Dear Mr Prime Minister,

We must sympathise with you in your hour of truthful confession when you blurted out the inner working of your government and your party by saying that Muslims must have the first claim on (development) resources. All the subsequent explanations from your office could not wash the egg on your face. The truth is that your government and your party are so bent on appeasing the Muslim vote-bank that the public was right in interpreting your remark at the NDC meeting to mean what it really meant - one more step in Muslim appeasement at the cost of the nation.

The media has not gone wrong. For the last two years and more your party has made placating Muslims a significant principle of your policies. You took no action when a Muslim minister openly called for murdering a certain Danish cartoonist and offered a huge reward for his head. Your party did not even condemn the open call. You succumbed to pressure from Muslim communalists and the Left and did not invite US President George W. Bush to address Parliament, a courtesy that is otherwise extended to many heads of state. The only reason was that such an invitation would wound the sensitivities of the Muslims in the country for what the United States has done in Afghanistan and Iraq. Can you deny that the present cordial relations that India has with Afghanistan would not have been possible if the Taliban government was still ruling in Kabul?

As for Iraq, let us thank the Volcker report for exposing the cordial relations (and some commerce) that your party had maintained with Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime. Maybe it was a solo operation by Natwar Singh of drawing some benefits from this relationship. But you cannot deny the relationship itself and the fact that a lot was going on between the two of you. This exposé is responsible for the public belief that there is some truth in Natwar Singh's lament that he has been made a sacrificial goat.

May I suggest that you do not take the easy route to get out of a bad situation by blaming the media? Please read your speech at the NDC once again. When you mentioned "they must have the first claim" was the media wrong in interpreting it as Muslims must have the first claim? In the previous sentence you did emphasise that Muslims should be "empowered" to get an equal share of the fruits of development, and not just minorities. Your appointment of the Sachar Committee to investigate the status of Muslims, your government's and party's repeated call for reservation for Muslims as a whole and not for the really needy among them, your proposal to fence the proposed Muslim and other reservation plans from judicial scrutiny by invoking the protection of the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution in which these legislations would be parked, etc., all go to show that you said what you meant: that Muslims should have the first claim on our national resources.

It is a pity that at one point in your career as Prime Minister you addressed the Muslim clerics and asked them to promote girls' education in their community, but soon after reverted to cater to Muslim communalism on issues like madrasas. Your government refuses to see the writing on the wall - that the jihadi mindset among a large section of the Muslim community is responsible for the turmoil within it, and that this is nurtured and directed by the free flow of Saudi and Iranian funds into the communalists' main weapon, the madrasas. If you have any doubt about how the community has been kept undeveloped, poor and angry, please read the recent book by William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal, in which he analyses the Muslim response to the end of the events of 1857 and the death of the Mughal empire. He shows how the majority of Muslims were led into an attitude of sulking and madrasa religious education became the only remedy for them, and how this keeps them backward for ever.

Mr Prime Minister, you too belonged to a poor village family, but your parents decided to get you into the formal education system even though a secondary school meant walking long distance every day. If instead of this formal school your parents had chosen some religious teaching for you, would you have blossomed as an economist of standing? Your Sachar Committee has gone overboard and wants formal recognition of the "degrees" conferred by these madrasas. It is typical of such recommendations that instead of pushing the community into the mainstream of enlightenment, they seek to confine them into the ghetto of religious orthodoxy and isolationism.

I wish you had utilised the NDC platform to highlight the real reason behind the backwardness of the Muslim minority. How can the community gain access to development funds if it refuses to send children, especially girls, to formal schools where they will be exposed to mainstream students, and realise what level of competence they must acquire to beat the competition and benefit in the modern milieu? By demanding "first priority" for Muslims in development funds, even if they prefer their ghetto mentality, are you and your party really helping the community? Or is it not more likely that by keeping it confined and fearful, you and your party are frightening them into voting for you en masse? The community is being herded into a state of permanent anger for which its leaders blame not only the bulk of Indians but also the whole developed world.

In the north as well as in the south of the country, the community's icons are Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Even the blind cannot miss the way these icons are projected within the community by the "secularists" to keep Muslim anger at a boiling point. And you are claiming that you will fight terrorism. By repeated statements like the one you made at the NDC meeting, you are at the same time allying with the ghetto mindset of the community. How long can you go on betraying the very community you are seeking to benefit? You are thus risking the growth of a second partition mindset. By demanding a first priority on development funds for a community identified by its religion, by asking for reservations based on religion, are you not promoting the same historic route that the Muslim League took between 1920 and 1947 - separate electorate, refusal to integrate with the mainstream, then a separate country? Is it too much to expect you look at all this once again; against these grim prospects?

With kind regards,
Yours sincerely

Balbir K. Punj

Courtesy: Asian Age, December 22, 2006