The communal faultline runs deep

December 31, 2010 9:02:54 PM

Prafull Goradia

From Europe to Asia, secularism has been transmogrified by its practitioners into meaning something which it was not meant to mean: Appeasement of minority communities. The Pope now bemoans the effects of ‘secularism’ in Europe where Christianity is under assault. If we look at Asia, specially India, we will find the same faultline running deep

His Holiness the Pope Benedict is reported to have expressed earlier this month deep concern over the “harassment” and “prejudice” against Christians in Europe. By implication, he was protesting against secularists’ bias against the majority religion of Europe. Until some recent protests against minarets and burqas, Muslim appeasement has been considered politically correct in most of Europe. He went on to bemoan that where Christians are in a minority, there was no religious freedom, especially in the West Asian countries.

The Pope was evidently referring to the hostile experience in Egypt, where to this day, the 10 per cent Coptic Christians must take permission of the Government to even renovate their churches. Darfur in Sudan where the atrocities of the Muslim north upon the Christian south of the country is a terrible tale. Earlier, northern Nigeria had driven Biafran or southern Christians to a desperate civil war. Turkey is well known in history for its atrocities. They were so unacceptable that Prime Minister William Gladstone was provoked to say on the floor of Westminster, with the Book in his hand, that so long as this Book remains there would be no peace on this earth. He went on to publish a book entitled The Bulgarian Horrors.

Subsequently, the Turks went on to massacre Armenian Christians. This genocide led Lord Curzon to call for discussions on the entire issue of minorities with Ismet Pasha of Turkey. It was his conclusion that minorities cannot co-exist with a Muslim majority. He solved the problem under the good offices of the League of Nations. He set up the Mixed Commission in order to work out a systematic exchange of Turkish Christians and Greek Muslims. Similarly, an exchange was arranged between Turkish Christians and Muslims in Bulgaria.

Does not Indian political life have a magnificent, rather a menacing, obsession? It is on the demand for a homeland for a minority that the Partition was conceded, minority is an euphemism for Muslims. At the 1931 Second Round Table Conference in London, Mahatma Gandhi had declared that he recognised Muslims as a minority. Christians, Parsis, Jews were all left out by him. The Constituent Assembly, elected at the end of 1945, had commenced deliberations on a forthcoming Constitution for independent India. The Congress thrust, at that time, was somehow to induce the Muslims not to insist on the country’s bifurcation. Hence, the undertone of the draft was appeasement whose highlights were the then clauses 19 to 23 A. Jawaharlal Nehru did not give a go-by to this menacing obsession and included the same clauses in the final post-Partition Constitution except that their numbers were changed to Articles 25 to 30.

The obsession continued as illustrated by what happened on November 4, 1948. Rajendra Prasad, President of the Constituent Assembly, proposed and got passed unanimously by the august body the following tribute: “Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who by his grim determination and steadfast devotion was able to carve out and found Pakistan and whose passing away at this moment is an irreparable loss to all. We send our heartfelt sympathies to our brethren across the frontier.”

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has leapt many steps in the same direction by declaring ‘minorities first’ as his Government’s policy, earmarking the first 15 per cent of the national resources for their benefit. The appointment of the Sachar Committee, the installation of a ministry for minority, declaring the concept of minority concentrated districts, et al are all steps in the direction of dividing the country into a majority and a minority.

The presidential address to the plenary session of the Congress party on December 19 has gone to the extreme by calling the RSS names such as ‘Fascists’, ‘Nazis’, etc. A few days earlier a general secretary had said that “Hindu terrorism was more dangerous to the country than Lashkar-e-Tayyeba”. Another general secretary over the months has made any number of statements of an anti-Hindu nature. The Home Minister of India has used the expression ‘saffron terror’. If any of these were true, why would the Hindu leaders have accepted the partition of India gracefully? Thereafter, would they have allowed Muslims to continue to stay in Hindustan although Pakistan was conceded as a homeland for the Muslims of the sub-continent? This was notwithstanding the offer by Muslim League eminences led by Quaid-e-Azam that there should be an exchange of populations. Sir Feroz Khan Noon, who later went on to become Prime Minister of Pakistan, while addressing the legislators of Bihar in April 1946, had gone to the extent of threatening the re-enactment of the “orgies of Changez Khan and Halaku Khan if Hindus did not allow us to take Muslims to the forthcoming Pakistan”.

Uncannily, in his 1946 book, India Divided, the same Rajendra Prasad had asked whether post-partition Muslims could be allowed to reside in India. If they were, would they be citizens or as aliens to be issued visas? Lebanon is an example of a majority being turned into a minority. Until World War I, it was a province of the Ottoman empire. With the defeat of Turkey, Lebanon was allotted by the League of Nations for France to administer. In 1945 when the French left, Lebanon had more Christians than Muslims and its President’s post was reserved for a Christian. The higher Muslim birth rate however began to tilt the balance. As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict escalated, more and more Arabs migrated to Lebanon. Gradually, the population ratio was reversed. Today, although the Constitution remains unchanged, Muslims call the shots. Going back to the Pope’s complaint about the treatment of minorities in Islamic lands, Lebanon is an extraordinary example.

Malaysia began as a secular country when in 1965 it separated from Singapore whose ethnic Chinese had felt harassed by the Malay Muslims. Before long the remaining Malaysia declared itself an Islamic country, although nearly half-the-population comprised others like ethnic Chinese, Tamils etc. Muslims showed no consideration for the minorities. The Indians, settled there for long years, repeatedly protest and complain against their ill-treatment. Indonesia ill treated its Christians and by UNO mandate it had to yield independence to its Christian province of Timor.