Can you explain what connection FISH has with Ismaili faith? Also mention the paragraph of old Dua in which the word FISH is used, thanks.kmaherali wrote: ↑Thu Jun 29, 2023 7:49 amIn his address at the FIRST ISMAILIA MISSION CONFERENCE, Dar es Salaam, 1945, MSMS stated:
"Number two: In 1905, Juma Bhagat, one of our great missionaries who had rendered great services to me, and other very very pious Ismailis, came to me---that is exactly forty years ago---and said that in the Dua the word which referred to 'fish' should be withdrawn. I said to them: Do you intend to drop one of the foundations of the Faith?
Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Fish is referred in the Old Dua as part of the various manifestation of the Imam in particular it is the first name appearing in the Das Avatar list but of course the Das Avatar is only 10 of the names of Imams in the genealogy. I would suggest that you read
Nooran Allah Noor of Bandali Haji Missionary at http://heritage.ismaili.net/node/15494
or the following link: https://www.academia.edu/70442096/Evolu ... _in_Alamut
or: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ge_Society
Read also the handwritten explanation in the affidavit of Mowlana Sultan Muhammad Shah which explain why fish can be referred as Godhead in the Ismaili faith.
Nooran Allah Noor of Bandali Haji Missionary at http://heritage.ismaili.net/node/15494
or the following link: https://www.academia.edu/70442096/Evolu ... _in_Alamut
or: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ge_Society
Read also the handwritten explanation in the affidavit of Mowlana Sultan Muhammad Shah which explain why fish can be referred as Godhead in the Ismaili faith.
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
I asked for the complete paragraph of ASAL DUA in which the word FISH (MATSYA) is used. You failed to provide .Admin wrote: ↑Fri Jun 30, 2023 11:21 pm Fish is referred in the Old Dua as part of the various manifestation of the Imam in particular it is the first name appearing in the Das Avatar list but of course the Das Avatar is only 10 of the names of Imams in the genealogy. I would suggest that you read
Nooran Allah Noor of Bandali Haji Missionary at http://heritage.ismaili.net/node/15494
or the following link: https://www.academia.edu/70442096/Evolu ... _in_Alamut
or: https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ge_Society
Read also the handwritten explanation in the affidavit of Mowlana Sultan Muhammad Shah which explain why fish can be referred as Godhead in the Ismaili faith.
Where is the original text of Asal Dua given by Pir Sadardin? Who has one?
You suggested that I should read Noorun ala Noor by missionary Banda Ali Haji, an article from Academia, minutes of 1945 mission conference. For your information I have hard copies of Noorun ala Noor as well 1945 mission conference. Let me ask few questions for understanding.
Was Adam created first or Matsya (fish)?
In DUS AVTAR series 3rd INCARNATION is VARAHA (Boar, a male wild PIG). Pig is unholy in Islam. My question is how come we call Imam as VARAHA? It is disrespect to consider Imam as unholy animal. (This VARAHA incarnation was discussed by leaders before banning recitition of Ginan Dus Avtar in JKs.
Though in 1945 conference Imam Sultan Muhammad Shah was annoyed and refused to drop the wordings, FISH AND ALI SAHI ALLAH. But in 1950 he himself changed the sentence ' ALI SAHI ALLAH' to 'ALIYULLAH' which means ALI IS FROM ALLAH.
Again in 1956, when Imam Sultan Muhammad Shah introduced new Arabic Dua, he dropped Fish Avtar and did not even mentioned Dus Avtar in Dua.
In 1986 when present Imam Shah Karim gave PREAMBLE describing TENETS of Ismailism, he also did not mention FISH AVTAR. Even in new curriculum of Religious education for students there is no mention of Dus Avtar.
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Here we go again! Read the links, they give links to whole texts of Das Avatar. This is a useless discussion when you do not know the theory of Das Avatar and are not willing to read what our Imam said in his own handwritten affidavit. Please do not waste time by posting on this subject unless you educate first yourself on the subject by reading the links I have provided and which have all the answers to your questions on this subject. Also read a little bit more about what is real Islam instead of clinging to Wahabi interpretation, this Forum is not the proper place to preach Wahabism. If you have a problem with the Farmans and sworn affidavit of Mowlana Sultan Muhammad Shah on Fish and similar subjects, feel free to ask the current Imam about this subject. Thank you. There will not be any other discussion on this.
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Nagib I just asked you to quote paragraph of Asal Dua in which the word FISH is used. Instead of quoting paragraph you are just calling names as per your habit. You called me Wahabi 'QURBAN E SHUMA'. Every Ismaili Khoja is Wahabi because after morning prayer they recite Tasbih " YA WAHAB".
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Obey the Farman of Hazar Imam if some one claims to be follower of Hazar Imam. Imam Sultan Muhammad Shah said, I quote," My Farmans in years to come will be quite different from the present ones". In other Farman he said, I quote," I have made many changes in Farmans and am still altering them according to times". ( Precious Pearls- Farman Booklet published in 1954).
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Refer to thread 'Asal Dua and Asal Ghattpot Dua'. Read again my post of Sun May 26, 2019, where I have given proof of explanation of meaning of ALIYULLAH by Hazar Imam on question asked by Rai Shamsuddin Tejpar. Imam explained meaning of Aliyullah is, " ALI IS FROM ALLAH".
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
I have copies of some important documents, notes from decades old Ismaili Khoja booklets and important guidance of MSMS to Ismailia Association. I am not posting on Heritage because you are not trust worthy in my experience. In past I posted couple of them but you twisted the facts. I believe follow the Farman of Hazar Imam. Please lower your tone and stop threats.
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Muslim woman assaulted in India
Monitoring Desk Published July 31, 2023 Updated 2 days ago
A MUSLIM woman was assaulted and molested by a group of men in Ujjain city of India’s Madhya Pradesh state, according to local media reports.
The woman, a physiotherapist by profession, was on her way home on Friday when the suspects tried to molest her. When she resisted, the men started beating her, according to a local newspaper, The Free Press Journal.
Her cousin, who came to her rescue, was also beaten. A video of the incident shared on social media showed men hitting him with iron rods and bats.
After the attacks, members of the Muslim community and local Congress party lawmaker Noori Khan staged a sit-in outside the Ujjain SP office.
Ms Khan later tweeted she met the victim undergoing treatment at the Ujjain Civil Hospital. “Her agony and the whole sequence of events have shocked me,” she wrote.
In a post on her Twitter account, the victim said five men were involved in the attack.
Published in Dawn, July 31st, 2023
https://www.dawn.com/news/1767507/musli ... d-in-india
Monitoring Desk Published July 31, 2023 Updated 2 days ago
A MUSLIM woman was assaulted and molested by a group of men in Ujjain city of India’s Madhya Pradesh state, according to local media reports.
The woman, a physiotherapist by profession, was on her way home on Friday when the suspects tried to molest her. When she resisted, the men started beating her, according to a local newspaper, The Free Press Journal.
Her cousin, who came to her rescue, was also beaten. A video of the incident shared on social media showed men hitting him with iron rods and bats.
After the attacks, members of the Muslim community and local Congress party lawmaker Noori Khan staged a sit-in outside the Ujjain SP office.
Ms Khan later tweeted she met the victim undergoing treatment at the Ujjain Civil Hospital. “Her agony and the whole sequence of events have shocked me,” she wrote.
In a post on her Twitter account, the victim said five men were involved in the attack.
Published in Dawn, July 31st, 2023
https://www.dawn.com/news/1767507/musli ... d-in-india
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Reuters
Hindu-Muslim riots expose risk at major Indian business hub
Rupam Jain
Thu, August 3, 2023 at 4:58 AM CDT
*
Hindu-Muslim clashes outside Delhi worsen religious fault lines
*
Revenge killings "justified", says member of a Hindu outfit
*
Restoring social harmony will take time, state minister says
*
Violence sends wrong message to investors, analysts say
By Rupam Jain
GURUGRAM, India, Aug 3 (Reuters) - Hindu-Muslim clashes just outside the Indian capital this week have worsened religious fault lines in the region and exposed a booming business hub to threats of violence and disruption, authorities and analysts said.
Seven people were killed and over 70 injured in rioting in Nuh and Gurugram districts of Haryana state after a Hindu religious procession was targeted and a mosque attacked in retaliation.
The 48-hour cycle of violence which was put out on Wednesday has brought to the fore Hindu-Muslim tensions brewing in the region since 2015, a year after the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) captured power nationally and in Haryana.
The lynching of two Muslim men in the region earlier this year by suspected Hindu vigilantes and the failure to nab the main suspect had worsened tensions, with the main suspect saying on social media that he would participate in the Hindu procession this week.
Ultimately he did not show up, police said.
"It has been shocking to see how distrust between two communities spilled onto the streets," Haryana's home (interior) minister, Anil Vij, told Reuters.
"Security has been restored...bringing relief and social harmony will take time," Vij said, adding that authorities understand safety concerns of businesses in Gurugram.
Gurugram, formerly known as Gurgaon, is a city of over 1.5 million people that shares a border with New Delhi.
A new urban centre with glitzy high-rises, luxury hotels, malls and gated condominiums, it is home to multinational firms, large Indian corporates and start-ups, with 250 of the Fortune 500 companies having offices here.
Among the multinationals with offices here are Google, American Express, Dell, Samsung, Ernst & Young and Deloitte. Suzuki's main India plant is also located near Gurugram.
Because of the violence, many companies allowed employees to work from home on Tuesday while schools and colleges were shut before resuming classes on Wednesday.
PREVIOUS TENSIONS
In the past, Gurugram has witnessed tensions over Muslims holding Friday prayers in public spaces and meat sales during Hindu festivals, which Hindu groups wanted banned to respect Hindu sentiment.
Clashes between India's majority Hindus and minority Muslims break out occasionally, but have been less frequent since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP government took power in 2014.
But tensions between the communities have risen, with many Muslims saying they live in fear as Hindu activists have become emboldened by the BJP's politics.
"Muslim men attacked the Hindu procession and killed many of our people," said Praveen Babbar, a leader of Hindu Yuva Vahini (Hindu Youth Force).
"Every action will have not just equal, but sometimes even more brazen reaction," he said.
Aftab Ahmed, Nuh's state lawmaker from the opposition Congress party, blamed local police for not acting fast enough even though he had alerted them about "provocative statements" being made by Hindu leaders.
Haryana Police, however, said they acted swiftly and prevented riots from spreading, and that two of its men were killed in the violence.
Analysts said the violence is worrying for the message it sends to businesses at a time New Delhi is seeking more investment under its "Make in India" campaign.
"Official reaction was inexplicably slow," said Tara Kartha, distinguished fellow at the New Delhi-based Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies.
"The commercial heart of north India was a target this time. It should have been prevented." (Reporting by Rupam Jain, Additional reporting by Sakshi Dayal; Editing by YP Rajesh and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 28832.html
Hindu-Muslim riots expose risk at major Indian business hub
Rupam Jain
Thu, August 3, 2023 at 4:58 AM CDT
*
Hindu-Muslim clashes outside Delhi worsen religious fault lines
*
Revenge killings "justified", says member of a Hindu outfit
*
Restoring social harmony will take time, state minister says
*
Violence sends wrong message to investors, analysts say
By Rupam Jain
GURUGRAM, India, Aug 3 (Reuters) - Hindu-Muslim clashes just outside the Indian capital this week have worsened religious fault lines in the region and exposed a booming business hub to threats of violence and disruption, authorities and analysts said.
Seven people were killed and over 70 injured in rioting in Nuh and Gurugram districts of Haryana state after a Hindu religious procession was targeted and a mosque attacked in retaliation.
The 48-hour cycle of violence which was put out on Wednesday has brought to the fore Hindu-Muslim tensions brewing in the region since 2015, a year after the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) captured power nationally and in Haryana.
The lynching of two Muslim men in the region earlier this year by suspected Hindu vigilantes and the failure to nab the main suspect had worsened tensions, with the main suspect saying on social media that he would participate in the Hindu procession this week.
Ultimately he did not show up, police said.
"It has been shocking to see how distrust between two communities spilled onto the streets," Haryana's home (interior) minister, Anil Vij, told Reuters.
"Security has been restored...bringing relief and social harmony will take time," Vij said, adding that authorities understand safety concerns of businesses in Gurugram.
Gurugram, formerly known as Gurgaon, is a city of over 1.5 million people that shares a border with New Delhi.
A new urban centre with glitzy high-rises, luxury hotels, malls and gated condominiums, it is home to multinational firms, large Indian corporates and start-ups, with 250 of the Fortune 500 companies having offices here.
Among the multinationals with offices here are Google, American Express, Dell, Samsung, Ernst & Young and Deloitte. Suzuki's main India plant is also located near Gurugram.
Because of the violence, many companies allowed employees to work from home on Tuesday while schools and colleges were shut before resuming classes on Wednesday.
PREVIOUS TENSIONS
In the past, Gurugram has witnessed tensions over Muslims holding Friday prayers in public spaces and meat sales during Hindu festivals, which Hindu groups wanted banned to respect Hindu sentiment.
Clashes between India's majority Hindus and minority Muslims break out occasionally, but have been less frequent since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP government took power in 2014.
But tensions between the communities have risen, with many Muslims saying they live in fear as Hindu activists have become emboldened by the BJP's politics.
"Muslim men attacked the Hindu procession and killed many of our people," said Praveen Babbar, a leader of Hindu Yuva Vahini (Hindu Youth Force).
"Every action will have not just equal, but sometimes even more brazen reaction," he said.
Aftab Ahmed, Nuh's state lawmaker from the opposition Congress party, blamed local police for not acting fast enough even though he had alerted them about "provocative statements" being made by Hindu leaders.
Haryana Police, however, said they acted swiftly and prevented riots from spreading, and that two of its men were killed in the violence.
Analysts said the violence is worrying for the message it sends to businesses at a time New Delhi is seeking more investment under its "Make in India" campaign.
"Official reaction was inexplicably slow," said Tara Kartha, distinguished fellow at the New Delhi-based Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies.
"The commercial heart of north India was a target this time. It should have been prevented." (Reporting by Rupam Jain, Additional reporting by Sakshi Dayal; Editing by YP Rajesh and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/finance ... 28832.html
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Reuters
Muslims flee Indian business hub after religious clashes, attacks
Thu, August 10, 2023 at 5:29 AM CDT
By Rupam Jain and Sakshi Dayal
GURUGRAM, India (Reuters) - Over 3,000 poor Muslims have fled a business hub outside New Delhi this month, fearing for their lives after Hindu-Muslim clashes and sporadic attacks targeting them, residents, police and a community group said.
Shops and shacks owned or run by Muslims and their houses in two large slum areas were padlocked when Reuters visited them more than a week after seven people were killed in clashes in Nuh and Gurugram districts in Haryana state, adjoining the Indian capital.
The violence began on July 31 after a Hindu religious procession, organised by groups ideologically aligned with the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was targeted and a mosque attacked in retaliation. Police quelled the unrest in 48 hours.
But minor attacks targeting Muslims have continued for days, scaring families who had moved to the new urban centre of Gurugram - where 250 of the Fortune 500 companies have offices - in search of a livelihood.
Stone-throwing, arson and vandalisation of two small Muslim shrines in the slum districts forced hundreds of Muslim families to abandon their single-room houses and seek shelter at a train station before heading out, witnesses said.
"Many of us spent the entire night on a railway platform because it was much safer there," Raufullah Javed, a tailor who fled to his home village in the eastern state of Bihar, told Reuters by phone.
The Gurugram president of Jamiat-Ulema-e-Hind (Council of Indian Muslim Theologians) Mufti Mohammed Salim estimated that more than 3,000 Muslims had left the district after the violence.
Four Muslim shopkeepers who also fled to their villages in eastern India said by phone that members of hardline Hindu groups had questioned them about their businesses and families.
"Some Hindu men came in a large group and started asking questions such as how much money I earn," said Shahid Sheikh, a barber who fled from Tigra village, home to over 1,200 Muslim families.
"Many Muslims decided it's best to leave for a while," said Sheikh, adding that some Hindu owners of shops rented out to Muslims wanted them to vacate.
Tensions between India's majority Hindus and minority Muslims have risen over issues such as the eating of beef and inter-faith marriages with Muslims saying they have been increasingly targeted by Hindu activists since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP government took power in 2014.
BJP leaders say clashes between the two communities have broken out in the past as well and have been less frequent since they came to power.
The trouble in Gurugram, a city of over 1.5 million people formerly known as Gurgaon, has exposed multinationals such as Google, American Express, Dell, Samsung, Ernst & Young and Deloitte based there to risks of violence and disruption.
Haryana police said they had arrested over 200 men from both communities in connection with the violence and some Muslims who had fled had begun to trickle back.
Anil Vij, the interior minister of Haryana's BJP government, said he had received reports of some Muslims leaving but the situation is completely under control now.
"No one is asking them to leave and we are providing full security in all communally sensitive areas," he told Reuters.
(Reporting by Rupam Jain and Sakshi Dayal; Editing by YP Rajesh and Angus MacSwan)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mu ... 55238.html
Muslims flee Indian business hub after religious clashes, attacks
Thu, August 10, 2023 at 5:29 AM CDT
By Rupam Jain and Sakshi Dayal
GURUGRAM, India (Reuters) - Over 3,000 poor Muslims have fled a business hub outside New Delhi this month, fearing for their lives after Hindu-Muslim clashes and sporadic attacks targeting them, residents, police and a community group said.
Shops and shacks owned or run by Muslims and their houses in two large slum areas were padlocked when Reuters visited them more than a week after seven people were killed in clashes in Nuh and Gurugram districts in Haryana state, adjoining the Indian capital.
The violence began on July 31 after a Hindu religious procession, organised by groups ideologically aligned with the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was targeted and a mosque attacked in retaliation. Police quelled the unrest in 48 hours.
But minor attacks targeting Muslims have continued for days, scaring families who had moved to the new urban centre of Gurugram - where 250 of the Fortune 500 companies have offices - in search of a livelihood.
Stone-throwing, arson and vandalisation of two small Muslim shrines in the slum districts forced hundreds of Muslim families to abandon their single-room houses and seek shelter at a train station before heading out, witnesses said.
"Many of us spent the entire night on a railway platform because it was much safer there," Raufullah Javed, a tailor who fled to his home village in the eastern state of Bihar, told Reuters by phone.
The Gurugram president of Jamiat-Ulema-e-Hind (Council of Indian Muslim Theologians) Mufti Mohammed Salim estimated that more than 3,000 Muslims had left the district after the violence.
Four Muslim shopkeepers who also fled to their villages in eastern India said by phone that members of hardline Hindu groups had questioned them about their businesses and families.
"Some Hindu men came in a large group and started asking questions such as how much money I earn," said Shahid Sheikh, a barber who fled from Tigra village, home to over 1,200 Muslim families.
"Many Muslims decided it's best to leave for a while," said Sheikh, adding that some Hindu owners of shops rented out to Muslims wanted them to vacate.
Tensions between India's majority Hindus and minority Muslims have risen over issues such as the eating of beef and inter-faith marriages with Muslims saying they have been increasingly targeted by Hindu activists since Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BJP government took power in 2014.
BJP leaders say clashes between the two communities have broken out in the past as well and have been less frequent since they came to power.
The trouble in Gurugram, a city of over 1.5 million people formerly known as Gurgaon, has exposed multinationals such as Google, American Express, Dell, Samsung, Ernst & Young and Deloitte based there to risks of violence and disruption.
Haryana police said they had arrested over 200 men from both communities in connection with the violence and some Muslims who had fled had begun to trickle back.
Anil Vij, the interior minister of Haryana's BJP government, said he had received reports of some Muslims leaving but the situation is completely under control now.
"No one is asking them to leave and we are providing full security in all communally sensitive areas," he told Reuters.
(Reporting by Rupam Jain and Sakshi Dayal; Editing by YP Rajesh and Angus MacSwan)
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/mu ... 55238.html
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
BBC
India-Pakistan partition: How aeroplanes played a crucial role
Soutik Biswas - India correspondent
Sun, August 13, 2023 at 7:12 PM CDT
In his 1974 novel Tamas (Darkness), a vivid portrayal of the bloody partition of India, author Bhisham Sahni vividly depicts the atmosphere changing in a violence-wracked village as a plane circles above it thrice.
"People ventured out. The fighting seemed to have stopped and dead bodies were being disposed. People went back to their houses to assess their losses in terms of clothes and armaments."
Sahni wrote a fictional account of the carnage that accompanied the partition as it split the subcontinent into the new independent nations of India and Pakistan. Religious violence erupted, displacing some 12 million people, and claiming the lives of up to one million people.
Fiction might have been mirroring reality when the planes swooped over the troubled villages, suggests Aashique Ahmed Iqbal, an Indian historian.
The mere presence of the aircraft, he says, had a deterrent effect, dispersing mobs and giving villages time to prepare their defences. "The aeroplane played a small but highly crucial role during the division of the British empire in India into the independent dominions of India and Pakistan," notes Mr Iqbal in his fascinating book, The Aeroplane and the Making of Modern India.
Of the 12 million people who fled from India and Pakistan, the overwhelming majority travelled by train, vehicle, cart and on foot. Up to 50,000 people - or less than 1% of the people evacuated - were flown out of what became India and Pakistan, Mr Iqbal says. A near-complete exchange of population was completed in three months, between September and November in 1947.
