Modi’s assault on India’s secular foundations

The marginalisation of Muslims in India continues unabated since the BJP has come to power, in 2014. The BJP’s mentor, the far right RSS, finally had an opportunity of imposing its agenda of making India align itself with its Hindu past — with the minorities being accepted as second class citizens.

Now nine years after coming into power, the BJP has launched a campaign of rewriting history books in an attempt to present a misplaced view of India’s past rulers to the present generation. The primary target is to banish all traces of Muslim rule and the historic contribution of Muslim rulers towards making India a great multi-racial and progressive country.

Prime Minister Modi, once a member of RSS, is endeavouring to accomplish what the RSS has been striving for all these years since the partition. The erasing of India’s history is a principal objective and that effort is currently well underway.

The school textbooks are being revised. References to Muslim culture and civilisation are being removed. An attack on Muslim heritage is in evidence everywhere. To brainwash children, references to the Delhi Sultanate — the Muslim rulers like Afghans, Tughlaqs, Lodhis, Khiljis, etc — are being erased. A distorted version of history is being presented to the youth of India. The idea is that the new generation of students should not carry any memories of India’s rich Muslim heritage.

References to the Mughal rule are also being systematically removed from textbooks. India was and has always been home to large number of many different communities, speaking different languages, owing allegiance to different faiths. It is a tribute to India’s unrivalled cultural affinity that keeps all strands of different faiths together as a homogenous population where there is no discord or discrimination. During the Mughal rule, between 16^th and 19^th centuries, there were no communal tension and the country presented a picture of unity with no traces of rivalries or communal tensions or violence. The Hindu-Muslim riots of 1947 are connected to the historic events of the partition and the withdrawal of the British.

Now that centuries-old conventions of love, tolerance and accommodation are being exploited at the altar of such fiercely communal outfits like RSS. Seeds of hatred are being sown. Muslims are being warned that India belongs to the Hindus. This will be catastrophic for India’s unit. This will be in contradiction with the philosophy of India. This will be an attack on India’s secular foundations that would have ominous ramifications in the years to come.

Names of cities, towns, airports and streets having any connection with Muslim heritage are being changed. The 16^th century name of the capital of UP — Allahabad — has been changed to Pyragraj. The practice of changing names started much before the BJP though. Calcutta was changed to Kolkata, Bangalore to Bangaloru, Madras to Chennai. But now these moves are just targeting any Muslim connection.

In this craze to remove Muslim connection to India’s history, all limits are being crossed. So much so that the name of Congress leader Maulana Azad is also being omitted from important historic documents! For deleting references to Muslim heritage, the whole Indian history is being rewritten; and totally distorted and wholly incorrect interpretations are being invented.

India’s rich and fascinating history is being erased. Whether the future Indian governments would have the courage to make amends and restore the originality and authenticity of India’s heritage would remain to be seen.

The most important lesson that the current BJP government is ignoring is that the move to erase all traces of Muslim heritage from a country that was made home by all the Muslim rulers would deepen acrimony, hostility and hatred in a multi-lingual and multi-cultural society, generating forces of instability and divisions. That surely does not augur well for the future of India.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 8^th, 2023.

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