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Sunday, 10 July 2016 | Kanchan Gupta | in Coffee Break
Islamist preacher Zakir Naik is a symptom, one of the many puss-filled festering sores that represent the wider malaise of radical Islamism in India and abroad. But what about the papier mache Indian state?
On January 16 this year media had published a news story, filed by PTI, that reflected the extent to which the papier mache Indian state has been corroded by vote-bank pandering. At another level, it showed the mainstreaming, if that’s the right word, of odious and regressive Sharia’h practices in the wondrous Sovereign, Socialist, Secular, Democratic Republic of India.
I reproduce here the PTI story, or the version of it which was published in The Indian Express:
In the wake of objections by a Muslim body, the Uttar Pradesh Government late Friday night revoked its decision to bar men having two or move wives from appointment as Urdu teachers. The State Government said the appointments would be made as per the rules and regulation in the past and there will be no change.
“While signing the government order today, I saw that there is no such clause in it and, therefore, we have issued a clarification in this regard,” Minister for Basic Education Ahmed Hasan said. “We are not able to understand how such a thing has surfaced… it is a wrong propaganda against the Government,” he claimed.
According to a recent Government order, candidates applying for the post must reveal their marital status and all those with two living wives would not be eligible. Women candidates married to a man with two surviving wives have also been barred from applying.
The notice for appointment of 3,500 Urdu teachers in primary schools was issued recently. The Muslim Personal Law Board had strongly opposed it, saying the order was violative of Islamic law and rights of Muslims.
“Government cannot impose such conditions when it comes to recruitment of staff. There is a provision for four marriages in Islam, even though just about one per cent of Muslim men have two wives. Even so, such conditions should not become part of the job application process,” Imam of Lucknow’s Eidgah Maulana Khalid Rasheed Firangi Mahali had said.
Three conclusions can be safely drawn from this story.
First, we have now reached a stage where Government decisions and orders compliant with the Constitution of India, laws and rules are contested if they are seen to be not Sharia’h compliant. Instead of sticking to that which is legally and morally correct, Government or its agencies capitulate at the slightest push, choosing political expediency over the lofty principles of secularism that, in any case, now lie in tatters after being subjected to mind-numbing perversities.
Second, the inalienable right, choice and freedom of taxpayers to decide how their money should be spent by Government is treated with unabashed contempt by politicians in power and their feckless lackeys in the bureaucracy. An otherwise activist judiciary eager to lay down rules of conduct for cricket administrators and given to asking profound questions as to why Parliament cannot select the Indian cricket team, has neither the time nor the inclination to protect the taxpayers right, choice and freedom.
Third, Urdu may have been patronised by the Muslim elite in its salad days, it was never an exclusive ‘Muslims only’ language. This appropriation of Urdu as an element of Muslim identity not only communalises a community and legitimises its separateness, it also makes it hostage to the dangerous machinations of a clergy inimical to change and progress. In fact, Urdu becomes an instrument of aggressive — as opposed to surreptitious, as was the case earlier — Sharia’h propagation and implementation, ironically with the Indian state partnering this reprehensible exercise.
So why am I drawing upon a story reported in January while writing in July? What prompted me to revisit the story, which I had flagged and filed for reference, is the ongoing chatter on Radical Islamist preacher and tele-evangelist Zakir Naik. His television channel, ridiculously and offensively named Peace TV, is prohibited from being broadcast in India, and for good reasons too.
But prohibition by law is rarely if ever effective in India where laws exist in abundance but are disdainfully more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Direct to home service providers do not beam Peace TV, yet that does not mean it is inaccessible. Across the country in ghettos, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and Kutch to Kamrup, cable operators bring Zakir Naik;s vile teachings to believers eager to believe every twisted interpretation of Islam.
A friend from Mumbai recounted how in a nearby slum inhabited by Bangladeshi illegal immigrants Zakir Naik’s sermons would be amplified for weekly and festive gatherings. Beat your wife, kill gays, demonise the West, repudiate modern education... and more would be listened to in awe and silence, to be practiced in real life at a latter date or possibly now and then.
It would be wrong to surmise that Zakir Naik panders to the underclass, the poor and the disadvantaged. His appeal cuts across class and country. The Bangladeshi jihadis who committed the recent carnage at a fashionable Dhaka cafe came from elite families, attended the most expensive and exclusive schools, and lived the high life till they discovered the road to ‘martyrdom’.
