Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines

[kmaherali]

‘Muslims Are Foreigners’: Inside India’s Campaign to Decide Who Is a Citizen

Tribunal members in the state of Assam say they felt pressured to declare Muslims noncitizens as the government seeks to expel illegal migrants. Some politicians have vowed to take the process nationwide.

JORHAT, India — For nearly two years, Mamoni Rajkumari, a lawyer, spent her days deciding who was an Indian citizen and who was not, as part of a tribunal reviewing suspected foreigners in the state of Assam. Then, she says, she was dismissed for not declaring enough Muslims to be noncitizens.

“I was punished,’’ she said.

Ms. Rajkumari, 54, has found herself on the front line of India’s citizenship wars. In addition to the tribunals, which Assam has operated for decades, the state has also recently completed a broader, separate review of every resident’s paperwork to determine if they were citizens.

That review found that nearly two million of Assam’s 33 million residents, many of them desperately poor, were possibly foreigners. Now this group — which is disproportionately Muslim — is potentially stateless.

What’s happening in Assam is a preview of what may be coming to India as a whole as Prime Minister Narendra Modi tries to pull the country away from its foundation as a secular, multicultural nation and turn it into a more overtly Hindu state.

Video and more at:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/worl ... ogin-email

[swamidada_2]

Indian MP’s poison

Editorial Updated April 05,2020

IN the India of today, members of the ruling Hindutva clique can get away with demonizing Muslims and other minorities without batting an eyelid. They hardly face any reprimands from their leadership, while the international community also mostly maintains a stony silence where persecution of minorities in India is concerned.

The comments made in a recent media interview by Subramanian Swamy, a member of the Indian parliament belonging to the ruling BJP, regarding Muslims, can only be described as hate speech of the most vile kind, and in any civilized dispensation the lawmaker would be facing charges of inciting communal hatred.

While talking to VICE News, Swamy told the interviewer that wherever there is a large Muslim population “there is always trouble” while adding that he was being “kind” by not letting “them [Muslims] ... enter India”.


He added that Muslims in India were not considered equal citizens. Such comments, from the classic playbook of right-wing hate-mongers and demagogues, belong in the dustbin and have no place in a democratic society.

But in today’s India, where a hateful Hindu revivalist narrative prevails, they appear to be par for the course. When India’s home minister and the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh — its most populous state — can make similar statements inciting and condoning violence against Muslims, perhaps such despicable words are no mere slip of the tongue; it appears to be part of the national narrative. After all, the BJP is and has been for decades the standard-bearer of communal politics in India. Prime Minister Imran Khan has rightly compared Mr Swamy’s comments to the Nazis’ demonization of Jews.

The fact is that such irresponsible remarks from politicians in India — coupled with the hyper-nationalism of Indian media outlets — has had an impact on radicalizing people in that country, and has contributed to the normalization of anti-Muslim violence.

The mob lynchings of Muslims on suspicions of eating or transporting beef; the deplorable lock down of India-held Kashmir; and the recent communal riots in Delhi all point to the fact that when the state condones and supports divisive policies, these have a trickle-down effect on citizens. If the police, bureaucracy and lawmakers stand by as minorities are cornered and pummelled, it does not bode well for national harmony.

Will the custodians of the ‘world’s largest democracy’ address these toxic trends, and will their international supporters raise their voices against blatant rights violations by a major trading partner?

Published in Dawn, April 5th, 2020
https://www.dawn.com/news/1546522/indian-mps-poison

[kmaherali]

In India, Coronavirus Fans Religious Hatred

NEW DELHI — After India’s health ministry repeatedly blamed an Islamic seminary for spreading the coronavirus — and governing party officials spoke of “human bombs” and “corona jihad” — a spree of anti-Muslim attacks has broken out across the country.

Young Muslim men who were passing out food to the poor were assaulted with cricket bats. Other Muslims have been beaten up, nearly lynched, run out of their neighborhoods or attacked in mosques, branded as virus spreaders. In Punjab State, loudspeakers at Sikh temples broadcast messages telling people not to buy milk from Muslim dairy farmers because it was infected with coronavirus.

Hateful messages have bloomed online. And a wave of apparently fake videos has popped up telling Muslims not to wear masks, not to practice social distancing, not to worry about the virus at all, as if the makers of the videos wanted Muslims to get sick.

In a global pandemic, there is always the hunt for blame. President Trump has done it, insisting for a time on calling the coronavirus a “Chinese virus.’’ All over the world people are pointing fingers, driven by their fears and anxieties to go after The Other.

Here in India, no other group has been demonized more than the country’s 200 million Muslims, minorities in a Hindu-dominated land of 1.3 billion people.

From the crackdown on Kashmir, a Muslim majority area, to a new citizenship law that blatantly discriminates against Muslims, this past year has been one low point after another for Indian Muslims living under an increasingly bold Hindu nationalist government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and propelled by majoritarian policies.

More...

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/in ... ailsignout

[swamidada_2]

Covid-19 presented an opportunity to make TV news credible again. But it succumbed to Islamophobia
COLUMNS Updated: Apr 23, 2020 17:37 IST
Rajdeep Sardesai

The coronavirus is the great unknown, and understanding its spread requires a relentless focus on hard information, and not on divisive agendas. Doctors and scientists are men and women of healing and research; they are not politicians who thrive on divide and rule. Which is why the coronavirus story must be told without the cacophony of communal politics, but by recapturing the spirit of news as a public service.
The coronavirus is the great unknown, and understanding its spread requires a relentless focus on hard information, and not on divisive agendas. Doctors and scientists are men and women of healing and research; they are not politicians who thrive on divide and rule. Which is why the coronavirus story must be told without the cacophony of communal politics, but by recapturing the spirit of news as a public service. (Deepak Sansta / Hindustan Times)

Hey, news television seems to have finally broken out of the Hindu-Muslim mindset,” I exulted to a colleague soon after the lockdown was announced in March. As news channels rushed to speak to doctors and biomedical researchers, it seemed like a whole new world of public health and virology was being discovered. Sadly, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Just days later, the Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) story broke and the familiar faces and the earlier narrative returned on TV: #CoronaJihad, #Tableeghistan, #Tableegh-Pak conspiracy, the sensationalist headlines and hashtags were back. Even in the age of the coronavirus, Islamophobia is alive and well.

In the last few years, the dominant storyline across the “nationalist” media has been to demonise the Indian Muslims as violent, untrustworthy and anti-national. From terrorism in Kashmir to fatwas by self-styled maulanas, each insupportable action was used to put the entire community in the dock. The TJ story fitted in with the script: A cleric in hiding, bearded men scurrying around in kurta-pyjama, a pan-India network with foreign links and a disproportionate number of coronavirus positive tests. An act of utter civic irresponsibility by a religious group was seen as further proof that Islam is a religion of zealots outside the pale of the law.

That the Delhi Police, unlike their counterparts in Mumbai, showed criminal negligence in not preventing such a gathering from being held in the first place was conveniently forgotten. The prime time enemy had been found: The Muslim was castigated as a coronavirus carrier, as if 200 million people must pay the price for an act of stupidity of a few.

Extensive research conducted by Joyojeet Pal, who specialises in tracking TV and social media trends, shows how misinformation campaigns turned significantly against Muslims once the TJ case surfaced. Where initially the misinformation largely centred around possible cures and panic over essential services, there was a marked shift from March-end towards incendiary messaging that referred to Muslims being responsible for the prevalence of the virus. Fake videos and WhatsApp messages of Muslim groups violating physical distancing norms were pushed into circulation. Little attempt was made by the political class to rebut this spurious link, reflecting the deep-seated prejudice that is bubbling under the surface.

Instead, government functionaries chose to reel off statistics of individuals who have tested positive for the coronavirus because of their TJ connection. This was done despite the World Health Organization’s guidelines explicitly prohibiting such religious profiling.

Finally, it is only in the third week of April that Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi was constrained to remark that the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) does not see race, religion, caste before striking, that too in a conversation on LinkedIn. The intervention came a day after the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation condemned the “unrelenting vicious Islamophobic campaign in India to malign Muslims for the spread of Covid-19”.

By now, the PM has addressed the nation several times but has chosen not to refer to the sinister anti-Muslim campaign. Could Modi, with his political equity and communication skills, not have spoken out against rumour-mongering and religious discrimination over the coronavirus much earlier?

Sadly, the damage is done. Reports of Muslim vegetable vendors being boycotted in Uttar Pradesh or separate wards being set up in Ahmedabad hospitals (since then denied by the Gujarat government) are disquieting. As indeed are terrifying images of police and doctors being targeted by mobs in Muslim localities in Indore. When a devious propaganda machine feeds into poverty, illiteracy and competing religious fundamentalisms, the result is a toxic atmosphere of fear, suspicion and hatred which may only further social antagonisms in a post-coronavirus world.

Ironically, the coronavirus story is a godsend opportunity to break away from the cycle of fake news and misinformation that has plagued the multimedia industry in a post-truth universe. A virus wears no religious badge: It is a weapon of death and illness that afflicts both Malabar Hill and Dharavi, Lutyens’ Delhi and Nizamuddin with a non-discriminatory policy. The coronavirus is the great unknown, and understanding its spread requires a relentless focus on hard information, and not on divisive agendas. Doctors and scientists are men and women of healing and research; they are not politicians who thrive on divide and rule. Which is why the coronavirus story must be told without the cacophony of communal politics, but by recapturing the spirit of news as a public service.

The period between 2010 and 2019 can be described as Indian television media’s lost decade, a period when noise replaced news, chaos scored over credibility. Now, viewers are returning. The first lockdown week saw a 250% rise in viewership. The coronavirus is perhaps the last chance to redeem our mandate as newspersons who place facts and analysis above contrived friction and polarised agendas. We may not get another.

Post-script: The rise of “TV maulanas” has been a striking feature of this past decade. One of them is an unknown tailor who often does three to four TV appearances a day. “Why do you go on TV debates when you know you will be shouted down?” I asked him. He said: “Ab kisi ko toh yeh sab karna hai!” (someone has to do it!). What he didn’t tell me is that he gets paid Rs 2,000 per appearance.

Rajdeep Sardesai is a senior journalist and author. His latest book is 2019: How Modi Won India
https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/ ... h6kVM.html

[swamidada_2]

Why Akbar the great remains so relevant

For our time the most striking quality is Akbar’s ecumenism. He believed “all religions are either equally true or equally illusory”.

COLUMNS Updated: Mar 21, 2020
Karan Thapar

Hindustan Times
Akbar negotiated a place of dignity for each person and every creed

It was “Zeeks” Sinha at Doon School who taught me there are two Indian monarchs we can legitimately consider “Great”, Ashoka in the 3rd century BC and, 18 centuries later, Akbar. I took his word for it. As I grew older and read more widely I realised he was right. But now a biography of Akbar has revealed just how astonishing this emperor actually was. Today I want to share some of the insights I’ve gleaned from Ira Mukhoty’s Akbar: The Great Mughal.

By the end of the 16th century Akbar’s was “the greatest empire on earth” and “greater than any previous Indian kingdom bar the Mauryan Empire”. With an annual income estimated at 100 million pounds Akbar was “by far the richest ruler in the world”. However, what made Akbar great was not his power or the size of his kingdom. It was his amazing personality.

For our time the most striking quality is Akbar’s ecumenism. He believed “all religions are either equally true or equally illusory”. Mukhoty writes: “In his quest for spiritual truths he prostrated himself in front of many gods — he prayed to the sun, he whispered mantras, he worshipped fire, he kept fasts and he examined his conscience.” His young son Murad was “entrusted to the Jesuits for an education”, taught the sign of the cross and to take the names of Jesus and Mary at the beginning of lessons. His Rajput Hindu wives were not required to convert to Islam. They had “complete freedom to exercise their own religion”. He abolished the jiziya and aware of the sentiments of his people “prohibited the slaughter of cows and the eating of their flesh”. On weekends, he was vegetarian.

Though his proud lineage stretches back to Chengiz Khan and Timur, Akbar “often wore a dhoti of fine silk rather than the usual pyjamas”. Mukhoty adds he “began appearing in the diwan-e-aam with a tilak on the forehead and a rakhi on the wrist, tied by a Brahmin, as a blessing.” This open-hearted liberalism was also reflected in the décor of Fatehpur Sikri. There were “frescoes painted of Christ, Mary and the Christian saints in the private chambers” and Akbar’s dining room had “images of Christ, Mary, Moses and Muhammad”. In 1582, he had the Mahabharata translated from Sanskrit to Persian. Thereafter the Ramayana, Rajatarangini and the story of Nala and Damyanti.

Not surprisingly, he chose his courtiers on the basis of talent not faith. Mukhoty calls this “Akbar’s genius”. So Todar Mal and Maan Singh were as powerful and influential as Bairam Khan and Shirazi. Indeed, “for a while Maan Singh was the highest paid mansabdar of the land, hindu or muslim”. Perhaps more tellingly by 1580, 24 years into his reign, out of 272 mansabdars, 43 were Rajput, 47 Persian, 44 Indian Muslim whilst his own Turani were marginally ahead at 67.

