Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Saudi Arabia urges US attack on Iran to stop nuclear programme

Embassy cables show Arab allies want strike against Tehran
• Israel prepared to attack alone to avoid its own 9/11
• Iranian bomb risks 'Middle East proliferation, war or both'

· Ian Black and Simon Tisdall

· guardian.co.uk, Sunday 28 November 2010 20.54 GMT


·

Nuclear energy campaigners in IranEmbassy cables reveal the US, Israel and Arab states suspect Iran is close to acquiring nuclear weapons despite Tehran's insistence that its programme is designed to supply energy. Photograph: Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly urged the United States to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear programme, according to leaked US diplomatic cables that describe how other Arab allies have secretly agitated for military action against Tehran.

The revelations, in secret memos from US embassies across theMiddle East
, expose behind-the-scenes pressures in the scramble to contain the Islamic Republic, which the US, Arab states and Israel suspect is close to acquiring nuclear weapons. Bombing Iranian nuclear facilities has hitherto been viewed as a desperate last resort that could ignite a far wider war.

The Saudi king was recorded as having "frequently exhorted the US to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons programme", one cable stated. "He told you [Americans] to cut off the head of the snake," the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir said, according to a report on Abdullah's meeting with the US general David Petraeus in April 2008.

The cables also highlight Israel's anxiety to preserve its regional nuclear monopoly, its readiness to go it alone against Iran – and its unstinting attempts to influence American policy. The defence minister, Ehud Barak, estimated in June 2009 that there was a window of "between six and 18 months from now in which stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons might still be viable". After that, Barak said, "any military solution would result in unacceptable collateral damage."

The leaked US cables also reveal that:

• Officials in Jordan and Bahrain have openly called for Iran's nuclear programme to be stopped by any means, including military.

• Leaders in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egyptreferred to Iran as "evil", an "existential threat" and a power that "is going to take us to war".

• Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, warned in February that if diplomatic efforts failed, "we risk nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, war prompted by an Israeli strike, or both".

• Major General Amos Yadlin, Israeli's military intelligence chief, warned last year: "Israel is not in a position to underestimate Iran and be surprised like the US was on 11 September 2001."

Asked for a response to the statements, state department spokesman PJ Crowley said today it was US policy not to comment on materials, including classified documents, which may have been leaked.

Iran maintains that its atomic programme is designed to supply power stations, not nuclear warheads. After more than a year of deadlock and stalling, a fresh round of talks with the five permanent members of the UN security council plus Germany is due to begin on 5 December.

But in a meeting with Italy's foreign minister earlier this year,Gates said time was running out
. If Iran were allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, the US and its allies would face a different world in four to five years, with a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. King Abdullah had warned the Americans that if Iran developed nuclear weapons "everyone in the region would do the same, including Saudi Arabia".

America is not short of allies in its quest to thwart Iran, though some are clearly more enthusiastic than the Obama administration for a definitive solution to Iran's nuclear designs. In one cable, a US diplomat noted how Saudi foreign affairs bureaucrats were moderate in their views on Iran, "but diverge significantly from the more bellicose advice we have gotten from senior Saudi royals".

In a conversation with a US diplomat, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa of Bahrain "argued forcefully for taking action toterminate their [Iran's] nuclear programme, by whatever means necessary. That programme must be stopped. The danger of letting it go on is greater than the danger of stopping it." Zeid Rifai, then president of the Jordanian senate, told a senior US official: "Bomb Iran, or live with an Iranian bomb. Sanctions, carrots, incentives won't matter."

In talks with US officials, Abu Dhabi crown prince Sheikh Mohammad bin Zayed favoured action against Iran, sooner rather than later. "I believe this guy is going to take us to war ... It's a matter of time. Personally, I cannot risk it with a guy like [President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad. He is young and aggressive."

In another exchange , a senior Saudi official warned that Gulf states may develop nuclear weapons of their own, or permit them to be based in their countries to deter the perceived Iranian threat.

No US ally is keener on military action than Israel, and officials there have repeatedly warned that time is running out. "If the Iranians continue to protect and harden their nuclear sites, it will be more difficult to target and damage them," the US embassy reported Israeli defence officials as saying in November 2009.

There are differing views within Israel. But the US embassy reported: "The IDF [Israeli Defence Force], however, strikes us as more inclined than ever to look toward a military strike, whether launched by Israel or by us, as the only way to destroy or even delay Iran's plans." Preparations for a strike would likely go undetected by Israel's allies or its enemies.

The Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, told US officials in May last yearthat he and the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, agreed that a nuclear Iran would lead others in the region to develop nuclear weapons, resulting in "the biggest threat to non-proliferation efforts since the Cuban missile crisis".

The cables also expose frank, even rude, remarks about Iranian leaders, their trustworthiness and tactics at international meetings. Abdullah told another US diplomat: "The bottom line is that they cannot be trusted." Mubarak told a US congressman: "Iran is always stirring trouble." Others are learning from what they describe as Iranian deception. "They lie to us, and we lie to them," said Qatar's prime minister, Hamad bin Jassim Jaber al-Thani.

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Towards Understanding Islam in the Postcolonial World Order

Towards Understanding Islam in the Postcolonial World Order

Taj Hashmi

Honolulu, Hawaii



Email: taj_hashmi@hotmail.com



Overview

As the discord between modern and traditional Muslims is ideological by nature, so is the conflict between Islam and the West. And ideology is more about power, influence and identity than a mere reflection of culture and belief system. While modern Muslim elites are unwilling to concede power and privileges to the mullahs, most mullahs and their followers – mostly rural and small town lower elites with traditional Islamic or “vernacular” education – are also unwavering about not conceding any ground to non-traditional “Westernized” Muslims. The Iranian Revolution and the Taliban/al-Qaeda experiment in Afghanistan have inspired mullahs and their followers to go the Khomeini or Taliban way. Meanwhile Western duplicities and open support for Islamists during the Cold War had further emboldened Islamists within and beyond the Muslim World. State-sponsorship of Islamism by Saudi Arabia, Gulf States and Pakistan, among other states, has also been a contributing factor to the rise of political Islam. Arab autocrats promote Sunni orthodoxy to contain Shiite Iranian influence; and Pakistani rulers sometimes promote Islamists to bleed archrival India and to neutralize secular democratic opposition at home.



For distancing ourselves from any pseudo-history of Islamism, we need to understand that postcolonial Islamist re-assertion is a legacy of defeats and humiliation for the Ummah. “The death of Nasserism… in the Six-Day War of 1967”, one analyst observes, “brought Islamism as the alternative ideology in the Muslim World.” We also need an understanding of the Muslim psyche vis-à-vis the Muslim experience in Palestine, Kashmir, Iran, Algeria, Egypt, and among other places, Iraq and Afghanistan. How the Cold War allies – Muslims and the West – turned into adversaries or competitors in an uneven “elite conflict” in the Globalized World for conflicting hegemonies and ideologies demands our attention.



We also need to discern the Cold War Islamism from the post-Cold War one. While during the Cold War, Muslims considered the West a “suspect-cum-ally”. Nevertheless, Muslims regarded the West as a friend against their common enemy, communism. Although the end of the Cold War following the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan had heightened Muslim optimism, they were soon crestfallen by the not-so-benign role of the West. Instead of ushering in a new dawn of hope and empowerment for Muslims, the New World Order did not bring anything new to the Muslim World. By 1991, almost all the Muslim-majority countries – barring Turkey, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Malaysia – had remain autocratic; and by 2003 three of them – Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan – had been invaded by Western troops. In short, the cumulative unpleasant post-Cold War Muslim experience has led to the beginning of another Cold War. “Islam vs. the West” has become the new catchword. Meanwhile, pre-modern ultra-orthodox obscurantist forces had gained upper hand in many Muslim-majority countries. Interestingly, enamoured by the concept of transnational Muslim solidarity, Muslims in postcolonial societies are grabbing the elusive Ummah as their security blanket as weak and marginalized people find security in number. We may impute the prevalent obscurantism among sections of Muslims to their backwardness, lack of education and opportunities for various historical factors, but we cannot turn a blind eye to Western duplicities and hegemonic designs in the Muslim World. One can at best consider the Western lip-service to “democracy and freedom” in the Muslim World as condescending, insincere and deceitful; its insistence on bringing peace without justice from Algeria to Iraq and Palestine to Kashmir is simply shocking and terrifying.



Islamism, a Postcolonial Syndrome

Since most Muslim countries with a handful of exceptions were European colonies, the Muslim-West conflict is at least as old as colonialism. One may trace the roots of the conflict to early medieval era, even predating the Crusades. The inter-state conflicts between Muslim neighbours are by-products of colonialism. European colonial powers’ arbitrarily drawing lines “across the desert”, which created artificial states like Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia and truncated entities like Syria and Iraq; have further accentuated the conflict. The postcolonial ascendancy of the Pax Americana, which coincided with the beginning of the Cold War, divided the Muslim World between pro-American and pro-Russian camps. However, the end of the Cold War signalled the beginning of another between the Muslim World and the West. In the wake of the Cold War, the overwhelming Muslim majorities globally turned anti-Western in general and anti-American in particular. They were disillusioned with the West for its continued support for Israel and regimes hostile to their interests in the Muslim World. As substantial part of the global disempowered people, they also believe the West-sponsored Globalization process has not been beneficial to their interests at all. We must contextualize Islamic reforms, resurgence and Islamist militancy and terrorism to the dilemma of postcolonial Muslim community. They can neither forget their pre-colonial and colonial pasts, nor can they fully integrate themselves into the modern world due to various cultural and economic constraints.

