A handful of thoughts

Secularism in India as it stands now at the hands of politicians, commoners and terrorists, is a much debated and sensitive topic. But if we cast a thoughtful look backwards in time, we’ll see that India alone has been the breeding ground for three religions - Hinduisim, Buddhism and Jainism. Interestingly, Buddhism and Jainism came up almost at the same time. Mahavira and Gautam Buddha if we remember, were contemporaries. Much later in history, the Muslim kings in India did violate Hindu values, devastated temples and built up mosques over their ruins. But even then, some kind of stability, the willingness to coexist in peace, was not totally lost.

Mostly with the coming up of the Muslim League and the firebrand ‘minority campaign’ initiated by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, did the Hindu - Muslim tension began taking shape. The final nail in the coffin obviously was the partition of India and Pakistan on the basis of religion. It is in fact funny to think that people as intelligent as Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru could even think of uniting two countries thousands of kilometres apart from each other (Pakistan and Bangladesh) just because their populace follow the same religion. But that was a separate and highly localised problem. But now, under the aegis of Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaida, etc., non-Muslims by and large have started blacklisting the religion as a whole. Generalisation is quite a public vice but it is increasingly becoming quite difficult to defend them.

I feel, the real problem with the religion however lies in the absence of  a middle class among them.  At least in India, the Muslims are either very very rich, or are appalingly poor. Muslim school teachers, clerks are as rare as good roads in India. One can only find them in cities wih Muslim majority, like Hyderabad, Lucknow, etc. By and large, they are either entrepreneurs, CEOs or poor landless labourers. It is really not in my capacity to analyse why there is such a discrepancy in their social structure, but that is one of the reasons that have come up my mind while biting my teeth into the overwhelming lack of enlightenment,  rationale or education among them. And what is worse, noone within their religion is even willing to look inside into these problems, let alone solving them. Perhaps we need another messiah to help them recognise the alternatives to guns, grenades and RDX; or one who would help them treat religion as a political identity, one that can be spread and promoted strategically as part of a holistic structure.