INDIA: Silence Over Suffering Is Deafening

We often read stories of India's economic miracle, its IT revolution and its Bollywood culture. We're keen to do business with India, and Indian migrants are regarded as highly skilled and hard-working. 

Australia is even considering selling uranium to India, presuming its status as the world's biggest democracy makes its nuclear programme less dangerous than that of Iran or Pakistan.

But what about human rights? We so often implement double standards when determining how human rights might affect our international relations.

The experiences of India's religious minorities have generally been ignored by Western Governments and commentators.

India's majority faith is Hinduism, an inherently pacifist and tolerant religion. Notwithstanding the caste system, Hindu societies have traditionally practised liturgical and doctrinal pluralism.

Yet indigenous Indian faiths also include Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. Indian independence leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, a deeply religious man, borrowed freely from all Indian religious traditions.

Gandhi's vision was of a truly civilised and democratic India which zealously protected its minorities. He fought not only the British Raj but also communal extremists who incited bloodshed between religious communities. His assassination occurred at the hands of extremists of his own Hindu faith. In recent decades, these forces have re-emerged in mainstream Indian politics.

The spirit of Gandhi's assassins was present in the various social, educational and political organisations linked to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which ruled India federally from 1998 until 2004 and which continues to be the ruling party in various Indian state legislatures. In 2002, BJP activists in Gandhi's home state of Gujrat systematically murdered at least 2000 Muslim (and some Christian) civilians and made 150,000 homeless.

Police stood by and watched these atrocities take place. State Government workers carried lists of Muslim- and Christian-owned businesses and properties which were destroyed. The Gujrat Chief Minister Narendra Modhi praised the attackers, and remains Chief Minister.

Christians in Pakistan are often victims of discrimination, some even prosecuted under Pakistan's selective implementation of religious-based laws. In recent times, there has been much discussion of the precarious position faced by Christians in Muslim-majority states such as Malaysia, Iraq and the Palestinian territories.

These are all crucial human rights issues about which people of all faiths, especially Muslim minorities, need to agitate.

Unfortunately, minority rights have become an issue of double standards. We rarely hear local Muslim religious bodies and lobbies talking about the plight of non-Muslim minorities in Muslim-majority states. Few Muslim religious leaders have taken the example of imams like South Africa's Farid Esack, who has agitated against the mistreatment of Pakistan's Christian communities.

Imagine a situation where members of an established indigenous Christian community in Malaysia are wrongly accused of murdering the leader of a Muslim chauvinist group. They are hunted down by Muslim thugs, their homes and villages firebombed.

The situation becomes so tenuous Christian leaders announce they might even form their own militia if the Government refuses to provide effective protection. This situation is happening, though not in Malaysia and not at the hands of Muslims. In India, activists of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a movement that forms part of the BJP opposition, have terrorised Indian Catholic communities and institutions.

The VHP regards Catholicism as a foreign faith, despite its presence in India for at least a millennium. Catholic welfare groups are accused of pressuring lower-caste Hindus to convert to Christianity. Most Catholics are either former Dalits (untouchables) or from indigenous tribal groups. 

On August 23, a senior VHP leader was murdered in the eastern state of Orissa. Maoist rebels claimed responsibility for the murder, accusing the VHP leader of having Nazi sympathies. But VHP leaders blamed Catholics. More than 40 churches and 11 other Christian institutions (including those linked to the order of the late Mother Teresa) were destroyed by VHP supporters. One female missionary was burned alive and dozens of other Christians murdered.

Yet the silence among otherwise vocal Christian activists about the suffering of India's Christian communities is deafening. Even politicians claiming to champion our Judeo-Christian heritage are silent.

There are 18 million Catholics in India, more than in Canada and England combined. Yet as Father Raymond de Souza lamented in a recent article for Canada's National Post, anti-Christian violence by VHP and BJP extremists cannot be checked if it is not even noticed.

As if to underscore his remarks, The Australian newspaper reported on September 16 that violence has spread to Karnataka, with some 14 churches destroyed.

All believers must all agitate for the rights of all religious minorities, especially those suffering human rights abuses in friendly nations. Selective indignation on human rights abuses compromises not only our faith but our very humanity.

First published in the NZ Herald on 21 September 2008.

