Dr Jay Dubashi
TWO families, both from Allahabad, living probably not far from each other, and maybe even acquainted with each other. One, a middle class, or even lower middle class family, headed by a never-do-well journalist-poet father, with cultured background. A son just out of college, looking for a job.
The other family, on the wrong side of tracks, headed by a single mother, a singer-dancer, of no social background, with a daughter just out of school, also looking for a career.
The hard-working, soft-speaking son of the former is now almost a Bollywood czar. The grandson of the singer-dancer, a kothawali, also made his name in Bollywood, fell into bad company, so bad that he was caught red-handed with imported AK-47s which, had he not been caught, he would have used against the police, and perhaps have been killed. He will now go to jail for five years. His grandmother, the kothawali, was a Muslim the Bollywood czar’s father was a Hindu.
You might say the grandson’s life went off the tracks because of his mixed background, but that is not true. Why he took into his head to get hold of AK-47s, and maybe other weapons, and store them in his mother’s house is a mystery. Good boys don’t do such things. Almost all his friends came from a rough or ruffian background, most of them Muslims, with personal and family links to Muslim dons in the Gulf. The boy—he was not a boy even when he was caught twenty years ago—was at odds with the society that had given him so much—a doting mother as well as father – both Members of the Parliament, and the father a minister in the bargain. But the young hoodlum refused to listen to them.
As I said, his friends were all Muslims, the ruffian types that grow on the dung heaps of a city’s refuse. But it was he who went out to look for them and make friends with the goons. He chose his friends, as every human being does; they did not come looking for him. Why did he choose such trash? If is wrong to say he was led astray. Why didn’t the son of the Hindu poet-journalist go astray and start dealing in drugs? Nobody leads anybody astray. It is your blood, and ultimately you yourself who choose to go where you go, for it is the same road for anyone who chooses to use it, Hindu or Muslim, kothawalis or poets, big and small, strong and weak, and your road is the one you choose, and lead your life. You are your own master and the driver of your own destiny.
Some people will say that the Hindu – Muslim divide has nothing to do with the man’s criminal career, and the man would have done what he did, even if he had been a Hindu. It was God’s will, they say. I don’t agree. The good God doesn’t force His will on you; you will force Him to force His will on you. You are not what the good God wants you to be; you are what you want to be, and you use your goodness to force the God to give His blessings. There must be something in you, in your bloodline, in your ancestry, to make of you what you ultimately become – a traitor to your country, a country that has been so kind to you and lifted your seed from the gutters of Allahabad to the ritzy palaces of Bombay.
There is another factor involved, as it always is in such matters. And that is politics. The man who is going to jail is the first big casualty of secularism. Secularism is a false creed, and is unrelenting in its demand for victims. In India, secularism had led, in a sort of dialectical cause-and-effect way to treat victims of anti-secularism – or call it communalism – as heroes. So anything that a Muslim does, even if it is high treason, as in the case of Afzal Guru, must be good, because to be anti-Muslim is to be communal, and communalism is, by definition, a crime. The opposite, therefore, must be true. If communalism is a crime, as defined by secularists, then a secularist or a Muslim, which is the same thing, must be, by definition, a virtuous man. A so called secularist or a Muslim cannot therefore do wrong. He may purchase a couple of AK-47s, go on a rampage in a crowded street full of Hindus, and spary them with bullets, and splatter the streets with innocent blood, as Afzal Guru did, but because he is a Muslim, he has done no wrong and that is what the Bookerwallas write, and there are stupid editors to print the nonsense.
If Afzal Guru & Co. can do no wrong, even if they massacre Hindus or even non-Hindus in cold blood, then Sanjay Dutt & Co. can do no wrong either, After all, one AK-47 is as good as another, and both are sanctified by secularists, fresh from prayers in mosques. So the Muslims go about as if they are dong no wrong, because by their standards, they are secularists and therefore blameless. They are not killing people, they are only killing communalists, and communalists, by definition, are not people. They are less than vermin. And what do you do with vermin? You destroy them and your brand new secular Constitution says you are doing no wrong.
I have a feeling that crimes by Muslims, which means crimes by secular-sanctified pundits, are going to multiply in the future, because there can be no end to them. If your crimes do not deserve punishment, who is going to stop them? The secularists say you have done nothing wrong. You have only killed or tried to kill some Hindus, who are communal anyway, and deserve death. So how can you be held guilty?
We are thus criminalising the entire Muslim community, because we are assuring them of immunity in the name of secularism. This also happened in the case of killing of Jews by Nazis in Hitler’s Germany. The argument was simple. Jews are not people; they have no rights. So go and kill them; you will not be blamed of any crime since killing non-people in no crime.
It is these very people – people who have created the monster of secularism – who are now clamouring for the grant of pardon for criminals like Dutt. Who are these people? Men like Digvijay Singh, the archbishop of secularism in India; a man called Katju, whose big nose you find thrust into every trough in Delhi, Jaya Bachchan, once a great follower of Mulayam Singh, himself a self-proclaimed protector of Muslims; and, of course, Mahesh Bhatt, even more of a Muslim protector then Mulayam Singh, whose heart, he says, bleeds for the likes of Sanjay Dutt and his goons.
It is not Dutt who is responsible for his present plight, but the Digvijay Singhs, Katjus, Mulayam Singhs, Jaya Bachachans and Mahesh Bhatts. It is they who led him astray and gave him the impression that he could get away with murder, if he bumped off a few Hindus. But life is not as simple as that, and the chickens are coming home to roost!
(The writer is a renowned columnist).
