Opinion The Muslim question

Following the tragedy of Partition,Muslims in India have been treated as a special species. The true secularist does not even refer to Muslims as such. They are called the minority. But are there not other minorities? Are Muslims the largest minority? Or are they,as a recent excellent paper by Javed Jamil says,the second largest majority? Does the status of a minority outrank their status as citizens? Are they the only group who has to ‘enjoy’ (suffer?) this special treatment?

The Partition was a great blow to the Congress’s vision of India. Congress leaders agreed to the Partition,of course. They did not resist Muhammad Ali Jinnah; indeed there is ample evidence that Congress leaders were quite impatient by April 1947 to get rid of the Muslim League rather than share power with it. But once the deed was done,there was denial. It was said that Jinnah believed in the two nation theory. The Congress apparently did not,but had to agree due to the perfidious British.

The denial has been accompanied by guilt and the result is an arrogant presumption that only the Congress can guarantee the welfare of Muslims in India. It has not helped Muslims attain full citizenship as they are considered a case which requires special treatment. After 66 years of tergiversation,the time has now come to have an open and frank discussion about what it means to be a Muslim in India. At 180 million,the community needs no special treatment. It needs to be considered a full member of India just like any other community.

This idea seems to be gaining ground in Muslim circles. Mehmood Madani,one of the leading lights of the community,has said what has been obvious for a while but was put in sharper focus by the events in Muzaffarnagar. Secular parties frighten Muslims with specter of Hindutva supporters depriving them of their basic rights. They tell Muslims that they have no choice but to vote for secular parties. Yet Muslims lag behind in the social and economic index everywhere.

If we did not have the secularist ideology but one of equal citizenship,we would not have Mandal which is a blatantly Hindu reservation agenda depriving all non-Hindu communities of equal rights. If there has to be affirmative action,why can it not be based on objective criteria of social and economic deprivation? Why did the Mandal Commission adopt a Hindu stance on deprivation and,even if they did,why did successive governments violate the fundamental rights in the Constitution to concoct such casteist positive discrimination policies?

Once you abandon secularism in such a gross manner,you have to scramble around and define Christian Dalits or Muslim Dalits. In the very least,a new debate on the Muslim question should replace the Mandal nonsense by objective criteria which can help the deprived of all communities without imposing losses on any one of them. That is real inclusion.

Finally,to say that a BJP government will leave Muslims unsafe is to indict the last 66 years of Indian democracy. Is it so fragile that only one party should be in power forever? Is this not also the party which has managed to keep Muslims captive and backward all this time?