The Ummah represents a racially, culturally, politically and economically diverse global Muslim community. As Muslims have economic, political and sectarian differences, they also have different ways of resolving problems, organizing dissent and protest, violently or peacefully, in the name of Islam or with secular agenda. Algerian Muslims, for example, fought a protracted bloody war of liberation against France. Algerian Muslims having the tradition of fighting a people’s war against oppressive regimes are more likely to take up arms against their enemies than Muslims in some other countries. They are not that different from Afghans. As the French colonial rulers did not allow representative self-governing institutions and relatively free press, unlike what the British experimented in its colonies; Algerians lack the tradition of organizing protests and demonstrations against their rulers in a peaceful constitutional way. The French allowed no Gandhis in their colonies either. Consequently, as Fanon has argued, the “colonized, underdeveloped man” in Algeria metamorphosed himself into a “political creature in the most global sense”. Unlike the “colonized intellectual”, the relatively free peasants posed the biggest threat to the French in Algeria. [1] The postcolonial Algerian government’s maintaining the colonial hierarchical systems, especially in the realm of education by continuing with the French and Arabic medium schools to create the employable and under-employable, French and “Vernacular” elites respectively. According to Roy, Algerian Islamist “lumpen-intellectuals”, mostly with science or engineering background, had been striving for “lumpen-Islamism”. He has demonstrated how corrupt autocracy in Algeria was responsible in culturally Islamizing the polity by toying with Islamism for the sake of legitimacy.[2]



The situation in Egypt, Sudan and Somalia is not that different from Algeria; the only major difference being their different colonial experiences. Unlike Algeria, Egypt was notsharply polarized between Western and Vernacular elites, as the titular heads of state or the khedives (later glorified as kings up to 1952) ran the administration with both Western and Arabic elites. By gagging the freedom of expression, proscribing all opposition parties and even executing dissenting politicians, postcolonial rulers have left no space for constitutional politics either in Egypt. As under Nasser and Sadat, Hosni Mubarak’s government also does not allow political dissent. Since April 2008, there has been a crackdown on the anti-Mubarak “Facebook Revolution” by Ahmed Maher. This youth movement through Facebook and Twitter has been mobilizing support for boycotting sham elections under Mubarak.[3] Dissident Muslim Brotherhood and others also face persecution on a regular basis. This has paved the way for clandestine organizations, especially the Jihadists. It is noteworthy that Pan-Islamist thinker Jamal al-Din Afghani’s Egyptian “great-grand-disciple”, Hassan al-Banna was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood; and Banna’s disciple, Sayyid Qutb directly inspired Ayman al-Zawahiri “who in 1967 established the first jihadist cell in the Arab world”. [4]



It is noteworthy that Indian (Pakistani after 1947) Islamist Maulana Maududi (1903-1979), who founded the Jamaat-i-Islami (Party of Islam) in 1941, was both influenced by the Brotherhood and his writings also influenced the latter. However, Jamaat and Brotherhood were (are) different as well; while Maududi admired fascism, Banna had admiration for socialism and wanted social justice for the poor. Interestingly, although the Egyptian Brotherhood holds a supranational ideology, the FIS in Algeria has been primarily an Algerian nationalist movement for “Islamo-nationalism”.[5]



Islamism is not a new factor in Sudan. In 1881 Muhammad ibn Abdallah proclaimed himself the Mahdi or Messiah and declared “jihad” against Ottoman rule. The Mahdi, and after him his son Sadiq al Mahdi, ran a theocratic Mahdi State (1883-1898) in northern Sudan. The country became a military-backed theocracy during 1989 and 1999 while General Omar Bashir and the “de facto ruler”, militant cleric Hassan-el-Turabi, were in good terms. Since its relatively smooth transition to democracy after the first multi-party elections in April 2010, we may see the end of Islamist resurgence and militancy, which dogged the country for almost two decades. Sudan provides an example of how international pressure to de-Islamize the polity and the fear of total disintegration of the country worked towards democratic transition. Then again, we must not lose sight of the fact that Western biased media, leaders and people with extreme prejudice against everything Islamic or Muslim represent did not miss the opportunity to misrepresent the tribal civil war in Darfur as an “Arab and Islamic” onslaught on “non-Arabs” – Muslim and Christian – in southern Darfur.



Somalia is another example of colonial misgovernance and plunder. Once resourceful and fertile, Somalia went through about a century of Egyptian, Italian, British and French colonial rule. Italy and Britain controlled the country for eighty years up to 1960. While northwestern Somalia, which was under the “benign” British has a semblance of governance and law and order; the “not-so-benign” Italian controlled (1880-1960) southeastern region, under Islamist warlords and pirates is one of the least governable regions in the world posing grave threat to the security of the entire region. It seems Somalian Islamist groups, the Al-Shabab and their likes, are being inspired by the fighting traditions of Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, the “Mad Mullah” of the British colonial rulers up to World War I. [6]



The unique Islamist regime of Saudi Arabia, which openly practices and promotes the age-old Shariah code beyond its perimeter, is a Western ally. Although scholars and leaders across the world despise the pre-modern Wahhabism, the state-ideology of the country, the oil-rich monarchy has love-hate relationship with the West. Ultra-orthodox Wahhabism emerged as an alternative to the colonial Ottoman caliphate which ran the country and the neighboring regions of Iraq-Kuwait and Greater Syria up to the end of World War I. Had there been some space for liberal nationalist movements under the autocratic Turkish caliphate, the more stringent and backward-looking Wahhabis would not have succeeded in establishing what Saudi orthodoxy represents today. The Saudi promotion of Sunni orthodoxy reflects the regime’s paranoia about pro-Iranian, anti-monarchical “Shiite heresy” and the growing Muslim Brotherhood-Iranian understanding.[7]



Iran is very different from other Muslim-majority countries in many respects. Although never formally colonized by any European power, this predominantly Shiite polity remained subservient to the West until the 1979 Revolution. Iranian mullahs did not always oppose the West. The well-entrenched formally hierarchical clergy, a class of privileged landed gentry that virtually was “running a state within the state” under Muhammad Reza Shah; unlike Sunni clerics, have been well-educated in Western sciences and philosophy, including comparative religion and Marxism. [8] Had the Shah left the ayatollahs and mujtahids to themselves by not adversely affecting them by his problematic land reform program or the White Revolution, there would not have been any Islamic Revolution. [9]



In neighbouring Iraq and Afghanistan, Islamic resurgence is a by-product of what foreign invasions, ethno-national conflicts and civil wars turned them into, failing if not totally failed states. Saddam Hussein’s minority Sunni autocracy in Iraq; and more than three decade-long civil wars – fought on ethno-national / tribal and even on sectarian lines – caused and accentuated by foreign invasions and interventions in Afghanistan, led to the ongoing Islamist terrorism and ethnic cleansing in these countries. Colonial rulers’ arbitrarily drawn lines to reconstruct the political geography; and the postcolonial rulers’ denial of any space to civil societies and freedom of expression in both Iraq and Afghanistan made room for Islamism, a hotchpotch of tribal, sectarian, ethnic and other identities. Al Qaeda’s exploitative-cum-hegemonic mobilization of Sunni and Pashtun ethno-national groups, respectively in Iraq and Afghanistan; and most importantly, American (Western) sponsorship of the “jihad” against Soviet Union in 1980 were the catalysts of Islamism in both Iraq and Afghanistan and beyond. Islamist violence in Iraq may be attributed to the Shiite assertion, Sunni retaliation and the invasion of 2003, the Afghan situation is quite complex; tribalism, ethno-nationalism, narcoterrorism and proxy wars by India, Pakistan and Iran are the main factors behind the Afghan crisis, or “quagmire” as some analysts love to use the expression with regard to Western intervention in the country. Despite the hyperboles about the “success” of the “Surge” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact remains that even if they emerge as stable democracies in the distant future, the Ummah is least likely to forget and forgive the US and its allies for directly or indirectly killing around a million Muslims in these countries since 1991. Tom Friedman has aptly described the bleak, undesirable situation in Afghanistan on the CNN. To paraphrase him: “Americans’ Training Afghans to fight is like someone training Brazilians to play soccer…. Who are training the Taliban? They even don’t have maps and don’t know how to use one….America needs nation-building at home, spending another trillion dollars in Afghanistan won’t work …. American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan may be compared with an unemployed couple’s adopting a child.”[10]



While the situation in Pakistan to some extent is similar to that in Bangladesh vis-à-vis Islamist politics, Pakistan has probably more in common with Afghanistan and what Algeria was going through in the 1990s with regard to Islamist terrorism. It is rather too early to assume that Islamist terror in these countries is going through its passing phase. Undoubtedly al-Qaeda and the Taliban are retreating, having very little support among Pakistanis, and their support base has always been very weak and insignificant in both Pakistan and Bangladesh. Yet, both these countries are paying the price of state-sponsorship of political Islam. Again, factors responsible for the growth of proto-fascist intolerance and extremism – secular or religious – such as youth bulge, mass poverty, illiteracy, misgovernance and corruption are very much around in both Pakistan and Bangladesh. Last but not least, they are still struggling over their identities. The polities are not sure if they are primarily multi-ethnic / multi-lingual or “Islamic”.



Although India is not a Muslim-Majority country, it has the second or third largest concentration of Muslims after Indonesia and Pakistan; some 150 million or more. Although perennial communal conflicts between more advanced Hindu majority and less advanced Muslim minority eventually led to the communal partition in 1947; and occasional rioting and even mass killing of Muslims in postcolonial India has been quite common, yet Indian Muslims in general do not believe in carving out another “Muslim Homeland” out of India. However, the situation in Indian-occupied Kashmir since 1947 is anything but normal. Denying the Kashmiris’ right of self-determination by violating UN resolutions since 1948, India has kept more than one-third of its regular army and thousands of paramilitary troops in this Muslim-majority state where violations of human rights has been endemic since long. Since long leading human rights activists, including Arundhati Roy, have been publicly asking India to stop what they call the genocide of Kashmiri Muslims and to concede to the majority Kashmiris’ demand for independence.[11] The marginalization of Muslims in India and the frequent incidents of large-scale attacks on them by Hindu mobs – mainly instigated by proto-fascist Hindu extremist groups such as the Shiv Sena and RSS in collusion with communal Hindu law-enforcers – have been breeding Islamist militancy in northern and western India. The Muslim pogroms in the wake of the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992 and the Gujarat killings of 2002 may be mentioned in this regard. One finds vivid accounts of discriminations and marginalization of Indian Muslims in the (Justice Rajinder) Sachar Committee Report, appointed by the Government of India. [12] Despite their “second class treatment” and discriminations by the Indian government, Muslim masses in general and clerics in particular have been opposed to terrorism in the name of Islam. In 2008, 6,000 Muslim clerics from around the country gathered in Hydrabad to register their disapproval for terrorism in the name of Islam.[13] In a personal correspondence with the author, Professor Harbans Mukhia wrote (February 28, 2009): “I think in the Indian milieu of being surrounded by a vast majority of Hindus, who have no notion of the ultimate truth, the Day of Judgment and therefore no notion of proselytisation, the Indian Muslims have been far less prone to fundamentalist manifestations than others, especially as among the Arabs.”



