More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Their faith was Islam but the culture they exuded had strands in it which were Hindu, not in a religious sense but in its broader cultural connotations.
(The impact of the Hindu caste system on the subcontinent’s Muslims should never be overlooked.
Unki yeh tamanna hai har ek naam badal jaaye Bigrey jo zubaan, zehniat e aam badal jaaye
Queen’s fondness for her favourite servant, Abdul Karim—whom she adoringly called ‘Munshi’—had become something of a scandal in the royal household.
Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal was able to establish in her Cambridge dissertation, The Sole Spokesman, that ‘it was the Congress which insisted on Partition. It was Jinnah who was against Partition.’
Partition, in a way, was the gift the Congress gave to the Hindu right, which in the fullness of time, is today’s Hindutva.
In his book, India Wins Freedom, Maulana Azad,
‘Jinnah may have raised the flag of Partition but now the real flag bearer was Patel’, he notes in his book.
In his book Guilty Men of India’s Partition, socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia wrote: [Congress leaders] paid no heed to Gandhiji’s wish to let the Muslim League govern the country by itself, because they were far too eager to do the business of governing themselves. In fact, they were shamelessly eager.
The only point I am trying to make is that his view of Islam was not the same as the Islam we lived.
Muslims in the south did not come as conquerors: they came as traders. It would hardly have been good business to go about proselytizing. They identified themselves totally with the language and culture of the area of their trade. They spoke the regional languages in which they have also produced great literature and music. The fruit of such cultural assimilation has promoted considerable social harmony.
The Babri Masjid was neither an important enough mosque for the Muslim community nor even a remarkable architectural wonder to warrant the controversy surrounding it.
The Shah Bano case was a landmark judgement in April 1985, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Muslim Personal Law could not stand in the way of Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code, which applied uniformly to all Indians, including Muslims.
Sheikh bhi khush rahay, shaitan bhi naraz
na ho (Please God and the Devil at the same time).
Not only was the incident itself condemnable but the manner in which it took place was reprehensible. Let me be clear: the demolition of the Babri Masjid was not a pious, solemn act of faith; it was an assault by a frenzied mob in a black mood.
Balasaheb Deoras, the elder brother of Bhaurao Deoras, was the Sarsanghchalak or the Supremo of the organization.
his primary responsibility was coordinating the RSS’s relations with the BJP and other political parties.
We have got them involved in non-issues. You and I have all got them involved in Babri Masjid; they are involved in the Shah Bano case; they are supposed to be objecting to our relations with Israel. They are agitating about Rushdie’s book. None of these are bread-and-butter issues. And you say they have been pampered. What have they got with all this so-called pampering?
Zahid e tang nazar ne mujhe kafir jaana/Aur kafir yeh samajhta hai Mussalman hoon main (The kafir thinks I am a Muslim and the mullah thinks I am a kafir).
I will recite numerous couplets written by Muslim poets in praise of Ram and in praise of Krishna. You show me one line in praise of Babur written by a Muslim poet.
Caste politics in post-Partition India made Hindu consolidation an imperative: targeting Muslims became an electoral expedient.
Nehru was never a traditionalist but he could abide by traditions to protect his political interests.
Nehru was an integrated intellectual carrying within his persona both Urdu and English cultures. Shastri was homespun.
Marwaris like Ghanshyam Das Birla, Shanti Prasad Jain and Ramnath Goenka owned the Hindustan Times, Times of India and Indian Express respectively. The jute press was therefore always in the left liberal firing line.
Rao’s role during the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 was dubious.
Rao was going through a phase when his interests as a Brahmin superseded his interests as a Congressman. It can be said without fear of being contradicted that if Rao were given the power to choose between Arjun Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee as prime minister, he would have, without any hesitation, cast his vote for Vajpayee. He was politically the most ‘Hindu’ of all Congress prime ministers.
Congress president Sitaram Kesri
Misprint since Kesri was not President as mentioned further.
The first batch of several thousands of these Muslims were loaded in about sixty lorries to take them to Sialkot.
But when they reached near Chattha on Jammu-Sialkot road, in the outskirts of the city, a large number of armed RSS men and Sikh refugees were positioned there. They were pulled out of the vehicles and killed mercilessly with the soldiers either joining [in] or looking [on] as idle spectators. The news about the massacre was kept a closely guarded secret. Next day another batch of these Muslim families were similarly boarded in the vehicles and met the same fate.
Entitling his piece ‘A Tale of Two Ethnic Cleansings in Kashmir’, Aiyar wrote: ‘Today, Jammu is a Hindu majority area. But in 1947 it had a Muslim majority. The communal riots of 1947 fell most heavily on Jammu’s Muslims; lakhs fled into what became Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. That turned Jammu’s Muslim majority into Hindu majority… In sheer scale this far exceeded the ethnic cleansing of Pandits five decades later.’
By contrast, Islam’s experience with the Hindu civilization was wholesome and led to the greatest multicultural edifice the world has known. The pity is that today this great edifice is being chipped away by electoral politics.
In Allahabad University, during the Babri Masjid–Ram Janmabhoomi agitation, I put a simple question to the packed audience consisting of teachers and students, almost equally divided between Hindus and Muslims. ‘Have the Hindus in this audience ever seen the inside of a Muslim home?’ One or two murmured ‘my father knew Persian’ or ‘my mother cooks chicken’ as evidence of his or her emancipation from religious parochialism. But, no, none of them had ever been to a Muslim home. Likewise, the Muslims in the gathering had never visited a Hindu home. At that moment, a truth hit me between my eyes.
...more
Indian Muslims must be freed from the clutches of their clerics just as Hindus need to turn away from communal politicians.
