By TCN News,
New Delhi: Dr Mohammad Manzoor Alam, Chairman of the Institute of Objective Studies, wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging him to take a stand for some restraint on hate speech. “We think the government should at least give some hint that it is not amused by such hate speech or violence directed against an Indian community,” he wrote in the letter dated July 28, a day before Eid.
Full Text of the Letter:
July 28, 2014
Shri Narendra Modi
Prime Minister of India
New Delhi
Dear Sir,
I hope it finds you well.
We all know you have little time left after your long hours of work to build the country and take it to new heights of glory. Keeping the paucity of your time, I make this correspondence brief.
Men who have to meet great targets often miss the smaller details, which are not really small for the people and do affect them deeply. A country is not known by its geographical boundaries alone, but by the quality of its people.
Indian Muslims, being Indian, naturally feel the situation in the country. Incidents like the lynching of a young Muslim techie in Pune recently without any rhyme or reason or the public threat (carried in newspapers) by Shri Ashok Singhal are taken as alarming.
Matters were not helped when Shri Parveen Togadia said, addressing Muslims, “You have forgotten Gujarat 2002 but you must not have forgotten Muzaffarnagar of last year.” These certainly are not reassuring words for us.
I hope we are not being too assertive if we hope for some restraint on hate speech and its actual manifestation like the lynching of the techie, or other forms of hostile behaviour like the force-feeding of a Muslim on fast by honourable MPs.
We think the government should at least give some hint that it is not amused by such hate speech or violence directed against an Indian community.
The new government’s stance on Palestine is radically different from that of Mahatma Gandhi, who said as England was for the English; France for French, Palestine too was for Palestinians. The Indian state since then had been for the establishment of a Palestinian state side by side with Israel. Now we are seeing a subtle dilution of the stance as was evident from Ms. Sushma Swaraj’s aversion to a full-fledged debate in Parliament.
We had expected a more pro-active policy keeping in view the long history of Arab support for India’s freedom, its role on the world stage and its peace and prosperity. The Arabs also happen to be our third largest business partner, the source of 70 per cent of our oil imports and a substantial amount of our foreign exchange earnings through remittances of hundreds of thousands of Indians working in that region. This calls for continuity in our foreign policy, not a break.
As a rising nation all sections of Indians expect to live together in harmony in their own way with their ethnic, religious and regional identities as well, without any hegemony. This is the order of things envisaged by the Founding Fathers of the Constitution and this is the order that the state has to preserve.
We are at the end of the holy month of Ramazan and Eid festival is only hours away. Happy Eid for your, your near and dear ones and the country as a whole.
With regards,
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Mohammad Manzoor Alam
Chairman