Islamism in Southeast Asia has differences and similarities with the syndrome elsewhere in the world, having its unique intra- and inter-state variations. However, prior to the recent Islamist terrorist attacks in Bali, southern Philippines and southern Thailand, scholars, political leaders and security practitioners had been complacent about any impending threat of Islamism in the entire region. They considered Indonesian and Malay Muslims’ syncretism as the main antidote to religious extremism, which is often a by-product of puritanism. Sukarno, so far the most charismatic leader of Indonesia, also played an important role in retaining its syncretistic heritage and keeping the largest Muslim-majority country relatively secular. However, Suharto’s ascendancy changed things almost overnight. He used Islamist fanatics in the mass killing of actual or so-called communists to strengthen his position; and thus legitimized Islamism and promoted political Islam for the sake of legitimacy, taking full advantage of Western “soft corner” for Islam during the prime of the Cold War. Later the emboldened and crest-fallen Islamists turned into his adversaries, turning the Jemaah Islamiyah into the most powerful Islamist organization in Southeast Asia. An al-Qaeda affiliate, JI believes in global jihad and wants to establish an Islamist state in the region, encompassing Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei southern Philippines and southern Thailand. [14] Ethno-nationalist separatist movements of Malay Muslims in Southern Philippines and Thailand during the last two decades have metamorphosed into Islamist movements, thanks to the growing resurgence of Global Islam.



The so-called Globalized Islam possibly exists among the Muslim Diaspora, refugees and marginalized people having no stable identity or sense of belonging to a nation or community besides the elusive transnational Ummah. [15] These “nowhere men” do not represent any civilization to fight for it; they are just angry people who have fled the “burning grounds of Islam”, carrying the fire with them and angry at the world around them.[16] There are, however, conflicting views as to why Islamists among the Diaspora resort to terrorism and even suicide attacks. As one analyst explains the British suicide attacks in July 2005:



For an earlier generation of Muslims their religion was not so strong that it prevented them from identifying with Britain. Today many young British Muslims identify more with Islam than Britain primarily because there no longer seems much that is compelling about being British. Of course, there is little to romanticise about in old-style Britishness with its often racist vision of belonging.[17]



If we accept the above as the right explanation of terrorism by members of the Muslim Diaspora, one wonders as to how about twenty Somali-American young men from Minnesota “vanished” in 2008; went to Somalia to fight for al-Qaeda and one of them, Shirwa Ahmed, last October blew himself up killing dozens of Somali opponents of their “jihad”. These young Somali-Americans came to the US in their early childhood.[18] And the US does not promote multiculturalism. It is difficult to explain the “home-grown” Islamist terrorism; Major Nidal Hasan’s killing thirteen fellow American soldiers for example, in terms of some cultural or economic explanations. American and its allies support for Israel in general; and their invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in particular have been the last straws. Muslims resort to terrorism not necessarily due to religious factors. As Rami Khouri has explained the Pakistani American Feisal Shehzad’s justifications for the attempted bombing of Times Square in New York, Muslims’ sense of collective humiliation at local, national or global level by their rulers or foreign occupation forces may turn them into terrorists.[19] One cannot agree more with Evelin Lindner, renowned psychologist and founder of the Center for Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies, that:



Basically all human beings yearn for recognition and respect; their denial or withdrawal is experienced as humiliation. Humiliation is the strongest force that creates rifts and breaks down relationship among people….Men such as Osama bin Laden would never have followers if there were no victims of humiliation in many parts of the world….The rich and powerful West has long been blind to the fact that its superiority may have humiliating effects on those who are less privileged.[20]



Throughout history, most of the time, Muslims primarily fought among themselves; more Muslims than non-Muslims fell victim of Muslim wrath everywhere. The situation has remained the same; especially in the wake of the US- led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. They have wide-ranging problems of poverty, backwardness, bad governance, and above all, the crises of identity and integration into the modern world. Again, Muslims are not the only people reviving their faith during the last fifty-odd years; Christians, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus have been on the same path to rebel against “secularist hegemony and started to wrest religion out of its marginal position and back to center stage”. We may agree with Karen Armstrong that no religion has so far been able to withstand changes over the last four hundred years in science and technology, philosophy and ideas, and socio-political and economic systems and structures. Religious revival is not just retrogressive but an attempt to cope with these changes and challenges of rationalism against myths and superstitions.[21] Again, the lines between “ethnic” and “religious” are too blurred to locate the real factors behind many conflicts.

The Muslim World and the West have been at loggerheads for centuries. During the 8th and 17th centuries, Muslim caliphates and empires had been the most formidable superpowers from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean World. Europeans in general either remained subserviently awe stricken by their Muslim hegemons or hell-bent to turn the table to their own advantage. One gets the reflection of this love-hate relationship in the corpus of European and Turco-Arabic literature, travel accounts and history. As Dante’s The Divine Comedy (written between 1308 and1321) is an epitome of hatred for Islam and its Prophet, so is Voltaire’s play, Fanaticism or Mahomet the Prophet (written in 1736). Hegel, Francis Bacon, Marx or Max Weber, among other Western scholars, had hardly any kind word for Islam either. Hegel and Marx through their discourse of “Oriental Despotism” portrayed the Orient, including the Muslim World, as inferior to the glamorous and enlightened West. The “Orientalists” only noticed despotism, splendour, cruelty and sensuality in the Muslim World to legitimize Western colonial hegemony in the orient.[22] British colonial rulers used expressions like “mad mullah” and “the noble savage” to undermine Muslim rebels and their followers in the Middle East and South Asia.[23]

Some Muslim leaders throughout history had been extremely prejudicial and discriminatory to their non-Muslim subjects and adopted oppressive policies against Jews, Christians and Hindus. The extermination of around a million Armenians by Turks in 1915-17 may be mentioned in this regard. Not only Muslim clerics and laymen but also sections of the intelligentsia and politicians glorify early and late medieval “Islamic Empires”. One just cannot ignore Europeans’ collective memories of subjugation of their ancestors under Muslim rule as an important factor to the growth of Islamophobia in the West. Similarly, one cannot deny the history of Western colonial rule of almost the entire Muslim World; and even worse, the postcolonial Western treatment of the Muslims in general and Arabs in particular as important factors in the promotion of Westophobia among Muslims. Only Turkey may be singled out as a Muslim-majority country, which ran a parallel and rival colonial empire in Eastern Europe, North Africa and Middle East for centuries. However, the loss of Turkey’s last vestiges of its empire soon after World War I sent two ominous signals to Muslims, especially in the Subcontinent: a) that while the Muslim World was under European (Christian) domination, Muslim supremacy and conquests of non-Muslim territories (often glorified by Muslim scholars and laymen) had become history; and b) that with the demise of the Ottoman caliphate, Indian Muslims had no one else to “help them out of British paramountcy”.

We must not lose sight of the extra-territoriality of transnational “jihads”. Al Qaeda, Taliban and their likes not only fight for the “liberation” of Arabia, Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq and Kashmir, but they also champion the cause of establishing an alternative Global Islamic Order. Islamists always claim to be the peace-loving champions of justice against injustice and freedom against (Western) hegemony. Very similar to Communism, Islam and Islamism promote transnational camaraderie and fraternity among their adherents. Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “formal declaration of jihad” against Soviet Union from Pakistan, and the decade-long US sponsorship of the mujahedeen refurbished their image as the greatest “freedom fighters” of all times. Lessons learnt in Afghanistan and Pakistan since the 1980s should never be forgotten. Exploiting ethno-national and class conflicts, Islamist extremists have turned yester-years’ “freedom fighters” into transnational insurgents and terrorists today.

Islamism is a political ideology to regulate Muslims’ private and public affairs in accordance with Islamists’ version of the faith. Again, it is not all about violence and terrorism; there are Islamists who believe in peaceful and democratic means of establishing their version of the utopian “Islamic State”. Both terrorist and peace-loving Muslims converge on one point that it is Muslims who have been at the receiving end of Western prejudice and exploitation since the beginning of Western colonialism. Consequently it is essential that we know and empathize with the Muslim discourse of “What went wrong with the Muslim World?”, or in other words, “Is the West and its allies hell-bent on destroying Islam and Muslims?” This is not a new discourse; Muslim scholars, saints, poets and politicians have been posing these soul-searching questions for the last 200-odd years, from Egypt to Arabia and Afghanistan to India and Indonesia.[24]Islamism got a new lease of life in 1979. Two events that shook the world took place in that year: the Islamic Revolution of Iran and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Never before in history, leaders, scholars and analysts in the world took so much interest in Islam and Muslims as have they been taking since 1979. Since then, more Muslims than non-Muslims have fallen victim to Western and Islamist wrath and attacks. However, despite their differences and history of bloody conflicts between Shiite and Sunni Muslims, they often close ranks against the West. While the First Gulf War of 1991 agitated Muslims against West; US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after Nine-Eleven have simply antagonized most Muslims towards the West. Interestingly, the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are critical of the invasions have never been sympathetic to the Taliban or Saddam Hussein. Islamist ideologues, who espouse the cause of “global jihad” against their Muslim and non-Muslim enemies, have benefitted most by exploiting the average Muslims’ hatred for postcolonial Western duplicities and hegemonic designs in the Muslim World. They love to hate anything Western, including pro-Western governments, leaders and culture. Paradoxically, some West-bashing Muslims also aspire for “Western-Style” democracy, justice and peace in the Muslim World. Since Nine-Eleven both the West and the Ummah in general are confused; and afraid of each other. By demonizing the “others”, Western and Muslim leaders, scholars and laymen justify the “inevitability” of the “Clash of Civilizations”. Muslim bewilderment and fear of Western retaliation against them led to the proliferation of denials and conspiracy theories after Nine-Eleven, which portray Jews and American government as the masterminds behind the attacks.

