"As soon as someone found out that I was from Pakistan, I was told that I had come from the home country: "Aap tau hamaray mulk say aye hain"." This is fictitious and outrageous statement which no Indian Muslim will ever make. This lie is the figment of the writer's imagination. Dr Zafarul-Islam Khan Editor, The Milli Gazette [India's largent Muslim newspaper in English] New Delhi
----- Original Message ----- From: Shahid To: eGroup For Muslims Around The World Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2008 9:51 AM Subject: Bismillah [IslamCity] To be a muslim in india - a liberal view To be a muslim in india Whenever India talks about its Muslims, Shahrukh Khan, Aamir Khan or Mohammad Azharduddin are mentioned. This despite the fact that they do not represent a typical Indian Muslim. Still, the few success stories that there are of Muslim bureaucrats, politicians, cricketers and film stars, are projected to the world as Indian secularism in practise. I was able to see things for myself on a recent trip to India. My interest in exploring the subject of how Muslims fare in India was fuelled by my friends from the fashion industry who visit India on regular basis. And who hold that Muslims don't have a bad deal. If that is true, I thought, why have Pakistan? Why did we fight for a separate country? And why don't we become one again? These were the questions nagging my mind when I set off to celebrate Eid in India. I spent my first few days meeting well-to-do Muslims. From film stars to politicians, most sounded like thoroughly patriotic Indians, once they discovered my origin. I could see why these people were the envy of my friends back home. They were exactly like us, they had the freedom to practise their religion as they saw fit, with the proviso that they had much more freedom and much more fun than we have here in Pakistan. But, I asked myself, are up-market Indian Muslims representative of the majority of Muslims in India? No, they are not, just as we are not representative of our majority here in Pakistan. Clearly, my friends so enamoured of the liberties Indian Muslims enjoy had never gone past the nightclubs and private parties to meet the dirt poor Muslims of the stinking streets around Delhi's Jama Masjid. I was determined that for me it would be it a true voyage of discovery. First, I went to Jaipur where my rickshaw driver took me to a Muslim locality where my co-religionists had poured in from adjoining areas looking for work. It was here that I heard tale after tale of how Indian Muslims love and cheer Pakistan's cricket team or how Imran Khan and Wasim Akram are bigger heroes for them than Kapil Dev and Tendulkar. I was also told some gory details of how Muslims suffered during and after the Babri Mosque crisis. A few statements were unforgettable. As soon as someone found out that I was from Pakistan, I was told that I had come from the home country: "Aap tau hamaray mulk say aye hain". An old woman whose two daughters and a grandson had married into Hindu families told me, "You (Pakistanis) don't value freedom. You don't know what a blessing it is to live in Muslim societies. At least when your daughter runs away with a boy you are assured that he would be a Muslim. Here we live in constant fear that Muslim girls and boys will marry outside the faith". Having regaled me with her tale of woe, she proceeded to condemn Hrithik Roshan's marriage to a Muslim girl, Suzanne Khan, and was violently opposed to Salman Khan dating Ashwariya Rai. Here was the first difference between the Muslim elites of India and ordinary folk. My next stop was Lucknow, where my host and I went to participate in a cultural event. In the middle of that event I was whisked away to see the famous sites of Lucknow. Amongst them were the famous Jamia Masjid, A beautiful Imambara next to it and the palace of Wajid Ali Shah. It was on one of these excursions that I met a local Muslim family who were "frightened" of the "hatred" they felt which was building up in India's underbelly against Muslims. "Why is it that every Indian movie or a music video will always feature a Muslim girl and a Hindu boy? Why can't Muslim men be shown dating Hindu girls?" In the past, one of my interlocuters said, Muslim actors had had to change their names to Hindu ones in order to be successful -- Yusuf Khan became Dilip Kumar, Nasim became Madhubala -- and now he said a director could not risk making a film with a Muslim boy and a Hindu girl as hero and heroine respectively. He gave examples of the films that had worked at the box office: "Bombay", "Fizza" and "Zubaida" -- all with Muslim heroines and Hindu heroes. I was in Delhi for Eid and went to the famous Jamia Masjid for my prayers. It was so like Karachi, it was uncanny. The men were in their tight fitted pajamas, churidars, whereas the women hid colourful finery beneath black burqas. There were open sales of meat and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's qawwalis were being played at a deafening pitch. This was the Chandni Chowk area with a strong Muslim population. My non-Muslim hosts called it "mini-Pakistan". Most Muslim families I met there had relatives in Pakistan and a few of them even had the Pakistani flag inside their houses. I wonder if any of Pakistan's minorities could fly the flag of a foreign country, especially India, within their homes? In Chandni Chowk, I was eagerly met and regaled with the things they liked about my country: Omar Sharif's stage plays and Shahid Afridi thrashing the Indian bowling attack. The serious talk began when I was told about police brutalities upon Muslims during search operations. I was shown scars of wounds on a few young men arrested they said, "for betting on the Pakistan cricket team". Next I visited some Muslim homes which had been burnt down during the Ayodhya crisis. The police had stood by when mobs attacked, they said. On my last night in India, I decided that I would not go out but sit back and think about all that I had seen. The Muslim elite is protected and pampered as are elites here in Pakistan. They live mostly in the big cities, I could not see that there were any significant number of Muslim landed elites. This, I suppose, is because India implemented a thorough land reform, unlike Pakistan. So those Muslims that have made it good in India have done so my dint of their own hard work. They have been able to rise through the ranks and credit for that must go to the system of education that was available to them. The Muslims that stayed aloof from the mainstream have become steadily more disenfranchised, steadily more powerless, and poorer. Are they themselves to be blamed for their pitiable state? Or is the Indian state to blame? It is a bit of both. A feeling of discrimination exists amongst a majority of Indian Muslims and the state has not been able to foster confidence in its policies. Equally, Indian Muslims hanker after a glorious past but are not prepared to change their ways to alter their abysmal present. Muslim icons Shabana Azmi and Dilip Kumar advocate that all Muslims educate their children, and plan their families. But their voices don't go far and the underprivileged Muslims of India continue to wallow in poverty, much like the Muslims of Pakistan. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Truth about Bollywood - http://www.youtube.com/v/wy-gLNSbU88 Bollywood Badboyz - http://www.youtube.com/v/S2-Sk0KdbXc&rel=1 Kashmir - The whole Truth - http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-1348259777892284067&hl=en Final Solution - Massacres in India - http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=3829364588351777769&hl=en We Muslims give them money for these atrocities by spending on indian movies and merchandise. Worldwide Musilms should be banning these Indian unislamic & antislamic products.
