Reunification of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh

[Spring Onion]

Fateh is Muslim name.. I am just asking if he is Indian Muslim or not...

Dont get bluffed by their names

 

[Spring Onion]

B]India's Muslims See Bias in Housing[/B]
Recent Increase Is Blamed on Islamist Terrorist Attacks in Mumbai Last Fall

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 19, 2009

MUMBAI -- The sunny apartment had everything Palvisha Aslam, 22, a Bollywood producer, wanted: a spacious bedroom and a kitchen that overlooked a garden in a middle-class neighborhood that was a short commute to Film City, where many of India's Hindi movies are shot.

She was about to sign the lease when the real estate broker noticed her surname. He didn't realize that she was Muslim, he said. Then he rejected her. It was just six weeks after the November Mumbai terrorist attacks and Indian Muslims were being viewed with suspicion across the country. He then showed her a grimy one-room tenement in a Muslim-dominated ghetto. She felt sick to her stomach as she watched the residents fight over water at a leaky tap in a dark alley.

"That night I cried a lot. I was still an outcast in my own country -- even as a secular Muslim with a well-paid job in Bollywood," said Aslam, who had similar experiences with five other brokers and three months later is still sleeping on friends' sofas. "I'm an Indian. I love my country. Is it a crime now to be a Muslim in Mumbai?"

In the months after the brazen three-day Mumbai terrorist attacks, stories like Aslam's are common, even among some of the country's most beloved Bollywood actors, screenwriters and producers in India's most cosmopolitan city. The accusations of discrimination highlight the often simmering religious tensions in the world's biggest democracy, where Muslim celebrities can be feted on the red carpet one minute and locked out of quality housing the next.


The phenomenon has become known here as "renting while Muslim." It raises questions that go to the heart of India's identity as a secular democracy that is home to nearly every major religion on the planet. Although India has a Hindu majority, it also has 150 million Muslims, one of the largest Muslim communities in the world.

"The new generation wants a better India that isn't bogged down in religious strife," said Junaid Memon, 34, a Muslim Bollywood director who is trying to promote religious harmony through his films and his Facebook site. "We shouldn't be an India that ghettoizes all Muslims to apartments near a mosque. This is a real test for modern India."

With national elections across India that began Thursday and last a month, some Muslim activists and Bollywood film directors are raising the issue with political parties and trying to form a voting bloc.

"This election, we have to talk about housing discrimination against Muslims," said Zulfi Sayed, a Muslim actor who is outspoken about the issue and is courting Hindus who agree with him. "In a shining India, this shouldn't be still such a common practice."

Muslims have long served as an important swing vote in India, since Hindus are increasingly divided among nearly 200 regional parties. Historically, India's Congress party won elections with the help of the Muslim vote by running on a platform of promoting religious diversity. The opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party has, at times, used anti-Muslim sentiment to court votes while pledging to keep Hindu heritage alive.

India blames the Pakistan-based Islamist militant group Lashkar-i-Taiba for the November attack in which 10 gunmen left more than 170 people dead, including 40 Indian Muslims.

Many Muslims here feared the attacks would unleash cycles of revenge killing of the sort that have recurred throughout India's modern history, from the violence of partition between India and Pakistan in 1947 to the 1992 riots in Mumbai. In the days after November's Mumbai attacks, Muslims from all corners of society united, holding candlelight vigils with a message to protest terrorism and pledge loyalty to India. In the end, there was no communal violence.

But across the country, reports of housing discrimination have increased.

Afroz Alam Sahil, 21, a student activist at Jamia Millia Islamia College in New Delhi, said that more than a dozen students from states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar -- which have large Muslim populations -- have been unable to find housing since the Mumbai attacks.

"Some Muslim friends have dropped out of college because they have nowhere to stay," Sahil said. "There is intense suspicion. Sometimes I ask myself why I was born Muslim."

Rana Afroz, a Muslim editor with the newspaper the Hindu, is investigating the issue after spending three months unable to find a landlord willing to rent to her and her husband.

"It is ridiculous that I have to prove to non-Muslims that I am not making bombs in my kitchen," she said. "Is this really the modern India I live in?"

In India, Muslims are often segregated, and they experience high poverty rates and low literacy. Although they make up nearly 14 percent of India's population, they hold fewer than 5 percent of government posts and are just 4 percent of the student body in India's elite universities, according to a 2006 government report.