OPINION: Muslims shouldn't have to keep apologising for terrorist attacks

The general response in the West to the appalling January 7 Paris attacks show that the Western view of terrorism has barely changed since 9/11. The same themes persist - "they" are terrorising "us". "Their" moderates need to do more to stop "their" extremists from attacking "us". Why aren't more of "their" moderates speaking out? Why don't "they" respect "our" values? Why don't "they" take responsibility?

Surely holding all Muslims (one-quarter of the world's population) collectively responsible for the actions of fringe groups should be universally hounded as imbecilic. Instead, many of the "official" Muslim spokespeople have taken this exclusionary message to heart.

Each time there is a terrorist attack on a Western country, they all but trip over themselves and each other to condemn - at times not even waiting for anyone to confirm the actual motives of those ultimately held responsible.

The same set formula, the same mantras are reported. "We condemn. It has nothing to do with us or our faith."

One can hardly blame them for this. In the Australian imagination, terrorism and Islam are interchangeable.

Whether it be small evangelical and far-right groups complaining about halal certification of Vegemite or opponents of mosque developments, the spectre of terrorism is ever present.

Even after it was established that a fringe loner was responsible for the Martin Place attack, some commentators insisted "sheikh" Haron had a substantial following.

Those who scream the loudest about the alleged Islamic threat to Australia are often those complaining they aren't free to speak loudly about the threat because of "stifling political correctness" or Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Yet there's a new generation of Muslims born and brought up in Australia who better understand and are less afraid to engage with media, politics and mainstream culture than their elders.

Many of them see their elders' rush to condemn terrorist acts as having the opposite effect to that intended. They see their elders' statements as reinforcing a dominant mindset on Islam and Muslims that is patronising and at times even xenophobic.

Conventional wisdom about terrorism is certainly worth questioning.

Jihadist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State regard many, if not most, Muslims as kuffar, plural of kafir or infidel. These groups have killed a far greater number of Muslims than Jews and Christians.

In December, about 132 students and 13 staff at the Army Public School in the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar were gunned down by the Pakistan Taliban. The Peshawar attacks received nowhere near as much media coverage nor pious statements from world leaders.

Nor was there much said about Boko Haram's assaults in Nigeria. In one such assault, which took place around the same time as the Paris attack, more than 1000 people were murdered. The Nigerian schoolgirls have still not been captured, though they have been immortalised in a Charlie Hebdo cartoon depicting them as pregnant welfare queens demanding no one touch their payments.

Muslims are often accused of seeing themselves as victims. But when so little emphasis is placed on a far greater number of non-Western terror deaths, young Western Muslims can be forgiven for seeing this as an indication of chronic Western victimhood.

Westerners are the only victims - or at least the only victims who matter.

No one should be murdered for drawing cartoons or for working as a policeman or for visiting a supermarket. But our knowledge and consciousness of terrorism is almost always limited to our own cultural backyard. Our sense of reality is distorted.

According to the 2013 Global Terrorism Index, 80 per cent of all terrorism-related deaths occurred in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria.

In sixth place was India, where terrorist deaths doubled. And who are the most feared group in India?

Communist terrorist groups are by far the most frequent perpetrators and the main cause of deaths in India ... Three Maoist communist groups claimed responsibility for 192 deaths in 2013, which was nearly half of all deaths from terrorism in India.

The Maoist uprising, which started in 1967, has been operating in 20 of India's 29 states.

But is the hypocrisy and victimhood that pervades much of the Australian and the broader Western debate on terrorism enough reason for community spokespersons not to speak the truth and call a spade a spade?

Haters can allow their hate to compromise their beliefs. They can point the finger at Muslims for being terrorists whilst ignoring them - and others - as victims.

Perhaps the issue is not whether to condemn terrorism but rather when, to condemn all political violence regardless of who are perpetrators and who are victims. Ultimately it doesn't matter who the victims are. Unjustly killing one is equivalent to killing all humanity. Surely that's a Biblical and Qur'anic principle we can all agree on.​

Irfan Yusuf is a lawyer and author of Once Were Radicals: My Years as a Teenage Islamofascist. This article was first published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 16 January 2015.

CRIKEY: Think you know the world’s terrorism hotspots? Think again

India does not spring to mind as a global terrorism hotspot, but lawyer and commentator Irfan Yusuf finds there’s much we don’t know about the world’s second-most populous nation.

