Onus On Hindus to Rescue Muslim Brethren!
Communal harmony is a prerequisite for a country like India, with its diverse population and cultures. Communal harmony means that people of different religions, castes, creeds, and backgrounds live together in the society with love and peace. It strives to create unity and goodwill among various communities, ensuring that every religion gets equal treatment.
This post argues that it is the responsibility of the Hindus and that Hindus should take the initiative for establishing communal harmony in the country.
India - The Next Superpower
Can we ever have communal harmony and live in peace in our country? If India is going to be the emerging global superpower, with its combined means of cultural, technological, economic, and military strengths, together with diplomatic soft-power influence, then there is no reason why we can't achieve superpower status in establishing communal harmony too.
Today, India no longer waits for other advanced countries to come up with solutions for mega problems. Instead the world looks to India. When the whole world was under pressure, we made our own vaccines and developed one of the best vaccination procedures ever, using CoWIN app. Similarly, in relaxed times, India came up with the world's best digital payment system, UPI app.
All that is required to find solutions for large social problems is to think outside the box and explore an alternate strategy, similar to what the brilliant External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar did in transforming India's engagements with the foreign powers. In the eight years since Modi became PM, the scale and intensity of change that our country has undergone in several sectors are unprecedented and unparalleled.
Tackling Communalism
Now, how do we handle the sharp rise in communalism today. First, communal conflicts are not a recent phenomenon in India. India witnessed its worst communal riots in 1948 after the partition. Since then, we had the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and more recently the Hindu-Muslim conflict of February 2020, both in Delhi. Unless we find a permanent solution, communal conflicts will remain a recurring issue in our country.
When we look at India's religious composition, Hindus make up 80% of the country's population and Muslims account for 14%; Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains account for the remaining 6%.
Therefore, purely from the numerical superiority alone, it is quite obvious that it is the sacred duty (dharmic responsibility) of Hindus to protect their Muslim brethren as well as people of other religious communities.
Taking the Muslim community as an example, it is a fact that India's peace loving Muslims are being exploited by different opportunistic groups:
- Exploitation by Islamic Religious Extremist groups like PFI, SDPI, ISIS, SIMI, etc. which declare Jihad against India to establish Dar-ul-Islam (land of Islam) by either forcefully converting everyone to Islam or by violence. They also systematically suppress the women, who are instructed to cover their bodies from head to toe, given a social status inferior to men, and preached to accept polygamy as a legitimate Islamic institution.
- Exploitation by Political Parties, mostly led by Congress, by providing material, territorial, and political concessions to Muslims through various policies for avoiding conflicts, gaining supporters, and winning elections.
- Exploitation by Self-serving Saviors of Muslims in the guise of social activists, journalists, academics, and student agitators whose sole objective is to easily achieve fame and fortune by encashing their visceral hatred towards Modi, BJP, Hindus, and India.
- Exploitation by Foreign Agents inimical to India such as News Agencies, Human Rights organizations, and NGOs who employ disruptive methods such as spreading fake news, carrying out disinformation campaigns, inciting social discords, disrupting economic activities, financing left-wing extremists, and intervening in national / local elections.
All these evil and villainous groups use modern social media tools to manipulate the people's mind and thereby hurt the nation’s interests.
The Hindus in India has to take the lead in protecting the peace loving Muslims that constitute the majority of Islamists, because:
- India is the natural home of all Hindus in the world and it also hosts the world's largest Muslim-minority population.
- India is also home to the world's third-largest Muslim population with 205 million Muslims, which is 11% of the world's Muslim population.
- India is duty-bound to guide the world in protecting Muslims in its role as the emerging global superpower.
- It is in the nature of India's Sanatana Dharma, characterized by belief in, or worship of, several gods, to absorb all religious faiths in its fold.
Once the exploitation of Muslims by different opportunistic groups are kept in check and contained, then spontaneously the Hindu fundamentalists will also give up their aggressive posture.
Religious Extremism
The main problem between the two communities, Hindus and Muslims, in India are caused by the religious fundamentalists of the two faiths, who blindly believe in the superiority of their respective religions.
This is more so in the case of worldwide Islam because today it has acquired an unacceptable and deplorable label as a fundamentalist religion involved in radicalism, extremism, and terrorism. The vociferous, vocal, and outspoken religious fundamentalists have taken control of the Islamic religion and seek to institute strict codes of behavior using Islamic canonical law (Sharia), waging the holy war (Jihad), and implementing a government under a Khalifah (caliphate).
In both cases the voices of the peace loving majority of the two faiths, Islam and Hinduism, are suppressed and the religious fundamentalists hold sway causing disruption and perpetual law and order problems in the civil society.
India's ancient Sanatana Dharma (eternal and universal law, order, principle) is an ethical concept, which explains in detail the moral values, righteousness, and the whole range of man's duties and responsibilities not only towards fellow humans but also towards all living entities in the entire world of natural, environmental, and social spaces they inhabit.
The principles and teachings of Sanatana Dharma gave births to a few major religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism. Sanatana Dharma transcends and surpasses the concepts of conventional religions in terms of its belief system, idea of divinity, and worship of God.
Honorable Interpretation of Quran
Today, both in India as well as internationally, Islam is in the clutches of religious fundamentalists, who shrewdly misuse religious references and misinterprets the teachings of the holy Quran to justify their violent methods, telling fellow Muslims to kill and go to war to fight for Islam and for Allah.
What is first required to accomplish this task is a proper interpretation and explanation of the holy Quran in tune with its teachings of Islam as a religion of peace, the ultimate goal of mankind.
To achieve this lofty goal we have a magnificent translation in Urdu of the Holy Quran, carried out by an illustrious son of India, namely Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Read all about this
This Indian scholar was an independence activist, a senior leader of the Indian National Congress (INC), President of INC for 18 years, the first Education Minister of independent India, who passed away in 1958 aged 69, and who was posthumously awarded 'Bharath Ratna', India's highest civilian honor, in 1992.
Promote Peace and Love
This glorious work of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad should be translated into all Indian languages and made available to the whole population to spread the real and genuine message of the great religion.
I hope that RSS and other Sangh Parivar organizations will take this suggestion in the right spirit and take the initiative in implementing it at a national level to bring peace and harmony, not only within the country but also internationally, as the Muslim population is widely spread out in many parts of the world.
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