In August 1947 India was partitioned into two different nations, namely India and Pakistan. The basis of Partition of India by the British rulers on the unyielding demand of the Muslim League was on religious grounds and on religious grounds only. The founder of the Muslim League was a proponent of the infamous ‘Two Nation Theory’ and he stoutly maintained that the seeds of this pernicious theory were laid the day the first Muslim invaders landed in India. His now much quoted August 11, 1947 speech to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan to prove his liberalist credentials by the so called secularists was an afterthought. His demand for Pakistan as an independent homeland for Indian Muslims arose on religious grounds and he used the basis of Muslim ‘separatism’ as a tool to achieve his political ambitions.

Jinnah was vehement that the new nation state of India after Partition should assume the name of ‘Hindustan’ as an anti-thesis of the Muslim nation state of Pakistan so that the criticism against him of creating a theocratic Muslim state could be neutralized.

India wisely did not fall into this trap and insisted that it would continue to be termed as India or Bharat as both these terms did not carry any religious connotations. The aim was to stress India’s secular credentials as a secular Republic which would not promote any religious divisiveness in its citizenry.

It was a noble objective and an admirable one at that and should have been maintained in its most purist form as the binding principle of the Indian Republic. But can we maintain that this noble principle has been maintained honestly in the last sixty years?

Sixty years down the line from India’s independence one sadly and regretfully has to assert that the 1947 Partition of India stands perpetuated even today by India’s so called secularists and the Indian media and India’s fake liberalist glitterati. Secularism always existed in an existential form for centuries with Hindus and Muslims following a tolerating co-existence without any political engineering by the state of the day. In the newly independent India there were no compulsions to deviate from this time-tested phenomenon.

Sixty tears down the line, India presents a picture today where the divisiveness inflicted by the Partition of India have found new ‘avatars’ amongst the so called secularists, the Indian media and the liberalist glitterati of India . ‘Secularism’ today is no longer the time-tested existential phenomenon but debased and degraded to a political tool of exploitation for electoral gains.

In the forefront of this political exploitation and which makes the most noises on this account is the party which claims inaccurately that it is the oldest political party of India, namely the Congress Party. It forgets that till 1947 it was not a political party but a freedom movement and it was only in 1947 that it emerged as a political party after many splinters had broken off.

Faced with a dilution of its political strength the new Congress Party started perfecting ‘secularism’ as a political tool for electoral gains. It started projecting itself as the ‘messiah’ of the Indian Muslims who had elected to stay back in India and rejected Jinnah’s two nation theory. Exploiting ‘secularism’ as a political tool, the Congress Party started promoting the Indian Muslim ‘separatism’ under the guise of protecting the minority rights. If it was protecting minority rights then there were Indian Christians , Sikhs and Buddhists who should have also been addressed. How were the Indian Muslims threatened when from 1947 to 1977 India was ruled by the Congress Party itself? Who were those from whom the Congress Party was trying to protect the Indian Muslims?

The ‘mantra’ that the Congress Party tried to exploit was soon picked by the regional parties trying to make their mark on the Indian political scene. With the Hindu vote split between various political parties, the Congress Party and the regional parties now looked to capture the Indian Muslim as a consolidated vote bank. For this purpose the Congress Party used the Indian Muslim theocratic leaders to gain Indian Muslim votes conveniently forgetting that it was the same class which fostered and nourished the Muslim League. In the process the progressive elements amongst the Muslims in India were sidelined and preventing the integration and assimilation of the Indian Muslims in the Indian Republic.

Not to be outdone, the Indian media took their cues from the ruling party and followed suit. A spin was constantly given by them and the so called liberalist glitterati that the Indian Muslims were a neglected lot and were being discriminated against. If that was true then it was certainly not the Hindu majority that was responsible for this neglect but the so called secularists who dominated India’s political fabric.

What is the picture today? The Congress Party in power is following blatant appeasement policies towards the Indian Muslims. The present Congress President and the present Prime Minister are in the forefront of crafting special packages for the Indian Muslim minority only. The Congress Party has today as its coalition partners communal parties like the Indian Muslim League and the MIM of Hyderabad. Is that secularism? Or is it crass political opportunism?

India’s counter-terrorism policies are also being hampered by the Congress Government being in a state of denial that the fringe elements of the Indian Muslim community stands subverted from across our borders on religious grounds. The state- sponsors of terrorism from across the borders is a fact and equally is the fact that the entire logistic support and growing execution today is from within India from the sleeper cells comprising the fringe elements in Indian Muslim neighborhoods.

The most depressing picture is that after sixty years of molly-coddling of the Indian Muslim community by the so called secularists they still remain backward raising doubts on the scores of secularist governments that have abounded in India in the last sixty years. The stage has been reached where the Indian Muslim community has now started demanding special reservations in every sector, they do not want uniform Indian codes to govern them and lately demands for their being governed by Shariah laws only. Soon there would be demands for separate electorates and possibly independence for Muslim majority areas.

If all of the above comes around then India’s so called secularists, the Indian media and the liberalist glitterati are to be blamed for encouraging Indian Muslim separatism rather than making sincere efforts to promote and motivate the Indian Muslims for assimilation in an all inclusive India that surely exists. The 1947 Partition of India stands perpetuated by this unholy trio for narrow political gains.  

September 1, 2007

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