The Qualifications Required  to be a Secular in India

This Communal- Secular pair of labels has attained the widest currency of all political words. We face a peculiar problem here. The meanings which these words have acquired in India's political parlance are not even remotely related to the meanings which the dictionaries assign to them. It would not be an exaggeration to say that although these two words belong to the English language, their meanings in India have become exclusively Indian.

The word secular is defined in the dictionaries as "the belief that the state, morals, education, etc. should be independent of religion." But in India it means only one thing -- eschewing everything Hindu and espousing everything Islamic.

Every one who wants to qualifying as secular should subscribe to the following articles of faith :

 

1. the Muslims in India after independence have become a poor and persecuted minority;
2. they are being deprived of their fair share in the fruits of development;
3. their religion and culture are not getting legitimate expression in public life and media;
4. they are not being given employment in public and private sectors in proportion to their population; and
5. the preponderance of Hindus in the security forces puts in grave peril the lives, honour and properties of Muslims.

Every Hindu politician or pen-pusher who aspires to pass the test has to

1. proclaim that Islam stands for equality and human brotherhood;
2. celebrate the prophet's birthday with fanfare and throw an iftar dinner at the end of Ramzan;
3. attend Urs of sufis and Urdu mushairas;
4. support the claim of Urdu to be the second state language in all states where Muslims are in a minority;
5. admire whatever passes for Islamic art and architecture;
6. relish Muslim cooking and appreciate Muslim dress and demeanour;
7. abuse Israel and applaud Arab countries.

He should also keep quiet or look the other way when Muslims

1. breed like rats;
2. refuse to give modern education to their children;
3. push their women into purdah;
4. practise polygamy;
5. start street-riots at the slightest pretext;
6. rejoice over every Pakistan victory and every Indian defeat in sports; and
7. invite and protect infiltrators from across the borders. And he should not whisper a word when Arab governments pour petro-dollars and professional preachers of Islam into this country in order to convert the weaker sections of Hindu society.

Even these positive services rendered to Islam are not sufficient for a Hindu politician or pen-pusher out to earn the secular certificate. One is not secular unless one harbours and expresses a pronounced anti-Hindu animus. One should lodge an immediate protest against the least little expressionm of Hindu religion or culture in public media and at government functions. One should frown upon every government dignitary performing a pooja in a Hindu temple or going to Hindu place prilgrimage. One should accuse all educational, cultural and research institutions of hiding Hindu communalists. One should put the blame squarely on the RSS for every communal riot. And so on, the list of one's grievances against Hindu society should be as long as one's love for Islam and Muslims.

The definition of communal is a logical corollary of the above definition of secular. The dictionaries define the word communal as "pertaining to community, owned in common,, shared." But Hindus in India have only to say that they belong to a community and that they share a culture in common. They immediately provoke secularists of all hues to come down upon them. In fact, the word Hindu itself has become a dirty word, almost an obscenity in India' political parlance. Woe betide the Hindu who dares say that India is his ancestral homeland and that his religion and culture also have a case. He will be immediately denounced as a Hindu chauvinist. A Hindu who blunders into reading Indian history with his own eyes who finds that his society has suffered immeasurably at the hands of Islamic imperialism, and who cries out that this aggression should now stop, makes the Leftists mad with fury. They brand him as an enemy of public peace and national integration. They find in him a fiend who is plotting a genocide of the "poor Muslim minority."

Below is the Muslim scholar's post-Godhra prescription for Indian Muslims. Dr Zakaria