India’s newly elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently told Commonwealth lawmakers in Canberra that Australia was firmly at the centre of his nation’s gaze. Meanwhile, our national broadcaster has announced it is closing its New Delhi bureau. And most Australians wouldn’t have much of a clue about the world’s second-most populous nation or its neighbours.

India doesn’t just want our uranium and coal; Modi has pledged to work with Australia to fight what he describes as the “menace of terrorism”.

But what does terrorism mean in India? Do publications like The Times of India or The Hindu or Caravan see terrorism as purely a Middle Eastern or Islamic problem?

The 2013 Global Terrorism Index placed India at sixth in the world when it came to number of terrorist attacks. Above India were Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria. These countries accounted for some 80% of all terrorism deaths. India experienced the largest increase in terrorist attacks, with deaths almost doubling (238 to 404) from 2012-13.

Yes, there certainly are jihadists operating in the disputed Jammu and Kashmir region. But the GTI Report states what most Indians already take for granted:

In 2013 around 70% of attacks were non-lethal. Communist terrorist groups are by far the most frequent perpetrators and the main cause of deaths in India. Three Maoist communist groups claimed responsibility for 192 deaths in 2013, which was nearly half of all deaths from terrorism in India. Police are overwhelmingly the biggest targets of Maoists, accounting for half of all deaths and injuries.

The Maoist insurgency has much to do with farmers in impoverished tribal areas being forced off their land. The uprising has been going since 1967, with the Naxal movement operating in 20 of India’s 29 states. Terrorism doesn’t happen in an economic or political vacuum.

Perhaps the most dangerous form of extremism can be found in the Indian ruling coalition. Before being elected Prime Minister in a landslide, Modi was chief minister of Gujarat province in the north-west of the country. Gujarat was also the home state of an eccentric barrister named Gandhi, who was once labeled a terrorist by Her Majesty’s government.

Far from engaging in violence, Gandhi preached a novel form of non-violent resistance with a view to securing independence for India. He was assassinated by a small cabal of extremists from his own Hindu faith, people who did not share his cosmopolitan vision for a multi-confessional India.

This coalition of theocrats has been quite happy to use violence and terror to put religious minorities — especially Catholics and Muslims — in their place. They include people within the current PM’s inner circle as well as convicted religious terrorists. They were behind some of India’s worst violence in its post-independence history.

And when it comes to violent Hindutva theocracy, guess which side the current Indian PM belongs to.

Indians (and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans and Nepalese) take this stuff for granted. But rarely will you read or hear or see much use of words like Hindutva or Naxalite in our own media. ​

First published in Crikey on 21 November 2014.

HUMOUR: Indian sexual prowess ...

OPINION: Cricket corruption exposes hypocrisy in Australian circles

I was watching Pakistani satellite TV at my parents' house in Sydney the other day when I saw an unusual character appear on the screen. He looked Pakistani. He dressed Pakistani. But he sounded like something straight out of Little Britain.

The young Londonistani told the Pakistani GEO cable news channel:

Dey should be sacked from da team and sent back to da motherland, innit.

Or something like that.

The GEO news crew back in the Lahore studios were clearly bemused by the passionate selfrighteousness of this and other Pakistani cricket fans in Pakistan and Britain responding to yet another match-fixing scandal involving Pakistani players and possibly officials. The sports presenter poked fun at the Pakistani team manager who had no trouble listening to the orders of his Pakistani administrators back home but had enormous trouble hearing the basic questions of international journalists in London.

But in a nation where cricket is perhaps the major religion, this is no laughing matter. Millions of Pakistanis witnessed their team suffer the biggest Test loss in its history.

And what made the loss even more humiliating was that it was at the hands of one of the world's weaker teams (England), a team that both Pakistani and Australian cricket fans have become accustomed to poking fun at.

Of course, it could never happen in Australian cricket. Certainly that's what cricket
journalist Michael Conn recently wrote in The Australian. Conn argued that the latest saga was a symptom of broader national corruption.

Cricket is widely regarded as a microcosm of the country where it is played, which offers an instant insight into why Pakistani cricket in particular and the ICC in general is such a basket case.

If it's as simple as that, how does Conn explain the incident involving Shane Warne and Mark Waugh, who happily took money from an Indian bookie in the mid-1990s? Admittedly they weren't accused of deliberately bowling no balls to throw a game away. But corruption is corruption whichever way you look at it.