But there are few issues more emotional than housing, especially in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, India's pulsating city of dreams where aspiring farmers and filmmakers come from across the country to seek fame and fortune.


"The ethos of Bombay is a city open to the world. The Muslims of this city feel that way, too. But the real question is why do we as Indian Muslims always have to be proving our loyalty?" asked Nawman Malik, a popular Bollywood producer who spent months searching for an apartment.

Mumbai has always had tensions over what are known here as "vegetarian buildings," where meat eaters are not allowed to live and are thus seen as devices to keep out Muslims and lower-caste Hindus. Those kinds of buildings have become more common in middle-class and posh neighborhoods as more merchants and industrialists from the neighboring state of Gujarat, where vegetarian Hinduism is the norm, migrate to India's richest city.

Managers of vegetarian buildings say they don't want the smell of meat in their hallways. But they often also explain their rules by saying they are worried about security and want like-minded residents to live together.

"Say you check one renter and they seem okay. But then they go to mosque and bring back their bearded friends and those friends are terrorists," said Raj Pathak, a vegetarian-building manager in downtown Mumbai. "Why do we have to live with such fears?"

Muslims, who have seen housing discrimination and the number of vegetarian buildings spike after every terrorist attack, see the issue as blatant discrimination.

"Everyone knows the vegetarian-only restriction is code language for 'No Muslims,' " said Naved Khan, a Muslim real estate broker who is trying to help Bollywood's Muslims find housing.

On a recent afternoon, Aslam, the producer, hung out at a cafe, as she sometimes does so she doesn't get on the nerves of those she is staying with. She wore jeans and a hooded sweat shirt.

Until January, she was living with a Hindu roommate. Then their lease ended. Her roommate was getting married.

"So I thought I would get my own place as a successful adult," said Aslam, who had come to Mumbai from Kolkata with dreams of landing a Bollywood job. "My mom was really proud of me. Now she's really upset."

A broker recently showed her a house in a working-class neighborhood. "It looked haunted. But I was denied even that," she said.

Another broker gave her advice: "Madam, live with a Hindu roommate. Only then will you get a flat."

India's Muslims See Bias in Housing - washingtonpost.com

 

[jinxeD_girl]

Jinxed is not even a human name, are you a robot

We call Indian Muslims as"Bhaiyyas" in Punjab.. especially Biharis... My sweet BHAIYYA can we stop fighting now...

 

[Spring Onion]

Government report concedes India’s Muslims are a socially deprived, victimised minority

A report prepared by a seven-member committee headed by Justice Rajinder Sachar has conceded that India’s Muslim minority faces appalling socioeconomic deprivation and is the victim of official neglect and frequent police harassment and violence.

The committee, which was charged with investigating the socioeconomic status of India’s 150 million Muslims and recommending means of improving their lot, was appointed by United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in March 2005.

It has long been patently obvious that India’s Muslims are disproportionately represented among the poor and that they have been the target of official discrimination. From 1998 to 2004, India’s government was led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which openly espouses the Hindu-supremacist doctrine of Hindutva. In 2002, more than 2,000 Muslims were killed and tens of thousands more left homeless by an anti-Muslim pogrom in BJP-ruled Gujarat.

Nevertheless, the Sachar Committee’s findings constitute a devastating indictment of bourgeois rule in India. In particular, they puncture the claims of the Congress Party, which dominates the current UPA coalition and has governed India for most of the 60 years since independence, to be the architect of a secular democracy.

Representing 13.4 percent of India’s population, Muslims are far and away India’s largest religious minority, living, albeit in varying concentrations, in all parts of the country.

The Congress-led UPA had two major motivations for appointing the Sachar Committee.

Addressing or at least appearing to address some of the grievances of India’s beleaguered Muslim minority is a way the current government can differentiate itself from the former BJP-dominated coalition, while pursuing the same socially incendiary neo-liberal economic agenda. Sections of the Indian establishment have become apprehensive over the politically destabilising consequences of the growing alienation of India’s Muslims, and in particular of a spurt in support for Islamicist organisations, some of them with terrorist affinities.

However, so damaging were the Sachar Committee’s findings to the Congress’s secular pretensions that the UPA government delayed the report’s release for some two months. Discrepancies between leaked copies of the report and the final version indicate, moreover, that the government insisted that some parts be deleted before making the Sachar Committee’s findings public.

