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Answers to VHP's Questions by Muslim Secularists, By Khalid Azam, The Milli Gazette

Sacrificer           Khalid Azam
Sacrifice code       wfor0358
Sacrifice date       25 march 2009


Subject: Answers to VHP's Questions to Secularists

Answers to VHP's Questions by Muslim Secularists, By Khalid Azam, The Milli
Gazette (online edition)

This must be a reprint, I've already seen it months ago. Since I'm not
financed with petrodollars to spend my days writing point-by-point
rebuttals, I'll confine my reply to a few points, illustrating the
mendacious and occasionally ludicrous nature of Azam's replies. And the
suicidally stupid nature of the VHP questionnaire.


>Are you a Secularist? Then please answer these
questions:

It is typical of the VHP's stupidity to argue their case in this format,
which is an open invitation to their opponents to spike the debate with
sarcastic answers. Also, some questions could be formulated in a manner
that makes clear how hard to answer the implied observations are, but that
would require careful wording, which is totally missing from this
questionnaire. It comes across as wailing and senile.

>1. There are nearly 52 Muslim countries. Show one Muslim country, which
provides Haj subsidy.

Reply: Saudi Arabia itself subsidizes millions of dollars for Hajj every
year to all Muslims of the world. Moreover, India's Hajj subsidy is not
given to either the Hajis or to Saudi Arabia, but to India's government
owned airline Air India.<

This nitpicking is a rhetorical trick to conceal that through Air India, it
is still the Indian (i.e. mainly Hindu) taxpayer who is paying the Hajj
pilgrims' air travel. Incidentally, a real pilgrim goes on foot.

> Reply: Furthermore, while the Haj subsidy is about Rs. 110-148 crores [Rs
1.1 to 1.48 Billion] , the government spends Rs. 450 crores [Rs 4.5 Billion]
on the Hindu festival of Kumbh Mela. The Haj subsidy will dwarf if all the
government subsidies to various Hindu rituals and festivals were taken into
account.<

This money is spent on electricity, sanitation etc., proper state duties for
the benefit of any citizens, equally provided to Muslim pilgrims to Ajmer
("the poor man's hajj"), not on the pilgrimage itself. On the contrary,
Hindu pilgrims to Hindu sites mostly have to pay special taxes on the spot,
contributing to the discharge of the said governmental duties.

> Reply: It is also a shame that the BJP (a non-secular, Hindutva party),
while in power, failed to remove the Haj subsidy despite the lack of
opposition to it from the Muslim community.<

Here, of course, Azam can take a righteous laugh at the BJP's disloyalty to
its own agenda. A wailing questionnaire like this one could have made sense
under a Nehruvian government, but after six years of BJP government,
everyone wonders what happened to the BJP's Hindutva.

>2. Show one Muslim country where Hindus are extended the special rights
that Muslims are accorded in India?
Reply: Malaysia. Hindus in Malaysia have far more "special" rights than
Muslims in India.<

This is a lie. In Malaysia, there is a legal bedrock of discrimination
against all non-Muslims. But then we have gotten used to Islamic apologists
pretending that discriminations are actually favours, e.g. that the
prohibition on Dhimmis to bear weapons, in order to keep them powerless, was
in fact a great favour freeing them from military service. Thus, I've often
heard it claimed about Malaysia that "the minorities have the freedom of
religion (i.e. freedom to convert) while Muslims have not", meaning that
hegemonic Islam prohibits apostasy from Islam but not from Hinduism to
Islam.

>8. When Hindus gave to Muslims 30% of Bharat for a song, why should Hindus
now beg for their sacred places at Ayodhya, Mathura and Kashi? Reply: This
rhetorical question can also be rephrased as "When Muslims gave 90% of India
to Hindus for a song (remember 90% of India was ruled by Muslims at one
point), why should the Hindutva Brigade be demanding and destroying the
handful of Muslims mosques left standing?<

Haha, the Muslims "gave" their rulership away? No, they were beaten on so
many battlefields, for they hung on to their ill-gotten gains by all means
fair and foul, but they simply lost. Incidentally, the Pakistan territory
given up in 1947 amounted to considerably less than 30%, and effective
Muslim rule never extended to 90%.

>10. When uniform is made compulsory for school children, why there is no
Uniform Civil Code for citizens?<

The reply is too ridiculous to quote and rebut, but the question is perhaps
even worse. Note the poor English, pervasive through the whole
questionnaire. The proper word order is not "Why there is...?" but "Why is
there...?" Anyone who has taken even the most elementary course in English
should know this, for every one of these has in its Lesson 1 the phrase:
"How are you?" No, it is not: "How you are?" but: "How are you?" I have
nothing against the champions of Hindi, but if at all they choose to publish
a text in English, it is not asking too much that they write proper English.
Being sufficiently fluent in English to write a text of this length yet
remaining unable to retain the "How are you?" construction, indicates either
an awfully low level of intelligence or a smug laziness. Secondly, while
the case for a Uniform Civil Code could easily be argued in a single
sentence with reference to the fact that this is the defining characteristic
of a secular state, it is pretty silly to build your argument on the dress
code in schools, which need not be the model for society as a whole.

