Latest Updates: communalism RSS
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thabet
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johnpi
‘Love jihad’ accusations against Indian Muslims racheting up tension, likelihood of violence.
The “love jihad” phenomenon – which may just be linked to a few religious-minded Romeos – could have been comical had it not deepened domestic hostility towards India’s Muslim minority. There are fears that the use of the word “jihad”, often interpreted as meaning holy war, may give extremist Hindu and Christian groups an excuse to justify attacks on Muslims.
“Certain fundamentalist groups that have been carrying out vigilante attacks against inter-community couples for several years have now started using the ‘love jihad’ theory to justify their attacks,” a police official told The Hindu newspaper. He did not name the groups, but was probably referring to the Sri Ram Sene and the Bajrang Dal, which target women and religious minorities.
Sri Ram Sene is now preparing for a nationwide campaign on the issue. Its leader, Pramod Mutalik, has said 150 party activists have been deployed in public places to keep an eye on “suspicious activities”. When a “love jihad” activity is identified, “it will be stopped then and there”, he said.
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thabet
Sunny notes that a Sikh group is upset at a BBC Asian Network presenter (who happens to be Muslim) for his ‘denigration’ of a Sikh symbol (the kirpan). Razib picks up on this news story and notes:
There is a third, more local, dimension in the UK: there is (or was in the 1990s) a lot of friction between Pakistani (i.e. Muslim) and Sikh gangs in certain hotspots across the UK, the most notorious of which is Chalvey Estate in Slough (just outside of west London). I didn’t grow up anywhere near Slough (I’m from the other side of town), but like most British Pakistanis have lots of family there. There were always punch ups (actual and rumoured) between gangs, and tales of boys from each side ‘targetting’ girls from the other community for sex or religious conversion as a way of humiliating their ‘enemies’.
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thabet
200 people are questioned by the police following the murder of Pakistani Christians by a rioting mob.
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thabet
Six (the BBC says eight) Christians have been burnt alive in a town in Pakistan:
Clashes erupted early on Saturday, with an exchange of fire from the members of the two communities.
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thabet
More violence in Nigeria:
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thabet
Hundreds of Indian students have taken part in violent protests in Sydney, after a spate of attacks on foreign students in Australia’s major cities.
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thabet
Something you won’t read in an OIC report:
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johnpi
“If I were an Indian Hindu” – Article by Indian Muslim writer Zafar Anjum imagining the perspective of his “regular Indian Hindu” friend in an effort to understand the country’s drift toward communalism.
Because of our peaceful [Hindu] nature, others have dominated us for centuries. They could do it because we were weak. Now we must strike back by showing that we are more aggressive even than the ones that dominated us. We have shown it in Gujarat, and elsewhere in the country. But these Muslims don’t seem to be getting the message.
Anjum then contrasts this with his own perspective of having always enjoyed diversity, but also having observed a slow inexorable push over the past 20 years to erase Muslim contributions to Indian culture – from the disappearance of Muslim food to the lack of Muslim characters in Indian movies and soap operas, to the experience of having a Hindu academic refer to Muslims not as Muslims but as ‘Mughals’ (foreign invaders, with the implication that Indian Muslim culture is imperialist and inauthentic).
Is it time for 150 million Indian Muslims to make hijrah, and where will Saudi Arabia put them?
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thabet
Faisal Devji on the Mumbai terrorist attacks:
Whatever its larger aims, in other words, the terrorism that revealed itself in Mumbai represents Al-Qaeda’s displacement from the cutting edge of militancy. Indeed the world’s most celebrated terror network appears to have been swallowed whole and fully digested by the Pakistani outfits that protect its leaders, which is the same thing as saying that the global has disappeared into the local to animate it from within. Having fitted itself into a long history of militancy in the region, these attacks were quickly bogged down in purely local concerns, however global their aims may have been. And indeed if it is the Lashkar-e Taiba that was behind the terrorism in Mumbai, then this entrapment by history is even more pronounced, since what the group says it wants is neither any military or political advantage for Pakistan, nor a global Islamic caliphate, but rather some version of the British Raj-given that its ideologues imagine a South Asia pockmarked with “Hindu” and “Muslim” countries that largely coincide with the princely states of colonial times. Bizarrely pluralistic in conception, and much like some British plans for the subcontinent, this vision of India’s future represents a profound failure of the militant imagination, one that in fact possesses no future of its own.
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razib, murtad fitri
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razib, murtad fitri
Muslims in India Put Aside Grievances to Repudiate Terrorism:
“There is a very deep divide,” said Mahesh Bhatt, a well-known film producer and director who is half Muslim, half Hindu, as he sat on a plastic chair on the set of his latest film on Sunday morning, with actors strolling nearby. “And if the foreign element is using the indigenous clay, how can justice be done?”
so does he believe in 150 million gods as a compromise between 300 mill and 1?
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thabet
Trouble in paradise: Hundreds of thousands of people have been taking to the streets of Kashmir’s state capital to demand independence from India.
Meanwhile, Hindu protesters have been arrested by police in the Jammu region, following the state government’s decision not to grant a small piece of land to a trust running a Hindu shrine.
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thabet