Conn's argument reaches heights of hilarity when he suggests that it was corrupt nations from ...

... [t]he Afro-Asia bloc ...

... whose corrupt administrators blocked John Howard from becoming president of the International Cricket Council.

In short, having John Howard as ICC president would solve all of world cricket's corruption problems. We all know that John Howard would never oversee corruption, nor would he allow anyone involved in an administration he was in charge of to have direct links to corruption.



Those who claim the Howard prime ministership did not tolerate, whitewash or make excuses for corruption or cronyism would pause for thought if they read Caroline Overington's awardwinning Kickback: Inside The Australian Wheat Board Scandal.

They should also ask the new federal member for Denison whether Howard would treat a whistleblower on cricket corruption in the same manner as he treated the Office of National Assessments officer who blew the whistle on intelligence failures that led to a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

Everyone knows corruption exists at ICC level. Corrupt governments of nations where cricket is a major sport will happily stack their national cricket boards with cronies. But while many cricketing countries may have corruption issues, others have issues with dealing with racism and parochialism.

That support still lingers for a Howard presidency illustrates a peculiar form of parochialism that continues to exist in many Australian circles.

Howard supporters argued that the "Afro-Asian" bloc that opposed Howard's nomination to the ICC presidency earlier this year did so because of his attacks on Zimbabwe's racist anti-white government. Howard wanted sanctions against Zimbabwe and was a staunch critic of Mugabe's regime. He was right.

If only he was also right when it came to the racist anti- black apartheid regime that ruled South Africa during the 1970s and '80s, a time when Howard opposed economic and sporting sanctions against the regime. Howard's attitude went against the dominant world opinion at that time.

Farid Esack, a prominent South African anti-apartheid activist and a gender equity commissioner appointed by the Mandela government, told an American audience in 2006 that the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa saw those outside the country opposing sporting and economic sanctions as being collaborators with the apartheid regime. That presumably includes John Howard.

Some would argue that all this talk of Howard's responses to apartheid, AWB, Andrew Wilkie, Iraq (and indeed Dr Haneef, Asian immigration, Pauline Hanson, asylum seekers, the stolen generation) is just ancient history. The real issue is cricket corruption.

Fair enough. Let's look at this in simple terms. One major element of corruption is that the right job goes to the wrong (and often least qualified) person. Australia and New Zealand had the opportunity to put forward a nominee for the ICC presidency.

They had a choice between Sir John Anderson, a top-notch experienced and respected New Zealand administrator, and John Howard. Australia bullied New Zealand into withdrawing Anderson's nomination, despite the fact that he was already pencilled in for the job.

And now Howard's backers have the temerity to cry corruption.

Irfan Yusuf is a lawyer and author of Once Were Radicals. His top score was 14 runs for the St Andrews' under-14s. He will not be nominating for the ICC presidency in the foreseeable future. This article was first published in The Canberra Times on 1 September 2010.

CRIKEY: Stuff the dirty dunnies, it’s the religious violence that could halt Delhi

Yes, many Indians are very embarrassed over the poor state of the dunnies at the athletes’ village in New Delhi. They’ve openly been writing about it, not ashamed to lash out at the government or even at themselves. One columnist wrote that the urban elite were deluding themselves:

Just when we were patting ourselves on the back for having become an economic dynamo and a growing ‘soft’ superpower represented by Bollywood and yoga, basmati rice and tikka masala ready to take over the world, the Commonwealth Games debacle has come as a slap across the national face.

And Western reporters faithfully reported this collective masochism while ignoring the story Indians were genuinely nervous about. Having dust on one’s dunny is something many Indians can live with. But would the Games be enough to stop some ordinary citizens transforming into religious warriors and slaughtering one another over a 16th century mosque demolished in 1992 to build a Hindu temple? How do you explain to Australian readers that the Cronulla riots were a Sunday picnic compared to the rioting and looting and murder that took place across India after the demolition?

Indians are now nervously praying riots aren’t repeated in response to the recent judgment in the Allahabad High Court in what has become known as the Babri Masjid case. The ancient mosque was built by Mughal Emperor Babar on the alleged birthplace of the Hindu god Rama at Ayodhya in northern India. The decision awards one third of the property to the Muslim religious trust and two thirds to two Hindu groups. Some argue the decision effectively reward the fanatics who tore the mosque down, and who subsequently went on a rampage of violence and looting.