At least two of the mass murderers, it now transpires, were radicalised by the hate speech of Zakir Naik. How many in India would have been similarly radicalised by his bunk?
The Congress says the UPA Government it headed prohibited the beaming of Peace TV but the NDA Government led by BJP did nothing to stop its re-emergence. That’s poppycock. PeaceTV was always accessible through cable operators. That the BJP regime, which tirelessly parrots its commitment to halt radicalisation of Muslims, has singularly failed in matching deed with word is another story to be told another day.
Vacuous, platitudinous statements by the Prime Minister and his Ministers on how terror and terrorists have no religion, and importuning India to the world community, asking others to fight a global war on terror in which we, of course, shall not participate, are no substitute for action. I do wish the Prime Minister and his Ministers spare a few moments to listen to what the ‘headmaster’ father of chocolate-faced Burhan Wani, a ruthless Kashmiri terrorist killed by security forces on Friday, has to say in response to his son’s death.
Frankly, Zakir Naik is a symptom, one of the many pus-filled festering sores that have come to represent the wider malaise of radical Islamism in India and abroad. A state that fails to stand by principles of secularism, like the Indian state falters and falls repeatedly, is no less a symptom. Zakir Naik teaches that it is a Muslim’s duty to have four wives and it is his right to beat them into subservience and submission as per Sharia’h. The Indian state plays a complicit role in making that teaching into reality as the Government order on the appointment of Urdu teachers shows.
Where do we start? Where do we end?
(The writer is a current affairs analyst based in NCR)
http://www.dailypioneer.com/columni...k-preaches-hate-indian-state-capitulates.html
*******************
To summarise,
1) Be it congress or BJP in power, vote bank pandering continues unabated.
2) Uniform Civil code is the need of the hour so that religion takes a back seat in a democratic country like India. Country should be a citizen's first priority and not religion.
3) Zakir Naik!!! This man often contradicts his own statements. For example on one side he writes a book on "Women's rights in Islam" and on the other, he asks Sania Mirza to wear decent clothes while playing (tennis).
Indian state has been soft on hate-mongers, be it Prachi or Zakir Naik.
Ppl like him have been working assiduously to divide India, while we allow them to utter mendacious nonsense under the garb of "freedom of speech".
Where do we draw the line?
**********
I'm tagging mods here.
@WebMaster @WAJsal @Manticore
I hope the content of the article is acceptable, if not, I'm ready to delete the thread.
On January 16 this year media had published a news story, filed by PTI, that reflected the extent to which the papier mache Indian state has been corroded by vote-bank pandering. At another level, it showed the mainstreaming, if that’s the right word, of odious and regressive Sharia’h practices in the wondrous Sovereign, Socialist, Secular, Democratic Republic of India.
I reproduce here the PTI story, or the version of it which was published in The Indian Express:
In the wake of objections by a Muslim body, the Uttar Pradesh Government late Friday night revoked its decision to bar men having two or move wives from appointment as Urdu teachers. The State Government said the appointments would be made as per the rules and regulation in the past and there will be no change.
“While signing the government order today, I saw that there is no such clause in it and, therefore, we have issued a clarification in this regard,” Minister for Basic Education Ahmed Hasan said. “We are not able to understand how such a thing has surfaced… it is a wrong propaganda against the Government,” he claimed.
According to a recent Government order, candidates applying for the post must reveal their marital status and all those with two living wives would not be eligible. Women candidates married to a man with two surviving wives have also been barred from applying.
The notice for appointment of 3,500 Urdu teachers in primary schools was issued recently. The Muslim Personal Law Board had strongly opposed it, saying the order was violative of Islamic law and rights of Muslims.
“Government cannot impose such conditions when it comes to recruitment of staff. There is a provision for four marriages in Islam, even though just about one per cent of Muslim men have two wives. Even so, such conditions should not become part of the job application process,” Imam of Lucknow’s Eidgah Maulana Khalid Rasheed Firangi Mahali had said.
Three conclusions can be safely drawn from this story.
First, we have now reached a stage where Government decisions and orders compliant with the Constitution of India, laws and rules are contested if they are seen to be not Sharia’h compliant. Instead of sticking to that which is legally and morally correct, Government or its agencies capitulate at the slightest push, choosing political expediency over the lofty principles of secularism that, in any case, now lie in tatters after being subjected to mind-numbing perversities.