Calling all ethno-national freedom fighters “terrorists” does not resolve any issue but takes us all to a dark cul-de-sac. This is reminiscent of how European colonial rulers used to portray armed freedom fighters as “robbers” and “outlaws” and their armed resistance as “disturbances” or “problems of law and order”. Similarly, since the heydays of the Cold War we find Western policymakers, media and intellectuals denigrating all rebels and freedom fighters fighting Western interests as “terrorists” or “communists”. Western ambivalence towards religion-based polities is noteworthy. While it despises the Islamic regime in Iran; the West is prepared to go to any extent to defend the Zionist state of Israel. An understanding of violent Islamist extremism hinges on the understanding of what the postcolonial Third World in general and the Muslim World in particular think of Western hegemony and arrogance. Evelin Lindner has beautifully explained it through her personal field work experience in Rwanda and Somalia in 1998. She conveys the perceptions of the downtrodden Rwandans and Somalis about the West in the following manner:

You from the West, you come here to get a kick out of our problems. You pretend to help or do science, but you just want to have some fun….You pay lip service to human rights and empowerment! You are a hypocrite! We feel deeply humiliated by your arrogant and self-congratulatory help! First you colonize us. Then you leave us with a so-called democratic state that is alien to us. After that you watch us getting dictatorial leaders. Then you give them weapons to kill half of us. Finally you come along to “measure our suffering.[25]



[1] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grover Press, New York 2005, Ch V, pp.181-234



[2] Oliver Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, I.B. Tauris, London 1994, pp. 75-88

[3] Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “The April 6 Youth Movement”, September 22, 2010 http://egyptelections.carngieendowment.org/2010/09/22/the-april-6-youth-movement (accessed November 22, 2010)

[4] Fawaz A. Gerges, Journey of the Jihadist: Inside Muslim Militancy, Harcourt, Inc. New York 2006, p.37



[5] Ibid, pp. 129-30



[6] Ioan Lewis and Anita Adam, Understanding Somalia and Somaliland: Culture, History and Society, C Hurst & Co, London 2008, p.5





[7] Oliver Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, I.B. Tauris, London 1994, pp.120-21



[8] Ibid, pp.172-3



[9] M. Reza Ghods, Iran in the Twentieth Century: A political History, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder 1989, pp.192-230



[10] CNN, Fareed Zakariya GPS, June 27, 2010

[11] Arundhati Roy, “Kashmir’s Fruits of Discord”, NYT, November 8, 2010

[12] Government of India, Ministry of Minority Affairs, Sachar Committee Report, New Delhi 2006

[13] Harbans Mukhia, “Indian Muslims: One of a Kind”, Times of India, 20 December 2008

[14] See Greg Barton, Indonesia's Struggle: Jemaah Islamiyah And the Soul of Islam, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney 2005



[15] Oliver Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah, Columbia University Press, New York 2004, pp.67-9



[16] Fouad Ajami, “The Clash”, New York Times Sunday Book Review, January 6, 2008;



[17] Kenan Malik, “multiculturalism has fanned the flames of Islamic extremism”, The Times, July 16, 2005

[18] Dan Ephron and Mark Hosenball, “Recruited for Jihad?”Newsweek, February 2, 2009



[19] Rami Khouri, “Terrorists AreAlso Spawned by Humiliation”, NYT, June 29, 2010

[20] Evelin Gerda Lindner, “Humiliation as the Source of Terrorism: A New Paradigm”, Peace Studies, 33(2), 2001, p.59

[21] Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God, Ballantine Books, New York 2001, “Introduction”



[22] Edward Said, Orientalism, Vintage Books, New York 1979, passim

Monday, October 04, 2010

Allahabd Highcourt Judgement on Babri Musjid : Obervations

The verdict of Allhabad is highly appreciated since it was able to satisfy "all" people of India. Now the question is should we need a Judiciary to settle disputes?. It is better to place the issue before general public since they can issue a better verdict than our respected Judges, as evident in the case of Allhabad judgment.What we needed is not a compromise, but a verdict on historical facts. I strongly suggest that the entire land should be given to Sangh Parivar to avoid a controversy, because Muslims have nothing to claim as holy in Babri Musjid. A Musjid can be constructed in any suitable place. But the question is such a compromise should not affect the justice of the minorities. If 'compromises' are only to entice the majority sentiments, where is democracy in India?

Let us look some of the views expressed by the people of eminence.


Commit the Crime and be rewarded: Ayodhya Dispute Verdict

Ram Puniyani

Nation heaved a sigh of relief following the three judges delivering the verdict on Ayodhya case (30th Sptember 2010). There was no violence anywhere, something which was feared very much. The day passed off peacefully and the fear that violence will engulf parts of the country proved to be wrong, thanks to the maturity shown by large sections of population. As such the judgment was an exercise of sorts trying to do a balancing act, between all the parties involved, Ram Lalla Virajman, Nirmohi Akhada and Sunni wakf board. The title of the land has been divided into three each sharing one part. Also court has declared since Hindus believe the ‘birth place’ of Lord Ram to be below the place where the central dome of the mosque stood, that place should be allotted to Hindus. In response RSS chief in a jubilant mood proclaimed that now the path for a grand Ram temple has been opened at the site and all the parties should cooperate in this “national” work.

As Mulayam Singh Yadav has correctly put it, the Muslim community is feeling betrayed. First their mosque is entered into by miscreants who install the Ram Lalla idols there. Then in a well orchestrated assault RSS combine demolishes the Mosque and now the court operates on the RSS theory that Lord Ram was born at that spot. It seems if matters go the way they are going there is no need for scientific disciplines of History, Archeology and others as a section of political force can gradually build up the faith, act upon that and then the court will legitimize the criminal acts in the name of faith of a section of society. The law of the land will come to such a pass is beyond the imagination of those who wish to adhere to the values of freedom movement and the Constitution of India.

Just to recall RSS combine, more popularly known as Sangh Parivar, picked up the issue of Ram Temple in Ayodhya in the decade of 1980s and later orchestrated the faith of section of Hindus that Lord Ram was born precisely at the spot where the mosque is located. Interestingly the trend of Lord Ram being regarded as the core deity of Hindu religion came up in the medieval times, more particularly after Goswami Tulsi Das wrote the story of Lord Ram in the popular Awadhi language. Till that time Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana was the major one prevalent in the society and being the language of elite, worship of Lord Ram was restricted to a section of Hindus. Tulsidas was pulled up by the Brahmins for his writing the story of Ram in Lok Bhasha, Avadhi, as Brahmins were supposed to be using Dev Bhasha; Sanskrit only. Tulsi Das was around thirty years old when it is claimed that the Ram Temple was demolished. The demolition claim is unlikely to be true as had such a demolition taken place Tulsidas must have mentioned this in his writings. As such the later interpretations of Ram have been so different for different people.

One understands that Kings had been ruling for the sake of power and wealth and victor kings many a times destroyed the defeated king’s holy place to humiliate the defeated king. The British introduced communal historiography aiming to pursue the policy of ‘divide and rule’ propagated that Muslim Kings destroyed Hindu temples to insult Hindu religion. This type of Historiography spread hatred amongst communities and became the foundation on which the communal violence started taking place in due course. As such Babri Mosque was a protected monument, under the custody of Government of India. Government failed to get the illegally installed Ram Lalla idols removed from the site and also failed to protect the mosque form the onslaught of RSS combines’ attack on the mosque in 1992. So de facto, with this judgment the RSS agenda of dividing the nation along communal lines is being legitimized by ignoring the fact of installation of idols and by turning a blind eye to the Babri demolition, coordinated by different wings of RSS combine. The crimes done by this stream have been richly rewarded by this verdict!

Now RSS and its progeny is taking the line that Muslims should hand over the land of their share to RSS front, to see that the aspirations of ‘Nation’ are fulfilled and a grand Ram Temple is built there. It is not only Hindus who constitute the nation. All the Hindus of the nation do not hold any such belief about the birth place of Lord Ram. All the Hindus do not want a Ram Temple there. As such majority of Hindus have kept aloof from this issue, many of them have looked with horror and disbelief the way the faith of people has been manipulated to catapult BJP to the seat of political power. Since the issue was highlighted and brought to the electoral arena; Hindu majority have never voted for the agenda of Ram temple. No doubt a section of Hindus has been won over to the Ram temple agenda; the majority of Hindus have not approved it as the results of elections show. The latest surveys also confirm that it is not an issue for most of the Hindus, but is an issue only for a handful of Hindus. Moreover the younger generation does not have anything to do with these types of identity related issues and that too imposed upon the nation through criminal means, the crime of installing Ram Lalla idols and the crime of demolishing the Babri Mosque.

Congress is calling for a negotiated settlement. What can be a negotiated settlement? One; it has to be based on justice, recognizing the due rights of each party involved and there has to a spirit of give and take. Do those calling for compromise will promise that the matters related to equity and security of Muslim community be granted? The Muslim community has been sliding down on the scales of social and economic indices. Will Sachar Committee- Rangnath Misra Committee reports be implemented in right earnest? Will RSS support such a ‘give’? Will Muslim community be able to live in security hereafter? India has 13.4% of Muslms in the population. In the communal violence, more than 80% of victims are Muslims! Will RSS withdraw the ‘Hate spreading books’ from its Shishu Mandirs? Will its Shakhas stop doing the ‘Hate Propaganda’ against the minorities?

For a moment one feels like supporting a compromise formula. Sure and that’s a good thing. One may be willing to talk of give and take, negotiation if the battered Muslim minority and also Christians are promised equal status as citizens, the baseless propaganda against them is held back, and the Congress takes it upon itself to fulfill the promise of Manmohan Singh that Muslim minorities have the first right to development resources as they have been left behind due to the social-economic discrimination and due to the politically motivated violence against them. Will all the guilty of communal violence be punished? Those behind Delhi anti Sikh massacre, Mumbai violence and Gujarat violence are roaming with their bloated chests; can they be brought to book before a negotiated settlement is talked about? In a way can we trust the state for abiding by the rule of law to protect its citizens before demands of sacrifice from them are articulated?

One can very well say that the very politics of Communalism is using Ram Temple issue to violate the Indian Constitution and the amity amongst the communities. One can appeal to the minority communities to make some sacrifices but one knows that they will get nothing in return. The way communalism has seeped into the very vitals of our society and polity it has created situations where minorities are being treated as ‘second class citizens’. The dominating ‘Religion based nationalism’, the politics of Hindutva with the agenda of Hindu Rashtra, will not let them live in peace and dignity. For RSS combine the matters of bread butter and shelter are secondary and imaginary constructs culled out from mythology form the base of their identity politics, the politics of Ram Temple, Ram Setu, Cow slaughter ban and what have you. We are in a catch 22 situation. The communalization of polity and society is so much that now faith, systematically constructed by a section of political stream is becoming the basis of law. As noted Film maker Anand Patwardhan pointed out on the day of Ayodhya verdict, it is ‘Victory of Hindu Sharia: A sad day for India’. One hopes the younger generation, and all those believing in the Indian constitution will try to move on from the identity politics, politics which abuses faith for short cuts to power and paves the way for a sane society concerned about the human justice, and affirmative action for weaker sections of society.