>12. Why Gandhiji supported Khilafat Movement (nothing to do with our
freedom movement) and what in turn he got?
Reply: The Khilafat movement was integrally tied to the freedom struggle of
the nations occupied by Britain. Abolition of Khilafat was a colonial act
just as the occupation of India was a colonial act.<

On the contrary, the Khilafat itself was a colonial-type institution, the
main difference being that it was totally backward-looking, whereas the
admittedly exploitative British empire had the strong redeeming feature of
its modernizing impact. Meanwhile, note how pointless it is to direct this
question at contemporary secularists, who need have no enthusiasm for
Gandhi's stupid and tragi-comical derailment of the freedom movement towards
the anti-freedom Khilafat cause, a fact long forgotten by the illiterates
who make up the vast majority of today's "secularist" circles.


>In contrast, one can legitimately ask why the so-called "Veer" Savarkar
supported Hitler's Nazi Germany and its genocide of the Jews? What relevance
did Hitler's massacres of the Jews have on the Indian freedom struggle? What
in turn did he get by supporting Hitler?<

Actions speak louder than words. When WW2 broke out, and the time of words
gave way to the time for action, Savarkar and his HMS party immediately
declared their support for the British war effort. Throughout the war,
Gandhians derided him as a "recruiting officer" who called on Hindu young
men to take service in the British-Indian Army. These hundreds of thousands
of Savarkarite volunteers contributed very substantively to the Allied
victories in Iraq, Libya, Burma etc. Meanwhile, most of the Muslim world
supported Hitler in words and, where they got the chance, also with actions.
Jinnah was the great exception, because he saw his own interests linked to
those of the British. It is a total lie that Savarkar or any other Hindu
leader (or even those sparse traditionalist Hindus who did support Hitler on
flimsy grounds such as his alleged celibacy and vegetarianism and his use of
the swastika) ever "supported Nazi Germany's genocide of the Jews". In
Muslim circles, by contrast, it is common till today to mumble that "Hitler
didn't kill enough of them". Regarding support to the Jewish and Zionist
causes, the record of the Hindu nationalists is very solid (or dismal, if
seen from Azam's usual Islamist and pro-Palestinian perspective), as is
clear from ante- and post-war writings of Savarkar, Golwalkar and others.
But the increasing role of the US in India's intellectual life, both through
the international media now accessible for Indian viewers and through the
strong presence of Indian Communists and Islamists on US campuses, forces
anti-Hindu polemicists to play to the influential Jewish-American audience
and pretend that not they themselves but the Hindu nationalists represent
the anti-Jewish wing in Indian politics.

> Here's a quote from Savarkar: "Who are we to dictate to Germany, Japan or
Russia or Italy to choose a particular form of policy of Government simply
because we woo it out of academical attraction? Surely Hitler knows better
than Pandit Nehru does what suits Germany best. The very fact that Germany
or Italy has so wonderfully recovered and grown so powerful as never before
at the touch of Nazi or Fascist magical wand is enough to prove that those
political "isms" were the most congenial tonics their health demanded. India
may choose or reject particular form of Government, in accordance with her
political requirements. But Pandit went out of his way when he took sides in
the name of all Indians against Germany or Italy. Pandit Nehru might claim
to express the Congress Section in India at the most. But it should be made
clear to the German, Italian, or Japanese public that crores of Hindu
Sanghatanists in India whom neither Pandit Nehru or nor the Congress
represents, cherish no ill-will towards Germany or Italy or Japan or any
other Country in the World simply because they had chosen a form of
Government or constitutional policy which they though (sic) suited best and
contributed most to their National solidarity and strength". SOURCE:
Published on 30 November 1938 by a famous German daily, the "Volkischer
Beobachter". Obtained from "NEHRU MEMORIAL MUSEUM AND LIBRARY, Savarkar
papers, microfilm, r.n.1, part 2, March 1937-May 1938."<

In 1938, Hitler's death toll was thousands of times smaller than Stalin's,
and also smaller than that of the British in India; while there was
discrimination against Jews, there was no question yet of what later became
known as the Holocaust, a plan which according to the present historians'
consensus was developed under war circumstances in 1941. In 1938, it was
the common opinion, also among Hitler's enemies such as Lloyd George and
Churchill, that Nazism and Fascism had worked wonders for their countries'
economies and national integration. The same belief existed regarding the
Soviet Union, admittedly based on false propaganda. At any rate, Savarkar
in this speech did no more than articulate the principle of non-interference
in other countries' internal affairs, a principle underwritten by Nehru
himself during the Pancha-Shiila agreement with China (when it had to
justify the suppression and massacre of the Tibetans, right on India's
doorstep, where unlike in Europe, India's stance could have made a world of
difference). It is also a simple fact that on this point, Savarkar and not
Nehru was representative of Indian public opinion.