Planes flew over railway tracks to safeguard refugee-laden trains from potential mob ambushes
The Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) - the aerial force of British India and later the dominion of India - would play a key role in quelling disorder and help in evacuating partition refugees, notes Mr Iqbal.
Every morning, their aircraft embarked on tactical reconnaissance missions, flying over railway tracks to safeguard refugee-laden trains from potential mob ambushes, and checking the rails for any signs of tampering. The planes would also look out for armed mobs and communicate with trains using wireless radio.
In September 1947, aircraft flying over Punjab reported a startling sight: up to 30,000 refugees trekking on foot along a 25-mile (40-km) stretch, as recounted by Mr Iqbal. These planes detected lurking mobs poised to attack weary refugees, relaying their locations to military patrols. They witnessed ominous columns of smoke rising from incinerated villages. "If you flew low," Mr Iqbal writes, "you would spot bodies floating through Punjab's famous canal system."
That was not all. RIAF planes - mostly trusty Dakotas - transported 1.5 million doses of cholera vaccines from Delhi to Karachi to help prevent an epidemic in the unsanitary refugee camps. They also dropped cooked food, sugar and oil for refugees. Both India and Pakistan used planes to drop leaflets warning rioters to cease violence, Mr Iqbal writes. The RIAF also ended up evacuating non-Muslims from distant parts of Pakistan like Multan, Bannu and Peshawar.
In scenes reminiscent of the desperate Afghans who attempted to flee their country by running alongside and clinging to military jets at Kabul airport in August 2021, the airfields of Delhi and Punjab in 1947 also witnessed moments of "great danger and desperation".
A soldier speaks with local officers at the U.S. Air Force Base in Arga, India.
Indian companies bought cheap aircraft left behind by the US forces after the end of World War Two
"Refugees in camps near the airfields would rush to the planes as soon as they were permitted. Passengers desperate to be flown out of danger bribed crew with money and gold to board the plane," Mr Iqbal writes.
Tickets were expensive. Passengers were allowed to carry very little luggage: there are accounts of a refugee from Hyderabad in India carrying only her Quran to Pakistan; and others carrying a "battered child's cane chair" and a "moth-eaten-looking parrot".
Not surprisingly, the planes were packed to the gills. Seats and carpets were removed to accommodate as many refugees as possible. Dakota DC-3 planes meant to carry 21 passengers often carried five times the number.
A private airline technician was given a pair of knuckle-dusters by his pilot to control the crowds. "He would punch his way to the door collecting undercarriage pins and punch his way into the plane before firmly locking in," Mr Iqbal writes. Once the doors closed, the engines would start. "Then the crowd would automatically vanish due to the slip stream of the engines."
That no major crashes were reported because of the overcrowding, lax airport security and overworked planes was remarkable. "Refugees often crowded airfields before planes landed because of lack of security. Matters were not helped by hostility of the authorities to air crews of the 'other' country," writes Mr Iqbal.
By early 1947, India had 115 civilian airplanes run by 11 private companies. The end of World War II had sparked an "unprecedented boom" for civil aviation as Indian companies bought cheap aircraft - mostly Douglas DC-3 Dakotas - left behind by the departing US forces. But there was a glut in supply and not enough demand and profits plummeted. During partition, civilian planes not flying on scheduled routes were diverted to ferry refugees from Pakistan to India; and 10 of these planes were made available for the government.
But civilian airline operators were not able to cope with the mass evacuation. They also refused to risk aircraft and personnel for this "impossible task". Eventually foreign help was sought: 21 British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) jet planes flew "non-stop" for 15 days to move 6,300 people from Delhi to Karachi. They also carried 45,000kg of food, tents and vaccines for Muslim refugees stranded at Delhi airfields.
Two Royal Air Force transport aircraft deployed to evacuate British nationals were also used to evacuate some 12,000 people between India and Pakistan. Only 2,790 were British personnel; the rest would be railways, post, and telegraph employees who would play a key role in the exchange of population on the ground, writes Mr Iqbal.
By October 1947, India realised this effort was still not enough. This was when 'Operation India' was launched: over six weeks in October and November, 21 planes - mainly Dakotas chartered from eight British companies - transported 35,000 people and more than 1.5 million pounds of baggage between India and Pakistan. Some 170 aviation personnel were flown in from Britain to help.
Indian aviation companies were overwhelmed by the magnitude of evacuation, so both the governments had to rely on chartered British aircraft. And the use of planes, says Mr Iqbal, "enabled the rapid constitution of independent India in the crucial first months after Independence".
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/in ... 02289.html
India-Pakistan partition: How aeroplanes played a crucial role
Soutik Biswas - India correspondent
Sun, August 13, 2023 at 7:12 PM CDT
In his 1974 novel Tamas (Darkness), a vivid portrayal of the bloody partition of India, author Bhisham Sahni vividly depicts the atmosphere changing in a violence-wracked village as a plane circles above it thrice.
"People ventured out. The fighting seemed to have stopped and dead bodies were being disposed. People went back to their houses to assess their losses in terms of clothes and armaments."
Sahni wrote a fictional account of the carnage that accompanied the partition as it split the subcontinent into the new independent nations of India and Pakistan. Religious violence erupted, displacing some 12 million people, and claiming the lives of up to one million people.
Fiction might have been mirroring reality when the planes swooped over the troubled villages, suggests Aashique Ahmed Iqbal, an Indian historian.
The mere presence of the aircraft, he says, had a deterrent effect, dispersing mobs and giving villages time to prepare their defences. "The aeroplane played a small but highly crucial role during the division of the British empire in India into the independent dominions of India and Pakistan," notes Mr Iqbal in his fascinating book, The Aeroplane and the Making of Modern India.
Of the 12 million people who fled from India and Pakistan, the overwhelming majority travelled by train, vehicle, cart and on foot. Up to 50,000 people - or less than 1% of the people evacuated - were flown out of what became India and Pakistan, Mr Iqbal says. A near-complete exchange of population was completed in three months, between September and November in 1947.
Planes flew over railway tracks to safeguard refugee-laden trains from potential mob ambushes
The Royal Indian Air Force (RIAF) - the aerial force of British India and later the dominion of India - would play a key role in quelling disorder and help in evacuating partition refugees, notes Mr Iqbal.
Every morning, their aircraft embarked on tactical reconnaissance missions, flying over railway tracks to safeguard refugee-laden trains from potential mob ambushes, and checking the rails for any signs of tampering. The planes would also look out for armed mobs and communicate with trains using wireless radio.
In September 1947, aircraft flying over Punjab reported a startling sight: up to 30,000 refugees trekking on foot along a 25-mile (40-km) stretch, as recounted by Mr Iqbal. These planes detected lurking mobs poised to attack weary refugees, relaying their locations to military patrols. They witnessed ominous columns of smoke rising from incinerated villages. "If you flew low," Mr Iqbal writes, "you would spot bodies floating through Punjab's famous canal system."
That was not all. RIAF planes - mostly trusty Dakotas - transported 1.5 million doses of cholera vaccines from Delhi to Karachi to help prevent an epidemic in the unsanitary refugee camps. They also dropped cooked food, sugar and oil for refugees. Both India and Pakistan used planes to drop leaflets warning rioters to cease violence, Mr Iqbal writes. The RIAF also ended up evacuating non-Muslims from distant parts of Pakistan like Multan, Bannu and Peshawar.
In scenes reminiscent of the desperate Afghans who attempted to flee their country by running alongside and clinging to military jets at Kabul airport in August 2021, the airfields of Delhi and Punjab in 1947 also witnessed moments of "great danger and desperation".
A soldier speaks with local officers at the U.S. Air Force Base in Arga, India.
Indian companies bought cheap aircraft left behind by the US forces after the end of World War Two
"Refugees in camps near the airfields would rush to the planes as soon as they were permitted. Passengers desperate to be flown out of danger bribed crew with money and gold to board the plane," Mr Iqbal writes.
Tickets were expensive. Passengers were allowed to carry very little luggage: there are accounts of a refugee from Hyderabad in India carrying only her Quran to Pakistan; and others carrying a "battered child's cane chair" and a "moth-eaten-looking parrot".
Not surprisingly, the planes were packed to the gills. Seats and carpets were removed to accommodate as many refugees as possible. Dakota DC-3 planes meant to carry 21 passengers often carried five times the number.
A private airline technician was given a pair of knuckle-dusters by his pilot to control the crowds. "He would punch his way to the door collecting undercarriage pins and punch his way into the plane before firmly locking in," Mr Iqbal writes. Once the doors closed, the engines would start. "Then the crowd would automatically vanish due to the slip stream of the engines."
That no major crashes were reported because of the overcrowding, lax airport security and overworked planes was remarkable. "Refugees often crowded airfields before planes landed because of lack of security. Matters were not helped by hostility of the authorities to air crews of the 'other' country," writes Mr Iqbal.
By early 1947, India had 115 civilian airplanes run by 11 private companies. The end of World War II had sparked an "unprecedented boom" for civil aviation as Indian companies bought cheap aircraft - mostly Douglas DC-3 Dakotas - left behind by the departing US forces. But there was a glut in supply and not enough demand and profits plummeted. During partition, civilian planes not flying on scheduled routes were diverted to ferry refugees from Pakistan to India; and 10 of these planes were made available for the government.
But civilian airline operators were not able to cope with the mass evacuation. They also refused to risk aircraft and personnel for this "impossible task". Eventually foreign help was sought: 21 British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) jet planes flew "non-stop" for 15 days to move 6,300 people from Delhi to Karachi. They also carried 45,000kg of food, tents and vaccines for Muslim refugees stranded at Delhi airfields.
Two Royal Air Force transport aircraft deployed to evacuate British nationals were also used to evacuate some 12,000 people between India and Pakistan. Only 2,790 were British personnel; the rest would be railways, post, and telegraph employees who would play a key role in the exchange of population on the ground, writes Mr Iqbal.
By October 1947, India realised this effort was still not enough. This was when 'Operation India' was launched: over six weeks in October and November, 21 planes - mainly Dakotas chartered from eight British companies - transported 35,000 people and more than 1.5 million pounds of baggage between India and Pakistan. Some 170 aviation personnel were flown in from Britain to help.
Indian aviation companies were overwhelmed by the magnitude of evacuation, so both the governments had to rely on chartered British aircraft. And the use of planes, says Mr Iqbal, "enabled the rapid constitution of independent India in the crucial first months after Independence".
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Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
BBC
Uttar Pradesh: India school shut down over slapping row
Mon, August 28, 2023 at 4:50 AM CDT
The teacher has been accused of making anti-Muslim remarks and asking students to hit their classmate
Authorities in India's Uttar Pradesh state have sealed a private school after its teacher asked students to slap their Muslim classmate.
Officials said Neha Public School was shut down as it "did not meet the education department's criteria."
The school's students would be shifted to a government school or other nearby schools, officials said.
Meanwhile, the teacher - Tripta Tyagi - has told NDTV news channel that she was "not ashamed" of her actions.
The child's family has said he was beaten up for getting his times tables wrong.
A video of Ms Tyagi telling her pupils to slap their seven-year-old Muslim classmate at a small private school in Muzaffarnagar district went viral on social media at the weekend.
"Why are you hitting him so lightly? Hit him harder," the teacher is heard telling the children, as the boy stands crying.
"Hit him on the back... His face is turning red, so hit him on the back now," she added.
The victim's father reported the incident to police and took him out of the school. But he did not press charges.
The video sparked outrage on social media, with several users saying that action should be taken against the teacher.
The police have registered a case against Ms Tyagi but she has not been arrested. The charges are bailable.
On Sunday, education officer Shubham Shukla said the authorities were investigating the incident.
An unnamed official told the Indian Express newspaper that the school had no lights or fans and that there were no proper sections for different classes.
Ms Tyagi has not yet commented on the sealing of the school.
However, in an interview to NDTV news channel, she defended her actions saying that they were necessary to "control" and "tackle" children in school.
The incident has sparked national outrage, with several opposition politicians calling it a "hate crime". Uttar Pradesh has been governed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2017.
India's opposition Congress party MP Rahul Gandhi said the BJP had contributed to religious tensions being felt across India.
"Sowing the poison of discrimination in the minds of innocent children, turning a holy place like a school into a marketplace of hatred," he posted on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. "This is the same kerosene spread by the BJP that has set every corner of India on fire."
In June during a visit to the US, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told journalists that there was "absolutely no space for discrimination" in India.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ut ... 02486.html
Uttar Pradesh: India school shut down over slapping row
Mon, August 28, 2023 at 4:50 AM CDT
The teacher has been accused of making anti-Muslim remarks and asking students to hit their classmate
Authorities in India's Uttar Pradesh state have sealed a private school after its teacher asked students to slap their Muslim classmate.
Officials said Neha Public School was shut down as it "did not meet the education department's criteria."
The school's students would be shifted to a government school or other nearby schools, officials said.
Meanwhile, the teacher - Tripta Tyagi - has told NDTV news channel that she was "not ashamed" of her actions.
The child's family has said he was beaten up for getting his times tables wrong.
A video of Ms Tyagi telling her pupils to slap their seven-year-old Muslim classmate at a small private school in Muzaffarnagar district went viral on social media at the weekend.
"Why are you hitting him so lightly? Hit him harder," the teacher is heard telling the children, as the boy stands crying.
"Hit him on the back... His face is turning red, so hit him on the back now," she added.
The victim's father reported the incident to police and took him out of the school. But he did not press charges.
The video sparked outrage on social media, with several users saying that action should be taken against the teacher.
The police have registered a case against Ms Tyagi but she has not been arrested. The charges are bailable.
On Sunday, education officer Shubham Shukla said the authorities were investigating the incident.
An unnamed official told the Indian Express newspaper that the school had no lights or fans and that there were no proper sections for different classes.
Ms Tyagi has not yet commented on the sealing of the school.
However, in an interview to NDTV news channel, she defended her actions saying that they were necessary to "control" and "tackle" children in school.
The incident has sparked national outrage, with several opposition politicians calling it a "hate crime". Uttar Pradesh has been governed by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2017.
India's opposition Congress party MP Rahul Gandhi said the BJP had contributed to religious tensions being felt across India.
"Sowing the poison of discrimination in the minds of innocent children, turning a holy place like a school into a marketplace of hatred," he posted on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. "This is the same kerosene spread by the BJP that has set every corner of India on fire."
In June during a visit to the US, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told journalists that there was "absolutely no space for discrimination" in India.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ut ... 02486.html
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
CNN
Ornate Indian Hindu temple will open on old mosque site, fulfilling Modi’s election promise
Rhea Mogul and Vedika Sud, CNN
Fri, September 15, 2023 at 8:22 PM CDT
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is close to fulfilling a decade-old election promise months out from nationwide polls with the announcement that a controversial new Hindu temple will open on disputed land in January.
The first detailed descriptions of the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir were released on Thursday, showing the lavishly decorated structure that is being built on the site of the Babri Masjid that was destroyed by right-wing Hindu mobs in 1992.
Located in the holy city of Ayodhya in the electorally significant state of Uttar Pradesh, the temple’s interiors will be adorned with gold bars and artwork that celebrates India’s diversity, according to Nripendra Misra, chairman of the temple’s construction committee.
Hindu fundamentalists demolish the wall of the 16th century Babri Masjid mosque in the city of Ayodhya in 1992. - Douglas E. Curran/AFP/Getty Images
Hindu fundamentalists demolish the wall of the 16th century Babri Masjid mosque in the city of Ayodhya in 1992. - Douglas E. Curran/AFP/Getty Images
Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP has campaigned for decades to construct a temple at the site, widely believed by devotees to be where Lord Ram, one of the most revered deities in Hinduism, was born.
Muslims claim the land because the mosque was built there in 1528. But many Hindus believe the Babri Masjid was built on the ruins of a Hindu temple, which was allegedly destroyed by Babar, the first Mughal emperor of South Asia.
The temple’s opening is expected to give Modi’s party a boost in the lead up to the election, making true on a promise he made to his supporters nearly a decade ago.
However, Misra said the date of its inauguration has got “nothing to do whatsoever” with the upcoming national elections.
“We are moving to January because the sun is on the south,” he said, adding its an auspicious time for the shrine to open.
Disputed land
The site of the temple, previously claimed by both Hindus and Muslims, has long been the center of controversy.
It was once home to the Babri Masjid, a 16th century mosque that was infamously desecrated by right-wing Hindus mobs with hammers and their bare hands in 1992, triggering communal violence that killed more than 2,000 people nationwide.
Dozens of temples and mosques were targeted in a series of revenge attacks after the mosque was destroyed, prompting outbursts of sectarian violence – some of the worst since India’s hasty and bloody partition following the exit of its British colonial rulers in 1947.
Hindu fundamentalists climb the dome of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya to demolish the structure on December 6, 1992. - Sondeep Shankar/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Hindu fundamentalists climb the dome of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya to demolish the structure on December 6, 1992. - Sondeep Shankar/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
In the following years, Hindu nationalists rallied to build the Ram Mandir on the land, setting the stage for an emotional and politically charged showdown that lasted nearly three decades.
Among the most vocal groups that pushed for the creation of the temple was Modi and his BJP, who used the topic to gain support among Hindus, who make up around 80% of the country’s 1.4 billion people.
In 2019, after a lengthy legal battle, India’s Supreme Court granted Hindus permission to build the temple on the contested site, ending the dispute. It was seen as a victory for Modi and his supporters, but came as a blow to many Muslims for whom the destruction of the Babri Masjid remains a source of tension.
When the Supreme Court delivered its verdict four years ago, Modi said the decision “has brought a new dawn” for the nation.
“The dispute may have affected generations,” Modi said. “But after this verdict, we need to resolve that a new generation, with a new start will join in the creation of a new India. Let us begin afresh and establish a new India.”
The new temple
In his briefing on Thursday, Misra gave detailed descriptions of the design of the Ram Janmabhoomi Madir, from the idols that will be placed inside the building to the source of materials used to build the shrine.
Indian engineering group Larsen and Toubro is constructing the temple on a 2.67 acre (1.08 hectares) site within a 70-acre (28 hectares) complex, Misra said, adding artists from across the country have been selected to create artwork and murals that showcase the country’s diversity.
Three sculptors have been entrusted with carving murals of Lord Ram, one of which will be picked to reside inside the sanctum sanctorum, and the temple will be adorned with gold bars created by well-known Indian jewelers, he said.
Misra said that about 100,000 devotees are expected to visit the temple everyday, meaning an individual might only be allowed inside the sanctum sanctorum for about 20 seconds, due to demand.
An artist's impression of the temple's interior provided to CNN by the temple's committee on September 14, 2023. - Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust
An artist's impression of the temple's interior provided to CNN by the temple's committee on September 14, 2023. - Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust
The temple’s construction is expected to cost about 15 billion rupees ($180 million), Misra said.
The government has not provided funds for its establishment, he added, saying donations of about 30 billion rupees ($361 million) have been collected for the complex.
Ayodhya, an ancient city of about 76,000 people in Uttar Pradesh, is an important Hindu pilgrimage site and sees millions of visitors each year.
Ayodhya has recently undergone a large infrastructural makeover, including the construction of a new international airport set to open in November, according to Misra. Some of the city’s historic and religious sites have also been restored, according to local media reports, while its roads and railways are expected to get a facelift.
Analysts say Uttar Pradesh’s BJP chief minister, the hardline Hindu monk Yogi Adityanath, has relied on a mixed strategy of economic reform and religious polarization to attract votes.
At the same time he has implemented policies that critics say favor Hindus and discriminate against minorities, particularly Muslims.
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Ornate Indian Hindu temple will open on old mosque site, fulfilling Modi’s election promise
Rhea Mogul and Vedika Sud, CNN
Fri, September 15, 2023 at 8:22 PM CDT
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is close to fulfilling a decade-old election promise months out from nationwide polls with the announcement that a controversial new Hindu temple will open on disputed land in January.
The first detailed descriptions of the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir were released on Thursday, showing the lavishly decorated structure that is being built on the site of the Babri Masjid that was destroyed by right-wing Hindu mobs in 1992.
Located in the holy city of Ayodhya in the electorally significant state of Uttar Pradesh, the temple’s interiors will be adorned with gold bars and artwork that celebrates India’s diversity, according to Nripendra Misra, chairman of the temple’s construction committee.
Hindu fundamentalists demolish the wall of the 16th century Babri Masjid mosque in the city of Ayodhya in 1992. - Douglas E. Curran/AFP/Getty Images
Hindu fundamentalists demolish the wall of the 16th century Babri Masjid mosque in the city of Ayodhya in 1992. - Douglas E. Curran/AFP/Getty Images
Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP has campaigned for decades to construct a temple at the site, widely believed by devotees to be where Lord Ram, one of the most revered deities in Hinduism, was born.
Muslims claim the land because the mosque was built there in 1528. But many Hindus believe the Babri Masjid was built on the ruins of a Hindu temple, which was allegedly destroyed by Babar, the first Mughal emperor of South Asia.
The temple’s opening is expected to give Modi’s party a boost in the lead up to the election, making true on a promise he made to his supporters nearly a decade ago.
