The myth of “Peaceful Indian Muslim” is carefully nurtured and sustained by the fake secularism practised in India. Whenever there is an attempt by anyone to uncover this veil, there are liberals who come up with fancy theories like Islamophobia to prevent the enlightenment of Muslim masses. What can be more sad than even a well-read, intelligent person feeling that telling this truth amounts to “making Muslims feel persecuted.” Well, if a person holds wrong ideas he needs to be confronted one day or the other. Would you also say that arresting rapists is incorrect because it amounts to singling them out? As a civilized society there is a red line that no one is allowed to cross. Gloating over the massacre of kafirs is not a civilized idea to espouse, and people need to confront those who do it instead of finding excuses.
Unless Indian history textbooks tell their students about the atrocities perpetuated by Muslims on Dharmics, they will continue to look at that atrocious period as their “glorious past” — and the more they romanticize it, the more difficult they will find it to come to terms with contemporary realities. It is THIS dissonance which leads to terrorism. The killing of Hindus by Muslim invaders was not a glorious act and those who romanticize it are not civilized people.
So how to fight against this ideological terrorism? The answer is education — and not just school education but political education of the masses. The idea should be propagated on all information channels until it becomes common parlance. The reason Muslims take to terrorism is because they feel they lived a glorious past where they could kill Hindus, in contrast to the lacklustre life they are living now where they have to abide by the rules of the land instead of being rulers. Unless there is a concerted effort to challenge and defeat this idea, India will always face an existential threat from Muslims. Admission of Muslim atrocities should become the mainstream quintessential Indian thought. There are so many museums in Germany and Japan depicting the atrocities committed by their ancestors on innocent people. Every year Hollywood comes out with half a dozen movies showing how bad the Holocaust was. This is the template that India should follow. There should be museums depicting the atrocities instead of making Bollywood movies and books that eulogize Akbar and Tipu Sultan.
What ordinary Indians want is not something extraordinary. They simply want closure similar to the one that Germans and Japanese got when they admitted their mistakes. You can sing a thousand songs in the praise of moderate Indian Muslims, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
The very fact that Hindus aren’t allowed to claim Ram Mandir is a testimony to the fact that Indian Muslims don’t adhere to a more evolved and tolerant form of Islam. Ram Janmabhoomi is to Hindus what Mecca is to Muslims — there can be no negotiation on this. Hindus have already forgotten the demolition of 40,000 temples by Muslims, but if they cannot budge on even one temple then there is no chance for reconciliation. If a case is being made that Indian Muslims are more reconciliatory in nature, where is the evidence?
Celebrating that Indian Muslims are better than the rest of their ilk is a relative and subjective benchmark. From time to time we must ask ourselves whether this “relatively good” is “good enough.” A woman journalist in Mumbai was hounded into exile by the same peaceful Muslims for reposting the Charlie Hebdo cartoon while reporting about it. Now, this act might be committed by a group of 5,000 people but the thought process is not an outlier. Same goes for the thousands — 15,000 people — who thronged the funeral of their “martyr” Yakoob Memon.
The deeper you go into the rabbit hole of Muslim extremist nexus, sooner or later you will realize that it is mainstream Islam — not a fringe, not a sect, not a twisted individual — but mainstream Islam which is responsible for all problems. One can draw artificial lines to separate them into moderates and extremists virtually speaking, but the crux of the matter is that until you are willing to admit that an ideology which at its core preaches that “everyone who disagrees with us is an enemy,” this problem will never be solved.
Like the Afghan intel chief Amarullah Saleh once said: “You will keep killing the guys in the outer circle for years and patting yourself on the back but the problem won’t be solved until you have the resolve to confront the guys in the inner circle who are running the show.” He was taunting the US for killing low-level commanders in Afghanistan but not confronting Saudi Arabia. Fake seculars are doing the same by drawing a dichotomy between gun-wielding terrorists and non-gun-wielding “peaceful chaps.” Terrorism is not about weapons — it is about ideology.
Being ruthless and killing people is not the recommended path. It is actually the “head in the sand” syndrome of fake liberals which will lead India into a civil war by not acknowledging the problem. A better way is to give closure on the atrocity issue. Include lessons of anti-Hindu atrocities in history books so that both Hindus and Muslims become aware of it and have a sense of national context instead of building their own personal victimhood narratives. Muslims claim that the Babri incident was wrong, but don’t want to concede that their co-religionist invaders captured and destroyed Hindu temples. This intellectual subversion is unacceptable. There is a need to have a frank discussion where people can put everything on the table so that everyone knows each other’s history and empathizes with the other before pointing fingers.
The more the rights of Hindus the state curtails, the more Hindu anger it will fuel — the eruption of which will lead to incidents of violence, which will lead to further radicalization and polarization on both sides. The constitution mentions secularism; it is about time that Hindus taste it too. Hindus have only been smelling it from afar while Muslims relished the entire cake of secularism.
To put it in short: India needs to take concrete steps to trash the Hindu narrative and Muslim narrative and adopt a common and reconciliatory national narrative which is acceptable to both parties — only then can people find closure and achieve peace. Otherwise these issues will keep flaring up.
There is a beautiful thesis about the fundamental difference between India and Pakistan which can be summarized in one line: “the story of Pakistan is the story of the state of Pakistan, and the story of India is the story of the people of India.” It holds true for the modus operandi of all Muslim states. The moment its citizens ask for some human rights or even basic things like water and schools, the state says “the nation is under threat and you are asking for things? You are not a true Muslim!” That is how Muslim states keep the dreams of their population suppressed. The very definition of a “true Muslim” has been fundamentally crafted in such a way that the individual is supposed to selflessly sacrifice for the survival of the Ummah dream — and because of this feudal definition, the individual will never have any rights for himself. This feudal system will eventually collapse, no doubt about it. But will the Indian state ever tell this real story to Indian Muslims and aid them in bursting this bubble?
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