Passive voices: a penetrating study of Muslims in India
- New Delhi Sterling Publishers 1973
- 396p.
This is a study in depth of the post-Partition status of Muslims in India who constitute the subcontinent's principal minority and numbers well over sixty million. For the best part of the past twenty-six years, the Indian Muslims have wandered shepherdless and almost friendless- misunderstood at home and misrepresented abroad. Four events in recent years combined in unpredictable conspiracy to draw world attention to their problems and their helplessness; the fire at Al Aqsa Mosque, the Ahmedabad riots, the Rabat Summit, and the visit of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan to India. None of these events had any pre-determined objec- tive, insofar as India was concerned, and yet each one, follow- ing the other in close sequence, served to focus world attention on the anti-minority communalism rampant in an allegedly secular India. When Michael Rohan set fire in Jerusalem to the much venerated Al Aqsa Mosque to prepare a site for rebuilding Solomon's Temple, he did not realise that the fire he lit might start fires of different sorts in different parts of the world. Because of Al Aqsa the wrath of the best part of the Muslim world was aroused, as was also the indignation of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in various parts of India. The latter were perhaps the more expressive in the cities of Bombay, Calcutta and Ahmedabad. Then came the great Islamic Summit at Rabat, the first in many years, to which came rulers and Heads of State and others from many Islamic countries. When no invitation came to India, the Government of India was not slow to claim Indian representation at the Islamic Meet on the grounds of her concern with India's sixty million Muslims and of her having the third largest Muslim population in the world. The Summit met in Rabat and promptly decided to invite represen- tatives of the Muslims in India, although India was not by any means an Islamic country, nor had an Islamic Head of State. By then other events had and were taking place. Ahmedabad, arson, murder, and carnage had become common place events. According to most accounts, though there had been several communal outbursts in India ever since the parti- tion of the country, none like what was being witnessed at Ahmedabad had ever happened before. Property worth crores of rupees had been reduced to ashes, thousands lay dead in the streets and elsewhere, and Mahatma Gandhi's Sabarmati Ashram had been attacked. More than thirty thousand Muslims had been rendered homeless and thousands were in refugee camps and the Army had been called in to restore order. By the time the Rabat Summit had met Al Aqsa had been repaired. Understandably Ahmedabad was not far from the minds of those attending the Summit. On receipt of the invitation an official delegation appointed by the Government went to Rabat from India, but consisted only of three Muslims and five non-Muslims, officials drawn from the Secretariat, and the Sikh Ambassador to Morocco. With all its defects, the Indian delegation would have been welcomed, nevertheless, but for a thoughtless declaration from Delhi that any enquiries at Rabat about Ahmedabad and the number of Muslims dead would be regarded as interference in a matter of India's internal affairs, with which the Summit was not concerned. The rest of the story is too well known to require repetition. The doors of Rabat closed and the official delegation had to find its way home from Rabat.