However, Misra said the date of its inauguration has got “nothing to do whatsoever” with the upcoming national elections.
“We are moving to January because the sun is on the south,” he said, adding its an auspicious time for the shrine to open.
Disputed land
The site of the temple, previously claimed by both Hindus and Muslims, has long been the center of controversy.
It was once home to the Babri Masjid, a 16th century mosque that was infamously desecrated by right-wing Hindus mobs with hammers and their bare hands in 1992, triggering communal violence that killed more than 2,000 people nationwide.
Dozens of temples and mosques were targeted in a series of revenge attacks after the mosque was destroyed, prompting outbursts of sectarian violence – some of the worst since India’s hasty and bloody partition following the exit of its British colonial rulers in 1947.
Hindu fundamentalists climb the dome of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya to demolish the structure on December 6, 1992. - Sondeep Shankar/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Hindu fundamentalists climb the dome of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya to demolish the structure on December 6, 1992. - Sondeep Shankar/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
In the following years, Hindu nationalists rallied to build the Ram Mandir on the land, setting the stage for an emotional and politically charged showdown that lasted nearly three decades.
Among the most vocal groups that pushed for the creation of the temple was Modi and his BJP, who used the topic to gain support among Hindus, who make up around 80% of the country’s 1.4 billion people.
In 2019, after a lengthy legal battle, India’s Supreme Court granted Hindus permission to build the temple on the contested site, ending the dispute. It was seen as a victory for Modi and his supporters, but came as a blow to many Muslims for whom the destruction of the Babri Masjid remains a source of tension.
When the Supreme Court delivered its verdict four years ago, Modi said the decision “has brought a new dawn” for the nation.
“The dispute may have affected generations,” Modi said. “But after this verdict, we need to resolve that a new generation, with a new start will join in the creation of a new India. Let us begin afresh and establish a new India.”
The new temple
In his briefing on Thursday, Misra gave detailed descriptions of the design of the Ram Janmabhoomi Madir, from the idols that will be placed inside the building to the source of materials used to build the shrine.
Indian engineering group Larsen and Toubro is constructing the temple on a 2.67 acre (1.08 hectares) site within a 70-acre (28 hectares) complex, Misra said, adding artists from across the country have been selected to create artwork and murals that showcase the country’s diversity.
Three sculptors have been entrusted with carving murals of Lord Ram, one of which will be picked to reside inside the sanctum sanctorum, and the temple will be adorned with gold bars created by well-known Indian jewelers, he said.
Misra said that about 100,000 devotees are expected to visit the temple everyday, meaning an individual might only be allowed inside the sanctum sanctorum for about 20 seconds, due to demand.
An artist's impression of the temple's interior provided to CNN by the temple's committee on September 14, 2023. - Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust
An artist's impression of the temple's interior provided to CNN by the temple's committee on September 14, 2023. - Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust
The temple’s construction is expected to cost about 15 billion rupees ($180 million), Misra said.
The government has not provided funds for its establishment, he added, saying donations of about 30 billion rupees ($361 million) have been collected for the complex.
Ayodhya, an ancient city of about 76,000 people in Uttar Pradesh, is an important Hindu pilgrimage site and sees millions of visitors each year.
Ayodhya has recently undergone a large infrastructural makeover, including the construction of a new international airport set to open in November, according to Misra. Some of the city’s historic and religious sites have also been restored, according to local media reports, while its roads and railways are expected to get a facelift.
Analysts say Uttar Pradesh’s BJP chief minister, the hardline Hindu monk Yogi Adityanath, has relied on a mixed strategy of economic reform and religious polarization to attract votes.
At the same time he has implemented policies that critics say favor Hindus and discriminate against minorities, particularly Muslims.
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Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Pakistan condemns Indian minister’s ‘irresponsible, provocative’ remarks on ‘taking back’ Sindh
Abdullah Momand Published October 9, 2023 Updated about 10 hours ago
Pakistan on Monday condemned the “highly irresponsible remarks” made by the chief minister of India’s Uttar Pradesh on “taking back Sindhu (Sindh)” and said that such statements “manifest a revisionist and expansionist mindset”.
A day earlier, Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath said that if Ram Janmabhoomi — the site of the Babri Masjid which has now been turned into a temple — could be “taken back after 500 years, then there is no reason why we cannot take back Sindhu”, NDTV reported.
“After 500 years, a grand temple of Lord Ram is being constructed in Ayodhya. Ramlala will be seated again in his temple by the prime minister in January. If Ram Janmabhoomi can be taken back after 500 years, there is no reason why we cannot take back Sindhu,” the report quoted Adityanath as saying.
The Babri Masjid stood on the site in the northern town of Ayodhya for almost 500 years until it was demolished by Hindu zealots in 1992. The demolition 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’s top court after a legal battle lasting decades awarded the site to Hindus, giving Muslims another location to build a new mosque.
In response to the Indian minister’s remarks today, Foreign Office Spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said: “We condemn the highly irresponsible remarks made by the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a key member of India’s ruling dispensation and a follower of the bigoted Hindutva ideology, at the National Sindhi Convention in Lucknow.”
She said it was “equally condemnable” that the “so-called” reclamation of the Ram Janmabhoomi was cited by Adityanath as a template for reclaiming a region that constituted part of Pakistan.
“History bears witness that a Hindu supremacist mob had brazenly demolished the historic Babri Mosque on December 6, 1992 to take back the claimed birthplace of Lord Rama in Ayodhya,” the FO spokesperson recalled.
Baloch stated that the Indian minister’s “provocative remarks” were inspired by the “gratuitous assertion of ‘Akhand Bharat’ (undivided India)”.
“These remarks manifest a revisionist and expansionist mindset that seeks to subjugate the identity and culture of not only India’s neighbouring countries but also its own religious minorities. They also reflect a perverse view of history.
“It is a matter of grave concern that such ideas are being increasingly peddled by individuals belonging to the BJP-RSS combined to further their divisive and parochial political agenda,” Baloch said.
The FO spokesperson added that instead of nurturing “hegemonic and expansionist ambitions”, Indian leaders should resolve disputes with neighbouring countries and work with them to build a peaceful and prosperous South Asia.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1780186/pakis ... back-sindh
Abdullah Momand Published October 9, 2023 Updated about 10 hours ago
Pakistan on Monday condemned the “highly irresponsible remarks” made by the chief minister of India’s Uttar Pradesh on “taking back Sindhu (Sindh)” and said that such statements “manifest a revisionist and expansionist mindset”.
A day earlier, Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath said that if Ram Janmabhoomi — the site of the Babri Masjid which has now been turned into a temple — could be “taken back after 500 years, then there is no reason why we cannot take back Sindhu”, NDTV reported.
“After 500 years, a grand temple of Lord Ram is being constructed in Ayodhya. Ramlala will be seated again in his temple by the prime minister in January. If Ram Janmabhoomi can be taken back after 500 years, there is no reason why we cannot take back Sindhu,” the report quoted Adityanath as saying.
The Babri Masjid stood on the site in the northern town of Ayodhya for almost 500 years until it was demolished by Hindu zealots in 1992. The demolition 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’s top court after a legal battle lasting decades awarded the site to Hindus, giving Muslims another location to build a new mosque.
In response to the Indian minister’s remarks today, Foreign Office Spokesperson Mumtaz Zahra Baloch said: “We condemn the highly irresponsible remarks made by the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, a key member of India’s ruling dispensation and a follower of the bigoted Hindutva ideology, at the National Sindhi Convention in Lucknow.”
She said it was “equally condemnable” that the “so-called” reclamation of the Ram Janmabhoomi was cited by Adityanath as a template for reclaiming a region that constituted part of Pakistan.
“History bears witness that a Hindu supremacist mob had brazenly demolished the historic Babri Mosque on December 6, 1992 to take back the claimed birthplace of Lord Rama in Ayodhya,” the FO spokesperson recalled.
Baloch stated that the Indian minister’s “provocative remarks” were inspired by the “gratuitous assertion of ‘Akhand Bharat’ (undivided India)”.
“These remarks manifest a revisionist and expansionist mindset that seeks to subjugate the identity and culture of not only India’s neighbouring countries but also its own religious minorities. They also reflect a perverse view of history.
“It is a matter of grave concern that such ideas are being increasingly peddled by individuals belonging to the BJP-RSS combined to further their divisive and parochial political agenda,” Baloch said.
The FO spokesperson added that instead of nurturing “hegemonic and expansionist ambitions”, Indian leaders should resolve disputes with neighbouring countries and work with them to build a peaceful and prosperous South Asia.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1780186/pakis ... back-sindh
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
‘Halal’ products banned in India’s Uttar Pradesh
Reuters Published November 21, 2023 Updated about 22 hours ago
LUCKNOW: Authorities in India’s Uttar Pradesh state have banned the distribution and sale of Halal-certified products, including dairy, garments and medicines, saying it was illegal.
Bakery products, sugar, edible oil and other products which were labelled as `Halal-certified’ by companies manufacturing them would be banned from distribution and sale, a state government notification said on Saturday.
“Halal certification of food products is a parallel system which creates confusion regarding the quality of food items,” the notification said.
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) is the country’s apex body in charge of determining standards for most food products sold in the country and determines the standards food products should meet, the notification said.
Uttar Pradesh is ruled by firebrand Hindu monk Yogi Adityanath, who belongs to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Both Adityanath and his government have been accused by critics of having a divisive agenda against the state’s sizable Muslim population, which they have consistently denied.
“Religion should not be brought into food. There were many items such as garments, sugar, etc which were being branded as Halal, which is against the law,” state BJP spokesperson Rakesh Tripathi said on Monday.
Published in Dawn, November 21st, 2023
https://www.dawn.com/news/1791100/halal ... ar-pradesh
Reuters Published November 21, 2023 Updated about 22 hours ago
LUCKNOW: Authorities in India’s Uttar Pradesh state have banned the distribution and sale of Halal-certified products, including dairy, garments and medicines, saying it was illegal.
Bakery products, sugar, edible oil and other products which were labelled as `Halal-certified’ by companies manufacturing them would be banned from distribution and sale, a state government notification said on Saturday.
“Halal certification of food products is a parallel system which creates confusion regarding the quality of food items,” the notification said.
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) is the country’s apex body in charge of determining standards for most food products sold in the country and determines the standards food products should meet, the notification said.
Uttar Pradesh is ruled by firebrand Hindu monk Yogi Adityanath, who belongs to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Both Adityanath and his government have been accused by critics of having a divisive agenda against the state’s sizable Muslim population, which they have consistently denied.
“Religion should not be brought into food. There were many items such as garments, sugar, etc which were being branded as Halal, which is against the law,” state BJP spokesperson Rakesh Tripathi said on Monday.
Published in Dawn, November 21st, 2023
https://www.dawn.com/news/1791100/halal ... ar-pradesh
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
India’s Muslim precariat
Ashraf Jehangir Qazi Published December 8, 2023 Updated about 23 hours ago
The writer is a former ambassador to the US, India and China and head of UN missions in Iraq and Sudan
RECENTLY, Prof Christophe Jaffrelot, an authority on India’s Muslims, spoke on ‘The Plight of Minorities under Modi’s India’ at the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad. He painted a sombre picture.
Since 1947, India’s “democracy” had evolved through the Gandhi/Nehru phase of “conservative democracy”, to a post-Mandal more inclusive democracy, to today’s BJP-dominated “ethnic democracy”. This ethnic democracy had evolved from Savarkar’s Hindu rashtra (Hindu state) to Modi’s Hindu raj (Hindu rule.) Accordingly, India’s Muslims had been marginalised institutionally, economically, and educationally.
Statistics from 1978 to 2016 showed the number of Muslims in the Indian Administrative Service was around four to five per cent, although Indian Muslims were 14.5pc of India’s population. In the Indian Police Service Muslims were a mere 2 to 2.5pc.
The only institution where Indian Muslims exceeded their percentage of the population were Indian jails! As for the judiciary, there were only one or two Muslims among the 30 justices of the supreme court of India.
Although Jaffrelot did not mention it, Muslims in the Indian military have been reduced from a third at partition to 2pc today. However, he mentioned the bureaucracy of occupied Kashmir as being “de-Kashmirised.”
Indian Muslims have only 9.5pc of India’s wealth, whereas the Hindu upper castes, with less than half the population of the Muslims, have 36pc.
Politically, the ruling BJP which won two landslide electoral victories in a row did not have a single Muslim in parliament. After the BJP defeated the Samajwadi Party in UP the Muslim percentage in its assembly went from 17pc to 6pc.
It has been a similar story in the other states of India. West Bengal and Kerala have been partial exceptions. Despite the rise of the BJP in the south it does not rule in any of its five states and accordingly the Muslims are relatively better represented in their assemblies.
Economically, the Indian Muslims have only 9.5pc of India’s wealth, whereas the Hindu upper castes (Brahmin and Bania), with less than half the population of the Muslims, have 36pc.
Moreover, there is no difference in the percentages owned by so-called Muslim upper and lower castes, indicating a more or less wholesale communal exclusion — not unlike the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany even if widespread vigilante violence against Indian Muslims is still of a lower order.
The lack of access to government jobs is a prime reason for the poverty of India’s Muslims. Accordingly, 64pc of Muslims are either self-employed or work as casual labourers. Indian Muslims are by and large not part of the ‘salariat’ of India! The Dalits and Other Backward Castes of India have representation in the salariat mainly as a result of the BJP’s ‘positive discrimination’ to break the traditional dominance of the upper caste anti-BJP Hindus of the south.
Educationally, the Muslims are also losing ground. In Kerala graduates among Hindu upper castes are 22pc whereas among Muslims it is 4pc. In UP the percentage for Hindu upper castes is 50pc whereas for the first time ever graduates among upper-caste Muslims have declined from 14pc to 12pc.
Education provides access to the salariat and upward mobility but educational costs and the fact that Muslim students have the fewest scholarships prohibits their access to an adequate education.
Urdu, moreover, is dying in India. Only half of the Muslims in UP — the home of Urdu — speak and read it. Urdu has become the language of the south, because of Hyderabad, and of West Bengal because Mamata Banerjee panders to her Muslim voters.
Comment: In Pakistan we often tell each other we must save Pakistan as it is our only country. In Modi’s India the vast majority of Muslims have no country to call their own. This is their plight.
Jaffrelot suggested their only hope may lie in relocation to the south of India where prejudice against them is less virulent. This is totally impractical. Asked whether improved India-Pakistan relations could help improve the lot of India’s Muslims, he did not think so because Modi had dramatically changed India’s character.
Secular democratic inclusivity could no longer compete with Hindutva exclusiveness and majoritarianism as a vote-getter. The Congress party was adjusting to this political reality. (Modi’s India has indeed realised the fears of Abul Kalam Azad that the partition of India would reduce India’s Muslims to below the status of Shudras!)
Pakistan is legitimately concerned with the plight of Indian Muslims and India-occupied Kashmiris, as well as the communal and genocidal ideology of Hindutva and Narendra Modi.
The international community is well aware of Modi’s India. The West, particularly the US and the UK, while critical of India’s genocidal human rights violations against Muslims ignores them because India is considered an ally against China. This Islamophobic hypocrisy needs to be condemned in no uncertain terms.
Tragically, as a failing state, Pakistan has forfeited the possibility of having a globally influential voice. Accordingly, discussing India’s dismal minority rights record becomes an act of self-indulgence aimed at placating domestic public opinion rather than doing anything about it.
Sincerity in this regard would require Pakistan to first address its own minority rights situation in accordance with the Holy Quran, the Constitution of Pakistan, and the International Human Rights Charter.
As for minorities in Pakistan, we should honestly ascertain the relevant facts from our religious minorities such as Hindus and Christians; ethnic minorities such as the Hazaras, Baloch, Brahui, Chitralis, Pakhtun, Sindhis, etc; and political parties that represent a massive majority of Pakistanis who want democracy, instead of any praetorian hybrid system which is thoroughly unconstitutional.
We should also consult reports of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission and the UN’s international human rights organisations to know our ranking among nations on minority rights.
In 1972, the International Commission of Jurists stated “there is a strong prima facie case that particular acts of genocide were committed against the Hindus” — who were our East Pakistan compatriots in 1971. Shamefully, there have been no proper investigations, apologies or criminal prosecutions. In these circumstances, merely discussing minority rights in an ‘enemy’ country is no measure of our concern for human rights.
Published in Dawn, December 8th, 2023
https://www.dawn.com/news/1796056/india ... -precariat
Ashraf Jehangir Qazi Published December 8, 2023 Updated about 23 hours ago
The writer is a former ambassador to the US, India and China and head of UN missions in Iraq and Sudan
RECENTLY, Prof Christophe Jaffrelot, an authority on India’s Muslims, spoke on ‘The Plight of Minorities under Modi’s India’ at the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad. He painted a sombre picture.
Since 1947, India’s “democracy” had evolved through the Gandhi/Nehru phase of “conservative democracy”, to a post-Mandal more inclusive democracy, to today’s BJP-dominated “ethnic democracy”. This ethnic democracy had evolved from Savarkar’s Hindu rashtra (Hindu state) to Modi’s Hindu raj (Hindu rule.) Accordingly, India’s Muslims had been marginalised institutionally, economically, and educationally.
Statistics from 1978 to 2016 showed the number of Muslims in the Indian Administrative Service was around four to five per cent, although Indian Muslims were 14.5pc of India’s population. In the Indian Police Service Muslims were a mere 2 to 2.5pc.
The only institution where Indian Muslims exceeded their percentage of the population were Indian jails! As for the judiciary, there were only one or two Muslims among the 30 justices of the supreme court of India.
Although Jaffrelot did not mention it, Muslims in the Indian military have been reduced from a third at partition to 2pc today. However, he mentioned the bureaucracy of occupied Kashmir as being “de-Kashmirised.”
Indian Muslims have only 9.5pc of India’s wealth, whereas the Hindu upper castes, with less than half the population of the Muslims, have 36pc.
Politically, the ruling BJP which won two landslide electoral victories in a row did not have a single Muslim in parliament. After the BJP defeated the Samajwadi Party in UP the Muslim percentage in its assembly went from 17pc to 6pc.
It has been a similar story in the other states of India. West Bengal and Kerala have been partial exceptions. Despite the rise of the BJP in the south it does not rule in any of its five states and accordingly the Muslims are relatively better represented in their assemblies.
Economically, the Indian Muslims have only 9.5pc of India’s wealth, whereas the Hindu upper castes (Brahmin and Bania), with less than half the population of the Muslims, have 36pc.
Moreover, there is no difference in the percentages owned by so-called Muslim upper and lower castes, indicating a more or less wholesale communal exclusion — not unlike the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany even if widespread vigilante violence against Indian Muslims is still of a lower order.
The lack of access to government jobs is a prime reason for the poverty of India’s Muslims. Accordingly, 64pc of Muslims are either self-employed or work as casual labourers. Indian Muslims are by and large not part of the ‘salariat’ of India! The Dalits and Other Backward Castes of India have representation in the salariat mainly as a result of the BJP’s ‘positive discrimination’ to break the traditional dominance of the upper caste anti-BJP Hindus of the south.
Educationally, the Muslims are also losing ground. In Kerala graduates among Hindu upper castes are 22pc whereas among Muslims it is 4pc. In UP the percentage for Hindu upper castes is 50pc whereas for the first time ever graduates among upper-caste Muslims have declined from 14pc to 12pc.
Education provides access to the salariat and upward mobility but educational costs and the fact that Muslim students have the fewest scholarships prohibits their access to an adequate education.
Urdu, moreover, is dying in India. Only half of the Muslims in UP — the home of Urdu — speak and read it. Urdu has become the language of the south, because of Hyderabad, and of West Bengal because Mamata Banerjee panders to her Muslim voters.
Comment: In Pakistan we often tell each other we must save Pakistan as it is our only country. In Modi’s India the vast majority of Muslims have no country to call their own. This is their plight.
Jaffrelot suggested their only hope may lie in relocation to the south of India where prejudice against them is less virulent. This is totally impractical. Asked whether improved India-Pakistan relations could help improve the lot of India’s Muslims, he did not think so because Modi had dramatically changed India’s character.
Secular democratic inclusivity could no longer compete with Hindutva exclusiveness and majoritarianism as a vote-getter. The Congress party was adjusting to this political reality. (Modi’s India has indeed realised the fears of Abul Kalam Azad that the partition of India would reduce India’s Muslims to below the status of Shudras!)
Pakistan is legitimately concerned with the plight of Indian Muslims and India-occupied Kashmiris, as well as the communal and genocidal ideology of Hindutva and Narendra Modi.
The international community is well aware of Modi’s India. The West, particularly the US and the UK, while critical of India’s genocidal human rights violations against Muslims ignores them because India is considered an ally against China. This Islamophobic hypocrisy needs to be condemned in no uncertain terms.
Tragically, as a failing state, Pakistan has forfeited the possibility of having a globally influential voice. Accordingly, discussing India’s dismal minority rights record becomes an act of self-indulgence aimed at placating domestic public opinion rather than doing anything about it.
Sincerity in this regard would require Pakistan to first address its own minority rights situation in accordance with the Holy Quran, the Constitution of Pakistan, and the International Human Rights Charter.