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ASI is the handmaiden of Hindutva
By OMAR KHALIDI
October 01, 2010 14:26 IST
REDIFF


http://news.rediff.com/column/2010/oct/01/column-asi-is-the-handmaiden-of-hindutva-writes-omar-khalidi.htm

The ASI's role in marshalling dubious evidence in support of the existence of a Ram temple at Ayodhya is the right occasion to assess its activities as a handmaiden of Hindutva, says Omar Khalidi

As India [ Images ] reinvents itself through archaeology and tourism, official organisations such as the ASI, state archaeology departments and tourism bureaus lend themselves as the handmaidens of Hindutva, points out Omar Khalidi

Justice DV Sharma's judgment in the Babri masjid [ Images ] case given on Thursday claimed that 'the disputed structure was constructed on the site of the old structure after demolition of the same. And that the Archaeological Survey of India has proved that the structure was a massive Hindu religious structure'.

What Justice Sharma was referring to was the ASI's report of 2003 of dubious value on Ayodhya. What the ASI claimed were the base of pillars which held up the temple, were in fact not pillar bases at all. The Siva shrine at a lower level adds no strength to the claim of a Ram temple. The terracotta from different levels has been so jumbled that it can be linked to no particular stratum and period. Moreover, the presence of animal bones and glazed earthenware found at the site makes it difficult to claim that a Ram temple existed on this site between the 12th and 16th centuries.

The ASI's role in marshalling dubious evidence in support of the existence of a Ram temple at Ayodhya is the right occasion to assess its activities as a handmaiden of Hindutva.

Four traits that mark archaeology

Four characteristics mark Indian archaeology since colonial times: it is a monument-specific archaeology based on geographical surveys, literary traditions and Orientalist scholarship. These characteristics combine to form a traditionalist, location-driven excavation agenda that privileged some sites to the Hindus without regard to the historical provenance of any site or monument.

Taken together, the four characteristics privilege ancient references to monuments, whether in legend or literature, as authentic, while all medieval and modern ones are perceived as tales of depredations.

The ASI's colonial origins are transparent in its philosophy and operation. Mortimer Wheeler, director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India between 1944 and 1948, advised Indian archaeologists that 'Partition has robbed us of the Indus Valley… We now have therefore no excuse for deferring any longer the overdue exploration of the Ganges [ Images ] Valley. After all if the Indus gave India a name, it may almost be said that the Ganges gave India a faith."

His student BB Lal (ASI director, 1968 to 1972) took his advice. He excavated the Gangetic sites in search of evidence for the mythical periods described in the epics Mahabharata [ Images ] and Ramayana [ Images ] identifying two kinds of pottery -- painted greyware as an indicator of the former and northern black polishedware of the latter. He then attempted to match archaeological sites with places named in the epics.

The ASI used this "evidence" to propagate the myth that underneath the 16th century Purana Qila built by Sher Shah Suri lay the site of Indraprastha, city of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata. This theory of Muslim rulers building over Hindu structures has certainly gained ground. By the 1990s, most publications about India's capital describe Indraprastha as the first of the 'seven cities of Delhi' [ Images ].

Lal used similar 'evidence' at Ayodhya to support his claim of the identification of Lord Rama's [ Images ] birthplace, which was used as justification for the demolition of the Babri masjid in 1992. The story of Ayodhya then became the prototype for Hindutva claims on innumerable mosques, mausoleums, dargahs, and idgahs, all of which were to be reclaimed as former Hindu sites or temples.

In ASI terminology, the term Hindu is a catch-all, homogenised category for all schools of Sanatan Dharma -- Buddhism, Jainism, Saivism, Vaishnavism and the cult of Shakti. The ASI deploys such a convenient term to efface the long and bloody Hindu sectarian wars or Saivite appropriation of Buddhist sites. The ASI's methods serve to perpetuate the Hindutva groups' myth of Muslim depredation of Indian heritage.

Hindu temples under monuments

The ASI has been looking for Hindu temples under every medieval monument. The unearthing of Jain idols in the vicinity of Fatehpur Sikri in the 1990s was the occasion to blame Emperor Akbar for destroying temples. When the annual meeting of the World Archaeological Congress in New Delhi coincided with the second anniversary of the Babri masjid demolition in December 1994, its two Indian organisers barred discussion of the event, since they were closely associated with the Ayodhya movement.

Numerous examples of the ASI's role in transforming medieval heritage can be seen across India.

* In 2007, the ASI cooked up history at Chittorgarh, a fort near Udaipur, Rajasthan [ Images ], by signposting an underground passage as the location of Padmini's jauhar or self-immolation, based on the myth of Emperor Alauddin Khilji's alleged atrocities. Numerous modern temples abound in the medieval fort.
* In 2003, the ASI virtually converted the 15th century Kamal Maula mosque in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh [ Images], into a temple by allowing Hindu worship in it.
* Since 1977, the ASI has allowed the construction of three new Hindu temples in the precincts of Sher Shah Suri's mausoleum in Sasaram, Bihar. These bathroom-tiled temples with their calendar-art frescos mar the magnificent mausoleum's vistas.
* In 1970, the ASI allowed a kumkum sprinkled stone on the southeast corner of Charminar in Hyderabad to be converted into a full-fledged Bhagya Laxmi temple. A modern temple is protruding out of a major medieval monument in defiance of the ASI's own rules.
* At the turn of the 21st century, almost all the grand gates in historic Golconda fort and Hyderabad are riddled with Hindu temples, signs and icons flying in the face of the ASI's preservation mission.
* In 1948, the ASI converted the Jama Masjid in the Daulatabad fort near Aurangabad into a Bharata Mata Mandir (Mother India temple). The very name is so candidly, crassly contemporary as to make a mockery of a medieval site.

ASI's impact on heritage tourism

The ASI's representation of India's archaeological legacy in Hindu terms has had a direct impact on heritage tourism. Unlike ecotourism, medical tourism and such like, heritage tourism has had vast appeal to the increasingly rich, upwardly mobile, tech-savvy upper caste Hindus at home and abroad.

The ASI's representation of Indian archaeological sites as essentially Hindu is revealed by a close scrutiny of the web sites and printed tourist guides and promotional literature. In the Indian tourism ministry and state tourism department web sites and literature, India's past is invariably described as the 'Hindu golden age' and all subsequent eras until the colonial era as the age of Muslim tyranny. Such representations of India as Hindu is most blatant and obvious in the Incredible India promotion directed toward the diaspora in North America, Europe and wherever it is the rich live.

When tourists come to the sites and monuments, they learn who they are and where they come from. If they come through the promotions by the tourism ministry and state tourism departments, they learn that they are Hindus and the Muslims caused all the depredations. To anyone who has been a tourist in India, the various self-appointed touts and guides at the sites are ubiquitous. They provide a spicy supplement to the official narrative of Muslim vandalism.

The wide appeal of Hindutva among the Indian diaspora can be partly explained by their experiences at tourism sites. The ASI and the official tourism bureaus' characterisation of Indian archaeological sites as the focus of Muslim vandalism reinforces what was learnt through biased textbooks. The growing Islamophobia in the West further adds to the mental images of Muslims as violent bigots.

As India reinvents itself through archaeology and tourism, official organisations such as the ASI, state archaeology departments and tourism bureaus lend themselves as the handmaidens of Hindutva.

Omar Khalidi, independent scholar and staff member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is also the author of Khaki and Ethnic Violence in India and Muslims in Indian Economy
Omar Khalidi
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AYODHYA VERDICT: NO HOPE FOR JUSTICE FOR DALIT-MUSLIMS IN INDIA
BY BHAI TEJ SINGH (noted Delhi-based Dalit-Bahujan ideologue and activist)


Aggrieved with the Allahabad High Court (Lucknow Bench) judgment on the ownership of the title of the land pertaining to Babari Mosque, the Ambedkar Samaj Party, Rashtriya Joota Brigade, Veerangna Phoolandevi Mahila Morcha, Ambedkar Student Front & Jyotiba Phule Kisan Morcha have decided to go the People’s Court to let people know as to how the Brahminical mindset Hindu Judges have been throttling the throat of justice by misusing the Judiciary in India. Terming the Allahabad High Court judgment on the title of the land pertaining to Babari Mosque as absurd, biased, prejudicial, sheer violation of human rights and a terrible miscarriage of justice, Bhai Tej Singh said that Ambedkar Samaj Party will prefer to go to the People’s Court as there appears no hope remains from the Brahmanized Indian judiciary comprising judges of Hindu-mindset. He said that this judgment has crashed opened the doors of declaring this country a Hindu-Rashtra which will be rather detrimental for the honorable living of the vast majority of Indian erstwhile Shudras and drag them to slavery. We fear that the day is not far away that the Hindu judges will declare the Constitution of India void to impose the rule of Shrutis and Manusmriti! The judgment appears to be based on the concocted and imaginary fairytales of Hindu scriptures. With this judgment, the imaginary Hindu God ‘Rama’ has got recognition. In order to protect Hindu mythology, the religious faith n feelings of our Muslim brethren have been trampled.
The chronology of the events to Babri Mosque demolition and thereafter, the prominent leaders of the congress have always played vital roles favoring Hindus. This judgment appears to have been dictated by the caucus of Smt. Sonia Gandhi as his late husband Shri Rajiv Gandhi was determined to have taken lead in constructing a Grande Rama Temple on the debris of Babri Mosque.

