The past week in India has seen enraged mobs burning buses, setting alight trains in protests that seem to be engineered to falsely depict the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of having an anti-Muslim agenda.
The current rampaging began soon after the Indian parliament enacted the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) on December 11, which grants easy access to Indian citizenship to non-Muslims of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh who faced religious persecution and sought refuge in India prior to December 31, 2014.
The CAA does not affect any Indian citizen of any religion, yet Islamist groups active in India’s Jama Islamic University in Delhi and the Aligarh Muslim University came onto the streets claiming discrimination on the basis of religion.
Read: Modi government dispels myths about CAA: Here are 19 FAQs and their answers
Indian Muslim leadership’s outrage seemed to be based on their fear that allowing citizenship to persecuted Pakistani Christians, Hindus and Sikhs would increase the non-Muslim population of the country and thus dilute the veto power they’ve exercised in India for the last 70 years. Therefore, to maintain the balance they insist that Muslims from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan too should be allowed to become Indians.
Never mind the fact that the genesis of Pakistan that was carved out of India in 1947, was based on the Islamist argument that Muslims cannot live in a land with a non-Muslim majority. As a result, Hindus and Sikhs faced genocide in Pakistan, a million died and close to 10 million were displaced to meet the whims and fancy of the founders of the world’s first Islamic State.
As I did the rounds on Indian TV networks on Wednesday, that threatening Muslim attitude was palpable. While Islamic clerics did not shy away from their hostility towards me, one threatened me, saying “Your turn will come soon.”
This as residents and students of Muslim districts in the capital demonstrated their street power by blocking roads and chanting such hate-filled slogans as “Hinduon se lenge azadi” (We’ll snatch our freedom from the Hindus).
Instead of clarifying to the community that the CAA is not against Muslims or Islam, the opposition political parties have poured fuel on the fire in their attempt to appease the Islamist agenda and garner votes in the Jan 2020 elections for the Delhi State Assembly.
On Thursday, the Communists Parties and other Left-wing groups have also thrown their weight behind the Islamists and plan a ‘nation-wide’ protest today against the new Citizenship Act, according to a statement issued by these parties.
To understand the behaviour of Indian Muslims and their leadership, one needs to read what India’s leading Muslim politician and nationalist and first education minister had to say about Muslims and their politics. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad told a Kolkata audience on 27th October 1914:
“This biradari (community of Muslims) has been established by God… All relationships in the world can break down, but this relationship can never be severed. It is possible a father turns against his son, not impossible that a mother separates her child from her lap… But the relationship that a Chinese Muslim has with an African Muslim, an Arab Bedouin has with the Tatar shepherd, and which binds in one soul a neo-Muslim of India with the right-descendant Qureshi of Mecca, there is no power on earth to break it, to cut off this chain…”
Meanwhile, the International Business Times quoting intelligence sources reported that banned extremist and militant Islamic fundamentalist organisations – the Students Islamic Movement (SIMI) and the Popular Front of India (PFI) were behind the CAA violence.
In addition, a hijabi woman depicted as a hero of the anti-CAA movement was reported by IANS – Indian Asian News Service as having links with the Indian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the radical Jamaat-e-Islami-Hind.
Sitting in Delhi and watching the Islamists play their cards to bring disrepute to the Indian Republic, I can see the parallels in Canada where despite the evidence, we keep appeasing the Islamists who have a foothold in every party and every urban municipality.
The menace is real; the response unreal.
