Articles
No Go Areas / Mini Pakistans In India’s Towns
No Go Areas / Mini Pakistans In India’s Towns
Dr T H Chowdary*
In too many cities, too frequently the police authorities in non-BJP ruled states are imposing several restrictions on Hindus’ processions in celebration of festivals like Ram Navami as to which routes they can march on and around which places they should not sing any song or raise slogan or play any music. These places are usually mosques and large areas around them. Is it not shameful and derogatory to Hindu citizens of this country that they cannot celebrate their festivals and that their programs should avoid where Muslims predominate? Are these no -go -areas for Hindus ; are they mini Pakistans ? In one town in Telangana police put the condition that within 200 meters of every mosque, there should be no singing or sloganeering or any music played in by the Hindu processionists. But the aazans, the calls to prayer by muezzins from all the mosques in the cities are permissible; that is, Muslims have freedom to make any sound at any time while Hindus have to keep off where Muslims are predominate.
2. The non-BJP governments have been carving out Muslim majority districts in Kerala in Haryana and in Punjab and some districts in Bihar and West Bengal and Kerala and Uttar Pradesh have already become Muslim- majority. It is quite possible that the local bodies of these Muslim majority districts will form an all India association in the name of Islam being implemented properly and slowly raise the ante to call these districts as a federation and finally declare autonomy or independence . We will then have scores of Muslim districts agitating for autonomy for their federation. We had 565 princely states. There was indeed a move by the Chamber of Princes under the presidentship of the Nawab of Bhopal to form Princesthan in addition to Pakistan and Hindustan in 1947. The move was nipped by Sardar Patel using the Vice Roy , Lord Mountbatten as the instrument.
3. In the way that non-BJP parties are fraternizing and appeasing Muslims , it appears that India is dangerously poised for fragmentation . This fear is confirmed by the leaders of regional parties saying that India is a federation and the states have to be more powerful . It is, precisely this possibility that was foreseen by great men like Dr Ambedkar and Dr Rajendra Prasad had in their speeches at the concluding session of the Consembly on 26 Nov 1949 warned the country about regionalism imperiling India’s integrity.
4. Nationalists and patriotic parties and intelligentsia should take note of the disintegrationist tendencies occasioned by the behavior of groups of Muslims just as in the 1940s which led to communal riots and partition of the country . Indian leaders made the fatal mistake by not heeding to Dr Ambedkar’s suggestion that there should be a total exchange of minorities between Pakistan and India and allowing the Muslims who rioted and voted for the division of the country and creation of Pakistan as Islamic state, to remain in India. Indian leaders did not heed to another advice from Sir C.P Ramaswami Iyer that the Muslims who despite rioting and voting for the division of the country have not gone to Pakistan, the state of their creation should be declared as foreigners in India. By a series of mistakes, blunders amounting to criminal negligence the Congress and likeminded groups are responsible for the emergence of the Muslims movement as by PFI to create further divisions . The proposition of the late Omar Khalidi reproduced below clearly indicates what the Muslims in India are working for and how in the bid to get their votes, the regional parties are partners in the onsetting crime of further divisions of India.
That such Muslim districts( like Malappuram in Kerala, Mewat in Haryana) are absolutely necessary for Islam to thrive has been publicly propagated by Dr. Omar Khalidi a Hyderabadi in Harvard University in the USA in the year 2005 ( a post graduate of Harvard University and Ph.D from University of Wales) wrote in the Jamat-e-Islami ‘s weekly, “Radiance”: “ we need Muslim districts for three reasons. First , concentrated areas provide security; second, to provide an environment that is conducive to our cultural independence; third, to provide a political base through which our people can be elected ……at present…our numbers don’t add up to elect adequate legislators. Hyderabad & Rangareddy in Andhra and Gulbarga (Karnataka) and certain Thlaukas could be merged to create Deccan province ( with Muslim majority) similarly in Bihar, Bengal & UP.. where Muslims can be in majority…”.
Well before Khalidi, Prof. Samar Abbas another Muslim intellectual wrote in the leftist Economic Political Weekly of Dec 2000 that India should be partitioned further to provide a Muslim state Mughalistan comprising of the Western districts of Assam northern districts of West Bengal, Bihar and UP and Punjab to form a continuous belt adjoining Pakistan on the West and Bangladesh on the East. This reminds us of Md Ali Jinnah wanting corridor across Northern India to link up West and East Pakistan (Bangladesh).
Dr B.R. Ambedkar opined that separatism and Pakisaniat have become DNA like in Muslims. He wrote:
“I do not think the demand for Pakistan is the result of mere political distemper, which will pass away with the efflux of time. As I read the situation, it seems to me that it is a characteristic in the biological sense of the term which the Muslim body politic has developed in the same manner as an organism develops a characteristic. Whether it will survive or not, in the process of natural selection, must depend upon the forces that may become operative in the struggle for existence between Hindus and Musalmans .
- Dr. Ambedkar in the book, “Pakistan or the Partition of India”
5. Will Hindus awake to the emerging danger of militant, divisionist Islamism/ Pakistaniat among Muslims of India, helped by patronage of regional, vote-hunting Dynasts? Unless nationalist parties like the BJP win the 2024 elections to the Lok Sabha and form a strong Central Government and governments in a majority of large states , the prospects for the survival of the civilizational State of Bharat will be bleak. (1,029 words)
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