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FIFTH
COLUMN
Ghosts
of Perception
Imaginary
grievances are driving a wedge between different communities
By
Tavleen
Singh
If
there is one thing we can really do without it is the tedious litany of
grievances that we hear from the self-appointed leaders of both Hindus
and Muslims. When are they going to understand that an atmosphere of grievances
helps nobody? And, that when it filters down to the semi-literate and
the semi-informed it only intensifies feelings of fanaticism and the mentality
of ghettos. It seems to be a season of grievances. First, we had the Big
Chief of the RSS, K.S. Sudarshan, celebrate the 75th birthday of his organisation
by whining about the threat of Christianity to Hindu India. How our tiniest
minority (less than 2 per cent) constitutes a threat to a country that
is 80 per cent Hindu only Chief Bongabong knows but he feels intimidated
enough to complain constantly.
 Then
we had the new Imam of Delhi's Jama Masjid announcing plans to start a
Muslim political party. He feels the need to do this, he told The Asian
Age, because all that the Muslims got in 50 years of supporting secular
leaders was a big, fat zero. "We did not accept Jinnah as our leader,
we recognised only Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, V.P. Singh and others,
but what have we got in return: only empty slogans and hollow promises,"
he declared. So, the solution of this wise new Muslim leader is a new
version of the Muslim League, guaranteed to make even non-believers in
Hindutva think that perhaps Chief Bongabong has a point. Result: more
ghettoisation, more hatred, more communal tension. Imam Syed Ahmed Bukhari
seems to think of this as a worthy objective or his first move would not
have been to get in touch with Kashmiri Muslim leaders in support of his
cause. Has he forgotten that the Kashmiri leaders he is trying to rally
round want azadi for Kashmir? Does he think it will help the cause of
Indian Muslims if they are seen to be supporting a violent, secessionist
movement in Kashmir?
Only
a few bad eggs: In an attempt to understand why Muslims have such
a deep sense of grievance, I spent some time recently talking to students
of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU). Everyone I spoke to felt deeply
that Muslims were discriminated against in India. When I asked for examples
of discrimination this is what I got. A group of students from the university
were denied permission to witness the working of the Mathura Oil Refinery
allegedly because they were from AMU; one student did not get a summer
internship with a big corporate house and he believed it was only because
he was Muslim; others imagined they would not get jobs because they were
Muslims and AMU was, they all felt, being maligned in the national media
because it was a Muslim institution. They resented AMU being viewed as
a hotbed of Muslim terrorism merely because a few bad eggs had been found.
None of these, in my view, is a serious complaint and yet there was an
almost frightening atmosphere of grievance in the university. Teachers
explained that this was part of the "post-Babri Masjid syndrome".
Funny, because
most Hindus drawn to the khaki knickers of the RSS also believe that they
have to avenge the destruction of Hindu India that Muslim invaders wrought.
Muslims talk about one mosque coming down, they say, well what about the
thousands of temples that Muslims destroyed? Where do we go from here?
In one word: nowhere. For the next 50 years, as we have done for the past
50, we will continue to concentrate on imagined grievances instead of
dealing with real problems. Both Hindus and Muslims in our fair and wondrous
land live in appalling conditions, a vast majority, without clean drinking
water, sanitation, healthcare, schools or anything that could be vaguely
described as 21st century living standards. Yet, their leaders urge them
to complain not about these things but about some imagined threat to their
identity and faith.
Atal Bihari
Vajpayee's supposedly communal Government seems to be encouraging this
trend. How else to explain the Home Minister's presence at the RSS birthday
party in Agra or his assertion that the BJP was inextricably linked to
it? How else to explain why the film Fiza is now showing "tax free"
in Mumbai and Delhi when its main message is: jehad is justified because
the Indian state is unfair to Muslims. Neither the makers of the film,
nor those who have exempted it from entertainment tax, appear to have
noticed that Hindus get an equally bad deal from the Indian state and
that if the soldiers of Hindutva also trot off on jehad we will end up
with the same situation we saw in Punjab in the Bhindranwale days, except
on a national scale. Hindu and Muslim leaders would do well to remember
that the good Sant Bhindranwale's biggest weapon was the sense of grievance
he created among the Sikhs. Look what it led to.
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INDIA TODAY Deputy Editor Swapan Dasgupta voices the despair of a community that Jyoti Basu forcibly converted into a diaspora in his 23 years of zero-contribution rule. 