Why Muslims have it better in India
India remains an island of pluralism in a world driven by bigotry. That thought will astonish The New York Times. It will also make India's self-styled secular cabal apoplectic.
India in the jaundiced view of Western newspapers took a sharp right turn when the Narendra Modi government assumed office. They made dire predictions: there will be communal riots. Muslims and Christians will be persecuted. The country will go up in sectarian flames. Two years later, The New York Times and the equally sanctimonious Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post have enough egg on their face to make an omelette.
Facts are no longer sacrosanct for some newspapers. They fix the narrative and then mould the "facts" to fit that narrative. In good old-fashioned terms, it's called agenda-driven journalism.
Facts
So what are the facts? Incidents of communal violence actually declined in 2015 (630 incidents) over 2013 (694 incidents). Ah, but there was Dadri, wasn't there? There was and it shamed the Hindu mob who lynched Akhlaq - an act of criminalilty whether or not he was eating, storing or selling beef.
But one Dadri does not make a majoritarian state. Muslims in India remain the most pampered minority anywhere in the world. In Europe, Muslims face a vicious backlash over refugees.
In the United States, the Republican party's presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has demonised Muslims.
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| Muslims are the most pampered minority in India. (Reuters) |
In India, in sharp contrast, Muslims are allowed to keep their personal laws, including triple talaq, banned even in most Muslim-majority countries like the Middle East and East Asia.
Muslims pray unhindered in mosques across India, often on public pathways. The Hindu majority goes quietly about its business, respectful of the pious, especially in this holy month of Ramzan.
Of course there are wrinkles in this story: in Uttar Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, West Bengal and elsewhere communal tension simmers.
Most of it is driven by politicians whipping up emotions to polarise communities.
And yet, Muslims in India enjoy privileges minorities in other countries can only dream of. They have their own subsidised universities. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared that Muslims have first rights over India's natural resources. Muslims set the agenda in electoral politics in several states.
Parties like the Trinamool Congress treat West Bengal's 28 per cent Muslim "minority" with kid gloves, offering sops and even Ramzan food packs.
The Samajwadi Party mollycoddles its 19 per cent Muslim minority, looking the other way when they riot.
The Congress regards Muslims with particular benevolence. Its liberal, secular mission is to "protect" minorities from big, bad majoritarian India.
The result of 60 years of such protection? Muslims are India's poorest, most backward group - worse off than even scheduled castes, according to both the Sachar Committee and Mishra Commission reports. All of this has made India a "minoritarian", not a majoritarian country.
Hindutva
But isn't the BJP reversing 60 years of poverty-inducing minoritism with soft and hard Hindutva? Haven't Sadhvi Prachi and Yogi Adityanath demonised Muslims in the same way as Trump has in America? Of course they have.
But just as Trump's irresponsible rhetoric doesn't make the United States a majoritarian country, the rantings of Sadhvi Prachi and Yogi Adityanath don't make India a majoritarian country either.
Muslims in India don't need the paternalistic protection of the Congress, TMC, SP, RJD, AAP and other parties that preach liberal secularism but practice a dishonest minoritism that does nothing to raise Muslims from the economic and social morass they have been stuck in for decades.
The warm embrace of parties practising counterfeit secularism has kept then trapped in that morass.
In a majoritarian country, laws discriminate against minorities. In India they don't. Quite the contrary, they often end up discriminating against the majority community in states like Jammu and Kashmir and West Bengal.
In a majoritarian country, minorities face persecution not just from the state but from the majority community. In India, they don't - and when they do it is the exception, not the rule.
Tradition
When a Shabana Azmi is refused a flat in Mumbai or Muslim boys are unjustly locked up without trial, it reflects on India's flawed cultural tradition of segregated housing on the one hand and an antiquated criminal justice system on the other, not majoritarianism.
Does that mean the BJP is innocent of practising majoritarianism in the past? Obviously not. The BJP rode to power in 1998 on the back of LK Advani's rath yatra in 1990 and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.
Polarisation of majority votes was a central electoral strategy that catapulted it from two MPs in 1984 (when the party was just four years old) to 182 MPs in 1998.
But now that it is in office with 282 MPs, it must abandon the impulses of the past. A new generation of Indians born in the 1990s want development, jobs and growth. They are religious but not communal.
If Shaira Bano, who is fighting a triple talaq case against her husband Rizwan Ahmed, lived in Turkey (which, like 21 other Muslim countries, has abolished triple talaq), she'd have got secular justice by now.
In India, she is reduced to pleading for Muslim personal law to be reformed to give women like her equal rights.
Had India been a majoritarian country, outdated Muslim personal laws would have been reformed despite protests from influential Muslims.
In minoritarian India, even the BJP doesn't dare do that and give Shaira Bano justice.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)