Systematic ethnic cleansing: Hindus always become the victims

There is one thing that nobody, not even the wisest among us can do: and that is to re-live history. Like it or not, we have to live with it. We have to accept the fact that a predominantly Hindu country was ruled for some eight centuries by Islamic invaders and some of their tyrannical successors and for another one hundred years by the British.
That was to give many Hindu intellectuals some of them described as Macaulay’s children a tremendous sense of inferiority. They were often willing to think the worst of Hindu royalty while unwilling or hesitant to look at anything but the more benevolent side of Islamic rule whether under an Aurangzeb or even a Tipu Sultan.
If there is a communal riot in Gujarat it is condemned as a `pogrom’ to eliminate Muslims or, worse still, as genocide on a scale practised by Hitler.
But let lakhs of Hindu Pandits be driven out of their ancestral home in the Kashmir Valley and there is silence in the secular press.
According to a Bangladesh Human Rights activist and writer Shahriar Kabir, an `ethnic cleansing’ has been going on in Bangadesh since 2001 and he has gone further in recording it in a 3- volume publication titled Bangladesh-e-Sankhyalaghu Nirjataner Ponerosho Diner Swetpatra (White Paper on 1, 500 days of Torture on Minorities in Bangladesh). We ignore it. On the contrary, we invite the prime minister a Bangladesh and honour her.
A foreigner, Chris Blackburn, who is a close observer of the Bangladesh scene has described the country as "the site of al- Qaeda-run training camps financed by Middle Eastern charities, including backing from rogue elements within Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence".
Hindus in Kashmir are routinely terrorised and killed but that is seldom noticed. There were six killings in 2000, another six killings in 2001, some seven killings in 2002 and just this May terrorists massacred 32 Hindus and our secular media took everything in its stride.
The wailing of women whose husbands, sons and fathers were murdered in cold blood went unheard. In early March, violence erupted in two prominent marketplaces in Lucknow, Aminabag and Kaiserbagh when Muslim protestors, after Friday prayers, marched through the streets damaging shops and setting ablaze over two dozen twowheelers. Bank of Baroda’s Aminabad branch and a post office were torched by rioters who also damaged two cinema halls.
Writing in Outlook (20 February) K. P.S. Gill raised an important point. He said: "Why does the Muslim world not rise up in rage against these fanatics and political opportunists who are bringing disgrace to their faith? Why are the voices of criticism against extremist Islam and Islamist terrorism so muted? Our secularists pretended not to have read Gill. When dams are raised and huge lakes are formed, ancient temples get submerged but Hindus don’t raise a hue and cry.
They understand the price they have to pay for modernity, and concede that what is more important than preserving a heritage building is the larger interests of the nation. In Saudi Arabia, mosques are razed almost routinely.
The London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat (5 Sept. 2005) noted that operations of demolition of important signs in the holy city of Medina are neither the first nor would they be the last, as earlier, seven mosques, including the Bani Qoreyza Mosque were raised to the ground despite their religious, historic and cultural importance.
According to Tarek Fatah, a Pakistani Canadian Muslim activist and broadcaster, writing in Canada’s widely-circulated paper Toronto Star, in the last two decades 95 per cent of Mecca’s 1,000 year old buildings have been demolished and, indeed, in the early 1920s the Saudi rulers Aal-e-Sa’ud bull-dozed and levelled a graveyard in Medina? cemetery of Al Baquee that housed the shrines of the holy Prophet Muhammad, his daughter Fatimah Az-Zahraa his grandsons Imam Hasan Al-Mojtaba, Imam Jafar As-Sadeq and Imam Baqer.
Furhter more, wrote Fatah, the house where the holy Prophet’s beloved daughter Sayyedah Fatimah Az-Zahraa was born as well as house of his wife Sayyedah Khadija were demolished in the pretext of (undertaking) an expansion project.
It would seem that even the Prophet’s own house in Mecca was demolished. Toronto Star quoted Tarek Fatah as saying that he found it incomprehensible that while the demolition of the Babri Mosque by Hindu zealots at Ayodhya continues to remain an emotive issue with Muslims, what the Saudi authorities plan to do has evoked no protest at all.
Wrote Fatah: "What makes this demolition (of the Holy Prophet’s home) worse is the fact that it is to make way for a parking lot, two 5- storey hotel towers and seven 35- storey apartment blocks; a project known as the Jabal Omar Scheme, all within a stone’s throw of the Grand Mosque. Yet, despite this outrage, not a single Muslim country, no ayatollah, no mufti, no king, not even a Muslim Canadian imam has dared utter a word of protest.
Such is the power of Saudi influence on the Muslim narrative". The writer wondered if the lack of response is because Muslims have become so overwhelmed by the power of the Saudi riyal currency or because Muslims had lost all courage and self-respect.
And he added: "Or is it because they feel the need to cover up Muslim-on-Muslim violence, Muslim-on-Muslim terror or Muslim-on-Muslim oppression"? The Babri Masjid in Ayodha was not demolished because the Vishwa Hindu Parishad wanted to build a 35-storey apartment house on the site.
It was because a general of Babar had demolished a temple dedicated to Sri Ram to insult Hindus, right in the holy city of Ayodhya, just as other Muslim rulers had demolished 2000 odd other Hindu temples on the sites of which mosques were built.
And may it be said that these facts are brought out not to defend the demolition of a dargah in Vadodara it is unfortunate that this happened but to say that there should be a limit to hypocrisy. What Pakistan and Bangladesh have done to their one-time Hindu population is not just a disgrace but a crime against humanity.
At no time has India practised genocide as its two Muslim neighbouring countries have done. It has suffered from terrorists and it continues to do even today and there has not been a voice of protest from Muslim organisations, which should also know that many are the Muslims in India who have been giving shelter to Muslim terrorists and their ISI patrons.
They could organise a protest against President Bush: why can’t they organise a similar protest against General Musharraf and his paid thugs? Is that too much to ask? Or are the wails of Hindu widows the price we have to pay for our vaunted secularism?