India – Pakistan an untold Story.

The British rule in India was basically financed by the Opium trade to China. Before the British arrived India was one of the large world economies with255 of global trade, when the British and East India co left, it had reduced this to just 1%.The burning smoke fuelled by the British greed engulfed entire communities, destroyed and divided an entire nation.
India was always secular and its fabric encouraged multiculturalism, but the British fanned the fires of communalism and religious fundamentalism, pitting brother against brother. Slowly a spiritual and tolerant India that gave refuge to Parsis, Iranians, and Jews who fled persecution from their homeland, has itself fallen neatly into the trap.
There is complete turmoil after…….., with no definition of right and wrong. People are aggressively pursuing religion, there is ghettoisation of communities, and the government allows armies of fundamentalists to roam freely and legally. We don’t accept different ideas; our minds are closed, to those who are not like us. We lack empathy and the government doesn’t want to act.
Even History altered to fan hatred. Aurangzeb is painted as an invader who destroyed Hindu temples and levied an unjust tax “Jazzia” on non Muslims. But what is not clarified is that Auranzeb only demolished those temples that harbored terrorists who were conspiring and plotting to overthrow him.
Aurangzeb’s donation to several Hindu temples is never highlighted, nor the fact that his brother Dara Shikoh championed the cause of Hindu-Muslim unity, bringing out the Majma –ul Bahrain which bears testimony to his untiring efforts. Dara Shikoh also spent 3 years in Varanasi translating the ancient Upanishads into Persian in an effort to globalize our culture.
We are poisoning the minds of a new generation that never witnessed the horrors of partition by implying that all Muslim rulers were anti-Hindu. It is not just Mullah’s and Mahant’s who are spreading this dissonance, but even the progressive are being slowly sucked into this quagmire of hatred and intolerance.
When the Supreme Court awarded alimony to Shah Banoo , a poor divorce in defiance of Islamic laws, the Muslim clergy and fundamentalists objected and gave emotional speeches against this verdict as well as the razing of Babri Masjid, turning it into a prestige war between these two communities.
A India gropes to find a new identity in the emerging world of today, it is a sad paradox that a nation that never professed any religion (Hinduism is a way of life) is veering toward religious intolerance and fundamentalism. A land where one Gandhi defeated the mighty British Empire with non violent means, the land straddled by spiritual giants like Gautama Buddha, Tagore and other towering personalities is now languishing in its own hubris of spiritual vacuity. –Vinay-