Editorial

The acerbic reaction to an innocuous survey of Muslim representation in the armed services seems to be totally unwarranted. The survey forms part of the task assigned to the Prime Minister’s High Power Committee to assess the socio-economic and educational status of Indian Muslims. The exercise would have been incomplete, had the Committee skipped the Armed Forces, the second largest State employer next to the Indian Railways. Obviously, the pen-pushing retired generals and the media, who have raised the ruckus over the issue in tandem with the largest Opposition party in the Parliament, have read too much and too quickly in the move.


Nothing against the national consensus on keeping the armed forces ethnically secular has ever been said by anybody. Nor does it form the premise of the on-going assessment. The brouhaha therefore appears stemming more from apprehensions latent in subjecting the forces to the test of social homogeneity rather than any dilution of the secular character. Needless to say that a universal recruitment policy that might follow as the logical corollary of the survey, would further reinforce the secular antecedents and enable it to reflect the demographic diversity of the nation in its real sense. It is further perplexing as to why there was not even an iota of protest when the previous NDA Government roped in the Army into providing logistical support to the Sindhu Darshan festival in Leh in 1998 and 1999. Not alone this, the former Defence Minister, George Fernandes in an open display of politicization, had taken the Army general to brief the BJP National Executive.


One would be sadly mistaken if corrective action in setting right the deficiency in national character of the forces is construed with crass communalisation. It will be very much in character with scrapping the British colonial administration’s policy of recruiting individuals from the so-called martial races viz, Rajput, Dogras, Sikhs Pathan, et al. The regiments bearing these names still continue, though only in name. Further universalisation of the character would only enhance the image of the armed forces leading to their more composite nature that is so integral to India.

It appears some elements are bent upon carrying the protests over sacrilegious cartoons by a Danish newspaper to absurd lengths in India. The protests world over have made it abundantly plain that the Muslim feelings have been greatly hurt by the outrageous piece of journalism. It would have been sufficient for Muslims here to send a memoranda to authorities in Denmark and hold a sit-in protest at the capital. But insistence on staging marches and forcing closure of shops in towns and cities all across the nation smacks of politicization of what deserved to have been kept within the limits of symbolism.


It seems the organisers of the protests have been vying with one another in voicing the outrage essentially spurred by the protests in the Muslim world. In doing so, the fact that most Muslim nations have despots ruling over the dispensation has completely bypassed their ken. It is absence of democracy and lack of debate on issues affecting the people within the country that basically fuels the rage in most Muslim nations. Rulers wary of popular discontent find such occasion handy to allow pent-up feelings to come out on issues that do not concern them immediately.


The Muslim world would do well to introspect in the light of the cartoon episode as to why the Western media chooses to taunt the Muslims. Absolute freedom is not even the hallmark of the West. It is evident from the ban on a debate on Holocaust, a punishable crime in some of the so called free West European countries. Similarly, there are laws—and legitimately so—against caricaturisation of personalities holy to Christians. The self censorship voluntarily adopted by the corporate owned media also makes it impossible to discuss corporate fundamentalism in most of these nations. Even a ‘free’ country like the United Kingdom banned a book titled Spycatcher. Plays and paintings have been regularly banned in Canada. Criticism of Israel and Zionism is curbed with a heavy hand in the United States. It is therefore not a matter of faith for the West to claim that freedom to express includes the freedom to satirize and heap profanities on the holy figures of faith other than those followed by majority of their own people. Unfortunately, the Muslim world has lost the opportunity to show the West its own skeletons, merely because it denies its people the basic freedom to express dissent.