“Dear friends, the days of old Moghual Badshahi have passed. Now both of us will have to live ultimately as brothers here, as co-sharers in this national life. After all you also belong to the same race as ours, to the same blood as ours, but converted to Islam at the point of sword by those Moghul, Turk and other foreign races. Now, there is no point in continuing to associate yourself mentally with those foreign aggressors and trying to follow in their footsteps. Forget all such separatist memories; merge yourself in the life of this soil. Hereafter, try to respect and follow the examples of the great sons of this land who fought for the freedom and honour of the motherland and our culture.” – M S Golwalkar (Shri Guruji), Second Sarsanghachalak of RSS, Samadhan (Press Meets and Statements of Shri Guruji), Suruchi Prakashan, 2000, New Delhi, p 142
The year 2024 is supposed to be the year of elections worldwide. The biggest democratic festival is going on in Bharat, and many Western democracies will elect their governments in the coming months. Recently, the United Kingdom went through the local municipal elections, in which the stand on Gaza played a critical role. Muslim voters gave a sort of warning to the Labour Party while standing firm with Sadiq Khan despite his dismal performance on the law and order front as a Mayor of London. Of course, the Muslim Council of Britain played a critical role in shaping the campaign around the anti-Israel voting, which was a relatively insignificant issue in municipal elections. The reactions from the radical voices on the streets of London are all the more concerning. Their open claim of imposing Sharia in the coming years is nothing short of a subversion of democracy through demography.
In Bharat, the niece of a former Law Minister, Salman Khurshid, gave a call for Vote Jihad. The fearmongering of doing Vote Jihad to drive away this Sanghi Government” was not just provocative but also undermining the democratic principles.
A call given by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the Muslim community, in an interview on a private channel, is significant in this regard. He urged Muslims to get out of the mindset of “who to put in power and who to remove” for the sake of the future of their children”. Using religious power to defeat a particular political party has been the common voting trend of Muslims in Bharat since the pre-Independence period, which needs to be analysed and introspected by the community.
There are two sets of people who are interested in keeping Muslims in this state of ghetto politics. The first group consists of liberal seculars who shy away from the historical facts and present a fabricated picture of the Muslim community in Bharat. As Shri Guruji argued, “They call themselves as ‘Sheiks’ and ‘Syeds’. Sheiks and Syeds are certain clans in Arabia. How then did these people come to feel that they are their descendants? That is because they have cut off all their ancestral moorings of this land and mentally merged themselves with aggressors. They still think that they have come here only to conquer and establish their kingdoms”. Instead of making the Muslims realise that they are not outsiders or aggressors in this land but the victims of invasions that happened from 712 onwards by Arabs, Turks and Mongols,this self-certified gang of liberals are distorting history by glorifying invaders and whitewashing of their crimes. Any attempt to delve into the historical incidents termed as saffronisation and questioning any attempt to put Sharia before the Constitution is labelled as Islamophobic.
The biggest beneficiaries of this liberal-secular treachery are the radicals who try to play with the sentiments of the large masses over emotive issues and pan-Islamic identity. All the actions, starting from global identification with the Palestine issue, internationalisation of Jammu-Kashmir, glorification of invaders, standing for Sharia laws even if they promote gender discrimination and justifying violence in the name of Islam, emanate from the mindset of putting supremacist ideas of religion above everything. Subverting democracy with the use of demography eventually to impose the Sharia law on everyone is considered the divine duty of Muslims by this group. The same trend is visible now in other democracies.
Sometimes, in the short term, such a strategy of ‘Vote Jihad’ may be fascinating and fruitful, but in the long run, it only isolates the Muslim community from mainstream development. As Shri Guruji pointed out, “while bringing about integration with the nation in its practical life, destruction of distinct ways of worship is not aimed at, only putting an end to undesirable tendencies of exclusiveness and intolerance is aimed at”. The earlier Muslim community understood this simple fact: it is better for the nation and humanity.
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