THE renewed secularist refrain of Muslim educational and economic backwardness and the need for redoubled efforts to remove it reminds me of certain pithy proverbs in various languages in view of the fact that recently even some authentic Muslim sources have been denying that they are backward any more. They in fact claim remarkable headway in their material status since 1947. But still the 100-year old litany continues forgetting their endemic social and religious obscurantism which is the real millstone round the community's neck. Obviously, nobody can do anything about it as long as they literally stick to the 7th century Islamic tenets under the constant whiplash of their mullahs and maulvis, the real arbiters of their immutable-politico social destiny of Islamic domination of India. But then the snag is that Nehruvian secularism has ensured them a privileged position to nurse their old Super-Race mindset.

In Punjabi, they call such Nehruvian sanitising and glamourising of Islamism as ‘Muddai sust, gawah chust’. Which means, the witness in a court case being more active than the plaintiff or the complainant himself. In English, they call it “Being more loyal to the crown than the King himself.” However, there is a more colourful version of the same also—“Being more Catholic than the Pope himself.” For, this is precisely the plight of Indian pseudo-secularism, which even after the creation of Pakistan has put Muslim minority in special category needing priority concern which encourages them to revert to an aggressive course instead of being on the defensive to wash off their past barbaric course in vivisecting India, simply because Congress needed their votes to offset the adverse reaction of the betrayed and disillusioned Hindu. As a result, rabid Muslim Leaguers downed the white cap and became lily-white patriots overnight.

I am saying this because a few days ago, when the Union Communications Minister, Shri Ram Vilas Paswan came out with the same politically-motivated refrain of ‘pathetic’ Muslim backwardness and the need to redress it, a local Jamaat-e-Islami biweekly came out with a frontpage article rebutting the contention with facts and figures to assert that the Indian Muslims are now comfortably much more placed as well as confident in the Indian educational and economic fields.

Apart from that assertion earlier convincingly argued by Maulana Waheeduddin Khan in an article in his book Indian Muslims, these are of course, certain fields which are their exclusive monopoly—for example, the smuggling trade as ‘Times of India's’ financial columnist once put it. Or the mafia channel for Gulf money which has flowed in billions, since the windfall in oil prices boom in 1974. More than fifty per cent of film business is in their grip. The oil money is above all used lavishly for myriad jehadist purposes of setting up mosques and madarsas in hundreds at strategic places all over India. A recent, Zee TV story highlighted the doubling of Madarsas with grand buildings in poorest areas of Rajasthan border.

Meanwhile, Nepal, Bangladesh, not to speak of the Pakistan are already rife with them to prepare committed soldiers of Islam for jehad, a sort of inevitable Armageddon in Kashmir and elsewhere. Meanwhile some old well-established institutions like Darul Uloom of Deoband and Nadwatul Ulema of Lucknow have been rearing up jehadis for even Central Asian republics and even Sinkiang province of China, as a recent American study has re-revealed.

Mafias, Gulf Money and Madarsas

Madarsas are of course modern militant Islam's most deadly weapons to subvert the Kafir countries as events in Kashmir have proved and the simmering situation in some other strategic Indian places may soon prove. Even a senior India Today columnist like Ms Tavleen Singh has painted an alarming picture of such fallout of the flawed Nehruvian secularism (September 11 issue) which has long used the RSS-BJP bogey to frighten Muslims into secular arms and perpetuated medieval mindset among them. It has rewritten history to paint even vandals like Aurangzeb in secular hues. They allow the Muslims to keep their retrogade civil code why not give them their criminal code of barbaric Shariat punishments also, she asks. This Nehruvian generosity is not helping poor Muslims but breeding resentment among Hindus, says the columnist.

Meanwhile, some secularist scribes and media mandarins are still busy serving the ferocious enemy faithfully by their diversionary strategy of making the Hindutva family their most obsessive target. Whereas actually, there would have been no Kashmir problem or even the Babri demolition if they had lavished even ten per cent of such attention on the deadly Islamic machinations instead of mindless bashing of a mythical Hindu fundamentalism.

Recently, publication of some anti-national stories—for example in the Hindustan Times which is apparently under the thumb of the general secretary of Mulayam Singh's SP outfit, Ch. Amar Singh, a conman of the Birlas for decades, as well as in the Times of India and the Hindu, even inventing security forces' atrocities on the Kashmiri Muslims to overshadow the killing of over a hundred innocent Hindus during Amar Nath Yatra in a single day, undoubtedly reveal a renewed sinister game that the Human Rights wallahs have been playing so often. These are obviously meant to vitiate Shri Vajpayee's visit to the USA.

‘Qurbani’ for Pakistan

No wonder, the BBC has also got active in playing up the pitiable plight of Indian Muslims in a recent detailed story, Eagerly lapping it up, a Pakistani paper remarked significantly that the Indian Muslims underwent a willing sacrifice of their future for the creation of an Islamic state under the ‘Qurbani’ theory. They are suffering but are happy that they helped in creating Pakistan which is committed for the supremacy of Islam in the rest of India, says the same columnist in Nawai Waqt of Lahore. But the thrust of the story is that Muslims can never expect justice from Hindus. Which is a case of Chor Machaye Shor. The thief crying, Thief! Thief!! But the pity is such India-bashing and Hindu-bashing has been the staple diet of Nehruvian secularism also right since 1947 which even Dr Rajendra Prasad resented in a letter to Nehru dated September 17, 1947.

