RAM JETHMALANI
Congress accusing BJP, RSS of being enemies of minorities makes the party guilty of slander.
Last week, I advised Rahul Gandhi to begin his new political life by launching an inclusive "national secularism" agenda, and prevailing upon his mother and her group of advisers to shun their "communal secularism", which appears to have intensified in the recent past. The Congress in its terminal spasm has turned too blind to realise that if there is anything that is polarising the nation today, it is not BJP or Narendra Modi, but its own divisive, communal vote bank politics.
I hope, dear Rahul, you are seriously considering my advice. I recall that on the morning of the November 2008 carnage in Mumbai perpetrated by Kasab and his gang, I had, exercising my rights as a citizen of India, asked you to disclose to the nation your academic and intellectual qualifications, since your fond mother had left us in no doubt that she was determined to displace Dr Manmohan Singh from his shaky throne. I had even offered to share with you whatever reservoir of knowledge I have acquired with my years and experience, through my humble company and library, to help fill the enormous gaps in your academic and intellectual equipment. I understand your rejection of this gratuitous offer, and I sincerely hope you have found some better "Guru". The thesis of this weekly piece and very likely a couple more is that it is the Congress which has consistently practised the most vicious form of communalism, that it has deliberately kept large sections of our Muslim fellow citizens ignorant and backward, that by buying up almost the entire media, print as well as electronic, your party and its allies have disgraced the noble concept of "Hindutva" by equating it with some poisonous anti-Islamic potion. Your accusing the BJP and RSS of being communal and enemies of the minorities makes your party guilty of a horrendous slander and criminal libel of the Hindu majority and the religion it professes and practises.
Religion divided the ancient land of India in 1947 into Pakistan and Bharat that is India. This partition was a painful dagger piercing the broken hearts of the Hindu majority. For centuries, Hindus had been ruled by Muslim emperors, their armies and bureaucrats. Some rulers like Akbar were civilised and humane, others tyrannical and totalitarian. Hindus, because of their religion, were even made to pay a special punitive tax — the hated jaziya. Hindus were humiliated as inferior citizens in their own homeland and thousands were converted to Islam, usually by force.
With the dawn of freedom, it was strangely Muslims from certain regions only who wanted to separate from India, for their own religio-political reasons, with tacit encouragement from the colonial power and continuous bungling by the Congress, and not because Hindus had treated them as inferior citizens. Pakistan became an Islamic state. Hindus, in retaliation could have made India a Hindu Republic; they could have even insisted on exchange of populations, but they resisted both the temptations because Hindu religion, even with some blemishes, had never claimed superiority over other faiths and certainly did not practise forcible conversion to gain new adherents. To the admiration and surprise of the civilised world, India decided to become a secular democracy. It is to a secular Constitution that Muslim members of the Constituent Assembly lent their willing assent and swore their perpetual loyalty.
Our new rulers, in the intoxication of freedom and power, forgot that the historically evolved and enlightened concept of secularism, which they inherited on a platter, has had a long and bloody struggle to gain ascendency in the world outside. After Independence, utmost priority should have been given to imparting secular education as a compulsory subject of every school and college curriculum to build national integration and social cohesion; to sensitise all minority communities, particularly Muslims to the concept of secularism, as it was some of their kinsmen who had opted for another state on the basis of religion, for which Indian Muslims had to bear the cross. But the Congress governments did nothing of the kind. I have been asking our rulers: "Can you show me one lesson on secularism, its meaning, implications and practice in any official text book prescribed for our young minds?" There has not been an affirmative answer. There can be none.
During the freedom movement, the first occasion on which the two communities came together to fight unitedly for independence from the colonial power, was not for liberty from colonialism, but for the preservation of the archaic institution of Caliphate for which many devout Muslims were prepared to lay down their lives. It is during this movement that we also learnt something about the Islamic concept of jihad. It had two versions. The first and easily acceptable to everyone was that it meant an internal struggle against one's own sinful tendencies or as a personal struggle against what is forbidden by reason and conscience. The second meaning, a totally abhorrent one, was a violent war for protection and propagation of the Muslim faith. According to this version, the sins of a jihadist are forgiven and his death in the path of God, equivalent to martyrdom, secures immediate entry to paradise. Our rulers forgot that it was this unacceptable version of jihad that had produced Pakistan, and its dream still persisted that the same jihad will ultimately make India a part of a not so distant "Empire of the Pure". All this has nothing to do with pristine Islam or its great Prophet.
Another essential part of our school and college curriculum should have been to explain the position of religion as assigned to it by the Constitution of India. A Constitution does not become secular by merely introducing the word "secular" in its preamble which Mrs Indira Gandhi did during the Emergency. Not one word was changed in the text of the Constitution, which implies that the ingredients of secularism were already there. No commentary on the Constitution of India teaches that Article 25 of the Constitution is the foundation of Indian secularism. This Article guarantees every citizen the right not only to profess and practise his religion but also the right to propagate it. However, these three rights have been subordinated to three fundamental interests of the Republic of India i.e., public health, public order and morality. This subordination of religion of every name and content to these overriding interests of the nation presupposes firstly, that all religious beliefs and practices will compete for acceptance in the free market of ideas and peaceful debate, and secondly, that the conflict between national interest and religion shall not be settled by pundits, priests or mullahs but by the use of the small yet magnificent equipment called the human brain. In short, Indian secularism mandates life, guided only by reason and logic but inspired by love and compassion.
I am a student of Islam and of the life of its Prophet. I have declared repeatedly and I have written successively that he was one of the greatest prophets who preached to his followers, when you walk in the search of knowledge, you walk in the path of God; the ink of the scholar is more valuable than the blood of the martyr. When Muslims faithfully followed the true teachings of the Prophet, they became masters of a great part of the civilised world. They rescued the Europeans from the Dark Ages, brought them back to the light of civilisation and paved the way for modernity and progress. Unfortunately, the Golden Age of Islam came to an end with the Mongol invasions in the 13th century and the siege of Baghdad, the burning of the Grand Library, containing countless precious books on subjects ranging from medicine to astronomy. The waters of the Tigris ran black with ink from the enormous quantities of books flung into the river and red from the blood of the scientists and philosophers killed. Thereafter, it is no wonder they became slaves of the same Europeans whom they had earlier civilised.
Their steady decline is continuing till today.
Courtesy : The Sunday Guardian
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