We are Indians, Subramanian Swamy

[I had a blog Aagan Says previously. But in a moment of emotional foolery i deleted the blog without taking backup, and posts between May-August were lost. I am going to REPOST those again. Today i post an article Taslima Nasreen  had written about in response to a communally charged article by Janata party president Subramanian Swamy].

This is a guest post by Taslima Nasreen, internally acclaimed writer and human rights activist and feminist. She wrote this in response  to an article by Subramanian Swamy in DNA which vilified Muslims and proposed utopian ideas for combating terrorism which were no less than communal.

Dear Subramanian Swamy,

My ancestors were Hindus. Because I defended minority Hindus in Bangladesh, I received numerous death threats and fatwas issued by Islamic fundamentalists. The government filed cases against me and forced me to leave the country. It has been 17 years since I left and I have not been allowed to enter my country. I am sure you haven’t risked your life the way I have risked my life for Hindus. But I did nothing as a descendant of Hindus. I did everything for humanity. I believe Hindus are human beings and they have all the rights to live with dignity and honour and must not be treated as second class citizen in Muslim majority Bangladesh.I fearlessly protest against Islamic fundamentalism, Islamic terrorism and I audaciously criticize Islamic doctrines. I accuse governments of practicing vote bank politics,building mosques,madrassas and keeping people in ignorance and darkness. I have become a victim of physical attacks, book banning, censorship and you may know that I was thrown out of Kolkata, my second home, in 2007 and could not return to the city since then.I was shivering with fear while reading your article published in DNA, exactly the same fear I have when I read Muslim fanatics’ manifesto about converting the world into Darul Islam. You simply want semitization of Hinduism and you don’t want to look different from Muslim terrorists.

Courtesy Google

Your idea to turn India into a Hindu Rashtra with legalized caste system is just insane.Your thoughts about occupying others’ land and starting a war are irrational and vicious. Islamic fundamentalists are small groups that terrorize society now and then using small bombs. Nothing happened like 9/11. Those terrorists have no capacity to do much bigger atrocities. The reality of Jews and Hindus are not the same. You can’t rewind time and rewrite or erase history. Your time-travel-dreams, I’m sure, will never come true. Before Hinduism was practiced in India, indigenous people worshiped some other gods, would you now start worshiping those gods? If you want to go back to the past, why don’t you to go back to Ethiopian Jungle from where our Homosapien ancestors came! And if you push yourself more and more backwards, you might end up in swimming in the water. You will be nothing but fish. As a modern and educated man, you should believe in evolution.

I am extremely disappointed to see that you are trying to spread racism, hatred, dangerous sectarianism, and narrow nasty nationalism.Not all Muslims are fanatics. If all Indian Muslims were fanatics or terrorists, India would have been burned to the ground decades ago. If all Hindus were fanatics, all Indian Muslims would have been burned to death.

When I lived in Kolkata, I created an organization called ‘Humanist organization free from religion’. The criteria to be a member of that organization was, true secular non-religious people born in Muslim family. There were hundreds of members who demanded uniform civil code,women’s equal rights,banning of Quranic schools and burqa system.

Image Courtesy Mohammad Omar

What India needs the most is a true secular state. India needs to have one law for all or uniform civil code, and a strict separation of state and religion. India needs more science schools instead of religious schools, more scientific academies instead of temples and mosques.Only then India will slowly become a modern state, free from religious bigotry, obscurantism and fanaticism.

After 60+ years of the partition, India  still witnesses  conflict. Yes, there is a  conflict, but the conflict  is not between two religions, Hinduism and Islam or between Hindus and Muslims.The conflict is between secularism and fundamentalism, between rational logical mind and irrational blind faith, between modernism and anti-modernism, between humanism and barbarism, between innovation and tradition, between the future and the past, between people who strive to go forward, and who strive to go backward, between people who value freedom and who do not.

Give peace a chance. Any bigoted faithhead fool can easily be an intolerant fanatic, you need to get real good education to be an enlightened, tolerant, rational,peace loving person, and a believer of human rights,women’s rights, secular humanism and democracy.

India’s biggest problem is not Islamic terrorism, India’s biggest problems are poverty, corruption,women’s oppression,superstitions, casteism etc.

We’re living in the 21st century, isn’t it? An eye for an eye is never a solution to any problem.

I hope you will understand.

Yours Sincerely,

Taslima Nasreen.

Courtesy Bindaas Kolkata