If the concocted fairytales of the Hindu scriptures is to be believed, their imaginary God Rama has been born way back in Tretayug. The life of Dwapuryug is mention in their so-called Hindu (A)dharma-shastras as 8, 60, 000 years and the present one is Kalyug is running now as such ‘Rama” would have been born prior to 8,60,000 years! It may not be out of place to mention that their Lord Rama is said to have been called as “Arya-putra” i.e. the son of Hindu-Aryas and the Aryans have come to India 4500 years ago from Central Asia or elsewhere as claimed and confirmed by none other than Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru the first Prime Minister of India in his book ‘Discovery of India’ and also by the great Hindu leader & scholar Pt. Bal Gangadhar Tilak (The Arctic Home in the Vedas) apart from so many other Hindu historians. It means, if ‘Rama’ would ever have born, he born some where else but under no circumstances in India.
Therefore, not only the God Rama of the Hindu is of the foreign origin but the Hindus themselves are alien to this land of ours i.e. Bharat (India).
On the contrary to the claims and utterances of these alien Hindus, the Muslims, Christians etc. are aboriginals to this land of ours who have got them liberated from the clutches of Hinduism by embracing Islam and Christianity. [http://www.missioncaravan.com/]
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Bhai Tej Singh can be contacted on http://www.missioncaravan.com/

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Friday, August 13, 2010

Masjid Complex at Ground Zero Wrangle

The recent controversy on the construction of Masjid Complex near Ground Zero is unwanted. The most important objection is that such construction glorifies murders. However, such construction can create religious harmony in America. In effect, it would be a setback to the terrorists who tarnish America as an anti-Islamic nation. So such narrow minded objection should be rejected and construct a Masjid as approved by the Authority in New York.

Saturday, July 03, 2010

Will The Hindu Reader’s Editor please listen? by Dr Yaseen Ashraf

The credibility of the ‘renowned terror expert’ of The Hindu, Praveen Swami, has now come down to near-zero, risking the credibility of the paper itself. Trusting the fake stories Swami files, both the editorial section of the news paper and the readers are getting misled. One example is the Mecca Masjid bombing at Hyderabad. It pays to read The Hindu editorial of October 15, 2007.
Titled “Challenge of Islamic terror”, the editorial begins as follows:
“Investigative leads point to the Harkat ul-Jihadi-e-Islami (HUJI), the Islamist organisation behind the Mecca Masjid attack in Hyderabad, as being behind the terrorist strike at the Dargah of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti in Ajmer. What can one say about an outfit so consumed by hatred as to deliver death to the shrine of a saint who preached the oneness of god’s creation? The Ajmer bombing is the latest in a series of terror strikes directed at both Hindu and Muslim religious institutions. Investigators have been able to establish that many of these attacks were carried out by Islamist terror groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Jaish-e-Mohammad, and the HUJI…”
The editorial, as authentic a record of the paper’s stand as is ever possible, overtly hints that the Ajmer and Mecca Masjid blasts were the deeds of “Islamist terror” groups, while investigations have now brought out the fact that they were the handiwork of Hindutva groups like Abhinav Bharat. The Rajasthan ATS and other investigators have by now identified RSS activists and Abhinav Bharat leaders as having plotted and executed the blasts. How could The Hindu come to a very early and premature conclusion to “establish” guilt on the wrong people and without solid proof categorically state that Islamist groups did these?
This was possible only because the paper was misled by its own “terror expert”. As early as 23 May 2007 (the Mecca Masjid bombing took place on 18 May) Praveen Swami decided who the culprits are. In his news analysis titled “Behind the Mecca Masjid bombing” Swami stated with absolute certainty: “What the Mecca Masjid bombings make clear is that the Islamist threat to India's cities remains in place, notwithstanding the decline in violence since the Mumbai serial bombings…” The story was accompanied by a photograph, with a caption reading: “The street leading to the house of `Bilal,' suspected to be the mastermind who planned the Hyderabad blasts, in Moosaram Bagh.” The story itself began with detailed descriptions of “Bilal’s” house, painting it and the streets leading to it in menacing colours.
Now that it has turned out these reports, analyses and even the editorial were based on lies, will the paper make amends? Is the Editor-in-Chief listening?
On 14 October 2007 The Hindu carried another Praveen Swami report on its front page: “New leads tie Ajmer blast to HUJI”. The disclosure this time was that the “SIM card reveals Hyderabad link”. The report went on to state: “In both the Mecca Masjid and Ajmer terror strikes, the bomb-maker who fabricated the explosive devices had the phone’s speaker connected to a detonator implanted in nitroglycerine-based industrial explosive…Andhra Pradesh police investigators believe that the Mecca Masjid strikes were carried out by two or more Bangladesh-based HUJI operatives, who planted the explosives in the mosque and left India soon after.” Swami always functions as the megaphone of police and security sources, and consequently The Hindu ends up being reduced to a tool easily manipulated at will by motivated people.
Praveen Swami has not yet confessed to his past mistakes. Also, he has not shown the courtesy of apologizing to readers and victims of the fake news.
There is a Reader’s Editor at The Hindu. Will he intervene in the issue? It might help if he could conduct a detailed study of Praveen Swami’s terror coverage.

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Grabbing Hindutva By Its Horns - By Rakesh Kumar

‘You really must meet Yugal-ji’, insisted my friend. We were at an activist meeting in Delhi . My friend indicated a middle-aged man, slimly-built with a broad, half-moon forehead, an unkempt beard and closely cropped graying hair, handing out leaflets to people filing into the lawn. He wore a thin cotton shirt and a simple, white handspun dhoti. ‘He’s a priest from Ayodhya and is in the thick of the battle against Hindutva.’

A man—a temple priest no less—taking on the Hindutva brigade at its very epicentre! I scrambled across the lawn to meet him. I simply had to hear his story. I introduced myself, and we got talking. I listened, humbled and stunned, as Yugal-ji began to tell me about himself, his life, his vision of and for the world, and, most especially, about his valiant struggle against communalism and institutionalized religion. By the time he had finished—two hours later—I had all but completely fallen in love with him.

Yugal-ji was born in 1954, in a village along the Indo-Nepalese border in Bihar ’s Sitamarhi district. His father, a poor peasant from the Yadav caste, insisted that his son must receive a decent education. He was sent to school, and then to college for Sanskrit studies, for which he shifted to Ayodhya, where he lived in an ashram and earned the coveted Shastri degree. There, sometime in the mid-seventies, he joined the RSS. ‘I was a young, energetic lad then, and loved playing games’ he reminisced. The local RSS shakha had devised a clever way of trapping young Hindu boys by organizing sports events. ‘That’s how I fell into their snare.’ He rapidly moved up the RSS hierarchy till he was appointed as a full-time pracharak in Barabanki, a town in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Impressed with his dedication to the Hindutva cause, he was appointed as the district organizer of the Hindu Jagran Manch, one of many RSS front organizations, and then, in 1983, as the Secretary of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s unit in Faizabad district, where Ayodhya is located.

At this time, the BJP had not as yet become a virtually unchallengeable political force in Uttar Pradesh, although it was rapidly winning converts in an increasingly communally- surcharged atmosphere. But Hindutva, the ideology of Brahminical supremacism, was not represented simply by the BJP alone. Various forms of it, including some that appeared somewhat diluted, were shared by many Congress leaders and supporters. One of these was a certain self-styled Shankaracharya allied to the Congress who asked Yugal-ji to work with him in an outfit which had a single point agenda: to ‘restore’ the disputed Babri mosque structure in Ayodhya to the Hindus.

It was at around this time, when Hindutva forces had begun galvanizing Hindu opinion and communal hatred across the country in the name of ‘liberating’ the Babri Masjid—a project in which he was himself involved—that Yugal-ji began developing second thoughts about the outfits that he had for so long been closely associated with. ‘I discovered that these groups were all dominated by Brahmins, and that they cared nothing for the poor, for the so-called low castes. They actually stood for a vicious system of caste discrimination while slyly denying this in public for fear of alienating their oppressed caste supporters, whom they routinely employed to attack and kill Muslims,’ he said. ‘I found their understanding of religion bore little resemblance to that of my own people back in my village, where inter-communal relations had generally been peaceful. These outfits, and the hatred they were spewing in the name of religion, were actually becoming a major burden on my own little head.’ They presented themselves as saviours of all Hindus, but even the hardcore Brahmin Hindutva activists Yugal-ji knew made him eat from separate plates kept apart for ‘low’ caste people, like himself, if they invited them to their homes for a meal. ‘I came to realize that what these people were propagating in the name of religion was raw hatred, greed and caste supremacism,’ he said.

In 1986, Yugal-ji joined the Rachnatmak Samaj, a group of social activists headed by the late Nirmala Deshpande. He was put in charge of the group’s work in the Faizabad district. By this time, he had established himself in Ayodhya as the manager of a small temple-cum-monastery not far from the Babri Masjid. It was there—where he still lives—right in the middle of the Hindutva dragon’s den, that he began fearlessly protesting and mobilizing public opinion against the Hindutva forces. Obviously, this was no easy task, and the intrepid Yugal-ji had to face stiff opposition, including from priests in the literally hundreds of temples scattered across the town. Many of these, he claimed, were actually criminals, including murderers, who had donned saffron robes to pass off as ‘holy-men’. A day before the Babri Masjid was torn down, Hindu mobs besieged his office, located in his temple premises, and threatened to bomb it down.

In 2000 Yugal-ji met with noted social activist and winner of the Magsaysay Award, Sandeep Pandey, and also with the noted Arya Samaj leader, Swami Agnivesh, both of whom were in the forefront of the struggle against Hindutva and communalism. Inspired by their work, he set up a society, Ayodhya Ki Awaz (‘The Voice of Ayodhya’), to promote communal harmony and address the plight of the oppressed castes, whom he now came to regard as the principal victims, along with Muslims and Christians, of Brahminism parading in the guise of Hindutva. Today, this organization has some fifty members, mostly Muslim, Dalit and Backward Caste youth in Ayodhya and surrounding villages and towns.

Over the years, activists of Ayodhya ki Awaz have been closely engaged in struggles against communalism, particularly against Hindutva aggression. It brings out a Hindi monthly magazine, edited by Yugal-ji, and organizes regular meetings in villages, aiming particularly at Dalits and Backward Caste youth (who, Yugal-ji noted, are routinely used by Hindutva Brahminical forces as foot-soldiers to attack Muslims in what are euphemistically-termed ‘Hindu-Muslim riots’), using innovative means such as bhajans that evoke popular oppressed caste icons such as Kabir and Babasaheb Ambedkar. ‘We tell them that even if a grand Ram temple is built in Ayodhya, they won’t gain a thing from it. It will be controlled by Brahmin priests, who will make a living eating off the domations of the credulous. We tell them that they won’t find salvation in a temple of stone and mortar,’ he explained.

Over the years, Jugal-ji and his team (which now includes activists from different religious and caste backgrounds from across the country) have organized numerous sadbhavana yatras—rallies for communal harmony—the latest being last year, when they traveled all the way from Ayodhya to Ajmer, seat of the shrine of India’s most revered Sufi, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, stopping in towns all the way to address public gatherings.