• 'Muslims must try and become an integral part of the mainstream... they must whole-heartedly co-operate in enriching composite nationalism which continues to be our pride... they must get out of their ghetto mentality, break the barriers of alienation and generate a harmonious environment.'
• 'They should do some introspection and ask whether they have genuinely tried to contribute to the strengthening of Hindu-Muslim relations since Partition. The answer will be no.'
• 'Indian Muslims must open their eyes to the ground reality that an increasing number of Hindus have begun to hate them... This is not confined to a small section; it has infected the rich as much as the poor; men as much as women; the young as much as the old; even children are no longer free from it.'
• 'This is the ugly reality that Muslims have to face in today's India. They have to do their best to bring about a change in the hostile attitude of the communal Hindus towards them. This is as much in their interest as that of the nation. Muslims continue to live in a make-believe world of their own. Their leaders waste their energies in playing games, whipping up emotions, and bringing more trouble to the ordinary Muslims.'
• 'Their self-serving leaders, with utter disregard to the aftermath of Partition, remained oblivious to their miserable decline and continued to behave with incredible arrogance, exhibiting a sense of false bravado by their loud utterances; they take out protest marches at the slightest pretext, hold demonstrations, shout slogans, demand justice and fair play but all this never gives any relief to the community... They fail to understand that by voicing meaningless grievances, asking for unrealistic rights, wailing, fretting and fuming, the leaders may gain some publicity but the community loses a great deal. They quote the Constitution and demand the implementation of this provision or that, guaranteed to the minorities but none of it gives Muslims the required protection; even democracy is ranged heavily against them because under it numbers count.'
• 'Have these leaders and their hold on different sections of Muslims ever been tested? Have their credentials been verified? Their uncompromising and rigid attitude on every occasion has only weakened Hindu-Muslim relations further.'
• 'Instead of coming out openly against Pakistan and taking a strong stand against the jihadis, these so-called guardians of Indian Muslims spend most of their time in running their own political shops to buttress their communal leadership.'
• 'None of these leaders visit villages so they are unaware of the fallout of their actions on the poor and hapless who live in the remote parts of the country.'
• 'Indian Muslims must now see the light of day and move in a different direction which will take them forward and not backward. They must discard their worn-out prejudices and outmoded habits and adjust themselves to the requirements of the changing times. They must give up asking for doles which will only cripple them. In order to survive, they must learn to stand on their own feet. For the fact is that they have no true friends; many of those who show them sympathy or consideration are not sincere. They do so only to obtain some electoral gain. This has been proved time and time again.'
• 'Muslims rely on India's commitment to secularism, but it has not proved to be of much help. Nor have Muslims of other countries ever come to their rescue.'
• 'To succeed, Indian Muslims must boldly come forward to undergo an all-round transformation in their style of functioning. If they neglect or fail to do so…they will be ruined.'
• 'They will succeed if parents shed their old habits, give up their outdated notions, and encourage and help their sons and daughters to get the best of education. Merit alone will give them reward; they must never seek patronage.'
• 'Indian Muslims must disown the bigotism which has made Muslims pariahs everywhere. They must... give to the non-Muslims the assurance that their religion stands for 'live and let live.' The orthodox clerics who shut themselves from the world must not be allowed to lock the Muslims.'
• 'They must, without compromising the Quranic injunctions, agree to the introduction of certain much-needed, essential changes in their Personal Law, particularly the enactment of monogamy. There is, in fact, enough scope under the Shariah to amend the laws relating to marriage, divorce, dower and even maintenance... .Ijtihad, (independent thinking) which was freely used by the classical jurists in the past, needs to be exercised by the present generation much more today.'
• 'The issue of Babri Masjid must be amicably resolved;   instead of talking it over with responsible elements among the Hindus, confrontation was adopted to press the point. This gave rise to more hatred against the Muslims. ... What have the Muslim leaders really gained by mounting agitation after agitation?'
• 'The controversy on the singing of Vande mataram by Muslims is also meaningless. It was sung by all Muslim leaders, belonging to the Congress, during the freedom struggle... Those Muslims who do not want to sing it, may not but they must stand up when it is sung as a mark of respect to an anthem which has a hoary past and is declared as a national song in the Constitution. Why add hurt to an already worsening inter-communal relationship?'
• 'Hindus are piqued by the fact that Muslims are multiplying fast, much more than Hindus. The Census figures, decade after decade, confirm it... communal Hindus are, by and large, convinced that polygamy results in an increased rate of growth of people. It is, therefore, not in the interest of Indian Muslims to persist with it... Then there is the question of family planning, on which much of our progress depends; it cannot be denied that Muslims have not taken to it as seriously as the Hindus; this has to be corrected... .There is no truth in the allegation that Islam prohibits family planning.'
• 'There must be a real awareness among Indian Muslims that they have to gird up their loins and prepare for reconciliation with Hindus on the basis that each respects the religious and cultural conventions, traditions and sentiments of the other.'

Elsewhere in his book, with regard to reform in Personal Laws as a prelude to a uniform civil code, Dr Zakaria comes with another home truth viz 'Muslims should not oppose something without knowing what it will be.'

All in all, Dr Zakaria's comprehensive diagnosis-cum-prescription is breath taking and path breaking. It is as though it were written out by the RSS chief himself. Indeed the essence of Dr Zakaria's prescription lies in what he says Sardar Patel told him in a personal meeting on May 19, 1950: 'The goodwill of the majority was the best safeguard for a minority.' Now wasn't that precisely what the RSS resolution said earlier this year? Wasn't that which got so much flak from the leftists and Patel's Congress descendants?

Dr Zakaria's courageous, almost historic, message would have been even more meaningful if he had told the Muslims about the Parsis, a minority that's probably the most liked community in India. Without raising a whimper about their unique religion and their rights, the Parsis have produced national luminaries in the field of law, industry, business, medicine, journalism and banking. The Parsis are the ones which the Muslims must emulate.

On the whole though, the Indian nation must stand up and say 'Million thanks' to Dr Zakaria. And the least that the secular media must do is to give the widest possible exposure to the Islamic scholar's advice on what the Muslims should do ...beginning now.