Off-centre | Communalism in Hyderabad: Why double standards will no longer work

Let us make one thing clear. Sanatana Dharma does not condone, let alone encourage, disrespect of other religious traditions or revered figures. This foundational principle is proclaimed in the Vedic injunction: “Eakam sat, viprah bahuda vadanti.” This statement can be the basis of a profound and lasting coexistence between people professing different views, even faiths.

But such pluralism cannot be said to be equally true of the Abrahamic faiths, which proclaim not only the oneness of truth and the oneness of God, but also the sole validity of their God and their truth. This means, in effect, that only their God is worthy of worship, while all deities and objects of worship are false. During the Islamic invasion of India, theologically justified and politically unremorseful destruction, vandalism, and looting of Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh temples and shrines, in addition to conversion, slavery and the imposition of the jaziya tax on “non-believers,” occurred on a massive scale.

The sad and suppressed history of this conquest cannot be kept under wraps or denied indefinitely. That is because amity, peace, or coexistence with dignity cannot be built upon lies or negationism. One is tempted to quote from the blood-curdling and stomach-churning poema, “In the City of Slaughter,” by Hayim Nahman Bialik, later Israel’s national poet. Written in the aftermath of the horrific anti-Jewish pogroms of 1903 in Kishinev in Czarist Russia, this poem is sure to move the heart and conscience of the most rabid Jew-hater.

“Crushed in their shame, they saw it all; they did not stir nor move; they did not pluck their eyes out; they beat not their brains against the wall! Perhaps, perhaps, each watcher had it in his heart to pray: A miracle, O Lord, and spare my skin this day! Those who survived this foulness, who from their blood awoke, beheld their life polluted, the light of their world gone out. How did their menfolk bear it, how did they bear this yoke?”

So sad is the plight of those marked for slaughter that God’s chosen seem not only like lesser mortals, but also the children of a lesser God. God himself, reduced to a “pauper Lord,” laments their fate, considering Himself guilty, helpless to alleviate their misery and suffering:

“Forgive, ye shamed of the earth, yours is a pauper-Lord!
Poor was He during your life, and poorer still of late.
When to my door you come to ask for your reward,
I’ll open wide: See, I am fallen from My high estate.
I grieve for you, my children. My heart is sad for you.
Your dead were vainly dead; and neither I nor you
Know why you died or wherefore, for whom, nor by what laws;
Your deaths are without reason; your lives are without cause.”

I am sure millions of Hindus must have felt like this in the past and have still felt thus, whether in the pogrom of Kashmiri Pandits as recently as the 1990s or during on-going “ethnic cleansing” of Hindus in Pakistan.

Till date, there has been no acknowledgement, let alone apology, for this history of unspeakable violence and trauma. Instead, all we have heard is prevarication, double-speak, attempts at equalisation, and outright contradiction. But how can we deny that the subcontinent itself was partitioned on religious lines into India and the enemy-state of Pakistan, which still swears by the very same ideology of conquest and hatred of Hindus and India?

One might argue, as our Mahatmas and secularists have in the past, that all this is a history that must be forgotten or overlooked if we are to be a successful modern nation. Yes, in the interest of lasting peace and a united India. But not if amnesia or forgiveness is only taken for weakness and taken advantage of, as has happened. The result? Forgetting and tolerance only on one side, that of the Hindus? While on the other side, in one guise or another, the continuation of the very same ideology of separatism, fanaticism, even terrorism?

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Coming back to Hyderabad, I am happy that Bhagyanagar, “Queen of the Deccan”, has enjoyed a high degree of communal harmony for several decades. When I was in the city a couple of weeks back, the people I spoke to said that there is very little anti-incumbency against Kalvakuntla Chandrashekar Rao or KCR, Telangana’s second-time Chief Minister, and his party, the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS). The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), desperate to make political inroads in the state, is looking for a formula to upset the applecart. I was told that the state was going to witness the inevitable polarising of the population along religious lines. After all, although the old city was over 60 per cent Muslims, state wide, Hindus were over 85 per cent. The BJP would try to capture this vote-bank.

Now let us return to the question why former BJP MLA T Raja Singh is considered so “dangerous” that over a hundred cases are registered against him and his own party has, apparently, disowned him. It is easy to blame one man, in this case, Singh, for disturbing communal harmony in Hyderabad. It is even easier to throw him into jail, as has already happened. Among those who were baying for his blood were not only the chanters of the Pakistani-origin “Sar Tan Se Juda” slogans, but also supposedly responsible Members of Parliament such as Asaduddin Owaisi.

But for lasting peace and concord, we must say loudly and with one clear voice, “No more double standards.” If Muslims find purported insults to their Prophet intolerable, they must learn to respect, and refrain from defaming, Hindu deities and sacred figures too. They must also stop threatening death to so-called heretics or chanting murderous slogans which show them as utterly disrespectful of the law of the land.

[To be continued]

This is Part 3 of the series, ‘Sar Tan Se Juda’ in Hyderabad

The author is a professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Views expressed are personal.

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