After all this, it hardly merits saying Akbar was also a great general. “He disregarded all the old rules of warfare”, writes Mukhoty, “and used speed, fury and firepower in such a manner that it appeared as though he was able to bend the very forces of nature to his will.” Among his innovations were “ingenious rockets” and “lightweight canon”. Yet — and this is the paradox — Akbar was “effectively unschooled and practically illiterate”. As a child, he was “distracted, undisciplined and rambunctious”. Mukhoty says: “In the parlance of the 21st century, (he) may have suffered from attention-deficit disorder”. Other historians have said he was dyslexic.

However, let me end with what makes Akbar so pertinent today. In Mukhoty’s words it’s “his determination, in a complex and complicated land, to negotiate a place of dignity for each person and every creed.” That’s so different to the men who rule us today. They want to rectify the perceived wrongs of the past by revising and reinterpreting history. If only they would open their eyes and heed Akbar’s lessons instead. It might make India great again.

Karan Thapar is the author of Devil’s Advocate: The Untold Story

[swamidada_2]

India detains pigeon on suspicion of spying for Pakistan
Joe Wallen
The Telegraph May 26, 2020, 4:55 AM CDT

An intrepid Pakistani ‘spy’ pigeon is facing a life behind bars in India.

The allegation was made after Geeta Devi, a resident of the Kathua district of Indian-administered Kashmir, reported a bird - painted pink and carrying a coded ring tagged to its foot - flew into her home on Sunday night.

The Indian Border Security Force passed the pigeon on to the police, who launched an investigation and logged the animal as a ‘Pak Suspected Spy.’

Officials in Kathua said the bird had flown across the border and they would try to decipher the message.

“The pigeon, suspected to have been trained in Pakistan for spying, has a ring with alphabets and numbers written on it,” a police source told the Times of India.

“Though birds have no boundaries and many fly across international borders during migration, a coded ring tagged to the captured pigeon’s body is a cause for concern as migratory birds don’t have such rings.”

The bird was captured near the Line of Control in Indian-administered Kashmir - Anadolu Agency

India and Pakistan have fought four wars since independence and tension between the two neighbours remains high.

It is not the first time India has claimed Pakistan has used pigeons to deliver secret messages.

In 2015, the Indian authorities captured a bird that had crossed the border and was found to have a message written on its feathers in Urdu - the national language of Pakistan.

To the disbelief of the international community, the bird was x-rayed and ruffled enough feathers to be also logged as a ‘suspected spy’ by police.

According to the police in Kathua, birds are commonly used to send secret messages across the border as they do not typically arouse suspicion.

However, he added the latest suspect would remain in a cage in a police station until the conclusion of the investigation.

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/ind ... 32198.html

[swamidada_2]

Rath Yatra in Puri: Pulling the chariots of Lord Jagannath and his siblings
The Odisha government has imposed a 41-hour curfew in the temple town and started Covid-19 tests of 700 temple priests who would pull the three chariots in Jagannath Puri Rath Yatra.

INDIA Updated: Jun 23, 2020 08:21 IST
hindustantimes.com | Edited by Meenakshi Ray

Priests and policemen pull the three chariots of Lord Jagannath, Balarama, and Subhadra from the construction site (Ratha Khala) to Jagannatha Temple for the annual Rath Yatra.
Priests and policemen pull the three chariots of Lord Jagannath, Balarama, and Subhadra from the construction site (Ratha Khala) to Jagannatha Temple for the annual Rath Yatra. (PTI Photo )

The Jagannath Puri Rath Yatra, one of India’s biggest religious festivals, is underway on Tuesday in the temple town in Odisha amid the coronavirus pandemic.

About a million devotees converge in Puri during the festivities but this year people will not be allowed after the Supreme Court placed several conditions, including the imposition of a curfew in Puri during the festivities.

A three-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice of India SA Bobde, said in its order that each chariot would be pulled by not more than 500 people, including officials and police, and there has to be an interval of one hour between pulling of the chariots.

The Odisha government has imposed a 41-hour curfew in the temple town and started Covid-19 tests of 700 temple priests who would pull the three chariots.

Here is all about the Rath Yatra festival in Puri:

* Lord Jagannath, Lord Balabhadra, and Goddess Subhadra are usually worshipped in the sanctum of the famous Jagannath Temple in Puri. They are brought out of the temple every year on the second day of the third Hindu month of Asadha onto the Bada Danda street of Puri in three huge chariots accompanied by Sudarshana Chakra.

* The nine-day Rath Yatra, or the chariot procession, celebrates this annual journey of Lord Jagannath and his two siblings from the 12th-century Jagannath Temple to Gundicha Temple, 2.5km away. The Gundicha Temple is their aunt’s home.

* The rituals for Rath Yatra will begin at 3am inside the 12th-century shrine.

* The Pahandi ritual (procession) will begin at 7am and the deities will board the chariots at the Singha Dwara facing towards the Gundicha Temple by 10am. The Chherapahara ritual will be held at 11.30am. The chariots will be pulled thereafter at around 12pm.

* The three deities are taken in the massive wooden chariots weighing 85 tonnes each. After staying in Gundicha temple for nine days, the three deities come back to the Jagannath Temple on the 10th day in a return journey.

* Lord Jagannath’s chariot Nandighosa is 45.6 feet in height and has 18 wheels. The 45- feet chariot of Lord Balaram comes with 16 wheels and is known as Taladhvaja and Devadalana is Goddess Subhadra’s 44.6 feet chariot with 14 wheels.

* The chariots are built every year only from a particular type of tree.

* Thousands of devotees pull the chariots to their aunt’s temple, the Gundicha Temple. It is considered to be a good omen and is also believed to bring luck and success if one gets a chance to pull the chariots.

* The deities stay at the Gundicha Temple for nine days, after which they ride the chariots back to their Jagannath Temple, a journey known as Bahuda Jatra.

* The chariots on the way back stop at the Mausi Ma Temple or home of Lord Jagannath’s aunt. The deities are offered Poda Pitha, a special pancake which said to be the favourite of Lord Jagannath, at the Mausi Ma Temple.

* In the 425 years of the Rath Yatra, the event has been stopped 32 times, mostly during invasions.

* It was not held for the first time in 1568 when Kala Pahad alias Kala Chand Roy, a general of Bengal king Suleiman Kirrani, attacked the temple and pillaged the deities.

* The last time it could not be held was between 1733 and 1735 when Mohammed Taqi Khan, deputy governor of Odisha, attacked the Jagannath temple, forcing the shifting of the idols to Ganjam district.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-ne ... uqDVJ.html

[swamidada_2]

hindustantimes

Noida man dies of Covid-19, family gets Rs 14 lakh bill
The patient, a Noida resident and a Unani practitioner who died on Sunday, was admitted at Fortis Hospital, Noida, on June 7 and was kept on ventilator for 15 days, hospital authorities and close relatives of the victim said.
NOIDA Updated: Jun 30, 2020 07:07 IST
Kushagra Dixit

The hospital gave a bill of over Rs14 lakh to the grieving family, which was later revised to Rs10.2 lakh after the insurance covered Rs4 lakh while the family paid Rs25,000, as per hospital authorities.
The hospital gave a bill of over Rs14 lakh to the grieving family, which was later revised to Rs10.2 lakh after the insurance covered Rs4 lakh while the family paid Rs25,000, as per hospital authorities. (Bloomberg)

Amid lack of clarity regarding the rates that Noida’s private hospitals may charge for the Covid-19 treatment, a private hospital has given a bill of over Rs14 lakh to the kin of a Covid victim who was admitted at the facility for 20 days. The Gautam Budh Nagar district administration has said that it will look into the matter.

The patient, a Noida resident and a Unani practitioner who died on Sunday, was admitted at Fortis Hospital, Noida, on June 7 and was kept on ventilator for 15 days, hospital authorities and close relatives of the victim said.

The family took possession of the body on Monday against a legal declaration on a Rs10 stamp paper to pay the negotiated amount, one of the relatives said.

The hospital gave a bill of over Rs14 lakh to the grieving family, which was later revised to Rs10.2 lakh after the insurance covered Rs4 lakh while the family paid Rs25,000, as per hospital authorities.

However, the Fortis Hospital, in a statement sent to HT, said that the charges were transparent, discounted and “based on the CGHS (central government health scheme) tariffs as per the MoU with the government”.

“The family of the patient was informed about the treatment details at every step and was also counselled about the criticality of the patient…The details have been submitted to the CMO office as well. Our transparent billing process ensured that the family of the patient was kept informed about the expenses incurred during the treatment. There is no discrepancy in the billing process in this case,” said the statement from the hospital.

Meanwhile, the district administration said that the private hospital fee is based on “self-regulation”. “We are looking into the matter. But the media reports about the charges levied by the private hospital for the Covid-19 patient seem unverified. The health team has been asked to look into the matter,” said Suhas LY, district magistrate, Gautam Budh Nagar.

Asked if the district administration has imposed a cap or upper limit on the charges levied by private hospitals to treat a Covid-19 patient, the DM said that charges are based on the ‘self-regulations’ and different guidelines, including those of the central government.

“The private hospitals are charging based on the self-regulation and the guidelines given by the health department that had been communicated to them. There are various government advisories on the maximum or upper limit of charges. For ICU, the maximum amount which can be charged is Rs10,000 while for the ventilator it’s Rs5,000 extra per day. The other charges like medicines, etc, are not included,” the district magistrate added.

However, despite several requests to share the official document that verifies the district administration’s claims on capping of charges for Covid-19 treatment in private hospitals, the administration officials stated they will share it soon.

According to senior state health department officials, the decision on capping of prices in private hospitals has to be taken by the district administration concerned.

“It’s the local administration of every district that would take a call and fix an upper limit on the charges that a private hospital can take for Covid-19 treatment. The state government has only fixed charges for the Covid-19 tests,” said Amit Mohan Prasad, health secretary, Uttar Pradesh.

Meanwhile, the deceased’s family stated that there was no clarity on the maximum hospital fee in UP, as declared by other states like Haryana and Delhi.

“There is no clarity on Covid-19 charges here. No order has been issued in this regard by the state government. We are still in talks with the hospital. We have lost a family member, and then are being asked to pay such unreasonable fee. We wish no one else has to suffer in future,” said a close relative of the Covid-19 victim.

Recently, both Delhi and Haryana capped the prices for Covid treatment in private hospitals.

A Delhi government order dated June 20 prescribes maximum per day package rates for Covid-19 treatment in private hospitals. According to the order, for isolation bed charges can’t exceed Rs10,000 while for severe sickness (ICU without ventilators) it’s Rs15,000 and for ICU with ventilator care the cost is Rs 18,000. All the cost includes the cost of PPE kits.

In Haryana, prices for private hospitals accredited by National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Health Care Providers (NABH) are Rs 10,000 for isolation beds (including supportive care and oxygen), Rs 15,000 for intensive care unit (without ventilator care) and Rs 18,000 for intensive care unit with ventilator care.

For the non-NABH accredited private healthcare facilities, Rs 8,000 a day has been fixed for isolation beds (including supportive care and oxygen), Rs 13,000 a day for intensive care unit (without ventilator care) and Rs 15,000 a day for intensive care unit with ventilator care. The rates will include charges for all lab investigations, diet, radiological diagnostics, monitoring charges, drugs, consumables, including PPE, masks and gloves, among others.

https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/n ... D60ZI.html

[kmaherali]

hindustantimes

Noida man dies of Covid-19, family gets Rs 14 lakh bill

Interesting article, but what has it to do with the relationship between Muslims and Hindus? Perhaps it could have been posted under 'poverty eradication'.

[swamidada_2]

hindustantimes

Noida man dies of Covid-19, family gets Rs 14 lakh bill

Interesting article, but what has it to do with the relationship between Muslims and Hindus? Perhaps it could have been posted under 'poverty eradication'.

I tried to find suitable thread but could not. Then I thought start a new thread, but gave up. Finally I posted in this thread thinking the same problem is with Muslims also. You did not objected my post of spy pigeon dated May 27, 2020, that pigeon was not Muslim!! Just to make you smile.

[swamidada]

Why Jinnah-Tilak comradeship is relevant for peace between Pakistan and India
Both Tilak and Jinnah, if they were alive today, would have been deeply distressed at the current state of India-Pakistan ties.

Sudheendra Kulkarni

India-Pakistan relations have once again entered a dark tunnel, with not even a flicker of light to give us hope that we are approaching its end. Within India, a Hindu supremacist government has been systematically moving towards the goal of converting plural and secular India into a 'Hindu Rashtra' (Hindu Nation). Our Muslim brethren, to whom the 'Indian Rashtra' belongs as much as it does to Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and others, have never felt more insecure and despondent since the birth of Free India in 1947 as they do now.