Second, the inalienable right, choice and freedom of taxpayers to decide how their money should be spent by Government is treated with unabashed contempt by politicians in power and their feckless lackeys in the bureaucracy. An otherwise activist judiciary eager to lay down rules of conduct for cricket administrators and given to asking profound questions as to why Parliament cannot select the Indian cricket team, has neither the time nor the inclination to protect the taxpayers right, choice and freedom.
Third, Urdu may have been patronised by the Muslim elite in its salad days, it was never an exclusive ‘Muslims only’ language. This appropriation of Urdu as an element of Muslim identity not only communalises a community and legitimises its separateness, it also makes it hostage to the dangerous machinations of a clergy inimical to change and progress. In fact, Urdu becomes an instrument of aggressive — as opposed to surreptitious, as was the case earlier — Sharia’h propagation and implementation, ironically with the Indian state partnering this reprehensible exercise.
So why am I drawing upon a story reported in January while writing in July? What prompted me to revisit the story, which I had flagged and filed for reference, is the ongoing chatter on Radical Islamist preacher and tele-evangelist Zakir Naik. His television channel, ridiculously and offensively named Peace TV, is prohibited from being broadcast in India, and for good reasons too.
But prohibition by law is rarely if ever effective in India where laws exist in abundance but are disdainfully more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Direct to home service providers do not beam Peace TV, yet that does not mean it is inaccessible. Across the country in ghettos, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and Kutch to Kamrup, cable operators bring Zakir Naik;s vile teachings to believers eager to believe every twisted interpretation of Islam.
A friend from Mumbai recounted how in a nearby slum inhabited by Bangladeshi illegal immigrants Zakir Naik’s sermons would be amplified for weekly and festive gatherings. Beat your wife, kill gays, demonise the West, repudiate modern education... and more would be listened to in awe and silence, to be practiced in real life at a latter date or possibly now and then.
It would be wrong to surmise that Zakir Naik panders to the underclass, the poor and the disadvantaged. His appeal cuts across class and country. The Bangladeshi jihadis who committed the recent carnage at a fashionable Dhaka cafe came from elite families, attended the most expensive and exclusive schools, and lived the high life till they discovered the road to ‘martyrdom’.
At least two of the mass murderers, it now transpires, were radicalised by the hate speech of Zakir Naik. How many in India would have been similarly radicalised by his bunk?
The Congress says the UPA Government it headed prohibited the beaming of Peace TV but the NDA Government led by BJP did nothing to stop its re-emergence. That’s poppycock. PeaceTV was always accessible through cable operators. That the BJP regime, which tirelessly parrots its commitment to halt radicalisation of Muslims, has singularly failed in matching deed with word is another story to be told another day.
Vacuous, platitudinous statements by the Prime Minister and his Ministers on how terror and terrorists have no religion, and importuning India to the world community, asking others to fight a global war on terror in which we, of course, shall not participate, are no substitute for action. I do wish the Prime Minister and his Ministers spare a few moments to listen to what the ‘headmaster’ father of chocolate-faced Burhan Wani, a ruthless Kashmiri terrorist killed by security forces on Friday, has to say in response to his son’s death.
Frankly, Zakir Naik is a symptom, one of the many pus-filled festering sores that have come to represent the wider malaise of radical Islamism in India and abroad. A state that fails to stand by principles of secularism, like the Indian state falters and falls repeatedly, is no less a symptom. Zakir Naik teaches that it is a Muslim’s duty to have four wives and it is his right to beat them into subservience and submission as per Sharia’h. The Indian state plays a complicit role in making that teaching into reality as the Government order on the appointment of Urdu teachers shows.
Where do we start? Where do we end?
(The writer is a current affairs analyst based in NCR)
http://www.dailypioneer.com/columni...k-preaches-hate-indian-state-capitulates.html
*******************
To summarise,
1) Be it congress or BJP in power, vote bank pandering continues unabated.
2) Uniform Civil code is the need of the hour so that religion takes a back seat in a democratic country like India. Country should be a citizen's first priority and not religion.
3) Zakir Naik!!! This man often contradicts his own statements. For example on one side he writes a book on "Women's rights in Islam" and on the other, he asks Sania Mirza to wear decent clothes while playing (tennis).
Indian state has been soft on hate-mongers, be it Prachi or Zakir Naik.
Ppl like him have been working assiduously to divide India, while we allow them to utter mendacious nonsense under the garb of "freedom of speech".
Where do we draw the line?
**********
I'm tagging mods here.
@WebMaster @WAJsal @Manticore
I hope the content of the article is acceptable, if not, I'm ready to delete the thread.
