“Hitlerite” is the word used by an Indian police official to define the manner of the carnage and mayhem of helpless Muslims at the hands of the ‘warriors’ of the Sangh Parivar, the VishwaHindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal.
The Hindu, a reputed newspaper of India, spotlights this feature of the current genocide of Muslims in a telling account of the tragedy: “There was a brutality to the carnage in Ahmedabad, which even in a city with as long a history of communal conflagrations as this one, was unprecedented. They reel of the list of past convulsions - 1969, 1980, 1985, 1986, 1990, 1992. But this one, almost everyone agreed, is different. One senior officer told us, ‘The intention this time was mass murder of Muslims.’ Another police officer said the violence in Gujrat was not a ‘riot.’ ‘A riot involves a clash of two groups. In every conflict in the State before this one both sides suffered. Both shared a sense of loss, both could turn to the State for help. This time the Muslims alone have been under attack with what appears to be the backing of the State.’ “ (‘Genocide in the land of Gandhi’ by Anjali Mody, The Hindu, Madras, India).
Adam Mynott, BBC correspondent in Ahmedabad, quotes Asif Ali, “a Muslim beyond grief,” bursting in a plaintive moan, “We have been abandoned…abandoned to die.”
The human tragedy continues. The death count mounts. But the Ummah looks the other way, the Organization of Islamic Conference furnishes a fresh proof of its impotency, the United Nations is a shameless spectator to the Hitlerite crimes, the European Union, the US and its human rights champions do not so much as raise a brow, the Commonwealth appears more concerned about the plight of the whites in Zimbabwe, Amnesty International is a picture of nonchalance, and the American media shows more empathy for the innocent media victims and families of soldiers killed in the war against terrorism in Afghanistan! As the torturous experience of the Muslims in India touches a new high and the gory tragedy mounts, so does the indifference of the powers that matter. Washington cannot afford to displease New Delhi: the corporate stakes are too high. The US insistence to press for the disbanding of Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-i-Mohammad is understandable but its silence on the more horrific and vengeful acts of the VishwaHindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal in a country much more populated than the USA is incomprehensible. Over 1,000 Muslims have been butchered, 122 of them burned alive, 350 mosques desecrated, and countless young girls raped, yet Capitol Hill and the White House are unmoved and unruffled. This show of apathy in the land of Lincoln and Emerson is unbelievable!
More so, as the VishwaHindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal - the Hindutva activists -in the words of The Hindu commentator Anjali Modi, “plunder, rape and destroy places of worship of other communities. The virility of their cultures and their political agenda seemed to be judged by their power to destroy.” Kuldip Nayyer, a freelance columnist based in New Delhi, India, airs his views in the same vein to make the incisive point: “Secular forces have to assert themselves to save the country from going communal. Blinded by fundamentalism, the BJP is not seeing the writing on the wall. Muslim jihadis have destroyed Pakistan and put on the country’s back the army which refuses to return to the barracks. The Hindutva ‘jihadis’ are out to install in India a theocratic state.”
Kuldip’s observations carry considerable weight. “Gujrat may be the worst case. But it is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is the distance between Hindus and Muslims, still yawning even after 55 years of partition. We have adopted the most secular constitution in the world. But we have failed to cultivate the temperament required to implement even the letter, much less the spirit, of the constitution.” The observation speaks volumes for itself. Kuldip recalls a meeting with Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the ‘Frontier Gandhi.’ “The communal orgy at Ahmedabad in 1969 was very much in his mind when I met him. Badshah Khan, another endearing title for him, asked me whether the victims at Ahmedabad were Muslims. I said: ‘Most of them.’ He fell silent. After a long pause, he said: ‘We had imagined that the Hindu-Muslim riots would end after the British left since it was their creation.’ Yet more poignant was his remark: ‘How could it happen in the land of Mahatma Gandhi?’ “
Neither Mahatma Gandhi nor Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah desired their respective countries to experience periodic communal bloodbaths. Following partition, the Mahatma said that Hindus and Muslims - “he called them his two eyes” (claims Nayyer) - could “forget their personal tragedies and past quarrels and live like brothers.”
Mr. Jinnah, once acclaimed as the ‘Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity,’ said on the occasion of his departure from Delhi for Karachi in 1947: “I bid farewell to the citizens of Delhi, amongst whom I had many friends of all communities and I earnestly appeal to every one to live in this great and historic city with peace. The past must be buried and let us start afresh as two independent sovereign states of Hindustan and Pakistan. I wish Hindustan prosperity and peace.” On October 25, 1947, the Quaid told Reuter’s Duncan Hooper: “Minorities do not cease to be citizens. Minorities living in Pakistan or Hindustan do not cease to be citizens of their respective states by virtue of their belonging to particular faith, religion, or race. I have repeatedly made it clear, especially in my opening speech in the Constituent Assembly, that the minorities in Pakistan would be treated as our citizens and will enjoy all the rights as any other community. Pakistan shall pursue this policy and do all it can to create a sense of security and confidence in the non-Muslim minorities of Pakistan. We do not prescribe any schoolboy tests for their loyalty. We shall not say to any Hindu citizen of Pakistan ‘if there was a war would you shoot a Hindu?’ “
It is now for the leadership in Delhi to prove that the Indian Muslims are citizens of India. That they are not a forsaken lot - abandoned to die.