History tells us that Hindu-Muslim discord and India-Pakistan hostility are inter-connected. Indeed, India’s blood-soaked partition in 1947, and the establishment of Pakistan as a separate "Muslim Nation", was the culmination of the failure of our anti-British struggle to find a common and acceptable constitutional framework, which could accommodate the concerns and aspirations of the two major communities that resided in this ancient land for centuries.

But history also tells us that wise and valorous efforts were made by farsighted leaders belonging to both communities for reconciliation of differences and construction of a future of amicable co-existence. It is by revisiting their inspiring legacies and learning the right lessons from those chapters of history that we can find pathways to Hindu-Muslim amity and India-Pakistan good-neighbourliness.

One such important chapter presents the tale of a close comradeship between Quaid-i-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Lokamanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920). August 1 marks the death centenary of Tilak, who was the tallest Congress leader before the advent of the Mahatma Gandhi era. In the history of India’s freedom movement, we see two milestones when Hindu-Muslim cooperation reached its zenith. One was the 1857 War of Independence, when Hindus and Muslims fought shoulder-to-shoulder — from Peshawar to Dhaka — against the rapacious rule of the East India Company. The other was the Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim League in December 1916. The principal architects of this pact were Tilak and Jinnah. Had the spirit of that pact endured, the outcome of the freedom struggle would have been different — and better.

Such was Tilak’s standing in India’s political life that Edwin Samuel Montagu, British Secretary of State for India between 1917 and 1922, said, "Tilak is at the moment probably the most powerful man in India". Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol, a British journalist who passionately defended the British empire, and had maliciously attacked Tilak, had called him the "father of Indian unrest".

Tilak breathed his last, after a brief illness, in Bombay on August 1, 1920. He was 64. The funeral at Chowpatty Beach was attended by over a million people. Among the pall-bearers were Gandhi, Nehru and Shaukat Ali, a prominent leader of the Khilafat Movement. Gandhi wrote in his newspaper *Young India*: "A giant among men has fallen. The voice of the lion is hushed... he knew no religion but love of his country.…he had an iron will, which he used for his country. His life was an open book. His private life was spotlessly clean. No man preached the gospel of swaraj (freedom) with the consistency and the insistence of the Lokamanya (an honorific which means 'a leader respected by the people')."

In a heartfelt tribute, Jinnah wrote: "Mr Tilak rendered yeoman services to the country and played a very important part in bringing about the Hindu-Moslem unity, which ultimately resulted in the Lucknow Pact in 1916."

An authentic account of Jinnah’s admiration for Tilak has been penned by Mohammedali Currim Chagla, the great jurist who served as chief justice of the Bombay High Court from 1948 to 1958. As a young lawyer, Chagla worked in the chamber of Jinnah, whom he idolised. Under Jinnah’s influence, he became a member of the Muslim League but quit the party after it started espousing the cause of Pakistan as a separate Muslim nation. Tilak was his childhood hero. This is what Chagla wrote in his autobiography Roses in December: “During my long association with Jinnah, I found that he always showed the greatest respect and regard for Tilak. Two persons in public life for whom Jinnah showed the greatest respect were [Gopal Krishna] Gokhale and Tilak. … [T]he regard Jinnah had for Tilak was reciprocated by Tilak."

Tilak was born on July 23, 1856 in the coastal town of Ratnagiri in the Konkan region of Maharashtra. Konkan, incidentally, had close contacts with Karachi in pre-Partition times. He studied in Pune, where he co-founded Fergusson College, one of India's most prestigious educational institutions. He became a renowned scholar in law, mathematics and Sanskrit. Later in his life, he wrote one of the most admired treatises on the Hindu scripture, Bhagavad Gita, extolling Karma Yoga or the philosophy of action for a noble cause. However, his passion was politics. To popularize his mission for India’s complete independence from British rule, he established two newspapers, Kesari (in Marathi, the native language of Maharashtra) and Mahratta (in English), which soon earned him the ire of the colonial administration.

The second half of the 19th century was an extremely difficult period in the freedom struggle. The defeat suffered by the uprising in 1857, and the bloody reprisals unleashed in its aftermath by the British, had created utter disillusionment that continued for many decades. The founding of the Indian National Congress in Bombay in 1885, and of the All India Muslim League in Dhaka in 1906, were natural responses of a freedom-loving nation that was trying to find its political voice. However, the voice was still weak and subdued. This is when Tilak began to quicken the growth of nationalist consciousness. Nehru, who was then a student in England, writes in his autobiography: "From 1907 onwards for several years India was seething with unrest and trouble. For the first time, since the Revolt of 1857, India was showing fight and not submitting tamely to foreign rule...Almost all of us were Tilakites or Extremists, as the new party was called in India".

Historians credit Gandhi with transforming the Congress into a mass movement. No doubt, he did so on a nationwide scale. But none can deny that Gandhi followed up, and greatly expanded, on the mass-oriented political work that Tilak had begun. Tilak's two arrests by the British on charges of sedition — first in 1897, when he was jailed for 18 months, and, especially, later in 1908, when he was sent to Mandalay in Burma for six years of rigorous imprisonment — galvanized the nation in an unprecedented manner (Jinnah successfully defended Tilak in the latter’s third sedition trial in 1916). Tilak’s banishment to Burma provoked the first ever political strike by the working class; the textile workers of Bombay (Hindus of all castes as well as Muslims) struck work for six days, one day for every year of the sentence.

Roaring like a lion in the Bombay High Court, Tilak asserted, "Swaraj is my birth right, and I shall have it". When the judge asked him if he had anything to say before the sentence was pronounced, he audaciously replied: "All I wish to say is that in spite of the verdict of the jury, I maintain my innocence. There are higher powers that rule the destiny of men and nations. It may be the will of providence that the cause I represent may prosper by suffering than by remaining free." These inspiring words were subsequently etched in a marble plaque in court room no. 46 in Bombay High Court, where he was tried.

Condemning Tilak’s imprisonment, Vladimir Lenin, who would lead the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, wrote, "The infamous sentence pronounced by the British jackals on the Indian democrat Tilak…this revenge against a democrat by the lackeys of the money-bags evoked street demonstrations and a strike in Bombay. In India, too, the proletariat has already developed to conscious political mass struggle — and, that being the case, the Russian-style British regime in India is doomed!"

Among Tilak's countless admirers was Maulana Hasrat Mohani, an eminent freedom fighter and Urdu poet, who coined the slogan Inquilab Zindabad ("long live the revolution"). After Tilak’s imprisonment in 1908, he wrote a ghazal in praise of Lokamanya. Here are a few lines from it translated in English.

O Tilak, o pride of patriotism
The knower, the follower, the believer and articulator of righteousness
The foundation of openly expressed freedom rests on you
The assembly of sincerity and loyalty is illuminated by you
You were the fiesta to hear O Son of India
Imprisonment in the service of India
Your being became the beacon light of freedom
Otherwise our friends were shackled in slavery
You have cast such a spell of self-respect
With one stroke, it cancelled all rituals of flattery
The free Hasrat prides himself on following you
May the Great God keep you for long.

In his book Jinnah and Tilak — Comrades in the Freedom Struggle, prolific scholar A G Noorani quotes Kanji Dwarkadas, a close Hindu friend of Jinnah in Bombay: "The two great political centres in Bombay at that time were Sardar Grih (a modest guest house in which Tilak lived in a single room) and Jinnah's chambers in the High Court. All political roads led to these two places for organisation, consultation and decision."

Sardar Grih Guest House in Mumbai where Tilak lived — and died. The Indian government's apathy towards the legacy of Lokmanya Tilak can be seen here. — Photo by writer
Cover of A G Noorani's book Jinnah and Tilak — Comrades in the Freedom Struggle.
Sardar Grih was in close vicinity of Anjuman-i-Islam, the oldest Muslim educational institution in India founded in 1874, a year before the establishment of the Aligarh Muslim University by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. Its founder was Badruddin Tyabji (1844-1906), a great patriot who was president of the Indian National Congress at its third session in Madras (1897). As a judge of the Bombay High Court, he was known for his courage and impartiality, as became clear in his granting bail to Tilak in a sedition case in 1897 after it had been rejected thrice by others. Tyabji, unlike Sir Syed, urged Muslims to join the Congress so that the interests of Muslims and Hindus could be advanced jointly. Incidentally, Jinnah, who held the same view, regarded Tyabji as his mentor, and once told him that there was "nothing that I shall follow more readily than your advice".

Was Tilak anti-Muslim? No he wasn't
All great historical personalities have been victims of falsification of history in some way or the other. This is also true about Tilak, who has been accused by some of being a "Hindu nationalist" and, therefore, "anti-Muslim". In support of this criticism, it is cited that he introduced "Hindu revivalism" into the national movement by popularising the festivals associated with Ganesh (a Hindu deity) and Shivaji (a Maratha warrior-king). The fact is he did so to mobilise the people in the freedom movement and what his critics conveniently ignore is that he also participated in Muharram processions with his Muslim compatriots in Pune, just as many Muslims took part in Ganesh and Shivaji festivities.

Tilak in a Muharram procession in Pune in 1892. He can be seen in the centre near the bottom of the picture.
It is true that in his earlier writings, Tilak flayed what he regarded as the fanaticism of Muslim invaders. But Tilak’s views on Indian Muslims changed in the course of the freedom struggle, and he became convinced that unity between Hindu and Muslim communities was absolutely necessary for India's liberation and future progress. He affirmed that Indian nationalism is "composite" — meaning that it has equal place for Hindus and Muslims. Tilak wrote in *Kesari*: "When Hindus and Muslims jointly ask for Swarajya from a common platform, the British bureaucracy has to realize that its days are numbered."

Here is some proof that Muslims of the time saw him as an Indian nationalist and not as a Hindu nationalist. When the British government arrested and imprisoned Tilak in a sedition case in 1897, his friends in Calcutta collected 16,000 rupees for his defence. Out of this, 7,000 rupees were donated by a Muslim-owned business firm Hirjee Ahmaed & Hajee Hossain Hajee Abdel. What Hajee Abdel wrote in the donation's covering letter is revealing. "The moment the Government arrested him, Mr Tilak ceased to be a leader of the Hindu community. He is now above all castes, creeds, and religions. He is going to be prosecuted for his fight for India, the common motherland of the Muslims and Hindus."

Both Shaukat Ali and his brother Mohammed Ali Jauhar held Tilak in high esteem because of his bold support to Muslim concerns, including his sympathy for their anti-imperialist Khilafat cause. Shaukat Ali even said: "I would like to mention again for the hundredth time that both Mohammed Ali and myself belonged to, and still belong to, Lokamanya Tilak’s political party." Furthermore, the mother of Ali brothers, Abadi Bano Begum, popularly known as 'Bi Amma', was also a Tilak supporter. She addressed meetings urging people to donate to the Tilak Swaraj Fund, which Gandhi had created in Tilak’s memory.

Those were truly sunny days for Hindu-Muslim fraternity. Recall this — when, some days after his cremation in Bombay, Tilak’s ashes were brought to his native city Pune by a special train, the procession stopped near a mosque and the people honoured their beloved leader with the slogan "Hindu-Muslim ekta ki jai".

Jinnah as a votary of Muslim-Hindu unity
Similar views on the need for Hindu-Muslim solidarity for national liberation were held by Jinnah, who was the most promising young lawyer and nationalist Muslim politician in India in the first two decades of the last century. Remarkably, he was an active member, simultaneously, of both the Congress and the Muslim League. He had joined the Congress in 1896, when he returned from England to Bombay to start his law practice. In 1906, he attended the Calcutta session as secretary to Dadabhai Naoroji, the 'Grand Old Man' of India’s freedom struggle, who was then president of Congress. He would take membership of the Muslim League much later, in 1913. Jinnah viewed himself as a bridge between the two Indian parties pursuing the common goal of national independence. Gokhale, his mentor and a leader of the 'moderate' faction of Congress (Tilak was a leader of the 'militant' wing of Congress), had described Jinnah as "an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity". Jinnah himself had expressed the desire to become "the Muslim Gokhale".

Predictably, this confluence of views brought the leaders of India’s two main political streams into a close association, whose historic outcome was the Lucknow Pact in December 1916. More by design than by coincidence, the annual sessions of the Congress and the Muslim League took place around the same time in the city that was one of the nerve centres of the 1857 War of Independence. Here, the two parties agreed on separate representation for Muslims and gave due weightage to their representation, higher than their percentage in population would warrant, in the imperial/provincial legislatures where they were in a minority. Applying the same principle, the pact also increased the representation of non-Muslims and suitably reduced the representation of Muslims in the Muslim-majority provinces, like Punjab and Bengal. It conceded to the Muslims one-third of the seats in the Imperial Legislative Council. Furthermore, it introduced another safeguard to reassure both communities. No proposal that affected any one community could be passed in legislatures if three-fourths of that community’s representatives were opposed to it.

