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asifzschool · 5 years ago

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The Minority Rights Monopoly of a Hindutva Nation

The game From seventy years, it has been the favorite game of Hindutva. The greatest monopoly in this world - that is called minority rights.

There is a traffic stop here. The signal is red. Unless you are a minority, you will never know how does it feel. You can not put yourself in the shoes of a minority, if you are a majority. For me, being a minority is an everyday thing. I struggle with my religious identity all the time. I face questions, I reply them, and I get into arguments. In this world of Islamophobia, my faith is put on trial every day. I know perfectly well that nobody wants to become a minority. If I were a Hindu, I would be grateful for it. I wish I were a Hindu! I wish I were a Christian! A Buddhist, a Taoist - anything at all but a Muslim! If I were something else, I would be free. I wouldn't have this ordeal. I wouldn't have to go through things I now fight with for being a Muslim. And I know the ways around that word, minority. There are too many ways to use this word, to abuse it and exploit it. It is a legit word. In all context and circumstances, a minority is a minority. It means that there is a group of people who do not posses the same privileges as their majority counterpart. And the world is always against them. In our subcontinent that exists down the Himalayas, we have been majorities and minorities from hundreds of years. From the last seventy years, it has become a game. Instead of cards, dice, deeds, game cash and tokens, we have people here. Real people. Mostly, we play it through riots.

We don't purchase properties. We plunder them. We confiscate properties left behind by our enemies. During riots, we forcibly take them away. We take over controls. We take things that did not belong to us, had it not been for a religious bloodshed.

This is the reality of Indian subcontinent. The game is our destiny. All of us, Hindus and Muslims. Our ancestors played it. They rolled the dice. They kept playing, until the last day of their existence. They've left the court afterwards. It was for us to take over. And now we're playing it. This is our history. Made of countless tales of religious wars, creating and separating countries. That is how India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were created, each with their own religious agenda. Far from it all, I live here in Malaysia, a country where nobody is playing games with religion. Here, people spend away their whole lifespan peacefully. Without trouble. Malay Muslims, the local Tamil Indians and the Malay Chinese. The last time a riot broke out was in 1969. In the Indian subcontinent, it is a completely different story. Rolling the dice Bangladesh is the youngest of nations down the Himalayas. This is where I am from. The official agenda of creating this country was secularism, which turned into pro-India servitude soon enough. While India is your neighbor, trust me, you can not afford to be a secular. If secularism means watching mosques destroyed and keeping your 'Muslim' mouth shut, then you can. You can simply shut up. That's absolutely fine, with both slaves and masters. The relationship between Hindus and Muslims in this territory has always been that of either slaves or masters. Masters were rich, slaves were poor. This is the reason behind the creation of Pakistan, to free Muslims from Hindutva's slavery. That is how the poor, low class Muslims became a Middle class. Bangladesh broke away from it in early 70s. It was East Pakistan. The only Pakistan that remains now was the West Wing of it. Since the beginning, India was rolling the dice. To roll the dice is to create an issue. Mostly, a religious disturbance. India has always been the mightiest in population, in economy and in every other aspects. So, the other countries nearby were expected to pay tax to it. To their master, India. The history is long, and endless. Babri Mosque, in 1992, shaped much of what it is now.

People witnessed multiple narratives from both sides. Muslims had their mosque destroyed, crushed to the ground, while Hindus were reading a book called 'Lajja', authored by a woman called Taslima Nasreen. Muslims called the book a 'BJP propaganda'.

It was the biggest demolition of something so big of its kind, in the recent history, before 9/11. When Twin Towers were destroyed, 9/11 replaced the Babri day in calendar in the magnitude of events. Back then, Hindutva rolled the dice. It created the saga. Riots broke out everywhere. In Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. In 2019, Hindutva rolled the dice once again. Again a woman, this time. Because in the age of colonialism, which likes to camouflage itself as liberty, female is the right gender. Things become soft core when it is a woman. Besides, New York Times can always decorate its headlines with words like 'Meet the Woman.'

So we had a Priya Saha. She went straight to Donald Trump. Could it have been a Muslim woman, in the stead of her place? Who would it be? Malala Yousufzai? She's a Nobel laureate, and she's a Muslim. She could have gone to Donald Trump and expressed her distress. But it would risk her image. Already she is mocked at in her own country, Pakistan. Then who? A Gujarat riot victim? Somebody from Assam? The Indian state where they were hunting down the Muslim poets right before it happened? There were some poets among them who were women. They did not get a US visa. Priya Saha got it. I still remember the day before it happened. People in Facebook were posting about this 'Miya poetry', which were elegies of the Assamese Muslim minority. They were written in the local dialect. A dialect that is not considered entirely 'polite' or 'standard', when it comes to the traditional literature.