The report concedes that India’s Muslims live under a shadow of fear due to a communalised political establishment and state machinery: “Communal tension or any untoward incident in any part of the country is enough to make Muslims fear for their safety and security. The lackadaisical attitude of the government and the political mileage sought whenever communal riots occur has been very painful for the Community.”

The report adds that Muslims have come to fear the police and security forces: “Concern was expressed over police highhandedness in dealing with Muslims. Muslims live with an inferiority complex as ‘every bearded man is considered an ISI [Pakistan’s foreign spy agency] agent’; ‘whenever any incident occurs Muslim boys are picked up by the police’ and fake encounters [between security forces and alleged Muslim terrorists] are common. In fact, people argued that police presence in Muslim localities is more common than the presence of schools, industry, public hospitals and banks. Security personnel enter Muslim houses on the slightest pretext. The plight of Muslims living in border areas is even worse as they are treated as ‘foreigners’ and are subjected to harassment by the police and administration.”

The treatment accorded Muslims by India’s security forces is directly bound up with Indian bourgeoisie’s use of anti-Pakistan and ant-Muslim chauvinism as a weapon of its class rule—as a means to manufacture “national unity” and to divert the social antagonisms and frustrations born of acute poverty, inequality and economic insecurity in a reactionary direction.

Ghetto-isation


The Sachar report points out that communal harassment is increasingly forcing Muslims into impoverished ghettos: “Fearing for their security, Muslims are increasingly resorting to living in ghettos across the country. This is more pronounced in communally sensitive towns and cities.”

This ghetto-isation, in turn, facilitates official neglect and discrimination. “It was suggested that Muslims living together in concentrated pockets (both because of historical reasons and a deepening sense of insecurity) has made them easy targets for neglect by municipal and government authorities. Water, sanitation, electricity, schools, public health facilities, banking facilities, anganwadis [day care centers], ration shops, roads, and transport facilities—are all in short supply in these areas.”

India’s Muslims, reports the Sachar Committee, face “deficits and deprivation in practically all dimensions” of socioeconomic development.

In most socioeconomic indicators that the committee considered, “Muslims rank somewhat above SCs/STs [the historically-deprived former untouchables (Dalits) and tribal (hunter-gather) peoples],” but below all other groups, that is “Hindu OBCs [Other Backward Classes or lower caste groups], Other Minorities and Hindu General [mostly those who come from families that would have traditionally been considered upper caste].”

For some measures of social deprivation, Muslims as a group fell below the Dalits, who more than a half-century after the abolition of untouchability continue to make up a grossly disproportionate share of India’s landless, poor and illiterate. And some particularly disadvantaged Muslims groups fell consistently below the Dalits.

The head count ratio (HCR) of poverty among Muslims is 31 percent—second only to the SC/ST communities whose HCR is 35 percent. The poverty figure among urban Muslims is higher, with 38.4 percent deemed to be living in poverty, as compared with 36.4 percent of urban Dalits and Scheduled Tribes.

Here it needs be emphasised that India’s official poverty line is pegged at the bare subsistence level, the income necessary to meet the caloric requirement to do a full day’s work.

Using data from the 2001 National Census and National Sample Survey, the Sachar committee shows that Muslims are disproportionately poorly housed; that they use less electricity than other Indians, with “the share of villages with no electricity increasing substantially” as the size of the Muslim population rises; and that they have less access to running water. While only 25 percent of households in rural India have running water, the figure for Muslim households is a mere 10 percent.

The share of Muslims having government jobs is just 4.9 percent. Only 4.5 percent of railway workers are Muslim, and of these, 98.7 percent occupy lower-level positions. Muslims constitute just 3.2 percent of those in India’s elite civil service corps.

The situation is worse in states with large Muslim populations. For example, in West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, and Assam, where Muslims form 25.2 percent, 18.5 percent and 30.9 percent of the population, respectively, their share of government jobs is 4.7 percent, 7.5 percent, and 10.9 percent, respectively.