As for minorities in Pakistan, we should honestly ascertain the relevant facts from our religious minorities such as Hindus and Christians; ethnic minorities such as the Hazaras, Baloch, Brahui, Chitralis, Pakhtun, Sindhis, etc; and political parties that represent a massive majority of Pakistanis who want democracy, instead of any praetorian hybrid system which is thoroughly unconstitutional.
We should also consult reports of the Pakistan Human Rights Commission and the UN’s international human rights organisations to know our ranking among nations on minority rights.
In 1972, the International Commission of Jurists stated “there is a strong prima facie case that particular acts of genocide were committed against the Hindus” — who were our East Pakistan compatriots in 1971. Shamefully, there have been no proper investigations, apologies or criminal prosecutions. In these circumstances, merely discussing minority rights in an ‘enemy’ country is no measure of our concern for human rights.
Published in Dawn, December 8th, 2023
https://www.dawn.com/news/1796056/india ... -precariat
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Yes one should be very concerned of the genocidal ideology of Hindutva but Pakistan also has done nothing to protect its own dwindling minorities such as Christians and Hindus and others from its own extremists.
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
I have reports from India that on daily basis hundreds of Muslims are converting to Hinduism past many years. Mostly poor Muslim families are pressurized, threatened, and offered money for convertion. BJP cronies and affilited political parties and their goons are telling them that your forefathers were Hindus and were converted to Islam, if you people want a safe, respectable life, and future for your children better convert to Hinduism again or better go to Pakistan.
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
They also took over THIS YEAR the Dargah at Pirana near Ahmadabad and are currently reverting the Imamshahis to Hinduism by transforming the Darga into a Mandir. Needless to say all their ancient documents have been destroyed to divorce them from their historical roots. This was easy because of the internal dissenssions among various factions of the Imamshahis and the fear created since the killing of hundreds of Muslims in 2006.
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
CNN
Ayodhya’s Muslims confront grief and anxiety as Ram Temple inauguration nears
Aishwarya Iyer, CNN
Sat, January 20, 2024 at 6:11 PM CST·
Saffron flags are flying in the majority Hindu town of Ayodhya as excited locals prepare to host Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the inauguration of a new multimillion-dollar temple.
But like many of the town’s 500,000 Muslims, 65-year-old Maulana Badshah Khan says he’ll be staying at home.
He fears a repeat of the religious violence that erupted more than 30 years ago, when Hindu nationalists destroyed the Babri Masjid, a 16th century mosque, triggering riots across the country.
On Monday, Modi will officially open the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir, a lavish temple built on the same site that analysts say is a monument to Hindu nationalist ambition.
Khan says he believes the celebration is a clear sign of how Muslims are becoming marginalized under the leadership of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“The wounds of Babri Mosque’s demolition will always be there. Even if we feel despondent about voicing them,” said Khan.
“The temple holds the symbolic value of showing the Muslims their place in New India.”
Fear and anxiety
More than 7,000 people have been invited to Ayodhya to attend the ceremony in person, including high-profile politicians who are flying in from across the vast country to take part. And tens of thousands of pious Hindus are thronging to the small town to place flowers and gifts inside the temple.
Amid these increasing crowds, there is apprehension among Ayodhya’s Muslims.
Azam Qadri, the 39-year-old head of a local religious body, said that those who lived through the 1992 violence fear the arrival of outsiders.
“Every time people come from outside there is trouble. One cannot afford to lose their precious belongings, savings, or identity papers anymore. It is not easy to restart your life again,” he said.
Haji Mahboob, who lost two relatives during the 1992 violence, said local Muslims are worried the emboldened crowds will chant provocative slogans against them.
“They will call for Muslims to be expelled from Ayodhya or demand a Hindu Rashtra (nation),” he said.
Mahboob said there is now a sense of hopelessness among his community.
Many Muslims believed that in 2019, when the Supreme Court granted Hindus permission to build the temple on the contested site, the controversy might come to an end, he said. But instead, emboldened Hindus began targeting even more mosques across the country, campaigning to tear those down too.
“The Hindus cannot stand us, they cannot see us, what can we do?” he said.
The rise of Hindu nationalism
Modi rose to power in 2014 with a pledge to reform the country’s economy and usher in a new era of development – but he also heavily pushed a Hindutva agenda, an ideology that believes India should become a land for Hindus.
Many states have passed legislation that critics say is rooted in Hindutva and discriminatory toward Muslims, including laws that make it increasingly difficult for interfaith couples to marry and banning the slaughter and transport of cows – an animal considered sacred to Hindus.
And one of Modi’s key promises to his voters was to build the Ram Temple on the desecrated mosque’s site, and he’s hoping its construction will firm his chances for a rare third election win this year.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of “The Demolition and the Verdict,” a book about the 1992 mosque demolition, said Modi’s decision to preside over Monday’s festivities is a sign of Hindu hegemony in India.
Modi’s involvement in the ceremony is indicative of how the line between the state and religion is becoming increasingly blurred, he said.
Mukhopadhyay added the sentiment among Muslims is not one of celebration. He has heard that Muslims are advising each other not to travel by train, not to drive cars alone and not to wear clothing that identifies them as Muslim.
“There is going to be immense sadness and there is also going to be tremendous fear (among India’s Muslims),” he said.
Speaking to CNN, BJP spokesperson Nalin Kohli said Muslims are not being marginalized in India, and that the inauguration of the Ram Mandir is a “cause for celebration.”
“In terms of Prime Minister Modi’s government’s work, initiatives, and developmental agenda, not one scheme, program, or anything, distinguishes between Indian citizens on the basis of religion, caste, region,” he said.
The new mosque
In the years following the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Hindu nationalists rallied to build the Ram Mandir on the site of the destroyed mosque, setting the stage for an emotional and politically charged showdown that worried Indian liberals, who feared more outbursts of sectarian violence.
That 2019 judgement that paved the way for the building of the Ram Mandir also allocated land for the town’s Muslims to build another mosque, some 25 kilometers (about 15 miles) from the Ram Mandir in a village called Dhannipur.
Mahboob, one of the petitioners who fought for the Babri mosque in the Supreme Court, said for most Muslims of Ayodhya, its construction does not hold emotional sway.
“If they built the mosque close to where Babri stood, we could have tried to convince ourselves that injustice was not happening to us. However, this land is so far away, and over that the construction has not even begun. So what do we say?”
Late last year, Arafat Shaikh – a member of the BJP – was appointed to lead the construction of the mosque. He told CNN that he had never stepped foot in Ayodhya before he took on the role.
He said the delays were due to disagreements about the design of the building but believes the new mosque will be unique as it will be the first in India with five minarets.
Amongst other ambitious plans, Shaikh says he wants additional land for educational institutions, a vegetarian kitchen, and a 21-foot-long Quran which will be painted saffron – a color closely associated with Hinduism but one that has become increasingly politicized and appropriated by the Hindu-right.
Shaikh said the color was chosen because Gharib Nawaz, a famous Sufi saint, also revered saffron.
“It will bring the two communities closer,” he said.
Enduring divisions
Right-wing Hindu nationalist organizations say the temple’s opening is a symbol of a new Hindu nation.
“The Mughals tried to change us, then the English tried to change us, but the inauguration of the Ram Temple shows the world that our Hindu traditions, practices, and beliefs are still intact. New India will see a resurrection of the Hindu civilization,” said Vinod Bansal, spokesperson of the right-wing Vishwa Hindu Parishad group.
Mahant Jairam Das, the local head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organization of the BJP, said he does not believe the mosque should not be built in Ayodhya, instead claiming calls to build the structure were a “call for war.”
“Go to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or a Muslim-dominated country. Why build a mosque like this in India?” he said.
For Hassan Ali, who was just nine when he spent two nights in a local police station trying to escape the 1992 violence, the sectarian fault lines are clearly visible.
“In 1992 there were many stories of local Hindus and Muslims helping each other. However now, there is a lot more poison that has been fed to people,” he said. “So one cannot tell anymore. One cannot tell what people have in their hearts.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ay ... 34414.html
Ayodhya’s Muslims confront grief and anxiety as Ram Temple inauguration nears
Aishwarya Iyer, CNN
Sat, January 20, 2024 at 6:11 PM CST·
Saffron flags are flying in the majority Hindu town of Ayodhya as excited locals prepare to host Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the inauguration of a new multimillion-dollar temple.
But like many of the town’s 500,000 Muslims, 65-year-old Maulana Badshah Khan says he’ll be staying at home.
He fears a repeat of the religious violence that erupted more than 30 years ago, when Hindu nationalists destroyed the Babri Masjid, a 16th century mosque, triggering riots across the country.
On Monday, Modi will officially open the Ram Janmabhoomi Mandir, a lavish temple built on the same site that analysts say is a monument to Hindu nationalist ambition.
Khan says he believes the celebration is a clear sign of how Muslims are becoming marginalized under the leadership of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“The wounds of Babri Mosque’s demolition will always be there. Even if we feel despondent about voicing them,” said Khan.
“The temple holds the symbolic value of showing the Muslims their place in New India.”
Fear and anxiety
More than 7,000 people have been invited to Ayodhya to attend the ceremony in person, including high-profile politicians who are flying in from across the vast country to take part. And tens of thousands of pious Hindus are thronging to the small town to place flowers and gifts inside the temple.
Amid these increasing crowds, there is apprehension among Ayodhya’s Muslims.
Azam Qadri, the 39-year-old head of a local religious body, said that those who lived through the 1992 violence fear the arrival of outsiders.
“Every time people come from outside there is trouble. One cannot afford to lose their precious belongings, savings, or identity papers anymore. It is not easy to restart your life again,” he said.
Haji Mahboob, who lost two relatives during the 1992 violence, said local Muslims are worried the emboldened crowds will chant provocative slogans against them.
“They will call for Muslims to be expelled from Ayodhya or demand a Hindu Rashtra (nation),” he said.
Mahboob said there is now a sense of hopelessness among his community.
Many Muslims believed that in 2019, when the Supreme Court granted Hindus permission to build the temple on the contested site, the controversy might come to an end, he said. But instead, emboldened Hindus began targeting even more mosques across the country, campaigning to tear those down too.
“The Hindus cannot stand us, they cannot see us, what can we do?” he said.
The rise of Hindu nationalism
Modi rose to power in 2014 with a pledge to reform the country’s economy and usher in a new era of development – but he also heavily pushed a Hindutva agenda, an ideology that believes India should become a land for Hindus.
Many states have passed legislation that critics say is rooted in Hindutva and discriminatory toward Muslims, including laws that make it increasingly difficult for interfaith couples to marry and banning the slaughter and transport of cows – an animal considered sacred to Hindus.
And one of Modi’s key promises to his voters was to build the Ram Temple on the desecrated mosque’s site, and he’s hoping its construction will firm his chances for a rare third election win this year.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, author of “The Demolition and the Verdict,” a book about the 1992 mosque demolition, said Modi’s decision to preside over Monday’s festivities is a sign of Hindu hegemony in India.
Modi’s involvement in the ceremony is indicative of how the line between the state and religion is becoming increasingly blurred, he said.
Mukhopadhyay added the sentiment among Muslims is not one of celebration. He has heard that Muslims are advising each other not to travel by train, not to drive cars alone and not to wear clothing that identifies them as Muslim.
“There is going to be immense sadness and there is also going to be tremendous fear (among India’s Muslims),” he said.
Speaking to CNN, BJP spokesperson Nalin Kohli said Muslims are not being marginalized in India, and that the inauguration of the Ram Mandir is a “cause for celebration.”
“In terms of Prime Minister Modi’s government’s work, initiatives, and developmental agenda, not one scheme, program, or anything, distinguishes between Indian citizens on the basis of religion, caste, region,” he said.
The new mosque
In the years following the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Hindu nationalists rallied to build the Ram Mandir on the site of the destroyed mosque, setting the stage for an emotional and politically charged showdown that worried Indian liberals, who feared more outbursts of sectarian violence.
That 2019 judgement that paved the way for the building of the Ram Mandir also allocated land for the town’s Muslims to build another mosque, some 25 kilometers (about 15 miles) from the Ram Mandir in a village called Dhannipur.
Mahboob, one of the petitioners who fought for the Babri mosque in the Supreme Court, said for most Muslims of Ayodhya, its construction does not hold emotional sway.
“If they built the mosque close to where Babri stood, we could have tried to convince ourselves that injustice was not happening to us. However, this land is so far away, and over that the construction has not even begun. So what do we say?”
Late last year, Arafat Shaikh – a member of the BJP – was appointed to lead the construction of the mosque. He told CNN that he had never stepped foot in Ayodhya before he took on the role.
He said the delays were due to disagreements about the design of the building but believes the new mosque will be unique as it will be the first in India with five minarets.
Amongst other ambitious plans, Shaikh says he wants additional land for educational institutions, a vegetarian kitchen, and a 21-foot-long Quran which will be painted saffron – a color closely associated with Hinduism but one that has become increasingly politicized and appropriated by the Hindu-right.
Shaikh said the color was chosen because Gharib Nawaz, a famous Sufi saint, also revered saffron.
“It will bring the two communities closer,” he said.
Enduring divisions
Right-wing Hindu nationalist organizations say the temple’s opening is a symbol of a new Hindu nation.
“The Mughals tried to change us, then the English tried to change us, but the inauguration of the Ram Temple shows the world that our Hindu traditions, practices, and beliefs are still intact. New India will see a resurrection of the Hindu civilization,” said Vinod Bansal, spokesperson of the right-wing Vishwa Hindu Parishad group.
Mahant Jairam Das, the local head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organization of the BJP, said he does not believe the mosque should not be built in Ayodhya, instead claiming calls to build the structure were a “call for war.”
“Go to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or a Muslim-dominated country. Why build a mosque like this in India?” he said.
For Hassan Ali, who was just nine when he spent two nights in a local police station trying to escape the 1992 violence, the sectarian fault lines are clearly visible.
“In 1992 there were many stories of local Hindus and Muslims helping each other. However now, there is a lot more poison that has been fed to people,” he said. “So one cannot tell anymore. One cannot tell what people have in their hearts.”
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/ay ... 34414.html
Modi Opens a Giant Temple in a Triumph for India’s Hindu Nationalists
The temple inaugurated by the prime minister is on the disputed site of a centuries-old mosque destroyed in a Hindu mob attack that set a precedent of impunity against Muslims.
They fanned out across the vast country, knocking on doors in the name of a cause that would redefine India.
These foot soldiers and organizers, including a young Narendra Modi, collected millions of dollars to be socked away for a long fight to build a grand Hindu temple in Ayodhya, in northern India. Across 200,000 villages, ceremonies were arranged to bless individual bricks that would be sent to that sacred city, believed by Hindus to be the birthplace of the deity Ram.
The bricks, the campaign’s leaders declared, would not just be used for the temple’s construction on land occupied for centuries by a mosque. They would be the foundation for a Hindu rashtra, or Hindu nation, that would correct what right-wing Hindus saw as the injustice of India’s birth as a secular republic.
Nearly four decades later, the cornerstone of that sweeping vision has been laid.
Mr. Modi, now the country’s prime minister, inaugurated the Ram temple in Ayodhya on Monday — the crowning achievement of a national movement aimed at establishing Hindu supremacy in India by rallying the country’s Hindu majority across castes and tribes.
“Today, our Ram has come. After centuries of patience and sacrifice, our Lord Ram has come,” Mr. Modi said during the ceremony. “It is the beginning of a new era.”
The moment is both one of triumph for Hindu nationalists and one of jubilation for many others who care little for politics. Ram has a wide following in India; excitement around the temple’s consecration had been building for weeks, with saffron-colored pennants strung across a million streets and markets, and posters of Ram advertising the event everywhere.
ImageWorkers walk near a large temple complex that is under construction. Cranes loom over the project, and large slabs of stone are piled nearby.
The Ram temple in Ayodhya last month. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, inaugurated the temple on Monday, months before an election, even though it is only 70 percent finished.
Image
Men and women, seated and standing, in a town in India.
A group on the streets of Ayodhya, believed by Hindus to be the birthplace of the deity Ram, watching the temple’s consecration ceremony.
But for the country’s 200 million Muslims, the Ram temple has reinforced a sense of despair and dislocation.
The Babri Mosque, which once stood on the site, was destroyed in 1992 by Hindu activists, unleashing waves of sectarian violence that left thousands dead. The manner in which the mosque was razed set a precedent of impunity that reverberates today: lynchings of Muslim men accused of slaughtering or transporting cows, beatings of interfaith couples to combat “love jihad” and — in an echo of Ayodhya — “bulldozer justice” in which the homes of Muslims are leveled by officials without due process in the wake of religious tensions.
The Hindu right wing has ridden the Ram movement to become India’s dominant political force. The opening of the temple, built over 70 acres at a cost of nearly $250 million, marks the unofficial start of Mr. Modi’s campaign for a third term, in an election expected in the spring.
That it was Mr. Modi who was the star of the inauguration of the temple in Ayodhya — which Hindu nationalists have compared to the Vatican and Mecca — captures the right’s blurring of old lines.
India’s founding fathers took great pains to keep the state at arm’s length from religion, seeing it as crucial to the country’s cohesion after the communal bloodletting wrought by the 1947 partition that cleaved Pakistan from India. But Mr. Modi has unabashedly normalized the opposite.
After completing the consecration rituals alongside priests on Monday, Mr. Modi prostrated in front of the Ram idol, carved with a warm smile and lucid eyes in black stone and bedecked in jewels. The prime minister then emerged at the edge of the temple steps in his signature style for big moments: the powerful leader, alone in the frame, striding forward and bowing to the thousands of handpicked guests — celebrities, seers and business leaders — seated below.
Mr. Modi’s public image is simultaneously one of statesman and god-man. His party chief recently described him as “the king of gods.” Ahead of the inauguration, the town was covered in posters and billboards, of Ram and of Mr. Modi.
Image
Women wearing head coverings use brooms to sweep sidewalks next to billboards.
Cleaning sidewalks days before the ceremony. “Today, our Ram has come,” Mr. Modi said on Monday. “It is the beginning of a new era,” he added.
Image
Colorful skirts and scarves swirl as dancers entertain a group of onlookers.
Dancers celebrated in Ayodhya on Sunday.
Just as they did in the 1980s, volunteers from right-wing Hindu organizations went door to door across hundreds of thousands of villages in the days before the temple’s consecration. This time, the effort was a reminder of the immense network Mr. Modi has at his disposal, one that the political opposition can come nowhere close to matching.
In preparation for his role in Ayodhya, Mr. Modi embarked on an 11-day Hindu purification ritual. The prime minister was seen temple-hopping across the country, and when his office put out pictures of him at his residence feeding cows, which are seen as holy by many Hindus, fawning television channels ran them as breaking news.
In between his expressions of religious devotion, Mr. Modi attended to the work of the state, inaugurating huge projects that perpetuate his image as a champion of development.
The omnipresent leader, in mixing religion and politics and tapping into the vast resources at his service, has achieved what his predecessors could not: turning a diverse and argumentative Indian society into something resembling a monolith that falls in line behind him. To question him is to question Hindu values. And that is akin to blasphemy.
Image
People wave flags as they stand atop roofs and pillars at a mosque, in a photo from 1992.
Hindu nationalists celebrating the destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992.Credit...Douglas E. Curran/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Image
People use sticks to attack the wall of a mosque in a photo from 1992. Other people are ripping down bars of a nearby fence.
Hindu nationalists attacking the Babri Mosque in 1992. Its destruction unleashed waves of sectarian violence that left thousands dead.Credit...Douglas E. Curran/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Manoj Kumar Jha, an opposition lawmaker, said that while Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., might be toppled someday, the transformation of the state and society would take decades, at least, to undo.
“Winning elections could be arithmetic. But the fight is in the realm of psychology — the psychological rupture, the social rupture,” Mr. Jha said. Just as Muslim Pakistan was founded as a state for one religious group, India is “now emulating Pakistan, a little late.”
“The toxic mix of religion and politics is idealized,” he added. “Nobody is bothered to see what such a toxic mix has done.”
In many ways, India’s birth as a secular republic was an idealistic project undertaken by its founding leaders, including Mohandas K. Gandhi and the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. With India’s diversity in mind, they defined a secular state not as one that keeps out religion, but as one that keeps an equal distance from all religions.
Muslims who remained in India after the creation of Pakistan amounted to the world’s third-largest Muslim population. There were also millions of Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists. Hinduism itself contained multitudes, distinguished not just by devotion to 30 million distinct deities, but also by rigid caste hierarchies and regional cultural identities.
Members of the Hindu right were appalled that the departure of the British had left Muslims with a nation of their own in Pakistan but had not afforded the same for Hindus in India. It was, to them, just the latest inequity for the religious majority in a country that had endured several bloody Muslim invasions and was ruled for centuries by the Mughal Empire.
Initially, these Hindus struggled to turn the anger over partition into a political movement not just because of the event’s trauma, but also because of the taint from a grave act of terrorism. In 1948, one of their foot soldiers, Nathuram Godse, assassinated Gandhi, who had amassed a huge following as an icon of nonviolence and an advocate of India’s diversity.
Gandhi’s last plea, after receiving three bullets from close range during his morning prayer meeting, was to the same deity that the Hindu right would later rally around at Ayodhya.
“O Ram,” he said as he collapsed.