The next day, Priya Saha's video went viral. It was a short clip. Roughly, a few seconds. It contained a footage of 'the Hindu Lady and Donald Trump', almost a Disney story of an unknown woman holding hands of a US President.

For what I know, I've never heard of Priya Saha before. I did not know who she was. The first time I learnt about her was 18 July 2019, after her video popped up in Facebook. When the clip was out, everybody in Bangladesh forgot about everything else. For the next thirty days, Facebook was all about Priya Saha. She alleged, 37 million Hindus are 'missing' from Bangladesh. That is a genocide. Probably the largest in the world. We have our war jokes there, about 3 million people who had supposedly perished in the war against Pakistan. Now the Bangladeshi people, the Muslims - were looking for these 'missing' 37 millions. In Bangladesh, it became a new joke. Because we always count in 'millions'. She said, Bangladesh still has 18 million Hindus. Some of them were out proving her number. Among the 37 millions, probably 30 million Hindus were never born, who could have been born otherwise, had Muslims been kind to them. In the Muslim majority nation, it took the joke even further. Not being born started to seem like a thing that's funnier. If we count from 1947, that is a true number - although. That was the year of India and Pakistan's creation. Had the demographics flowed on the way it did before, we might have had 30 million unborn Hindus who would grow into adults by now, plus 7 millions more who were displaced and exiled.

Priya Saha referenced a professor, who has a Muslim name, Abul Barkat. He disowned her statement.

Once again, Muslims were the violent majority. Their reaction was something Westerns would call 'outrageous'.

Thanks to BJP, that it exists. There are, somehow, balance in things. The Bangladeshi Muslims know about their existence. We did not want to deliver BJP their next propaganda, after Nasreen's 'Lajja'. That is how the riot did not happen. We were expecting a riot. We were scared of it. But the fear of a BJP propaganda making gains and profits was much more greater than that - to the Muslim majority. That fear, stopped the riots. Not a single Hindu died. Not a single Hindu was killed. There were no mass rapes of Hindus. No Hindu girls were stripped nude in broad daylight. BJP wanted all of it to happen. They did not, unlike before. From time to time, such things did happen in Bangladesh. And they gave BJP a solid ground for their arguments. This time, there was no bloodshed. No massacre. At the end of the day, it made the Muslim majority feel more confident. This was the first time they ran down a Hindu woman for a complain like this. In the recent Awami regime, that too was unheard of.

Some of them felt more radicalized. The Hindus were silent. The Muslims accused them of 'having more privileges’ under the Awami regime. As they said, Hindus were getting more jobs, government was hiring them in more top posts and etc. Hindus did not reply to it. They did not want to make the noise louder. They wanted it to die down, as minorities do. In US, Priya Saha did not make news, simply. Nobody in Trump's country heard of her from the US media. The New York Times was busy with Ilhan Omar's minority politics. Not that it did not know about Saha, it decided to skip it. Regardless of the turmoil in the South Asian country that their President has caused.

BJP did not shy away from it, though. They protested against the Bangladeshi Muslims in front of the country's consulate in West Bengal. BJP did not deny that it rolled the dice, either. They admitted it quite frankly, that they sponsored Priya Saha.

They rolled the dice. The game started. The show was on.

Priya Saha went on saying, 'I've learnt all this from Sheikh Hasina, my Prime Minister. She inspired me to say this. Now I feel endangered. My life is threatened.'

The Game After Nothing can be right and wrong at the same time. Either it is right, or it is wrong. BJP kills Muslims for eating beef. Either it is right, or it is wrong.

Muslims threatened Priya Saha and called out their desire to turn her into a whore. Either it is right, or it is wrong. 37 Millions might have been a fat fetched number. But some Hindus were displaced, raped and burnt. Either it is right or it is wrong. So, who is the guilty party here? Who's guilty? BJP, or Muslims? What if they both are criminals? The fact is, nothing is that simple. Nobody is guilty as a community, just as nobody is innocent as a community, either. At least in our part of the world, where these things happen. BJP rose to power after killing thousands of Muslims. If they killed millions, that would have been crazier. They openly threaten their Muslim minority in India with it. They say they will kill millions.

