What would a Muslim India look like?

I often wonder what will happen to India. Given its ancient Hindu past, it’s perpetual uneasy relationship with Islam and the increasing numbers and assertiveness of its Muslim population, what does the future bode for India?

Despite what you may read about Hindu right wingers, the fact remains that these form only a small minority amongst Hindus. Most Hindus quite openly deride their intellectual capacities and their propensity to settle intellectual arguments by violence as is usual with right wingers of all stripes everywhere.

Hindus have traditionally never been assertive. This is partly to do with the nature of the religion . Hinduism has always invited inquiry and questioning and shunned assertion. There is always another question you can ask, another way you can choose, another guru you can go to. No one can claim to know all the answers. This is stated in fact in one of the most famous verses in the Rig Veda, the Nasadya Sukta. This poem speculates about the origin of the universe and it’s creator:-

“ Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it?

Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?

Gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.

Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whether God’s will created it, or whether He was mute;

Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not;

Only He who is its overseer in highest heaven knows,

Only He knows, or perhaps He does not know.”

— Rigveda 10.129 (Abridged, Tr: Kramer Christian)

This tradition of questioning is probably unique among world religions and almost totally absent in the Abrahamic faiths, which posit a mute acceptance of self declared prophets who preach absolute obedience to an angry God, who casts people into hellfire for minor infractions. The greatest sins here are that of disbelief, the questioning of received wisdom and horror of horrors, worshipping false gods, for which the punishment is death here on earth and eternal hellfire thereafter. Only the true God can be capitalised, not the lesser ones.

In fact most young Hindus, by which I mean people born to Hindu parents, are ignorant about what it means to be a Hindu. This is not surprising. Their parents too probably know nothing about Hinduism.

Therefore a young Hindu of this type is likely to be agnostic or neutral in matters of religion. Fact checking is a laborious process and since our education system does not encourage independent thinking or inquiry, the young Hindu is more likely to be guided by her peers and is thus more susceptible to stories of minority oppression.

This we witnessed during the illogical anti-CAA agitation. The supposed denial of a rapid processing of citizenship for Muslim refugees from our Muslim majority neighbours agitated many young Hindus. According to them these should be treated at par with non Muslims actually fleeing real oppression in these lands. Incidentally they forget that citizenship is not an automatic right but a privilege conferred after due process. A non citizen does not have the same rights as a citizen.

For most of the current generation and perhaps quite a few of the previous, Hinduism merely means festivals like Dussehra, Diwali and Holi in the North of India and some specific regional festivals like Onam, Pongal, Gudi Padwa etc the specifics of which the current generation will be hard put to explain.

In any case thanks to adroit marketing, most of these occasions have become an excuse to shop mindlessly for clothes, gold and even cars, with shopkeepers harvesting rich dividends in festival season, their religious significance having been utterly obscured. Perhaps I should omit gold from the list above, since buying gold ornaments is not festival specific but a year round activity in most Indian homes.

In fact even Valentine’s Day and Halloween, which have no discernible connection to this subcontinent have been marketed so cleverly that they have, like Christmas, become Indian festivals. It is probably just a matter of time before Thanksgiving, which celebrates the English migrant Pilgrims surviving their first winter in the New World, too becomes a marketable Indian festival, shorn of its genocidal associations.

I mention Christmas particularly, because despite India’s minuscule Christian population, thanks to its association with children and Father Christmas, presents and good cheer, it has lost its other-religious connection and become just another Indian festival like Diwali. This is perhaps also due to the fact that a large number of Hindus have studied in Christian run convent schools and colleges and have therefore become slightly Anglicised. Significantly most Hindus of this type have no major grouse against Catholic Christianity. Their ire is probably reserved for Protestant Christians of the evangelical type, known for barging into Hindu homes, asking startled housewives preparing lunch, “Have you been saved? You know Jesus loves you” or “Sinners, repent! The end of the world is at hand” and leaving consternation in their wake as they leave.

Some ultra rightist Hindus, of whom fortunately there are not many, object to this. But they carry little weight with most Hindus, despite the great weight and significance ascribed to them in Western writings. The average Hindu thinks of them as sometimes violent eccentrics and dismisses their rants.

However the sustained campaign against Modi and the supposed imminent conversion of India into a Hindu Rashtra has gained great traction in the Western press and also within India in leftist and Islamic circles (now practically synonymous). Huge volumes of newsprint, blogs and interviews on the internet feature anti-Modi and anti- Hindu writings and speeches, culminating in the recent Demolishing Hindutva initiative undertaken by some Western and Indian academics, with Arundhati Roy, Shiv Vishwanathan, Harish Khare and Harsh Mander being among the most prominent.

