RELIGION CANNOT ACT AS A GLUE IF AGENDA IS DIVISIVE

 

 

U.S. President Barack Obama and the many so called indices of democracy, free speech and minority rights never fail to lecture India on harmonious co-existence and minority rights. If we are to believe these indices the India is less democratic than Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan and Somalia and minorities in India are a persecuted lot, leading a miserable life! The proposition so preposterous that we think it is below our dignity to even counter it.

 

Where as In India, while the majority Hindu population decreased from 84.1% (1951) to 78.3% (2011), Muslim population increased from 9.4% (1951) to 14.2% (2011), the share of Muslims in Pakistan's overall population in 1951 was 85.80 per cent, while the share of non-Muslims was 14.20 per cent. (Pakistan here refers to East and West Pakistan taken together). Today the non-Muslims are 3.4% of Pakistan’s population! Will the tolerant world care to ask Pakistan where are the rest of their Sikhs and Hindus? The percentage of non-Muslims in Bangladesh has shrunk from 23.2% in 1971 to 9.4% in 2011. Will the tolerant world ask them where their Hindus are?

 

Afghanistan has an even more dismal story of the minority Hindus and Sikhs. During the 1970s, the Afghan Hindu population was estimated to number between 80,000 and 280,000, or 0.7% to 2.5% of the national population at the time. However, the population rapidly declined thereafter due to the Afghan wars along with continued persecution, discrimination and forced conversion. Today their numbers are minuscule.

 

Pakistan's foundation itself is built on a divisive agenda. In 1947, they said that they want a separate nation because their religion is different from others & they created Pakistan from India. They are still practicing the same divisive agenda and the results are there for all to see. Why would Baloch people not say that they want their own nation because their ethnicity & language is different from rest of the Pakistan? Why would people from Sindh province not say that they want a different country because of their ethnicity & language (Sindhi language)? Why would Pasthuns of Pakistan, who identify more with their brethren across the Durand line, not demand their own territory on the basis of their different ethnicity, language & culture? And the creation of Bangladesh was also a result of this divisive agenda and other discriminatory policies which people of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir, Gilgit, Baltistan, Balochistan, Khyber and Sindh are complaining today.

 

Religion is a set of organized beliefs, practices, and systems that most often relate to the belief and worship of a controlling force, such as a personal God or another supernatural being. It involves cultural beliefs, worldviews, texts, prophecies, revelations, and morals that have spiritual meaning to members of the particular faith, and it can encompass a range of practices, including sermons, rituals, prayer, meditation, holy places, symbols, trances, and feasts. Religion can contribute to a sense of community, provide support, and offer guidance. It has also been shown to impact both physical and mental health. Religion can help bring people together, but it can also be a source of division and stress, particularly for those who face discrimination from other religious groups or even within religious communities.

 

When various communities live together within a territory with understanding and cooperation, there is communal harmony. On the other hand, whenever such groups, either ethnic or religious, fight for their exclusiveness, group identity or group interest even at the cost of national interest or try to impose their way of life on other group, there is communal disharmony and this is termed as communalism.

 

All religions have different ceremonies, rituals, beliefs and practices. But when a section of people and their co-practitioners consider themselves superior, and get intolerant of others’ beliefs and practices and starts hating them the seeds of communalism are sown. They think the people of other religion are their enemy and they may attack their religion. This fear is one of the factor which make religion as a divisible factor. This is what has happened in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

 

India being a secular country promotes equal faith towards all religions. Secularism does not mean that State is hostile to a religion. The State is not partial towards any religion and this, if practiced honestly, helps in maintaining co-existence between different religious groups. However, if religion becomes a threat to the peace and harmony of the Nation, State may intervene in religious matters and act as a reformist. Similarly, Law may protect and preserve certain precepts of religion like humanity, togetherness, harmony etc. Society is the common ground for both religion and State and for orderly development of the society a balance between the values preserved by religion and those preserved by State must be reached.

 

Religion is not the only identity of a person. Race, ethnicity, language, culture etc also make a person different from others. India has far more diversity in terms of religion, language, ethnicity & culture but even after India is strongly united because India's foundation is not based on a certain religion or language. India has given equal importance to all the religions, language & culture. India has no state religion & no single language has been given the status of national language. Even after a huge population of India speaks & understand Hindi language it is not forced down the throat of all Indians. Language played an important role in Bangladesh's secession from Pakistan (as Bangla was their language and Pakistan Government tried to impose Urdu on them).

 

Unlike India, Pakistan made Islam as it's state religion and declared Urdu as the national language of Pakistan. You'll be surprised to known that only 7% people of Pakistan speak Urdu language, and that too a very adulterated one, with lots of Punjabi, Sindhi, Baloch, Pashtu and English words. Most of the people of Pakistan proudly speak in their local languages as Urdu, the language spoken in Lucknow and surrounding areas, is alien to them. As the foundation of Pakistan was on a divisive agenda they have failed to celebrate their diversity and their varied and distinctive ethnicities. 

Published in Times of India on 07.07.2023

What Mr. Obama and his likes fail to understand, or perhaps, choose not to understand is that discrimination can be measured and by that measure in his country the blacks are far more discriminated than the Muslims in our country. Way back in 1957 Nobel Laureate and economist Gary Becker gave a landmark measure of discrimination in paper - The Economics of Discrimination. Discrimination was unlikely to exist without racism, casteism and sexism Becker opined. While wage income should be primarily related to education, experience and inherent ability discrimination in the U.S market resulted in less profit by hiring less productive white workers at higher wages and ignoring more productive coloured people. The wage gap between blacks and whites has remained almost unchanged in the last 40 years in the U.S with blacks earning 18% lower in 1983 and 23% lower today! During the same time the median wages of Muslims have been higher than Hindus by 18.6% in 1983 and 4.4% in 2022. So much for discrimination in these two countries and I wonder why we have not started lecturing them about 'Black Lives Matter'!

 

India thrives because of her diversity despite attempts by politicians to misuse it during elections. Minority appeasement has been a tried and tested formula of winning elections, but it is slowly losing its efficacy. In 75 years the electorate has matured enough to see through the divisive agenda and so India remains united and prospers. Development and prosperity matter because divisive agendas thrive in their absence. Religion can neither be used as a glue to hold together diverse ethnicity and culture and nor can it be used as an opium to make the people forget their miseries due to lack of development. Look no farther than Pakistan and Afghanistan, the two most disturbed, volatile and bankrupt nations of the world. But don’t be fooled, they rank higher than us in index of democracy, happiness, hunger, press freedom, minority rights and tolerance!!