Image
A man raises a small drum in his right hand as he stands in a row of drummers in front of celebrants holding orange flags.
Celebrations were held on the banks of the Sarayu River in Ayodhya on Saturday.
Image
People gathering along a river bank with blue and orange lights casting a glow on buildings.
On the banks of the Sarayu River on Saturday. For India’s 200 million Muslims, the Ram temple has reinforced a sense of despair.
The founders’ secular vision remained in place largely because of Nehru’s nearly two decades in power. But it rested on a thin foundation. There was no major project of historical reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims, said Abhishek Choudhary, the author of a recent book on the ascent of the Hindu right, as Nehru — “a terribly overworked politician” — focused on the immense work of ensuring the country’s immediate survival.
The opening for the right wing came in the decades after Nehru’s death. When his descendants — first his daughter, Indira Gandhi, and then his grandson Rajiv Gandhi — toyed with majoritarian sentiments in the 1980s to keep themselves in power, they walked into a game for which the Hindu right was much better prepared.
The right’s fountainhead, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S., which will be 100 years old next year, has many offshoots, all working closely for the same goal. When one sibling in the R.S.S. faced a state crackdown, the others could continue organizing.
But what the right wing lacked was political power. One group related to the R.S.S. had already been agitating around the issue of a Ram temple. The B.J.P., the political arm of the R.S.S., got on board.
The Babri Mosque had been built by a military commander of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century after the destruction of a Ram temple, the Hindu right argued. The movement to build a temple for Ram at the same spot was not just about the return of a deity with crosscutting popularity as a just ruler and moral exemplar, but also the toppling of a symbol of conquest.
Image
People crouch near a river to light small candles and float them in a river.
Worshipers lit candles along a river in Ayodhya to offer prayers in December.
Image
People pray at a temple in India.
Mr. Modi has tried to rally the country’s Hindu majority across castes and tribes.
After turning the Ram movement into a participatory affair across the country, the B.J.P. saw its political fortunes shoot up in elections in 1989, and again in 1991. There was no turning back.
The campaign gained such confidence that even as the dispute over the plot was being heard in court, tens of thousands of foot soldiers gathered at the spot in December 1992 and, in the presence of top right-wing leaders, destroyed the mosque with ropes, sledgehammers and their bare hands.
Alok Kumar, the president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the R.S.S. offshoot that has led the decades-long temple movement, said the destruction of the Mughal structure — which he asserted the Muslim rulers had erected to drain Hindu “willpower and self-respect” — and the building of the temple were crucial to a Hindu revival.
“I believe that when that structure in Ayodhya was brought down,” Mr. Kumar, a soft-spoken lawyer, said in an interview, “the inferiority complex of the Hindu race went away.”
As the court case dragged on, the issue remained a communal tinderbox. When more than 50 Hindu activists returning from Ayodhya in 2002 were burned to death in a train fire in Gujarat, it unleashed days of brutal violence that left more than 1,000 people dead in the state, a majority of them Muslims.
Mr. Modi, who was then the chief minister of Gujarat, was accused of complicity in the riots, though the courts later cleared him of wrongdoing.
Twelve years later, he would become prime minister. While he campaigned first on the economy and then, in his re-election bid five years later, on national security, his focus remained on the Hindu right’s priorities. Victory in the temple fight was sealed with a Supreme Court ruling in 2019.
Image
Volunteers, wearing orange scarves, talk with a woman in a crowded alley.
Volunteers handed out kits in Mumbai, telling people how they could participate in the consecration ceremony at home.
Image
Two people hold photos of a large temple.
The kits included a photo of the temple.
Mr. Modi has continued the uphill task of uniting Hindus into a powerful monolith, through outreach to lower castes and welfare handouts that expand his base. In the process, secularism has been redefined as the suppression of public expressions of other faiths, while Hinduism has increasingly been displayed as the religion of the state.
Ziya Us Salam, who documented patterns of violence and marginalization against India’s Muslims in a recent book, said the right-wing campaign had reduced Muslims to the worst deeds of Mughal rulers from long ago while overlooking Muslims’ contributions.
“What matters to you is to project the Muslim as a villain in the past, and to pass off that villainy to the modern contemporary Muslim who is supposed to atone for what happened in the 13th and 14th century,” Mr. Salam said.
Image
In hazy skies, two people walking along a road flanked by glowing streetlights.
A street in Ayodhya in December.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/worl ... 778d3e6de3
They fanned out across the vast country, knocking on doors in the name of a cause that would redefine India.
These foot soldiers and organizers, including a young Narendra Modi, collected millions of dollars to be socked away for a long fight to build a grand Hindu temple in Ayodhya, in northern India. Across 200,000 villages, ceremonies were arranged to bless individual bricks that would be sent to that sacred city, believed by Hindus to be the birthplace of the deity Ram.
The bricks, the campaign’s leaders declared, would not just be used for the temple’s construction on land occupied for centuries by a mosque. They would be the foundation for a Hindu rashtra, or Hindu nation, that would correct what right-wing Hindus saw as the injustice of India’s birth as a secular republic.
Nearly four decades later, the cornerstone of that sweeping vision has been laid.
Mr. Modi, now the country’s prime minister, inaugurated the Ram temple in Ayodhya on Monday — the crowning achievement of a national movement aimed at establishing Hindu supremacy in India by rallying the country’s Hindu majority across castes and tribes.
“Today, our Ram has come. After centuries of patience and sacrifice, our Lord Ram has come,” Mr. Modi said during the ceremony. “It is the beginning of a new era.”
The moment is both one of triumph for Hindu nationalists and one of jubilation for many others who care little for politics. Ram has a wide following in India; excitement around the temple’s consecration had been building for weeks, with saffron-colored pennants strung across a million streets and markets, and posters of Ram advertising the event everywhere.
ImageWorkers walk near a large temple complex that is under construction. Cranes loom over the project, and large slabs of stone are piled nearby.
The Ram temple in Ayodhya last month. Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, inaugurated the temple on Monday, months before an election, even though it is only 70 percent finished.
Image
Men and women, seated and standing, in a town in India.
A group on the streets of Ayodhya, believed by Hindus to be the birthplace of the deity Ram, watching the temple’s consecration ceremony.
But for the country’s 200 million Muslims, the Ram temple has reinforced a sense of despair and dislocation.
The Babri Mosque, which once stood on the site, was destroyed in 1992 by Hindu activists, unleashing waves of sectarian violence that left thousands dead. The manner in which the mosque was razed set a precedent of impunity that reverberates today: lynchings of Muslim men accused of slaughtering or transporting cows, beatings of interfaith couples to combat “love jihad” and — in an echo of Ayodhya — “bulldozer justice” in which the homes of Muslims are leveled by officials without due process in the wake of religious tensions.
The Hindu right wing has ridden the Ram movement to become India’s dominant political force. The opening of the temple, built over 70 acres at a cost of nearly $250 million, marks the unofficial start of Mr. Modi’s campaign for a third term, in an election expected in the spring.
That it was Mr. Modi who was the star of the inauguration of the temple in Ayodhya — which Hindu nationalists have compared to the Vatican and Mecca — captures the right’s blurring of old lines.
India’s founding fathers took great pains to keep the state at arm’s length from religion, seeing it as crucial to the country’s cohesion after the communal bloodletting wrought by the 1947 partition that cleaved Pakistan from India. But Mr. Modi has unabashedly normalized the opposite.
After completing the consecration rituals alongside priests on Monday, Mr. Modi prostrated in front of the Ram idol, carved with a warm smile and lucid eyes in black stone and bedecked in jewels. The prime minister then emerged at the edge of the temple steps in his signature style for big moments: the powerful leader, alone in the frame, striding forward and bowing to the thousands of handpicked guests — celebrities, seers and business leaders — seated below.
Mr. Modi’s public image is simultaneously one of statesman and god-man. His party chief recently described him as “the king of gods.” Ahead of the inauguration, the town was covered in posters and billboards, of Ram and of Mr. Modi.
Image
Women wearing head coverings use brooms to sweep sidewalks next to billboards.
Cleaning sidewalks days before the ceremony. “Today, our Ram has come,” Mr. Modi said on Monday. “It is the beginning of a new era,” he added.
Image
Colorful skirts and scarves swirl as dancers entertain a group of onlookers.
Dancers celebrated in Ayodhya on Sunday.
Just as they did in the 1980s, volunteers from right-wing Hindu organizations went door to door across hundreds of thousands of villages in the days before the temple’s consecration. This time, the effort was a reminder of the immense network Mr. Modi has at his disposal, one that the political opposition can come nowhere close to matching.
In preparation for his role in Ayodhya, Mr. Modi embarked on an 11-day Hindu purification ritual. The prime minister was seen temple-hopping across the country, and when his office put out pictures of him at his residence feeding cows, which are seen as holy by many Hindus, fawning television channels ran them as breaking news.
In between his expressions of religious devotion, Mr. Modi attended to the work of the state, inaugurating huge projects that perpetuate his image as a champion of development.
The omnipresent leader, in mixing religion and politics and tapping into the vast resources at his service, has achieved what his predecessors could not: turning a diverse and argumentative Indian society into something resembling a monolith that falls in line behind him. To question him is to question Hindu values. And that is akin to blasphemy.
Image
People wave flags as they stand atop roofs and pillars at a mosque, in a photo from 1992.
Hindu nationalists celebrating the destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992.Credit...Douglas E. Curran/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Image
People use sticks to attack the wall of a mosque in a photo from 1992. Other people are ripping down bars of a nearby fence.
Hindu nationalists attacking the Babri Mosque in 1992. Its destruction unleashed waves of sectarian violence that left thousands dead.Credit...Douglas E. Curran/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Manoj Kumar Jha, an opposition lawmaker, said that while Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., might be toppled someday, the transformation of the state and society would take decades, at least, to undo.
“Winning elections could be arithmetic. But the fight is in the realm of psychology — the psychological rupture, the social rupture,” Mr. Jha said. Just as Muslim Pakistan was founded as a state for one religious group, India is “now emulating Pakistan, a little late.”
“The toxic mix of religion and politics is idealized,” he added. “Nobody is bothered to see what such a toxic mix has done.”
In many ways, India’s birth as a secular republic was an idealistic project undertaken by its founding leaders, including Mohandas K. Gandhi and the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. With India’s diversity in mind, they defined a secular state not as one that keeps out religion, but as one that keeps an equal distance from all religions.
Muslims who remained in India after the creation of Pakistan amounted to the world’s third-largest Muslim population. There were also millions of Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists. Hinduism itself contained multitudes, distinguished not just by devotion to 30 million distinct deities, but also by rigid caste hierarchies and regional cultural identities.
Members of the Hindu right were appalled that the departure of the British had left Muslims with a nation of their own in Pakistan but had not afforded the same for Hindus in India. It was, to them, just the latest inequity for the religious majority in a country that had endured several bloody Muslim invasions and was ruled for centuries by the Mughal Empire.
Initially, these Hindus struggled to turn the anger over partition into a political movement not just because of the event’s trauma, but also because of the taint from a grave act of terrorism. In 1948, one of their foot soldiers, Nathuram Godse, assassinated Gandhi, who had amassed a huge following as an icon of nonviolence and an advocate of India’s diversity.
Gandhi’s last plea, after receiving three bullets from close range during his morning prayer meeting, was to the same deity that the Hindu right would later rally around at Ayodhya.
“O Ram,” he said as he collapsed.
Image
A man raises a small drum in his right hand as he stands in a row of drummers in front of celebrants holding orange flags.
Celebrations were held on the banks of the Sarayu River in Ayodhya on Saturday.
Image
People gathering along a river bank with blue and orange lights casting a glow on buildings.
On the banks of the Sarayu River on Saturday. For India’s 200 million Muslims, the Ram temple has reinforced a sense of despair.
The founders’ secular vision remained in place largely because of Nehru’s nearly two decades in power. But it rested on a thin foundation. There was no major project of historical reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims, said Abhishek Choudhary, the author of a recent book on the ascent of the Hindu right, as Nehru — “a terribly overworked politician” — focused on the immense work of ensuring the country’s immediate survival.
The opening for the right wing came in the decades after Nehru’s death. When his descendants — first his daughter, Indira Gandhi, and then his grandson Rajiv Gandhi — toyed with majoritarian sentiments in the 1980s to keep themselves in power, they walked into a game for which the Hindu right was much better prepared.
The right’s fountainhead, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or R.S.S., which will be 100 years old next year, has many offshoots, all working closely for the same goal. When one sibling in the R.S.S. faced a state crackdown, the others could continue organizing.
But what the right wing lacked was political power. One group related to the R.S.S. had already been agitating around the issue of a Ram temple. The B.J.P., the political arm of the R.S.S., got on board.
The Babri Mosque had been built by a military commander of the Mughal Empire in the 16th century after the destruction of a Ram temple, the Hindu right argued. The movement to build a temple for Ram at the same spot was not just about the return of a deity with crosscutting popularity as a just ruler and moral exemplar, but also the toppling of a symbol of conquest.
Image
People crouch near a river to light small candles and float them in a river.
Worshipers lit candles along a river in Ayodhya to offer prayers in December.
Image
People pray at a temple in India.
Mr. Modi has tried to rally the country’s Hindu majority across castes and tribes.
After turning the Ram movement into a participatory affair across the country, the B.J.P. saw its political fortunes shoot up in elections in 1989, and again in 1991. There was no turning back.
The campaign gained such confidence that even as the dispute over the plot was being heard in court, tens of thousands of foot soldiers gathered at the spot in December 1992 and, in the presence of top right-wing leaders, destroyed the mosque with ropes, sledgehammers and their bare hands.
Alok Kumar, the president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the R.S.S. offshoot that has led the decades-long temple movement, said the destruction of the Mughal structure — which he asserted the Muslim rulers had erected to drain Hindu “willpower and self-respect” — and the building of the temple were crucial to a Hindu revival.
“I believe that when that structure in Ayodhya was brought down,” Mr. Kumar, a soft-spoken lawyer, said in an interview, “the inferiority complex of the Hindu race went away.”
As the court case dragged on, the issue remained a communal tinderbox. When more than 50 Hindu activists returning from Ayodhya in 2002 were burned to death in a train fire in Gujarat, it unleashed days of brutal violence that left more than 1,000 people dead in the state, a majority of them Muslims.
Mr. Modi, who was then the chief minister of Gujarat, was accused of complicity in the riots, though the courts later cleared him of wrongdoing.
Twelve years later, he would become prime minister. While he campaigned first on the economy and then, in his re-election bid five years later, on national security, his focus remained on the Hindu right’s priorities. Victory in the temple fight was sealed with a Supreme Court ruling in 2019.
Image
Volunteers, wearing orange scarves, talk with a woman in a crowded alley.
Volunteers handed out kits in Mumbai, telling people how they could participate in the consecration ceremony at home.
Image
Two people hold photos of a large temple.
The kits included a photo of the temple.
Mr. Modi has continued the uphill task of uniting Hindus into a powerful monolith, through outreach to lower castes and welfare handouts that expand his base. In the process, secularism has been redefined as the suppression of public expressions of other faiths, while Hinduism has increasingly been displayed as the religion of the state.
Ziya Us Salam, who documented patterns of violence and marginalization against India’s Muslims in a recent book, said the right-wing campaign had reduced Muslims to the worst deeds of Mughal rulers from long ago while overlooking Muslims’ contributions.
“What matters to you is to project the Muslim as a villain in the past, and to pass off that villainy to the modern contemporary Muslim who is supposed to atone for what happened in the 13th and 14th century,” Mr. Salam said.
Image
In hazy skies, two people walking along a road flanked by glowing streetlights.
A street in Ayodhya in December.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Ram Mandir — an ill portent
Pervez Hoodbhoy Published January 20, 2024 Updated 2 days ago
The writer is an Islamabad-based physicist
WHERE the five-centuries-old Babri Mosque once stood, there now stands Ram Mandir. Around it, a new Vatican-like city is coming up.
A staggering $4.2 billion have been collected as donations, both official and private. Though the temple’s completion is years away, consecration ceremonies began days ago. RSS has distributed 50 million small food packets and the first seven tonnes of halwa have arrived.
The government is arranging train and helicopter services for 100,000 sadhus and devotees, contracts for new five-star hotels have been awarded, and schools are holding daily prayers. Muslims have been advised to limit their travel by bus and train.
On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will arrive in Ayodhya. His recent message: “The whole world is waiting for the historic moment. With folded hands, I am requesting 140 crore people of the country that on Jan 22, when the consecration of Ramlalla’s idol takes place, light the Ram Jyoti in your house and celebrate Deepawali.” Hospitals in Uttar Pradesh report that dozens of pregnant women have requested C-sections so their child is born on this auspicious date.
The purpose of these celebrations — and the PM’s lead role — is ostensibly religious, but some senior priests dispute that. They will boycott the event because Modi is technically unqualified for performing the ‘pran-pratishtha’ (putting soul inside an idol) ritual. This scarcely matters, because Modi wants to signal once again that under him a new India has arrived, one bearing little or no resemblance to the India born in 1947.
Hindutva’s message targets two audiences. The first is India’s Muslims: reincarnated India is for Hindus, not for them. Just as Pakistan treats its Hindu population as inferior citizens with fewer rights, so too Muslims in India must never forget they are the unwanted progeny of invaders who despoiled a pristine land and robbed it of its glories.
Religious communalism in reincarnated India is no longer considered abhorrent.
Revenge — exemplified by destroying ancient structures — is Hindutva’s guiding principle. In March 2023, when a mob shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ burned down a century-old madressah and library containing ancient manuscripts, it was tit-for-tat for the sacking of Nalanda University by the 12th-century Muslim invader, Bakhtiyar Khilji. To avoid adverse consequences during the Ram Mandir consecration, RSS has recommended that Muslims chant “Shri Ram, Jai Ram, Jai Jai Ram” in mosques, dargahs and madressahs.
The second message is to BJP’s political opposition, principally Congress. Change your discourse from secular to religious and play on our turf. Else, be seen as anti-Hindu and lose out in the April 2024 elections, when Modi will seek his third term.
Ram Mandir’s inauguration has left Congress dazed. Just days earlier, its top leaders had scorned this ‘political event’ and refused to attend. But those below could not take the pressure and broke rank. They visited Ayodhya, took a holy dip in the river, and vowed they too want “Ram Rajya” — albeit a better one than BJP’s.
Mixing religion with politics — whether in the Hindu or Muslim way — won’t surprise those who know Pakistan’s history. Soon after the All India Muslim League suffered a crushing defeat in the 1937 elections, its leadership successfully weaponised religion and wove it into politics. It was reinjected with a double dose by Gen Ziaul Haq in the 1980s.
Today, in every Pakistani political party’s arsenal, religion is the weapon of choice for demolishing opponents. When in power, PTI used it repeatedly against PML-N and PPP. In retaliation, Maryam Nawaz’s media team has recently returned the favour — with markup — in attacking Imran Khan.
Still, to me, an infrequent visitor to India, secularism’s rapid retreat comes as a surprise. Twenty years ago, while visiting the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Research in Bangalore, I was intrigued by Nehru’s words inscribed on the foundation stone: “I too have worshipped at the shrine of science.” But I don’t see ‘worship’ and ‘shrine’ tallying well with modern science or the scientific temper associated with Nehru.
My hosts rushed to explain. Shrine of science, they said, was actually a metaphorical allusion to labs and research centres. Nehru, they proudly asserted, was an atheist and never went to temples. Later, I found he actually did visit temples as well as mosques. Further, as in his prison diary The Discovery of India, his view of religion is fairly nuanced.
Mani Shankar Aiyar recently argued that Nehru would have fought tooth and nail against making Hinduism India’s official religion. In December 1947, his cabinet decided to rebuild — at state expense — the Somnath temple plundered in the 11th century by Mahmud Ghazni. When Nehru found out, he was furious and had the minutes secretly altered. But so long as the state was not involved, he said, any private initiative was fine. In 1951, when president Rajendra Prasad sought to officially visit the restored temple, Nehru refused permission.
India’s other founder, Mahatma Gandhi, would also have roundly rejected making the grand new Ayodhya temple. Ramachandra Guha, his biographer, notes that whereas Gandhi called himself a devout Hindu, yet in the many years he lived in Ahmedabad, he did not visit any of the city’s temples. Why, said Gandhi, does God need a building or idol to be worshipped?
Gandhi’s eclecticism is evident from his prayer meeting of Nov 21, 1947: “As per the information I have received, about 137 mosques of Delhi have been virtually destroyed in the recent riots. Some of them have been turned into temples. In my opinion, this goes against every tenet of religion … The magnitude of this act cannot be mitigated by saying that Muslims in Pakistan have also despoiled Hindu temples or turned them into mosques.”
India’s descent into a Hindu rashtra generates a kind of smug satisfaction in Pakistan, a vindication of the two-nation theory that Hindus and Muslims cannot ever live together. But then, how shall the Muslims of India, and the few Hindus remaining in Pakistan, fare in times to come? Whether India can ever revert to its earlier, more accommodative and secular self, is an open question. For Pakistan, whose flirtation with liberal values ended in the 1970s, it appears even more difficult.
