Sunday, July 6, 2014

India, Muslims and Khilafat - By Ghulam Muhammed

Sunday, July 06, 2014


India, Muslims and Khilafat

With the coming to power of Modi with a very comfortable majority at the center, India could be on the threshold of a new era with the Idea of India taking a distinct turn towards a rightist Hindutva ideological formulation.

In the comity of nations India will appear to be charting a new course that has yet to unfold the full flavor of its supposedly cherished ideals and aspirations deeply drawn from its distant past of continuous experimentation with spiritual and temporal affairs.

However, the most visibly obvious challenge that its Hindutva ideology faces is its undeniable confrontation with Islam and Muslims that has robbed it of any originality that the world could look forward to.

Unlike Nehru, who had drawn a silk curtain around India and isolated the nation to give it a breathing space and develop the fundamentals of its new independent social and economic status while keeping it non-aligned in world affairs; Modi's government is finding itself in the very vortex of conflicting pulls of forces that is not offering any respite to pause and develop its own course of short term and longer term priorities.

The worst part is that its top leadership is very rapidly getting out of touch with its rank and file who were brought up on their own emotional priorities that do not gel with the challenges faced by the new government.  

From the Hindutva ideology, honed for over a century now, take out its hatred of Muslims, their history in India, and there potential to dominate any plural society with their distinct and well–established religious and social profile, and the entire edifice of Hindutva collapses.

The big challenge therefore for the new Hindutva government is how to go out in the open world with its anti-Muslim baggage.

Of course, it has support of the West and Israelis who are more or less committed to accommodate the new India on the highest tables of the world affairs. However, India cannot afford to be independent as well as dependent on the West for its survival as a proud and confident nation.

To compound the trials and tribulations, it is now faced with international challenges that directly pitch it against the same adversary that it has supposed to have licked to be able to come to power.

From Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Iraq, Modi's anti-Muslim reputation is creating more open adversaries than friends that a new government would love to cultivate.

For merely under 50 nurses held up in the newly occupied areas of Iraq, by ‘Islamic State’ or ISIS, India went through an agonizing fortnight, reliving the old Kandahar hijack saga, with media virtually loading its news with war hysteria language. In future, how we will deal with millions in the Gulf, if things go wrong with the monarchies of the peninsula. The new diehards are openly critical of India’s role against its Muslim minority. They would not need any signal one way or another to make a pretext of holding India to ransom for acts of commission and omission.

Afghanistan will be another headache in not distant future. If Indian leaders feel that the Western alliance and Israel will stand by it in any untoward happening in the region, it must be realized that their own problems with the Muslim hotheads are not yet under control, to be able to come to aid of India. Instead, they would like to drag India in their own imbroglio, whether India is willing or not.

With such unsavory climes engulfing the future of the area, the new announcement of a new Caliph, for whatever it is worth, will not be something India can possibly ignore.

With map making, being the cursor of threats, the entire Indian subcontinent being mapped as ‘Khurasan’ of the historical reference, is very unsettling and would require Modi government to deeply review its future course in dealing with both propaganda as well as symbolic disruptions that may leave India helpless and at the mercy of others that will not always forgo demanding their pound of flesh.

The swiftness, with which ISIS had spread out and captured territory in Iraq, cannot be so easy as it appears to be. Somebody is playing double game. And those masters of double game can always be there to attend to India, if that fits their national interest.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

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