Whose Interest, This?

Tavleen Singh
Last week, the city of Jammu was put under curfew to control Hindu protestors. Jammu is largely a Hindu city whose Hindu population includes Hindu refugees who fled from Kashmir when the violence began in the early nineties. They oppose the decision of the Government of Jammu & Kashmir to take back the land it offered for the use of pilgrims during the Amarnath Yatra. The Government was coerced into changing its mind by several days of Muslim protests in the streets of Srinagar. The protests drew more people into the streets than we have seen for a long while. Muslims were so angered by the decision to allow ‘forest land’ to be used by Hindu pilgrims that the People’s Democratic Party, which is one half of the ruling coalition in Kashmir, threatened to withdraw from the Government rather than be party to the decision. The Congress party is the other half of the coalition and it did not take Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad long to back down.The media is mostly leftist in our ancient land and too politically correct to point out when Muslim hysteria is guided by Islamist ideology. So, almost nobody has mentioned that the protests against the facilities for Hindu pilgrims were out of proportion, hysterical and anti-Hindu. Governments across India go out of their way to facilitate Muslims going annually off on their Haj. There are Haj houses in nearly all our major towns where Muslim pilgrims can stay for almost no cost. The Haj is itself subsidized by the state. Keeping this in mind, it is an outrage that Hindu pilgrims should not be provided minimum facilities when they go on the Amarnath Yatra. If it were a case of forest land being given permanently to Hindu pilgrims, there would be cause for protest but this was not what happened, according to former Jammu & Kashmir Governor Lt General SK Sinha. In an interview to the 'Indian Express', he said, ‘No permanent constructions were to come up in the camps. The ownership of the land was not transferred to the Board. And it was only a diversion of land for two months in a year.’Nobody should have any objections but objections there are and in the view of your proudly politically incorrect columnist, these objections have taken the form of mass hysteria now because the Government of Dr Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi has gone out of its way to woo Muslims by creating a general sense of grievance. Two examples will suffice. The first is the setting up of the Sachar Committee in the first few months of the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) Government coming to power in Delhi. The Sachar Committee toured the country finding aggrieved Muslims and when it published its findings, it deepened the Muslim sense of grievance by showing them as an underclass everywhere. The report did not analyse why this was the case. Had it done so, it would have noticed that any community that prevents the education of the girl child will end up badly. Muslim backwardness is more to do with not educating girls than poverty. This is true also of those Hindu castes and communities that discourage the education of girls. In the way the UPA Government has dealt with the major terrorist attacks that have occurred on its watch, we see an example of pandering to Islamism. The terrorist attacks have been perpetrated by Islamist groups from Pakistan and Bangladesh with local Muslims lending shelter and support. Hundreds of innocent people have lost their lives in these attacks but to this day neither the Prime Minister, Sonia Gandhi or any other senior member of the UPA have come out with a full condemnation of Islamism. The signal the police get is that there are political reasons for them not being allowed to go all out to catch the killers. So the police works to rule and nobody gets caught.Islamism is so politically acceptable in India that the Islamists have gone from strength to strength in the promotion and spread of their evil ideology. It is an ideology based on terrible tenets as the famous British author, Ian McEwan, pointed out recently in an interview to the Italian newspaper, Corriere Della Sera. “And I myself despise Islamism’ he said ‘because it wants to create a society that I detest, based on religious beliefs, on a text, on lack of freedom for women, intolerance towards homosexuality and so on……Islamism, in most of its manifestations, not only wants to kill me, it wants to kill you.’Our South Asian Islamists have publicly stated on more than one occasion that their objective is to turn India from being a land of happy heathens to one in which Islamism prevails. The weak-kneed, dithering response of the UPA Government to this threat has encouraged Islamist groups to believe that their nightmare scenario will come to happen. Kashmir’s ‘azadi’ movement, which started at the end of the eighties, had nothing to do with religion but if you looked at the mobs in Srinagar streets, you would have seen that the women were all in ‘burkhas’ and the men nearly all bearded. The ‘azadi’ movement has been transformed into something else altogether. To fight Islamism, we need a Prime Minister in Delhi who can take firm decisions.Do I think this is going to happen before the next general election? No. source: sentinel assam editorial 07.07.08