Reflections on Indian Independence
http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=125473&d=15&m=8&y=2009
By Siraj Wahab
Published in Arab News on August 15, 2009
On this anniversary of India’s independence, as an Indian I am both happy and sad. I am happy because we attained freedom after a long and painful struggle and because India has made great strides in many fields over the last 60 years. Most importantly, we have managed to maintain the sanctity of the ballot. Democracy has been our guiding principle, and that is a remarkable achievement.
I am sad because my community has not been given due representation in some spheres. My community is still eyed with suspicion. The contribution of our ulema to the fight for independence seems to have been totally forgotten. Hundreds of Muslim scholars died in the run-up to independence. Now, mere lip service is paid only to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Although we attained independence in the physical sense, mentally we Indians still remain trapped in the British-engineered divide-and-rule ideology of the past. That is very sad and something that should change.
All of our problems could be solved provided we accepted the existence of those problems rather than ignoring them. Correct diagnosis is key to fighting any disease. Our foreign policy has always been Pakistan-centric. We are obsessed with Pakistan. We have always blamed our neighbor for all our problems. This is not to absolve Pakistan from its occasional misdeeds, but we are a big country, and we should act like an elder brother. We should be magnanimous in our approach toward our neighbors.
Pakistan aside, Sri Lanka has reservations about India; Nepal has gripes against us, and Bangladeshis aren’t too happy with us. We are a great nation because we have a great history. We shouldn’t squander that by being parochial and jingoistic. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh took a great step forward in Sharm El-Sheikh recently. We should build on that first step and isolate extremists on both sides. Let us not forget the courageous decision of former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in taking that bus ride to Lahore and seeking a meaningful resolution to the many issues dividing India and Pakistan.
If we, the Indian people, don’t get the deserved social and political status in the new world, even in Arab society, it is because our leaders have not been able to see the big picture. They bog themselves down in domestic affairs and limit our foreign policy simply and almost exclusively to Pakistan. We seem unable to get out of that vicious tit-for-tat cycle. We never took proactive steps to capitalize on the strength of our economy and civilization. To be very honest, we have had no real statesman since Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.
In the 1980s, African nations and Arab nations looked at India with awe and respect. Our stand on Palestine was unflinching. But then we lost that status because we diluted our stand on a number of issues. There was a conscious effort to get closer to Israel, so much so that we even helped put an Israeli spy satellite in space. We started being seen on the wrong sides and gradually people looked at us with suspicion. Arabs have a begrudging admiration for India because of its educational renaissance, especially in the field of information and technology. We should capitalize on this and win the hearts and minds of both the Arabs and Africans. This is possible, provided we stop looking at the small details and concentrate on the big picture.
As an Indian who has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for some time, I think the Gulf countries offer Indian expatriates a great opportunity to better understand the problems of our neighbors. Just as we are fighting poverty so are Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Their problems are very similar to our problems. We had Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, Pakistan had Baitullah Mehsud and Sri Lanka had Velupillai Prabhakaran. They were all extremists. We all grapple with the same problems.
Once we Indians are out of the country, we look at things with fresher perspectives. In India as well as in Pakistan, it is the mass media that has made things worse. That is not the case here. When India and Pakistan came very close to war in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, I remember talking to two taxi drivers: One non-Muslim from Kerala and one Pathan from Swat Valley. They both were worried and both were praying for the war clouds to clear. They had their families and loved ones in their respective countries. All of us surely encounter such people on a daily basis here in Saudi Arabia and in the other Gulf countries. We should carry the message of good will to our respective countries and work for the greater good of the entire Subcontinent. And we can.
Many people like to speak of an undivided India, but such ideals are far from the present reality. It upsets our Pakistani friends. They think, and perhaps rightly so, that we have still not accepted them as a sovereign nation. What happened in the past happened, and we cannot undo it. There is no need to. We may be separate countries, but nothing stops us from joining hands as the European nations do. France and England have centuries of war and trouble behind them, yet the two are part of the European Union. Why can’t we follow that example? Our films are hugely popular in Pakistan, and Pakistani television serials are adored by Indians. Pakistani cricketers, such as Wasim Akram and Imran Khan, have huge followings in India, and Indian cricket legends such as Sunil Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar have many admirers in Pakistan.
We need to build on our trust, on what is common to both of us. We have to inspire confidence in the nations around us. That would give no room to outside powers to play politics in our backyard.
-- Siraj Wahab is a senior editor at the Jeddah-based Arab News . He can be reached at sirajwahab@arabnews.com .
