Skip to main content

Being Muslim in India



Book Review

Title: Being Muslim in Hindu India: A critical view

Author: Ziya Us Salam

Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023

Pages: 313

The greatest disservice that Narendra Modi has done to India is to divide the country into two sects: Hindus versus the rest, particularly Muslims. There are concerted efforts to strip the Muslims of their very citizenship. The Muslims have been victimised in many ways. Their food is blocked, their dress-choice is questioned, their jobs are made illegal, their history is distorted, their places of worship are attacked, their residences are bulldozed… This book takes a hard look at these painful truths.

The book is divided into seven parts with 30 chapters in all. The titles of the seven parts will give you a clear and comprehensive idea about the contents of the book: Political Marginalization; Rubbishing Medieval History; Kill a Muslim a Day; Wrath on Houses of Worship; Matters of Love, the Jamaat and the Hijab; Looks and Beyond; and Finding Their Voice.

Muslims in India are portrayed as antinational terrorists, religious fundamentalists, breeders of children and stealers of Hindu women. “The largest political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), steadfastly marginalized the community,” the Preface asserts. In 2014, BJP gave only 7 tickets to Muslims out of the 482 seats the party contested, the percentage of representation coming to an abysmal 1.45. For the first time since Independence, the ruling party had no Muslim Member of Parliament in the Lok Sabha.

Muslims are disappearing from India, the author says. They are removed from political power and even the voters’ lists. A little before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the National Herlad carried a telling a headline: Lok Sabha Elections 2019: 3 crore Muslims, 4 crore Dalits among 12.7 crore voters missing from electoral rolls.

The book is based entirely on such revealing data and facts. Only the last chapter offers some hope. Titled ‘Muslims Move Past Their Clerics,’ the last chapter discusses the revolt by some Muslims against the Shahi Imam of the Delhi Jama Masjid. The Muslims bluntly refused to follow the counsels given by their religious leaders about the Citizenship Amendment Act and related issues. The Muslim women who protested using some ingenious methods at Shaheen Bagh were the beacons of hope for a different kind of Islam, the author thinks. The semi-literate, conservative religious leaders may not now find it easy to control their people. “It was time for the masses to be heard. And the imams to listen.”

The final message is that the Muslims need to reform themselves too. It’s no use to play the victim card. Certain reforms are necessary from within. The going won’t be easy even then, the author knows. “It is dark, very dark still,” he knows. But “a new dawn may just beckon.” Let a new dawn break out. Let India rise above ancient religious savagery and modernise itself, humanise itself.

If you are interested in knowing how India has treated her Muslim citizens in the past ten years, this book is an ideal read. But it offers little more than the painful data and facts.

PS. Related Post: Being Hindu in Bangladesh

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanAugust 17, 2024 at 2:16 AM

    Hari Om
    As ever, your review is lucid, pertinent, and encouraging. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Liz A.August 17, 2024 at 6:48 AM

    Very troubling.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 17, 2024 at 6:53 AM

      When humankind must be moving beyond the primitivity of religions, we're being taken back to their savagery by a man who thinks too highly of himself.

      Delete
  3. peppylady (Dora)August 18, 2024 at 8:08 AM

    I don't think we have any muslim here my community.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 18, 2024 at 9:05 AM

      If they remain far from you, so much the better. But I don't endorse any persecution in the name of any religion.

      Delete
  4. vanderloostAugust 23, 2024 at 9:55 PM

    This is the alternate perspective we do not care to know about.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...
11 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
12 comments
Read more