That incident also transformed India’s political landscape. Mahatma Gandhi was murdered in 1948, shortly after independence, by Hindu fanatics who resented his efforts to maintain inter-communal peace and who wanted to implement a virtual theocracy inspired by a far-Right ideology called Hindutva. For years, the Hindutva mob were considered freaks by the political mainstream. The destruction of the Babri mosque and the alleged restoration of the birthplace of a god millions of Hindus revere enabled the Hindutva crowd to hijack the private devotion of followers of perhaps the world’s most tolerate religion.

Eventually the ragtag Hindutva groups aligned themselves with a political party called the BJP. The current BJP website has removed essays such as Semitic Monotheism: The Root of Intolerance in India. But how do these ideas translate on the ground?

Suketu Mehta, author of the 2004 book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, describes meeting with Hindutva zealots who describe a typical scene from the 1992-93 riots as told to him by one “Sunil”:

“Those were not days for thought,” he continued. “We five people burnt one Mussulman. At four am after we heard of Radhabai Chawl, a mob assembled, the likes of which I have never seen. Ladies, gents. They picked up any weapon they could. Then we marched to the Muslim side. We met a pavwallah on the highway, on a bicycle. I knew him; he used to sell me bread every day.” Sunil held up a piece of bread from the pav bhaji he was eating. “I set him on fire. We poured petrol on him and set him on fire. All I thought was, ‘This is a Muslim’. He was shaking. He was crying, ‘I have children, I have children!’ I said, ‘When your Muslims were killing the Radhabai Chawl people, did you think of your children?’ That day we showed them what Hindu dharma is.”

The scene in Delhi was much the same. And it didn’t just happen in Delhi and Bombay immediately after 1992. It was repeated in the 2002 massacre in the state of Gujrat, where textbooks are being modified to glorify Hitler and downplay Gandhi.

And if you think Muslims have been the only victims, ask yourselves why our conservative Catholic commentariat ignored the story of the 2008 massacres of Catholics in Orissa?

This is the kind of stuff most Indians are scared of. The dust-sensitive backsides of foreign athletes don’t rate very highly when the prospect of communalist violence is very real.



First published in Crikey on 1 October 2010.

UPDATE I: An anonymous poet and former Christian Democratic Party official sent this lyrical response:

Imagine there's no nigg3rs
It's easy if you try
Blackheads in hell below us
Above it only whites
Imagine all white people
Living for today

Imagine no shit countries
filled with subhuman poo
Something to kill or die for
a subhuman zoo
Imagine all white people
Living life in peace

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf






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CRIKEY: The real Delhi: not as dirty, scary and chaotic as the media thinks

Over the past few weeks, we’ve read western sporting officials declare that Delhi’s Commonwealth Games won’t work because the city (and in particular the athletes’ village) is “filthy”, “uninhabitable” and “seriously compromised”.

It’s true that many Indians have been mightily peeved with their government’s handling of the affair. Tejaswini Patil writes that “one of the English media channels in India conducted a panel discussion which referred to the CWG mishaps as ‘national shame’”. And Amol Rajan talks of “the cruel irony” that “most Indians don’t care about the Games, because it will have such little effect on them”: ”And in any case, they care about cricket, not athletics. To them, the event is above all an expensive nuisance, and a distraction from the daily grind.”

The Indian media, like their Pakistani colleagues, know how to be critical of their government. I’m reminded of this each time I visit the house of my parents (both of whom were born in Delhi) and watch them switching between South Asian news channels. Indians have bigger fish to fry than dust on the toilet boils where elite athletes will be placing their buttocks. They’re more worried about more basic issues like the Indian authorities misleading the public on maternal mortality.

Too often Western media have a skewed view of South Asia in general and India in particular. On the one hand you have the Greg Sheridans of this world rabbiting on about India’s economic boom whilst rarely mentioning major corporate corruption and institutional weaknesses exposed by major scandals such as the Satyam scandal which erupted in January 2009 when the chairman of the Indian multinational confessed the corporation’s accounts had been falsified.

Then there’s security. Unlike western cultural warriors, Indians understand that terrorism has no race and no particular religion. In August 2008, a senior Hindutva leader was assassinated in the eastern state of Orissa. Maoist rebels claimed responsibility, but this didn’t stop Hindutva terrorists from going on the rampage against local Catholics and their institutions. Churches and other Christian institutions (including those linked to the order of the late Mother Teresa) were destroyed.

