The credo of the Secular State of Bharat are: Hinduism can be criticised, scrutinised and interfered with, but no other religion would be even touched. In recent years the country has heard a great deal about “Islamophobia”, but what are the markers of it? What makes a thing Islamophobic? The word is applied to anything which could be deemed offensive to any Muslim, anytime, anyplace and anywhere. Personally, I think the word is nothing more than a farce, for a lot of reasons. Phobia is an irrational fear. And there is nothing “irrational” about fearing parts – though certainly not all – of Islam.
I remember words from Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s speech, she says, “Islam is not a religion of peace, it’s a political theory of conquest that seeks dominance by any means it can.” And then there is nothing irrational in fearing it. Wouldn’t it be rational to be “phobic” of 9/11 or 26/11 terrorists? It is rational to be “phobic” about Islam if you are an audacious Indian-born British-American novelist, if you work at French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo or if you are a brave girl who rejects a Muslim’s proposal in this secular country. Now the perpetrators may have their beliefs and what-so-ever, but being “phobic” of such things is a perfectly rational instinct, indeed I might call it a survival instinct.
Anyways, this article is not about the much used term, Islamophobia. It is about something else. The word which you hardly hear, which is a far more useful term and an infinitely more widespread phenomenon – “Islamophobia”. And it has gripped India and its political system.
Islamophilia, the expression of disproportionate adoration of Islam. It seems strange that so many people today can be quite so asinine and supine when it comes to ‘the religion’. In secular India, where the majority’s religion currently get a hell of a time, but Islam does not.
There are kinds of people who adore it and there are reasons for it.
Those who just think Islam is wonderful. As in the case of most of the people, who express over-the-top praise or love for Islam, whether or not they feel it. They do it because they either think they ought to or they feel they have to. Those who wish to be called liberal-minded, fair or otherwise decent. And the most commonly found kind, the people who are Islamophile because they don’t want to be tagged as Islamophobes.
It can be found across every spectrum of society. Strangely prominent among Indian politicians, supposedly clever college professors and ‘intelligentsia’. And of course the media and Bollywood is awash with sufferers.
In case anyone is under the impression that Islamophilia is a fringe activity, it is worth noting that some of the most powerful people on earth suffer debilitatingly from the condition. Let’s take example of the person who has not just affected now almost 4 to 5 generations of India, but Indian and Hindu Psyche as a whole. Yes, Mr. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
MK Gandhi not just supported Khilafat Movement, he went on to state: “I would gladly ask for postponement of Swaraj if thereby we could advance the interests of Khilafat”.
Handing out an atrociously infuriating prescription of non-violence for the Hindus to die “bravely”, Gandhi stated the following absurdity: “…I see nothing impossible in asking the Hindus to develop courage and strength to die before accepting forced conversion. I was delighted to be told that there were Hindus who did prefer the Moplah hatchet to forced conversion. If these have died without anger or malice, they have died as truest Hindus because they were truest among Indians and men… Even so is it more necessary for a Hindu to love the Moplah and the Mussalman more, when the latter is likely to injure him or has already injured him… Hindu help is at the disposal of the Mussalmans, because it is the duty of the Hindus, as neighbours, to give it…”
Mahatma Gandhi wrote in his ‘Young India’, ‘it is wrong to say that Islam has employed force. No religion in this world has spread through the use of force. No Musalman, to my knowledge, has ever approved of compulsion.’ Does this not show that Gandhi practiced political deception?
For Gandhi, no price was too great for appeasing Muslim. And the price for Gandhi’s Hindu Muslim Unity was always to be paid by the Hindus. He had let loose a monster that has assumed mythical proportions in Indian polity, the Muslim Appeasement.