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Anyway, this renewed refrain of Muslim backwardness and even persecution despite their Super Race conduct and the cries of need to woo them doubly for their vote bank veto has emboldened their political, religious and media guardians no end so as to make them give up their mood of introspection which was triggered by BJP's rise to power. It has put them on the offensive again, after their brief spell of sobriety. Only sometime back they were deeply concerned that the Muslim voting bloc in India has been rendered irrelevant by BJP's rise as the most powerful political nucleus of a truly federal and stable government without the assistance of Muslims.

More alarmingly, they discovered that even secularist parties could not help them to win even half of the seats warranted by their population ratio because of the obnoxious disruptionist image that Muslim leaders have acquired. Their claims that no government could be formed without their permission and exercise of veto power has been punctured. It was in fact, the defeat of the old Jinnah policy of continuous bargaining and bullying and threats of joining up with the scheduled castes, the backwards, and the fringe elements to restore the Akbar-style Mughal-Rajput coalition dreamed of even by Maulana Azad.

So, we find that after sustaining the Nehruvian brand of anti-Hindu secularism so long, they started playing musical chairs with other small parties shifting their loyalty to one unstable group or the other. The result was that while they claimed to be the King-makers, they ended up crumb-pickers. But the fatal ‘hubris’ still prevents them from behaving as normal citizens satisfied with equal civil rights.

Their main declared enemy is of course the resurgent Hindutva front just as the ‘Hindu’ Congress was in the pre-partition era, because their religious fixations compel them to treat every Hindu dominated entity as enemy to be treated as a temporary ally by compulsion of circumstances till the final Quranic injunction of Islamic hegemony is implemented. Naturally, they feel uneasy all along in a country dominated by shirk and but-prasti (polytheism and idol-worship). This is their religion and politics. They can never feel or be treated as normal human beings unless they get out of this mindset. However, the pity is they keep dashing their heads against ‘saffron’ mindset, which is indeed the basic national mindset in forming even the pseudo-secular Gandhian mindset which is anathema to them now after years of co-habitation with the Congress.

Genocide of Pandits in Kashmir led to Babri demolition

Even if one forgets creation of Pakistan as black-mark in their confidential file, the Pakistan-propelled Kashmiri militancy, silently condoned by most of their zealous keepers, is a permanent reminder of their rejection of Indian secularism and contempt for liberal Hindu polity. The Babri episode was but a fall out and only an infinitesmal reprisal of an unbroken chain of brutal medieval type temple desecrations, massacres and wholesale expulsion of Kashmiri Pandits from the Islamised Valley, an operation now extended to Jammu and Ladakh. Thus, it is the Muslim leaders who have to win the confidence of Hindus and not vice-versa. The pseudo-secularists are leading them up the blind alley by mollycoddling them to think otherwise for temporary gains.

Meanwhile, regarding failure of Nehruvian nostrums on other fronts, one is reminded of a recent appraisal of Nehru-Gandhian dynastic era by the eminent Indo-Anglian author Ms. Nayantara Sahgal, daughter of Jawaharlal's sister Vijaylakshmi Pandit, in an article entitled ‘Tryst with Destiny’ in a special Millennium Issue (Vol. II) of India Today. While she gives credit to that dynastic patriarch, Jawaharlal's autocracy for “ensuring stability in government by and large” and for building a self-reliant and diverse industrial base of independent India, she finds fault only with Smt. Indira Gandhi for launching “a decade of giant statism with a hugely expanded public sector”.

As Ms Sahgal further puts it, “A grand strategy of centralisation reduced Centre-State relations to an imperial court and its retainers,” so that “a personalised power structure did away with the (intermediate) rungs of command in her party and the government, and called for commitment to the regime from civil servants and judges. It also brought development and welfare programmes within her orbit of power. Time turned back, stood still.” It was to all intents and purposes a ‘monarchical’ system with ‘the glamour of court” prevailing in Delhi, she says. In fact Nehru-Gandhian scheme of things was to turn the whole nation into a gulag of government servants under a private dynastic dispensation.

Ms Sahgal, however, glosses over the roots of this wild, weedish outgrowth in the Nehruvian era which as B.K. Nehru, Indira Gandhi's cousin and former diplomat-governor, says in his memoirs was marked by idiotic extravagance and sycophancy. Sahgal's myopia, however, springs from the fashionable liberal lack of moral courage to look a gift horse in the month; in this particular context failure to see the blind spots of a charismatic icon of the independence struggle, skilfully planted and imposed by a fawning foster-father, Mahatma Gandhi. To borrow an observation of Subhas Chandra Bose, such soft-pedalling only exploits a general lack of critical sense in the Indian character.