RELIGION-INDIA: Muslims Seek Integration into Secular Mainstream

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Analysis by Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Feb 26 2004 (IPS) - India’s minority Muslims are in a new mood of reconciliation with majority Hindus and there are clear signs that large or influential sections are ready to integrate into a truly secular national mainstream as set out in the country’s Constitution.

Last week, Muslim leaders in northern Uttar Pradesh rejected as a misplaced gesture an order by Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav, whose regional Samajwadi Party is popular with Muslims, closing schools in the state by noon on Fridays to allow students to attend prayers at mosques.

”School children are not very regular when it comes to namaaz (prayers) anyway so why this populist move now?” asked Maulana Kalbe Jawwad, a leading Shia scholar in Uttar Pradesh, where 32 million Muslims make up 20 percent of the state’s population of 166 million.

Uttar Pradesh also is home to nearly one-fourth of the 140 million Muslims who make India the world’s second largest Islamic country after Indonesia. But India is overwhelmingly Hindu, with the majority community making up 80 percent of the country’s billion-plus population.

Reacting to Yadav’s gesture Kamal Faruqui, a member of the influential Muslim Personal Law Board, said: ”Muslims don’t need this kind of tokenism. What they need is constructive action such as more schools and not a half-day of teaching.”

”Symbolic politics is no mark of secular credentials,” said Javed Akhtar, the well-known screen writer and lyricist who has been at the forefront of efforts by civic groups to bring about peace and harmony between India’s two major religious groupings.

The Times of India newspaper, in an editorial on Feb. 21, a day after Yadav was compelled to withdraw his order, commended the Muslim community and said it had, ”in the face of its own extreme hardship and misfortune, bravely resisted the cynical ‘secular’ stratagem of Hindi heartland leader.”

Yadav found himself widely accused of giving the centrally-ruling, pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) another opportunity to scream ‘minority appeasement’ and then position himself as a defender of minority interests and marginalising the Congress party and others which lay claim to secularism.

The BJP owes its meteoric rise to prominence in national politics during the 1990s by harping on about ‘minority appeasement’ by the Congress party. By 1998, it cornered enough votes from the Hindu community to form a government led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

BJP rule has alienated India’s Muslims more than ever before. In 2002, the country saw the worst communal violence since its traumatic partition in 1947 to create Islamic Pakistan in the west and what later became Bangladesh to the east.

At least 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, died in the 2002 violence in western Gujarat state, where a BJP state government led by Narendra Modi refused to rein in Hindu mobs as they raped, burned and looted at will to avenge the deaths of 60 people on Feb. 27 that year, when a train carrying Hindu pilgrims was set ablaze at Godhra station.

Two years after the pogrom, on Feb. 7, 2004, federal sleuths from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), on orders from the Supreme Court, dug up mass graves in Gujarat that clearly suggested the complicity of the Gujarat state police in the carnage.

In spite of such a gruesome record, the BJP hopes to win support from the Muslim community in the elections and Vajpayee is now personally appealing to prominent political leaders from the community to join his party as the only one which can guarantee their safety and well-being.

The BJP has in recent days managed to win over to its side such influential Muslim politicians as Arif Mohammed Khan, a former external affairs minister, and Najma Heptullah, who has served 24 years in parliament’s upper house, the Rajya Sabha, much of it as deputy chairperson of the house.

Khan said he would strive to build good relations with the BJP and ”travel with them to Gujarat to build communal harmony in the state.”

His plans also include cooperating with the BJP to find a settlement on Ayodhya, the town in Uttar Pradesh where BJP supporters tore down the 16th century Babri mosque and swore to rebuild on the site a temple to the Hindu deity which they believe stood there until it was razed by Muslim invaders in mediaeval times.

Observers feel that the new rapproachment is possible mainly because of the personality of Vajpayee, who is seen as a moderate even though he leads a party that owes its rise to a fundamentalist agenda.

”Vajpayee has demonstrated so clearly to his party that its sectarian and divisive platform of the past cannot provide the route to lasting power, even if it did well for a Narendra Modi in Gujarat, and that the future for the BJP lies in occupying the political centre,” wrote Sanjay Baru, chief editor of the Financial Express newspaper.

Vajpayee’s success in building peace with Pakistan also has boosted his image tremendously among Muslims in India who have a major stake in peace between the two countries since many of them have relatives living across the border.

”Our policy is to have peace with all our neighbours while keeping the country’s interests in mind,” Vajpayee told a largely Muslim election meeting on Wednesday at Ajmer-sharief, a well-known Sufi shrine in western Rajasthan close to the Pakistan border.

”Many Pakistanis want to travel to India. If we can’t pull down the walls between us, let us at least open the windows and let light stream in,” Vajpayee said, explaining a policy which has won him international approbation and may yet win him another election.