Being Muslim in India Today | YE DAAGH DAAGH UJAALA | Episode 2

Описание: Karwan e Mohabbat has initiated a series of video discussions on the
state of the Indian republic. The series is called Yeh Daag Daag Ujala, in
tribute to the iconic poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

In this episode, the host Harsh Mander discusses what life is like for
Muslim citizens in India today. His guests are veteran journalist Ziya us
Salam, lawyer and legal scholar Shahrukh Alam and young writer Zeyad
Masroor Khan.

Mander begins by asking his guests if they feel their ancestors chose
correctly when they opted for multi-religious secular India over Islamic
Pakistan at the time of India’s partition in 1947. Their response was
emphatic. “If I could get into a time machine and go back in time to
1947, I would still urge my father to choose India”, declares Khan.
“India is sometimes confused if it wants me”, he adds, “but I have no
confusion that India needs me.” Salam also affirms, “For those whose
ancestors joined the freedom struggle and who in full control of their
senses chose India over Pakistan, they are not required to seek a
certificate of their patriotism over a cricket match”. Alam says that the
question does not at all resonate with her. “I am so embedded in this
country, that we are India and India is us”.

But they speak in anguish about the ways that India has transformed
after 2014. “Repeatedly people communicate to you that you are
separate, different from us,” says Salam. He describes how he is frisked
more carefully in airports, how even his two daughters face
discrimination in their schools, on the school bus, even in their
neighbourhood. Alam says that Muslim culture and practices were an
intrinsic part of Indian cultural life. Now these are either fetishised or
mocked at.

“The Muslim today is the trouble-maker, the disruptor, the
anti-national and this overtly sexualised being”. And the ordinary
Muslim cannot understand all of this – these accusations, this twisted
stigma – because this is not how Muslims are. She recalls the words of
MP Manoj Jha when he spoke to an audience of largely young Muslims.
He said to them, “Do you realise that you are the last wall of defence of
constitutionalism and rule of law on one side, pitted against a very
unequal society with huge democratic deficits?” Through India’s struggle
for freedom and as it rose as a democratic free nation, Muslims have
always been there to defend freedom and democracy.

Salam said that each time he returns to his country after travels abroad,
he quietly bends down to touch the soil of his land, because it is the
country he so loves. Once again, he says, “I don’t need the certificate of
a Hindutva practitioner of my love for my country. All those people who
collect abroad for Howdy Modi gatherings, if someone asks them to
return to India – to Muzaffarnagar, to Meerut, to Bhopal, none of them
would be willing to do this. I feel insulted to even think I need their
certificates of my patriotism”.