Opinion Fifth Column: Je suis Charlie Hebdo

For me, the most important lesson that we need to learn from the horrible massacre at the office of the French satirical magazine is that we must stand up more fiercely for India’s values: democracy, the freedoms it brings and religious tolerance. Too many European countries have failed to defend their values and traditions and, in a twisted form of political correctness, have allowed Muslim immigrants to impose their values instead. They have demanded and been granted rights that they would never dare ask for in the totalitarian theocracies from which most of them flee. So it was perhaps only a matter of time before countries like France with huge Muslim populations would start to suffer jihadi blowback.

What should worry us is that something similar has been happening in India for decades and because of ‘secularism’ and the Muslim vote bank, political leaders rarely dare to speak up against it. The ones who do come from Hindutva’s lunatic fringe and they do more damage than good with their hate speeches and hysteria. This has allowed lefties and secularists to occupy the moral high ground and created a peculiar situation in which the biggest sympathisers of radical Islamists are godless Marxists. If the smallest measure is taken to control the spread of virulent jihadi Islam, the first people to raise their voices are likely to be writers and politicians from the extreme left. These are the same people who are the first to start shrieking hysterically at the smallest sign of Hindutva.

It is most unfortunate that in the past decade these leftist rabble-rousers have been fully backed by the Congress party. Rahul Gandhi has gone on record (according to Wikileaks), telling an American ambassador that Hindu fundamentalism is a bigger threat than jihadi Islam. It is time to state, in the clearest possible terms, that this is a big, fat lie. The biggest threat to India comes from the worldwide jihad. It has created, in Muslim communities across the country, a sense of persecution and a sense of power. And it has radically changed the nature of Indian Islam which, until recently, was very different from Wahhabi Islam.

Indian Islam produced poets, writers, musicians and academics who have left an extraordinarily enlightened legacy that is now under serious threat from semi-literate mullahs and illiterate jihadists. Ghalib, Mir, Faiz and Iqbal would today be shot dead for the crime of ‘insulting’ Islam and if India were a Muslim country, their murder would be celebrated.

We need to remember that India is not a Muslim country so we are not obliged to make any concessions to Islam’s new crusaders. Too many concessions have been made already in the name of ‘secularism’. In this column some years ago, I wrote about the ugly religiosity I saw in the Dar-ul-Uloom seminary in Deoband. A similar ugly atmosphere of extreme religiosity and paranoia now exists in Muslim communities across India and there are fewer and fewer signs of the older version of Islam that gave us such a rich and refined legacy.

It is time for India to at least stand by secularism and make it clear to Muslims, Hindus and everyone else that they are more than welcome to worship in whichever way they prefer, but privately. In a truly secular country, there should be no room for religious exhibitions in the public square and if we remain true to this principle then the recent hysterics over conversions and re-conversions will automatically calm down.

Speaking of which, did you notice that the rage we saw from so many ‘secular’ activists over the actions of Hindutva groups in recent months was absent when Charlie Hebdo was attacked? One especially loud-mouthed Congress secularist went so far as to condone the massacre on the grounds that this was a consequence of the global war on terror. This bizarre justification fits perfectly with other Congress officials blaming the 26/11 attack on the RSS. Decades of warped secularism have created a situation today where jihadists appear to get ever closer to their goal of raising the flag of Islam over India once more. Horrible thought!

Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ tavleen_singh