Either that is right, or that is severely wrong. It can't be both at the same time. There was no jury board here. Nobody awarded BJP a 'Freedom of Speech prize', or punished the Muslims - for the Priya Saha episode of Bangladeshi history. The same Awami regime who came to power through BJP's machinery were quick to declare their indifference. Although the PM said that Priya must be given a chance to defend herself. So, the issue was not solved. Priya Saha complained. What after that? Should Muslims change their behaviors towards Hindus? Should BJP change its behavior, towards every other minority around India? People did not have answers to these questions. Everybody knows neither India nor Bangladesh is Malaysia. Here, people use the word 'race' instead. They take courses about interracial relations. Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists live side by side, in the Malaysian society. Most of them don't practice secularism. They practice their own religion. The country's constitution keeps Islam as its state religion - that doesn't stop the Malaysian youngsters from pursuing diverse lifestyles that are completely westernized. Some Malaysian girls choose to wear Hijab, others pick Bikinis. In India, that is impossible. It is sort of impossible in Bangladesh as well, unless you are very rich. You at least have to be from the middle class, with your social securities guaranteed. For us who are from either Bangladesh, India or Pakistan, we don't see our countries going somewhere remotely near to that in the next hundred years. We are a war-torn populace. In Malaysia, we pretend like we don't mind each other. That we are absolutely fine with each other's nationality and presence. Here in Malaysia, Indian and Pakistanis are friends. Even couples. Back home, we are enemies. The deadliest enemies of each other. So, those of us who escaped but still are suffering from irrational homesickness, we look back to our countries. We check Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We see what is happening. Thus, we live two different realities at the same time. The Malaysian reality and the reality of our homes. After a month, Priya Saha was still hot in newspapers. Here were the Muslims, still blasting her without mercy. However, there were no riots. Only the ISKCON was closing down. That's the only blow the Hindu community has taken.

BJP couldn't make much profit out of it. There wasn't enough materials to write a new novel. Probably, a sequel of 'Lajja.' So, Hindus were unharmed. For the first time perhaps. It is not natural. While Muslims did not harm them, they still kept bashing. Through their words. It was a great insult, for sure. Having no rise of terrorism in the country was an insult, too. BJP was literally insulted, with no terror whatsoever. No temples were exploded with bombs. In Bangladesh, people do tolerate each other. It is not communal harmony, it is tolerance. The very basic of it. Nobody is fanatic enough to drop a bomb in a temple. It is not middle east. But that is of no use to BJP. BJP wants more novels. More Taslima Nasreens. More Hindutva bestsellers. Frankly speaking, once upon a time, this woman's words were dangerous enough to set off a riot in the country. She still keeps setting riots, but in India. If a minority person complains about the sufferings of a minority, can you simply call it Hindutva? Can you silence it? Can you turn down the volume? The question is, should you? Even if it sets off riots? Priya Saha is from the Minority community. Her words were setting off riots. Almost. That is the fact. Had she did not went to Trump, Bangladesh wouldn't be in an almost riot situation. She chose Trump for it. People started questioning, since when did Trump become the jury?

The fact is, the riot was not provoked by Muslim hardliners this time. But here was BJP, deprived of its chocolate. Its unborn bestseller. Like a naughty boy in the street who can't have his ice cream, after the ice cream trolley has went away without stopping.

Now the naughty boy wanted to destroy the world. Because the whole world was criminal enough for having ice-creams. He was deprived of it. He missed. Soon enough, in the following month of August, it was the article 370 of Indian constitution that was tampered with, instead of born and unborn 37 millions. It cracked like a firework in whole Bangladesh, right after Priya Saha. Muslims and Hindus were at it again. That article, in that fucking constitution, gave Kashmir a statehood. Before BJP tampered it, the Indian Kashmir was still a state. The Pakistani Kashmir was Azaad, free.

How easy it is to play with people's lives! Lives of millions! All it takes is a fucking constitution. A Muslim MP in India ripped it apart before walking out of the parliament that day.

37 millions was a joke. 12.5 million people of Kashmir, of which 68% are Muslims, was not even a good tragedy. These millions of Kashmiri Muslims were already 'have been born'. Nobody offered a figure for how many million weren't born there. After BJP passed a bill that changed Article 370, the newly revised constitution was shoved down people's throats. They happened to be Muslims, from Kashmir. It was 5 August 2019, the day India dismissed the article. Exactly 18 days after they cracked Priya Saha.

Right now, Kashmiri Muslims were fleeing for their lives. The Indian Kashmir was no more a state. Now Hindus could purchase lands there, an option they did not have before.

The state/territory was put under a lockdown.

Nobody could get in or out. The internet was cut off. The Kashmiri newspapers stopped. Phones were disconnected. All communications ceased.

