I am not a Muslim. And I am not a confessional. I was born a Hindu, a Kashmiri Pandit to boot. Your faith, I was told when very young, was between me and my God. It’s the God, the one and only, I am turning to explain to me why it should make a difference to anyone else, my being Hindu or Muslim or for that matter a Christian or, at the far end of it, to my being an atheist. Yet the more I look around myself, my neighborhood, my country, faith-based intolerance seems to have become an all pervasive obsession. The more you hate, the more acceptance you gain and, who knows, you may even have bought yourself a ticket to the corridors of power. Not exactly where power resides but near abouts, its offshoots such as a zila parishad, a municipal corporation or the legislative chambers in the States or I the event of your being the pushy sorts may at the Centre of it all. And to identify the object of your hate doesn’t really cost much effort either. You could way-lay the unwary young man taking home a cow or two or a group of men homing a few heads of cattle at the neighboring fair, and, silly you,it may well be that you didn’t shout loudly enough to celebrate Virat Kohli’s latest hundred or, the ultimate blasphemy, of having uttered the fatal words Hindustan Zindabad instead of a Vande Matram or a Bharat Mata ki Jai. Your offense is graver if you also happen to be a Muslim. Now, I don’t carry any religious marks and ,thank God, it hasn’t yet been made compulsory for the Hindu majority to sport “tilaks”,or those standout tufts of hair falling on the nape of your neck and in my 86th year, the last time I saw a movie, in the cinema hall nearby, I nearly got whipped by the fellows seated behind me when I failed to get up as the National Anthem hit the hall, saved by my wits, requesting the angry patriot behind me to give me a helping hand to rise. And why, pray, must Kashmiri students living in Haryana, Rajasthan or UP, to name some of the States, where they study, mostly on scholarships awarded by the government, be bashed up for watching a Pakistan team playing cricket in some distant part of the world (and not against India since bilateral ties stand banished) or simply because they do not look like say a Haryanvi or a Rajasthani etc. Most such students live in hostels and surely are no stone-throwers or rabble rousers as such. Why must they be subjected to utter humiliation, dragged to police stations and generally made to feel unwanted. The question arises why and how long must the Muslim remain a suspect. The current dispensation and its extended limbs, as any Kashmiri who has faced the wrath of authority in the State will affirm, firmly as long as the safronites continue to serve the poison that tells that Muslims generally are traitorous lot and therefore unworthy of trust. To the saffron eye Indian Muslims – forget the thought that he has been around for at least 1200 years – the Muslim continues to be a scourge. Their logic would have it that only a certain kind of Hindu can be an authentic Hindu or, according to them, an Indian. And so powerful do they believe they have become these past four years and more that that the communalism and hate mantra of the majority Hindu community appears to have, at least for the moment become the norm. This happens very much to be a part of the agenda of the extreme Hindu right, the RSS at the top of the bigoted heap, the ruing Bharatiya Janata Party and the other front al parivar organizations working furiously to fulfill their dream of Hindu Rashtra. To twist and misuse Hindu religion, faith and identity for narrow political purposes. All is fair in the “dharma yudh” as conceived by the founders of the RSS being currently fought in the streets as much as in the corridors of power not excluding the pillars on which the democratic setup of the founding fathers” dreams was supposed to rest. I am not letting out secrets: the fact remains that Press is muzzled, Parliament very often bypassed, the judiciary under severe attack and basic rights of citizens curbed as and when required by the saffron subedars in the States ruled directly or indirectly by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Nothing is sacrosanct. All is fair in the war that the parivar has unleashed in its hurry to take charge of the country as a whole and take the country back through the millennia to what they have traditionally liked to harp on the pre-Muslim glory that was India, a picture they have created in their mind’s eye of a unified once upon a time Bharat Varsha. I don’t wish to get embroiled in the left, right versions of history of the sub-continent but it would be fair to say that the land was over many millenniums but a conglomeration of principalities. The British and before them to a small extent Mughals did unsuccessfully try to put the map of India together but the British, who partly succeeded, too, had to contend with the existence of several hundreds Maharajas and Nawabs,described as the princely States within British India. That’s neither here nor there.The truth is that the saffron leadership of the day is determined to misuse Hindu religion,faith and identity for very narrow,limited political purposes. As someone has aptly put it the men of Hindutva/Hindu Rashtra have been fundamentally wrong in reducing a religion/faith which was actually a soaring metaphysical religion of questioning ,of doubt,of uncertainty into some sort of a badge of identity that any hooligan with pretensions to greatness would turn to.
You, A Muslim ?