Influential Hindu leaders of the Congress, such as Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, B S Moonje and Tej Bahadur Sapru, opposed Tilak, saying he had surrendered to the Muslims by conceding the 'anti-national and anti-democratic' system of separate electorates. Yet, Tilak stood his ground and staked his all for the Hindu-Muslim settlement. Addressing over 2,000 delegates in the open session, and using words that only a leader with enormous conviction and self-confidence can, Tilak said: "It has been said that we, Hindus, have yielded too much. The concession that has been made to our Muhammadan brethren in the Legislative Council is really nothing too much. In proportion to the concession that had been made to the Moslems, their enthusiasm and warm-hearted support is surely greater. I urge the audience to give effect actively to the resolution adopted by the Congress."

Tilak addressing a meeting at Shantaram Chawl, Bombay, in 1917. M A Jinnah can be seen, in black jacket, to his right.
Explaining his stand further, Tilak remarked: "As a Hindu I have no objection to making this concession. We cannot rise from our present intolerable condition without the aid of the Muslims." Tilak’s stand was that the "triangular" fight among Hindus, Muslims and the British should be reduced to a "two-way" fight between the British and the common front of Hindus and Muslims. And for bringing about this fundamental change, he was prepared to show that Hindus were willing to be magnanimous towards their Muslim brethren, who, after all, were fellow Indians.

Jinnah echoed Tilak’s thoughts and sentiments. In his speech at the Muslim League session in Lucknow, he described himself as "a staunch Congressman" who had "no love for sectarian cries". In November 1917, addressing a public meeting in Bombay’s Shantaram Chawl in Tilak’s presence, he said: "My message to the Musalmans is to join hands with your Hindu brethren. My message to the Hindus is to lift your backward brother up." Jinnah strongly believed in the idea of a "union of the two great communities in India". He regarded it a necessity for the Hindus and Muslims "to combine in one harmonious union for the common good".

Tilak-Jinnah Pact — why its spirit should be resurrected
It is one of the great tragedies of India’s freedom movement that the spirit of Hindu-Muslim unity, and Congress-Muslim League cooperation, did not last the test of subsequent developments. One reason for this is that Tilak did not live long enough to give a practical shape to its contents. Jinnah on the other hand was finding himself sidelined in the Congress party. His hopes of Hindu leaders in the Congress willing to share power with Muslims and the Muslim League in a self-governing India started fading. And they received a body blow when Nehru, who was then the Congress president, refused to share power with the Muslim League after the Congress swept the elections to the provincial legislature in UP in 1937. Thereafter, there was little trust left between the two parties. And the growing mistrust, and little cooperation, between the two ultimately led to the Partition in 1947.

This happened because Tilak’s prescient endeavor to transform the "triangular" fight — Hindu vs. British, Muslim vs. British and Hindu vs. Muslim — into a direct two-way fight between a Hindu-Muslim joint front against the British, which he had accomplished in Lucknow in 1916, came unstuck after his demise. The fight once again became "triangular" with cataclysmic consequences.

The Lucknow Pact is now a part of history, forgotten in both India and Pakistan. But the question is: does the spirit of the pact still have any relevance? The answer, most certainly, is, yes it does. The specific provisions of the pact are no longer relevant. But its basic motivational principle — namely, that the two main communities of India should not only peacefully and cooperatively coexist but also show the readiness to compromise should the need arise — is valid even today.

Both Tilak and Jinnah, if they were alive today, would have been deeply distressed at the current state of India-Pakistan relations and also at the inter-religious disharmony in our two countries. In particular, neither India nor Pakistan is showing any magnanimity, any constructive understanding, and any inclination to compromise in dealing with contentious bilateral issues. Let us be honest: can the dispute over Kashmir ever be resolved through bilateral negotiations without mutual trust, without an attitude of give-and-take, and without a commitment to justice and fairness? Are India and Pakistan to regard each other as permanent enemies?

Another question to ponder is has Indian nationalism ceased to be "composite", as Tilak had believed it to be, after Narendra Modi became prime minister in 2014? Is the concept of, and demand for, India as a 'Hindu Rashtra' consistent with Tilak’s vision of India?

If we ponder over these questions, we will begin to realise that the essential spirit of mutual understanding and cooperation demonstrated by Tilak and Jinnah alone can help in the fruition of two all-important challenges before us today: Hindu-Muslim harmonisation and India-Pakistan normalisation.

Sudheendra Kulkarni was an aide to India’s former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee between 1998 and 2004. As the founder of Forum for a New South Asia, he is actively engaged in efforts to strengthen communal harmony in India and also to promote India-Pakistan and India-China friendship. He is the author of Music of the Spinning Wheel: Mahatma Gandhi’s Manifesto for the Internet Age. He tweets @SudheenKulkarni and welcomes readers' comments at [email protected]

https://www.dawn.com/news/1571797/why-j ... n-and-indi

[swamidada]

AUGUST 05, 2020
India's Modi to lay Hindu temple foundations at site of Babri Masjid

The flashpoint Indian town of Ayodhya geared up on Tuesday for a ceremony attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to lay the foundations for a Hindu temple on the ruins of a mosque destroyed by a mob in 1992.

The building of the temple in northern India, starting on Wednesday with a colourful rite broadcast live on TV, has long been a pledge of Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Babri Masjid stood on the site for almost 500 years until it was demolished by Hindu zealots in 1992.

That sparked riots across the country in which 2,000 people, mainly Muslims, died — some of independent India's worst sectarian violence.

Devout Hindus believe that Lord Ram, the warrior god, was born in Ayodhya some 7,000 years ago but that a mosque was constructed on top of his birthplace in the 16th century.

In November, India'a top court after a legal battle lasting decades awarded the site to Hindus, giving Muslims another location to build a new mosque.

It was a stunning victory for the BJP, but for critics, it marked another step in Modi's agenda to turn officially secular India into a Hindu nation, marginalising its 200 million Muslims — something he denies.

Babri mosque verdict 'shredded the veneer of so-called secularism of India': Foreign Office

Wednesday also marks one year since Modi's government imposed direct rule on occupied Kashmir, another long-standing BJP pledge.

The Ayodhya ceremony, held at a time recommended by astrologers, has been curtailed because of the coronavirus, with at least two priests as well as Modi's right-hand-man and Home Minister Amit Shah testing positive.

But it will still be a grand affair beamed onto large screens around India and even on the huge displays at Times Square in New York, reports said.

Hindus around India have also been asked to light earthenware lamps.

Those attending include 135 “revered saints” and Mohan Bhagwat, the head of the BJP's hardline and militaristic parent organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), who will share the stage with Modi.

Soil from almost 2,000 holy sites around India and water of around 100 holy rivers will be used in the foundations, as well as silver bricks and a “time capsule” with information written in Sanskrit on copper plates, reports said.

The temple will also include a shed for cows — considered sacred by Hindus — as well as a huge prayer hall.

“Tomorrow is the foundation of a very different kind of structure for the Indian Constitution,” Pratap Bhanu Mehta, former president of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), told AFP.

“It's not a reflection of a new temple but it's a reflection of the fact that the fundamental constitutional structure of India is changing.“

https://www.dawn.com/news/1572586/india ... bri-masjid

[kmaherali]

Poor and Desperate, Pakistani Hindus Accept Islam to Get By

Drawn by jobs or land offered by Muslim groups, some Hindus, facing discrimination and a virus-ravaged economy, are essentially converting to survive.

The Hindus performed the prayer rituals awkwardly in supplication to their new, single god, as they prepared to leave their many deities behind them. Their lips stumbled over Arabic phrases that, once recited, would seal their conversion to Islam. The last words uttered, the men and boys were then circumcised.

Dozens of Hindu families converted in June in the Badin district of Sindh Province in southern Pakistan. Video clips of the ceremony went viral across the country, delighting hard-line Muslims and weighing on Pakistan’s dwindling Hindu minority.

The mass ceremony was the latest in what is a growing number of such conversions to Pakistan’s majority Muslim faith in recent years — although precise data is scarce. Some of these conversions are voluntary, some not.

News outlets in India, Pakistan’s majority-Hindu neighbor and archrival, were quick to denounce the conversions as forced. But what is happening is more subtle. Desperation, religious and political leaders on both sides of the debate say, has often been the driving force behind their change of religion.

More...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[swamidada]

The Indian Express
Thursday, August 06, 2020

How to view the Bhoomi pujan ceremony of Ram temple in Ayodhya
Ayodhya Ram Mandir Bhoomi Pujan: The Ram Temple represents a shared sentiment of sacredness according to Ram Madhav, but for Pratap Bhanu Mehta, it is the first real colonization of Hinduism by political power.

Ayodhya Ram Mandir Bhoomi Pujan: Ahead of the Ram temple “Bhoomi pujan” in Ayodhya on August 5, The Indian Express’ opinion pages carry the views of several commentators on this topic.

Ram Madhav, national general secretary of the BJP, writes that “Places like Ayodhya represent a universal sentiment of sacredness, not merely because of their association with the epic Ramayana and its hero Ram, but also because of a value system that they represented”.

Madhav points out that “Ram is a god to many. But the sage Valmiki presents him both as an avatar of Vishnu as well as an ideal human being”. The Prime Minister will be laying the foundation of those great values, hidden in the fabulous tale of Ayodhya that has for millennia been — and then Madhav quotes historian William Dalrymple — “treasured as the common property of every Hindu — as well as that of many Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians”.

Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, a Rajya Sabha MP of the BJP as well as the president of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, looks back at the “Temple movement” and says it “sought to change the character of polity, nature of public discourse”.

He writes: “Going beyond the temple, every Hindu must realise that unless caste discrimination is abolished lock, stock and barrel, a common consciousness and Hindu unity will remain a chimaera. Muslims must realise that it is wrong to see the temple movement as anti-mosque or anti-Muslims. The Indian ethos, with spiritual democracy at its core, can never accept rulers imposing its way of worship by destroy- ing other places of worship. The destruction of Ram temple by Babar was a historic wrong, which is being corrected today”.


The Express’ contributing editor, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, addresses Ram in his column and puts forward a contrasting view.

He writes: “Today, those who waged war in your name will consecrate your temple at Ayodhya. They are describing this as the ultimate act of devotion to you, the ultimate obeisance to your sovereignty. They are, they say, reclaiming hallowed ground, desecrated by barbarous invaders. They are describing this as a cathartic overcoming of Hindu humiliation. They are describing this as a new renaissance for Ram Rajya. You will now be the symbol of a community united in strength, full of a new found pride. It will be said, secretly, this is restoring wholeness to a broken culture. But I know I will not find you there. This is because what is being consecrated is a monument to a violent, collective narcissism”.

Ayodhya, Ram Temple, Bhooi pujan in Ayodhya, Ayodhya ground breaking ceremony, PB Mehta on Ayodhya ram temple ceremony, ram madhav on ayodhya, indian express The streets of Ayodhya are decorated with flowers on the eve of the groundbreaking ceremony of the Ram Mandir, at Hanumangarhi area in Ayodhya, Tuesday, Aug 4, 2020. (PTI Photo: Nand Kumar)
In her piece, Syeda Hameed, a former member of the erstwhile Planning Commission, says that on the eve of August 5, 2020, her mind goes back to December 6, 1992.

“I watched as stroke by stroke, kar sevaks did what they had to — youths donning orange headbands stood atop the dome, their pickaxes held up for the TV cameras, before striking the 15th-century structure. Leaders reached the spot to be seen and to cheerlead the mobs,” she states.

“With the razing of Babri, Muslims stepped on the road which would lead a decade later to Gujarat 2002, to lynchings, pogroms, riots, killings, incarceration, to the Ayodhya judgment in 2019 and finally, the Bhoomi Pujan,” she states. (Follow live updates on the Ayodhya Ram Mandir ceremony)

https://indianexpress.com/article/expla ... t%20realis

[kmaherali]

Madhav points out that “Ram is a god to many. But the sage Valmiki presents him both as an avatar of Vishnu as well as an ideal human being”. The Prime Minister will be laying the foundation of those great values, hidden in the fabulous tale of Ayodhya that has for millennia been — and then Madhav quotes historian William Dalrymple — “treasured as the common property of every Hindu — as well as that of many Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians”.

Only if they recognized that the avatar of Vishnu is indeed the present Imam, things might have been very different.

[swamidada]

Pro-Delhi politics in Kashmir faced a credibility crisis. Post-August 5, it stands demolished
Besides feeling humiliated, pro-Delhi politicians are perhaps also grieving over the loss of certain privileges that they enjoyed.

Gowhar Geelan Updated about 21 hours ago
For unionists in held Kashmir, the dawn of August 5 came like a betrayal.