Published in Dawn, January 20th, 2024
https://www.dawn.com/news/1807273/ram-m ... ll-portent
Pervez Hoodbhoy Published January 20, 2024 Updated 2 days ago
The writer is an Islamabad-based physicist
WHERE the five-centuries-old Babri Mosque once stood, there now stands Ram Mandir. Around it, a new Vatican-like city is coming up.
A staggering $4.2 billion have been collected as donations, both official and private. Though the temple’s completion is years away, consecration ceremonies began days ago. RSS has distributed 50 million small food packets and the first seven tonnes of halwa have arrived.
The government is arranging train and helicopter services for 100,000 sadhus and devotees, contracts for new five-star hotels have been awarded, and schools are holding daily prayers. Muslims have been advised to limit their travel by bus and train.
On Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will arrive in Ayodhya. His recent message: “The whole world is waiting for the historic moment. With folded hands, I am requesting 140 crore people of the country that on Jan 22, when the consecration of Ramlalla’s idol takes place, light the Ram Jyoti in your house and celebrate Deepawali.” Hospitals in Uttar Pradesh report that dozens of pregnant women have requested C-sections so their child is born on this auspicious date.
The purpose of these celebrations — and the PM’s lead role — is ostensibly religious, but some senior priests dispute that. They will boycott the event because Modi is technically unqualified for performing the ‘pran-pratishtha’ (putting soul inside an idol) ritual. This scarcely matters, because Modi wants to signal once again that under him a new India has arrived, one bearing little or no resemblance to the India born in 1947.
Hindutva’s message targets two audiences. The first is India’s Muslims: reincarnated India is for Hindus, not for them. Just as Pakistan treats its Hindu population as inferior citizens with fewer rights, so too Muslims in India must never forget they are the unwanted progeny of invaders who despoiled a pristine land and robbed it of its glories.
Religious communalism in reincarnated India is no longer considered abhorrent.
Revenge — exemplified by destroying ancient structures — is Hindutva’s guiding principle. In March 2023, when a mob shouting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ burned down a century-old madressah and library containing ancient manuscripts, it was tit-for-tat for the sacking of Nalanda University by the 12th-century Muslim invader, Bakhtiyar Khilji. To avoid adverse consequences during the Ram Mandir consecration, RSS has recommended that Muslims chant “Shri Ram, Jai Ram, Jai Jai Ram” in mosques, dargahs and madressahs.
The second message is to BJP’s political opposition, principally Congress. Change your discourse from secular to religious and play on our turf. Else, be seen as anti-Hindu and lose out in the April 2024 elections, when Modi will seek his third term.
Ram Mandir’s inauguration has left Congress dazed. Just days earlier, its top leaders had scorned this ‘political event’ and refused to attend. But those below could not take the pressure and broke rank. They visited Ayodhya, took a holy dip in the river, and vowed they too want “Ram Rajya” — albeit a better one than BJP’s.
Mixing religion with politics — whether in the Hindu or Muslim way — won’t surprise those who know Pakistan’s history. Soon after the All India Muslim League suffered a crushing defeat in the 1937 elections, its leadership successfully weaponised religion and wove it into politics. It was reinjected with a double dose by Gen Ziaul Haq in the 1980s.
Today, in every Pakistani political party’s arsenal, religion is the weapon of choice for demolishing opponents. When in power, PTI used it repeatedly against PML-N and PPP. In retaliation, Maryam Nawaz’s media team has recently returned the favour — with markup — in attacking Imran Khan.
Still, to me, an infrequent visitor to India, secularism’s rapid retreat comes as a surprise. Twenty years ago, while visiting the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Research in Bangalore, I was intrigued by Nehru’s words inscribed on the foundation stone: “I too have worshipped at the shrine of science.” But I don’t see ‘worship’ and ‘shrine’ tallying well with modern science or the scientific temper associated with Nehru.
My hosts rushed to explain. Shrine of science, they said, was actually a metaphorical allusion to labs and research centres. Nehru, they proudly asserted, was an atheist and never went to temples. Later, I found he actually did visit temples as well as mosques. Further, as in his prison diary The Discovery of India, his view of religion is fairly nuanced.
Mani Shankar Aiyar recently argued that Nehru would have fought tooth and nail against making Hinduism India’s official religion. In December 1947, his cabinet decided to rebuild — at state expense — the Somnath temple plundered in the 11th century by Mahmud Ghazni. When Nehru found out, he was furious and had the minutes secretly altered. But so long as the state was not involved, he said, any private initiative was fine. In 1951, when president Rajendra Prasad sought to officially visit the restored temple, Nehru refused permission.
India’s other founder, Mahatma Gandhi, would also have roundly rejected making the grand new Ayodhya temple. Ramachandra Guha, his biographer, notes that whereas Gandhi called himself a devout Hindu, yet in the many years he lived in Ahmedabad, he did not visit any of the city’s temples. Why, said Gandhi, does God need a building or idol to be worshipped?
Gandhi’s eclecticism is evident from his prayer meeting of Nov 21, 1947: “As per the information I have received, about 137 mosques of Delhi have been virtually destroyed in the recent riots. Some of them have been turned into temples. In my opinion, this goes against every tenet of religion … The magnitude of this act cannot be mitigated by saying that Muslims in Pakistan have also despoiled Hindu temples or turned them into mosques.”
India’s descent into a Hindu rashtra generates a kind of smug satisfaction in Pakistan, a vindication of the two-nation theory that Hindus and Muslims cannot ever live together. But then, how shall the Muslims of India, and the few Hindus remaining in Pakistan, fare in times to come? Whether India can ever revert to its earlier, more accommodative and secular self, is an open question. For Pakistan, whose flirtation with liberal values ended in the 1970s, it appears even more difficult.
Published in Dawn, January 20th, 2024
https://www.dawn.com/news/1807273/ram-m ... ll-portent
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Muslim shopfronts torn down in Mumbai after Ram temple opening sparks communal clashes
AFP Published January 25, 2024 Updated about 13 hours ago
Authorities in India’s financial capital Mumbai have torn down several Muslim-owned makeshift shopfronts after communal clashes sparked by a divisive Hindu temple opened this week by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Minor clashes broke out on Sunday in parts of Mumbai, including one incident where Hindus chanting religious slogans passed through a Muslim neighbourhood on the megacity’s outskirts.
No serious injuries were reported in the melee but by Tuesday, authorities had called in excavators to knock down more than a dozen shopfronts belonging to Muslims in that locality, according to local media reports.
The following evening another 40 shopfronts were knocked down on Mohammed Ali Road, a major downtown thoroughfare and centre of local Muslim commerce that had also seen weekend clashes.
“We were undertaking deep clearing of the road in which some temporary hawkers and so forth were removed,” a local municipal officer, who declined to be named, told AFP on Thursday.
Numerous traders of all faiths often build makeshift shopfronts out of canvas and wood to shield their businesses and patrons from the city’s scorching sun and pounding monsoon rains.
“I cannot fathom why this was done,” Abdul Haseeb Khan, owner of a restaurant hit in the clearance drive, told AFP.
“If they didn’t want these structures here, they should have informed us and we would have removed it. This is no way to take action.”
Municipal officials told local media that the campaign was “routine” and planned before Sunday’s clashes, and that it was aimed at clearing illegal encroachments and easing pedestrian traffic.
‘Bulldozer justice’
So-called “bulldozer justice” has been an increasingly common tool of local officials in India to punish suspected criminals by demolishing their property.
Rights groups have condemned the practice as an unlawful exercise of collective punishment that disproportionately targets the country’s Muslim minority.
Aaker Patel of Amnesty International said in a statement that this week’s drive in Mumbai represented a “policy of arbitrarily and punitively demolishing Muslim properties following episodes of communal violence”.
Demolition drives have been employed in numerous Indian states ruled by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in recent years against the homes of people accused of participating in anti-government protests.
Muslims make up the bulk of those targeted in the campaigns.
Officials elsewhere in India customarily say that the demolitions are lawful as they only target buildings constructed without official approval.
That is disputed by victims, who say they are not given the legally required notice period to dispute demolition orders.
Sunday’s clashes happened on the eve of Modi’s inauguration of a new Hindu temple to the deity Ram in the northern city of Ayodhya.
Processions in Mumbai had been celebrating the opening of the shrine, which was built atop a centuries-old Babri Masjid torn down by Hindu zealots in 1992 — an incident that sparked India’s most deadly sectarian riots since independence.
Local media outlets said at least 13 people had been arrested for participating in the weekend clashes.
vhttps://www.dawn.com/news/1808563/muslim-shopfr ... al-clashes
AFP Published January 25, 2024 Updated about 13 hours ago
Authorities in India’s financial capital Mumbai have torn down several Muslim-owned makeshift shopfronts after communal clashes sparked by a divisive Hindu temple opened this week by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Minor clashes broke out on Sunday in parts of Mumbai, including one incident where Hindus chanting religious slogans passed through a Muslim neighbourhood on the megacity’s outskirts.
No serious injuries were reported in the melee but by Tuesday, authorities had called in excavators to knock down more than a dozen shopfronts belonging to Muslims in that locality, according to local media reports.
The following evening another 40 shopfronts were knocked down on Mohammed Ali Road, a major downtown thoroughfare and centre of local Muslim commerce that had also seen weekend clashes.
“We were undertaking deep clearing of the road in which some temporary hawkers and so forth were removed,” a local municipal officer, who declined to be named, told AFP on Thursday.
Numerous traders of all faiths often build makeshift shopfronts out of canvas and wood to shield their businesses and patrons from the city’s scorching sun and pounding monsoon rains.
“I cannot fathom why this was done,” Abdul Haseeb Khan, owner of a restaurant hit in the clearance drive, told AFP.
“If they didn’t want these structures here, they should have informed us and we would have removed it. This is no way to take action.”
Municipal officials told local media that the campaign was “routine” and planned before Sunday’s clashes, and that it was aimed at clearing illegal encroachments and easing pedestrian traffic.
‘Bulldozer justice’
So-called “bulldozer justice” has been an increasingly common tool of local officials in India to punish suspected criminals by demolishing their property.
Rights groups have condemned the practice as an unlawful exercise of collective punishment that disproportionately targets the country’s Muslim minority.
Aaker Patel of Amnesty International said in a statement that this week’s drive in Mumbai represented a “policy of arbitrarily and punitively demolishing Muslim properties following episodes of communal violence”.
Demolition drives have been employed in numerous Indian states ruled by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in recent years against the homes of people accused of participating in anti-government protests.
Muslims make up the bulk of those targeted in the campaigns.
Officials elsewhere in India customarily say that the demolitions are lawful as they only target buildings constructed without official approval.
That is disputed by victims, who say they are not given the legally required notice period to dispute demolition orders.
Sunday’s clashes happened on the eve of Modi’s inauguration of a new Hindu temple to the deity Ram in the northern city of Ayodhya.
Processions in Mumbai had been celebrating the opening of the shrine, which was built atop a centuries-old Babri Masjid torn down by Hindu zealots in 1992 — an incident that sparked India’s most deadly sectarian riots since independence.
Local media outlets said at least 13 people had been arrested for participating in the weekend clashes.
vhttps://www.dawn.com/news/1808563/muslim-shopfr ... al-clashes
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Hindutva leaders eye Mumbai shrine as polls draw near
Our Correspondent Published January 30, 2024 Updated about 23 hours ago
NEW DELHI: As a new temple in Ayodhya to Lord Ram may not have successfully invoked ‘divine’ support for India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s third bid in polls due in May, the search for new sources of inspiration is on.
One such search has led to a Sufi shrine near Mumbai, which Hindutva allies have laid claim on to polarise voters, reports said on Monday.
A dispute, dormant for centuries with only sporadic stirrings, is being dusted and readied to fire in the run-up to the state assembly and Lok Sabha elections in Maharashtra, reports say.
The first sign that Malang-gad — located on a 789-ft hill in Ambernath in the Mumbai metropolitan region in Thane district — will be the centerpiece of the election season has come from Maharashtra CM Eknath Shinde himself.
Speaking at the annual Malang-gad Harinam Mahotsav in Thane, Mr Shinde, who broke away from the late Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena to lead a BJP-backed coalition, said he is “committed to liberate Malang-gad”, adding he would not rest till he had fulfilled the promise.
Malang-gad (’gad’ means a fort in Marathi) is famous for its 12th-century shrine of Sufi saint Haji Abdul Rahman, popularly known as ‘Haji Malang’. But Hindus believe the place holds the samadhi of Machindranath, a revered deity in Nathpanthi sect, which was later converted into a dargah.
An article published in The Times of India on Feb 14, 1993 reveals the arrest of Thane’s top Shiv Sena leader late Anand Dighe while leading an agitation demanding the renaming of Malang-gad as Shri Malang. Dighe was Mr Shinde’s mentor and the promise to liberate Malang-gad is a logical political move on the chief minister’s part to claim his master’s legacy.
According to The Times article, the Hindu-Muslim dispute on the trusteeship of the shrine is centuries old and the rift between the two communities over the shrine’s control goes back to 1817. The dispute was referred to the district collector and a lottery draw took place. On all three occasions, the lots favoured Kashipantnath Ketkar, an emissary of the ruling Peshwas. A member of the Ketkar family, to this day, occupies a seat at the dargah committee that manages the annual Urs in February.
However, Nasir Khan, chairman of the Peer Haji Malang Saheb Trust, refers to the Gazetteer of Bombay Presidency which mentions the structure as the shrine built in honour of Arab missionary Haji Abd-ul-Rahman. “It is only in the 1980s that the Shiv Sena began making claims of it being a Hindu temple. If it was a Hindu temple, why did the Peshwa kings send gifts to the shrine?” asks Mr Khan.
According to the chairman of the Trust, Haji Malang is equally revered by Hindu and Muslims. He says that even Christians and Parsis visit the shrine to seek blessings.
Published in Dawn, January 30th, 2024
https://www.dawn.com/news/1809673/hindu ... -draw-near
Our Correspondent Published January 30, 2024 Updated about 23 hours ago
NEW DELHI: As a new temple in Ayodhya to Lord Ram may not have successfully invoked ‘divine’ support for India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s third bid in polls due in May, the search for new sources of inspiration is on.
One such search has led to a Sufi shrine near Mumbai, which Hindutva allies have laid claim on to polarise voters, reports said on Monday.
A dispute, dormant for centuries with only sporadic stirrings, is being dusted and readied to fire in the run-up to the state assembly and Lok Sabha elections in Maharashtra, reports say.
The first sign that Malang-gad — located on a 789-ft hill in Ambernath in the Mumbai metropolitan region in Thane district — will be the centerpiece of the election season has come from Maharashtra CM Eknath Shinde himself.
Speaking at the annual Malang-gad Harinam Mahotsav in Thane, Mr Shinde, who broke away from the late Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena to lead a BJP-backed coalition, said he is “committed to liberate Malang-gad”, adding he would not rest till he had fulfilled the promise.
Malang-gad (’gad’ means a fort in Marathi) is famous for its 12th-century shrine of Sufi saint Haji Abdul Rahman, popularly known as ‘Haji Malang’. But Hindus believe the place holds the samadhi of Machindranath, a revered deity in Nathpanthi sect, which was later converted into a dargah.
An article published in The Times of India on Feb 14, 1993 reveals the arrest of Thane’s top Shiv Sena leader late Anand Dighe while leading an agitation demanding the renaming of Malang-gad as Shri Malang. Dighe was Mr Shinde’s mentor and the promise to liberate Malang-gad is a logical political move on the chief minister’s part to claim his master’s legacy.
According to The Times article, the Hindu-Muslim dispute on the trusteeship of the shrine is centuries old and the rift between the two communities over the shrine’s control goes back to 1817. The dispute was referred to the district collector and a lottery draw took place. On all three occasions, the lots favoured Kashipantnath Ketkar, an emissary of the ruling Peshwas. A member of the Ketkar family, to this day, occupies a seat at the dargah committee that manages the annual Urs in February.
However, Nasir Khan, chairman of the Peer Haji Malang Saheb Trust, refers to the Gazetteer of Bombay Presidency which mentions the structure as the shrine built in honour of Arab missionary Haji Abd-ul-Rahman. “It is only in the 1980s that the Shiv Sena began making claims of it being a Hindu temple. If it was a Hindu temple, why did the Peshwa kings send gifts to the shrine?” asks Mr Khan.
According to the chairman of the Trust, Haji Malang is equally revered by Hindu and Muslims. He says that even Christians and Parsis visit the shrine to seek blessings.
Published in Dawn, January 30th, 2024
https://www.dawn.com/news/1809673/hindu ... -draw-near
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Centuries-old mosque torn down in Indian capital
AFP Published February 1, 2024 Updated about 16 hours ago
Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) officers guard an entrace point to the site of a mosque demolished by local authorities over claims that it was an illegal construction in the Mehrauli area of New Delhi on February 1. — AFP
Bulldozers have knocked down a centuries-old mosque in India’s capital, a member of the mosque’s managing committee said on Thursday during a demolition drive to remove “illegal” structures from a forest reserve.
The demolition comes at a sensitive time in India with nationalist activists emboldened in their long campaign for the replacement of several prominent mosques with Hindu temples.
The Masjid Akhonji in New Delhi, which its caretakers say is around 600 years old, was home to 22 students enrolled in an Islamic boarding school.
It was torn down on Tuesday in a forest of Mehrauli, an affluent neighbourhood dotted with centuries-old ruins from settlements predating modern Delhi.
Mohammad Zaffar, a member of the mosque’s managing committee, told AFP that it had not received any prior notice before a demolition carried out “in the dark of the night”.
He said many graves in the mosque compound were also desecrated, and no one was allowed to take out copies of the Holy Quran or other materials from inside the mosque before it was razed.
“Many of our revered figures and my own ancestors were buried there. There is no trace of the graves now,” Zaffar told AFP.
“The rubble from the mosque and the graves has been removed and dumped somewhere else.”
The Delhi Development Authority, the city’s main land management agency responsible for carrying out the demolitions, did not respond to AFP’s requests for comment.
A heavy police presence had barricaded roads outside the grounds on Thursday and refused access to the site.
The demolition took place barely a week after Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a grand new Hindu temple in the northern city of Ayodhya, built on grounds once home to the centuries-old Babri mosque.
That mosque was torn down in 1992 in a campaign spearheaded by members of Modi’s party, sparking riots that killed 2,000 people nationwide, most of them Muslims.
Hindu activist groups have also laid claim to the disputed Gyanvapi mosque in the Indian holy city of Varanasi, which they say was built over a Hindu temple during the Muslim Mughal empire centuries ago.
Hindu worshippers entered the Gyanvapi mosque on Thursday to pray after a local court gave them permission to do so.
Calls for India to enshrine Hindu supremacy have rapidly grown louder since Modi took office in 2014, making the country’s roughly 210-million-strong Muslim minority increasingly anxious about their future.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1810339/centu ... an-capital
AFP Published February 1, 2024 Updated about 16 hours ago
Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) officers guard an entrace point to the site of a mosque demolished by local authorities over claims that it was an illegal construction in the Mehrauli area of New Delhi on February 1. — AFP
Bulldozers have knocked down a centuries-old mosque in India’s capital, a member of the mosque’s managing committee said on Thursday during a demolition drive to remove “illegal” structures from a forest reserve.
The demolition comes at a sensitive time in India with nationalist activists emboldened in their long campaign for the replacement of several prominent mosques with Hindu temples.
The Masjid Akhonji in New Delhi, which its caretakers say is around 600 years old, was home to 22 students enrolled in an Islamic boarding school.
It was torn down on Tuesday in a forest of Mehrauli, an affluent neighbourhood dotted with centuries-old ruins from settlements predating modern Delhi.
Mohammad Zaffar, a member of the mosque’s managing committee, told AFP that it had not received any prior notice before a demolition carried out “in the dark of the night”.
He said many graves in the mosque compound were also desecrated, and no one was allowed to take out copies of the Holy Quran or other materials from inside the mosque before it was razed.
“Many of our revered figures and my own ancestors were buried there. There is no trace of the graves now,” Zaffar told AFP.
“The rubble from the mosque and the graves has been removed and dumped somewhere else.”
The Delhi Development Authority, the city’s main land management agency responsible for carrying out the demolitions, did not respond to AFP’s requests for comment.
A heavy police presence had barricaded roads outside the grounds on Thursday and refused access to the site.
The demolition took place barely a week after Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a grand new Hindu temple in the northern city of Ayodhya, built on grounds once home to the centuries-old Babri mosque.
That mosque was torn down in 1992 in a campaign spearheaded by members of Modi’s party, sparking riots that killed 2,000 people nationwide, most of them Muslims.
Hindu activist groups have also laid claim to the disputed Gyanvapi mosque in the Indian holy city of Varanasi, which they say was built over a Hindu temple during the Muslim Mughal empire centuries ago.
Hindu worshippers entered the Gyanvapi mosque on Thursday to pray after a local court gave them permission to do so.
Calls for India to enshrine Hindu supremacy have rapidly grown louder since Modi took office in 2014, making the country’s roughly 210-million-strong Muslim minority increasingly anxious about their future.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1810339/centu ... an-capital
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
India razes seminary in Uttarakhand, sparking deadly clashes
AFP Published February 10, 2024 Updated a day ago
DEHRADUN: Five people were killed in India and dozens more injured after religious clashes sparked by the destruction of a madressah, the latest in a spate of demolitions targeting Islamic structures, on Friday.