It is interesting that these writers highlight any minor incident involving Muslims and Dalits victims, but entirely ignore atrocities against Hindus in India itself or its Islamic neighbours. ‘Serves them right’ is perhaps the dominant thought process here, while the same people shed copious tears for the poor Muslim and Dalit. Those who bemoan the fate of India’s oppressed Muslims need to explain how an oppressed people have successfully managed to multiply from around 6 percent after partition in 1947 to about 15 percent now after accounting for those Muslims who left for Pakistan, while at the same time Hindus in neighbouring Bangladesh Pakistan and Afghanistan, areas once predominantly Hindu until the advent of Islam, now constitute a minuscule minority subjected to systematic rape and conversion with the blessing of the state in their ancestral lands.

This phenomenal increase in Muslim numbers is not part of the leftist discussion, just as the decrease in Hindu numbers and the atrocities visited on them in the neighbouring Muslim states around are not. And this increase has taken place after the Muslims of the subcontinent, by majority vote decided in 1946 that they could not stay with Hindus, but wanted a separate Muslim nation. They got Pakistan. And the funny (really?) part is that four-fifth of those who voted for Pakistan stayed back in the Hindu majority India they hated. Why? What was partition about then? And the Hindus, despite the vast massacres of Hindus that took place, decided that India would not be a Hindu nation like Pakistan was a Muslim one, but would be a secular one. A suicidal death-wish? Talk about failing to learn from history!

In fact in certain critical districts in strategic border states, the Muslims constitute 60 per cent or more of the population. This cannot be an accident. Where Muslims are a majority, the minority community lives in fear and often migrates. One knows what happened to the Kashmiri Hindus in the valley, tales of a shared heritage and so-called Kashmiriyat notwithstanding. Something similar has already happened in certain districts in UP and West Bengal. Will this become the norm elsewhere too once the Muslim percentage rises?

Many Hindus now notice the increasing number of burkha clad women in circulation. Incidentally wearing the burkha was earlier exceptional in Kerala despite its substantial Muslim population. One way you distinguished a Muslim man from a Hindu was that he had his dhoti or lungi or longyi knotted on the other side, usually the left. Muslim women dressed similar to Hindu women except for sometimes a small head covering. But in the seventies with many Muslims having got jobs in the Middle East, Salafi Islam made inroads into Kerala. Many Muslims started sporting Arab dress like the kefaya and dishdasha and women started adopting the burkha. Must be uncomfortable in the humid climate, but now a majority wear it. They were increasingly told that Indianised Islam was not sufficiently Islamic. They had to jettison any customs they might have in common with their ungodly Hindu neighbours and adopt Arabic practices wholesale. This they proceeded to do.

The burkha is now almost universally accepted as the official costume for Malayali Muslim women with even girls as young as six and seven being dressed up in some variant.

New Muslim businesses have sprung up everywhere without going through the usual stages of a small shop expanding gradually over a couple of generations to become a prominent shopping destination. These new stores spring up overnight at important junctions, are fully stocked with the latest goods and have a large number of youngsters serving. This is noticeable especially in Bangalore where the grocery business has now been monopolised by Muslims from North Kerala, putting the local Mom and Pop stores out of business. The business of selling fruits and vegetables is now a Muslim monopoly. The same has happened in real estate.

It seems that no one in government has questioned these new businesses on the source of their capital, whether legitimately earned or diverted from less than legal ventures or whether their source is funding from abroad and whose money it is. Since no one really knows, stories abound, which do no credit to government, the financial authorities or the police. One noticeable fact is that many of these shops continue in business despite a visible absence of of customers. So how do they survive? It is obvious that they are being supported. Who is doing so? Again a subject that needs investigation. But is a lackadaisical state likely to do so? I leave you to answer.

Then again in states like Kerala, one finds that Muslims are buying up properties in many areas where there was hardly any Muslim presence earlier. Once they do so, the inevitable happens. Mosques and madrasas spring up and the silence of the hour before dawn is rudely shattered by the call for azaan. The neighbours know that the Muslims have taken over yet another area.

Many Hindus especially women, will not willingly venture into Muslim areas in town. They are discomfited by the absence of women in the streets, the many men in long beards, the suspicious (or so it seems to them) looks directed at them. They feel that they are not wanted here. They are intruders.

This is the state when Hindus are the majority community and Muslims a minority of around 15 per cent if official statistics are to be believed. The last census was last carried out in 2011. Perhaps there is a reason why the census has not been carried out. We are told it was the COVID, but then again are governmental announcements to be taken at face-value? Further, government census data is not critically analysed. If it is indeed analysed, the results are not made public. This gives rise to the apprehension that facts are being concealed for some reason less than laudable.

What Hindus will face when they are a minority is clearly evident from within India in Kashmir, where the Muslims booted out their Hindu brethren without second thought in 1989/90. Most of the Pandits live in exile in Jammu and Delhi in refugee camps. Most have lost all hope of returning to Kashmir to regain their lost homes and homeland. This in a Hindu country!

About the fate of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh the less said the better. Periodically we hear of young girls aged 10 to 14 picked up by Muslim men, raped and then married off by a willing mullah. Their families will never see them again. They will keep house for a husband of about 45 to 50 whose crime will be justified by a court which will accept the argument that the girl has attained majority, has converted to Islam of her own free will and willingly married a muddle aged nondescript Muslim out of love for the true faith. Signed sealed and delivered.

