Oh! Boy.. This post is going to be controversial…!!!
A few days back, when P Chidambaram attended the Deoband national convention, all he would have had in his mind would have been political motives. The support of Muslim organizations like the Jamait-e-Ulema is absolutely essential for a party which claims itself to be a secular one. But this raises an interesting question.! If u r secular, why even bother attending a religious convention? Would he have taken the time off his busy schedule (when he should have been contemplating and formulating defense strategies against imminent attacks from the other side of the North Eastern border or even better, addressing the naxal problem of the north east where innocent policemen and civilians are being decapitated) to attend a Hindu/RSS convention that promotes Hindutwa? It should be either ‘all or none’ if u r a secular party. Shouldn’t it? What this shows is that at the end of the day every single politician in our country is a bloody hypocrite.
This fatwa raised against Vande Mataram states that ‘no muslim can/will worship the Nation. They can only worship Allah, not the mother land. ’ But experts believe that Vande Mataram actually means to respect the motherland and not worship it. Irrespective of this, I believe that when this song was promoted, the people then had no intentions of disrespecting other religions. The first Indian national flag raised by Bhikaji Cama in 1907 is a proof of that. Or atleast that’s what I think. I may be totally wrong too.
The Flag of 1907 (Wikipedia)I did all my 14 years of schooling (yet I have not learned much :P) in two Christian institutions. I have started each and every working day of those years offering prayers to Lord Jesus. As my previous post most obviously indicates, I have also dressed up as a santa. But I m a practicing Hindu. Does it mean I should never worship/respect other religions? Absolutely NO…! At the end of the day I believe there is only one god. It may be Shiva/Jesus/Allah/Nature. We do not know for sure. But the point is that religion is just a basis for an identity. Not a measure of our superiority.
In this week’s ‘We the People’ in NDTV, when a young muslim musician echoed my thoughts when he said he respected every religion and worshipped every god around because there was only one god, he was fried by the supposedly elder section of muslim junta in the panel. This sums it up totally. For us, the younger generation of India, the future of India, NATIONALITY is our identity and not religion. We may have enrolled to visit temples or churches or mosques but we most definitely have not enrolled to disrespect or disbelieve other religions and gods. Atleast the sane people.
The one major upsetting outcome of this fatwa might be that AR Rahman may not ever be allowed to sing his beautiful version of the Vande Mataram again.
Rammy
