SECULAR BLAST

This is a guest post be T.R.Ramaswami
How many blasts have taken place in the last 15 years? – Here is the list which may not be complete but still sufficient – Mumbai (1993), Coimbatore, Lucknow, Jaipur, Varanasi, Mumbai (2006), Malegaon, Hyderabad, Delhi, Kabul, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, New Delhi (2008), Malegaon (2008), Modasa, Assam.
However we find that all the attention has been directed only to the Malegaon blast and we hear nothing about the rest. Why? Because the Malegaon blast was an unsecular blast. All the other blasts were evidently secular according to Secular Maataji, whose temple is said to be located somewhere in New Delhi.
SECULAR HYPOCRISY
Recall how netas and even the media scream that terrorists have no religion. Now how does this tie up with the plea that Mohammed Afzal should not be hanged during Ramzan? Here is a case where the police have been able to produce evidence to convince the court of his guilt. Now letting him go would be a blow to the police. And since he is a man convicted of a terrorist act, ipso facto he has no religion and Ramzan has no meaning for him. If secularism is so important, then why did such considerations not come into play when the Sankaracharyar of Kanchi was arrested on Diwali day, the most auspicious religious festival of Hindus? Evidently secularism is the art of boot-licking the minorities to garner votes.
SUCKULARISM
I write with reference to Mr. Balbir Punj’s article “A 17-year 48-act farce” (Asian Age 4 Dec 2009). Mr Punj is right – Muslims and Christians are able to do in Hindu majority India what they will never be able to do in each other’s country and even in their own country. India is secular not because that word is there in the Constitution but because the majority are Hindus. Secularism has become “suckularism” because certain political parties, particularly the Congress suck up to minority vote banks because they ejaculate votes every five years. Let the Congress answer one question – if Jinnah wanted a separate country for Muslims, as is taught in school history, why were all Muslims not sent to Pakistan? That’s because Nehru was worried that if this was done then Pakistan may have got Kashmir and he did not want his Kashmiri Pandit jathwallahs to become refugees. He did not mind Sikhs, Sindhis and Punjabis being thrown from their lands.
SECULAR RUBBISH
Over the past few days we heard a number of “secular” leaders mouthing inanities like how the “non- secular forces” have been defeated etc. The fact is that no party can claim to be secular, as the country itself is not yet fully secular. Secondly, if the carnage in Gujarat in 2002 was a non-secular act how about the slaughter of Sikhs in 1984. It appears that a Congress slaughter is secular while an RSS/BJP slaughter is non-secular. Incidentally will Mr. Manmohan Singh have the secular courage to ensure that some justice is done to those who lost their relatives in 1984. After all some of the alleged accused are now MPs in his own party.
SECULAR TERRORISM
At last terrorism is also going secular. The media has the courage to use headlines like “Hindu Terrorism”. Perhaps they will soon develop testicles to also write about “Islam Terrorism.” If all Muslims are not terrorists and terrorists do not have any religion then why is this rule also not applicable to Hindus? Maybe because we are secular. There is another aspect regarding the daily and front page publicity given to Col. Purohit. Evidently the ruling party is using it an election propaganda to check the BJP. It is also stated that the netas, bureaucrats and the police are using the issue to keep the armed forces silent on the Pay Commission issue. Perhaps the police and particularly the Mumbai police, which forms the ATS, need to be reminded that it was the army that held its pants up during the police mutiny in 1980. In fact the “coffee-table” book on the Mumbai police does not have one word on this as it would probably spoil the aroma.
But let me state something in defence of Hindu terrorism. I have no objection to the term provided the media also uses the term “Islamic Terrorism.” Looked at from one perspective this country has been subject to Islamic terrorism for more than 1000 years from the days of Ghazni. So what if Hindus have started retaliating? What riles the Islamic world and many Muslims in India is that even after ruling India for more than 600 years they were unable to convert more than 30% – the only country which they could not turn Islamic in entirety. Half of these converts went to Pakistan and Bangladesh. We made the mistake of not having a clean partition on the basis that is taught as history in schools – that Jinnah wanted a separate country for Muslims. If that is so then why are there more Muslims in India? That’s because Nehru did not want all Muslims to go to Pakistan. If they did then Jinnah would have been justified in asking for more land and ideally Kashmir should have been given to Pakistan with ALL Muslims. But Nehru did not want his Pandit jathwallahs to become refugees – which they are now.
To sum up we are paying for the biggest mistake in modern Indian history – that of Nathuram Godse – he shot the wrong man.
SECULARISM, JINNAH AND GANDHI
I write with reference to the letter “Not A Secular” by Mr. Shailesh Kumar (BS 8 July 2005). Mr. Kumar states that Jinnah was not a secularist although he did not want the clerics to have a say in the government. However Mr. Kumar seems to have forgotten that it was Gandhi who gave the Indian Muslim an extra-territorial identity by unnecessarily supporting the Khilafat movement. This incident, sometime in 1919, which involved the Caliph, was not even considered important by several Muslim nations. By this one act Gandhi made the Indian Muslim feel that he was a Muslim first and an Indian second. In fact, soon after came the Moplah rebellion in Kerala when several Hindus were slaughtered. Hence any incident anywhere creates an issue here even if several Muslim nations keep quiet. A case in example – the ban on Salman Rushdie’s novel.
Regarding Jinnah’s violent methods – if we had used violence to fight for our freedom, as advocated by Bose, we would have got it at least 25 years earlier and there would have been no partition. Gandhi’s non-violent method delayed independence and is the main reason for our “soft state” image.
MUSLIMS, INTELLIGENCE AND WAHHABISM
I write with reference to the article “Need to recruit Muslims in Intelligence agencies” by Mr. Mobin Pandit. It may be pertinent to note that from 1947-1977, not a single Muslim was recruited in the higher ranks of the intelligence agencies by the so-called secular Congress government as they were considered “untrustworthy”. This has been revealed in several books by spooks who worked in these agencies. In fact it was Morarji Desai who changed the policy but since he was there only for a year, one wonders whether it was again changed thereafter.
As regards the Wahhabism and the Deoband School, it may be noted that more than 50,000 Indians, concentrated in Bihar and UP have given Arabic as their mother tongue in the census. This is not surprising and the history behind this is intriguing. It goes back to the 16th. century when Naqshbandi Sufism was brought to India by Sheikh Ahmed of Sirhind (1563-1624). Thereafter the lines connect to Syed Ahmad of Rae Barreilly (1786-1831) who was influenced by both Sheikh Waliulah of Delhi and Muhammad ibn Abd-al Wahhab of Nejd, Saudi Arabia. It was Syed Ahmad who was responsible for creating the Three Patna Families, whose descendants/followers are the foremost practitioners of Wahhabism in India. In fact, during British Raj, this group funded and maintained a terrorist group in the Mahbun mountain range, west of the Indus in the present Swat province in Pakistan. This group was called the “Hindustani Fanatics” who were planning a jihad which can only be launched from dar-ul-Islam (land of Faith) on the dar-ul-harb (land of the unfaithful). For more details one should read the superbly chronicled book – God’s Terrorists – The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad – by Charles Allen.
– T.R.Ramaswami