Friday, August 14, 2009
Interview with Siddique Hasan: Architect of JIH’s vision 2016
Interview with Siddique Hasan: Architect of JIH’s vision 2016
Prof Siddique Hassan, Naib Ameer (vice president) of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, a college professor and former head of JIH’s Kerala unit is credited with undertaking some big projects and making them success. No example can be better than Madhyamam, a daily newspaper published by Jamaat-e-Islami Hind in Kerala and Gulf. It has more than a dozen editions being published from Kerala and Gulf simultaneously. Now he heads JIH’s mammoth social welfare project Vision 2016 that aims to positively transform lives of the underprivileged sections of the Indian society. In an interview with Fasil K of Khabrein.info, Prof Siddique Hassan, speaks extensively on the project Vision 2016, a mammoth multi billion rupees project, its progress and the challenges ahead. Excerpts:
Q: What is Vision 2016 all about?
A: Vision 2016 is an ambitious plan envisaged for the development and upliftment of the deprived sections of our society that includes Muslims and Dalits. Lasting for period of ten years, the project has identified education, health, employment, women empowerment, and microfinance as its chief focus areas. The schemes and projects run by various institutions and agencies are supervised by an umbrella organization, Human Welfare Foundation. In the first phase, Muslims of the selected 58 poor districts are going to benefit from the project.
For complete interview click on the following link:
http://khabrein.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24904&Itemid=65
Prof Siddique Hassan, Naib Ameer (vice president) of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, a college professor and former head of JIH’s Kerala unit is credited with undertaking some big projects and making them success. No example can be better than Madhyamam, a daily newspaper published by Jamaat-e-Islami Hind in Kerala and Gulf. It has more than a dozen editions being published from Kerala and Gulf simultaneously. Now he heads JIH’s mammoth social welfare project Vision 2016 that aims to positively transform lives of the underprivileged sections of the Indian society. In an interview with Fasil K of Khabrein.info, Prof Siddique Hassan, speaks extensively on the project Vision 2016, a mammoth multi billion rupees project, its progress and the challenges ahead. Excerpts:
Q: What is Vision 2016 all about?
A: Vision 2016 is an ambitious plan envisaged for the development and upliftment of the deprived sections of our society that includes Muslims and Dalits. Lasting for period of ten years, the project has identified education, health, employment, women empowerment, and microfinance as its chief focus areas. The schemes and projects run by various institutions and agencies are supervised by an umbrella organization, Human Welfare Foundation. In the first phase, Muslims of the selected 58 poor districts are going to benefit from the project.
For complete interview click on the following link:
http://khabrein.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24904&Itemid=65
History Lessons from India
History Lessons from India
Aijaz Zaka Syed
13 August 2009
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?section=opinion&xfile=data/opinion/2009/august/opinion_august67.xml
My new place in Hyderabad, India, is a little, two-storey affair that looks rather large to us after spending seven years in a two-bedroom apartment in Dubai. It’s not great, but offers a rare view of the magnificent Golconda fort built by the Qutub Shahis.
When threatened by the Mughals, the last Qutub Shahi King Abulhassan Tana Shah withdrew himself to the fort and fought a long and hard battle against a far more superior and larger army led by Emperor Aurangzeb himself.
Not surprisingly, when the siege of Golconda began, the 100,000-strong Mughal army had not anticipated much resistance, let alone a long and debilitating engagement with the rag-tag Qutub Shahi army. The Mughals ran into a fierce wall of resistance led by the valiant Qutub Shahi commander, Abdul Razaq Larry, who kept the flag flying on the fort for more than eight months at a huge personal cost.
Golconda finally fell to the Mughals in September, 1767, after they managed to buy the loyalties of a couple of Qutub Shahi generals despite tremendous sacrifices by Larry, who nearly died fighting the invading army with his entire family.
The dynasty that Larry fought to protect lies buried next to the Golconda fort, what is known as Gumbadan-e-Shahi, or more popularly as Saat Gumbad (Seven Tombs). The last abode of Quli Qutub Shah, the founder and the architect of Hyderabad including its architectural marvels Charminar and Makkah Masjid, and six of his successors is only a stone’s throw away from my place—literally. Standing on my terrace these days as the rest of India desperately prays for rains, I often watch the sun set behind the still imposing Golconda fort and the grand Seven Tombs that stand guard over the city built by their sleeping residents.
Although this entire country is steeped in history, five thousand years of it, Hyderabad lives and breathes history like no other city does, perhaps with the exception of Delhi. This city of nabobs and kebabs is not merely about its legendary cuisine, including the fabled biryani and haleem, or even its grand palaces. Hyderabad is a state of mind and it’s far from dead.
This may be why while the unique Indo-Islamic culture that came into being with the arrival of Muslims has all but disappeared from its traditional centres like Delhi, Lucknow and elsewhere, it continues to thrive and blossom in this fascinating city.