Those among the unionists, who spent several months in "preventive detention", are feeling jilted and cheated. Cheated because New Delhi made the decision about the region’s political future, its geography and landscape, and the people's identity without the consent of the people of Kashmir. As a result, the now believe that the aim behind New Delhi's move was to manufacture consent by use of force, with aggression and siege as the tools deployed to seal Kashmir’s fate.

In these circumstances, the unionists now feel disempowered and humiliated. Many are yet to come to terms with what happened on August 5, 2019. And more than the people of Kashmir, it was the unionists who were shocked by the tectonic constitutional changes of August 5. Besides feeling hurt and humiliated, they are perhaps also grieving over the loss of certain privileges that are associated with power politics in South Asia.

Many a betrayal
What must be kept in mind is that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appeared to have done its homework long before it formally abrogated Articles 370 and 35-A. But such a move is not extraordinary when it comes to how this region has been treated historically and how conveniently 'democracy and morality can wait' in India when it comes to Kashmir.

Let's rewind to August 9, 1953, when then prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah, was unceremoniously dismissed and subsequently imprisoned for over two decades in separate stints between 1953 and 1975.

Academic and historian Perry Anderson writes in The Indian Ideology that: "The Intelligence Bureau had little difficulty convincing [Pandit Jawaharlal] Nehru that he [Abdullah] had become a liability, and overnight he was dismissed by the stripling heir to the Dogra throne he had so complacently made head of state, and thrown into an Indian jail on charges of sedition."

Late Professor Balraj Puri, an academic from Jammu, was enraged over Abdullah's dismissal and detention. With the aim to register his protest over the issue, he met then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in New Delhi with his earnest trip to Delhi ending in disappointment. He later noted in his book In Kashmir Towards Insurgency that "Nehru warned me against being too idealistic and asserted that the national interest was more important than democracy".

Anderson corroborates the account. "When an anguished admirer from Jammu pleaded with him [Nehru] not to do so, he replied that the national interest was more important than democracy: 'We have gambled at the international stage on Kashmir, and we cannot afford to lose. At the moment, we are there at the point of a bayonet. Till things improve, democracy and morality can wait'."

That long wait continues to this day.

A blow to the Kashmiris' collective sense of pride
This is the context to the Kashmir story and the state of unionist politics. Even after 73 long years since the Partition in 1947, the unionist politics in J&K is at the precipice of irrelevance. It is feeling the heat as never before. "To this day, I fail to understand the need for this move (August 5, 2019), except to punish and humiliate," former chief minister Omar Abdullah argued in a recent newspaper article.

To put it mildly, the August 5 decision was a blow to the Kashmiris' collective sense of pride. Perhaps, it was also aimed at instilling a sense of permanent psychological defeat in the hearts and minds of the people. It was a decision that has resulted in collective disempowerment and humiliation. A series of actions that followed only ended up serving further rounds of insult and any nuances that may have been disappeared into thin air when the region’s five-time former chief minister Farooq Abdullah was placed under detention at his Gupkar residence in Srinagar. Among all the unionists, Abdullah was inarguably Kashmir’s most powerful politician in the public imagination. Only until then, though.

On August 6, 2019, he appeared from the balcony of his Gupkar residence to speak to the media in desperation. And he broke down. "They [the ruling dispensation in New Delhi] want to murder us [Kashmiris]. My chest is ready. Fire here," Abdullah said in an emotional tone, alluding to his chest area with the fingers of his right hand. "Not in my back," he added after a brief pause. This was the moment when it became clear that one of Kashmir’s most influential political figures was not only caged, but also made aware that he was helpless. His humiliation was complete. "My son (Omar Abdullah) is in jail. And I do not know how many more poor people will be in jail. I think this is the price we will have to pay," he said as tears streamed down his face, adding that the people of Kashmir had been "stabbed".

In Farooq Abdullah's fall was a message for the National Conference's cadre base and for other regional parties like the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) led by Mehbooba Mufti, the Sajad Lone-led J&K People's Conference (JKPC), the Awami Ittehad Party (AIP) headed by incarcerated Sheikh Rasheed, and the celebrated bureaucrat-turned-reluctant-politician Shah Faesal's People's Movement (JKPM) etc. That message being that it was all over now.

BJP's long game
A year before the events of August 5, some in the J&K Raj Bhawan (Governor House) began to manufacture the narrative that the Kashmiri Muslim elite holding positions of power in the region was corrupt, that the unionists were dynastic in character, that the Hurriyat was corrupt and that the chairman of Jammu and Kashmir Bank was also dishonest. It was made up to be all about corruption.

Satya Pal Malik, the region’s then governor, would on a daily basis deliver prolonged monologues and scripted sermons on transparency and corrupt practices as if not a single Kashmiri was earning an honest living and that he was some kind of saviour of Kashmir trying to rid the region from the scourge of corruption.

Then, in June 2018, the BJP walked away from the alliance that it had forged with the PDP in early 2015. And that is when the operation to disempower and neutralise the political centrality of the valley began.

According to a unionist politician who understands the ground realities and the pulse of the public, Kashmiris have not given up. The politician says that Kashmiris are in a state of mourning, arguing that mourning is not to be taken as inaction. He believes that Kashmir will respond at the time of its own choosing after calculating the pros and cons of internal and external factors.

Another unionist says he is yet to reconcile with the reality of the August 5 decision. "Did it happen or was it a nightmare?" he asks me as he remains under house arrest in Srinagar. He says he would be the one offering hope to thousands of people in his pockets of influence but remains clueless about what to do or what to say right now. "I feel helpless and hopeless."

The state of the unionists
On August 5 last year, former Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah called New Delhi's move an act of "aggression" against the people of Kashmir and in a recent article said he won't contest elections of the J&K assembly if the region's special status was not restored. But the bitter reality is that three legislators from his own party did not resign, not even to register a token protest, if nothing else, against New Delhi's "unilateral and undemocratic" abrogation of Article 370.

Former Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, who rejected New Delhi's move, is under house arrest and has been held at her residence in Srinagar for nearly a year now.

Sajad, son of slain Hurriyat leader Abdul Gani Lone, who once referred to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a "friend of Kashmiris" whom he found "down to earth" and like his "big brother", wasn't spared either. Those who were detained along with him at Srinagar's Sher-i-Kashmir International Conference Centre (SKICC) said that there were times in detention when "Sajad shed tears". He felt dishonoured.

Then there's the celebrated Kashmiri bureaucrat Shah Faesal, who before joining politics, had in an article published in January 2019 argued that "at the root of the political problem in Kashmir is the paradox that those who represent the sentiment do not participate in the electoral process and those who participate in the electoral process do not represent the sentiment". He pointed out that "the elected representatives are either a disempowered lot, a group of helpless daily-wagers with the Government of India or that the elected representatives are misrepresenting their electorate by not speaking out about the basic Kashmir issue".

Faesal had resigned from his job as a civil servant and in March last year formally launched his party, the J&K Peoples Movement. At the time of his resignation, he had claimed that he would "manipulate the system to his advantage" and would be able to do so because he "knows the system well" and that it was time to employ a new "political vocabulary" in J&K’s electoral politics. By that, he meant that unionists should stop lying about Kashmir's ground realities, public sentiment and people's political aspirations. After his famous interview with BBC’s Hard Talk in August last year, he too was detained under the Public Safety Act (PSA). After experiencing first-hand how the system treated him when he tried to speak as a 'free' man, Faesal, according to one of his close aides, now sees J&K's unionist politics as "a brothel never to be revisited".

But both Sajad and Faesal remain unpredictable.

Since the Partition of the sub-continent, the unionists in Kashmir have been selling the idea of democracy and development to the people. They naively believed that solutions to all the intractable problems of the region would be reached within the ambit of the Indian Constitution. Since 1989, they have also been paying a heavy price for selling the idea of a secular and democratic India to the people. However, most of them now candidly concede that they have run out of arguments, aware that for decades they went against the tide and the sentiment on the street. An overwhelming majority in Kashmir always viewed them as Delhi's representatives in Kashmir, not Kashmir's representatives in Delhi. Now Delhi has demonised and disowned them and they are clueless about what to do next.

The unionists (initially the JKNC and later PDP and Co.) through scornful jocularity would often criticise the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) for chasing what they called an "unrealistic goal" of 'aazadi' or Kashmir's merger with Pakistan. The NC's argument was that restoring J&K's regional autonomy by turning the clock backwards to 1953 was an "ideal solution". Whereas, late Mufti Sayeed-led PDP has batted for the "self-rule" and "joint mechanism" formula for Kashmir on both sides of the Line of Control (LoC) since January 1949. The PDP's Kashmir formula was not very different from the four-point K-formula proposed by former president of Pakistan, General (retired) Pervez Musharaf, in 2006. The idea is said to have been originally floated by Farooq Kathwari, a Kashmiri American who founded the Kashmir Study Group.

For many Pakistanis and Indians, Kashmir symbolises the conflict between their competing concepts of national identity. From the BJP’s perspective, it has successfully contained the Kashmir story with an iron fist and controlled the narratives. But has it really won anything in Kashmir? Has its ideological decision factored in the external factors, such as China and Pakistan? And has it misinterpreted Kashmir's silence as surrender?

A loose congregation of stooges and turncoats
The saffron party seems to be in a tearing hurry to alter ground realities in the region, raising anxieties about domicile, demography and dignity among Kashmiris. Other steps that the people see as anti-Kashmir include delimitation of assembly constituencies, notifying "strategic areas" for use by the army, and denying high-speed 4G internet services for a year now.

After discrediting unionists, the BJP now appears to be on a mission to create a new political elite in Kashmir. The party has invested in Altaf Bukhari, a businessman-turned-politician and a former cabinet minister. Bukhari heads the newly-created Apni Party which, in simple words, is a loose congregation of stooges and turncoats. Most of its members are PDP dissenters. They have joined the bandwagon either because of coercion or out of greed.

Despite these transparent tactics by the BJP, there appears to be little hope for the traditional unionists to revive themselves and win public trust.

On March 13 this year, the J&K administration released Farooq Abdullah after seven months of detention. And what he said upon release is particularly telling: "I speak before you as a free man. But this freedom is not complete. Several leaders are still under detention. It is important to release them. I will not make any political statement unless all political leaders are released from detention."

When a politician of Farooq's calibre decides not to talk politics it is clear as day that the region's political landscape stands deeply altered.

Farooq's silence also connotes that people have very little expectations from unionists to make a difference in Kashmir's political landscape. The unionists' mandate was limited to providing basic governance and that too has been snatched from them. Their politics in Kashmir was facing a credibility crisis but post-August 5, it stands demolished. The unionists are in a state of mourning and the people of Kashmir are trying to survive to tell the tale. And their attempt at surviving through is nothing short of an act of rebellion.

Gowhar Geelani is the author of Kashmir: Rage and Reason. A broadcast journalist and commentator based in Srinagar, Geelani works for Germany’s public broadcaster, Deutsche Welle. He is also a Chevening Fellow and a Munich Young Leader and is a Kashmir affairs expert.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1572162/pro-d ... demolished

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Madhav points out that “Ram is a god to many. But the sage Valmiki presents him both as an avatar of Vishnu as well as an ideal human being”. The Prime Minister will be laying the foundation of those great values, hidden in the fabulous tale of Ayodhya that has for millennia been — and then Madhav quotes historian William Dalrymple — “treasured as the common property of every Hindu — as well as that of many Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, and Christians”.

Only if they recognized that the avatar of Vishnu is indeed the present Imam, things might have been very different.

What a fantastic idea. You should have written a letter to Mr. Modi advising him about Imam. By the way, Imam has met Mr. Modi quite few times, should have introduced himself as Vishnu.

[kmaherali]

What a fantastic idea. You should have written a letter to Mr. Modi advising him about Imam. By the way, Imam has met Mr. Modi quite few times, should have introduced himself as Vishnu.

Given the scale of activities of the Imam in India, perhaps many of them would be coming to that understanding but are reluctant to admit it openly due to various pressures.

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What a fantastic idea. You should have written a letter to Mr. Modi advising him about Imam. By the way, Imam has met Mr. Modi quite few times, should have introduced himself as Vishnu.

Given the scale of activities of the Imam in India, perhaps many of them would be coming to that understanding but are reluctant to admit it openly due to various pressures.

I do not want to comment on AKDN or Aga Khan foundation work. But look at donations, contributions, and services of Azim Premji, Tata, Ambanis, even movie stars in various fields.

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AUGUST 09, 2020
Pak-India education compared
Pervez Hoodbhoy Updated 08 Aug 2020

ON July 29, Narendra Modi’s government unveiled what it calls a groundbreaking new national education policy (NEP 2020). The 65-page document’s wide range — from primary to university — forces me to consider here just a single issue: To what extent does NEP reflect the BJP ideology of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan? And how does it compare against Pakistan’s newly declared single national curriculum with logo: one nation, one curriculum?

