Stark Realities a Muslim faces in India Today!

MUSINGS

Something seems to be going wrong. The minority communities of the country have never felt so helpless and insecure ...mind you, their apprehensions and worries are growing with every single day. The Dalits are fuming; detailing the discriminations they face, not overlooking the latest bait thrown their way, adding: ‘Appointing a Dalit at that top slot is akin to putting a man in a golden cage! Can our cries be heard out there!’

And as I’m writing this column on Eid-ul- Fitr, to be precise as dusk overtakes the evening, so let me tell you what the Muslims of the country are feeling under the might of Right-wing governance. Foremost, a majority of the Muslims did not ‘celebrate’ this Eid. Yes, they did go to offer namaaz at the nearby mosques and did visit close friends but there was little festivity, nor that enthusiasm we’d been witnessing in the past. To quote the Muslims I spoke to, ‘The way we are getting hounded by the goon brigades unleashed on us by the RSS rulers of the day! Lynching of our children is taking place on a daily basis; yet the administration looks the other way. What can the police force do? After all, it is getting directions from the pracharaks and maha-pracharaks to kill or frighten or break the very backbone of the Muslims of the country! We are completely disillusioned by today’s political rulers and their utter lies and propaganda speeches ...there is no hope of even surviving in these conditions. The situation is so bad that anyone can be killed out there because he is a Musalmaan! In the Congress or BSP and SP rule, this sort of blatant goondagardi was not there. We were left alive ...we could move about freely, travel and talk aloud without fear of getting killed by the RSS murderers!’

Yes, these are the stark realities that a Muslim is facing here. I sit back and ask myself: would I have allowed my son to go to the local market with a skull cap or shervani on? No, for I would have feared for his safety. That is, the very safety of his limbs.

You can’t imagine the havoc caused by the communal poisoning, where every single Muslim is looked as some devil at work! The RSS has managed to fulfil its agenda to hit and hound the Muslims by creating that ‘dirty and devilish’ image about them. The RSS-run schools are drilling into young psyches the most obnoxious inputs about the Muslim community. Not to overlook the fact that any or every terror or criminal activity gets officially or even unoffi-cially linked to the Muslims, more than relaying that beware of Muslims as they are some sort of terror-striking wolves! Nobody even bothers to question or query—how could ISIS or the Al-Qaeda or any of the propped-up terror outfits survive or exist without the support of the superpowers of the world? The tragedy is that today nobody even bothers to question the very authenticity of the link to the ISIS; fed that we are on a heady dose of outrageously biased propaganda against the Muslims.

I have been subjected to the most humiliating communal comments, getting blatant by the day. Space constraints come in the way to detail each one of them, but let me write about one of them: I’d carried a green colour carry-bag to a local grocery store from where I had been purchasing the usual routine household stuff for the last few years. The men manning the store didn’t know I am a Muslim and as there were no talks so no question of names or designations getting exchanged ...anyway, getting back to that that day—as soon as they saw me entering the shop with that green colour bag, the manager-cum-owner of the store stared in that disapproving way and within the next five minutes he stood right next to me, looking very upset and agitated, saying rather loud and clear: ’Madam yeh kya ...Musalmaano kai rang ka bag! Chee ...Chee! Yeh to Pakistani colour hai. Yeh Musalmaan log! Chee!’

I was so appalled that I simply walked out of that store. Nah, there was little need to have argued with that communal creature, for he’d been over-fed on a communal diet. It took me a couple of hours to recover and, of course, I vowed never to even walk past that store... But how does that prevent from getting bombarded by communal onslaughts day after day!

The Majority Commmunity Has to Speak Out!

The only cushioning in these dark times is that several Hindus are speaking out and taking on the political mafia. In fact, this week well- known academics have joined Dr Prem Singh (of the Hindi Department, Delhi University) at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar as he sits on a seven-day fast to relay his protest and disgust at the way Muslims are getting killed and lynched and murdered in the various corners of this country. Also, another large group of artists and actors and activists are holding a protest rally this mid-week in the Capital city. And on Eid noon, Professor V.K. Tripathi, teaching Physics at IIT (New Delhi), decided to travel towards Ballabhgarh, to spend that day with the grieving family of the murdered Muslim boy, Hafiz Junaid.

Wake up my countrymen, before the political mafia makes us kill each other. There would be nobody left to mourn our deaths. Mark my words—no country can flourish if one quarter of its population is humiliated and hounded, if not made to stand out there and murdered! It’s a dangerous situation, as the rulers of the day are heaping humiliations on the minority communities on a daily basis. Perhaps, not taking into account the ancient theory that if you pull and stretch a rope or even a nylon ribbon for far too long it will either break or snap back.