Urdu, the heady brew of a language that was born out of a willing union of Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic and the folksy Khadi boli, is a living tribute to that fascinating encounter between Islam and India. Urdu or Hindustani, as Mahatma Gandhi liked to call it, happens to be the language of Bollywood, the world’s biggest movie industry. It remains the lingua franca of majority of Indians, although in its more Sanskritised form it metamorphoses into Hindi, the country’s official language.
This great language is fast dying in north of the country in its written form, especially in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. It has been banished to occasional mushairas (poetry reading sessions) and Indian parliament where politicians love to invoke greats like Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz to make their point.
However, the Urdu language and the culture that gave birth to it continue to flourish in Hyderabad and districts around it. The city is home to three of India’s largest selling and world-class Urdu newspapers and countless other publications and research centres.
What never ceases to intrigue me though is the fact how early Muslims built these great centres of civilisation and culture in a seemingly alien landscape. If Hyderabad happens to be far from the original cradle of Muslim power and civilisation in the north, centres like Mysore, once ruled by the legendary Tipu Sultan, and Bijapur down south are even more distant.
How did they do it? Surely, all this couldn’t have been accomplished by way of the sword, as many today tend to suggest. You cannot create such rich cultural legacy and phenomenon of a civilisation at gunpoint. It needs and thrives in peace and social harmony.
What early Muslims in India — in fact wherever they went — did was to win hearts and minds of people. Watching the Emraan Hashmi controversy unfold over the past couple of weeks, I have repeatedly wondered why Muslims have become so unwelcome in the land, which has been their home for nearly a thousand years.
Commenting on the Bollywood star’s complaint of ‘religious discrimination’ in Mumbai last week, yours truly had stuck out his neck to suggest Muslims had no option but to break out of their mental ghettoes and do more to end their isolation in India and elsewhere.
Now this seems to have upset some of my fellow travellers, who have been particularly offended by the word ‘host societies’ suggesting it implied Muslims are ‘invaders’ or guests in this country. (One particularly emotional reader has even accused me of being a ‘secret agent of anti-Muslim forces,’ out to create intellectual confusion and disillusionment in the community!)
Perhaps, I should have been more discerning and nuanced in my choice of words. But I still believe, and firmly so, that the myriad problems we face as a community today can be confronted by reaching out and integrating and communicating more effectively with our neighbours and society at large.
Inclusion, and not isolation, is the way forward, whether you happen to be in India or Indonesia—or even in the West. A million misconceptions, prejudices and complete lies can be tackled, if only we communicated and interacted more with the people around us.
This is what early Muslims did wherever they went. They personified their beliefs and won hearts and minds with their character, behaviour and actions. The Arab fishermen who landed on India’s Malabar Coast were simple folks. They didn’t know reading or writing, let alone the local language.
Yet they bowled over local people with their honesty and simplicity. It was thanks to people like them and the message of love and peace by pious men of God like Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer and Nizamuddin of Delhi that Islam spread and blossomed in the subcontinent, not because of the long swords of Mughals or Turks.
Those men built bridges of love, faith and dialogue wherever their circumstances took them. They genuinely loved God’s creation and were real leaders of men, not escapists like us. They did not cloister and lock themselves in their neighbourhoods but led their societies from the front. They did not just win on the battlefield but also knew how to conquer hearts and minds. Unlike some of us today, they celebrated and deeply respected life. They were both medium and the message.
Aijaz Zaka Syed is Opinion Editor of Khaleej Times and can be reached at aijaz@khaleejtimes.com
Aijaz Zaka Syed
13 August 2009
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticleNew.asp?section=opinion&xfile=data/opinion/2009/august/opinion_august67.xml
My new place in Hyderabad, India, is a little, two-storey affair that looks rather large to us after spending seven years in a two-bedroom apartment in Dubai. It’s not great, but offers a rare view of the magnificent Golconda fort built by the Qutub Shahis.
When threatened by the Mughals, the last Qutub Shahi King Abulhassan Tana Shah withdrew himself to the fort and fought a long and hard battle against a far more superior and larger army led by Emperor Aurangzeb himself.
Not surprisingly, when the siege of Golconda began, the 100,000-strong Mughal army had not anticipated much resistance, let alone a long and debilitating engagement with the rag-tag Qutub Shahi army. The Mughals ran into a fierce wall of resistance led by the valiant Qutub Shahi commander, Abdul Razaq Larry, who kept the flag flying on the fort for more than eight months at a huge personal cost.
Golconda finally fell to the Mughals in September, 1767, after they managed to buy the loyalties of a couple of Qutub Shahi generals despite tremendous sacrifices by Larry, who nearly died fighting the invading army with his entire family.
