This morning I received several pictures of Modiji and Hitler comparing their mannerism and body languages. Initially, I thought of ignoring it as recent days such campaigns against Modiji in particular and against the CAA and NRC are going around in social media. Including me, most of those who forward these messages and pictures never read both CAA and NRC. So I thought that I don’t have any right to pass any comment on them. But when one of my close Christian friends forwarded these pictures, I thought that like him I too registered my view without reading both CAA and NRC. Anyhow I am not going to give my personal view about them as I never read them. But what I hear from the neutral voices, both these do not target the so called religious minorities, particularly Indian Muslims.
But in a SECULAR country when the so-called religious minorities, particularly those who have violence as the DNA as part of their religion continue to antagonise the majority, then people like Modi cannot be defeated. In fact, even those moderate and neutral people among the majorities, when provoked by certain activities of the so called religious minorities, even by using violence to demand their right, then giving space for extreme NATIONALISM, they will start to support people like Modi. When religious FUNDAMENTALISM raises its head then extreme NATIONALISM WILL be the byproduct of it.
Without knowing the history the way the so called religious minorities make such hue and cry against certain laws which no way affect their fundamental rights in India. But the same so-called religious minorities and pseudo secularists do not even want to recognize when the extreme violence is used by the religious minorities to assert their religious rights. In the recent past, Kashmir Pandits were driven away from their home in Kashmir by the Pakistani proxies in Kashmir by killing Kashmir Pandit men and rapping their women with a slogan ‘we want both Kashmir and Pandit’s women but not men for Pakistan’. When recently the Kashmir Pandits remembered the 30th anniversary of that tragic incident in their life, people like my friend did not even come forward to recognize that incident. People like him without knowing the history properly merely succumb to the malicious campaign of pseudo secularism and religious fundamentalist.
Let me quote one such incident that happened during the Khilafat movement in 1920 in India:
…in the rural Malabar district on the Indian Ocean coast, where a community of Muslims known as Mappilas, rose in rebellion, crying jihad and brandishing the Khilafat flag, after a couple of skirmishes with the police in which two British constables had been killed. Tiny Khilafat kingdoms were then proclaimed by the insurgents, and in some of these, Hindu homes and temples were set ablaze, women raped, and children slaughtered. The doctrine of nonviolence had never reached the Malabar district; political meetings had, in fact been banned there. That was hardly an excuse for the gruesomeness or scale of the carnage: six hundred Hindus reported killed, twenty-five hundred forcibly converted to Islam. Gandhi and Muhammad Ali were denounced as infidels when they called on the insurgent leaders to disavow violence. The {British} Raj dealt severely with the rising, blaming the noncooperation movement {led by Mahatma Gandhiji} and hanging some two hundred rebels.—Joseph Lelyveld, GREAT SOUL: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India, New Delhi, HarperCollins Publishers India, 2011, p. 163
Now ask my friend what is this Khilafat movement on behalf of which innocent Hindus were killed and converted in India? He might not know about it. Not only that, many Indians like him, particularly among the so-called religious minorities without knowing the history properly simply blame the extreme nationalism when some of its leaders try to protect the birth rights of the majority that too in a SECULAR country where only the religious minorities have it. Just read the following record by Lelyveld to understand about this Khilafat Movement:
…In defeat the Ottoman Empire {of Turkey} faced dismemberment; its sultan, whom many of them recognized as their caliph—invested, in their view, with spiritual authority that was no less than papal—was being stripped in the war’s aftermath of his control of Mecca and Medina and the other holy places. The struggle to save the caliphate, known on the subcontinent as the Khilafat, was portrayed in India’s mosques as nothing less than a struggle for Islam, an occasion for jihad and even for hijrat,@ meaning voluntary migration to a truly Muslim country such as Afghanistan, if{Viceroy} Lloyd George’s imperial government remained impervious to the appeals of the subcontinent’s faithful.
No one outside India seriously cared about the feelings of Indian Muslims on this issue or granted them any standing to be heard on it. This was true not only of the victorious Allies now dictating the peace (p.156) but also of the Arab world, which was hardly sorry to be relieved of Turkish rule it was even true of Most Turks, who’d wearied of the sultan and his decadent court. To most Hindus as well, the future of the Khilafat would have been a matter of profound indifference had they not been exposed to Gandhi’s tireless and ingenious rationalizations for making its preservation a primary goal of India’s national movement. Even then, few understood what it was all about. Gandhi’s knowledge of Islamic history derived from his reading in south Africa of Washington Irving’s Life of Mahomet and an English translation of the Koran. He didn’t try to make the case for the Khilafat. He offered a simple syllogism, telling Hindus it was of supreme importance to their Muslim brethren and, therefore, to national unity, and, therefore, to them. Using an Indian measure that stands for ten million, he asked, “How can twenty-two crore Hindus have peace and happiness if eight crore of their Muslim brethren are torn in anguish?”
Incomparably quixotic as it may appear today, the Indian struggle to preserve the authority of the Ottoman sultan became the preeminent Indian cause among Muslims. It’s easy to say that it was doomed from the start, but that wasn’t evident to them then. The coup de grace wouldn’t come until 1924, when Mustafa Kemal, known as Ataturk, formally dissolved the caliphate, driving the last sultan into exile. Still the Khilafat movement lingered on in India, channeling the passion and resentments it had aroused into new reformist groupings….{italics original]—ibid. pp. 156-57
Well, in order to preserve the political and religious right of a Turkish sultan, which was not supported even by the Arab Muslims, Hindus in India were forced to pay a cost for it in Malabar. In other words, in order to accommodate the ‘religious’ sentiment of the Muslims, Hindus have to give up their birth right to remain as Hindus or like Kashmir Pandits should lose not only their home and land but also even their life. Just search to read about the plights of the Kashmir Pandits. Then you will understand this. Similarly, what Hitler has done to the Jews in Germany in no way can be compared with extreme NATIONALISM raising in India that to preserve the fundamental rights of the majority which was questioned to appease the so called religious minorities in the name of their religious rights. How many Jews Hitler accommodated in his party and government as Muslims are accommodated not only in Modi’s cabinet, but also in the party. Without knowing the history, when people like my friend from Christian and other minority communities and pseudo secularists launch such campaigns against Modiji, it will further strengthen his hand as it will only provoke the religious sentiment of the majority.
10-2-2020
Notes
@ In fact one Sayyid Ahmed Barelvi actually moved away from India to an Islamic land. See C. A. Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire, New Delhi, Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 94 [I cannot find any other information about this Barelvi or to which Islamic country he moved—db]
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