I try and imagine myself in Yugal-ji’s place, fighting Hindutva (or any other form of fascism for that matter) while living in Ayodhya, right in the lion’s lair—I know this I couldn’t dare. I want to touch Yugal-ji’s feet in respect and awe, so overwhelmed am I by his sincerity and passion, but he restrains me and holds me back. He recounts the opposition that he has faced in the course of his crusade for communal harmony over the years. He tells me about his experiences as chief guest at a rally organized in Lucknow in 2006 by a group of oppressed caste activists of the Vishwa Shudra Mahasabha (the name having being deliberately chosen to counter the claims of the Brahmin Vishwa Hindu Parishad to speak for all ‘Hindus’). ‘I garlanded a picture of Ram, the Brahminical god-king, with shoes, because Ram, as the Ramayana says, lopped off the head of an innocent Shudra named Shambhukh for daring to violate the draconian law of caste,’ he goes on. For this, he was arrested and spent almost four months in prison, while enraged ‘upper’ caste men brutally assaulted the lawyers (both ‘low’ castes) who defended him.

Unfazed by the opposition he faced, Yugal-ji continued his battle against Brahminism even inside Ayodhya. Sometime in 2007, he took up the issue of a board in a public park in the town named after Tuslidas, author of the Ramayana, which was maintained out of government funds. The board had boldly declared: ‘A Brahmin, no matter how despicable his deeds, is worthy of being worshipped. A Shudra, no matter what good deeds he does, is ignoble.’ Enraged by the slogan, Yugal-ji sent a notice to the Commissioner and the Director of Parks, demanding that the board be taken down. ‘I wrote to them that 80 per cent of Indians, including myself, are so-called Shudras, and it was an insult to all of us. Tulsidas’ Ramayana, that preaches hatred for the Shudras, was an affront to our dignity. The slogan was also against the Constitution of India,’ he explains. If the board was not removed within a fortnight, he threatened that he and his supporters would tear it down themselves.

Buckling under pressure, the board was removed, but that did not settle matters. The local unit of the Sanatan Brahmin Samaj rose up in protest, organizing a demonstration and threatening to take revenge on Yugal-ji. A senior VHP leader even announced a sum of a lakh of rupees for Yugal-ji’s head.

I ask Yugal-ji to tell me his views about the Babri Masjid controversy that continues to rankle unsolved. ‘It was a mosque, no doubt,’ he insists. ‘There was no temple on the spot before. Indeed, Ram was not even worshipped in ancient times, the cult of Ram being a relatively new invention. So, there’s no question at all of the Mughal king Babar having destroyed a Ram temple and building a mosque in its place.’ Yugal-ji continues, ‘No one knows if Ram was ever born, or even if he was a historical figure at all. The Puranas claim he was born nine lakh years ago or so, but of course no recorded history exists from that period.’ But that is not all, he says. ‘As far as the Shudras, who form eighty per cent of India ’s population, are concerned, Ram is simply unworthy of worship. He worked to uphold the Brahminical social order and the degradation of the oppressed castes, though Brahmins and other so-called ‘upper’ castes, who live off the sweat and blood of the Shudras, might believe him to be divine.’

I am eager to learn what Yugal-ji believes to be the cure to the curse of communalism. ‘Ultimately’, he insists, ‘the only lasting solution is for human beings to identify themselves as just that—simply as humans. As long as we continue to regard ourselves as Hindus or Muslims or whatever, the menace of communalism can never be cured. We have to move towards a stage when identities are no longer premised or bracketed with religion. Our only identities should be that of being human. The final antidote to communalism is humanism’

Yugal-ji handles my irksome questions about his own religious faith somewhat indirectly and with tact, but I suspect that he is, like me, something of an agnostic. ‘You should be a good, compassionate person, and that is enough as far as I am concerned,’ he cryptically answers. ‘Righteous action, as the Buddha says, is what ultimately matters, not what caste you are born into, or what religious beliefs you profess or what name you call the Divine, if it does exists, by.’ He evokes Buddhist wisdom again: ‘The Buddha taught his companions not to blindly follow whatever he said. Rather, they should ponder on his words and accept them only if it appealed to their intelligence and conformed to their welfare and that of the majority, the bahujan.’

‘All institutionalized forms of religions place their scriptures above human intelligence and block human freedom and that is where the problem lies’, Yugal-ji goes on. ‘They soon become cages,’ he continues, ‘especially once they develop a system of priesthood, intermediaries or scholars who claim to have privileged access to the truth. Some might appear to be gilded cages or made of silver, but cages they remain. But it is the bird that flies in the open sky, using its own intelligence, that alone is truly happy.’

Yugal-ji can be contacted on ayodhyakiawaj@yahoo.com

Thursday, June 24, 2010

The Print Media and Minority Images by Chandan Mitra

It is a general view among Muslims in India that the English-Language media does not project a true and positive picture of the community. They also believe that there is a bias in the international media against the Muslims in general. This, of course, is an over-simplified analysis of an otherwise complicated situation- portraying the image of Muslims as the largest religious minority in India, as well as that of a stereotyped monolithic community living in a Hindu-majority country. The reality is that the variation of the image of Indian Muslims projected by the Indian media varies vastly but the expectations are unfair in the given circumstances. My point of reference is the English language media–for the simple reason that, being an insider, I am closely aware of the reality and more of limitations.

Though I do not fully agree with the perception of Indian Muslims as far as their media image is concerned but I will not directly contest their perception, I would rather go into detail of the features of this psyche along with the problems of the media. For only this reason, I shall also speak from the stand-point of the Urdu press in India as it is only the Urdu press run by Muslims that has done more damage to the Muslim image in India than any other language media. In this analysis, I shall not include such Urdu newspapers as Pratap, Milap, and Hind Samachar as neither are they run by Muslim establishments, nor are their readership Muslim. Their professional concerns and editorial orientations are altogether different. The Urdu media, especially in north India -and more specifically Delhi -is negative and least interested in propagating and encouraging positive Muslim images in a plural society such as India . There is a perception among scholars—even Muslim readers—that Urdu newspapers are not interested in playing any role to make the Muslims a part of the social changes and modernization that is rapidly taking place in India . Ather Farouqui, sums this up aptly:

…the prospects remain that Urdu journalism will continue the traditional game of arousing Muslim sentiments through provocative writing, and render them susceptible to the influence of the communal leadership with which a good many Urdu journalists are themselves aligned due to their own ambitions for political prominence and professional clout…

It is also true that, other than Delhi, the English media and the media of regional languages (other than Hindi print media of north India as in north India it is a different story altogether with a much complicated political sociology) in respective regions see Muslims as part of regional culture and local politics. Except from north Indian Muslims, the Muslims of the entire country whose mother-tongue is other than Urdu or Hindi have fully assimilated themselves with the regional cultural ethos to the extent that they cannot be counted as one entity with the Muslims of northern India . Farouqui further says:



Without doubt the Muslims of South India and West Bengal never recognized Urdu as their language and a symbol of their religious identity. In the changed political milieu too even if Urdu was never their language and in the past they were greatly distanced from the Muslims of North India. Culturally north Indian Muslims always considered themselves different from Muslims in the rest of the country. They are also the victims of the pronounced sense of superiority. Cultural distance and the strong sense of superiority on the part of north Indian Muslims become a great hurdle in linking them with the South Indian Muslims. This factor also prevented the movement for Pakistan from reaching South India except for a few big cities such as Hyderabad . Migration to Pakistan from the South was limited precisely because of the hold of north Indian Muslims over the Muslim League particularly by the Ashraf (gentry). Linguistic and cultural conflicts have arisen there even after the formation of Pakistan thus, the subsequent establishment of Bangladesh and the remarkable rise of the Muhajir Qaumi Movement (MQM). The strife in the refugee-dominated urban areas of Sindh province is an ample proof of this. Muslim politics in contemporary India are not particularly different from what they were in the past. The hold of north Indian Muslims on Muslim political campaigns even after independence has been strong. This prompted the presumption that the north Indian Muslim leadership would also be successful in the South. However the humiliating defeat of Syed Shahabuddin, a self-designated vocal spokesman of South Indian Muslims, in Bangalore during the 1989 general elections made the north Indian Muslims leadership acutely aware of its real standing in the South.

In northern India , not only the Muslims, but also the Hindus, are a unique socio-political phenomenon. Broadly speaking, north India is itself such a strange political phenomenon that understanding its psychology has never been easy, even for sociologists. The Hindu-Muslim context of north India is different from that of the rest of India . The imbroglio called Hindi versus Urdu is therefore not only the politics of language, but also has the gamut of political complexities at its forefront. The Urdu-Hindi controversy of the nineteenth century was the reflection of this politico cultural conundrum. Even today, the situation has not changed much. Howsoever complicated the reality may be because of its variations, in the eyes of the world, the images that are projected by the English media of India especially Delhi , are the images of India , irrespective of being Muslim or Hindu.

As far as Muslims are concerned, Muslim intellectuals in Delhi are deemed the sole representatives of the entire Muslim community for the simple reason that their being in Delhi gives the media easy access to them. To what extent are the Muslim intellectuals working in the universities and the retired bureaucrats active within the media circle genuinely concerned about the sociology of India Muslims, is a known fact? Very clearly, the members of the English speaking Muslim elite in Delhi have neither have an understanding of the problems of common Muslims, nor do they have any interest in the matter. This is perhaps the reason why the common educated Muslim is not only unfamiliar with these so-called intellectuals but, if they know of them, they even hate them.

To an extent, the Urdu newspapers of Delhi , working as a single entity, could be said to have an understanding of the north India Muslims’ psyche, but they have only played a negative role in their lives. As far as the electronic media is concerned, some Urdu TV channels use the spoken language and focus on the Muslim middle-class that is still almost negligible in proportion to the entire Muslim population. But these channels too give the way to misunderstanding about Muslims. As such, viewers of Urdu TV channels are mostly those who do not know English, it seems that there is no respite for common Muslims.

Despite being a single entity, the speed with which Urdu newspapers form north India, especially weekly newspapers of Delhi, are heading towards decay is rather on expected and anticipated lines. I shall not talk here about official circulation figures of Urdu newspapers that merely serve the purpose of the government to show that Urdu is flourishing. In the government files, of course, Urdu journalism is making steady progress simply because the government officials are assigned the role of issuing misleading statements highlighting the progress made in case of the promotion of Urdu, particularly by a certain central government organization namely National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language.

