Neither the baggy Salwar nor the cruel circumcision, neither the Qaaba nor the cow slaughter, neither Arabic names nor Arabic language, are a part of Islam. They find no mention in the Koran. And yet it’s these things that alienate them from us. Muslims should have no religious objection to giving them up.
The First Fact about Hindu-Muslim relations which every school boy knows but which few politicians seem to find convenient to remember is , that they have been bad for a thousand years now. There are any number of theories to simplify-over-simplify, to be exact-the nature of this conflict. The one to be heard of most is the familiar story of we two being the lover and the beloved-who’s what, nobody bothers to tell with the British being the villain. The British were no doubt the villain, but that did not make us lovers. Indeed the British came on the scene after we had warred for over seven centuries. The villain no doubt aggravated and prolonged existing hates, but we cannot give him the credit-to be exactm debit-for reading those hates. Facts are sacred. And here the fact is that your hates ante-date the British machinations by long centuries.
A more fashionable theory advanced by the self –appointed “progressives”, is, that the Muslims opposed the freedom struggle because they feared the Hindu capitalist who were exploiting them economically. In this respect it is taken for granted that the Muslims on the whole were economically worse off than the Hindus.
Pakistan on War Path By our Special Correspondent As of Last Year-but on a smaller scale-troop concentrations along the East-West Punjab border is going on. It is learnt Pakistan, with its acute internal crisis, is anxious to divert public attention against Bharat. Tribesmen are reported to have been hired and moved into occupied Kashmir in readiness for a repetition of October, 1947. The fact that Churchill has given them some Centurion Tanks and Jet Planes—which he refused us—is reported to have emboldened some in Pakistan to seek a military solution to Kashmir. |
Is our quarrel then of a racial nature? Do Hindu and Muslims belong to separate races? Fore one thing people do not fight on and on and on just because they belong to different races. And in this case we know that the vast bulk of Bharati Muslims have no foreign blood in them. And even the remaining few can claim only partly foreign parentage. They are, by and large sons of the soil.
We all know that language doesn’t divide us either. Muslims in Bharat do not have any language exclusively their own. Arabic is no more common among Muslims than is Pali among the Hindus.
And yet the fact remains that Muslims are quite distinct from us-and very hostile. Surely we have not been divided over airy nothings. Then what is it that divides us? I submit, it is Not religion.
My submission is that Muslims stand aloof and hostile not because they are a religious community but because they stand as a cultural–or uncultural-entity. The things that divide them most from us Hindus, are not religious. They are not found in the Koran. They are chiefly socio-cultural.