>16. Why post-Godhra is blown out of proportion, when no one talks of the
ethnic cleansing of 4 lakh Hindus from Kashmir? Reply: Because the Gujarat
massacres were carried out by the state/government while the violence in
Kashmir (in which more Muslims have been killed than Hindus) was carried out
by non-government actors. Is there any difference between a government and a
terrorist in the eyes of VHP? Or does the VHP consider that government
should play the role of a terrorist killing and plundering minorities?<

As is now clear from the official figures released by the Home Ministry
(Congress), there was no Gujarat "genocide" but a two-sided series of riots
in which 254 Hindus were killed along with 790 Muslims (altogether far fewer
than in Congress-age riots such as Bhagalpur 1989 or the
Congress-secularists' own Sikh massacre 1984, which also counted Congress
Muslims among the perpetrators), and that the police shot dead dozens of
mostly Hindu rioters apart from wounding many more. Clearly the state did
intervene to quell the riots, and this as per the official version stated by
an anti-BJP minister. If there was any one-sided massacre, it was the
initial killing of 58 Hindus, mainly women and children, by arson in Godhra.
As for Kashmir: that more Muslims have been killed than Hindus falsely
suggests that Hindus have done some killing too. In reality, the terrorists
targeted not only the non-Muslims but also all Muslims deemed insufficiently
compliant. And yes, the security forces have also killed terrorists, all of
whom happened to be Muslims. But killing terrorists is arguably not a bad
thing, and they could have escaped their fate by not committing acts of
terrorism in the first place.

>17. In 1947, when India was partitioned, the Hindu population in Pakistan
was about 24%. Today it is not even 1%. In 1947, the Hindu population in
East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was 30%. Today it is about 7%. What happened
to the missing Hindus? Do Hindus have human rights? 18. In contrast, in
India, Muslim population has gone up from 10.4% in 1951 to about 14% today;
whereas Hindu population has come down from 87.2% in 1951 to 85% in 1991. Do you still think that Hindus are fundamentalists?

Reply: The question clearly hides another important statistic relevant to the declining population of Hindus - the statistics of the rising female feticide, a
practice overwhelmingly associated with Hindu community. According to
population survey reports, the sex ratio which was 972 females per 1000
males in 1901 was 933 females to 1000 males in 2001. New technology is now
used to diagnose the gender of the child and female children are eliminated
with precision. Rather than lamenting the decline of Hindus, the Sanghis
should rather show some mercy toward their daughters and stop killing them -
and recognize that women are the ones who are responsible for bringing in
the next generation.<

The near-disappearance of the Hindus from (then West) Pakistan in 1947, more
drastic in its end result than the decline of the Jews in Nazi-occupied
Europe in 1941-45, has of course nothing to do with female foeticide, but
purely with the application of the Islamic principles against the
unbelievers. The decline in Hindu percentage in India is mostly due to a
differential in acceptance of family planning, a fact long and hotly denied
by the secularists but now fully documented in the latest census report and
admitted by all expert observers. However, female foeticide does account
for a part of the difference over the latest decades, and even if it didn't,
it should still be a top priority concern for all Hindu organizations. The
worst offenders are the Jains followed by the Sikhs, not coincidentally the
wealthiest communities. Wealth breeds an intolerance for even the smallest
discomfort, such as the discomfort of having to spend some of your opulence
on a daughters' dowry (rather than taking the trouble of seeing to it that
the legal prohibition on dowry is applied). Selective female foeticide is a
despicable act, but to cool down Mr. Azam's moral smugness, he needs to be
told that the latest census also shows that the Muslims have caught up with
the Hindus regarding the incidence of female foeticide (incidentally, the
practice is even marginally catching on among Christians, so far the only
ones unaffected). Also, the female/male ratio is not better in Pakistan
than in India.

Now, after having followed Mr. Azam in his digression into female foeticide,
let us return to the main point which he is trying to obscure: all countries
where Islam is in power, and to my knowledge even all Muslim-majority
countries (meaning also those with a communal power-sharing arrangement such
as Nigeria or Lebanon) are showing a decline in the percentage of
non-Muslims, with external or internal migrations of non-Muslims out of
Muslim-majority areas where life is made difficult for them. Practically
all of them, including "secular" Turkey, have legal discriminations against
non-Muslims, and all of them without exception maintain de facto
inequalities and pressures encouraging the flight or at least the withdrawal
from public life of the non-Muslims. The reason for this common tendency,
across ethnic and economic differences, is the doctrine they hold in common,
viz. Islam.


Koenraad Elst


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