Afghan Press Author: Rooh-ul-Amin

India, a revered land for revered waters and mother for the three religions of the world–Hinduism, Buddhism (according to some notions it took birth in Nepal) and Sikhism, has been under the attack of religious intolerances since long. Islam came from out side and because of that difference even today it is alien in India. Though its followers in India comprise world’s largest Muslim population. But its followers in India are the most down trodden segment of the Indian society. As it is said that the ideas of ruling class become the ruling ideas so Hindus started learning Persian when Muslims were in their heydays. Contrary to their past, this class in India is compelled on leading a life of miseries and more dilapidation than Dalits–the Hindu untouchables.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy stands prominent whenever there is a talk about reformation in Hinduism. He was deeply inspired from the traits of Islam.

He was the first person to agitate against the worst kind of religious tradition of Satti (a tradition which compels a widow to burn herself alive in the pyre of her husband). He was the founder of Brahmoo Samaaj (the society of God), which was aimed at introducing reforms in Hinduism.

In his early puberty he wrote Tuhfattul Mu’ahhidin (The gift of monotheists) in Persian and wrote its preface in Arabic but he could not publish it at the cost of his father and relatives’ anger. It was then when his father perished away he got the chance to publish it.

When he reached his manhood he launched ‘Mira-tul-Akhabar’ a newspaper in Persian and started preaching his message of moderation and shunning superstitious beliefs. Today even in the modern and so-called secular and world’s largest democracy–India is mired in the web of centuries old superstitions, which have turned the lives of its minorities in a hell. Among such superstitions, the slogan of Indian extremists that India is mother only to Hindus and there is no room for minorities. “Either they should be expelled of the country or be proselytized back into Hinduism” is the slogan of Hindu extremist charlatans that is responsible for the all the chaos in India. Before the incidents in Mumbai there was propaganda against Indian minorities and daily “The Pioneer” published an article with the headline ” Minoritism is the problem” which blames Minorities for the instability in India. Its writers like K.P.S. Gill and Balbir K Punj have mastery in this regard. It is only one example but a hundred of examples from Indian media can be brought and this is the discriminatory attitude that has made minorities prone to violence.

When media starts blaming the downtrodden section of the society then Golden Temple issue, Gujarat carnage, Ahmad Abad decimation, Babri Masjid and Mumbai-like incidents take place.

For the Muslim rulers also it was a thorny issue to bring them under one yoke as a subject and Akbar the great who was totally illiterate yet he was cognizant of the fact that India is a patched work of different races and casts where religious intolerances would undermine the political roots of India. For bridging the gape between the Muslims and Hindus he married Hindu princess and tried to overcome the religious hatred and devised a new religion of his own, the “Deen-e-Elahi”. It was an attempt to unite the different and rift-apart races under the flag of one religion.
Saleem, who is known in history as Jahangir, always felt pride being a son of a Hindu princess. The then India was more lenient towards other religions. Islam and Hinduism glided for at least 850-year but without overt antagonism and clashes as it is the daily routine in present India. Contrary to them the Hindu extremism took roots in modern-day and secular India and demolished the centuries old Babri Masjid which was built in Ayodhya by Zaheeruddin Babar in 16th century?
Was it done in the beck and calls of ISI or it was its own political party BJP with the accomplice of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh that spawned conspiracy against the Muslims in India? Indeed all that was done under the very nose-tip of the government by the Hindu extremists though the Iindian Supereme Court had given bids not to demolish the Masjid.
Since then many positive changes took birth across the Globe but India, which is clamant to be world’s largest democracy, is in the tight noose of religious bigotry and hatred. With the partition of India the long lasting rancorous feelings towards Indian Muslims and Pakistan morphed into eternal enmity. No doubt its secular class, which dreams for greater India, wants to check the surging wave of religious fanaticism but there is upsurging trend in Hindu and Muslim extremists outfits instead.
Today there are more than 175 extremists and militants groups in India and majority of them belongs to Hindus. South Asia Terrorism Portal reports that only in Manipur more than 40 gangs and such outfits have their havens, which are a stigma on the democratic face of India. Assam comes next to Manipur with 36 while Jammu and Kashmir is proliferated with 32 militants’ outfits. Tripura is a resident for 30 groups while Punjab is known to have given shelter to 12 terrorists groups. In such a scenario how a country can blame its neighbours for terror attacks when its police and Army has been backing such militants outfits.

It is not only the world community but its own intellectual class has been castigating New Delhi for the covert support of Shiv Seena, Bajran Dal and

Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which have virulent and anti-minorities sentiments for the followers of other than Hinduism. Sikh crisis in India is also a bleak example which shows that the real threat is within when Indian Army assaulted the Golden Temple in Amritsar and Indira Gandhi the then Premier of India, who was main character behind the attack on Golden Temple, was gunned down by her two Sikh body guards in June 1984.
As violence breeds violence so the present host of militants in reality is a reaction to the violent attitude of Hindus towards minorities. and since then India witnessed more severe surge of reaction from minorities.
India at that time did not denounce that the attack on Babri Masjid is attack on the secular face of India. It does not call the decimation of Christians and razing of Churches in India as infringement on its democratic and secular face, for there was Hindu conspiracy behind all the plots. It was the Indian government decision to demolish the Golden Temple which the Sikhs leader called it “state terrorism”.
India is also fully aware of the fact that religious abhorrence will undermine the political stability thus it will have to subdue the fast growing and spreading trend of terrorism tagged with the name of religions. For that reason it started traveling on the path of secularism in the recent decades and which indeed is the need of the hour. In India, Mumbai is a city, which is considered to be financial hub for India and its economic backbone, has seen many violent incidents in past but the one in past month shook it altogether. Pakistan, like past gave way to Indian pressure and India played well by using its old card of blame game and referring the case to the UN and Washington.
The UN Security Council banned 113 different organisations including monetary agencies, Internet companies and food production companies across the world. Among such organisations ten belongs to Pakistan and this is the reason that it brought a more severe crackdown against its self-sown extremists bodies of Jihadists. Jamat-e-Dawa is one of them, which has been banned by the UN labeling it as a terrorist organisation. Ridiculously when Security Council was declaring bane on these outfits Indian Bajrang Dal recruited more than ten thousand Hindu fanatics to encounter the terror attacks by the Indian minorities and to unleash more lethal series of violence in India. Right after the terror incident of Mumbai, India exploited it in demonizing Pakistan deftly. Unlike biased American media some of English intellectuals and papers castigated India for its dubious role in the whole show. Its own impartial intellectuals also showered New Delhi with criticism for blaming Islamabad instead confessing its own security lapses. One of English famous papers alleges the entire plot was hatched by RAW and Hindu terrorists to weed out Hemant Karkare, Assistant Commissioner In-Charge of Anti Terrorist Squad of Maharashtra, who had unearthed the hands behind Malegaon bomb blasts and Samjhota Express blasts. The persons behind all that conspiracy were a Lt. Col, Purohit Prasad and Dayanand Pandey.
RAW and Hindu terrorists outfits menaced Karkare with dire consequences for his candid steps and was pressurised to avoid further investigating into the Malegaon bomb blasts and Samjhota Express blasts. But their menace and threats could not budge him even an inch and he was seen more interested in exhuming all the black faces behind the terror attacks. Before that he could have traced out more hands they wiped out him from the scene.
The killing of foreigners and Karkare along with his other fellows and guards all was deliberate. All of the terrorists were Hindus having links with Shiv Seena and the Muslims were threatened not to offer their funeral prayers. Thus giving way to the pressure by state agencies the Indian Muslims refused to offer funeral prayers of the terrorists. According to the report of the paper, RAW trained the terrorists from the Hindu terrorists outfit Shiv Seena in its camps where they were given the maps of the Hotels, Nariman House and other important places. According to the plan the same evening of 26th November Karkare was informed through a fake call that some unknown terrorists has injured one of his friends. He rushed out along with his other friends and security guards where he was shot dead by two unknown terrorists with long-range automatic guns. As a result of the firing, he, his comrades and three police constables were killed on the spot while one of his security guard survived the incident. The person who survived the terror attack divulged the whole fiasco to the paper that they were entrapped with the hoax call.

The report also alleges that RAW had brought up the first suicide squad in South Asia, which has been successfully used.

Barbara Crossette who writes for The Nation alleges India for all the tumult and chaos in Mumbai. She says that more than 150 million Muslims have been leading a life of miseries and afflictions and the volcano of their deprivations one day will erupt with more severe consequences. Barbara has embanked her arguments with reports from the UN office and historical events in India. She says in her article, Gujarat, the native village of Mahatma Gandhi, who was flag-bearer of non-violence, witnessed in 2002 the carnage of two thousand Muslims. The death toll in the Gujarat holocaust is ten times greater than in Mumbai. In such a country the darkness and threat is within. After the attacks in Mumbai, Pakistan also started demonising India but it could not convince the masses for they took it mere counter blame game. Here the notion is so deep-rooted that even a layman understands it that all the terror, which is surging across the country, is homegrown and like India the threat in Pakistan is also within.

But how the world community reacted to the two issues in India is biased in nature to the core. When the dust and smoke of the attacks on Mumbai hotels was not off that CNN interviewed Dr. Deepak Chopra, who is impartial Indian based at New York, responded the TV host that labeling 1.8 billion Muslims around the world is no solution to the issue of terrorism. Good and bad goes abreast thus goes righteous and hypocrites. This very sentence is the solution for all the leper of terrorism across the globe. Be it in Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan or India, it is the outcome of exploitation, violence and the language of labeling. Indeed this comes true to South Asia. For the threat here is always within rather than outside. At least, when Pakistan alleges India for all the ongoing chaos in tribal belt and Peshawar with no exception of Karachi, the masses connoted it with the escapism of the government and counter attack on Indian propaganda. The case of the Indians is also not much different and especially the Indian Muslims reacted well to the Mumbai hotels attacks but its media fell in the old trap of the ‘language of labeling’, and broke out a fog of uncertainty, obliterating the difference of black and white.

Media in such hour of crisis and uncertainty must avoid the ‘us versus them approach’ which yields nothing but a cleavage of hearts and minds. And this is the cleavage, which is responsible for the threat within.

The writer is a FATA-based freelance journalist.