Muslims in India need progressive leadership…

There are 150 million Muslims in India who need progressive leadership to guide their future. Most of the Muslims in India follow moderate ‘Sufi Islam’, but are intimidated by a minority of very vocal Wahhabi or Deobandi element. The problem is even larger because of the absence of any credible political leadership. There are no Muslim Political leaders in India who can claim any following on the national level. The few Muslim Leaders in Kashmir or Uttar Pradesh are too self serving to think of any future for their community. My bigger concern is the ‘victim mentality’ that ordinary Muslims have started cultivating as a substitute for the lack of talent. As long as you lavish praise on the Muslim participants, they are happy and feel the competition is fair. The moment they start loosing, the competition becomes unfair. This victim mentality would not serve the Muslims well in this competitive world. Unfortunately, the Muslims need to be told the truth for their own good. Like it or not!

Muslims are too busy in their self pity and do not think of other ordinary people facing discrimination at every step in their lives. The ordinary people do not complain because they are lumped together as the ruling majority. Let me enlighten my fellow Muslim citizens. My family migrated from West Punjab (now in Pakistan) to UP (Uttar Pradesh), before and after Partition of India. We were probably a couple of hundred families. We were called refugees and were not welcome to stay in conventional neighborhoods. We were allotted some land outside the city limits to build our dwellings. This migrant community had no choice but to keep it to themselves. Muslims on the other hand were part of the regular society. If this was not discrimination what was that? Back in Punjab we grew up as meat eating people (non-vegetarians). In UP only Muslims ate meat, we were not invited to traditional ‘Hindu House-holds’. Does it sound discrimination to you? Most of us spoke in Punjabi only, but some of us could talk in English. Majority of us could barely speak in ‘Chaste Hindi’, people avoided talking to us. We learnt Hindi in just 10 years. Do you think this could be considered discrimination? We did not proclaim ‘Jihad”.

Most of the Punjabis in UP couldn’t get a job since there were no jobs to begin with. We were all self-employed and quickly made little money. Their children in schools were given an extra slap just to send a message to the parents that school teachers were not impressed. During the 50s and 60s NCC (National Cadet Corps) was mandatory, we all had to join NCC. No matter how we performed, we were never given any ranks since we did not belong to the ‘Marshall Caste’ (Warrior Classes). Talent did not mean much, you had to have some sort of ‘Singh’ attached to your name to receive any form of recognition in defense related organizations.

Once we grew up, we moved to Bombay, looking for higher education or jobs. Bombay had become a part of Maharashtra by then. Anybody coming from ‘North India’ was automatically called a ‘Bhaiyya’ (people of Eastern UP) or if you moved in from the South India, you were all ‘Madrasis’. Only a ‘Marathi Mulga’ was worth some-thing. Rest of us were outsiders and were often told to go back to where we came from. It did not matter if we were Hindus or Muslims or even Christians. we were all outsiders! Muslims, are you listening? So stop whining and compete as we all do. You just have to work little harder and smarter. We all did and succeeded.