To our “Secular” friends and neighbors
I was reading the
excitement-concealed reports of the “secular” press on the funeral of Yakub
Memon. 10-15000 people participated in the funeral prayers though a larger funeral
procession was aborted by the efforts by Mumbai Police. I am sure, except a
handful of close relatives, those assembled were supporters of certain ‘cause’,
a belief that Yakub was a holy warrior of sorts, who was unjustly hanged by
Hindu India! News papers and News Television channels, forever looking for
sentimental stuff made a sob story (a sympathetic Times of India wrote of
“erudite” Yakub having a fan-following in the Nagpur jail, of Usman crying
during the 90 minute flight with the dead body of cousin Yakub!) out of the
whole thing, ignoring that a legal battle was going on for more than two
decades, at multiple levels of Indian judiciary and he was convicted and
sentenced to death in 2013.
While ‘mercy’ plea
was made for him to the Supreme Court of India, the Governor of Maharashtra and
finally to the President of India, a hypothesis was put forward by the
‘intelligentsia’ to support their cause; that Yakub had surrendered to Indian
authorities an hence he had to be spared gallows. It was totally untrue
according to the record of events made by B. Raman (head of the
counter-terrorism division of the Research and Analysis Wing, and later Additional
Secretary of the Cabinet Secretariat of the Government of India) Yakub went to
Kathmandu to consult a relative and lawyer on the advice of relatives and out
of his own fear of the Pakistani ISI, to consider the consequences if he chose
to return to India. The advice given to him was not to surrender, but to return
to Karachi. But before he could board the flight to Karachi, Nepal police picked
him up, identified and quickly handed him over to Indian authorities. This was
twisted by the pro-life guys and the “secular” media to assert that late Raman
had written the opposite. A fine example of suppressio veri, suggestio falsi"!
While on the issue of
Mr.B. Raman’s revelations, let me also assert that the upright IPS officer had also
written that "There is not an iota of doubt about the involvement of Yakub
and other members of the family in the conspiracy and their cooperation with
the ISI till July 1994”! Yakub Memon lived in the eight-storey Al-Husseini
building near the historic durgah of Makhdoom Shah Baba in Mahim, Central
Mumbai. It was in this building that the bomb blasts conspiracy was hatched by
Mushtaq alias Tiger Memon, Yakub's brother and the right-hand man of fugitive
accused and mastermind Dawood Ibrahim.
Several members of
Yakub Abdul Razak Memon’s family, were among the accused in the case in which
he was convicted and hanged. Some of them were discharged for want of evidence.
(That however, wouldn’t convince a person like Justice(Retd)Kolse Patil and his
ilk about justice to Muslims in India.)
There are people who
now worry (!) that Tiger Memon and Dawood now wouldn’t want to surrender to
Indian authorities! Yakub himself had said, according to some reports that if
he didn’t get remission “Dawood Bhai” would be unhappy and wouldn’t ever
co-operate with India!
Now, I am not
astonished by the 15000 people who went to pray for Yakub Memon or the slogans
heard there or the many communally tinged, unsavory comments about the Indian judiciary and our
society sympathetic reporters recorded for the benefit of posterity. From
“environmental activists” to maverick politician Digvijay Singh people have
made comments that would have got them murderous attacks in any less-civilized society. But why do the Muslim community avoid some soul-searching? I wish they
would acknowledge for once that they as full citizens in political, social, cultural
and religious life of India enjoy greater rights and freedoms in India than
their brethren in any Muslim country.
Look around the
world. There is war, revolts and daily friction and violence in the countries
where Muslims are in majority. Muslims are in more often victims of the Imams,
Ayatollahs, and dangerous and inept leadership. Koran, Hadiths, Sira have many
and some 70 verses in the Sunnah are used by Islamic terrorists today to
justify their beheadings, killing non-Muslims, abuse of women, lying, betrayal,
child marriage, slavery, torture, hatred of Jews, and conquering the world in
the name of Islam to create an Islamic Caliphate.
Notwithstanding the
Muslim denial and secular political correctness associated with the issue of
radicalisation of Muslims and their involvement or tacit approval of terror in
India, global jihad has been seeping into Indian society for several years. Two
dozen Muslim youths posed for a picture wearing ISIS T-shirts in front of the
‘Periya Pallivasal’ (Big Mosque) in Ramanathapuram district of Tamil Nadu, from
where some youths have reportedly, already gone to fight in Syria; it was also from
where one of the greatest Indians, and a Muslim too, went on to become the
First Citizen of India and where he came back to be buried a day ago as
millions of Indian cried in sorrow over his demise! It is a tragedy that nearly
one hundred Muslims from India are fighting alongside jihadists in Iraq, Syria
and Afghanistan.
I will tell you an
unpleasant truth: The root of the problem is that just a Nazis believed in a
master race, militant Islamists believe in a master faith! They are not willing
to accept other religious beliefs at par with theirs, and not even worth
existing on earth. Religion is an all-consuming passion which makes
fundamentalist Muslims forget everything else. With the result, an Indian Islamic
society that is poor, immiserated and indoctrinated to hate non-Muslims,
particularly Hindus in India, seem to agree to serve as foot soldiers in a
perpetual war with kafirs! I would like to add that there are no Hindu counterparts
to radical Muslims and extremists who favor/call for world domination by Islam
and violence against non-Muslims!
