• Recent Posts

    House Hunting Of Our Secularists

    Since Narendra Modi took over as the PM of this nation in 2014 there are lots of instances where religious disharmony was manufactured for one single reason – to show how the NDA government automatically brings religious volatility in the nation. But the facts are far from being what the secularists or their beloved media wants us to believe. Almost all of the church attacks that media cried over for days were found out to be, either manufactured or by insiders to show the present dispensation in bad light. There were arrests made in almost all church vandalism which showed the real culprits are the ones who were employees of the said churches or routine burglary in want of quick and easy money. It is a different matter that such vandalism occurring in our temples seldom gets the media time that the church attacks got. Without fact checking the media cried “Attack On Secularism” while the truth appears to be otherwise.

    That ploy failed, much like the wolf crying that the same secularists were doing for long 13 years post 2002 Gujarat riots. I say failed because the Church attacks seem to have disappeared all of a sudden. At one point, every second day we had our media bursting out in episodic outrage over something as silly as throwing a stone at the gate of a particular church. Once the truth behind all such cases came to light, our media at once stopped shouting and so are the Church attacks. Do you feel something is missing in the plot? Certainly, I do at least.

    In desperation, the secularists need new lease of Oxygen to keep on tarnishing this Modi government on religious lines. And people like Misbah Qadri routinely provide that Oxygen cylinder by their insinuating and cooked up stories. Irony even, the Arnav Goswamis of the world buy such synthetic stories and hold hour long debates to malign the government without fact checking even for once. Now that Misbah’s story is been proved fake by the police and at least three independent dallies, will AG hold another hour long debate and ask the same panelists, starting with that fraud woman called Misbah Qadri, to apologize to the government? He won’t because that is not how our secularists work. They believe in shoot and scoot theory as truthfulness and honesty are never their virtue.

    Not only our media, even our secularists believe in the shoot and scoot theory like it is nobody’d business. One among the prominent secular Rudalis is a certain Shehzad Poonawala. In fact both the Poonawala brothers are of high secular breed. Their contribution in upholding the Indian version of secularism is noteworthy. No wonder, both of them are darlings of our equally secularist media, both digital and print. So when one skewed piece of Shehzad gets published in a typical Congress doormat called Indian Express, it hardly raises an eyebrow on the content and the legitimacy of the claim or the lack of it. You can read Shehzad’s bile right here before you move ahead.

    Shehzad starts with a typical victimhood tone as every secularist worth of his/her salt does.

    Recent cases of alleged discrimination in Mumbai — a diamond firm refused a job to MBA graduate Zeshan Ali Khan and Misbah Qadri was denied a flat, reportedly because of their religion — once again lift the veil of cosmopolitanism that sits uneasily on the ugly reality that corrodes the constitutional pillar of secularism. While in these specific cases, the National Commission for Minorities was approached and inquiries and penal action initiated, the larger question that needs to be addressed is: How should we tackle religion-based discrimination, and not just its symptoms?  

    I agree, Zeshan Ali’s case is deplorable, at least on the fact that, there were official communication going between the company and Ali. But that is just half of the story. If Shehzad is worried about Zeshan then he should equally be worried about hundreds of classifieds that categorically ask for Muslim candidates. Have anyone seen Shehzad writing even a line against those classifieds? None that I can remember. So when Shehzad wakes up crying discrimination for a Mislim, I can safely call him, for want of a better word, a Hypocrite. If Zeshan pinches Shehzad the bad way it should equally pinch Shehzad for a certain Sudhansu Shekhar or a Vikramaditya Poddar. Both were denied jobs because they were non-Muslims. Since I never heard Shehzad crying wolf back then, I can see the selected amnesia with Shehzad and his ilk.

    Misbah Qadri is a bad example that Shehzad should have stayed away from. Since he has used her name, it only pontificates why we shouldn’t believe a single word of the Mashbah Qadris in future. That woman is an outright liar. Isn’t Shehzad aware of the fact that, her version of victimhood is actually a thought after story to get that limelight factor? Isn’t he aware that the lady in question and her story is out rightly refuted by the investigative authorities and other Muslims staying in the same society? Even Mid-Day, The Hindu and local daily carried stories to prove how Ms. Misbah Qadri is a big time liar in hunt for that media time to propel her otherwise depleting career. Since Shehzad started with the lie of Misbah Qadri it only shows how fractured are his thought processes and how stories to malign Modi government are routinely brewed in our secularism bylanes.

    He further writes

    The deep extent of the malaise has been demonstrated by several independent studies. For instance, one study shows that in the secondary and tertiary sector, the share of Muslims between 16 and 64 years of age in regular and casual employment is lower than that of SCs and STs. In the public sector, the situation is equally dismal, with Muslims having a share of just 2.5 per cent in the civil services.  
       
    Let’s keep these studies aside since most of the studies were proved wrong by facts on the grounds. Let’s ponder on the point that Shehzad wants to harp on. Who is responsible for the pathetic presence of Muslims in our taskforce, starting with the primary sector to our public and government sectors? For decades, the Congress party intentionally made sure that the Muslims remain uneducated and stay in their ghettos because there where Congress’s political dividends are. An educated Muslim would see through the appeasement farce and will ask very uncomfortable questions for his terrible situation. That is what Congress doesn’t want. Shehzad, the sympathizer in chief must have asked the right questions here than simply quoting numbers. He should have asked why his beloved party Congress kept the Muslims to languish in the gutter for this long. Who created ghettos for the Muslims to stay there and get stereotyped further? But our secularists have a serious problem with history, albeit the history isn’t the history of Gujarat and the year is 2002. So I give that liberty to Shehzad as it suites most of the secularists, not just him.

