It is good to feel for the poor and the downtrodden but the remedy for alleviating poverty lies not in encouraging separatism, howsoever well-meant, but in encouraging togetherness down to the last man. All else is folly. The Congress-led UPA government should stop playing with the lives of people. We have had enough of this tomfoolery.

On March 23, 2007 fell the 76th anniversary of the martyrdom of Sardar Bhagat Singh. On that day in 1931 Bhagat Singh, along with his two colleagues, Sukhdev and Rajguru, was hanged. Does anybody remember Bhagat Singh or his colleagues or, for that matter, the scores of patriots who gave their lives like Mallappa Dhanashetty and Jagannath Shinde? Do names like those of Khudiram Bose, Madanlal Dhingra, Jatindranath Das or Kartar Singh Sarabha ring a bell in the minds and hearts of the GenNext? Hardly! Why, one should ask, did they give their lives for? That a Nehru dynasty should be established in Delhi? That one third of rural Indian must live on less than Rs 12 a day? That by 2006 there should be more than 8,200 CBI cases awaiting trial? That on the 75th anniversary of their hanging, there should be a mind-boggling 2,92, 10,015 cases-or nearly three crore of them-pending before our courts, from the Supreme Court downwards? That a Congress Party should divide the country on religious lines-something that M.A. Jinnah accomplished after much bloodshed?

What is all this silly talk about minorities? When a single-Bench of the Allahabad High Court ruled that in UP, Muslims do not constitute a minority, there was a hue and cry among our secularists who would rather see this country divided yet again on religious lines, several times over, than see that justice is done to people. Let us forget that as of now a Special Appeals Bench of the same Allahabad High Court has stayed the order of the single-judge Bench. That was only to be expected. But does anybody remember history, especially the entire period spreading for some thousand years from 1001 AD when Muslim invaders and later their successors ruled the country? Were Muslims then in a minority? Forget the Mughals: Think of the time when Tipu Sultan ruled Mysore for a short period of time when Hindus were treated like slaves and in order to survive, even his Hindu Minister, Poorniah had to give away his niece to Tipu's harem and state coins were issued in the name of Islam? Or think of the long reign of Nizams in Hyderabad State when Urdu was compulsory subject for study and Hindus had to kowtow before their Muslim master? That was only to end after India wrested the state from the Nizam's thugs and united the country.

Does anyone-including A.R.Antulay, the once-disgraced former Chief Minister of Maharashtra and now, under the UPA government, Minister of Minority Affairs, realise how Hindus lived in fear and often trauma, under Muslim rule? Did the Vijayanagar Hindus kings enslave Muslims of demolish their masjids? Did Shivaji, under whom all Maharashtra became one, do so?

If the British conceived the idea of minorities, they had reason enough to do so. They wanted to divide India perpetually and pitch Hindus against Muslims and vice versa. Is that what the UPA Government wants to do to remain in power? Haven't we had enough of V.P.Singhs? Is this secularism? Of course, there are poor Muslims. But then there also are poor Hindus. This country cannot be divided along Hindu-Muslim lines. Or on majority-minority lines. Anyone who does so is doing intense harm to the country and this should be stated in clear and loud tones. There are no such people as Hindu Indians and Muslim Indians. The very concept is abominable. India is inhabited by just one people-Indians.

The country was named Hindustan not be Hindus but by Muslim invaders and in a way they were right. But India has only one people and they are Indians. And the sooner the Congress-led UPA government realises this, the better for all concerned. Muslim rulers enforced the jazia-a foul tax-specially on the Hindus.

By saying that Muslims should be given special treatment, the UPA government, oddly enough, is unconsciously imposing a new kind of jazia tax on Hindus. What is worse, by constantly reminding Muslims in India that they are a minority, the UPA government is making them self-conscious about their religions affiliation and not to their oneness with the rest of the people. To deliberately make a people look inwards and treat them as separate entities is to not only damage the social fabric of India but, even worse, to destroy the essential unity of the country.

When will India be truly secular? If the UPA government wants to help people belonging to one community that help should be on par with the help given to all other communities, irrespective of their religion or creed. That will make the Muslims conscious of their Indianness, not of their Islamic identity. Besides, how long is the government going to practise religious separatism? For a decade? For two decades? For half a century? When the Constitution was promulgated under the guidance of none other than Dr B.R. Ambedkar, reservations were supposed to end in a decade. It is now sixty years since the Constitution was passed and we are still talking of reservations for SCs, STs, and OBCs. Reservation has become a joke and a tired joke at that.

One can understand the desire to help the SCs, etc. Hindus, especially those in the upper crust, have a guilty complex in this regard of having persecuted the SCs and other 'low' castes for centuries. But OBCs have done quite well in recent years. And in any event, they outnumber the so-called upper castes pretty substantially as the voting patterns show. The topmost caste, in reality, is a minority. Are we, then, to treat them like one? Minoritism is a mind-set that should under no circumstances be promoted. It is pure communalism. Does one realise that the Constituent. Assembly adopted a resolution on April 3, 1948 which clearly laid down that "communalism should be eliminated from Indian life" and that it was impermissible to mix religion with politics?

Isn't minoritism another face of communalism, no matter what saintly looks we put on to fool the multitudes? The Muslims were betrayed not by Hindus but by their own well-to-do co-religionists, who ran away to Pakistan when that state was formed, leaving their poor in the lurch. They deserve help, certainly. But they should be helped in a way which would enrich their sense of unity with the rest of the people and not strengthen their sense of Islamic identity. By doing so we are only harming the Muslims in the long run. It is good to feel for the poor and the downtrodden but the remedy for alleviating poverty lies not in encouraging separatism, howsoever well-meant, but in encouraging togetherness down to the last man. All else is folly. The Congress-led UPA government should stop playing with the lives of people. We have had enough of this tomfoolery.

Courtesy: www.organiser.org, May 06, 2007