Sunday, October 11, 2009
Times of India flashing of Pew Report on global Muslim population becomes Talk of the Nation
Providentially it was Friday, the most auspicious day of the week for the Muslims, when India’s largest circulation daily newspaper, The Times of India came out with its report headlined: One in four people worldwide is Muslim.
Any news about Muslims, good or bad, in India can never be ignored. But thanks to constant propaganda by Hindutva Parivar about Muslims multiplying like rabbits and eventually taking over the world, if not India by the sheer number of its population; the newspaper readership in India made the news the most talked about news item in the nation. The dread of ‘the Muslims are coming’ seems to have gripped entire length and breadth of the nation with some unknown uncertain feeling of unease. A question seems to hit the most worried of the lot: how this will end. The stunning silence in the media, after publication of the report was ample sign that the entire nation is stunned into silence. At TOI website, not a single comment was posted by its readers.
On the other side, Indian Muslims gathered for Friday prayers, had nothing but the news item to discuss and congratulate each other. Indian Muslims are a forlorn lot. For the last 63 years, the Brahminical political strategies had virtually reduced 150 million of them to an unknown entity within their own country. Congress Brahmins were the most successful with keeping India Muslims on tenterhook and compel them to vote for it, with a combination of promises that are rarely fulfilled and touting of its pseudo –secularism, that guaranteed them physical protection, though hundreds of thousands of communal riots would clearly belie their secular bona fides.
A new topic of discussion following the population tally of the 3 sub-continental neighbours, India – Pakistan – Bangladesh coming up to a grand figure of 450 million, took up from where recently Jaswant Singh has started with his new evaluation of the role of Jinnah in India’s partition.
Indian Muslims are aware that even when British were playing its game over granting freedom of British India, those that passionately called for United India, within Muslim community were not insignificant and infinitesimal in numbers. With PEW figures, it is not hard to imagine, how Muslims would have fared in United India, with such a huge number and percentage dominating the nation in every sphere of its existence.
There is no qualms for some to speculate that Muslim unity was deliberately divided in the subcontinent, to render Muslims incapable of any political weightage in the new politics of democracy, especially when it comes to counting of heads.
It is in this perspective that Indian Muslims are once again forced to reiterate their belief that Jinnah had seriously erred in his judgment when he collaborated with the British and agreed to procure a ‘part of India’ for them to base their military outpost when India goes free.
Sixty year down the line, Pakistan is still in the grip of western strategies playing the Great Game.
The way the US-backed army has been humiliated in their own General Head Quarters in Rawalpindi, shows that both West and Jinnah have failed to grasp the real genius of the people of the region. There will never be peace in the region, until and unless the people are masters of their own destiny and not sold out to the interest of the Western colonization.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
