(Excerpts from an article by Ajaz Ashraf, ‘Like Zia’s Pakistan, Sangh Parivar’s India is walking a dangerous road’, Scroll.in, December 20, 2014.)
The grisly, senseless killing of schoolchildren in Peshawar should be a reminder to us in India that mixing of religion with politics is akin to triggering nuclear fusion, which is difficult, even impossible, to control beyond a point. Ultimately, it renders both politics and religion rudderless, devastating society besides.”
A good many mournful citizens in India have taken to social media to point to the inevitability of blood being spilled, rather routinely, in Pakistan. They forget that the nightmarish path Pakistan is on is precisely the one which the Sangh Parivar wants India to take. Our journey to enter the hellhole may have just begun, unless the tragic stories from across the border prompt our politicians, as also us, to revise our travel plans into the future.
Obviously, we in India feel we are remarkably different from them in Pakistan. We have had a continuous democratic tradition of over six decades. Our Army remains in the barracks unless the political regime calls it out. Then there are all those who point to the implausibility of religious consolidation, claiming the factor of caste neutralises such possibilities. We forget that the genie in the bottle can take many forms once out.
There are remarkable similarities between the path we have embarked upon and the one which Pakistan took in the Seventies and Eighties. They amended their Constitution to declare the Ahmadiyyas non-Muslim. We have the Sangh Parivar supremo, Mohan Bhagwat, demanding that Muslims and Christians call themselves Hindu. The Ahmadiyyas cannot call their places of worship mosque. The Sangh has a list of places of worship which it deems were temples once.
They hunt out those who they accuse of blasphemy and kill dissenters like Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer. We have had books withdrawn, and wish to impose a dress code for women. History books were rewritten during the Zia regime. Much the same is underway in India. They read Arabic, we must learn Sanskrit. They have the Caliphate ideal, we have the grandiose goal of Ram Rajya to seek.
They compel poverty-stricken Hindus to embrace Islam, we have devised a “ghar wapsi” programme which seeks to reconvert the religious minorities.
We are so busy living our realities that only a Pakistani can tell us where we are headed. So here is a poem titled, Naya Bharat, by Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz. This is blogger Sanjiv Bhatt’s rendition in English.
So it turned out you were just like us!…
Where were you hiding all this time, buddy?
That stupidity, that ignorance
we wallowed in for a century -
look, it arrived at your shores too!
Many congratulations to you!
Raising the flag of religion,
I guess now you’ll be setting up Hindu Raj?
You too will commence to muddle everything up
You, too, will ravage your beautiful garden.
You, too, will sit and ponder -
I can tell preparations are afoot -
who is [truly] Hindu, who is not.
I guess you’ll be passing fatwas soon!
Here, too, it will become hard to survive.
Here, too, you will sweat and bleed.
You’ll barely make do joylessly.
You will gasp for air like us.
I used to wonder with such deep sorrow.
And now, I laugh at the idea:
it turned out you were just like us!
We weren’t two nations after all!
To hell with education and learning.
Let’s sing the praises of ignorance.
Don’t look at the potholes in your path:
bring back instead the times of yore!
Practice harder till you master
the skill of always walking backwards.
Let not a single thought of the present
break your focus upon the past!
Repeat the same thing over and over -
over and over, say only this:
How glorious was India in the past!
How sublime was India in days gone by!
Then, dear friends, you will arrive
and get to heaven after all.
Yep. We’ve been there for a while now.
Once you are there,
once you’re in the same hell-hole,
keep in touch and tell us how it goes!
