Religious Divide

Men of sense are all of one religion. But men of sense never tell what it is.

India is a land not only blessed with cultural and linguistic conglomeration but also with multiple religion adding to the unfathomable riches of this nation’s heritage. Religions like Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Hinduism, Isalm, Judaism, Shintoism and various others decorate the Indian heritage.
Think of two Indian Muslims with two very different experiences of their homeland. While one chooses to serve the nation by joining the police force while the other feeling sorry about the state of affairs leading to poverty and inequality joins a terrorist organization. Both are Indian Muslims. They began their careers simultaneously. But they could hardly have chosen more different paths. While the policeman was taking his civil service exams, the other was being admitted as a full time activist in a fundamentalist group.
This may be true with every religion. But the truth is that the two share a fundamental burden: in the eyes of many Hindus, uly belong in India. The origins of this antagonism are centuries old. In essence, hard line Hindus regard as a national humiliation the Islamic influence and the Christian influence and for that matter any other religious influence other than Hinduism. This distrust of other religions particularly Islam has only increased since independence in 1947: modern India was founded in the Muslim-Hindu bloodletting of partition of the subcontinent, in which a million people died, and since then tensions have boiled over into three wars against Islamic neighbour Pakistan. Today, much of the religious tension in the region stems from India’s rule over Muslim dominated Kashmir in the face of strident Pakistani opposition. The war on terror and the 1998 election of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on a Hindu nationalist agenda, which focused debate on physically undoing the Mughal invasion by razing mosques built over Hindu temples, have lent a veil of legitimacy to India’s lurking anti-Muslim prejudice. “Muslims are a despised minority, disliked by a large section of the majority,” wrote Muslim commentator Firoz Bakht Ahmed in the Hindu news paper.
Indian Muslims do have their high achievers: President Abdul Kalam; Wipro chairman and India’s richest man, Azim Premji, and a host of Bollywood stars. But for every President or Muslim tech entrepreneur or movie star or policeman, there are 1,000 others with tales of discrimination in the workplace or the education system, harassment by wayward police officers or segregation into ghettos by Hindu landlords. Whatever the causes, there is no disputing the fact that Indian Muslims today are less educated, poorer and live shorter, less secure and less healthy lives than their Hindu counterparts. Census figures paint a bleak picture of their plight. In rural India, 29% of Muslims earn less than $6 a month, compared with 26% of Hindus; in the cities (where a third of all Muslims live) the gap rises to 40% vs. 22%. Some 13% of India’s population is Muslim, yet Muslims account for just 3% of government employees, and an even smaller percentage are employed by private Hindu businesses. Meanwhile, in the cities, 30% of Muslims are illiterate, vs. 19% of Hindus. Nor are any of these indices improving.
India’s Muslims are also far more likely than Hindus to be victims of violent attacks. In all the communal riots since independence, official police records reveal that three-quarters of the lives lost and properties destroyed were Muslim, a figure that climbed to 85% during last year’s riots in Gujarat. The Gujarat authorities even went so far as to price Muslim lives below those of Hindus, offering $2,050 in state compensation for Muslims killed but double that for the riots’ 58 Hindu victims. “There is often a tendency in India to treat Muslims as them rather than us,” says K.C. Tyagi, former leader of the moderate Hindu Samajwadi Party. “And this tendency does have terrible manifestations. Even today, by and large, Muslims have not been admitted to what we call the Indian mainstream.” The portion of the population affected by this systemic discrimination is staggering: India’s Muslim “minority” numbers 150 million people (vs. 850 million Hindus)—after Indonesia, the second-largest Islamic community in the world. Religious divide stems from the unequal distribution of wealth. It has its roots in violation of fundamental rights. Every demand for human rights is termed as a terrorism. W