[IAC#RG] Fwd:

Dear Seema,

                    I've gone through your write up indicating a sense of concern including the comments made by a few individuals. While each one has voiced his concern about the communal situation being worrisome and shameful,no one,I am afraid,has touched the root cause of the problem. There is a talk of growing religious intolerance in society. Let me say this with a firm sense of conviction that society at large is all secular. Only a few limited ones from all denominations/religions who might not be so don't really matter much as they cannot influence anything against the wishes of a large majority with a secular thought. What in fact happens is something entirely different.

Come election time and all the political parties start shouting from the roof tops to polarise the society on communal lines in an effort to convert them into vote banks for electoral gains thereby creating religious fault lines. These fault lines are very cleverly manipulated and used to its advantage by each political party. In this respect there is no political party which can be termed as secular. It is a fallacy in the minds of the gullible to have categorised parties as secular or communal. In fact all political parties are unscrupulous in capitalising on the fault lines created by them between communities.

Politics in India has never been issue based. For deriving electoral gains parties use cast, regional or religious sentiments. Unsocial elements are patronised with money and muscle power. To destabilise governments law and order problems are created by providing support to disruptive individuals.

Orchestrators of such incidents irrespective of which party they belong to walk hand in hand showing great bonhomie as if nothing had happened. They only pretend to blame each other in the electronic and print media.

An other fall out of the fault lines created between communities gives rise to certain disgruntled/fringe elements who are extremely vulnerable for being used and misused for violence and terror activities by certain forces especially like Pakistan which are inimical to the interests of India. 

Two suggestions, therefore need to be seriously considered :-

1.A movement by civil society and the fourth estate to impress upon the political parties to shun vote bank politics involving cast,region or religion and in stead indulge in issue based politics. Media to my mind  can play a big role in this endeavour. It is just as well that you form part of the media too.Issues pertaining to cast and religion can be handled by a council comprising members from all parties without giving it a political colour.

2. Whenever untoward incidents like terrorist attacks,hostile,insulting or demeaning activities by a particular community occur,it should be vehemently condemned and opposed by the silent liberal majority of that community involved.

Sent from my iPad

Begin forwarded message:

From: Seema Mustafa <seemamustafa@gmail.com>
Date: 2 October 2015 at 00:17:29 GMT-5
To: Kn Panikkar <knpanikkar@gmail.com>
Cc: "indiaresists@lists.riseup.net" <indiaresists@lists.riseup.net>
Subject: Re:[IAC#RG]
Reply-To: indiaresists@lists.riseup.net

Thanks a lot!

I agree, and while everyone is working here full time trying to do something, it is clearly not going to be enough.

We need political parties to take a lead, and civil society to follow for a really proper counter which is unfortunately not happening. Civi Society alone is too fragmented...although now there is a lot of work going on.

Lets see what happens after Bihar...

Warm regards 

Seema

On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 10:42 AM, Seema Mustafa <seemamustafa@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you. Of course I know that, and guess thats what gives us some hope.

On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 1:00 AM, ashok kumar <indiaresists@lists.riseup.net> wrote:

Seems Mustafa , kudos to you for bringing it all out so lucidly.                                                    Like all Muslims in India are not "Dawood " variety , all Hindus aren't  hardcore hindutva fundamentalists either. And this I say as a proud , practising Hindu from the heartland , U.P.  Please rest assured that I don't represent the minority but the majority amongst Hindus though we may  have differing  eating preference or praying methodology than yours. So what ? You are as much an Indian as    me or any Sikh , Christian  or a Parsi  etc.  Every Dadri or Muzaffar Nagar shames and saddens us as much . It  also alarms us as much. I don't have  the gift which the Almighty has blessed you with , to express my feelings adequately in words. Hope you understand my pain , anguish and sorrow .           Ashok  Kumar.

---

From: Seema Mustafa
Sent: ‎01/‎10/‎2015 22:36
To: indiaresists@lists.riseup.net
Subject: [IAC#RG]

• 
  POLITICS
• BORDER
• OPINION
• SOUTH ASIA
• WORLD
• GENDER
• YOUNG CITIZEN
• LIFE
• THU, OCT 1, 2015

THE RSS/BJP MESSAGE TO MUSLIMS IN INDIA TODAY

SEEMA MUSTAFA Wednesday, September 30, 2015

NEW DELHI: It was a systematic communal campaign in Dadri, that precedes acts of violence always. First a calf was reported missing, and a campaign unleashed that basically spread rumours linking the calf to eating beef. When the tension reached prescribed levels, a temple in Dadri announced that a particular family--- Muslims of course--- was eating, after keeping, beef in their home. And barely before the echo of the announcement had subsided, a mob attacked the house of Mohammad Akhlaq, in the village in Dadri, pulled him out and beat him to death with bricks. His 22 year old son was also attacked, and is presently battling for his life in a hospital. The mob attacked their grandmother, and tried to molest the women in the house. The family is completely traumatised, terrified and currently praying for the young son's life. 