    But he carries on with his rambling. Let’s see where he jumps next.

    Housing, like employment, is another area where Muslims face discrimination. A comprehensive account of this can be found in the Sachar Committee report, not to mention the media stories that emerge periodically from urban centers like Ahmedabad, Delhi, Mumbai and Noida. Most often, the terminology used is not as direct as it was in the 99acres.com case, which involved a “no Muslim” ad and which this writer had legally pursued in 2013. Discrimination usually revolves around stereotyping — “Muslims have four wives” and “Muslims eat non-vegetarian food”. Political and media narratives that portray Muslims as terrorists or “love jihadis” deepen pre-existing prejudice. Nobody wants a single man with a Muslim name and a long beard staying next to them. “What if he belongs to Simi or IM?” What if he misbehaves with “our women”? Even actor Emraan Hashmi couldn’t escape discrimination.

    Every secularist cries in the name of Sachar committee but none asks, why its recommendations were never implemented. I bet the answers to this question couldn’t be more interesting. Sachar committee precisely talks on something that Congress party hates to hear. Sachar committee talks about elevation of an entire community through education but that hardly seems like a benefit to Congress’s preserved vote bank. Though all secularists would cry over non-implemented Sachar committee guidelines, none would question Congress on its complete disinterest in the implementation part. But again, that is part of the story. The other and more significant part is where the report clearly educates all governments, not just Congress, to stay away from rolling out doles against the lack of facilities for the community. Does the Shehzad Poonawalas of the world got balls to ask Congress on what ground they so conveniently ignored this particular suggestion?

    Now coming to the stereotyping part. Why I have to think through my feet to come up with a story so that I can answer my kid on why the neighbor’s son Salim has four moms while she has only one. I mean I don’t see a problem in answering but then don’t expect me to hide the facts from my kid and come up with a fake story. If one finds keeping four wives is as per their religion then they shouldn’t cry foul if I explain my kid on how a religion treats women as nothing more than objects and hence keeping four or for that matter 10 hardly matters. You can’t have the Samosha and eat it too. I agree, not all Muslims are terrorists but then examples like that Yahoo engineer who later found out to be an IM operative, makes me feel little uncomfortable. If an average person sees danger in a beard wielding Muslim, the blame need to be shared equally, not just on the person who thinks so. I have one regular reader who once met an engineering graduate who also happens to be the younger brother of his friend but later on got arrested by Manglore police for having active participation with anti-India elements. One of my friends, who used to stay in the same apartment where the Yahoo IM operative was residing, is still in the shock of his life and I certainly can’t blame him if he gets jittery by the mere mention of a Muslim name.

    He keeps blabbering.

    We need a fair housing law that prohibits discrimination in housing, along the lines of the legislation that protects African-Americans from such practices in the US. It must make blockbusting illegal, incentivise developers to create inclusive habitations and ensure that the language used in real estate advertisements is non-discriminatory. Such a law would not only protect Muslims but other vulnerable groups too.

    On the employment and education front, India needs the equal opportunity law to be passed with the consent of state governments. Disallowing discriminatory human resource and hiring policies, prescribing affirmative action on economic parameters and mandating the creation of equal opportunity commissions at the state and national levels to monitor practices and ensuring implementation are important steps that must be taken.

    Here is a very simple question. In India we don’t have specific laws for communities except SC and ST. And there are far minor communities than Muslims in India. For example, the Christians are highly educated and better placed, so are the Sikhs. Does the secular in Shehzad ever wondered, why it is the Muslims who are rotting among the minorities? When it comes to jobs, most of the Muslims simply don’t fit the bill in terms of qualification and abilities. What Shehzad expects to happen? Muslims getting hired even if they are far from being capable? Same is the case with education as well. Does Shehzad expects Muslims to go through IIT and IIM even if they are not even half the worth? What kind of human resource pool Shehzad wants to build in national terms? Highly incapable people running around crazy and doing nothing? I haven’t heard a bigger absurdity than this. Which law was formulated specifically looking at Christians or Sikhs or Parsis? If not then why there should be one for the Muslims? Just because Congress fooled them for decades, Shehzad wants new avenues to fool further should be rolled out? What kind of logic is this? And when he says fair housing law then one wonders what that one should be. Is it something like, to supersede one’s personal choice, fear and prejudice and ask him to abide by something that he is not OK with and which even looks grossly out of sync with our constitution? Isn’t the freedom of choice getting hampered right there, Mr. Shehzad Poonawala?

    And by the way, like Maishbah Qadri, Emran Hashmi’s case is another instance of limelight mongering. It is clarified later by the Bhatts that Emran’s case is not because of discrimination but because of incomplete and wrong documents. So how fair it is on the part of Shehzad and many other secularists to keep popping Emaran’s name on every damn occasion? Isn’t that a lie to begin with?

    2 comments:

    1. How about Common Civil Code while expecting laws that prohibit discrimination? Can he demand that one too?

      ReplyDelete
    2. Taslima Nasreen relocated to USA, Where are these Secularists and Media. Had this been reverse, media and so called secularist would be ready to bark on and continue debates for atleast a week.

      ReplyDelete