| Terror of Secularism! | |||
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By: V Sundaram, IAS, Retd. April 24, 2006 Views expressed here are author’s own and not of this website. Full disclaimer is at the bottom. 
FeedbackThe great nationalist and intellectual Sita Ram Goel asked the pertinent question: Why are we not asking whether Islam believes in "secularism", whether Islam believes in religious toleration, whether Islam believes in the peaceful coexistence of communities? If he was alive today, he would have been dismissed by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh and Home Minister Shivaraj Patil and other "secular" politicians as a saffronized, non-secular and communalist Hindu. In 2005, the Dussehra festival saw Muslim mobs attacking Hindu devotees in the eastern Uttar Pradesh town of Mau. Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav remained stolidly neutral in order to retain his Muslim vote-banks in Uttar Pradesh. When the compassionate and truly secular and doubtlessly non-saffronised bomb-blasts took place in New Delhi during Diwali in 2005, the pseudo-secular leaders in the Government of India remained unshaken unruffled and unmoved. In March 2006, the combined protests over President George W Bush"s visit and the Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet saw Lucknow being brought to a standstill and Hindu business establishments being attacked under the umbrella of Mulayam Singh government"s declared anti-Hindu secularism. Soon thereafter came the Holi-eve Varanasi outrage at the Sankat Vimochan temple in the first week of March, 2006 in which many people were killed at the temple and many grievously injured. This outrage was viewed as an exercise of "legitimate minority rights" by both the anti-Hindu Central government led by Manmohan Singh in New Delhi and the anti-Hindu government of Mulayam Singh in Uttar Pradesh. To crown it all we now have the communal clashes between Hindus and Muslims on Ramnavmi Day in Aligarh last week. My mind goes back to 1943. Hitler"s right hand Himmler and his family used to watch the procession of young Jewish children and women being marched to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland in 1943. In our shame and shameful democracy today, we now have Manmohan Singh, Shivraj Patil, Sonia Gandhi, Mulayam Singh Yadav and a gang of pseudo-secular anti-Hindu leaders watching with stoic indifference helpless Hindu pilgrims being bombed to death by Muslim terrorists at various Hindu temples on holy days like Dusserah, Diwali, Holi, and Ramnavmi in interminable succession. In this context let our "secular" leaders take heed from the following beautiful poem called "Deadly Warning to the Secularists": First they came for the Hindus And we did not speak out on their behalf Because they are not secular Then they came for the Sikhs And we did not speak out on their behalf Because they are not secular Then they came for the Jains And we did not speak out on their behalf Because they are not secular Then they came for the Buddhists And we did not speak out on their behalf Because they are not secular Then they came for the Parsis And we did not speak out on their behalf Because they are not secular Then the marauders came for us ? Sonia Gandhi Manmohan Singh Lalu Prasad Yadav Ram Vilas Paswan Mulayam Singh Yadav Sitharam Yelchuri Harkishan Singh Surjeeth Karunanidhi Lately Chandra Babu Naidu They all cried out in despair BUT WE ARE SECULAR! And then they heard the terrorists declare BUT WE ARE NOT SECULAR! We don"t want to be secular. Of Course, Terrorism can ill afford to be secular! What is of great public concern is that the mafia of Mass Media in India is always in a state of ever-alert combat readiness to assist, aid and abet the pseudo-secular UPA non-government in new Delhi and the "Araaj" Islamic government of Mulayam Singh in regard to the coverage and conveyance of true and irrefutable news about the Hindu Muslim riots now going on in Aligarh. There is no need for the media or the government to resort to the politically expedient euphemism of clashes arising from differences of opinion between two communities in Aligarh while referring to the communal clashes between Hindus and Muslims on Ram Navami Day last week still continuing in a boiling situation blessed by all the secularists in India. The facts relating to the communal tension in Aligarh today are too well known to be hidden below the carpet by the pseudo-secular worshippers of Compassionate Islam. Indefinite curfew has been clamped in the communally sensitive areas of Aligarh city following violent clashes between Hindus and Muslims last week. These clashes have resulted in the loss of eight lives, besides injuries to several others. The main point to be noted is that the whole trouble began on Ramnavmi Day and it was engineered in a deliberate manner by some anti-national and anti-social Muslim elements. The clashes were sparked off by a dispute pertaining