Indian Muslims - an Oppressed Minority

INDIAN MUSLIMS - AN OPPRESSED MINORITY

By Abdul Haq

India has a unique experience of Muslim minority. A dominant minority in the medieval period became a dominated minority, all of a sudden with the advent of British rule in India. This sudden change resulted into complex problems. Partition of sub-continent in Aug 47 converted the Muslim community of India into Ð''Pakistani Muslims' and Ð''Indian Muslims'. This was a great shock as far as Indian Muslims are concerned. The rulers of Yesterday now had to live under the Ð''Hindu rule'. Fifty years having passed, the Muslims who opted to stay in India are still getting a raw deal in every sphere of life. They are still drowned in the scourge of poverty and backwardness. They continue fighting the ever-hunting spectra of communal riots and threats to their religious and cultural identity. The sense of insecurity experienced by the Indian Muslims in the post partition period has been compounded in recent years by the state repression and terrorism under the Ð''draconian', Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevension) Act (TADA). Under this act 7, 9332 people, mostly Muslims were detained and tortured during 1990-95 across the country. Though the Act has been repealed, yet about 5000 persons, mostly Muslims, are still in jails.

Hinduism and Islam. Dr Balraj Madhok, former Professor of history at Delhi University while explaining the term Ð''Hindu' said, "Everyone living in India is a Hindu. Hinduism is no religion, it is the name of a civilization (Tahzib), a way of life." He further said that, "Whereas his (Madhok's) nationality is Hindu, his (Madhok's) religion is Vedic Dharmi". While giving an interview to Ð''New York Times' correspondent at Delhi in 1966, he said, "In this country we have never insisted on religious confirmity and we are not going to start now. However, one thing we do insist on, is that Muslims become Indians. They can worship as they like, but they must adopt this country's customs as their customs." What all it means for Muslims is that Hinduism is not so much a religion as it is a way of life. It prescribes not only how a man must pray, but also how he must eat, dress, converse, work and die. On the other hand Islam is much more than this. While asking a Muslim to give up all but his mosque and adopt the Indian way of life, is virtually demanding that he should give up Islam and become Hindu. Nobody can dispute that the Muslims have individually and collectively the duty and responsibility to mould their personal and social lives in accordance with the dictates of Islam, which is a perfect way of life, better than any religion in the world.

Birth of Hindu Revivalism. The Hindu reformers of the 19th century were the pioneers of Hindu renaissance. foremost among them was Raja Rammohan Roy (1772-1833) the founder of Brahmo Samaj, which represented the first throb of modernism in Hinduism. A great admirer of Muslim thought, he had been deeply influenced by his study of Islamic works (including Quran) and by Sufism. Yet at heart he was a staunch Hindu. His deepest yearnings were to turn the Hindus back to the Vedas. He was thus one of the founders of modern Hindu nationalism. The message of Rammohan Roy was carried further by Dayananda-Saraswati, a Gujrati Brahman (1824-1883), who openly raised the slogan Ð''India for the Hindus.' According to him, Hinduism was to be the sole religion of the sub-continent, and the Hindus its sole masters. The Muslims were foreigners and must be pushed out. He devised a new weapon to fight the Muslims. It was the weapon of Ð''Shuddhi' or individual conversion of Muslims to Hindu faith. After the partition of India in Aug 47, thousands of Muslims were butchered cold blooded and forced to leave India. Since then, Hindu militant Bal Thackeray of Shiv Sena and other militant Hindu organiztions are of the opinion that Muslims have their own homeland in the shape of Pakistan (though they do not accept it from their hearts), therefore they have no right to live in India.

Alienation of Muslims. In terms of numbers, the Muslims are only next to the Hindus, totalling 95.2 million (1991 census) and constituting about 12 percent of the population, yet they are considered by the Hindus even less important than the Jains and Buddhists who are only 0.43 and 0.41 percent of the population respectively (1991 census). A prominent

Hindu writer S. Harrison admits that the dominant note in the Hindu attitude towards Muslim today is that, "Hindus have a natural right to rule in modern India as a form of long overdue retribution for the sins of the Mughal overlords. It is not enough that unified state with a Hindu majority, clearly dominant over a Muslim minority now reduced to 12 percent, has been established at long last in the Indian sub-continent. The fulfilment of Indian nationalism requires an assertion of Hindu hegemony over the Muslims of the subcontinent in one form or the other." The cumulative outcome of all this is that according to Jai Prakash Narayan, "The Muslim population has been so much cowed and demoralized that they are not acting according to their convictions. They are afraid that if they expressed their real feelings, their loyalty will be suspected."

Interference in Muslim Religion. Apart from being made to suffer a host of disabilities, political, cultural and economic; the Indian Muslims have often been subjected to a campaign of interference with their religion as well. It usually takes the form of slanderous attacks on Islam made in school text books, or in the press, desecration of mosques and shrines, or deliberate incitement of feelings of religious hatered against the Muslims. In most of the Hindu dominated Indian states, Hindu religious beliefs, philosophy and methodology have been introduced into the text books in the name of Indian culture. This is to an extent that a glance through the officially prescribed school text books leaves an impression that those responsible for them regard India (a multi religious country) as the home of Brahmans and attach value only to their deities, temples, religious customs and practices.

Adverse propaganda against Islam. The books dealing with the heritage of India exclusively enumerate Hindu heritage and gloss over everything Muslim. The Muslim heroes in medieval Indian history have been treated as Ð''aliens' and Ð''strangers', the book Ð''Hamara Purwaj' prescribed for classes VI, VII and VIII in the state of Uttar Pradesh is an instance of such unfair treatment. A text book on history approved by Bihar State Government entitled Ð''Gayania Uday Basic Itihas'