In his book prophetically titled as ‘Gandhi and Anarchy’ published by Tagore and Company, Madras in 1922 he wrote: ‘It is impossible to believe that Gandhi and his adherents are not aware that this claim of the Mohammedans to be judged only by the Law of the Koran, is a claim which is the fons et origo of all Khilafat claims of whatever kind. It is well to be clear about this, for not only does the acceptance of the claim mean the death knell of the British Empire or Indo-British Commonwealth, whatever name we may care to give to the great fraternity of nations to which we belong, but specifically as regards India it means a real denial of Swaraj. for it involves Mohammedan rule and Hindu subjection.”
We all know about the Shah Bano Case. The Congress party, which had tacitly encouraged Muslim fundamentalists in order to garner their support during the elections, now played the appeasement card during this. The party could not let the judiciary wrestle Muslim support from its control. Votes were evidently more important than women’s rights.
1988, under Prime Minister Rajeev Gandhi, India became the first country to ban The Satanic Verses in 1988 as a pre-emptive measure. The ban was put in place even before Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa (religious edict) for the beheading of Rushdie.
H V Seshadri in his seminal book called: ‘The Tragic Story of Partition’, published in 1982 rightly summed up the Congress Party’s disastrous philosophy and policy of Muslim appeasement in these words: ‘Congress had been, from its very inception, caught in an ideological trap laid by the British: that the Congress could lay claim to be a national body only if all the religious communities in this land would come together on its platform; then alone would the British Government consider it as representative of all Indians and look into its demands.’
After independence, Nehru considered it his bounden duty to treat the Hindus of India as sacrificial goats in order to quench his thirst for Muslim infatuation through his pernicious policy of secularism and Muslim appeasement duly enshrined in Articles 29 and 30 of the Indian constitution.
Indira Gandhi amended the Indian constitution to confirm the first class secular special status of the Muslims in India and to relegate all the Hindus of India to the ‘communal’ degradation of a position of politically condemned second class citizens.
As H.V.Seshadri rightly concludes: ‘This was how the Congress – in place of educating the Muslims in lessons of the true content of emotional integration, i.e., making them realize the dangers of separatism and persuading them to share the common national aspirations and joys and sorrows of the rest of their countrymen – began pampering their divisive tendencies
Coming to present, participating in the prayers on the occasion of Id-Ul Fitr, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee urged the Muslim community to unite and vote in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
According to a RTI report revealed that the Delhi government, led by CM Arvind Kejriwal granted over Rs 101 crore of public funds to the Wakf board in the last seven years and Rs 62.57 crore alone in 2021.
Amanatullah Khan, an elected Muslim member of the Legislative Assembly, openly called for a beheading of a Hindu. And we pretended everything’s hunky-dory, because he’s ‘Muslim’
No leading Muslim figures or morally Muslim figures, or Indian politicians in power or the opposition condemned Khan’s call for a beheading.This was because this is what Islam stands for. Why would anybody like them condemn traditions of Islam?
If everybody in a country agress on something, from the Prime Minister, important historical figures to most film stars, almost whole of film industry, writers, proffesors, brain-boxes–then surely they must be right. Well, no. They are wrong. Wildly, terribly, embarrassingly and dangerously wrong. But Bharat has not yet learned any lesson from the blood soaked pages of their history of the past thirteen centuries caused by the Islam and Christianity.
As a result of historical blunders, the Hindus of Bharat at present, are facing three types of problems, and challenges: One directly from the Muslims, second from the pro-Muslim Hindus, communists and the so-called secularists, the short sighted selfish Hindu leaders, and the third from those Hindu leaders and Dharmacharyas who are neglecting the political aspects of Hindu Dharma in the discourses and dreaming for the eternity of Sanatan Hindu Dharma. Probably they are underestimating the long term consequences of the Jehadi policies and activities of the Muslims and of the ‘secularist’, being adopted since 1947.
An impartial historical analysis reveals that the Hindus have not lost so much morally and have not been humiliated, neglected and demoralised in the last thousand years, while fighting bravely with the barbarous Muslim invaders as they have been made to suffer in the last century 1901-1947 in British Rule, under Christianity, and 1947- 2002 in independent India,under Muslim appeasement in garb of Secularism.
