A discussion on what American Muslims can do for the Muslims living in India
Dr.Shaik Ubaid siyasat.net
Media is the most powerful tool or weapon that humanity has invented yet Indian Muslim media institutions and journalists always had to struggle from early 1900s and never got adequate support from the community which was more interested in building masajid and dargahs Whether it was Maulana Jouhar or maulana Azad or Maulana Daryabadi or Maulana Amir Usmani or the more recent efforts such as Radiance, Muslim Mirror, Clarion, Milli gazette,or siyasat.net and some more.
Indian American Muslims are severely limited by distance and by the fact that they do not live in India.
They can do three very important things . The best that they can do is help the Muslim media in India and other institutions financially. Second provide a neutral platform where different Muslim leaders of India can come together to exchange views forgetting their differences And lastly provide the lessons from American empowerment movements ( Civil Rights movement, etc) for the Indian leaders to pick and choose. Any other leadership from America will be just Arm chair generalship as we are not there in the field.
People living in India have as much intelligence, as much passion for the community and as much talent if not more than their NRI brethren They do not need remote leadership from outside
Living in America we cannot bring Muslim Dalit leadership together in India nor cause Muslim social reforms.
We can only advise and tell them of our experiences.
Dalit leaders have been much more easily intimidated and bought off then the Muslim leaders by the Brahmannical establishment. So relying on them too much will be suicidal. No doubt Muslims will have to build alliances with other communities
My advice to the Indian Muslim community and the leadership therefore is to have a three pronged strategy.
First and The most important thing is for Muslims to become truer Muslims who are dedicated to the Prophetic mission – establishment of justice and inviting people to Allah’s way. This will make them deserving of Allah’s help and also will get them united and attractive to others for conversion.
The second prong is to build alliances with other communities without depending on them
The third is encouraging caste and language-based identities among the so-called Hindus to counter the RSS attempt to build a monolithic ultranationalist Hindu Ummah
But the real work in INDIA will have to be done by Muslims and their leaders living in India
Having humbly proposed the two Trinities of what Indian American Muslims can do in India and what the Indian Muslim should do themselves; I will come to the most important role of the Indian American Muslims. That role is to work in the place where they live (USA or Canada) and build public opinion in America against RSS and to bring sustained pressure on India from outside. This will give the Indian Muslims the breathing space to work. If we do not do this then the Brahmanical fanatic establishment will crush the disunited Indian Muslims.
(www.siyasat.net is Ahmedabad,Gujarat, India based website)
(The writer is based at Newyork. Views are personal)
I cannot agree with the third point. Instead efforts should be made to
propagate the idea of India. The efforts
of the so-called nationalists should be exposed to convince right thinking citizen that we have to sail and sink together. Dividing people of India on the basis of religion or caste or language is a disservice to the country.
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