The question of the progress of Urdu journalism is concerned with the system of Urdu education in common schools with secular curricula. The issue of script has now arisen in the context of the dini madaris. If the children whose mother-tongue is Urdu get an opportunity to study Urdu within their school curricula, the entire sociology of the dini madaris will undergo a sea-change; it would mark their decisive decline. Until there is no arrangement for teaching Urdu in the secular curriculum, the population wanting to learn Urdu would remain confined to the dini madaris and the Urdu newspapers even though unwillingly, would print only what the madrasa-educated people would like to read. We all know what the madrasa-educated people want to read and we are also aware of how a person educated in religious institution views a pluralistic society, or how the religious person himself is viewed by the pluralistic society.

Unfortunately, after Partition, Urdu has not been included by the Congress leadership in the secular curriculum, especially in the north India states. Consequently, the madrasas kept growing. With the passage of time, they replaced school education among Muslims and established a parallel system dangerous to the nation but more for Muslims themselves. One reason for the survival and growth of the madrasas is the economic backwardness of the common Muslims. But when Muslim children did not go to school, both economic and social transformation stopped among Muslims. Without doubt, the increase in the number of madrasas is also an example of the failure of our national educational policy and constitutional obligation to treat Muslims at par in education too. Obviously, an economically backward section of society, such as the Muslims, cannot develop an educational system parallel to the state-sponsored educational apparatus. Sooner or later, society will have to provide Muslims with secular education at par with other religious groups, mainly Hindus, so that they are made part of mainstream education and occupy a common civic space. It is for us to think how to stop the growth and spread of the dini madaris, whose network comprises half-a-million madrasas with 50 million full–time students. (These are authentic and undisputed figures known to all, issued by the government, and which were not challenged.) We should also not forget that because of being religious educational institutions, madrasas are much more organized and influential than the secular-curriculum schools run by the government.

The English media in India is an elite media, an offshoot of the baggage of history. As a large majority of Muslims in India are economically deprived and do not live in big cities, there is a tendency in the English language media to ignore issues that concern Muslims. The English media, however, plays an important role in shaping perceptions in the minds of India as a whole. Although read by 2 or 3% (and really understood by hardly 1%) of the Indian population, the images that the English media builds and creates are reflected decisively in the international scene as well as within India . These images enhance a political balance. The English media provides the pan Indian picture for the regional language media unaware of north Indian languages, such as Hindi (which is already considered as biased as the Urdu media is overzealous in its presentation of Muslim issues). The English-language media is said to provide a common ground between these conflicting positions and is, in a certain sense, a moderator or a melting pot among the various sections of India . There are also allegations from Muslims against the English media that are true but the whole English media does not behave so irresponsibly.

It is true that the English media often picks up wrong Muslim voices that do not represent the community; this is counter productive. For example we have Shabana Azmi who always gets space because of being associated with Bollywood. She is easily accessible and knows the English idiom of discourse. But she does not represent anybody but herself, and due to the glamour element attached, her views get highlighted much more than those of various other more representative people. It is the responsibility of the media to search for the right voice and the media has certainly been lazy in that matter.

Certain stereotypes in the media also condition issues. For instance, there is a widespread misconception in the media about the role of the Dar-ul Uloom Deoband. The general feeling is that it is a place where one can get the ‘fundamentalist Muslims’ very easily. Certainly this perception is wrong but the Muslims did nothing to remove this misconception. They just blame the media but cannot request the ulema not to issue fatwas that makes a mockery of the entire community. After 11 September 2001, there has been a lot of coverage of Deoband and its activities, on assumed lines based moe on imagination than field work and visits to the prestigious Islamic university. To the great disappointment of correspondents from the electronic media who occasionally happen to visit Deoband, they found that Deoband was not what they had actually visualized.

But all said and done, one is at a loss to realize that if, half a million madrasas exist in India , where 50 million full time students are enrolled, it is naturally a matter of great concern. These 50 million students do not include the part-time student who attends the madrasas. There are lots of Muslim students who go to regular schools and attend the madrasas part-time to study the Koran and Islamic tenets. So instead of blaming Deoband we should suggest something that can enable the Muslim educational empowerment. I would not comment on the practical joke of the government which, in the name of the madrasa modernization scheme, proposed to spend Rs. 20 crore. A break-up of this money would show that on an average it comes to Rs.0.40 per student. One can easily understand the Congress’s logic or the whole logic of the modernization of madrasas scheme initiated by Rajiv Gandhi.

There are two strands in the media, particularly in the English media. One is patronizing, the other antagonistic. The patronizing strand recognizes that a wrong has been done to the Muslims, and one has to go out of the way to support them and advise them what they should and should not do. This strand is growing among a section of the Hindu intelligentsia and the media. There is another well-known antagonistic strand mainly propounded by Vinod Mehta that Muslims are a prisoner of these images. This strand does not reach out for any kind of dialogue or understanding and has certain stereotyped images of which everybody has become a prisoner.

Siddharth Varadrajan, a senior editor with The Hindu, was scathing in his criticism of the media for long. I do not think that there is a conscious communal basis, at least in the English media but I agree with the view that most of the people working with the English media, including Muslims do not know Muslim society at large. They know only the elite Muslims and at the most, the upper middle class Muslim strata. The bias, if any, is a product of ignorance. It is time for common Muslims to not get into the paranoid feeling that the media has been consciously seeking to victimize or portray them as villains in the Indian society. There are people with a communal viewpoint, who would not in acceptable parlance be called secular. Though they do have space in the English media, they belong to various communities (including Muslims). By and large, the media has tended to be responsible even in cases related to reporting on riots. The English-language media has persisted in trying to bring the guilty to book on a number of issues, —whether it was during the 1984 anti-Sikh massacre, in Maliana or Hashimpura or Meerut or Bhagalpur, or in 2002 Gujarat carnage. The reporting of the English press of these incidents shocked the entire nation. English press pursued these incidents relentlessly, and reporters have gone back to the spot on every anniversary of these riots to bring home the point that the guilty persons are running scot-free, and that the state has not taken any action to bring them to book. Siddharth Varadarajan is correct that there were lapses during the initial reporting because of newspaper reliance on the police version (which is often communally biased), the high financial cost of newsgathering, reliance on unprofessional stringers and the bias of the news desk. But, the media does thereafter take up in systematic manner cases of human rights violation, police atrocities, and the tardy process of inquiries.

I do not agree with the view that the media is insensitive to the issues of the Muslims. It has, in fact, been responsible and responsive – its extent is another issue. Instead of tarring the entire media with the same brush, one needs to differentiate and expand the space where there is a greater concern and sensitivity, rather than saying that the whole media is the same. The Muslim intelligentsia should not shut themselves out from the English media; rather, they have to enhance their space within it.

The painting of the images is not only in terms of terrorism or madrasas. There are other issues with wider social ramification that we must consider. Take the issue of the triple talaq in one sitting, for instance, on which reams have been written in the English media in the last ten or twelve years, ever since the Shah Bano issue. I am not saying that these should not be discussed, but the disproportionate amount of space and time that goes into the over-simplified analysis intensifies stereotypes. Most of the nonsense becomes possible because of publicity hungry ulema. We have to look beyond, rather than just point to improper riot reporting or inherent biases. We have to highlight issues that will bring about fundamental changes – issues of the Muslims’ socio-economic growth, progress and the educational empowerment and achievements. The reality is that issues that are not really germane to the genuine problems of the Muslim community get undue attention from the media as well as from Muslim writers, There are other issues that are of greater relevance. For example, how many Muslim students go to primary schools? What is the drop out ratio of Muslim students after secondary and senior secondary examinations? How many Muslims have been inducted into the police force at the level of sepoy and sub-Inspectors? How many are there in the administrative services examinations conducted by the subordinate staff selection commissions in the states? If the proportion of Muslims is low, why is it so? These are real issues that the Muslim themselves do not get to read or reflect upon, debate, or discuss.

If we discuss Muslim education, we discuss it only through the English medium which is just utopian. If we can discuss Muslim proportion in government services, we just talk of civil services, an impossible thing for first generation learners whether Hindus or Muslims. Needless to say that, this entire elite phenomenon will not work to improve the socio economic conditions of common Muslims in India . In the world of entertainment, there is a great deal of Muslim participation but again it is an elite phenomenon. I think that is where we are all collectively guilty: these issues do not get discussed.

Is there a bias that is causing the decline in Muslim representation in the government services? Why, for instance, has the Muslim middle-class, which was such a critical factor in the pre-Partition years, declined and dwindled in comparison to the Hindu middle class? Arguably, it is true that a very large section of the Muslim middle-class did migrate to Pakistan between 1947 and 1950, but why did it not grow? We never discussed the complexity of the issue that the Muslim middle-class voice is not really the voice of the entire Muslim community

The new Muslim middle class is also the new-born psychological version of the aristocratic Muslim elite of pre-partition India . In the Hindu community, the Hindu middle-class got education in state run schools where regional language and not English was the medium. Now the Hindu middle class dictates and determines the socio political agenda and sets the tone for dialogue and discourse at the international level too. These issues, I emphasize again, needs to be reflected in the media, debated, and discussed again and again. The media is the only forum for interaction and greater participation, both for intra-community dialogue within the Muslim community and inter-community dialogue between all communities that together can lead to a better, prosperous and cohesive India . The media has to correct itself, but we also have to look beyond as the myopic vision that we have at present will not solve the problem. The two communities have lived together for hundreds of years, and they will continue to live together. Biases have to be corrected – unfortunately, they have intensified. What do we do about that? I think that is what we have to focus on, and I hope that there will be more writers, more commentators, and more Muslims joining and contributing to the media. The media is today getting increasingly effective and powerful, and greater Muslim participation is needed in it.

Biases do exist every where. But just as there are biases, there are also people who go out of the way to try and correct them. These are both part of the fractured Indian reality that we should recognize, and try to widen the space, widen Muslim participation in the media, and have more people talking about real Muslim issues, going beyond those issues that unfortunately help intensify stereotypes.





Chandan Mitra is the Editor in chief of the widely circulated English daily 'The Pioneer' and he is also a Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha).He can be contacted at chandanmitra@hotmail.com.



(This article was included in the book edited by Ather Farouqui titled "Muslims and the Media Images:News versus Views" published by the Oxford University Press , India .)