K N Pandita
Addressing a gathering of clerics in Tehran on Monday, Iranian supreme religious leader Ayatollah Khamenei talked about what he described as the “suffering” of Muslims in Gaza, Myanmar and India.
We will not directly comment on the Ayatollah’s views on Gaza and Myanmar. But we shall focus on India, which has the second-largest Muslim population in the world. It is roughly three times that of Iran. Incidentally, the Indian Muslim community is not only a mix of various factions and schools of thought but is also spread over many states of the Indian Union. Therefore, an unsavoury remark by a responsible leader, with the potential of damaging otherwise friendly relations between the two countries, needs to be set right.
Earlier also, the Ayatollah had issued a statement on Kashmir hurting the interests of India and the MEA had to caution the Iranian mission in New Delhi. The impression which the Iranian leader creates by issuing loose statements like this is that Iran has taken upon its shoulders the responsibility of speaking for the oppressed Muslims anywhere on the globe. This is an indirect challenge to Türkiye and Saudi Arabia who claim to have the final say on matters pertaining to Muslim ummah.
India is a secular democracy and not a Hindu Republic, unlike the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is a large multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-lingual society. Muslims are not the only religious minority in India though calling about 200 million-strong Indian Muslim community a minority is anachronistic. We have almost all religious denominations in our country, including Parsees — the offspring of an ancient Zoroastrian community of Iran —- hundreds of thousands of whom were forced to leave their country-of-origin as a result of religious persecution by the Muslim Arabs after the defeat of the last Zoroastrian King Yazdegerd III of the Sasanian dynasty. They came to Southern India where the local rulers gave them shelter and freedom of religious practices and of running their business. They were permitted to build dakhmah or the burial place of their dead and also raise the fire-worshipping temples called ateshkadeh. One of these immigrant Parsees, namely Tata Co, is jokingly called one-half of the Government of India. It is a practical example of India’s religious tolerance.
Indians demonstrated the same liberalism to the communities of different faiths that came and settled down in India in the course of her history. Long back when the world did not know the word democracy India had spoken of vasudevamkutumbkam meaning international fraternity. So did Sa’adi, the great Iranian poet and thinker say nearly a thousand years ago (bani adama’zayeh yak paikarand – humans are the limbs of one body).
But today, India has perhaps the most comprehensive constitution guiding the heterogenous Indian polity of how a country with enormous diversity has to be run through a system that treats all Indian citizens on equal keel.
It sounds strange that a country run according to Sharia (Islamic law) and that too of Shia orientation expresses concern for the Indian Muslims who are governed by secular and democratic dispensation. May we request the Iranian supreme religious leader to name a single Islamic country where laws and rules apply to all citizens based on equality before the law? In which Muslim country do we find the income from the mosques and endowments utilized as support to non-Muslims to facilitate performance of religious rites? But in India, under the Indian Constitutional provision, the enormous in come from Hindu temples and shrine properties running into billions of dollars is handed over to Muslim Trusts to support pilgrimage by the Indian Muslims to Mecca. This practice has been going on ever since the dawn of freedom in 1947.
If the Iranian supreme religious leader is really concerned about the Muslims in India, he should not have opposed the application of India for the membership of the OIC. If an Islamic organization like OIC rejects the admission of a country with the world’s largest Muslim population, is it doing justice to its existence? If the Iranian religious leader is really concerned about the oppressive elements meting out a heavy-handed treatment to the Muslims in different parts of the world, he should have raised his voice for the Baluch, the Pushtun, the Gilgatis and Baltistanis, the Kalash and the Chitralis. He should have highlighted the case of nearly 2.5 Uyghurs of Xinjiang. Will any of the Ayatollahs explain why were nearly 400 young Iranian girls and women butchered by gun-wielding Pasdaran forces even as they were peacefully demonstrating against the kidnapping and killing of a Kurdish girl named Ahsa? Thousands of Iranians protesting against the dictatorial type of theocracy are lingering in the dreaded prison houses of Iran like Avin.
We said in the beginning that Iran’s problem is to be searched in her history as well as her psyche. Ancient Iran was famed for her great empire and monarchies like those of the Achaemenians and Sassanians. Under the long rule of staunch nationalist monarchies, Iran raised a magnificent civilization of world fame. After Iran passed over into the hands of the Muslims, the fabulous monarchical grandeur and civilizational splendour perished to its nadir. The Iranian nation down the present day has not come out of that trauma. Secondly, since Iran had to show her superiority as a conformist of the faith that Muslim Arabs brought, (more faithful than the king), they picked up an injunction from the holy book that says the people of Jewish faith should be decimated and the traces of Judaism effaced from the Islamic lands, and are faithfully following it by raising proxies in different parts of the Middle East.
We would like to let these happening slip off our memory but we need to tell the world what India stands for.
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