to decoration at a temple and use of loudspeakers on Ramnavmi day in the sensitive Dahiwali Gali area. Soon, the temple wall was found damaged and things spiralled out of control. The self-proclaimed secularists of India at the highest levels of governance in New Delhi and Lucknow would like to view the Aligarh fracas as a proverbial and isolated incident. Unfortunately, established empirical evidence for more than 200 years suggests otherwise. The series of incidents in the last 10 months only points to a newly emerging disturbing pattern which can be ignored by the UPA government and the state government in Uttar Pradesh, only at our national peril. They should not fail to distinguish between terrorist attacks which have a greater external dimension and contrived "issues" leading to frequent domestic attacks on the Hindu community, which has been the case in Mau, Lucknow and now in Aligarh. What passes for secularism in India is epitomised in the title of Sita Ram Goel"s book "India"s Secularism: New Name for National Subversion". According to him, in the West, historically secularism stood for rationalism, universalism and humanism. In India today, "Secularism" is a united front of all anti-Hindu ideologists: Islam, Christianity and Communism. In the context of minority appeasement which has led to a sad perversion of India"s political parlance, I would term all the THREE as "LANGUAGES OF IMPERIALISM". Each of these is an intolerant, aggressive and violent ideology and each aims at a conquest of the world by rooting out other pagan religions. Each of them has a history soaked in the blood of the innocent. All over the world, they are enemies of one another; but in secular India alone, they are always found on the same side against their common enemy: "Hinduism". Unlike the secularists with feet of clay in New Delhi and elsewhere in India, I am not surprised that the communal riots are now rocking a town like Aligarh, with an established tract record of such riots for more than 100 years. In this context I would invite the kind attention of all the Police Officers, Intelligence Officers, I.A.S. Officers and all the secular Ministers in New Delhi and the States to a brilliant book written by R N P Singh, a retired Intelligence Bureau Official, entitled "Riots and Wrongs" which was published in 2004. He has objectively and thoroughly analysed the historical and cultural roots of Hindu-Muslim animosity. In this book he presents an interesting visual representation of what he calls Vicious Circle of Communal Riots. According to him, provocation leads to confrontation to conflagration to force deployment to attrition to normalcy to friction to tension and back to provocation. That he describes as the "Primary Cycle." Then, there is a "Secondary Cycle": Provocation leads to confrontation, to conflagration to insecurity to migration to ghettoisation to alienation to fundamentalism and then on to the eternal wait for fresh grounds of provocation. To quote the appropriate words of R N P Singh in this context: The subject of Hindu-Muslim relationship has been a matter of debate, both during pre-partition and post-partition eras. Perhaps, the crux of the problem has not been looked into honestly by a section of the scholars. The main reason behind communal problems in India is the dilemma posed before the major section of Muslims, i.e. to choose between the secular democratic way and the hard line tenets of Islam, which declares that "Allah" is the only God, Mohammed is the only leader, Quran is the only Constitution and Jehad is the only path. Hindus, even after facing the barbaric behaviour of the Muslims for so many years, always stretched their hands to embrace Muslims, which was evident in 1857 during the first war of Independence against the British. Muslims overlooked it. Another serious such attempt was made by Mahatma Gandhi in 1918-21, in spite of opposition from a section of the Congress Party. Gandhiji openly declared that for the religious cause of Muslim brothers, Hindus should join the Khilafat Movement. But this attempt too received a serious set back when the Moplah Muslims in Calicut (now Kozhikode) turned Khilafat Movement into a horrible Hindu-Muslim riot. The subsequent situation including Direct Action Day of August 16, 1946 and partition of the country after unparalleled riots in 1947 are well-known. IS IT NOT THE NATURE OF THE ISLAM, WHICH HAS KEPT MUSLIMS FIGHTING AND INDULGING IN VIOLENCE SINCE ITS INCEPTION TILLD ATE? Though history has been a witness to this cruel and barbaric behaviour since Islam"s birth, only after the Muslims" attack on World Trade Centre, New York on 11 September, 2001, did the world openly realise this phenomenon. India has been facing such Islamic terror for many years, but the world ignored it. Indians have been living a miserable life since the day in 711 AD when Muhammed-bil-Quasim invaded Sindh. V Sundaram, IAS, Retd.
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