears
specifically. The “secular” group, led by the Congress, on the other hand, is
pitchforking India’s Muslims into this unequal fight against the BJP. As if the
responsibility of saving our secularism lies with our Muslim minority. An
Indian Muslim would find it both unfair and worrying.
To
say that only Muslim consolidation can stop Modi, or at least limit his
mandate, is unfair to the Hindu majority as well. It is as if all of the
Hindus have joined the RSS and have no faith in constitutional secularism.
This is rubbish. Because if such
was the case, Modi would probably equal Rajiv Gandhi’s 1984 mandate of
415, if not better it. No such thing is about to happen. The most generous opinion poll estimates put the NDA’s vote
share in the mid-30s, which accounts for just over a third of India’s Hindus.
The remaining majority will be voting for others. And most of these 30-odd per cent
would vote for the BJP/NDA not because they want to build grand temples, spank
the Muslims or banish them to Pakistan. They will be voting in search of an
alternative to the weakest, most incompetent, uncommunicative and incoherent
full-term government in our history. Having voted in the UPA so
enthusiastically for a second time, they are going elsewhere, in search of
jobs, more buying power, stability and confidence. To insinuate that this mass
of Hindus will be voting Modi because they have suddenly turned communal is
unfair to them.
It is
also intellectually lazy, morally cynical and politically disastrous.
Put more simply, it is a bit like saying that Hindus have been voting for the
Congress and other “secular” forces all these decades because they were not
given a convincing saffron option.
India gave itself a secular, liberal
constitution because a vast majority of all its people, in fact almost
unanimously, determined that this was the finest formulation for nation-building
in a land as diverse and complex as ours. The Constituent Assembly had
participation from across the many ideological divides. The document it drafted
has now acquired the status of scripture and nobody in mainstream politics
dares to question it. The man credited with leading that process, Ambedkar, has
been added to our pantheon of all-party gods.
It is also unique. Unlike Western
countries, where secularism means living with one or two faiths, Christianity
and Judaism or Islam, India is a deeply religious country, and peopled by every
religion invented, including the many thousand variants of Hinduism. As Wendy Doniger says in her magisterial book, The Hindus — the
one Penguin pulped, quivering with fear in the face of a man called Dina Nath Batra
— Hinduism is the “Ellis Island of
religions”. Pluralism and diversity are deeply ingrained in it, “the lines
between different beliefs and practices are permeable membranes”. That
is why, she says, there are countless more narratives of Hinduism than the ones
defined by Sanskrit, Brahmins and the Gita. And if I may dare to make my own
risky addition to that list of defining three, by the RSS or VHP.
In a country
where the determinants of identity change every 10 miles, from religion to
caste to language to ethnicity to culture, tribe, sub-tribe and region,
secularism is the glue needed to keep it all together. It isn’t just a charter
to protect Muslims. The Hindus need it as much as them. That is all the more
reason why India is secular, and must remain so.
Indian Muslims can, in fact, complain that over
the decades, they have been taken for granted and offered a minimal political
deal in return for their votes: to give them physical protection from the Hindu
right. I know some will argue that even that promise was never really kept. But
the truth is, the Muslim vote has been
hostage to fear. Explaining why he had joined the BJP now, M.J. Akbar said to me that in the
“Congress/secular” view so far, the Indian Muslim had to conform to one of
three stereotypes: the decadent, decrepit feudal with sherwani fraying at the
collar, as portrayed in the 1960s’ “Muslim socials” like Mere Mehboob, a riot
victim like the crying Gujarati with folded hands in that infamous 2002
portrait, or a petty criminal in the image of Haji Mastan, even if sometimes
with a sacrificing heart of gold.
Since he hasn’t delivered, despite my asking him
several times to put this in an article, I am borrowing the idea. That mainstream, liberal politics in India has
deliberately failed to treat the Muslim as a mainstream Indian. The
extreme and most shameful manifestation of this was Azam Khan’s claim that the
peaks of Kargil were conquered not by Hindu soldiers of our army, but by
Muslims with the battle cry of Allah-o-Akbar. This is not a secular claim, but
amounts to spreading communalism to the one institution that remains so
secular, the army. It is true that Muslim soldiers fought alongside the Hindus
and the rest in Kargil. Two of the battalions with mostly Muslim soldiers, 12
JAK LI and 22 Grenadiers, suffered heavy casualties.
But
to now view them in isolation, through a sectarian prism, and pit them
competitively against their fellow soldiers from other faiths is not
secularism. It isn’t even pseudo-secularism. It is the most cynical, anti-minority communalism. That is why this newspaper and
this writer had objected so furiously to the Sachar Committee’s misplaced idea
of investigating the recruitment patterns and numbers of Muslims in the army
(‘Kitne Musalman hain?’, National Interest, IE, February 18, 2006, iexp.in/FC79596)
The
fundamental values of our secular Constitution sustain because of our
institutions, which are trusted as fair and secular. The Election
Commission can send Imran Masood to jail, ban Azam Khan
and Amit Shah and then let one off with an apology. Some will call it unfair
but nobody calls it communal. The Supreme Court, the UPSC, the armed
forces, the mainstream media and the public intellectual class are, by and large,
liberal and secular. Of course, these institutions will be tested
by such a fundamental ideological shift on Raisina Hill.
But that is why the founding fathers invented them. We need to strengthen them, preserve their
credibility and freedoms to protect and strengthen our secularism. It is
too hasty to write its epitaph. Or to hunt for a sabbatical to a liberal campus
on the American east coast until some post-Modi secular resurrection. I am
conscious that this column is being written on Good Friday. But that is purely
coincidental.