Less access to education


According to the Sachar report, Muslims in India have less access to education than other religious groups. As a result, the literacy rate among Muslims is only 59.1 percent while the national average is 64.8 percent. School enrollment among urban Muslim boys is only 80 percent, as compared with 90 percent of SC/ST boys. Only 68 percent of Muslim girls attend schools, while the figures for Dalit girls and girls categorised as non-Dalit are 72 percent and 80 percent, respectively.

When it comes to higher education, the Muslim presence is even lower. The report says that in the elite Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Muslim students constitute only 1.3 percent and 1.7 percent, respectively, of the student body.

One of the means through which the Indian ruling elite has discriminated against the Muslim minority is through its treatment of Urdu—a north Indian language that, like Hindi, is a variant of Hindustani, the major distinction being that Hindi uses a Sanskrit-derived script, while Urdu is written in a Persian-Arabic type script. (As a result of the activities of Hindu and Muslim communalists, Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, was redefined as a “Muslim” language during the first half of the twentieth century.)

Reports the Sachar Committee: Urdu “has been neglected. The fallout of this has been inadequate access to education in the mother tongue for many Urdu speaking children. The neglect has also resulted in poor performance of Urdu medium school students because of poor infrastructural facilities and absence of adequate number of qualified teachers.”

There is evidence that India’s banks, both public and private, also discriminate against Muslims. According to the report, the average bank loan disbursed to a Muslim is two thirds of the amount disbursed to other minorities: “ome banks use the practice of identifying ‘negative geographical zones’ on the basis of certain criteria where bank credit and other facilities are not easily provided.”

According to the Indian Express, the Sachar report also contained statistics showing that Muslims make up a disproportionately high percentage of jail inmates in all parts of India. But these figures have been excluded from the final version of the report.

Citing an earlier draft of the report, the Express says that in Maharashtra, India’s second most populous state, Muslims constitute 32.4 percent out of all inmates even though Muslims represent just 10.6 percent of the state’s population. In Gujarat, also in western India, Muslims account for more than a quarter of all prison inmates although they constitute just 9.06 percent of the population. In Karnataka, in southern India, 17.5 percent of jail inmates are Muslim as compared to their 12.23 percent of the population. In Delhi, the Union Territory that is home to India’s capital city, Muslims account for 11.7 percent of the population but 29.1 percent of prison inmates.

The high presence of Muslims in Indian prisons is a product of the deplorable socioeconomic conditions that they confront and of systematic anti-Muslim bias on the part of the police and judiciary. Thousands of innocent Muslim youths have been caught up in various “anti-terrorism” dragnets—dragnets that have made use of such draconian anti-terrorism laws as the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA) and the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) and allow the authorities to hold people for weeks and months without charge.

Meanwhile, the Indian state has done nothing to prosecute those responsible for the 2002 Gujarat pogrom and other anti-Muslim atrocities.

The Congress and the communal partition of India


Despite the claims of India’s ruling elite concerning the secular and democratic character of India’s polity, Muslims have faced systematic and escalating discrimination since independence.

That discrimination has its roots in the 1947 communal partition of then-British India along religious-communal lines into a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu-dominated India. Partition was implemented through violent communal clashes fomented by both Hindu and Muslim chauvinists. These clashes resulted in the deaths of some 2 million, while another 12-14 million people were forced to flee their homes and cross the artificial border that had been drawn across the subcontinent. As a part of this forcible exchange of communities between the newly independent states of India and Pakistan, millions of Muslims were chased out of India.

Although the Indian National Congress (INC), led by Gandhi and Nehru, denied any responsibility for partition, portraying it as entirely the product of the machinations of India’s departing colonial overlords and the Muslim League, the Congress played a pivotal role in implementing partition.

It was the Congress leadership that insisted that partition be taken to its logical conclusion and that the British Indian provinces of Bengal and Punjab be partitioned on communal lines, so as to ensure that the new states were as communally homogeneous as possible.

Even more importantly, it was the Congress that joined forces with the British and the League to reorganise the state structure in South Asia, so as to contain and suppress a mass anti-imperialist movement that between 1945 and 1947 had given rise to a myriad of social struggles—including strikes, peasant land-seizures and challenges to feudal obligations, popular revolts against various princely rulers, and mutinies in the British Indian armed forces—and was assuming revolutionary dimensions.

Organically incapable of leading—and opposed to—a struggle to unite India from below through an appeal to the common class interests of the toiling masses, the bourgeois-led Congress chose to “unite” India from above by accepting partition and inheriting the British-colonial-engineered Indian state.

