When the controversial AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan tweeted about Tahir Hussain being punished because he is Muslim, and that being Muslim is the biggest crime in India, he received more than 21 thousand likes. Amanatullah is not alone, these past few days the ‘Ganga Jamni Tehzeeb’ club members which include leftover (and irrelevant) socialites from the Congress Ecosystem, JNU Junkies, Rana Ayyub and her clones and some publications in India and abroad have been working overtime to express horror over lost Muslim lives.
Yes the Delhi riots were horrible and innocent lives of both Muslims and Hindus were lost, it’s a tragedy we need to learn from because we must co-exist! The great puzzle however is how 20 crore Indian Muslims have the sole privilege to be certified as victims over all other Indian communities even when they face greater sufferings.
Myriad witness accounts and videos have emerged which point fingers at Tahir. Interestingly Tahir Hussain also circulated a video where he is pleading as a defenceless dove, the video was trashed as a poor green screen creation within minutes of its release, yet Amanatullah seems convinced that Tahir is an innocent lamb who is being victimised.
That the victimhood card is a clever and a hugely successful ploy is not the point, it’s those millions of Hindus who have suffered for centuries yet never complained, never played victim, also needs some attention.
For now let’s leave aside the destruction of Hindu institutions, murder and mayhem during the 800 years of bloody invasions to look at some other stories from our recent past conveniently erased from our history books
Just a 100 years ago thousands of Malayalee Hindus were raped, butchered and forcibly converted to Islam under what is sugar coated as the ‘patriotic’ Malabar rebellion against the British who had put a stop to the fantastic Khilafat (Caliphate) Movement. In spite of leaders like Ambedkar saying “The blood-curdling atrocities committed by the Moplas in Malabar against the Hindus were indescribable”, Annie Bessant asking the Mahatma to go to Malabar and see the horror meted out on Hindus for himself. But since we don’t complain Gandhiji simply refused to believe his brothers could do any wrong.
This may well have been the beginning of our peculiar behaviour where the Hindu’s ‘offered the other cheek’ instead.
Hindu genocide from Portuguese occupied Goa is one more case which no one ever talks about. Goan Hindus who refused to convert had to die or flee for their lives right up till Goa’s Independence in 1960, yet we simply have no sense of this misfortune.
1947 saw the worst kind of human tragedy where lakhs suffered terrible loss of lives, property and more. Both sides of my family migrated from West Punjab now in Pakistan with no more than a shirt on their back. Growing up I only heard cheerful stories of life in Lahore, what I was never told was how they had to live in the Kingsway Camp (refugee camp) in Delhi for nearly 2 years before they found a decent house. None of my aunts and uncles ever discussed the hardships they had to face and never once expressed any hatred for Muslims!
All the Punjabi and Bengali Hindus who fled their beloved homeland to save their lives and honour in 1947, collected shattered pieces of their banished lives and worked through extreme suffering and hardships to prosperity.
One would think India’s independence should’ve put a permanent stop to all oppression against Hindus. The fact is we continued to face tyranny in our home land right through the 20thcentury.
Most Indians have no clue of the Tamil Brahmin exodus in the 60s and 70s. They were so traumatised by the bigoted Periyarists, that they had to leave their homeland to cities like Mumbai and Delhi where they could live in peace.
Has anyone ever heard them talk about it? TamBrams as they are affectionately called used the ‘Brahmastra’ (ultimate weapon), that of educating themselves to arrive at the board rooms of fortune 500 companies.
Little over 35 years ago the Sikhs in Delhi were butchered and five years later it was the turn of Kashmiri Pandits. Here again there are no instances of playing the perpetually wounded, anger yes, but no victimhood. Both the Sikhs in Delhi and the Pandits of the Valley had lost their businesses only to resurrect them through grit and hard work.
So what is this phenomena which keeps us from playing victim even after our Gurus were martyred, women raped, children killed and families forcibly converted?
Read: Glorifying Aurangzeb and forgetting Guru Tegh Bahadur: The dangers of losing our identity
Is it our DNA, shaped over thousands of years of Karma, Dharma and Eternity of Life?
Is it the light of education which shows us the path in adversity? Or is it an overdose of Gandhi quotes?
Are we are too proud to acknowledge failure?, or maybe it is our curriculum which pushed us into a guilt zone or sorts?
Or have the years of oppression have made us so thick skinned that anti-India and anti-Hindu tirades no longer make a difference. They did it then, they are doing it now, we will continue to survive.
The Kashmiri Pandits in the North to Punjabi’s to Bengali’s in the East and Goans in the West to Tamil Brahmins & Malayalee’s in the South never shed a tear, they recreated, they reinvented, they soared even higher! May be this is why the Hindu civilization continues to live and thrive and we never have to play the victim hood card game!
We will continue to believe in ‘Sarva Dharma Sambhava’ while they chuckle at our naïvete’