At face value NEP is innocuous, even charming. It speaks of India’s rich heritage, the ancient universities of Nalanda and Takshashila, mathematicians like Bhaskaracharya and Brahmagupta, jnan (knowledge) and satya (truth) etc. The goal of education is: “complete realisation and liberation of the self”. Who can possibly object? Still better: my computer word search yielded only two occurrences of the word ‘religion’, both times in the harmless context of NEP’s purported inclusion of all religions.

NEP also engages our anti-colonial sensibilities: Indian children up to grade 6-7 can learn English if they want but, under its new three-language formula, states and regions can choose their languages provided at least two of the three are native to India. In principle Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Christian students will use the same books, study side by side in the same classrooms, and take the same exams. Wonderful!

But inside NEP’s not-so-hidden agenda are the clear wishes of RSS, the BJP’s ideological parent. RSS follows its guru, M.S. Golwalkar, who suggested India learn from Hitler in keeping races pure. In 1947, RSS wanted all Muslims remaining in India expelled to Pakistan. Then a minority, it now enjoys full state support.

India must look towards its glorious past, declares NEP, with that past exclusively Hindu. Although Sanskrit is a culturally dead language, NEP calls it the fount of all sacred and secular knowledge. Urdu, on the other hand, although spoken by tens of millions of Indians and once the language of the Bombay film industry, is absent from a list that includes Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Pali, Persian, and Prakrit.

India and Pakistan’s new education policies will push their respective religious minorities into a corner

All education policies are cooking recipes; the final product depends upon ingredients. NEP hints at, but leaves unspecified, what textbooks will contain. Will history be dispassionately presented as a series of invasions which, layer by layer, built Indian culture over the millennia? Or are Muslims merely wicked temple-destroyers who shattered the seraphic heaven of Mother India? One worries because in BJP-ruled states, leaders have demanded removal of references to Mughal emperors Akbar and Aurangzeb to make space for Hindu kings like Maharana Pratap and Shivaji.

Interestingly, RSS’s nativism appears driven more by its anti-Christian agenda than its anti-Muslim one. Since the days of Lord Macaulay, convents and other English-medium Christian missionary schools have been the mainstay of modern Indian education. But today, tens of thousands of RSS-associated vernacular language schools stand against them. These will gain from downgrading English.

RSS pracharaks are jubilant but Indians face a reality check. English-medium schools, not traditional patshalas and gurukuls, modernised India and gave it global clout. While India can name its satellite ‘Aryabhatta’, Isaac Newton’s laws actually guided it into orbit. Even the BJP minister whose signature is on NEP, Prakash Javedekar, knows this. From Indian press reports I found that he, along with nine other BJP ministers, has also sent his children to study abroad.

NEP is a step backward for India’s national integration. In spite of 30 languages, 130 dialects, and well over a dozen faiths, India took barely 50 years to create a national identity after Jawaharlal Nehru set it on a secular track. Most Muslims, Sikhs and Christians were then proud to declare themselves Indian. But, as Indian secularism retreats, this is now disappearing.

Pakistan’s new education policy, only parts of which are known so far, is much more upfront on creating a religion-based society. The goal is to put madressahs at the same level as all other kinds of schools. Henceforth, bearded men from the Ittehad Tanzimat-i-Madaris (Coalition of Madressah Organisers) will decide what Pakistani children will learn and will also scrutinise their textbooks.

Religious materials are mandatory from nursery classes onward. The new Class 1-5 curriculum is extremely detailed and reveals more religious content to be memorized than even madressahs require. Discrimination is automatic. Since non-Muslim students cannot be allowed to study from the Holy Book, they must be separated.

Major changes are afoot at higher levels as well. The governor of Punjab, Ghulam Sarwar, told me during an exclusive one-on-one meeting in his office on July 23 of his decision to make the award of all university degrees in Punjab contingent upon studying the Holy Quran together with translation. Doing so, he said, will ensure that our university students learn Arabic. He did not elaborate on how this would help make better doctors, economists, engineers, or scientists.

For building national identity Pakistan seeks to Arabicise and Islamise whereas India wants to indigenise and Hinduise. The BJP’s way is more subtle than Pakistan’s but cleverer because it understands the enormous power of culture. Programmes such as ‘Aik Bharat Shreshtha Bharat’ aim at developing a multilingual, multicultural (but not multi-religious) Indian national identity.

Compare that with education policies in Pakistan where regional cultures and languages find only fleeting references. With no lessons learnt from 1971, Pakistan still assumes that solidifying its Islamic identity will somehow create national integration. Even something as mild as the 18th Amendment, which entrusts education to the provinces, has the sword of Damocles hanging over it.

The new education policies of India and Pakistan will further divide them, both from each other as well as within each country. Majoritarian consensus against their respective religious minorities will be hugely strengthened. The Indian policy is milder in tone than Pakistan’s but is probably more dangerous simply because it is better thought out and professionally formulated, hence, likely to be more successful when implemented. On the other hand, the Pakistani policy document is half-baked, wrapped in multiple layers of confusion, and will almost certainly flounder. But if it is implemented, it will lead to fasaadi extremism of a kind that operations like Radul Fasaad cannot ever defeat.

The writer teaches physics in Lahore and Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, August 8th, 2020

https://www.dawn.com/news/1573256/pak-i ... n-compared

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From Ayodhya to Mumbai and back
In 2020, go back to the riots and violence of 1992-93. There has been no closure, no justice
COLUMNS Updated: Aug 13, 2020 18:49 IST

Rajdeep Sardesai

The law has failed to take its course. A majority of the 2000-odd cases related to the riots have been closes.

In television newsrooms, the Ram mandir bhoomi pujan on August 5 was a grand spectacle where a religious epic met a modern-day political supremo. As multiple cameras tracked every move of Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi with breathless excitement, I must confess to switching off from the frenzy. My mind instead was rewinding to another big news day. For long before August 5, 2020, there was December 6, 1992.

It was a Sunday and I was playing a cricket match in the genteel environs of the Bombay Gymkhana when the news trickled in around noon that the Babri masjid had been demolished in Ayodhya. Abandoning the game mid-way, I rushed to work. This was a pre-24x7 breaking news television era and our somnolent newspaper office in Mumbai seemed another universe away from the happenings in the temple town.

It was only late evening as the images of the demolition were telecast on BBC that there was a marked shift in mood. That night, we got the first reports of stone-throwing near Minara masjid in the congested by-lanes of Bhendi Bazaar. A police wireless van had been attacked by a mob: The men in khakhi were seen as a symbol of government authority which had failed to protect the mosque. By midnight, there was visible tension in the air. Policemen were patrolling the streets even as the stone-throwing continued in some parts. The next day, the local Muslim League called a bandh, and a curfew was declared in central Mumbai even as the violence spread to the suburbs. For the next three months, Mumbai would be shaken out of its cosmopolitan illusions. A riot that began in December between the police and angry Muslim groups would transform in January into aggressive street mobilisation by militant Hindu outfits and culminate in March 1993 in serial blasts triggered by the Dawood Ibrahim-led underworld.

For an archetypal south Mumbai child of relative privilege, the riots and terror attack were a wake-up call. Under the city of gold lurked an underbelly of grime, an overcrowded metropolis that was sitting on a combustible tinderbox. The Babri demolition had exposed Mumbai’s fault-lines and left the city at the mercy of resentful Muslim groups, Shiv Sena storm troopers, underworld gangs and a partisan police force. Outside my south Mumbai comfort zone, I was exposed to another Mumbai. We met dozens of families who were caught in the crossfire, forced to abandon their homes and flee, others whose shops and offices had been burnt down. More than 1,000 people died in Mumbai’s twin riots and blasts, a majority of them faceless, innocent citizens targeted for their religious identity.

In late 1993, as an eyewitness to the carnage, I deposed before the Justice Srikrishna Commission that was appointed to inquire into the Mumbai violence. The cross-examination went on for three days. A tough Shiv Sena lawyer and Member of Parliament (MP), Adhik Shirodkar, was unbending in his interrogation. At the Mumbai reporting team of The Times of India, we even compiled a book, When Bombay Burned, detailing the chain of bloody events that had traumatised the city. Publishing was still in infancy and only around 1,000 copies of the book were printed. It was easily the most harrowing, gut-wrenching year in my professional life — a city that I loved dearly had been scarred, perhaps forever. Mumbai was sharply divided on communal lines. A Hindu-Muslim physical and psychological fracture occurred in those months that has never quite healed.

Twenty-eight years later, the wheel has come full circle. Here we are in a new, distinctly polarised India, where majoritarian politics is now mainstream, where the lines between secular and communal, law and illegality have been conveniently erased. The Shiv Sena, whose leader Bal Thackeray claimed in 1992 to be “proud of his boys” for their role in the demolition, is now the party in power in Maharashtra with the Congress as a junior ally. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), for which the Ayodhya movement was the passport to political influence, is now the country’s dominant political formation. Narendra Modi who earned his spurs while organising the 1990 Ram Janmabhoomi rath yatra that gained momentum and eventually led to the masjid’sdemolition is now the country’s all-powerful leader. The Indian Muslim is a fearful, marginal voice, ghettoised and demonised as the permanent other.

The law has failed to take its course. A majority of the 2,000 odd cases that were registered in connection with the Mumbai riots have been closed. There have been a handful of convictions, but most of the accused are out on bail. The Srikrishna report, which indicted the Sena and Mumbai police officers, was never acted upon and eventually dumped by the Maharashtra government. The Babri masjid demolition trial is still going on in a special court in Lucknow with no convictions. The high-profile politicians named in an FIR are now part of the power elite. No one who suffered in the post-Babri violence can claim to have got any justice or closure from a compromised State machinery.

As for me, I remain haunted by the images of rioting and destruction, of the smoke-filled skies of a city’s social fabric being torn apart, of tearful Mumbaikars with their agonizing stories of despair. The PM may have likened August 5 to the freedom movement but the festivities of the mandir nirman will always remind me of December 6, the day when vandalism triumphed over the Constitution and violence over ahimsa.

Postscript: My children are the post-Babri generation, born years after the demolition and, like millions of millennials, with no link to the past. Maybe, one day, they will read our Mumbai riots book, if only to realise that the foundation of a shiny new India has been built on the debris of a bloodied old order.

Rajdeep Sardesai is a senior journalist and author
The views expressed are personal

https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/ ... bOAQP.html

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Facebook refused to check hate speech by India's BJP fearing business fallout: WSJ report
Dawn.com Updated 15 Aug 2020

An India right-wing politician who has called for violence against Muslims and threatened to raze mosques continues to remain active on Facebook and Instagram, even though officials at the social media giant had ruled earlier this year the lawmaker violated the company's hate-speech rules, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.

The move to not proceed against T. Raja Singh, a member of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party, came after Facebook's top public-policy executive in India, Ankhi Das, opposed applying the hate-speech rules to Singh and at least three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups flagged internally for promoting or participating in violence, the newspaper quoted current and former employees as saying.

According to the report, Facebook employees charged with policing the platform had concluded by March that Singh's rhetoric against Muslims and Rohingya immigrants online and offline not only violated hate-speech rules but he also qualified as "dangerous" for his words could lead to real-world violence against Muslims.

Yet, instead of following the officials' recommendation to permanently ban him from the platform, the company allowed Singh, a member of the Telangana Legislative Assembly, to remain active on Facebook and Instagram, where he has hundreds of thousands of followers.

The decision was influenced by Das, whose job also includes lobbying the Indian government on Facebook’s behalf, telling staff members that punishing violations by politicians from the BJP would "damage the company’s business prospects in the country", which is Facebook’s biggest global market by number of users, the exposé said.

The way Facebook has applied its hate-speech rules to prominent Hindu nationalists in India "suggests that political considerations also enter into the calculus" of policing hate speech, it added.

Current and former Facebook employees cited in the report said Das’s intervention on behalf of Singh is part of "a broader pattern of favouritism by Facebook toward Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party and Hindu hard-liners".

Responding to the allegations, a Facebook spokesman acknowledged that Das had raised concerns about the political fallout that would result from designating Singh a dangerous individual, but said her opposition "wasn’t the sole factor" in the company’s decision to let the lawmaker remain on the platform. The spokesman said Facebook is still considering whether a ban is warranted.

Facebook deleted some of Singh’s posts after the WSJ inquired about them. The company said the BJP lawmaker is no longer permitted to have an official, verified account, designated with a blue checkmark badge.

According to the report, the representative said Facebook bars hate speech and violence globally “without regard to anyone’s political position or party affiliation”, adding that the company took down content that praised violence during deadly protests in New Delhi earlier this year.

But a team overseen by Das that decides what content is allowed on Facebook took no action after BJP politicians posted content accusing Muslims of intentionally spreading the coronavirus, plotting against the nation and waging a “love jihad” campaign by seeking to marry Hindu women, a former employee was quoted as saying.

