As the 2014 elections begin, the time has
come again to state the obvious. In the context of massive propaganda
campaigns, the subtle use of stereotypes, and the fact that both the
Western and the Indian media share certain basic biases, many people end
up believing in a range of myths about the adherents of the world’s
second largest religion. This is a quick attempt at exposing those
myths.
Myth: ‘Muslim’ countries are never secular. Muslims do not tolerate
minorities in ‘their’ countries but demand minority rights in other
countries.
The world’s largest Muslim majority country is Indonesia
(total population approximately 25 crores, larger than Pakistan).
Indonesia is a secular democracy. Indeed, its population is
almost a mirror image of India’s – 88% Muslim, 9% Christian, 3% Hindu,
2% Buddhist, etc. (as compared to India, which has a population that is
80% Hindu, 13.4% Muslim, 2.3% Christian, etc.) Indonesia’s national
slogan is “Unity in Diversity.” Yes, Indonesia has occasional riots and
bomb blasts, but so does India.
In reality the majority of Muslim majority countries in the world are
secular. Several large examples include Turkey, Mali, Syria, Niger, and
Kazakhstan. Despite having Islam as ‘state religion’, Bangladesh’s
government is also secular in law. The same is true of many other
countries. Only six countries in the world claim to use Islam as the
basis of their law making – and their total population is roughly the
same as the population of Indonesia, Turkey and Kazakhstan combined. In
other words, the vast majority of Muslim majority countries are secular,
and the vast majority of Muslims live under secular governments.
Myth: Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims.
Even if we accept the government’s
definition of who is a terrorist in India, this is entirely untrue. In
India, less than a third of the organisations banned as “terrorist”
under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act are Muslim organisations.
Internationally, the group that engaged in the most suicide bombings in
the world was the LTTE in Sri Lanka – a militantly atheist group whose
members are mostly of Hindu and Christian origin.
It is also not true that Muslim organisations engage in the most violence in India. Between 2005 and 2014, as per the
South Asia Terrorism Portal,
twice as many people were killed in ‘terrorist incidents’ by
Northeastern militant organisations and “left wing extremism”. These are
all non-Muslim organisations, and the largest Northeastern organisation
in this period (ULFA) has a mostly Hindu, upper caste leadership.
Besides, the definition of “terrorism” that the government uses is
contradictory. Killing twenty people by a bomb blast is considered
terrorism, but the killing of thousands of people in 1984 or more than a
thousand people in Gujarat in 2002 (or, for that matter, the killing of
40 people in Muzaffarnagar, 68 people in Orissa in 2008, etc. etc.) are
not. All riots involve planning, stockpiling of weapons and systematic
attacks. Why then are they not considered terrorism?
Myth: Muslims have always been fundamentalists and are ‘more religious’ than followers of other religions.
Recent history shows that this is a lie, and also exposes where
current “Muslim fundamentalism” comes from. Just forty to sixty years
ago, in most of the major regions of the world with high Islamic
populations – Indonesia, the Middle East, north Africa – the strongest
political forces were secular leftists. This took many forms: the
Indonesian Communist Party, the Nasserite and Baa’thist regimes in
Egypt, Syria and Iraq, the Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadegh,
etc. In these countries, especially in the Middle East, it was the
United States and its client states (such as Saudi Arabia) that
sponsored, financed and armed right wing and religious fundamentalist
organisations, precisely in order to counter the strength of the secular
leftists whom they opposed.
Israel’s role in propping up Hamas to counter the PLO is also well
known. This reached its height in the 1980s with the war in Afghanistan,
with the US bankrolling and training the people who later founded Al
Qaeda. It was during this period as well that the US financed and
supported the Zia regime in Pakistan in its “Islamisation” drive. The
current strength of the Islamic fundamentalist movement in the Middle
East is a result of American strategy, which involved finishing off all
leftist resistance while tolerating and encouraging Islamic
fundamentalism.
Above all, to repeat the key point, Islamic fundamentalism is a
political phenomenon
created by a particular history – just like Hindutva, Christian
fundamentalism and every other form of right wing movement. The myth of
the inherently fundamentalist Muslim owes a lot to European mythmaking
around the Crusades and subsequent efforts to prop up their empire in
India. But people continue to recycle colonial self-justifications as if
they are true.
Myth: Muslims always start violence. Hindus only ‘retaliate’ or ‘act in self defence’.
Every single group that has ever engaged in mass killings has claimed to be ‘retaliating’ or ‘defending themselves’.’ The September
11 attacks in the US were justified as “retaliation” for the killing of
lakhs of people in Iraq (through sanctions) and in Palestine by the US
and Israel. If you believe the emails being sent before the Delhi and
Ahmedabad bomb blasts in 2008, the blasts were “retaliation” for police
atrocities and the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat. In 2008 Christians
were massacred in Orissa in “retaliation” for the killing of a VHP
leader. Going back further in history, the Nazis justified the
Kristallnacht-
their first state-sponsored riot against Jews, in which thousands of
synagogues and homes were destroyed – by claiming it was “retaliation”
for the murder of a German diplomat and necessary to ‘defend themselves’
against ‘international Jewry’.
The reason for this is simple – the only way to convince people to
commit inhuman atrocities against other people is to make them believe
that they are “defending themselves” or “paying back.” The sheer
inhumanity of talking about “retaliation” is obvious. Would those who
claim “Hindus only retaliate” be comfortable if a Bihari militia were to
massacre Maharashtrians as “retaliation” for attacks by the MNS and the
Shiv Sena? Would they accept if Northeastern armed organisations
carried out massacres of Delhiites in “retaliation” for atrocities and
racism against Northeasterners in the capital? It is a mark of how low
we have come as a society that so many people go around mouthing these
slogans today, as if gangrape and massacres can ever be justified by
“retaliation” and “self-defense.”