India is a country where extreme elements of almost all communities have used terror. Ajai Sahni, editor of the South Asia Intelligence Review, told Newsweek in late 2008: “The fact of the matter is you have Hindus who are terrorists. You have Muslims who are terrorists. You also have Christians who are terrorists. [S]everal other denominations that have proven their capacity for terrorism. We must realise that terrorism is simply a method by which civilians are intentionally targeted. That’s it.”

But it isn’t as if bombs go off in India everyday. India continues to host major sporting events in cricket, hockey and a host of other sports. And if any Australian deserves a gold medal in the upcoming Commonwealth Games, it is Mike Duffy, the Channel 7 reporter exposed on Media Watch last night who claims to have slipped a suitcase full of explosives through the security barricade of the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Delhi. The story went across the globe. I read about it in The Economist.

And now serious doubts have been raised about Duffy’s and Channel 7’s credibility. Watch this space.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf




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SPORT: All-Indian Superstars

Irfan Yusuf watches his cricketing namesakes hit sectarian politics out of the park in Gujurat ...

Humility is one of my strengths. Indeed, I can confidently state that I’m the most humble person I know. To confirm this, over the weekend, I took the ultimate humility test. I sat down at my computer, from whence many an article for this magnificent website has emerged, and surfed my way to Google News. There, I typed the words "Irfan Yusuf" and clicked.

As my self-effacing nature expected, the first item was an article on WYD published under my name in the New Zealand Herald. But what followed was quite instructive: article upon article from newspapers, sports blogs, cricket blogs, TV websites and e-zines about two Indian cricketers. There’s no doubt that in the online Irfan Yusuf stakes, Irfan Pathan and Yusuf Pathan are hitting me for six!

Growing up with a name no one could pronounce wasn’t the nicest experience. Was it "Eefun"? Or "Urfun"? Or "Earphone"? And if that wasn’t bad enough, people constantly misspelt my surname. "No, it isn’t ‘Y’ ‘O’ ‘U’ double-’S’ etc". Get the drift? I doubt I’ll have any more problems with spelling or pronunciation on my next trip to India. Thanks to a pair of Gujarati cricketers, millions of Indians now know how to spell and pronounce my full name correctly.

The Pathan brothers are all-Indian superstars. They hail from the north-western Indian state of Gujarat, part of which borders Pakistan. Gujarat was also the hometown of the great lawyer Mohandas Gandhi, who spent some years in South Africa fighting apartheid and went on to become the spiritual leader of the Indian independence movement.

There is a spiritual side to the story of the Pathan brothers. Until recently, their father Mehboob Khan was the caretaker at the Jammi Masjid (congregational mosque) in Mandvi, a suburb of the Gujrati town of Varodara. He had inherited this role from his father and grandfather. The mosque is 400 years old, older than any mosque — or indeed any church — in Australia. With the exception of Indonesia, India has more Muslims than any other country on earth. Yet Indian Muslims make up only around 15 per cent of India’s population. Most are relatively poor.

After the 1947 Partition, people on the "wrong" side of the India-Pakistan border left everything behind to make it to the "right" side. The Pathan family were different. Sher Jaman Ibrahim Khan, the paternal grandfather of Irfan and Yusuf Pathan, migrated from the Manshera district of Pakistan to India a few months before Partition.

Although India is officially secular, it has seen a rise in pseudo-religious far-Right Hindu nationalist politics. It isn’t alone in this regard. Until the most recent elections, two Pakistani provinces were dominated by pseudo-religious Islamist parties.

I describe such politics as pseudo-religious because I believe that no religion teaches its followers to be intolerant toward the poor and the vulnerable. The situations of millions of Hindu, Sikh and Christian Pakistanis are made to feel even more precarious thanks to misdirected blasphemy laws promoted by Pakistani politicians who only use Islam as a divisive wedge. On the other side of the border, similar wedges — of the allegedly Hindu variety — are used by Indian politicians to make millions of Muslim and Christian Indians feel vulnerable.