Das has allegedly also provided the BJP with favourable treatment on election-related issues and in 2017 wrote an essay praising Modi......more on dawn.com

https://www.dawn.com/news/1574532/faceb ... wsj-report

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I have no choice but to post this information here instead of starting new thread:

Over 1,200 Hindu temples in India will pawn their gold to maintain running costs during the pandemic
Joe Wallen
The Telegraph August 26, 2020, 7:25 AM CDT
More than 1,200 temples across India will pawn their gold to make financial ends meet -

The unprecedented move comes after both Hindu devotees and tourists stopped visiting temples over the past five months as India struggles to contain the world’s fastest growing Covid-19 epidemic, recording over 3.2 million cases.

Daily cash donations from these worshippers had previously paid for the ongoing maintenance of temples and paid staff members' wages.

The famous hilltop Sabarimala Temple in the southern state of Kerala, is said to be among those looking to loan its gold supplies to the Reserve Bank of India. The temple is dedicated to the celibate Hindu God Ayyappan and is usually one of the world's largest pilgrimage sites, attracting 50 million devotees annually.

“We are in a big crisis… For the last five months, no devotees were visiting our temples but we have to spend around ₹50 crore (£5.1 million) in salaries and others per month,” said N Vasu, president of the Travancore Devaswom Board (TDB), a Kerala Government-run organisation managing Hindu temples, in Livemint.

“To tide over the crisis, we have in-principle agreed to deposit the gold in the form of coins, bars and others donated by devotees.”

The Sabarimala temple is among those that will pawn its gold to the Bank of India to tide it over during the pandemic - Stringer/Reuters
Mr Basu said the TDB would deposit around 1,000kg of gold after already selling unused lamps and traditional brass utensils to generate funds in May.

Worshippers have donated as much as 8.8 million pounds of gold to the country’s largest temples, according to a World Gold Council Report.

India’s influential Hindu nationalist groups have advocated for devotees to return to temples but public health experts have advised caution.

The third million of India's Covid-19 infections were recorded in just over two weeks - faster than both the United States and Brazil - and its overwhelmed public hospitals face a shortage of healthcare professionals and beds.

Some temples opened their doors on Wednesday for the first time since mid-March, in the hope of raising funds through donations, with Covid-19 restrictions in place.

An online booking system was set up in the Lord Padmanabha Swamy temple in the city of Thiruvananthapuram to limit the numbers of worshippers at any one point, while floor markings ensured devotees could adhere to social distancing.

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/ove ... 20307.html

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SEPTEMBER 04, 2020

Owen Bennett-Jones Updated 01 Sep 2020

KAMALA Harris’s acceptance of the vice presidential nomination is part of a trend — politicians with links to India are achieving positions of power in the West. Harris, who now has a far from implausible route to becoming the next but two US president, is half-Jamaican and half-Indian.

Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, arrived in Berkeley in 1958, nine years after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto studied there. But whereas ZAB returned (via Oxford) to win power at home, Gopalan married a Jamaican economics student and civil rights leader, Donald Harris. Her choice of partner was consistent with her family’s political traditions: back in India, Gopalan’s mother, Rajam, was an outspoken community organiser and husband, P.V. Gopalan, a progressive Indian diplomat involved in resettling some of those who fled the 1971 conflict in East Pakistan.

While Americans assess Harris, Brits are getting used to having three government ministers with an Indian heritage. As chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, has won praise for his liberal distribution of cash to counter Covid-19. Dishy Rishi, as he has become known, is within the globalised elite, having studied at Oxford and Stanford before marrying the daughter of an Indian billionaire.

Another senior minister, hard right Home Secretary Priti Patel, went to less glamorous universities but she also completed postgraduate studies. Like Sunak, her family moved from India to East Africa before reaching the UK. The trio of Indian-origin heavy hitters is completed by Business Minister Alok Sharma who moved to the UK from Agra at the age of five.

Why are British Indians wielding more power than British Pakistanis?

By comparison, British Pakistanis have the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and just one junior minister — Lord Tariq Ahmed in the Foreign Office.

Indian and Pakistani diplomats in London like it when they have a minister with links to their country in power. Conspiracy theories abound. They wonder whether it is a coincidence that Priti Patel’s new immigration policy favours applicants with PhDs in science and technology — something achieved by many more Indians than Pakistanis. The merging of the British Department for International Development into the Foreign Office could also have negative consequences for Pakistan. With the aid budget now controlled by diplomats, the UK is likely to demand more quid pro quos from Pakistan in return for funds.

But why are British Indians wielding more power than British Pakistanis? There are many explanations. British Indians such as Sunak and Patel, who reached the UK from East Africa enjoy two advantages: generally these families reached the UK not only relatively early but also with several generations worth of trading, education and worldliness behind them. Many Pakistanis by contrast came from undeveloped rural areas such as Mirpur where they picked up little experience of the outside world and even less education. While many British Indians now aspire to be accountants, many British Pakistanis have lower expectations, often ending up in relatively menial jobs; 15.4 per cent of British Indians are in higher managerial and professional occupations compared with 6.6pc of British Pakistanis.

Researchers in the UK are compiling increasing amounts of data about how different ethnic and religious groups are faring in the country and drawing tentative conclusions as to what is happening. It is now clear, for example, that Chinese and Indian pupils tend to make the most progress in primary school, with Indian pupils from lower socioeconomic backgrounds making the fastest progress. Pakistani and Bangladeshi young people do well between the ages of 11 and 16 but then their results taper off between the ages of 16 and 18. One study suggests that effect is especially marked in places where pupils are living in areas with a high concentration of their ethnic group.

It is hard to reach firm conclusions but it does seem clear that socioeconomic outcomes are shaped not just by ethnicity but also other factors. Some research looking at religion as well suggests that, all other things being equal, British Hindus fare better than British Muslims. It is striking that, within the British Indian community, Sikhs and Muslims remain almost twice as likely to be unemployed as Hindus. Having said that, Indian Muslims generally enjoy better outcomes than Pakistani Muslims, a finding which is consistent with research that suggests that factors such as gender are more important than someone’s faith.

Taken as a whole, the research suggests that for more people with Pakistani heritage to break through to positions of power in Western countries, there will need to be broader social changes affecting their community. No doubt Rishi, Patel, Sharma and Harris think they climbed to the top through their own efforts. To some extent they did, but they are also the product of socioeconomic trends beyond their control.

The writer is a British journalist. His book The Bhutto Dynasty will be published later this year.

Published in Dawn, September 1st, 2020

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Today's India is living the nightmares of its founding fathers
Aiding and abetting the BJP in its design are some of the so-called independent institutions of democracy.

Sanjay Kumar Published 31 Aug, 2020 03:37pm

Inaugurating a dam in the 1950s, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru called it the temple of modern India. For Nehru, factories, research institutes, universities, irrigation dams and power stations were the temples of modern India. As the first premier of a nascent nation, he wanted to keep India away from deep religious divide that marked the country’s independence. Nehru consciously steered clear of divisive agendas and tried to navigate India towards a new trajectory of development to establish it as a secular and modern nation where religion was not to be used as a marker for defining nationhood.

In the second decade of the 21th century, Narendra Modi’s idea of India is the opposite of what the founding fathers of independent India envisioned. He wants to define India as a Hindu nation and not as a modern, progressive, secular state where nation building means a focus on developing a scientific temperament, keeping religion out of political discourse and forging unity in diversity.

By laying the foundation of a Hindu temple in Ayodhya where the Babri mosque once stood, Modi on August 5 announced loud and clear that Indian nationalism could not be separated from Hinduism. He compared August 5 with August 15, signalling clearly that August 5 held the same significance for Hindu nationalists that Independence day holds for all Indians. He even called the foundation day of the temple a liberation day for India’s majority community.

The undercurrent of right wing majoritarian politics has been a constant presence in Indian politics since independence. But the leadership of the Congress party with Nehru at the helm kept such forces in check and the fringe Hindu groups could never get the political and moral legitimacy in independent India as they enjoy now. There had however always been a constant fear of what will happen to India if and when the fanatical Hindu nationalist fringe took over political power.

That fear is a now living reality in India.

The political agitation to build a temple at Ayodhya in place of the mosque started in the 1980s and reached its crescendo in 1992 with the demolition of the Babri mosque by a fanatic Hindu crowd.

After the humiliating defeat of the BJP in the 1984 general elections where it got just two parliamentary seats out of 545, the new party president Lal Krishna Advani decided to launch an aggressive political campaign in the name of temple building and mobilizing people in the name of Hindu pride. It was also advertised that the 16th century mosque in Ayodhya was built on the site where Hindu mythical god Ram was born. Advani established an emotional chord with Hindu nationalists and the BJP started to gain traction in India for the first time.

The temple movement polarized the entire society and wherever the Advani campaign reached, religious tension and violence took place. The campaign became so vicious and emotionally charged that in 1992 the majoritarian mob razed the mosque and riots took place at many places with Mumbai witnessing one of the worst communal unrest in modern times.

The deepening polarization catapulted the BJP to the national mainstream and by 1996 it secured 161 seats in the Indian parliament and in the subsequent mid-term elections in 1998 the party secured 182 seats, for the first time forming a government in New Delhi, albeit with the support of other parties.

The rise of the BJP has also seen growing political marginalization and societal otherisation of India's 15% Muslim population.

Furthermore, while the nation-building that started after India's independence focused on inclusive growth and bridging religious fault lines, BJP thrives on these exact fault lines, and to it nation-building only means majoritarian consolidation.

The otherisation of Muslims got new momentum after BJP's thumping victory in two subsequent general elections — in 2014 and 2019 — and subsequently a new phase of Hindu nationalist consolidation got underway. And it is not surprise that for the first time in the last two general elections, a ruling party in India does not have a single elected Muslim parliamentarian in its camp. Before this, it was pretty much unthinkable for a ruling party in India to run without adequate representation from the largest religious minority in the country.

The 2019 mandate further emboldened the BJP, which launched an aggressive push for Hindu consolidation.

The criminalisation of triple talaq among Muslims was the first major change the BJP brought in after returning to power. Under this law, any Muslim man would face a jail term if he utters triple talaq. By criminalising a civil law, the BJP is sending a message to its Hindu constituents that it is punishing Muslim men and not so much that it's protecting Muslim women, which it claimed the law aimed at doing.

The abrogation of the special status of Muslim majority Jammu and Kashmir was another step in the same direction. From the 1950s, the right wing group has had the agenda to abolish Kashmir's special status and it has always seen the issue from the prism of religion.

So blinded is the BJP in pursuing its majoritarian agenda that it fails to take into account the long term consequences of its actions in Kashmir when it comes to regional peace and geopolitical stability.

Similarly, the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) are open attacks on Indian Muslims. The CAA grants citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and Parsis from neighbouring countries but denies the same option to Muslims. Meanwhile, the NRC aims to prepare a registry of genuine citizens of India and if a Muslim fails to find a place in the NRC because of lack of documents, he or she will be declared stateless, unlike people from other religions who will be assimilated through CAA.

The humiliation of Muslims didn't end there. The communal violence in New Delhi in February further reinforced the divisive mindset of the regime. Media reports and fact-finding teams clearly blamed pro-CAA elements for inciting violence against Muslims who had been protesting against the controversial law. Majority of the lives lost and properties damaged belonged to Muslims. But the tragedy is such that the government instead of reaching out to Muslims and other victims got busy in arresting those who agotated against the CAA. Many students and civil society activists belonging to different religious groups ,mostly Muslims, have been arrested under draconian terror laws.

On the other hand, those associated with the BJP and other similar right-wing elements, who the fact-finding teams identified as being actively involved in fomenting violence, are roaming free.

Aiding and abetting the BJP in its design are some of the so-called independent institutions of democracy. Commentators question the silence of the judiciary on some of crucial issues, such as the change in Kashmir’s status as well as a lack of concern on mass arrests of civil society activists and students after the violence in New Delhi. Prominent experts and jurists have also questioned the apex court's one-sided verdict on the temple where the judgment gave the disputed land to Hindu plaintiffs without conclusively deciding the charge that the mosque was built after demolishing a temple.

A large section of the media is an active participant in promoting the divisive agenda of the Modi regime. They have turned communal and openly promote hatred and division in society, thereby further legitimizing majoritarian rule and majoritarianism.

Today, India is not living the dreams of its founding fathers but in fact their nightmares.

Sanjay Kumar is a New Delhi based journalist covering South Asia. A keen observer of politics in India and the subcontinent, Kumar in his 15 years of journalistic career has worked with both national and international media. A news reporter, columnist, commentator, producer and blogger, Kumar does not confine himself to one particular genre in journalism.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1577197/today ... ng-fathers

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Home / India News / SIT formed to ‘probe’ interfaith marriages in Kanpur
SIT formed to ‘probe’ interfaith marriages in Kanpur
Radical Hindu groups have popularized the term “love jihad”, which they use to describe what they believe is an organised conspiracy of Muslim men to trick Hindu women into marriage.
INDIA Updated: Sep 17, 2020 04:55 IST
Haidar Naqvi

Hindustan Times, Kanpur
The SIT probe has been ordered even as the woman recorded her statement in Delhi’s Tis Hazari court, saying she married on her own volition.
The SIT probe has been ordered even as the woman recorded her statement in Delhi’s Tis Hazari court, saying she married on her own volition. Photo

The Uttar Pradesh police have formed a nine-member Special Investigation Team to probe cases of interfaith marriages in Kanpur, inspector general Mohit Agarwal said. Agarwal said the SIT has been given 10 days to complete the probe after a woman’s family claimed she was a victim of “love jihad”.

