SATIRICUS
THE truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about secular truth is that it has to be secular to be the truth. That is, only when secularists say it, can it be certified as the truth. Unfortunately, this cardinal principle is beyond the ken of communal cusses like Satiricus. Consequently the confusion in Satiricus´s so-called head gets worse confounded when he finds to his consternation that a truth revealed by a secularist has been told by quite a few communalists much before. Take, for instance, this special article by Arun Shourie in Indian Express on Bangladeshi Muslims flooding India. More than a half of it has been given to quotes from a series of articles that T.V. Rajeswar, former head of the Intelligence Bureau and the new Governor of Uttar Pradesh, wrote in Hindustan Times in 1996.
In it he had drawn attention to a long-standing design to create a Greater Islamic Bangladesh by swamping Assam, bordering districts of West Bengal, and even parts of Bihar with Muslims. This demographic invasion was massive enough for Rajeswar to fearfully forecast the rise of a ?third Islamic State? out of secular India.
Here in secular India, that is blessed Bharat, we are re-writing history for detoxifying history, but are they, in Pakistan, detoxifying history for denying their history?
Now Rajeswar is obviously a secular Governor, as he has not been dismissed like those four communal Governors. And if he is secular, it automatically follows that what he warned against eight years ago was true. But is it not precisely the same warning that the thrice-cussed communalists of the RSS have been giving for years before Rajeswar wrote his series?
Satiricus personally knows a top-ranking RSS leader who had written a very similar series on the same subject years ago. Oh well, what he wrote then was already a communal claim. Only when the UP Governor wrote the same thing, on the basis of his ?intelligence?, that it was raised to the status of a secular truth. But that creates another problem for this poor pen-pusher. If Indian secularism is indeed poised to produce yet another Islamic State, should that be feared as dire news or should it be hailed as glad tidings? In fact, what is Indian secularism if not Islamic? First it created an Islamic State on both sides of secular India. Then, out of this one Islamic State, it created two Islamic States. So, if one can become two, why can´t two become three? The more the merrier, wot?
And in a written rejoinder to Shourie´s article, the Bangladesh High Commission has officially assured us that it is a ?friendly neighbouring country?. And with such friends in the neighbourhood, who needs enemies? So let us forget those Indian jawans whose dead bodies were carried in Bangladesh hanging upside down on sticks like slaughtered pigs, and let us rest assured with the not very old official Bangladeshi disclaimer that there is not a single Bangladeshi in India?because India has itself recognised them as Indians.
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Satiricus lives and learns. But apparently there are people who live and unlearn?such as, believe it or not, the Pakistanis. Take this coloured front-page box item in a recent issue of the Indian Express titled ?Pak Unlearns Fundamental Lessons?, for which, says the subtitle, it ?engages scholars to rid history textbooks of ?Islamisation?.? Satiricus is stunned. Here in secular India, that is blessed Bharat, we are re-writing history for detoxifying history, but are they, in Pakistan, detoxifying history for denying their history? Even admitting that the complexities of Islam are beyond soft-brained Satiricus, he fails to see how a Pakistan ?rid of? Islamisation cannot but become a Napakistan. Was not Pakistan carved out of a hideously Hindu India on the basis of the Hindu-Muslim two-nation theory, all Congress claims to the contrary notwithstanding? Did not Pakistan proudly and officially claim to be one of the world´s biggest Islamic States? And did not Khushwant Singh describe how, during a visit to Pakistan, he saw huge hoardings at every street corner displaying verses from the Quran for the Islamic education of the Pakistani populace? Is all that learning now going to be unlearnt? And that too thanks to the Pakistani government?
Satiricus can only exclaim?strange are the ways of God and government! For, the Pakistani government has actually set up a committee to examine a report prepared by an experts´ committee ?citing examples of how the system has ensured an overarching influence of Islam in textbooks?. And what are its recommendations for ?immediate changes?? Unbelievably enough, they include, first: ?No encouragement to ideas in the name of Islam which end up producing hate. For instance, the glorification of jihad.? And secondly: ?No blatant distortion of history to further a religious ideology.?
This is the limit. Has Musharraf gone mad? How dare he perniciously and profanely pollute the purity of Islam like this?
In fact Satiricus did suspect that the man was losing his mind when it was reported a few short years back that he was actually editing the Quran. And if an ignorantly edited Quran is bad, a wretchedly revised Quran is far worse. For, would not the de-glorification of jihad be a devilish doing? And what is this boorish business of blatant distortion of history? Was it that when a patriotic Pakistani wrote a book titled 5000 Years of Pakistan? Of course not. In short these emerging Napak Pakistanis seem to be headed for a Hindu hell. Who can save them? Only anti-Hindu India, that is secular Bharat. Here jihad is still glorified, while being piously passed off as a spiritual struggle, and history is being diligently detoxified to reveal that Aurangzeb was a paragon of secularism and Shivaji was a ?misguided (read communal) patriot?.
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