Hindu nationalist groups have been emboldened in their campaign against Muslim religious structures since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office a decade ago.
Authorities in the northern state of Uttarakhand bulldozed the Islamic school and an adjoining prayer site on Thursday, claiming they had been built without permission.
Five people had been killed in the clashes in Haldwani district, local official Vandana Singh said.
Five dead, dozens injured; curfew imposed, internet suspended in Uttarakhand areas
Ms Singh earlier told reporters that dozens of others were being treated at “various hospitals”.
“Orders have been given to shoot the rioters on sight,” she said.
Footage of the clashes posted on social media showed Hindu residents of the district chanting anti-Muslim slogans and throwing stones at the crowd.
Authorities in Haldwani suspended internet services, closed schools, imposed a curfew and banned large gatherings after the violence broke out.
Security forces were also rushed into the area from other parts of the state to contain the unrest, officials said.
Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said the government would punish anyone found to have participated in the unrest.
“Anyone who attempts to disturb the peace will not be spared,” he said in a Friday social media post.
Calls for India to enshrine Hindu supremacy in law have rapidly grown louder since Mr Modi took office in 2014, making the country’s roughly 210-million-strong Muslim minority increasingly anxious about their future.
Thursday’s violence comes at an especially sensitive time, with nationalist activists stepping up a long campaign to replace several prominent mosques with Hindu temples.
Mr Modi inaugurated a grand new temple last month in the northern city of Ayodhya, built on the site of a centuries-old mosque that was destroyed by Hindu zealots.
That demolition in 1992 sparked sectarian riots that killed 2,000 people nationwide, most of them Muslims.
The clashes also come days after Uttarakhand’s legislature passed a polarising common civil code to replace existing religious laws governing marriage, divorce and inheritance.
Muslim groups across India have objected to the new law, saying it is a violation of their religious freedom.
Published in Dawn, February 10th, 2024
https://www.dawn.com/news/1812967/india ... ly-clashes
AFP Published February 10, 2024 Updated a day ago
DEHRADUN: Five people were killed in India and dozens more injured after religious clashes sparked by the destruction of a madressah, the latest in a spate of demolitions targeting Islamic structures, on Friday.
Hindu nationalist groups have been emboldened in their campaign against Muslim religious structures since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office a decade ago.
Authorities in the northern state of Uttarakhand bulldozed the Islamic school and an adjoining prayer site on Thursday, claiming they had been built without permission.
Five people had been killed in the clashes in Haldwani district, local official Vandana Singh said.
Five dead, dozens injured; curfew imposed, internet suspended in Uttarakhand areas
Ms Singh earlier told reporters that dozens of others were being treated at “various hospitals”.
“Orders have been given to shoot the rioters on sight,” she said.
Footage of the clashes posted on social media showed Hindu residents of the district chanting anti-Muslim slogans and throwing stones at the crowd.
Authorities in Haldwani suspended internet services, closed schools, imposed a curfew and banned large gatherings after the violence broke out.
Security forces were also rushed into the area from other parts of the state to contain the unrest, officials said.
Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said the government would punish anyone found to have participated in the unrest.
“Anyone who attempts to disturb the peace will not be spared,” he said in a Friday social media post.
Calls for India to enshrine Hindu supremacy in law have rapidly grown louder since Mr Modi took office in 2014, making the country’s roughly 210-million-strong Muslim minority increasingly anxious about their future.
Thursday’s violence comes at an especially sensitive time, with nationalist activists stepping up a long campaign to replace several prominent mosques with Hindu temples.
Mr Modi inaugurated a grand new temple last month in the northern city of Ayodhya, built on the site of a centuries-old mosque that was destroyed by Hindu zealots.
That demolition in 1992 sparked sectarian riots that killed 2,000 people nationwide, most of them Muslims.
The clashes also come days after Uttarakhand’s legislature passed a polarising common civil code to replace existing religious laws governing marriage, divorce and inheritance.
Muslim groups across India have objected to the new law, saying it is a violation of their religious freedom.
Published in Dawn, February 10th, 2024
https://www.dawn.com/news/1812967/india ... ly-clashes
Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2024/02/09/ ... -of-faith/
This recently-published article on February 9, 2024 by Professor Karim H. Karim gives an insight allowing one to understand the "hinduisation" and "islamisation" of various creed, including that of the Satpanth, all pushed to declare themself as part of one or the other group while previously they have lived in peace with their own identity. The article can be read here: https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2024/02/09/ ... -of-faith/
Tackling Hindu-Muslim Conflict at the Interstices of Faith | GJIA
Indic-Islamic engagement in several South Asian “guru-pir” groups challenges the conception of religions as completely separate entities.
gjia.georgetown.edu
The closely integrated relationships of certain religious communities present a compelling counter-narrative to views on interfaith conflict. Indic-Islamic engagement in several South Asian “guru-pir” groups challenges the conception of religions as completely separate entities. However, Hindutva and Islamist forces that maintain confrontational positions are currently laying siege to these centuries-old movements. This article discusses how the pressure on some of these groups, such as Satpanthi Khoja Ismailis, has led to the erosion of pluralism in favor of exclusionary conceptions of religion. Finally, the author proposes that transnational Aga Khan institutions can demonstrate the peace-making potential of interfaith engagement and produce a vibrant discourse that challenges religious conflict.
Introduction
A common assumption in the study of religion is that various creeds are inherently antagonistic, rendering religion a putative cause of war and terrorism. Accounts of clashes over who or how one worships litter history books, and journalists frequently cite the religious identities of warring parties as causes of contemporary conflicts. When addressing Muslim contexts in particular, Western policymakers tend to give more weight to religion as the reason for intergroup conflict rather than blame politics, economics, or territorial disputes. While clashes occasionally occur between religious groups, evidence from the Indian subcontinent reveals a rich history of harmonious communal intermingling.
Past interactions between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia offer a robust counterpoint to the narrative of religious antagonism. The interfaith relationships in the subcontinent that gave rise to the Sikh faith, Kabir Panth, the Bauls, Sai Baba movement, and Satpanth illuminate the potential virtue of intersectional spirituality. However, politics in contemporary South Asia have pressured these “guru-pir” groups to abandon their hybrid identities. In present-day India, such pressure stems from the government’s attempt to dilute the country’s pluralism. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s rewriting of educational curricula diminishes the historical presence of Muslims in India and seeks to remake the country into a “Hindu Rashtra” (Hindu polity). Some Pakistani religious and political authorities have also pushed groups with hybrid spiritual identities to conform to Arab-centric practices. Guru-pir communities and Sufis in Pakistan have been forced to diminish the Indic elements of their faith. Scholar and cultural critic Henry Giroux discusses such “organized forgetting” as a mobilization strategy that politicians use to reframe the past to promote their own agendas.
Interfaith Engagement in South Asia
South Asia exhibits a strong history of interfaith engagement and hybrid religious identities. Several edifices built by medieval Muslim rulers in South Asia are inscribed with Hindu religious symbols, such as images of the lotus in the Taj Mahal. Certain Mughal emperors, especially the sixteenth-century Akbar the Great, encouraged sustained interfaith engagement at the royal court. Indian society at large also experienced vibrant inter-religious interactions during this period. For instance, the populist and indigenous Bhakti religious movement that challenged priestly and caste hierarchies in Hindu society also engaged with Sufi Muslims in worship that sought a direct relationship with divinity.
Such interactions in India gave rise to a religious symbiosis based on a common spirituality. Ethnographer Sultan Somjee terms these communities “guru-pir,” referring to the amalgamation of Indic and Muslim spiritual guides. Guru-pir groups include the Sikhs, Kabir Panth, the Sai Baba movement, and Satpanth, whose beliefs and teachings intertwine Indic and Islamic traditions. The Sikh holy book, for instance, contains both Bhakti and Sufi poetry. The fifteenth-century founder of the Kabir Panth group described Allah, the Islamic deity, and Rama, an Indic divinity, as his unified spiritual guide. He wrote that “Kabir’s a child of Allah and Rama; they’re his Guru and Pir.” Likewise, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century saint Sai Baba of Shirdi, whose disciples possessed both Hindu and Islamic leanings, refused to identify his religious affiliation with one faith at the exclusion of the other.
Like other guru-pir communities, the Satpanth tradition represents an intercultural and interreligious understanding of faith concerned with universalist truth. The Satpanth (Path of Truth) movement in India arose from the teachings of the Persian Muslim preachers of the Shia Da’wat al-Haqq (Invitation to Truth). The pirs or Muslim spiritual guides indigenized the group’s beliefs in lyrical literature (ginans), which were composed in Indian languages and sung in Indian ragas. The lyrical literature and traditions draw on both Islamic and Indic spirituality. Pir Sadardin, the major fifteenth-century Satpanthi guru-pir who organized the movement, formulated the group’s ritual prayer (du‘a) in Gujarati, Sindhi, Arabic, and Persian. Words and symbols from Islamic and Indic traditions intertwined in the Satpanthi Khojas’ spiritual practice.
Challenges to Interfaith Understanding
While guru-pir traditions represent harmonious interfaith interactions, they have also experienced multiple challenges to their pluralist characters in the past two centuries. British rule in India asserted the idea that religions are completely distinct from each other. The colonial census’ monolithic categories labeled individuals as either “Hindu,” “Muslim,” or “Sikh,” among other faiths. This framework restricted open-ended religious identities that had long coexisted alongside dominant orthodoxies. The Hindu and Muslim representational politics that led to the subcontinent’s partition into India and Pakistan further reinforced this essentialist pigeonholing.
In recent decades, religious nationalists in South Asia have continued to exaggerate the differences between faiths for political purposes. Intensified Hindu nationalism and Islamism have further marginalized hybrid religious manifestations. Guru-pir communities now feel compelled to declare themselves as followers of one religion over all others, a choice that is antithetical to the pluralist and universalist guru-pir identity. The Hindutva nationalist ideology, in particular, seeks to reshape Indian national identity from one that embraces a variety of religious backgrounds to one that favors elite caste Hindu hegemony. The recent success of the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, which adheres to Hindu nationalism, has caused the systemic and violent marginalization of religious minorities. Guru-pir movements in India face pressure to identify solely as Hindu. As a result, certain breakaway Satpanthi groups have severely diminished their Islamic affiliations while prominently foregrounding Hindu symbolism in their practices. Religious nationalism in India has thus served to obscure centuries of religious pluralism and politically mobilize Hindu majorities.
Monolithic conceptions of religion have also resulted in Muslims facing pressure to conform to Islamic conservatism. For example, in Pakistan, conservative political elites favor exclusionary Islamist views of Saudi Wahabi dogma. These elites have accused guru-pir communities of not having “true” Islamic practices. Pakistani Sufis also face pressure to abandon interfaith activities with Hindus and Christians. In 2017, an Islamist suicide bomber killed ninety worshippers at a Sufi commemoration in Lahore, where the hereditary shrine guardians are Hindu. Ultra-conservative groups, such as Salafis, dismiss the indigenous Islamic practices in South Asia because of purist notions that consider only certain Arab-centric modes of worship to be authentically Islamic. Consequently, certain political and faith leaders in this region have diminished their own religious heritage in favor of Arab-centric norms. For instance, certain Arab-style hijabs, which Muslim women in South Asia rarely wore, became widespread in the region in the late twentieth century.
Even some of the guru-pir groups whom Wahabi or Salafi ideologies have not influenced directly are eroding the Indic aspects of their tradition. Such a trend among the Satpanthi Khojas (who have been under attack from both Islamist and Hindutva militants) reverses the centuries-long indigenization process through which Persian-origin pirs placed their Shia faith within an inclusive Indic-Islamic framework. The community’s leadership is Arabizing its religious vocabulary and subsuming its indigenous identity of Satpanthi Khojas under the term “Ismaili Muslims.” Decades ago, the community’s school curricula dropped Gujarati and Sindhi, curtailing linguistic access to the centuries-old Indic poetic tradition of ginans. Ismaili institutions also ceased to publish poems they categorized as being “rich in Hindu element.” Upon its establishment in 1977, the London-based Institute of Ismaili Studies, the transnational Ismaili community’s premier academic body, has focused on Arabic and Persian manuscripts while marginalizing the study of the Indic Satpanth branch. Even the communal buildings used mostly by Satpanthi South Asians in the subcontinent and the diaspora are now adorned mainly with Middle-Eastern designs, and ceremonial Central Asian robes have replaced Indian regalia. These choices reveal the leadership’s perception that Arabic and Persian elements are more authentically Islamic and Ismaili than the 700-year-old South Asian Satpanth tradition, a mindset that erodes the idea of a common Indic-Islamic spirituality.
Such processes proceed from the conception of religions as exclusive, monolithic entities separate from one another. This idea denies the interfaith expressions historically demonstrated in South Asian society among the millions of devotees to figures such as Kabir, Sai Baba, and Pir Sadardin. The intersecting spaces of guru-pir traditions are rich and dynamic, bridging multiple worldviews. Unfortunately, the current political climate erodes the distinctive nature of these groups that promotes interfaith harmony.
The Way Forward
Organized forgetting has engendered ignorance about shared religious values and histories of harmonious coexistence. The current Ismaili Imam, Aga Khan IV, has criticized the idea of the inevitability of clashes between religions and promoted pluralism. Failure to recognize the overlap between religions has contributed to contemporary conflicts, such as that between Hindus and Muslims. For individuals to recognize the social value that interreligious engagement brings, political and faith leaders must oppose narratives of religious essentialism and organized forgetting of interfaith histories.
The institutions representing guru-pir traditions can but have not been mobilized to counter hostile ideologies. The tremendous potential of the intersecting religious traditions in fostering better social relations remains largely uncharted. The Ismaili Imam has established several modern organizations with Khoja leadership to improve intergroup understanding. However, despite profound historical Satpanth interfaith interaction, the growing conception of religions as completely separate entities poses a major obstacle for even Khojas’ current understanding of hybrid faiths. For instance, the Ottawa-based Global Centre for Pluralism holds to the monolithic framework of religion to study pluralism in India, disregarding the social value of the intersectional Indic-Islamic guru-pir movements. Similarly, the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, England generally overlooks the intertwining of faith traditions in South Asia. Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum can also better familiarize visitors with the dynamism of religious hybridity by exhibiting the spiritual interactions of Muslims with other religions, which are often found in sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century Mughal paintings. The dozens of communal and secular educational Aga Khan institutions should advance an appreciation for the spaces where faiths interact. A collective effort of the global Aga Khan network, drawing on the centuries-long Satpanth tradition, can raise awareness of the peace-making potential of interstitial religious engagement. With their research capabilities, these institutions are well-positioned to and should study the productive outcomes of intersecting religious traditions.
Conclusion
The erroneous concept of individual religions as monolithic entities has contributed to the idea that faith communities are inherently confrontational. Such ideas hide the fact that shared spirituality has long existed across different faiths. Centuries of intermingling between Islamic and Indic worldviews in South Asia have brought together millions of people. However, self-serving politicians and extremist groups seek to erase the knowledge and practice of interstitial spirituality, inducing clashes across creeds. Religiously fluid movements are under intense pressure to identify only with one faith. However, given their unique comprehension of pluralist engagement, such movements and their institutions should respond with a powerful counter-narrative to those who promote inter-religious conflict.
…
Karim H. Karim is Chancellor’s Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he previously served as Director of the Centre for the Study of Islam and the School of Journalism and Communication. He has also been Co-Director at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, senior advisor to the Aga Khan University and the Central Asian University, and member of the Aga Khan Development Network’s Higher Education Forum. Karim, who studied at Columbia and McGill universities, received the Robinson Prize for his book Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence and has produced other critically acclaimed publications.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
This recently-published article on February 9, 2024 by Professor Karim H. Karim gives an insight allowing one to understand the "hinduisation" and "islamisation" of various creed, including that of the Satpanth, all pushed to declare themself as part of one or the other group while previously they have lived in peace with their own identity. The article can be read here: https://gjia.georgetown.edu/2024/02/09/ ... -of-faith/
Tackling Hindu-Muslim Conflict at the Interstices of Faith | GJIA
Indic-Islamic engagement in several South Asian “guru-pir” groups challenges the conception of religions as completely separate entities.
gjia.georgetown.edu
The closely integrated relationships of certain religious communities present a compelling counter-narrative to views on interfaith conflict. Indic-Islamic engagement in several South Asian “guru-pir” groups challenges the conception of religions as completely separate entities. However, Hindutva and Islamist forces that maintain confrontational positions are currently laying siege to these centuries-old movements. This article discusses how the pressure on some of these groups, such as Satpanthi Khoja Ismailis, has led to the erosion of pluralism in favor of exclusionary conceptions of religion. Finally, the author proposes that transnational Aga Khan institutions can demonstrate the peace-making potential of interfaith engagement and produce a vibrant discourse that challenges religious conflict.
Introduction
A common assumption in the study of religion is that various creeds are inherently antagonistic, rendering religion a putative cause of war and terrorism. Accounts of clashes over who or how one worships litter history books, and journalists frequently cite the religious identities of warring parties as causes of contemporary conflicts. When addressing Muslim contexts in particular, Western policymakers tend to give more weight to religion as the reason for intergroup conflict rather than blame politics, economics, or territorial disputes. While clashes occasionally occur between religious groups, evidence from the Indian subcontinent reveals a rich history of harmonious communal intermingling.
Past interactions between Hindus and Muslims in South Asia offer a robust counterpoint to the narrative of religious antagonism. The interfaith relationships in the subcontinent that gave rise to the Sikh faith, Kabir Panth, the Bauls, Sai Baba movement, and Satpanth illuminate the potential virtue of intersectional spirituality. However, politics in contemporary South Asia have pressured these “guru-pir” groups to abandon their hybrid identities. In present-day India, such pressure stems from the government’s attempt to dilute the country’s pluralism. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s rewriting of educational curricula diminishes the historical presence of Muslims in India and seeks to remake the country into a “Hindu Rashtra” (Hindu polity). Some Pakistani religious and political authorities have also pushed groups with hybrid spiritual identities to conform to Arab-centric practices. Guru-pir communities and Sufis in Pakistan have been forced to diminish the Indic elements of their faith. Scholar and cultural critic Henry Giroux discusses such “organized forgetting” as a mobilization strategy that politicians use to reframe the past to promote their own agendas.
Interfaith Engagement in South Asia
South Asia exhibits a strong history of interfaith engagement and hybrid religious identities. Several edifices built by medieval Muslim rulers in South Asia are inscribed with Hindu religious symbols, such as images of the lotus in the Taj Mahal. Certain Mughal emperors, especially the sixteenth-century Akbar the Great, encouraged sustained interfaith engagement at the royal court. Indian society at large also experienced vibrant inter-religious interactions during this period. For instance, the populist and indigenous Bhakti religious movement that challenged priestly and caste hierarchies in Hindu society also engaged with Sufi Muslims in worship that sought a direct relationship with divinity.
Such interactions in India gave rise to a religious symbiosis based on a common spirituality. Ethnographer Sultan Somjee terms these communities “guru-pir,” referring to the amalgamation of Indic and Muslim spiritual guides. Guru-pir groups include the Sikhs, Kabir Panth, the Sai Baba movement, and Satpanth, whose beliefs and teachings intertwine Indic and Islamic traditions. The Sikh holy book, for instance, contains both Bhakti and Sufi poetry. The fifteenth-century founder of the Kabir Panth group described Allah, the Islamic deity, and Rama, an Indic divinity, as his unified spiritual guide. He wrote that “Kabir’s a child of Allah and Rama; they’re his Guru and Pir.” Likewise, the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century saint Sai Baba of Shirdi, whose disciples possessed both Hindu and Islamic leanings, refused to identify his religious affiliation with one faith at the exclusion of the other.
Like other guru-pir communities, the Satpanth tradition represents an intercultural and interreligious understanding of faith concerned with universalist truth. The Satpanth (Path of Truth) movement in India arose from the teachings of the Persian Muslim preachers of the Shia Da’wat al-Haqq (Invitation to Truth). The pirs or Muslim spiritual guides indigenized the group’s beliefs in lyrical literature (ginans), which were composed in Indian languages and sung in Indian ragas. The lyrical literature and traditions draw on both Islamic and Indic spirituality. Pir Sadardin, the major fifteenth-century Satpanthi guru-pir who organized the movement, formulated the group’s ritual prayer (du‘a) in Gujarati, Sindhi, Arabic, and Persian. Words and symbols from Islamic and Indic traditions intertwined in the Satpanthi Khojas’ spiritual practice.
Challenges to Interfaith Understanding
While guru-pir traditions represent harmonious interfaith interactions, they have also experienced multiple challenges to their pluralist characters in the past two centuries. British rule in India asserted the idea that religions are completely distinct from each other. The colonial census’ monolithic categories labeled individuals as either “Hindu,” “Muslim,” or “Sikh,” among other faiths. This framework restricted open-ended religious identities that had long coexisted alongside dominant orthodoxies. The Hindu and Muslim representational politics that led to the subcontinent’s partition into India and Pakistan further reinforced this essentialist pigeonholing.
