QUESTION TIME

Why must there be two sets of laws in India, one for the Muslims and one for the rest of the Indians? Are not all Indians essentially equal in the eyes of the Constitution of India? Or, are we to suppose that Muslims have a special privilege to observance of their own culture which mandates the lawmakers to give them special legal rights? Why this appeasement of a religion that on a doctrinal basis regards Hinduism as an idolatrous, false religion and Hindus as kaffirs (unbelievers) fit to be converted, taxed or executed and was responsible for untold suffering of the Hindus for a thousand years culminating in the Partition of India from which we suffer even today? How are Indian Muslims going to ever integrate with the rest of India if the Indian Parliament is going to keep granting them privileges pertaining to the medieval Middle East which have no relevance in a modern democratic society of the 20th and the 21st centuries?

How long will the Indian Muslims live in ghettos and segregate themselves in an India seeking national integration? How long must the 350,000 Kashmiri Hindu Pundits suffer banishment from their homeland at the hands of the murderous Muslim Kashmiris? Why is this religion the source of so much intolerance, so much violence, so much hatred from its very inception till date? Is it something doctrinal in it that prompts it to be so and instigates its sincere adherents to take up arms against the infidel? Why is it so exclusive in its relation to God that it must perforce convert the rest of the world to its fold? Why does it hold a monopoly over God and prophet that it stifles the possibility of evolution of its adherents and its tenets and thereby effectively prevents its own reformation in a changing world with altered needs? Why does it require suspension of the rational faculty of its followers and submission to its tenets simply as an article of faith which essentially means the holding back of a vast section of humanity to the ardent assumptions of a single man fourteen centuries ago with no hope of ever regaining one's liberty to critically think and reject its tenets for fear of terrible retribution? Why must apostates be killed, infidels killed, dissenters destroyed? Whither humanity? Whither freedom?

Is it then slavery to the 'divine dictate' that must thwart human aspirations and condemn life on earth as a temporary travail, a test to be gone through to allow an omniscient God wisdom enough to judge one onto eternal bliss or eternal damnation as His Highness deems it fit? Will anyone reflect? Will someone look into the mirror and see his own image brighter than all the impositions that have sullied it? Will I await such a change in stance? O, I must, must I not?