Something about Indian Muslims' problem
Reader comment on item: There Are No Moderates: Dealing with Fundamentalist Islam

Submitted by Vishal (United States), May 1, 2005 at 16:12

There is no "solution" to Muslim demands in Kashmir, and if they were to be met, the demands on India, and within India, by heartened Muslims would simply increase. There is no end to this.

Infidels (like Americans, Indian Americans) keep hoping there is, and Indian Hindus and secularists think of the "good" Musliims such as the completely secular Muslims in the national government or even among some of the weapons scientists, and take these people to be representative Muslims.

In the United States, Indian-Americans who are of Hindu or Sikh ancestry or belief appear far less wary of Pakistanis or of Indians of Muslim background, than are their counterparts in the United Kingdom, and certainly are often ill-informed about the treatment of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan and of Hindus in Bangladesh. Why? Surely it is because Muslims, including the Pakistanis, in England, can allow themselves to be more aggressive (and make life difficult for Hindus in such places as Bradford and London) because of their greater numbers.

But even here, where a false melting-pot of curry and saris may cause Hindus not to sense the real aggression, or to overlook the history, of Muslims in the subcontinent, or where a shared interest in something, curry or cricket, may render seemingly irrelevant the grim history of Muslim rule in India, or of the essence of Islamic ideology, that will always make life difficult for Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and always be a demographic threat within India itself for all non-Muslims, Hindu, Sikh, Jain, and Christian. In the shared excitement over deal-making with Muslim colleagues in Silicon Valley or Route 128, Indian-Americans may forget what Islam is all about. They should not. Mughal India had many Aurangzebs, and only one Akbar, revered in Hindu India precisely for his syncretism, his failure to be a real Muslim.

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