India is not just
Babari Masjid (it was a Shia Mosque, and Sunnis who burn Holy Koran in Shia
mosques are at the forefront of war on Hindutva vaadis who want to have Ram
Temple restored where they believe, with concrete evidence backing that belief,
a Ram Temple existed! Heaven is not going to fall if the vast majority of
Indians who feel for it are given their temple and have them build a grand
mosque nearby! Blaming Hindu majority Indians for destruction of the Babari
Masjid, Gujarat riots etc. and claiming that it triggered all the violence
being unleashed and threatened proves only one thing: the extremes of Muslim
violence that go beyond anything the community and a friendly media is capable
of covering up can only be addressed with more extreme smears of their Hindu victims.
The helpful media and certain political parties playing vote-bank politics have
been working overtime to disregard evidence of Islamic terrorism, and in the
same way also to disregard the lack of evidence when making the case that
Muslims are the victims.
How many of you
remember that a senior police officer had filed an affidavit before the
Srikrishna Commission that RDX landed on the shores of Alibag in November, well
before the December 6 demolition of the Babari structure? It
is certainly not Babari Masjit that triggers Hindu-Muslim conflicts. India is a
lot more than Babari Masjid. It is the only society in the region that allows
the freedom to make things better for all communities. But what do the large
sections of political Islam in India do? Sometime during July 2014, Maulana
Salman Al-Husaini Nadwi, an Islamic scholar at the Nadwatul Ulama seminary of
Lucknow, wrote an open letter greeting Al-Baghdadi considered a terrorist by
almost the entire West and the East, on his assuming the role of Caliph.
Anjuman-e-Haideri,
a Delhi-based organisation of Shia Muslims, placed advertisements in Urdu
newspapers calling on volunteers to defend holy shrines in Iraq. Ali Mirza of
Anjuman-e-Haideri said his group will register one million volunteers. One hundred thousand Shias reportedly registered; of them, 6,000 volunteers have applied for Iraqi
visas. It seems Muslims are fighting “injustice” everywhere. Quite obviously,
if Islam gets offended it pushes the faithful to go trigger-happy, with
Kalashnikovs, grenades and long knives.
What about in India?
Well, I fail to pass the political litmus test that so-called (self-identified)
progressives see as their default position: namely, being pro-minority/Muslim.
So I would dare to attempt some plain-speaking. Contrary to the view propagated
by Marxists which certain wretched sociologists/historians tell the Time of
India, Muslim League and two-Nation theory did not arise in hostile symbiosis with
Hindutva ideology, in the first place. Weren’t Indian Muslims too belligerent
and believed that tolerance, justice, diversity etc only applied to positions
and people who were their own? But the so-called “secular” media as well as the
Muslim intelligentsia would gloss-over the tell-tale facts. Take for example,
the case of Kashmir. In sharp contrast to the abundance of sympathy and signals
sent to Kashmiri Muslims in support of Article 370, of the Indian Constitution,
if anyone from the large Muslim community in India has expressed any intention
to speak out about Muslim persecution of Kashmiri Hindus, it has not been
recorded yet.
Hindus have been
happy to live their lives without bothering about Faiths of others. Why are
Christians, Muslims (and atheists too) waging war on beliefs that mean nothing
to them Why can’t we Hindus say that we reject a religion that does not agree
with Indian thought and values? Isn’t it logical to think that Indian Muslims
who subscribe to the ideology of the Caliphate and Shariah Law, really do have
views that are incompatible with liberal democracy, secularism human and individual
rights? There are 21 Islamic nations in the Gulf region alone. Is any one of
them approving of human rights as we know it? Justice for the Kurds, for
example, is subjected to the whims of Shiite-Muslim Iran, Sunni-Muslim Turkey,
and the Iraqi Shiite-Arab government in Baghdad. Indian workers in most of
these countries complain that they are more-or-less open jails! It is on account of the cultural imperialism
of Islam!
What I see at work in
these situations is the long established “secular” narrative in which endemic
Hindu communalism accounts for all the ills that afflict Muslim Indians. This
narrative plays in camouflaging the privilege of those millions of Muslims who
live better and have more social clout than millions of Hindus. Islamists’
version of terrorism’s causes: Babari Masjid, seeking integration of Kashmir,
arguments for Common Civil Code, and the lack of social justice, which, we are
to believe is the beating heart of Islam. Hindus feel that the Islamic
“grievances” against the Indian State are not predicated on any human standards
of equality or justice, but only their supremacist worldview. India’s Muslims,
almost 14% of the population and having more rights than its majority Hindus,
isn’t an embattled minority that deserves a defense! And radicalization doesn’t
begin with a Babari Masjid, Dawood Ibrahim, Tiger/Yakub Memons, a Madani, and
an Owaisi out there or many on social media. It begins in homes, in certain
mosques and of course just ends with ISIS. India, and we Hindus in particular, don’t
deserve it, our dear brothers! If there are scales of justice in Heaven, we
shall weigh heavier in it. Muslims are being unnecessarily and unreasonably
paranoid. Life in India showcases the magnanimity and largesse of an Indian
society that didn’t cause a backlash every time Jihadis and their local
supporters cause terror. To those who cry hoarse for an “inclusive society”,
yes indeed. But remember, the next phase is integration. Let the thieves,
thugs, mountebanks, and experts in manipulation, often described as “political technologists”
and “social engineers”, understand that integration has to be based on what
unites us, rather than what drives us apart.
