By TCN Staff Writer,
New Delhi: The National Commission for Minorities was created to fight forces that threatened to rob India of its prized attribute, its secularism. Why then is it looking away from its raison d’être? Is it because, being a construct of the state, it can do precious little to indict the state? Despite of repeatedly finding that our communal biases have been institutionalized, why hasn’t the NCM been able to do anything significant to rein it?
These questions were raised by noted film personality Mahesh Bhatt at the Annual Conference of the National Commission For Minorities on 18th March at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi.
“Is the NCM a body created to be a pain-killer and not a cure? Is its only job to numb the pain of nation temporarily but do nothing to fix it? Is it merely a hope-peddler? Friends of mine fighting communal forces at great personal risk wonder what the NCM can really do to uproot the cancer that rots within our core.
The need of the hour, ladies and Gentlemen, is for the National Commission for Minorities to shed its timidity. It needs audacity, audacity and more audacity,” said Bhatt who was Chief Guest at the conference.
The NCM, he said, has to play a more adversarial role in these trying times. It needs to lock horns with the forces that it had been created to fight.
Outspoken on social and human rights issues, Mahesh Bhatt stressed that the wounded psyche of the minority needs a healing touch. “It is the birth right of every Indian to be cared for both economically and physically. When that does not happen the individual and the community feels that the leadership do not think that they are worthy of it. The community is now beginning to blame itself for the failure of the leadership. Their self esteem needs a boost,” he said.
Text of Mahesh Bhatt’s speech:
In 2002 – immediately after the blood bath in Gujarat in which 2000 people died, I heard the then Prime Minister, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee give a talk about the secular core of India still being intact. At that time these were the thoughts that came to my mind: People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction. And anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead, turns himself into a monster.
That was in 2002. The year now is 2011. I am very sorry to say, things haven’t changed much. Then, the likes of people like me lamented that the monumental tragedy of Gujarat was possible because of the apathy of the right wing Government at the centre and the collusion of the state.
But since 2004, a Government chosen by us, and a government which has historically sworn to stitch together the tattered fabric of secular India, has been in power. Yet, the bitter truth is that in spite of this Government claiming that today’s India is a booming India, the fact is that we are a fallen nation. A nation from which everything genuine seems to have disappeared.
Friends, we have become a ‘sound byte society’. A society which confuses our ambitions to be our reality. You are what you do, not what you say you want to do. The political passivity of our people, bred by a culture of illusion, is exploited by some of our leaders.
These leaders present themselves to a submissive minority as saviours. How long will our helpless minorities continue to be narcotized by leaders who hypnotize them with their promises of utopia? By their ‘heaven is just around the corner’ talk?
By drawing a curtain of fantasy over an ugly truth, we cannot alter reality. Doing that is like turning the lights off in a room to escape a deadly snake.
Is denial the only way in which we as a nation are going to deal with a harsh reality that our minorities have to live day in and day out?
Will we let the world of illusions strangle the grim reality? The reality that we have not delivered to the minority the promises that Nehru, in his historical inaugural speech made to the nation? The promise that there will be no discrimination on the basis of religion?
The National Commission for Minorities was created to fight forces that threatened to rob India of its prized attribute, its secularism.
Why then is it looking away from its raison d’être? Is it because, being a construct of the state, it can do precious little to indict the state? Despite of repeatedly finding that our communal biases have been institutionalized, why hasn’t the NCM been able to do anything significant to rein it?
Is the NCM a body created to be a pain-killer and not a cure? Is its only job to numb the pain of nation temporarily but do nothing to fix it?
Is it merely a hope-peddler? Friends of mine fighting communal forces at great personal risk wonder what the NCM can really do to uproot the cancer that rots within our core.
The need of the hour, ladies and Gentlemen, is for the National Commission for Minorities to shed its timidity.
It needs audacity, audacity and more audacity.
It has to play a more adversarial role in these trying times. It needs to lock horns with the forces that it had been created to fight.
An angry Muslim once said to me: We’ve learnt betrayal because our nation has betrayed us. The job of leaders, like parents, is to keep the minority safe. To nurture them, to help them thrive. Instead, for the last 63 years the leadership has taught us both through covert and overt abuse and abandonment that we as Muslims do not deserve to feel safe. We are made to feel that perhaps we don’t deserve take up space in this country.
The feeling you have left the Muslims with is: “They are wrong, they are bad, they are unworthy and that they don’t deserve all that the others can claim.
“This wounded psyche of the minority needs a healing touch. It is the birth right of every Indian to be cared for both economically and physically. When that does not happen the individual and the community feels that the leadership do not think that they are worthy of it. The community is now beginning to blame itself for the failure of the leadership. Their self esteem needs a boost.
I knew a woman who used to blame herself every time her drunken husband beat her.
The community is becoming like that woman. Can anything be done or is the dream of a secular India merely just a mirage created by our founding fathers?
A mirage that we are destined to walk towards but never reach!!