The Hindu Supremacists Get the Mandate

Dr Firoz Mahboob Kamal :
Moral darkness exposed
The real mind of the people speaks loudly in the general election of a country. So, the recent election in India gives an explicit expression of the Hindu supremacist agenda of its people. It has indeed nakedly exposed the moral darkness and the hateful sick minds of the Indian voters. The voters have given the ongoing persecution of the minorities in India – especially the Muslims, a massive approval. The secular parties like Indian National Congress, Samajwadi Party (SP) and Vahujan Samaj Party (VSP) of Uttar Pradesh and Trinamool Congress of West Bengal that plead for peaceful co-existence of all religious communities got badly decimated. Through ballots, the Hindu majority shows their utter intention to bulldoze the right of the minorities.
The Indian Muslims have been labelled as termites by the BJP President Mr Amit Shah – Modi’s right hand man. Such a narrative tells a lot about the political objectives of the party. How such people in BJP’s top position with so intense anti-Muslim hatred can allow the Muslims to get fair access to the Indian parliament? They can only think of quick extinction of them. Such a mind-set causes ethnic cleansing in many parts of the world in the past. India has 195 million Muslims -about 16% of the Indian population. In the last Parliament, the Muslims had only 24 seats -only 4% of total 543 seats. About 48 million Muslims of Uttar Pradesh didn’t have a single MP in the previous parliament. This time the total number of the Muslim MPs will be fewer. Therefore, what could be the worst travesty of democracy? Democracy must not work as a tool of exclusion of any section of the citizens; rather ensure the proper representation of citizens of different race, religion and geographical identities. Otherwise, democracy fails.
Turning to be an apartheid state
BJP President Mr Amit Shah and his party comrades in BJP and RSS never hide their Hindu supremacist agenda. They show worst displeasure to see 195 million Muslims -labelled as termites, in their midst. So, they are in desperate mood to find ways to exterminate them. Amidst such a toxic milieu, morality, humanity, equal opportunity and other higher values stand irrelevant. Hence, the Indian Muslims can’t think of even their safe survival, let alone enjoying the civil rights. The apartheid state of South Africa has ceased to exist. Now, India is quickly taking its place; but with a difference. In apartheid state of South Africa, the black people were never classified as termite. Nor they were inflicted with the organised killing episodes -as happened to the Muslims. Moreover, in apartheid South Africa, a cow never received more security and respect than a human. But in India, it is otherwise. Muslims get lynched in public; but thousands of vigilantes are deployed to ensure security to cows.
India hardly looks a civilised state. Giving equal rights to all of its citizens -irrespective of creed, cast and religion is not the norm. The Hindu supremacists reiterated that implementing the absolute Hindu agenda is their core objective. The key agenda of Bharatia Janata Party (BJP) and its parent organisation Rashtria Shevak Sangha (RSS) is to make India a Hindu state -where the Hindu majority will have its brute and exclusive supremacy. They also coined a new definition of a Hindu. Hinduism is given a narrative as a way of life for all those who live in India. Hence implied that whoever lives in India must call himself or herself a Hindu. So, they demand that a Muslim too, should take the Hindu identity. They call it “ghar wapsy”-meaning returning back of a Muslim to his or her own home. And the home is none but the Hindu world view; and worshiping cows is its indispensable part.
Such a Hindu supremacist agenda has its worst political, ideological, cultural and social ramifications. Because of the communal agenda, the Muslims’ survival needs along with their educational, religious, cultural, economic and political needs are not compatible to Hindu agenda; hence never to be addressed by the ruling clique. Rather, it will do exactly the opposite -as it is evidenced by the Indian government’s plan for evicting 4 million residents from Assam on alleged allegation that they are infiltrators from Bangladesh. Such a plan has been hatched only to pursue an extremist Hindu agenda. Bangladesh came into being in 1971; but these ethnic Bengalis were living there since the British era. In those days, migration was a part of human life all over India; there was no political border to hinder it. Moreover, Assam was the part of the Bengal Province for a long period of time; the British government encouraged migration of Bengali peasants to promote agricultural growth in Brahmaputra valley. Muslims constitute 36 percent of the Assam’s population -second only to Kashmir. The Hindu supremacists can’t swallow this harsh reality. So, the issue of evicting the Muslims from Assam has been manufactured only to cut down the size of the Muslims in this strategic North-Eastern part of India. In the meantime, millions of the Assamese Muslims have already been deprived of the citizenship to restrict their political power. For the same reason and on the same pretext, the BJP leaders have reiterated that they will deport millions of the Bengali Muslims from the West Bengal to reduce its Muslim population that constitute about 28 percent.
With the similar mind-set, the fascists of Hitler’s Germany manufactured the much needed pretext to exterminate the Jewish population. So, they had to deploy massive gas chambers to do the job in an industrial scale. With the similar objective, Mr Modi, Mr Shah and others in the murderous BJP and RSS gangs needed to exacerbate the anti-Muslim hatred to the current hype. As a result, lynching the helpless Muslims to death in daylight on the Indian streets for allegedly eating beef gets a celebration proportion. In such a murderous milieu, the Muslim mothers in Uttar Pradesh ask their children not to wear a cap – a religious symbol of Muslim attire in public. Such a Muslim identity invites persecution and even death in the hands of the Hindu extremists -as recently stated by the Muslim Mayor of Kolkata.

(—- Second part of the article will be published tomorrow——- Dr Firoz Mahboob Kamal, worked as a medical doctor in Pakistan, Iran, Bangladesh and in UK. As a freelance columnist have been writing in several dailies and periodicals of Bangladesh, and also in blogs and websites, and had the opportunities to edit periodicals in London.)