I am really obliged to Bang Galore for this timely reminder. Without contradicting him, in a spirit of academic enquiry, may I present the following facts:
- Other minorities in India include the Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists among religions; the forest tribals, Santhals and Oraons, among the section protected in the Constitution as Scheduled Tribes; the tribes of the North-East, including the residents of Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Tripura, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh, and the Bodo, Koch and a few others in Assam; the Scheduled Castes; the Dravidians, specifically the Tamilians.
- The Sikhs, after a turbulent political history, where one segment, the Jat Sikhs, stood for a greater independence for themselves, veered off into violence due to mis-handling by Zail Singh, and cost India several blood-baths before being brought under control.
- The Christians and Buddhists are too weak to mobilise themselves, although the Parivar has made its intentions clear.
- I think the Santhals and Oraons have made their point clearly, beyond any further doubt. This is not the forum for us to go deep into these matters; it is a defence forum, not a laundry.
- 37 separate movements and insurgencies have been identified, of various degrees of commitment and seriousness, in the tribal areas of the North-east.
- As for the Scheduled Castes, surely, by now, comment is superfluous? Mayawati has shown that she understands power, and the exercise of power, and the authority that the support of such a huge mass gives her. This was one major source of strength for Gandhi, retained from the independence coalition by the Congress,and lost by them by sheer neglect and cynical exploitation.
- The Tamils deserve special mention. At one stage, they seemed far more affected by centrifugal forces than any other nation within India. Their strong sense of identity equipped them, above all other Dravidian groups, to seek a greater place under the Sun for themselves.That they have stayed on peacefully is due to the compromise that has evolved, whereby the Dravidian parties rule supreme, only alternating power among themselves. I have no explanation for this alternation; only a Cho can tell us, and Cho has sold out.
Thank you for presenting the above facts . My head hurts from reading through all of them. It hurts even more when I try to figure out what the point here is?
Just kidding !
But Hobbes has insisted that you must be replied to and therefore I comply with his orders.
This is not the forum for us to go deep into these matters; it is a defence forum, not a laundry
Yet a laundry is what it has become! We were discussing whether shirts of different colours can be washed together & here you bring in pants,T shirts,woollens,denims,skirts,sarees, towels,undergarments & what not pointing out that they are all clothes and further muddy the question.
What does any of the above have to do with the TNT? If your point is that they are all minorities, why not go further & say that each one of us is in fact in a minority somewhere or the other?
You made this remark when you were referring to Muslims in India & Hindus in Bangladesh..
What we sometimes fail to understand is what happens to a minority in psychological terms
I pointed out that other minorities in India did not suffer from the same affliction in terms of being backward in the economic or cultural fields and while some have formed political blocks, all have not felt that necessity..
You made two other remarks
it was a shock to realise that staying back in Bangladesh might have meant descending to their levels in a few generations.
To which I said that the comparison may not be accurate because of socioeconomic differences between you & them as also between the muslims of Northern India & those of Pakistan.
Yasser Latif Hamdani once argued that if I wanted to judge the effects of this fear on the ground, I should look at the efflorescence of culture, of literature, poetry and music, in Pakistan, and to compare it with our own Muslim population. The numbers are very nearly the same; had I considered for one minute, leaving aside Bollywood and a numerous brood of plastic-bottomed cultural parodies, what contribution we have had on the cultural scene from our Muslim population compared to that in Pakistan?
To which I pointed out that the Muslims of south India who did not share language & cultural similarities & therefore suffered less attrition during partition contribute substantially to the cultural & literary scenes within their own states and in their own languages.
The point is that the Muslims were the best organised, and fortuitously led by a man in a million. To take on Gandhi in his prime, to take on Nehru and Patel at the height of their powers was possible by no ordinary person. None of the others enjoyed that degree of organisation and leadership.
Unfair comparison. As Narsimha Rao said in a parliamentary speech in 1996 " I can't fight Ram & win". Jinnah was not fighting the INC leaders on the same plane as they were.. His plane of battle against those leaders of the INC involved an emotional appeal to the religious sensibilities of a particular community of which he was a member & they were not. The basic assumption in the TNT theory was that neither he nor any other "muslim" leader could command the same following across the board thus in their eyes necessitating a division to protect their community while the INC had a smaller but not insubstantial following among Muslims.
I would like your comments on the Southern Muslims and their passivity, considering that the Khilafat Movement was centred among the Moplahs, that it was marked for its violence and its communal hatred, and that the community today contributes much of the muscle, perhaps half of it, for the minuscule insurgency among Indian Muslims. Also your comments on the peaceful and mercantile-oriented Beary Muslims and the Konkan Muslims, who were practising Muslims decades before Sind fell to the Arabs, and who with their counterparts in Kerala were among the earliest mosque-builders on the sub-continent. Why, in your opinion, were they not interested in the TNT? It cannot be entirely due to their conversion by example and conviction; the Bengal Muslims were also converted thus, but were far more radical and aggressive. So what made southern Muslims (an odious category! as if there is something about latitude that distinguishes them or the southern Hindus from any other) so quiescent?
While I cannot be absolutely sure, I would have to assume that the differences over language & culture were far too great ( something that was proved right in 1971) to ever be bridged. Also since unlike the Bengali Muslims who were a large community numerically & who would remain in their own territory, these disparate communities would have feared being culturally & linguistically swamped in far away Pakistan. There was nothing to connect them to the Northwest or Northeast of India. This actually proves the point that religion was & is not as deep a binding factor as made out in TNT theory.
found this on wiki....
While giving an interview to American press representatives in July 1942, when asked by one of the journalists whether the Muslims were a nation or not, Jinnah replied:
We are a nation with our own distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, names and nomenclature, sense of values and proportion, legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions, aptitudes and ambitions, in short, we have our own distinctive outlook on life and of life. By all cannons of international law we are a nation.
Guess they (S.Indian Muslims) didn't agree with this. It took the Bengalis a few more years to come to the same conclusion.
Lastly:
Finally, if India were to become a Hindu state, I would not be a proud Indian citizen. Like thousands others, I would have emigrated. We are proud to be living in a country where your religion should not matter. That it matters and that it has to be fought is a good fight. We have not won, but it certainly is not a Hindu state by any stretch of the imagination.
While I could not agree more that India should never be a Hindu state, I find your position puzzling. You have spent a lot of time in arguing that there was a valid reasoning behind the TNT & yet you are so against a
Hindu state that you threaten to emigrate. What according to you is the TNT? A muslim part & what on the other side....? The entire argument in the TNT was that Hindus get their own state. It was those very leaders of the INC who according to you compared poorly to Jinnah who had the guts to stand up & say that even though they could not prevent partition on the basis of TNT, they were going to reject the basic principle of the TNT & create a secular state for all who chose to stay there.
) Tamilian ,born,brought up and living in Tamil Nadu for that past 24 years.
