[Reader-list] Muslims -- India's new 'untouchables'

[Pawan Durani]

Naeem ,

Be assured...non of commies and liberals would try to correct you........And
if they would they wouldn't be intellectual liberals....

Pawan

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 7:55 AM, Naeem Mohaiemen
<naeem.mohaiemen at gmail.com>wrote:

> Muslims -- India's new 'untouchables'
> The condition of the country's Muslims has deteriorated, and the world
> has overlooked the nation's problems.
>
> By Asra Q. Nomani
> December 1, 2008
>
> The news of the attacks in Mumbai eerily took me back to a quiet
> morning two years ago when I sat in Room 721 of the Taj Mahal Palace &
> Tower hotel, reading the morning newspaper, fearing just the kind of
> violence that has now exploded in the city of my birth. The headlines
> recounted how the socioeconomic condition of the people of my
> ancestry, Muslims in India, had fallen below that of the Hindu caste
> traditionally called "untouchables," according to a government report.
>
> "Muslims are India's new untouchables," I said sadly to my mother, in
> the room with me. "India is going to explode if it doesn't take care
> of them." Now, indeed, alas it has. And shattered in the process is
> the myth of India's thriving secular democracy.
>
> Mumbai police said over the weekend that the only gunman they'd
> captured during the attacks -- which left nearly 200 dead and more
> than 300 wounded -- claimed to belong to a Pakistani militant group.
> But even if the trouble was imported, the violence will most certainly
> turn a spotlight of suspicion on Muslims in India. Already, my
> relatives are hunkered down for a sectarian backlash they expect from
> anti-terrorism agencies, police and angry Hindu fundamentalists.
>
> India, long championed as a model of pluralism, used to be an example
> of how Muslims can coexist and thrive even as a minority population.
> My extended family prospered as part of an educated, middle class. My
> parents, who settled in the United States in the 1960s when my father
> pursued a doctorate at Rutgers University, were part of India's
> successful diaspora. I love India, and on that trip, I wanted to show
> it off to my son, Shibli, then age 4.
>
> But on that visit, across India from Mumbai to the southern state of
> Tamil Nadu and north to Lucknow, the hub of Muslim culture, I was
> deeply saddened. Talking to vegetable vendors, artisans and
> businessmen, I heard about how the condition of Muslims had
> deteriorated. They had become largely disenfranchised, poor, jobless
> and uneducated. Their tales echoed those I'd heard on previous trips,
> when my extended family recounted their humiliating experiences with
> bureaucratic, housing, job and educational discrimination.
>
> Indeed, the government report I read about in the newspapers two years
> ago acknowledged that Muslims in India had become "backward." "Fearing
> for their security," the report said, "Muslims are increasingly
> resorting to living in ghettos around the country." Branding of
> Muslims as anti-national, terrorists and agents of Pakistan "has a
> depressing effect on their p syche," the report said, noting Muslims
> live in "a sense of despair and suspicion."
>
> According to the report, produced by a committee led by a former
> Indian chief justice, Rajender Sachar, Muslims were now worse off than
> the Dalit caste, or those called untouchables.
>
> Some 52% of Muslim men were unemployed, compared with 47% of Dalit men.
>
> Among Muslim women, 91% were unemployed, compared with 77% of Dalit women.
>
> Almost half of Muslims over the age of 46 couldn't read or write.
>
> While making up 11% of the population, Muslims accounted for 40% of
> India's prison population.
>
> Meanwhile, they held less than 5% of government jobs.
>
> The Sachar committee report recommended creating a commission to
> remedy the systemic discrimination and promote affirmative-action
> programs. So far, very few of the recommendations have been put in
> place.
>
> Since reading the report, I have feared that Islamic militancy would
> be born out of such despair. Even if last week's terrorist plot was
> hatched outside India, a cycle of sectarian violence could break out
> in the country and push some disenfranchised Muslim youth to join
> militant groups using hot-button issues like Israel and Kashmir as
> inspiration.
>
> What has irked me these last years is how the world has glossed over
> India's problems. In 2006, for instance, former U.S. Defense Secretary
> William Cohen, whose Cohen Group invests heavily in India, said the
> U.S. and India were "perfect partners" because of their "multiethnic
> and secular democracies." When I asked to interview Cohen about the
> socioeconomic condition of Muslims, his public relations staffer said
> that conversation was too "in the weeds." But, to me, the condition of
> Muslims needs frank and open discussion if there is to be any hope of
> stemming Islamic radicalism and realizing true secular democracy in
> the country.
>
> India's 150 million Muslims represent the second-largest Muslim
> population in the world, smaller only than Indonesia's 190 million
> Muslims. That is just bigger than Pakistan's 140 million Muslims or
> the entire population of Arab Muslims, which numbers about 140
> million. U.S. intelligence reports continually warn that economic,
> social and political discontent are catalysts for radicalism, so we
> would be naive to continue to ignore this potential threat to the
> national security of not just India but the United States.
>
> Throughout my 2006 journey, I found the idea of India's potential for
> danger unavoidable. On one leg, my son tucked safely in bed with my
> mother in our Taj hotel room, I went out to watch the filming of "A
> Mighty Heart," the movie about the murder of Wall Street Journal
> reporter Daniel Pearl by Muslim militants in Pakistan. When the
> location scouts needed to replicate the treacherous streets of
> Karachi's militant Islamist culture, they didn't have to go far. They
> found the perfect spot in a poor Muslim neighborhood of Mumbai.
>
> Asra Q. Nomani is the author of "Standing Alone: An American Woman's
> Struggle for the Soul of Islam."
>
>
> Please click the following link and read the comments on above article:
>
> http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oew-nom1-2008dec01,0,2169717.graffitiboard
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