Moreover, a large section of the Congress leadership led by Vallabhbhai Patel collaborated with Hindu-chauvinist forces such as the RSS and the princely ruler of Alwar in stirring up anti-Muslim communalism, both before and after partition. Within weeks of independence, Patel and other senior Congress leaders were pressing for measures to reduce the use of Urdu in government and restrict Muslim participation in the police and security forces. Patel, in particular, demanded that India’s Muslim minority prove it wasn’t a fifth column for Pakistan.

The subsequent decades of Congress rule failed to address the basic socioeconomic needs of India’s working people. The deplorable socioeconomic conditions facing the Muslim minority are only an extreme expression of the situation facing the vast majority of Indians.

In the 1980s, as the Indian bourgeoisie’s post-independence national economic development strategy began to unravel, the Congress, first under Indira Gandhi and then under her son Rajiv, increasingly resorted to Hindu-chauvinist appeals. This in turn helped pave the way for the Hindu-supremacist BJP to emerge as a major political force.

In December 1992, a BJP-RSS anti-Muslim chauvinist campaign to build a Hindu temple on the site of the Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya culminated in its demolition by Hindu-chauvinist fanatics and the worst communal rioting since partition. The then-Congress government of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao passively allowed this to happen, thereby further strengthening right-wing Hindu communalist forces.

Some six years later, the BJP managed to become the ruling party in India, indicating a further shift of the Indian bourgeoisie and political establishment to the right and its embrace of an explicitly anti-Muslim Indian/Hindu nationalism.

Government report concedes India’s Muslims are a socially deprived, victimised minority

 

[jinxeD_girl]

Jinxed is not even a human name, are you a robot

I wish I was a robot who was programmed to find Bengalis attractive..

 

[Hyde]

Is that why you are nurturing taliban who are killing you

I think pakistan is a pathetic state where pakistani members don't even feel necessary to even mention that there are hindus, christians, sikhs, shias, ahmadis in pakistan too. Why more shias have died in pakistan in the last one year alone than the gujarat riots, yet pakistani pretend all is well and keep taunting indian muslims even when indian muslims show them their middle finger.

Its a monster, your ideology.

never happened kindly prove it or keep this BS with you

 

[notsuperstitious]

We call Indian Muslims as"Bhaiyyas" in Punjab.. especially Biharis... My sweet BHAIYYA can we stop fighting now...

a beautiful girl calling me bhaiyya!! happens too often.

peace

 

[Hyde]

We call Indian Muslims as"Bhaiyyas" in Punjab.. especially Biharis... My sweet BHAIYYA can we stop fighting now...

no i think thats more common in Sindh....... those Muslims who migrated from Bihar during Indo-Pak partition are usually called "Bhaiyyas" in Pakistan

 

[Valiant_Soul]

a beautiful girl calling me bhaiyya!! happens too often.

peace

I want to know, are you changing sides now?

 

[jinxeD_girl]

a beautiful girl calling me bhaiyya!! happens too often.

peace

I think you didn't get what I really wanted to say lol ... Indian Muslims use the word "bhaiyya" alot in their conversation... Thats why Punjabis tease them by calling them "bhaiyyas"...

 

[ameer219]

a beautiful girl calling me bhaiyya!! happens too often.

peace

Lol,In Singapore,The Bangladeshi uses the word Bhaiyyas many times too especially the one under my flats.

 

[DESERT FIGHTER]

Of course. Dividing countries was Britain's specialty. The Kashmir issue was also done by the British to stop the unification of India and Pakistan.

And MA Jinnah and his supporters were joking?Why was Muslim league formed?
Why Jinnah left congress?

 

[Indiarox]

Take a look at Bipasha Basu uwill fall in love with a bengali

 

[Roby]

I am not telling that... I got banned from that forum...

Are you the same Pakistani_girl from afghan forum ...I liked your posts there

 

[jinxeD_girl]

Take a look at Bipasha Basu uwill fall in love with a bengali

Bipasha Basu, Koena Mitra, Sharmila Tagore, Succhitra Sen are all Bengali actresses... and very beautiful indeed... but thats not my point...

My point is... I have seen lots of Bengalis from India and Bangladeshis here in USA... I don't remember even one stunning Bengali beauty... you know what i mean ?