Naseeruddin Shah's Civil War

Naseeruddin Shah, the actor, writes in the Indian Express- 

Manal al-Sharif, the Saudi human rights activist who was jailed for defying the ban on women driving in her country,

that ban was instituted for religious reasons. Which religion instituted it? It is the same religion which has enslaved, oppressed, or ethnically cleansed Hindus, whom it considers infidels, wherever it has had the upper hand. 

said with hope, “the rain begins with a single drop”.

Indeed. When Christian Europe humbled Islam, non-Muslims in Islamic lands began to revive. A desert began to bloom. In India, it was Hindutva which battled hardest for Independence. That is why genuine anti-Imperialists like Maulana Azad and Leftists like Hasrat Mohani (who did join the Muslim League but who resigned in 1947 and thus got to remain in India with unimpaired dignity) supported Gandhi and even Nehru.  

However in our country, that first single drop was of acid rain, and it fell when Narendra Modi was elevated to Chief Minister of Gujarat as reward for being the charioteer of L K Advani’s hate-fuelled ‘rath yatra’, which opened the floodgates of the othering of the Muslim community.

Islam has done nothing but spew hate against 'infidels' since its inception. Muslims othered non-Muslims and demanded the right to rule over them or, if that was not possible, special treatment from the majority. The 'rath yatra' was for the construction of a Temple. Muslims hate Temples. They abhor 'idol worship'. But the law says that a Hindu temple deity has legal personality. It was the Supreme Court which awarded the disputed site to the deity Ram Lalla. What Shah calls a 'hate-fueled' campaign was actually for a legal and proper purpose- viz. the rebuilding of a Hindu sacred site where Hindus, but not Muslims, had offered continuous worship from time immemorial.

All over the World, the actions of fundamentalist Muslims opened the floodgates for the othering of the Muslim community. That is why there was a 'War against Terror' in which, according to certain American academics, 1.3 million Muslims were killed. Did Shah protest against this? No. He'd have been shunned by Hollywood. His career would have suffered. However, he felt it safe to say ' 200 million of us will fight back' against the Hindu majority in the country his Religion vivisected so as to oppress and ethnically cleanse non-Muslims from areas where Muslims were more powerful. Did Shah protest the pogrom against Kashmiri Pandits? He made a big fuss about the post-Godhra riots but there was no ethnic cleansing of Muslims from Gujarat. 

Shah is living in a fantasy world where Muslims- but not Hindus- have super-powers. He says-

" Two hundred million of us are not going to get wiped out that easily. Two hundred million of us are going to fight back, we claim it [India] to be our motherland, we belong here and were born here, generations of our families have lived and died here and I'm certain if any such movement begins, it's going to be met with a massive resistance and a massive amount of anger,".

Non-Muslims got ethnically cleansed from Pakistan and Bangladesh despite being a bigger proportion of the population than Muslims in India are now. Shah thinks Muslims have the capacity to wage a 'Civil War' in India. They don't. Getting angry that Hindus are getting their Temple or that Hindus are forming administrations won't change the brute fact that Muslims don't have the military might or economic resources to do anything more than terrorism- for which they will pay a disproportionate price- rather than insurgency or Civil War. This was accepted by all sensible people long ago. But Shah is not sensible. The fact is that where Muslims have succeeded in defeating non-Muslim or Secular forces, they have also banned many of the things vital to the commercial viability of Shah's own profession. Who would pay to see song and dance numbers featuring burqa clad actresses? On the other hand, Shah's own career might have received a fillip if he'd worn a paper bag over his head. Come to think of it, I could have given Zeenat Aman a run for her money if both of us had to wear burqa. Fuck! I've just convinced myself that the only way I'll fulfill my Bollywood ambitions is if the Taliban takes over. Why did I lose the 'Miss Teen Hindutva' beauty contest I organized last year? The answer is that my muffin top is unsuitable for display in saree. Thus, though I was the only contestant- due to lockdown- the pageant was won by my neighbor's cat. Again!