An India of their dreams

I asked what was the alternative. His answer was at once starkly simple and stunningly profound. In no rational form of social organisation, he said, could rights be divorced from duties. None could hope to get something for nothing. You had to work for what you wanted.

If this argument were to be acted upon, India’s Muslims would no longer crouch in a dark well of hopelessness, they would no longer see themselves only as victims. Instead, they would see India as their country, to which they owed their all — and they would work to make the India of their dreams, the India of every Indian’s dreams. All Indians, working shoulder to shoulder.

Like the rest of us, Muslims in India must fight for their rights— but for their rights as citizens of a democratic nation, not just for their religious rights. A struggle which uses religion as its justification will only antagonise other religious communities, especially the majority, which will see it as a challenge. This will also be a distortion of the only struggle which is valid today — the struggle for every citizen’s rights, upon which alone a nation can stand.

If India’s Muslims claim only that which is guaranteed to every citizen by our Constitution, the Vedic Taliban — whose offensive is based on religious bigotry and is anti-democratic in a fundamental way — will be left with no leg to stand on. Their arguments, relying as they do on a travesty of religion, will count for nothing against a stand which has nothing to do with religion. They cannot then shriek about a mythical “appeasement” of those who contribute far more to the country than they themselves do or ever have done.