Twenty days later, as I'm writing this in the evening of 25th August, the Kashmiri newspapers are still not back online. One of my Kashmiri friend in Malaysia, did receive a phone call from his family in Kashmir the day before yesterday, for the first time after lockdown. Rest of it, nobody knows. In today's world, nobody knows what is happening in a state/territory that is placed under a lockdown. New York Times has been there. They came out with horrific pictures. But the world is too tired for horrors in Kashmir.

But a few videos were somehow uploaded online. They show people running to-and-fro, in the hospitals. Apparently too many has been injured in Kashmir. People are assuming they are Muslims, leaving a few Indian soldiers aside. Yeah, some Jawans of the Indian military also suffered major and minor injuries, when the locals threw rocks at them. Imran Khan, the Pakistani PM, compared it to 'Nazi ideology', this ghettoization of Kashmiri Muslims. He still refrains from sending his troops for a war, although. But BJP is calling for a war. War is what it wants. War is what Kashmiris want, too. Because Kashmiri Muslims want Azaadi, freedom. Kashmir has its own history. In 1947, the states and kingdoms of British India were asked to join either India or Pakistan. The Hindu Rajah of Kashmir, decided to join India. Without giving a damn to the Muslim majority in Kashmir. Eventually, Kashmir was divided into two. Azaad Kashmir, that is in Pakistan, and the Occupied Kashmir in India, as most Kashmiri Muslims from both sides and Pakistan calls it. The Maqbooza Kashmir, in Urdu.

The same BJP that kills Muslims for eating beef has unleashed its terror in the Maqbooza Kashmir.

It is still allowing the foreign press there. New York Times, BBC and all. But from the Kashmiri people, not a word has been heard from last twenty days. Trump is here again. After Priya Saha, he's now saying he will 'mediate' between Pakistan and India. His 'mediation’ will bring peace, he said. But the Kashmiris want Azaadi, which is impossible to achieve without breaking peace. Azaadi means either Maqbooza Kashmir joins Pakistan or it breaks away from India, like Bangladesh did - from West Pakistan. Either way, Azaadi will make India lose some geography completely, forever. A 'peace process' will return the Occupied Kashmir its lost statehood, at most. That's not what Kashmiris want. They've suffered enough when it was a state. They are suffering when it is no longer a state, too. They wanna break free. Absolutely free. Free from India.

That is not Priya Saha's concern, for sure. But when the lockdown started, BJP asked Hindus to 'go marry the Kashmiri girls (and convert them to Hinduism)'.

There aren't 37 million Muslims there. There are millions of them, though. 68% of the 12.5 million, how much is that? Almost 8.5 million. A lot of these 8.5 million Muslims are now in police custody. Being a Muslim is a crime under the laws and codes preferred by BJP. Many of them are in hospitals, injured. As reports are coming, those hospitals are being raided by Indian military. Kashmiri women have been raped since history. From years. There is a mass rape epidemic in Kashmir. The raped girls are all Muslims, all the rapists are Hindus. There has been countless mass killings. Each with a different name. Kunan Poshpora, Sopore, Kupwara, Varmul.

BJP has a plan for it all. It asked Hindus to purchase lands there so that it can replace the Kashmiri Muslim majority with a new Hindu majority, within a few upcoming generations. The majority Muslims will lose their majority status, eventually. In the demography. It looks like the 'missing' 37 million of Priya Saha have flocked there in Kashmir, straight from Bangladesh. They will avenge Bangladesh with Kashmir, turning the majority Muslims into a minority. After Priya Saha, not a single Hindu girl was raped in Bangladesh. They have been raped before. During the war with Pakistan, they were raped and killed. After the war, they were raped during the riots. This time, there wasn't. Not a single one. The Kashmiri girls are being raped. Right now. The Kashmiri boys are being killed. After Priya Saha. Right at this moment. The Monopoly

What makes a minority? Is it just numbers? Numbers are stupid, come on!

Minorities come in all shapes and colors and sizes. They are tall and short, fair and white as well as pitch-black skins. In Africa, certain human species were wiped out because they were dwarfs. They did not have the normal height as other people. Now they are wiping out Muslims. The definition is not just numbers. It may vary here and there, but all the minorities in the world have a common feature. They are discriminated against, and they suffer bigotry. If I am not hired for a top post in a company because of my religion, it makes me a minority - despite the demographics telling otherwise. If a company hires a Hindu man to appoint him as their CEO just because he is a Hindu, it makes him a majority. Because he is sharing the same privileges with the majority religion and gaining unfair advantages for his religion. If a country's police department never arrests criminals from Hindu religion just because he's a Hindu - it does make them the ruling majority. Because a Muslim criminal wasn't to be spared for the same crime. Only the majority knows how to get away with religion. Minority does not have that chance. So, demographics often lie. The majority-minority binary doesn't stop at religion, either. It goes as far as people's sexuality, their lifestyles and professions as well. Bangladesh have a Hindu minority. So did Kashmir. Kashmir's Hindu Pandit minority had to evacuate the valley, when tensions ran high.

