December 6 is a black day for Muslims. Nine years ago it was a milestone in Muslim history in India. On that day in 1992 what was destroyed was not merely a monument of the Mughal era, nor just a place of worship for Muslims. The enemies of Islam tried not just to shake the Muslim will-power but uproot their foundations.
History is a broad church (to put it mildly) and the term ‘historian’ covers a bewildering range of sinners, from those deliberately hiding from unpleasant realities in the study of the deadest-possible past (agrarian life in the Aztec empire, say) to contemporary historians whose agendas are blatantly political, with no end of variation between.
While the west and its Muslim admirers have been gripped by a frenzy of grief over the destruction of Buddha statues in Bamiyan (Afghanistan), Hindu fascists in India have busied themselves with burning copies of the Qur’an and killing Muslims.
At a time when much concern was being expressed in the western media about attacks on Christians and their places of worship in India, there was defeaning silence about the killing of Muslims in the same media.
Rubbing salt into the raw wounds of Muslims, police arrested thousands of Muslims across India on the eve of the sixth anniversary of the demolition of the historic Babri Mosque in Ayodhya.
Hindu fanatics have intensified their efforts to erect a temple on the site of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya that was destroyed by a Hindu mob six years ago.
Indian elections are always a violent affair. Scores of people are killed on all sides of the political divide. With politics dominated by syndicated criminals, this is natural. Over the years, violence has escalated alarmingly.
Hindu chauvinist organisations - the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) - have chalked out new strategies in their quest for electoral success leading to power in India.
Can a country which is too proud to apologize to ‘natives’ for the massacre committed by its own troops (in Amritsar, India) as long ago as 1919 bring itself to admit that the ‘mad cow disease’ and the related Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease (CJD) it hosts, and exports, have put world health at risk - when such admission is certain to lead to political and economic consequences?
In a multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic country, that India is, secularism has been a far cry. The Muslim community has been the worst victim of this pseudo-secularism.
HINDUTVA is specifically a post-colonial development which took birth under the impact of British Orientalist scholarship and which imparted a great deal of its own meaning and political content to Hinduism.