In recent decades, religious nationalists in South Asia have continued to exaggerate the differences between faiths for political purposes. Intensified Hindu nationalism and Islamism have further marginalized hybrid religious manifestations. Guru-pir communities now feel compelled to declare themselves as followers of one religion over all others, a choice that is antithetical to the pluralist and universalist guru-pir identity. The Hindutva nationalist ideology, in particular, seeks to reshape Indian national identity from one that embraces a variety of religious backgrounds to one that favors elite caste Hindu hegemony. The recent success of the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, which adheres to Hindu nationalism, has caused the systemic and violent marginalization of religious minorities. Guru-pir movements in India face pressure to identify solely as Hindu. As a result, certain breakaway Satpanthi groups have severely diminished their Islamic affiliations while prominently foregrounding Hindu symbolism in their practices. Religious nationalism in India has thus served to obscure centuries of religious pluralism and politically mobilize Hindu majorities.
Monolithic conceptions of religion have also resulted in Muslims facing pressure to conform to Islamic conservatism. For example, in Pakistan, conservative political elites favor exclusionary Islamist views of Saudi Wahabi dogma. These elites have accused guru-pir communities of not having “true” Islamic practices. Pakistani Sufis also face pressure to abandon interfaith activities with Hindus and Christians. In 2017, an Islamist suicide bomber killed ninety worshippers at a Sufi commemoration in Lahore, where the hereditary shrine guardians are Hindu. Ultra-conservative groups, such as Salafis, dismiss the indigenous Islamic practices in South Asia because of purist notions that consider only certain Arab-centric modes of worship to be authentically Islamic. Consequently, certain political and faith leaders in this region have diminished their own religious heritage in favor of Arab-centric norms. For instance, certain Arab-style hijabs, which Muslim women in South Asia rarely wore, became widespread in the region in the late twentieth century.
Even some of the guru-pir groups whom Wahabi or Salafi ideologies have not influenced directly are eroding the Indic aspects of their tradition. Such a trend among the Satpanthi Khojas (who have been under attack from both Islamist and Hindutva militants) reverses the centuries-long indigenization process through which Persian-origin pirs placed their Shia faith within an inclusive Indic-Islamic framework. The community’s leadership is Arabizing its religious vocabulary and subsuming its indigenous identity of Satpanthi Khojas under the term “Ismaili Muslims.” Decades ago, the community’s school curricula dropped Gujarati and Sindhi, curtailing linguistic access to the centuries-old Indic poetic tradition of ginans. Ismaili institutions also ceased to publish poems they categorized as being “rich in Hindu element.” Upon its establishment in 1977, the London-based Institute of Ismaili Studies, the transnational Ismaili community’s premier academic body, has focused on Arabic and Persian manuscripts while marginalizing the study of the Indic Satpanth branch. Even the communal buildings used mostly by Satpanthi South Asians in the subcontinent and the diaspora are now adorned mainly with Middle-Eastern designs, and ceremonial Central Asian robes have replaced Indian regalia. These choices reveal the leadership’s perception that Arabic and Persian elements are more authentically Islamic and Ismaili than the 700-year-old South Asian Satpanth tradition, a mindset that erodes the idea of a common Indic-Islamic spirituality.
Such processes proceed from the conception of religions as exclusive, monolithic entities separate from one another. This idea denies the interfaith expressions historically demonstrated in South Asian society among the millions of devotees to figures such as Kabir, Sai Baba, and Pir Sadardin. The intersecting spaces of guru-pir traditions are rich and dynamic, bridging multiple worldviews. Unfortunately, the current political climate erodes the distinctive nature of these groups that promotes interfaith harmony.
The Way Forward
Organized forgetting has engendered ignorance about shared religious values and histories of harmonious coexistence. The current Ismaili Imam, Aga Khan IV, has criticized the idea of the inevitability of clashes between religions and promoted pluralism. Failure to recognize the overlap between religions has contributed to contemporary conflicts, such as that between Hindus and Muslims. For individuals to recognize the social value that interreligious engagement brings, political and faith leaders must oppose narratives of religious essentialism and organized forgetting of interfaith histories.
The institutions representing guru-pir traditions can but have not been mobilized to counter hostile ideologies. The tremendous potential of the intersecting religious traditions in fostering better social relations remains largely uncharted. The Ismaili Imam has established several modern organizations with Khoja leadership to improve intergroup understanding. However, despite profound historical Satpanth interfaith interaction, the growing conception of religions as completely separate entities poses a major obstacle for even Khojas’ current understanding of hybrid faiths. For instance, the Ottawa-based Global Centre for Pluralism holds to the monolithic framework of religion to study pluralism in India, disregarding the social value of the intersectional Indic-Islamic guru-pir movements. Similarly, the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, England generally overlooks the intertwining of faith traditions in South Asia. Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum can also better familiarize visitors with the dynamism of religious hybridity by exhibiting the spiritual interactions of Muslims with other religions, which are often found in sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century Mughal paintings. The dozens of communal and secular educational Aga Khan institutions should advance an appreciation for the spaces where faiths interact. A collective effort of the global Aga Khan network, drawing on the centuries-long Satpanth tradition, can raise awareness of the peace-making potential of interstitial religious engagement. With their research capabilities, these institutions are well-positioned to and should study the productive outcomes of intersecting religious traditions.
Conclusion
The erroneous concept of individual religions as monolithic entities has contributed to the idea that faith communities are inherently confrontational. Such ideas hide the fact that shared spirituality has long existed across different faiths. Centuries of intermingling between Islamic and Indic worldviews in South Asia have brought together millions of people. However, self-serving politicians and extremist groups seek to erase the knowledge and practice of interstitial spirituality, inducing clashes across creeds. Religiously fluid movements are under intense pressure to identify only with one faith. However, given their unique comprehension of pluralist engagement, such movements and their institutions should respond with a powerful counter-narrative to those who promote inter-religious conflict.
…
Karim H. Karim is Chancellor’s Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he previously served as Director of the Centre for the Study of Islam and the School of Journalism and Communication. He has also been Co-Director at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, senior advisor to the Aga Khan University and the Central Asian University, and member of the Aga Khan Development Network’s Higher Education Forum. Karim, who studied at Columbia and McGill universities, received the Robinson Prize for his book Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence and has produced other critically acclaimed publications.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Citizenship Law That Excludes Muslims Takes Effect, India Says
The law sparked lethal riots when it was passed. Now, after a four-year delay, it has come into force on the eve of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s re-election campaign.
Police block students trying start a protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act in India’s Assam State on Tuesday.Credit...Anupam Nath/Associated Press
Weeks before a national election, the Indian government has abruptly announced that it will begin enforcing a citizenship law that had remained dormant since late 2019 after inciting deadly riots by opponents who called it anti-Muslim.
The incendiary law grants Indian citizenship to persecuted Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsees and Christians from a few nearby countries. Muslims are pointedly excluded.
With a characteristic thunderclap, the government of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, made a short declaration on Monday night that it had finalized the details that would bring the law, known as the Citizenship Amendment Act, into force.
The government’s action, coming just before India announces the dates for an election expected in April and May, shows Mr. Modi delivering on a promise, and could change the electoral math in districts with Hindu refugees who stand to benefit from the law.
Politics aside, the law is not expected to significantly change the demography of India’s diverse population of 1.4 billion, at least not on its own. But it makes plain the power that Mr. Modi wields to redefine the Indian republic, steamrolling any resistance to his vision of a Hindu-first state.
Image
Narendra Modi stands on a platform behind a glass partition and in front of an ornate Hindu temple.
The government’s action, coming just before India announces the dates for the next election, allows Prime Minister Narendra Modi to deliver on a promise.Credit...Kamran Jebreili/Associated Press
The law spent more than four years in hibernation after protests by hundreds of thousands of Muslims and other Indians who were outraged by the idea that citizenship would be defined with reference to religious identity.
In February 2020, while President Donald J. Trump was on a state visit, riots broke out in the capital, New Delhi. Whole neighborhoods were devastated in the northeastern part of the city, where gas cylinders were turned into makeshift bombs and tossed into mosques. At least 50 people were killed, most of them Muslims.
A high-profile protest camp at a place called Shaheen Bagh, operated mainly by female protesters from different religious groups, carried on until late March before being dispersed. And then Covid-19 intervened, helping to suppress further protest.
The government justified the new rules as a humanitarian response to the plight of minorities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, India’s three big Muslim-majority neighbors. Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk turned political ally of Mr. Modi, wrote on social media that rescuing communities “who are suffering from religious brutality” would bring “joy to humanity.”
It is hard for many to take this explanation at face value. For one thing, the inclusion of some countries and exclusion of others looks arbitrary. For another, Muslims persecuted because of their faith, for instance the Ahmadiyya and Shiites of Pakistan, do not make the cut for Indian citizenship. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights called the law “fundamentally discriminatory.”
Image
Throngs of men, some with their face covered, crowd a city street.
Demonstrations against India’s citizenship law roiled Meerut, India, in 2019.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
To critics, the Citizenship Amendment Act looks like one part of a pincer movement against Muslims. It was brought to life at the same time as a national citizenship registry that would allow the government to expel undocumented residents, even if their families had lived in India for generations.
As Mr. Modi’s right-hand man, Amit Shah, said at the time, “Please understand the ‘chronology’: first the C.A.A.,” and then the registry. In other words, first non-Muslim refugees would be allowed citizenship. Then the refugees who remained would be expelled. More than 1,000 “declared foreigners” have been detained in the northeastern state of Assam.
On Monday, protests erupted there and in several other states after the government announced enforcement of the citizenship law. Shaheen Ahmed, a doctoral student in Kerala, said that he and other students came out to protest across his state.
“We were demanding the rollback of the law when police came and started beating us,” Mr. Ahmed said.
One group that rejoiced at the news is a large community of lower-caste Hindus in West Bengal, whose ancestors came to India from Bangladesh. Their support for Mr. Modi in the upcoming election could tip several parliamentary seats into the majority that he is expected to achieve anyway.
Other Hindu refugees, from Pakistan, had already been acquiring citizenship. More than 1,100 have been granted that status in Mr. Modi’s home state, Gujarat, since 2016. The point of the Citizenship Amendment Act will be to make these naturalizations possible on a national level, and more visible.
Bond of Brothers: The Black Crowes Are Back, and Bygones Are Bygones
Alex Travelli is a correspondent for The Times based in New Delhi, covering business and economic matters in India and the rest of South Asia. He previously worked as an editor and correspondent for The Economist. More about Alex Travelli
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The law sparked lethal riots when it was passed. Now, after a four-year delay, it has come into force on the eve of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s re-election campaign.
Police block students trying start a protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act in India’s Assam State on Tuesday.Credit...Anupam Nath/Associated Press
Weeks before a national election, the Indian government has abruptly announced that it will begin enforcing a citizenship law that had remained dormant since late 2019 after inciting deadly riots by opponents who called it anti-Muslim.
The incendiary law grants Indian citizenship to persecuted Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsees and Christians from a few nearby countries. Muslims are pointedly excluded.
With a characteristic thunderclap, the government of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, made a short declaration on Monday night that it had finalized the details that would bring the law, known as the Citizenship Amendment Act, into force.
The government’s action, coming just before India announces the dates for an election expected in April and May, shows Mr. Modi delivering on a promise, and could change the electoral math in districts with Hindu refugees who stand to benefit from the law.
Politics aside, the law is not expected to significantly change the demography of India’s diverse population of 1.4 billion, at least not on its own. But it makes plain the power that Mr. Modi wields to redefine the Indian republic, steamrolling any resistance to his vision of a Hindu-first state.
Image
Narendra Modi stands on a platform behind a glass partition and in front of an ornate Hindu temple.
The government’s action, coming just before India announces the dates for the next election, allows Prime Minister Narendra Modi to deliver on a promise.Credit...Kamran Jebreili/Associated Press
The law spent more than four years in hibernation after protests by hundreds of thousands of Muslims and other Indians who were outraged by the idea that citizenship would be defined with reference to religious identity.
In February 2020, while President Donald J. Trump was on a state visit, riots broke out in the capital, New Delhi. Whole neighborhoods were devastated in the northeastern part of the city, where gas cylinders were turned into makeshift bombs and tossed into mosques. At least 50 people were killed, most of them Muslims.
A high-profile protest camp at a place called Shaheen Bagh, operated mainly by female protesters from different religious groups, carried on until late March before being dispersed. And then Covid-19 intervened, helping to suppress further protest.
The government justified the new rules as a humanitarian response to the plight of minorities in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, India’s three big Muslim-majority neighbors. Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk turned political ally of Mr. Modi, wrote on social media that rescuing communities “who are suffering from religious brutality” would bring “joy to humanity.”
It is hard for many to take this explanation at face value. For one thing, the inclusion of some countries and exclusion of others looks arbitrary. For another, Muslims persecuted because of their faith, for instance the Ahmadiyya and Shiites of Pakistan, do not make the cut for Indian citizenship. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights called the law “fundamentally discriminatory.”
Image
Throngs of men, some with their face covered, crowd a city street.
Demonstrations against India’s citizenship law roiled Meerut, India, in 2019.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
To critics, the Citizenship Amendment Act looks like one part of a pincer movement against Muslims. It was brought to life at the same time as a national citizenship registry that would allow the government to expel undocumented residents, even if their families had lived in India for generations.
As Mr. Modi’s right-hand man, Amit Shah, said at the time, “Please understand the ‘chronology’: first the C.A.A.,” and then the registry. In other words, first non-Muslim refugees would be allowed citizenship. Then the refugees who remained would be expelled. More than 1,000 “declared foreigners” have been detained in the northeastern state of Assam.
On Monday, protests erupted there and in several other states after the government announced enforcement of the citizenship law. Shaheen Ahmed, a doctoral student in Kerala, said that he and other students came out to protest across his state.
“We were demanding the rollback of the law when police came and started beating us,” Mr. Ahmed said.
One group that rejoiced at the news is a large community of lower-caste Hindus in West Bengal, whose ancestors came to India from Bangladesh. Their support for Mr. Modi in the upcoming election could tip several parliamentary seats into the majority that he is expected to achieve anyway.
Other Hindu refugees, from Pakistan, had already been acquiring citizenship. More than 1,100 have been granted that status in Mr. Modi’s home state, Gujarat, since 2016. The point of the Citizenship Amendment Act will be to make these naturalizations possible on a national level, and more visible.
Bond of Brothers: The Black Crowes Are Back, and Bygones Are Bygones
Alex Travelli is a correspondent for The Times based in New Delhi, covering business and economic matters in India and the rest of South Asia. He previously worked as an editor and correspondent for The Economist. More about Alex Travelli
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/12/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: Islam and Hinduism's blurred lines
Indian court effectively bans madrassas in Uttar Pradesh before election
Reuters Published March 23, 2024 Updated about 8 hours ago
A court in India has essentially banned Islamic schools in the country’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, a move that could further distance Muslims from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government ahead of general elections.
Friday’s ruling scraps a 2004 law governing madrassas in Uttar Pradesh (UP), claiming it violates India’s constitutional secularism and ordering that students be moved to conventional schools.
The Allahabad High Court order affects 2.7 million students and 10,000 teachers in 25,000 madrassas, said Iftikhar Ahmed Javed, head of the board of madrassa education in UP, where one-fifth of the 240m people are Muslims.
“The state government shall also ensure that children between the ages of 6 to 14 years are not left without admission in duly recognised institutions,” Judges Subhash Vidyarthi and Vivek Chaudhary wrote in their order, which was made based on an appeal by lawyer Anshuman Singh Rathore.
Reuters could neither contact Rathore nor determine if he is connected to any political group.
India holds a general election between April and June that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is widely expected to win. Muslims and rights groups have accused some BJP members and affiliates of promoting anti-Islamic hate speech and vigilantism, and demolishing Muslim-owned properties.
Modi denies religious discrimination exists in India.
The BJP says the government is undoing historical wrongs, including recently inaugurating a Hindu temple on the site of a 16th-century mosque razed in 1992. Many Hindus believe the mosque was built where God-king Ram was born and over a temple demolished under the Mughal ruler Babur.
Rakesh Tripathi, a spokesperson for BJP Uttar Pradesh, which runs the state government, said it was not against madrassas and expressed concern about the education of Muslim students.
“We are not against any madrassa but we are against discriminatory practices. We are against illegal funding, and the government will decide on further action after going through the court’s order.”
Prime Minister Modi’s office did not immediately respond to an email on Saturday seeking comment on the court ruling.
‘I am scared’
Arguing for the federal government, which was a respondent in the case, Sudhanshu Chauhan told the court that “religious education and religious instructions of a single religion cannot be included in school education and the state government has no power to create statutory education boards permitting religious education”.
He added that the government was not planning to revive a federal policy stopped in March 2022 that had provided funds to madrassas to teach subjects like mathematics and science.
Madrassa official Javed, national secretary of the BJP’s minority wing, said that as a Muslim, he is often caught between the priorities of his party and members of his community. He said he has been fielding numerous calls from fellow Muslims since Friday’s order, which came during the holy month of Ramazan.
“Sometimes it becomes very difficult,” he said. “I have to balance a lot because, being a Muslim, the party sends me to the community to convince them to vote for us and join the party. I am scared and I walk with personal security whenever I go to any public event or programme.”
The BJP’s Tripathi responded that Muslim BJP leaders had nothing to fear as their community equally benefits from various government welfare programmes.
“I am Hindu and I visit the Muslim community often and get good support from them,” he said. “The fact is that the BJP and the government are very serious about education and it’s doing its best.”
The BJP’s de facto parent organisation has been installing Muslims loyal to it in leadership positions at India’s Muslim universities as part of a push to garner Muslim votes.
The UP government halted a funding programme for madrassas in January, rendering 21,000 teachers jobless. Friday’s order applies to all madrassas in the state, whether funded privately or by the government, Javed said.
The court did not give a timeline for its order, but Javed said that the madrassas are unlikely to be closed right away.
The northeastern state of Assam, also ruled by the BJP, has been converting hundreds of madrassas into conventional schools.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1823322/india ... e-election
Reuters Published March 23, 2024 Updated about 8 hours ago
A court in India has essentially banned Islamic schools in the country’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, a move that could further distance Muslims from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government ahead of general elections.
Friday’s ruling scraps a 2004 law governing madrassas in Uttar Pradesh (UP), claiming it violates India’s constitutional secularism and ordering that students be moved to conventional schools.
The Allahabad High Court order affects 2.7 million students and 10,000 teachers in 25,000 madrassas, said Iftikhar Ahmed Javed, head of the board of madrassa education in UP, where one-fifth of the 240m people are Muslims.
“The state government shall also ensure that children between the ages of 6 to 14 years are not left without admission in duly recognised institutions,” Judges Subhash Vidyarthi and Vivek Chaudhary wrote in their order, which was made based on an appeal by lawyer Anshuman Singh Rathore.
Reuters could neither contact Rathore nor determine if he is connected to any political group.
India holds a general election between April and June that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is widely expected to win. Muslims and rights groups have accused some BJP members and affiliates of promoting anti-Islamic hate speech and vigilantism, and demolishing Muslim-owned properties.
Modi denies religious discrimination exists in India.
The BJP says the government is undoing historical wrongs, including recently inaugurating a Hindu temple on the site of a 16th-century mosque razed in 1992. Many Hindus believe the mosque was built where God-king Ram was born and over a temple demolished under the Mughal ruler Babur.
Rakesh Tripathi, a spokesperson for BJP Uttar Pradesh, which runs the state government, said it was not against madrassas and expressed concern about the education of Muslim students.
“We are not against any madrassa but we are against discriminatory practices. We are against illegal funding, and the government will decide on further action after going through the court’s order.”
Prime Minister Modi’s office did not immediately respond to an email on Saturday seeking comment on the court ruling.
‘I am scared’
Arguing for the federal government, which was a respondent in the case, Sudhanshu Chauhan told the court that “religious education and religious instructions of a single religion cannot be included in school education and the state government has no power to create statutory education boards permitting religious education”.
He added that the government was not planning to revive a federal policy stopped in March 2022 that had provided funds to madrassas to teach subjects like mathematics and science.
Madrassa official Javed, national secretary of the BJP’s minority wing, said that as a Muslim, he is often caught between the priorities of his party and members of his community. He said he has been fielding numerous calls from fellow Muslims since Friday’s order, which came during the holy month of Ramazan.
“Sometimes it becomes very difficult,” he said. “I have to balance a lot because, being a Muslim, the party sends me to the community to convince them to vote for us and join the party. I am scared and I walk with personal security whenever I go to any public event or programme.”
The BJP’s Tripathi responded that Muslim BJP leaders had nothing to fear as their community equally benefits from various government welfare programmes.
“I am Hindu and I visit the Muslim community often and get good support from them,” he said. “The fact is that the BJP and the government are very serious about education and it’s doing its best.”
The BJP’s de facto parent organisation has been installing Muslims loyal to it in leadership positions at India’s Muslim universities as part of a push to garner Muslim votes.
The UP government halted a funding programme for madrassas in January, rendering 21,000 teachers jobless. Friday’s order applies to all madrassas in the state, whether funded privately or by the government, Javed said.
The court did not give a timeline for its order, but Javed said that the madrassas are unlikely to be closed right away.
The northeastern state of Assam, also ruled by the BJP, has been converting hundreds of madrassas into conventional schools.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1823322/india ... e-election