By Md Farrukh Ilyas, TwoCircles.net
“If Muslims become more than 30% of the population, that country is in danger,” said a leader of the Rajya Sabha member on a show by the international media outlet The Vice. The RS member was none other than Subramanian Swamy of BJP. India being home to the 2nd largest population of Muslims in the world with 200 million Muslims in the population mass of 1.3 billion makes the path towards the attainment of beliefs in right to equality, justice and freedom a just one.
The constitution of India is the fiercest pillar to support the will and social composition of the minorities in India. The law of the land, the guide book to law and rights to the citizens of India, the constitution of India, doesn’t discriminate against any individual citizen of the country in terms of religion, colours, identity etc. India harbors a lot in its home, it’s a country with the egalitarian concepts of citizenship access to the national public policy and its distributions amongst them. Things and history both have changed according to the time and the pattern of politics.
The institutional induction of Islamophobia in the politics and in the lives of common citizens in India is on the pinnacle. There are several players who have benefited from this plot of the story and the media is one of them. The media is at the top of this chain and assists the political clan and indulges in propaganda to take the helm of its success in civil society.
Islamophobia is eating up the basic tenets of India’s stand in the global frame of accepting and celebrating pluralism, tolerance and Gandhism in the nation.
History will go on record for the generations to come who shall witness in near future that Islamophobia was the greatest assault on the foundational values of the constitution and the idea of people of India. A nation is on the path forward to development when its social, political and economic institutions are regulated through the legislature and executive with an intention to serve the society with egalitarian motives, and any amount of bigotry will lead to the fatal abyss of the national interest to run for the larger goals.
Unfortunately, the hatred towards selective minorities is being institutionalized through political means and self-interest in order to assist the selective good in the political class.
“A just society is that society in which ascending sense of reverence and descending sense of contempt is dissolved into the creation of a compassionate society,” said Dr BR Ambedkar, in his book, The Annihilation of Caste.
The question to ponder is, “Where and how are the ascending sense of reverence and the descending sense of contempt used in the Indian civil society?” The challenge with Indian citizens and civil society is, will the politically privileged class ever be able to establish a compassionate society in the long run? Is India being governed by obtrusive and obscene forces? The quest to witness constitutionalism as sense and belief is the need of the hour.
The political distortion of civil society
The manufacturing of hate and the creation of instilling a feeling of otherness in civil society is very cunningly done by the political class, who sit at the helm of power. The politics in India has always been of a divisive nature. The application of ideologies is severely hardcore that goes right straight to an individual that drives him to take up hatred against one particular community. This is done with a legitimate sense of appreciation and pride, without the fear of the clutches of the rule of law.
“All people are not equal, article 14 is for the equals, and Muslims are in the wrong category,” said the Swamy in the same show. This is where the buck should start because it’s where the defined pattern of creating the society of hatred and dismissing the values of the constitution of India starts. If India fails here, future India will deny facing the nation of Gandhism and the justice and equality of BR Ambedkar. The roots to Islamophobia are from the rooms of divisive politics.
The recent global break out of Coronavirus has left the world into a standstill, putting social, political and economic activities at halt. The only universal ambitions of the world are now to fight the virus and to survive.
But the case in India is something different and astoundingly unbelievable. The recent case of Nizamuddin Markaz, and how Indian society and political class responded to it shows how Islamophobic the society has become. The consequence of the political statements added to this Islamophobia and the social media went into giving the results of those waiting for political opportunism. Twitter went on to trend with #CoronaJihad which appeared nearly 300,000 times and was trended by 165 million people on Twitter. This will assist the young minds of the nation to perceive the divisive politics in the long run. The future is dismal, as we forget to address the fundamental questions, how hate is manufactured against a particular community? Where is the feeling of constitutionalism? How will democracy be addressed to the minorities facing inequality, injustice and hate? These questions demand serious answers. The idea of India and inclusiveness in the nation is at stake.
The well-transformed fear of Islamophobia has already ensconced in deep places of civil society in India. It has penetrated into the breadth and length of governance in the nation, and there is no check to this. It has been made legitimate and is institutionally practiced. A man with his wife in Rajasthan was denied access to basic health by the doctors for her delivery and her child died. She was denied for being Muslim. This should tremble your soul. As a believer in the constitution of India, justice and equality are under assault.
The nation is passing through a lean phase in time of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are all in this together, but along the way, it’s our utmost duty and obligation to address Islamophobia in our society. Islamophobia runs like blood in our veins, we share lives with those who hate Muslims and we don’t recognize this in the first place. The cultivation of hate starts from an individual before it becomes a political agenda accepted by the civil society. If intolerance against a community is entrenched so much in the social, political and economic life of an individual, it will only lead to more hate. The tides of hate and the production of hate-mongering will be an unimaginable strain for the constitution of India to serve its values for the citizens of the country. The country needs a collective conscience ignoring the divisive politics in India. The divisive politics will impact the philosophy of the preamble and this philosophy shall cease to exist.