Radical Hindu groups have popularized the term “love jihad”, which they use to describe what they believe is an organised conspiracy of Muslim men to trick Hindu women into marriage. In February, junior home minister G Kishan Reddy told Parliament the term “love jihad” is not defined under the laws and no such case has been reported by any central agency.

The SIT probe has been ordered even as the woman recorded her statement in Delhi’s Tis Hazari court, saying she married on her own volition. The case fell flat but the Vishwa Hindu Parishad joined the family in staging a demonstration in Kidwai Nagar alleging a pattern in five interfaith marriages. As of now, the SIT has 15 such cases to look into.

Agarwal said apart from tracing links between Muslims in such cases, the team would explore the conspiracy angle and look at whether the men were receiving overseas funding.

Deen Dayal Gaur, a local VHP functionary, said, “They are a result of a well-hatched conspiracy to target the Hindu girls; most of them are minor as per our inputs.”

https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-ne ... zuagI.html

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Why Yogi is wrong about the Mughals, writes Karan Thapar

The greatest of our rulers is the Mughal emperor Akbar. His ecumenism was unique for his time. As Ira Mukhoty has written, He believed ‘all religions are either equally true or equally illusory’

COLUMNS Updated: Sep 20, 2020 05:43 IST

Karan Thapar

I doubt if Yogi will accept he’s made a terrible mistake. I have no doubt he has
“How can our heroes be Mughals?”, asked chief minister Yogi Adityanath last week. To make his meaning clear, he added, “anything which smacks of subservient mentality” is not acceptable to his government. Today, I’d like to answer him.

First, however, I want to ask him a few questions myself. What gives a chief minister the right to question who our heroes are? He may have the authority to govern us but not to determine our values and shape our ideals. It’s arrogance on his part to presume to tell us who to look up to and which rulers of our past to consider great.

Although I don’t know Yogi, I’ll go one step further. I suspect his question reveals either prejudice or ignorance, possibly both. If I’m right, this not only is unfortunate and unbecoming in a chief minister, but compounds his arrogance.

And so to my answer. The greatest of our rulers is the Mughal emperor Akbar or, to use his full name, Abu’l Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar. I know many consider the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, who ruled 18 centuries earlier, Akbar’s equal or, possibly, heroically superior but I disagree. Akbar was not responsible for 100,000 deaths at Kalinga.

Now, let me tell Yogi a little about Akbar. As Ira Mukhoty, his latest and, arguably, best biographer has written, in the 16th century, his was “the greatest empire on earth”. With an annual income estimated at 100 million pounds, he was “by far the richest ruler in the world”. But it’s not his wealth or the size of his kingdom which makes him great. It’s his amazing personality.

For a start, Akbar’s ecumenism was unique for his time. He believed “all religions are either equally true or equally illusory”. Mukhoty says he prayed to the sun, whispered mantras, worshipped fire and kept fasts. His young son Murad was “entrusted to the Jesuits for an education”, taught the sign of the cross and to take the names of Jesus and Mary at the beginning of lessons. Akbar’s Hindu wives were not required to convert. They enjoyed “complete freedom to exercise their own religion”. He abolished the jiziya, “prohibited the slaughter of cows and the eating of their flesh” and was a vegetarian on weekends.

Mukhoty’s account reveals an incredible individual, far greater than the pomp and circumstance that inevitably surrounded him. He “often wore a dhoti” and appeared in the “diwan-e-aam with a tilak on the forehead and a rakhi on the wrist, tied by a Brahmin, as a blessing”. The décor of the palace he built in Fatehpur Sikri reflects the same open-hearted liberalism.

There were “frescoes painted of Christ, Mary and the Christian saints in the private chambers”. In 1582, he had the Mahabharata translated from Sanskrit to Persian. In later years, he commissioned translations of the Ramayana, Rajatarangini and the story of Nala and Damyanti.

This becomes even more remarkable when you discover Akbar was “effectively unschooled and practically illiterate”. In fact, Mukhoty believes he may have “suffered from attention-deficit disorder”. Some historians have even claimed he was dyslexic.

Let me now ask Yogi another question: How can such a man not be one of our heroes? Is it because he was a Muslim that we cavil? Or because his grandfather conquered India? Is this what you were implying when you said regarding Mughals as heroes reflects “the mentality of slavery”?

I wonder if he realises such logic could encourage the people of Odisha to curse Ashoka. Or India’s Buddhists to consider Pushyamitra Shunga villanous for persecuting their ancestors?

I know Yogi spoke as a politician, not a man of the cloth. Yet, he’s a revered priest of the faith we share.

Do these views represent Hindu thinking? Do they add lustre to our faith? Do they make Indians feel taller? Or more patriotic?

I doubt if Yogi will accept he’s made a terrible mistake. I have no doubt he has.

Karan Thapar is the author of Devil’s Advocate: The Untold Story

https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/ ... aILdP.html

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Netflix faces boycott calls in India over 'A Suitable Boy' kissing scene
CNN Mon, November 23, 2020, 6:06 AM CST
Netflix is facing a backlash in India over a now-infamous kissing scene in one of its shows.

The exchange takes place in the series, "A Suitable Boy," an adaptation of the award-winning novel by Indian author Vikram Seth, which was released on the streaming service last month.

The story follows the love life of a young Hindu woman and at one point, depicts her being kissed by a Muslim man at a Hindu temple.

That has proven controversial for some viewers in India, including Hindu nationalist politicians. On Sunday, "#BoycottNetflix" was trending on Twitter there, according to local media reports. The same day, Narottam Mishra, the minister of home affairs in the government of Madhya Pradesh state, said on Twitter that he had "asked the police to examine this controversial content."

"This has extremely objectionable content which hurts the sentiments of people of a particular religion," said Mishra, who is a member of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

"I have requested authorities to examine why, and with what intentions this program and this theme has been restarted on [streaming] platforms," he said, adding that he was looking into what legal action could be taken.

On Saturday, a BJP youth leader — Gaurav Tiwari — told reporters that he had lodged a separate complaint against Netflix's vice president of content in India and its director of public policy in relation to the show. The complaint accuses Netflix of committing "deliberate or malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings." Under Indian law, such an offense could be punishable by a prison term of up to three years, a fine, or both.

Netflix declined to comment.

Adapting to India
Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi was reelected in a landslide victory for his BJP party last year, many Indian Muslims say his emphasis on empowering India's Hindu majority has left them feeling like second-class citizens in their own country.

The news also comes at a sensitive time for streaming services in India. Earlier this month, the government announced new rules for digital media, saying that online streaming platforms would start to be regulated by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

That could force companies like Netflix to begin following the same restrictions as traditional media.

India is a huge part of Netflix's push into Asia. It has poured $400 million into the market over the last two years, turning the country into one of its main regional production hubs. Earlier this year, it also added a Hindi option on its platform to reach more Indian users.

"A Suitable Boy," a BBC production that was later acquired by Netflix, is just one of a string of titles focused on India the company is releasing there. The show is focused on how "modernity confronts tradition," according to a summary on Netflix's website.

That could also be a description for the current cultural debate in India. Recently, many politicians have been floating the topic of "love jihad," an Islamophobic theory that claims that Muslim men entice Hindu women into conversion under the pretext of marriage.

Mishra told reporters this month that a law would be introduced in his state to punish anyone found guilty of committing what was deemed as "love jihad."

Other businesses have been thrown off by similar controversies. Last month, an Indian jewelry brand pulled an ad showing a Muslim family with their Hindu daughter-in-law after criticism from some people in the Hindu community.

— Helen Regan, Priyali Sur and Vedika Sud contributed to this report.

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/cm/ ... 13334.html

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Indian state U P bans religious conversion before marriage in crackdown on 'Love Jihad'
Joe Wallen
The Telegraph Wed, November 25, 2020, 3:40 AM CST
Politicians from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party claim Hindu women are being forced to convert to Islam - Mahesh Hariani/Moment RF
Politicians from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party claim Hindu women are being forced to convert to Islam - Mahesh Hariani/Moment RF
Religious conversion before marriage will be punishable with a 10-year jail sentence in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, a move opposition activists say is the latest attack on India’s historic secularism.

Politicians from the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claim Muslim men are brainwashing Hindu women into converting to Islam before marriage - a practice they have described as “Love Jihad” - and allege it is a wider conspiracy to change the demographics in India.

The authorities in the BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh said the law was necessary as they have documented more than 100 cases of forced conversion in the state.

“The way in which religious conversions are done using deceit, lies, force, and dishonesty is heart-wrenching, and it was necessary to have a law in this regard,” said an Uttar Pradesh government spokesperson.

Similar bills have been tabled in two other BJP-ruled states, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has introduced a string of Islamophobic policies since his re-election in 2019 - Reuters
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has introduced a string of Islamophobic policies since his re-election in 2019 - Reuters
Uttar Pradesh, home to over 200 million people, may permit religious conversion after marriage but only if an application is submitted to a district magistrate two months in advance and reviewed by a committee.

In reality, forced religious conversions are extremely rare and approximately 80 percent of India's 1.38 billion citizens remain practicing Hindus.

Last week, five opposition-ruled states condemned the “Love Jihad” laws as an encroachment on personal liberty and an attack on Indian secularism.

The bill is the latest attempt to “divide the nation and disturb communal harmony”, according to Ashok Gehlot, the chief minister of Rajasthan, who belongs to the opposition Congress Party.

The BJP has been accused of implementing a string of Islamophobic policies since Prime Minister Narendra Modi was re-elected with a landslide victory in 2019.

These included the removal of the autonomous status that India’s only Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir has enjoyed since independence and the introduction of a new bill that only offered citizenship to non-Muslim religious minorities fleeing persecution in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh.

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/in ... 57346.html

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Indian police arrest Muslim man under 'love jihad' law for allegedly attempting to convert Hindu woman to Islam
Rahul Bedi
The Telegraph Thu, December 3, 2020, 9:24 AM CST
Protesters have criticized the new law -  JAGADEESH NV/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

A Muslim man has been arrested under a controversial anti-Muslim "love jihad" law in India after a Hindu father accused him of harassing his daughter to convert to Islam and marry him.

The man was arrested on Thursday from his village in Uttar Pradesh state, under the new legislation approved five days earlier.

In his complaint the woman's father claimed that three years ago the man had ‘harassed’ his teenage daughter, with whom he went to high school, pressuring to convert to Islam by offering her ‘allurements’ in order to marry him.

He claims the man had threatened to kidnap his daughter if she refused.

Police said the father, who strongly objected to his daughters association with a Muslim man, had similarly accused the man at the time of kidnapping his daughter, but the case was closed after the girl was found and denied having been abducted.

Local media reports indicated that the two were in a relationship, but this has not been confirmed.

The woman, who has not been named, married someone else in June, but in his complaint after the approval of the ‘love jihad’ law last week, her father claimed the man continued pursuing and harassing her.

Under the law, which carries a 10-year sentence and a £500 fine, all marriages between Muslims and Hindus can be annulled if it is proved the woman had converted solely for that purpose.

Hindu women who want to change their religion to Islam after marriage need to apply to the local district authorities for permission to do so.

The law was passed by the ruling Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party, the BJP, which believes that Muslim men have launched a "love jihad" to turn Hindu women Muslim, which would dilute India’s Hindu majority.

Hindu’s constitute around 80 per cent of India's population of 1.3 billion, while Muslims comprise around 15 per cent.

Over the past six years in power, the BJP has increased its political and electoral support across India, primarily by portraying Muslims as the ‘enemy’ poised to ‘dominate’ Hindus.

Opposition parties and critics have called the ‘love jihad’ legislation ‘regressive’ and accused the BJP of normalising anti-Muslim sentiment, charges the nationalist have ignored.

In October, a leading Indian jewellery brand was withdrawn by its manufacturer after one of its advertisements featuring an inter-faith Hindu-Muslim family was viciously trolled online by BJP supporters.

Senior BJP ministers accused Netflix of the same in a scene in The Suitable Boy television series, in which a Hindu woman kisses a Muslim man.

Senior BJP leaders are demanding legal action against the producer and director of the series for this ‘outrage’. In the meantime, other than Uttar Pradesh at least four other Indian states, all ruled by the BJP, are readying to pass identical ‘love jihad’ legislation.

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/in ... 22931.html