Hindus once knew what lives they would live in Muslim ruled India. They could build no new temples. Those they had were periodically destroyed. They kept their women veiled like the Muslims did, for fear that the sight of a pretty face could result in some Muslim kidnapping their daughters. No legal redress could be obtained. Forced conversion was the norm. Once Muslim always Muslim. They paid the jaziya tax and submitted to humiliating treatment as the norm. They were not allowed to ride horses or own arms. In some cases when they approached Muslim officials for some favour, they had to keep their mouths open so that the nawab sahib could spit into it, to show his contempt for them and their faith.

Such was the life of the Hindu in most of Islamic ruled India. This has however been sanitised by left leaning historians who pretend that no temples were ever destroyed. That if in fact temples were ever destroyed, that was done by Hindu monarchs in their internecine fights. That if Muslims destroyed temples that was merely because the Muslims were bringing down a structure built to show the power of a Hindu ruler, not because they disapproved of Hindu temples per se, though they were not particularly fond of idolatry either.

However these historians do not mention any instances of mosques being destroyed by Muslim rulers for the same reason. If we apply the argument adduced earlier, viz that temples were destroyed as they symbolised some Hindu king’s power, then Muslim conquerors too should have destroyed mosques built by rival Muslim kings. But it is clear that mosques were not destroyed despite the fact that they too were the symbols of the power of some sultan just like temples were examples of the power and wealth of their Hindu builders.

So the argument that temples were destroyed by Hindu kings is a fiction, designed to obscure and conceal the real fact that the Muslims did destroy temples in droves wherever they found them out of hatred for this alien religion and its idolatrous worship.. Such facile arguments to cloak the widespread destruction of Hindu temples in North India beggar description and speak of intellectual dishonesty and an attempt to distort the historical discourse in order to push the party line.

In sum, Hindus given past and current history have reason to fear the treatment they would get were they to become a minority. They can expect no help from outside, since India is the only place which Hindus know as home. There are no significant Hindu states other than India. Nepal relinquished it’s Hindu status some time ago to become a secular state on JNU lines. This means promoting minority rights and encouraging attacks on Hinduism. However Hindus will have to learn how to deal with such attacks. These are likely to increase in the years ahead.

Hindus need to reconnect with their religion, learn it’s values, jettison the parts of it that do not accord with modern liberal thought and cleave to the spirit of inquiry that their ancestors fostered, venturing out on a journey into the unmapped interior of the human mind and the cosmos.

Only then can they gather the strength to face this relentless onslaught on their dearest held beliefs and culture. Only thus can they enable this sole surviving remnant of ancient religion to survive, the rest already having disappeared thanks to Christianity and Islam. Hinduism, as far as these two faiths are concerned, is unfinished business and has no right to exist.

Another fact that needs to be kept in mind is that mosques have become centres to spread the ideology of Islamic oneness and a hatred of any other belief system.

With the advent of ISIS, al Qaeda, the Taliban and other Islamic supremacist groups it is time to get rid of the trope that all religions preach the same values, when clearly they do not. All religious books, the so called holy books of the Abrahamic faiths, preach a form of religious exclusivity, relegating the ‘other’ to some form of hell. This would normally be after death, a punishment richly deserved, in the opinion of true believers, for rejecting the ‘true’ faith. That would be quite OK and no great punishment, unless like some true believers you decide it has to be put into effect in this life itself by you, the chosen messenger of the One True God, who has assigned you the task of despatching the infidels to hell before their due date. This is obviously because you know better than your Creator, your One True God, that this heathen has no business contaminating this earthly paradise with his continued presence. So you preempt your Creator by doing his work for him. This is a kind of blasphemy, but your Creator obviously would approve of your zealotry.

It is clear that this radicalisation takes place in mosques and madrasas. Something similar does occur in churches, but since the Reformation and the end of colonialism, Christian triumphalism has been much muted and it has come to some kind of modus vivendi with Hinduism and other Indic beliefs. The same cannot be said for Islam. Islam has become more and more radical in its inability to coexist with other faiths and as Muslim numbers increase this is increasingly becoming more evident.

The unbridled increase in the number of mosques and madrasas does not bode well for peace and quiet in India in view of the propaganda that these spew forth unchecked. So there has to be some kind of control of what is preached in these establishments. But will our ‘secular’ governments which are eager to control Hindu temples and do, be able to regulate what mosques preach? That would lay them open to the charge of promoting a Hindutva agenda, and sully India’s secular image, God forbid! And upset Pakistan, that upright beacon of tolerance and love.

So I do not see this happening anytime soon, which brings us back to point one. Hindus have to combat these extreme versions of Islam, which are increasingly becoming normative by learning more about their own faith and teaching their children accordingly. Will that happen? The jury is out on that one.