Myth: Hindus do not kill based on their religion. Only Muslims do, because their religion requires them to.
In Gujarat in 2002, in Delhi and other cities in 1984, in Bhagalpur
in 1989, and in most other riots, the overwhelming majority of those who
died were from minority communities (Muslims, Sikhs, etc.) Then we have
the recent instances of bomb blasts by Hindutva organisations. The
majority of the killers in all of these incidents were Hindus, and the
organisations that drove the killings called on them to kill non-Hindus.
Would it be accurate to say they killed
because Hinduism
required them to do so? No, clearly, in all those instances, the
attackers and the organizers were political groups seeking political
goals (and dressing them up as religious goals). This is exactly what
far right Muslim groups do too.
Every religion has groups that urge conflict with other religions,
and holy texts in every religion contain things that endorse atrocities
(just look at the what the
Manu Smriti says about women and
Dalits, or the Old Testament of the Bible says about massacres of
non-Jews). This does not mean that followers of those religions follow
those texts literally. The vast majority of Muslims, like the vast
majority of Hindus, Christians, or any other group, have never killed
anyone and never will.
Myth: Muslims are united and act together, while Hindus are divided and weak.
Every election study ever done has found that Muslims vote in the
same manner as any other community votes – for facilities, on the basis
of the candidate, whether they like a political party, etc. In practice
also Muslims are no more united than any other group; they have internal
divisions on religious, caste, gender, regional, language and countless
other lines, just like any other community in India. If Muslims were
“united”, one would expect that they would be represented well in
Parliament. In fact, Muslim MPs constituted only 5.5% of the outgoing
Lok Sabha, even though they are more than 13% of the population.
If anything, in today’s cities the idea of “Muslims all live
together” has been created by discrimination against them and them being
forced to live in particular ghettos. Meanwhile, in voting, people
worry about their own physical safety; just as a Bihari will not vote
for a Shiv Sena candidate, most Muslims would not vote for the BJP. This
is, once again, common sense. A party which has built itself around
calling you foreigners, terrorists and anti-nationals is not likely to
win your vote.
Myth: The government favours Muslims and pampers them.
On the contrary, official data indicates systematic discrimination
against Muslims. The Sachar Committee found that availability of bus
stops, roads, bank branches etc. is lower in Muslim majority areas, even
when compared to nearby villages with a Hindu majority. Muslims on
average received only 2/3 the loan amounts disbursed to other
minorities. The proportion of Muslims living in pucca houses is lower
than the general population, both in cities and in villages, even if
compared to others at their level of poverty. Muslims form less than 3%
of the IAS officers and 4% of IPS officers, even though their
population is about 13% of the total. Overall, the Sachar Committee
concluded that on average Muslims are at roughly the same socioeconomic
level as Dalits and adivasis.
Similarly, in a study published in the Economic and Political Weekly
in 2007, the authors responded to 548 job advertisements from private
sector companies with three identical applications – one with a high
caste Hindu name, one with a Dalit name, and one with a Muslim name.
Even though the applications were otherwise identical, the Dalit name
was approximately one third less likely to get called for an interview,
and the Muslim name was two thirds less likely. In both the public and
the private sectors, Muslims are denied opportunities across the board.
Myth: But Hindus cannot buy land in Jammu and Kashmir!
Non-Kashmiris cannot buy land in J&K – just as
non-Himachalis cannot buy land in Himachal Pradesh, outsiders cannot
enter Nagaland without permission, non-Uttarakhandis can buy only small
plots in Uttarakhand, etc. Many parts of India have these regulations to
protect local populations. The issue has nothing to do with religion.
Myth: The Muslim population is increasing faster than the Hindu
population, especially because Muslim men can have many wives. Their aim
is to become the majority.
The National Family Health Survey has found that young Muslim women
have the same fertility rate as young Hindu women of the same economic
level. The slightly higher growth rate for Muslims overall is due to the
fact that, on average, Muslims are poorer than Hindus. Common sense
would also indicate this. Kerala, which has a Muslim population of
approximately 25%, also has the lowest population growth rate of any
State in the country. Poverty and lack of facilities are far more
important than religion in deciding how many children you have. The
fertility rate of Muslims in States like Tamil Nadu and Kerala is far
below that of Hindus in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar or Rajasthan, for instance.
As for Muslim men marrying many wives, it is blindingly obvious that
this can make no difference to population growth, since if one Muslim
man has two wives, that means some other man will have no wife (given
that the populations of men and women are roughly equal). Meanwhile, the
NFHS found (in the only survey that looked at this) that approximately
5.8% of Hindu men have multiple wives, while only 5.73% of Muslim men
do.
Myth: Muslims got ‘their’ country when Pakistan was created, now they should leave ‘our’ country.
The first active political leaders to talk of separate countries for
Muslims and Hindus were those who would later be part of the Hindu
Mahasabha. Bhai Paramanand, later president of the Mahasabha, demanded
this in 1905. The demand for Pakistan did not emerge from the Muslim
League until 1940, and then as well it was a political demand by a
political party. Huge numbers of Muslims opposed the idea of Pakistan,
including the biggest Islamic religious school in India – the Deoband
seminary – and President of the Congress party, Maulana Azad, who was
one of India’s greatest freedom fighters. The demand for Pakistan was a
demand by a political party, not a demand by Muslims as a whole.
In short, it’s simple: Muslims are human beings, with as much
diversity and free thinking as any other group of people. In this
climate of intense hate-mongering against Muslims, it’s necessary to
reject these racist myths and instead stand up for a world that values
human dignity.–kafila.org
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