The dynasty that Larry fought to protect lies buried next to the Golconda fort, what is known as Gumbadan-e-Shahi, or more popularly as Saat Gumbad (Seven Tombs). The last abode of Quli Qutub Shah, the founder and the architect of Hyderabad including its architectural marvels Charminar and Makkah Masjid, and six of his successors is only a stone’s throw away from my place—literally. Standing on my terrace these days as the rest of India desperately prays for rains, I often watch the sun set behind the still imposing Golconda fort and the grand Seven Tombs that stand guard over the city built by their sleeping residents.
Although this entire country is steeped in history, five thousand years of it, Hyderabad lives and breathes history like no other city does, perhaps with the exception of Delhi. This city of nabobs and kebabs is not merely about its legendary cuisine, including the fabled biryani and haleem, or even its grand palaces. Hyderabad is a state of mind and it’s far from dead.
This may be why while the unique Indo-Islamic culture that came into being with the arrival of Muslims has all but disappeared from its traditional centres like Delhi, Lucknow and elsewhere, it continues to thrive and blossom in this fascinating city.
Urdu, the heady brew of a language that was born out of a willing union of Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic and the folksy Khadi boli, is a living tribute to that fascinating encounter between Islam and India. Urdu or Hindustani, as Mahatma Gandhi liked to call it, happens to be the language of Bollywood, the world’s biggest movie industry. It remains the lingua franca of majority of Indians, although in its more Sanskritised form it metamorphoses into Hindi, the country’s official language.
This great language is fast dying in north of the country in its written form, especially in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. It has been banished to occasional mushairas (poetry reading sessions) and Indian parliament where politicians love to invoke greats like Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz to make their point.
However, the Urdu language and the culture that gave birth to it continue to flourish in Hyderabad and districts around it. The city is home to three of India’s largest selling and world-class Urdu newspapers and countless other publications and research centres.
What never ceases to intrigue me though is the fact how early Muslims built these great centres of civilisation and culture in a seemingly alien landscape. If Hyderabad happens to be far from the original cradle of Muslim power and civilisation in the north, centres like Mysore, once ruled by the legendary Tipu Sultan, and Bijapur down south are even more distant.
How did they do it? Surely, all this couldn’t have been accomplished by way of the sword, as many today tend to suggest. You cannot create such rich cultural legacy and phenomenon of a civilisation at gunpoint. It needs and thrives in peace and social harmony.
What early Muslims in India — in fact wherever they went — did was to win hearts and minds of people. Watching the Emraan Hashmi controversy unfold over the past couple of weeks, I have repeatedly wondered why Muslims have become so unwelcome in the land, which has been their home for nearly a thousand years.
Commenting on the Bollywood star’s complaint of ‘religious discrimination’ in Mumbai last week, yours truly had stuck out his neck to suggest Muslims had no option but to break out of their mental ghettoes and do more to end their isolation in India and elsewhere.
Now this seems to have upset some of my fellow travellers, who have been particularly offended by the word ‘host societies’ suggesting it implied Muslims are ‘invaders’ or guests in this country. (One particularly emotional reader has even accused me of being a ‘secret agent of anti-Muslim forces,’ out to create intellectual confusion and disillusionment in the community!)
Perhaps, I should have been more discerning and nuanced in my choice of words. But I still believe, and firmly so, that the myriad problems we face as a community today can be confronted by reaching out and integrating and communicating more effectively with our neighbours and society at large.
Inclusion, and not isolation, is the way forward, whether you happen to be in India or Indonesia—or even in the West. A million misconceptions, prejudices and complete lies can be tackled, if only we communicated and interacted more with the people around us.
This is what early Muslims did wherever they went. They personified their beliefs and won hearts and minds with their character, behaviour and actions. The Arab fishermen who landed on India’s Malabar Coast were simple folks. They didn’t know reading or writing, let alone the local language.
Yet they bowled over local people with their honesty and simplicity. It was thanks to people like them and the message of love and peace by pious men of God like Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer and Nizamuddin of Delhi that Islam spread and blossomed in the subcontinent, not because of the long swords of Mughals or Turks.
Those men built bridges of love, faith and dialogue wherever their circumstances took them. They genuinely loved God’s creation and were real leaders of men, not escapists like us. They did not cloister and lock themselves in their neighbourhoods but led their societies from the front. They did not just win on the battlefield but also knew how to conquer hearts and minds. Unlike some of us today, they celebrated and deeply respected life. They were both medium and the message.
Aijaz Zaka Syed is Opinion Editor of Khaleej Times and can be reached at aijaz@khaleejtimes.com
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