In terms of numbers, always very important for a statistic obsessed government, only one man has died so far. But in terms of impact, the incident has rung alarm bells across the country being reported in the global media at some length. And as the Muzaffarnagar violence at the time of the last Lok Sabha elections had shown, corroborated by subsequent communal incidents, the new strategy of those seeking to divide India on communal lines is to minimise deaths, but to exaggerate impact. Be it in the form of large scale displacement of the minorities, or widespread fear. 

In the Dadri attack the intention was not displacement, but to generate fear, to terrify. Hence the singling out of the one family, and the brutal attack where Akhlaq was killed without mercy. Do not eat beef is the ostensible message. The real message is: you are second class citizens, so you will do what you are told in India. 

So what are Muslims being told in India? But before that the stereotype which is fed by an ignorant, complicit media; goes largely unchallenged by the so called regional parties as they neither have the cadres nor the organisation to do little more than listen; and that is slowly being injected as a poisonous venom into society at every available opportunity, borrowing also from the US led campaign against Muslims across the world. 

1. Muslims in India are a monolith and hence dangerous; 

2. At best they are of two types: the APJ Abdul Kalam variety or the Dawood Ibrahim kind. And the second are in the majority, hence have to be hunted out before they hurt others; 

3. They are influenced greatly by the extremist politics of the terror groups in Pakistan and West Asia; 

4. They are growing rapidly and pose a challenge to the stability of India; 

5. They work against the cultural ethos of India, as they eat beef, take away our daughters, are aggressive in following their religion, and hence a threat to Hinduism; 

In this discourse there is no room for the reality. That Muslims are not a monolith, and are as culturally different as all other Indians; that they are largely liberal, even if they are religious as are non-Muslims in India; that they have shunned extremist politics to a point where they vote always for the secular option and not for the kinds of Owaisi, or the Jamaat e Islami in elections; that they have done nothing, repeat nothing, to be branded anti-national; that they too do not eat beef, and are secular and Indian as the last Indian. 

And hence through the systematic, crafted, manipulated communal incidents come the many messages. Muslims are being told very deliberately, and through violence: 

1. Do not marry outside your religion. The entire 'love jihad' campaign launched in Uttar Pradesh in particular by the RSS affiliates was directed at invoking terror through deliberate attacks on Hindu-Muslim couples, and on the families of the Muslim young people so involved, making it clear that this will not be tolerated; 

2. Do not eat meat or beef. The central government itself passed an order against the export of beef. The Maharashtra government has gone many steps further. This should have been a message to all Indians, but through the campaign and now Akhlaq's murder it has been demonstrated that the defaulters are Muslims. Hence Muslims must follow the food code or suffer the consequences, as posts on the social media by self-acknowledged Hindutva acolytes profess in language that is abusive and vitriolic. 

3. Do not live in cosmopolitan colonies, move into ghettos. Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi have managed to make this a rule with most of Gujarat covered, and other cities and states following. Muslims do not easily get rented accommodation in these cities, and are also not allowed to buy property easily by the residents associations. 

4. Do not become too successful economically. The communal violence has been increasingly targeting Muslim businessmen, with shops being specifically targeted.In fact the Congress government in Maharashtra also fed into this by unleashing a wave of terror against Muslim professionals, many of whom were arrested on suspicion of having "terror links.' While some were released after months and years, there are many languishing in jail for crimes that local lawyers have described as concocted. 

5. And speak only when you are asked to, actually not at all. This is the message coming out of a major attack on Muslim writers, academics, intelligentsia on the social media where trolls describing themselves as bhakts of PM Narendra Modi, Hindutva acolytes and carrying profile pictures of angry gods literally abuse and threaten any one writing under a Muslim name, questioning their patriotism, their religion and their identity. In fact Muslims are repeatedly reminded when they share in democratic debate, that they should remember how other countries ---Pakistan for instance---treats its minorities, and should thus follow a path of caution. 

The campaign is virulent and relentless. And political parties in states going to the polls in particular are now feeling this pressure and re

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Seema Mustafa

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Seema Mustafa

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