Kashmir's Muslim majority is now being butchered by Indian Hindus - who are not from Kashmir. These butchers are no Pandits, either. In no definition of the world, the butchered people are a ruling class. The ruling class are never persecuted. The ruling class are not shot dead. That never happened in the human history. Both the Kashmiri Muslims and the Kashmiri Pandits are minorities - in their own ways. Next the demography will change. Kashmiri Muslims will become a minority in numbers as well. If they are still the majority, they are asking for their majority rights perhaps. That is the kind of stuff happening in Kashmir. The situation in Bangladesh is not that different. Except that we saw Hindu houses getting burnt as recent as three years ago. People burnt their houses and started looting them. I don't remember Muslims hailing the looters, but they say those were political goons. But that made me realize that yes, it still can happen. Three years ago, BJP had its chocolate, too. It did not stop in Bangladesh. The Indian Hindu fanatics celebrated that riot in Nasirnagar. It gave them exactly what they wanted, excuses to kill Muslims.

The Bangladeshi cops setting fire on a Santal tribal village

It stirred up emotions to get BJP exactly what it wanted as well, more Hindu votes. Priya Saha alleged that her house was burnt down. Not in Nasirnagar, it was somewhere else. Bangladeshi media said, she's torched her own house herself. Never mind Bangladeshi media, they suck. However, a thousand homes were burnt down in India because they belonged to Muslims. The Muslim shops, looted. Cash boxes, vandalized. There were Bilkis Bano, Jakia Jafri. There was Israt Jahan, a Muslim girl killed in a false encounter.

Did Bilkis Bano ever fantasize to reach Donald Trump? Did Jakia Jafri want Donald Trump to listen to her story? Did Israt? Would the White House let them enter? It is the same thing. They too are minority. That day, Donald Trump was there to listen to all the stories from minority people around the world, in his oval office.

There were some Rohingya Muslims, too. But Jakia Jafri wasn't there. Bilkis Bano wasn't there. Israt was dead long time ago. No Kashmiri was there, either. Besides, Donald Trump shares a very good friendship with Narendra Modi. Why was the Indian minority 'missing' in his oval office that day? Some people asked, some didn't. Because everybody knows it is the same thing, but it is not the same thing. Being a minority is not the same thing for Priya Saha and Bilkis Bano. The later is a Muslim, the former, Hindu. It is not the same thing, in our subcontinent. Priya Saha can meet Donald Trump if she wants. The Muslim minorities can not. Israel and US will listen to her if they feel like it. They rarely listen to Muslims. Donald Trump declared a 'Muslim ban', a few years ago - if I need to remind you. Trump is 'mediating'. That is not stopping Hindus. That is not stopping Narenda Modi from butchering Kashmiris. So, what's the conclusion? Both the Hindu minority and Muslim minority are in hellfire. The majorities are roasting them both. But when it is the Hindu minority, their stories make best sellers. When it is Muslims, France Germany Italy Nicaragua Israel and a few dozen of other countries are not interested. So a man asked in Facebook, a Muslim man from Bangladesh. He said, 'thousands of Kashmiri girls are killed and raped everyday. They aren't winning a Nobel prize for it. Malala did.'

Kashmiri girls are not Malala. They are not fighting the 'war on terror'. So, when they will pen their stories, it won't sell. Mostly, the Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Indians will read it.

The Hindu minorities get that extra favor. Muslim minorities don’t. Hindutva always excuses its crimes with their Hindu minority. Muslims make no excuses, officially.

Is this really about minority, at all? Or is it about Hinduism? The Hindutva brigade expanding its territory?

To this day, Indians are the sole owner of this monopoly. Because they placed their minorities in Muslim lands. They alone play this minority rights monopoly. They even make money with it. They make a thriving business out of their sufferings. The Indian subcontinent's Muslims did not join them. Their Bilkis Banos were not sexy enough for Donald Trump. We have a minority, too. We have only God to complain. When the God finally listens.

Asif Tamoso 25 August 2019

(Photographs: Collected)

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#Muslim #Hindu #Minority #Majority #India #Pakistan #Bangladesh #Kashmir #Priya Saha #Donald Trump #Sheikh Hasina #Taslima Nasreen #Ilhan Omar #Article 370 #Indian Military #Police #Indian Army #Azaadi

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