The Pathan brothers may tour across the world scoring runs and taking wickets with millions back home cheering them on. However, their home town in Gujarat is frequently the scene of communal violence whipped up by extremists from the governing fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Dal (BJP) party. Go to the BJP website and you’ll see that Gujarat and India’s proudest son, Mahatma Gandhi, barely rates a mention. You’ll also read essays blaming allegedly foreign "Semitic" faiths for India’s woes.

The BJP State Government of Gujarat led a massacre of religious minorities in 2002 that saw thousands of civilians murdered and hundreds of women raped by mobs armed with official records showing the residential and business addresses of Muslims and Christians. While the rest of India tossed out the BJP in the last national elections, Gujarat’s Chief Minister Narenda Modi remains the man who allegedly orchestrated much of the 2002 violence — or at the very least turned a blind eye to it.

This explosive environment even affects national heroes like Irfan and Yusuf Pathan. In May 2006, Indian journalists spent time in the Pathan family home. Don’t let the headline "Genius in the time of hatred and bloodshed" put you off reading the inspiring story of young Indian athletes who honed in their skills in an environment where their poverty-stricken families and communities were subjected to discrimination and even violence.

The religion that South Asians follow most fanatically - cricket - is, ironically enough, one which overrides sectarian exclusions. Pakistan’s national side has no shortage of Hindu and Christian players, and Muslim, Sikh and Christian players step up to the pitch for India. In both India and Pakistan, religious fundamentalism sits side by side with a blend of tolerance and pluralism that is often best displayed on sporting fields.

The good news is that the Pathan brothers were able to use cricket to rise above the sectarian bigotry. We often hear that sport - and religion - and politics shouldn’t mix. But sometimes spectator sport can become a powerful religious force in its own right allowing its practitioners and fans to overcome the obstacles set by sectarian politicians.

First published in NewMatilda on 17 July 2008.


Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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OPINION: The fuss over the burqa is out of kilter ...

Sarkozy's focus on a tiny minority who cover up risks alienating most Muslims, writes Irfan Yusuf.

IN ABOUT six months, a cross-party French parliamentary committee of 32 MPs will prepare a report examining whether the wearing of the burqa (an outfit, usually black, that covers a woman's full body, including her face) in public represents a threat to French secularism. They'll also determine whether to ban it being worn in France.

The committee was formed after French President Nicolas Sarkozy addressed the French Parliament on June 22 and described the burqa as "a problem of liberty and women's dignity" and "not welcome in France".

Sarkozy further claimed that the burqa was not a religious symbol at all, but rather "a sign of subservience and debasement", which created "women prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity".

Of course, even if Sarkozy regarded the burqa as a religious symbol, he might still ban it. In the past, he hasn't been averse to banning the open display of religious symbols in French state schools.

Sarkozy was originally behind the push to proscribe the hijab (headscarf) from state schools, only to subsequently oppose specific legislation, introduced in 2004, which saw the wearing of all religious symbols in state schools prohibited.

Many French, and indeed many Australians, find the various shades of religious head covering adopted by Muslim women somewhat troublesome. Women draped in black represent one of the most potent stereotypes of Islam in the West, one reinforced by media images. When one Sydney Muslim man called for polygamy to be legalised, the Herald Sun website carried a photo of two burqa-clad women crossing the street. The website of its Sydney equivalent regularly carries photos of burqa-clad women in any story even mildly related to Muslims. On August 8, 2007, in a story on an investigation into a refugee housing project run by a main Muslim body, The Daily Telegraph showed the image of the top half of a fully veiled woman's face.

It's unclear exactly what proportion of Muslim women wear any sort of head covering when in public, though anecdotal evidence suggests only a minority do. Among those who cover, the vast majority seem to follow the religious consensus and restrict themselves to merely covering all or part of their hair. This can take the form of a more fixed hijab (as commonly worn in the Arab world and South-East Asia) or a loose shawl draped over the head (common in Iran and South Asia).

The vast majority of Muslims in France are from North Africa where the face veil is rarely worn. This naturally raises the question: with such a tiny minority wearing such a veil, why is Sarkozy using his precious time talking about this issue?

Sarkozy's remarks are reminiscent of former prime minister John Howard's frequent references to alleged non-integration of Muslim Australians. Yet in one radio interview Howard declared 99.9 per cent of Muslims were perfectly integrated. I wondered at the time whether his repeated emphasis on the 0.01 per cent non-integrated was little more than an attempt to create an environment where the 99.9 per cent were made to feel uncomfortable.

No women in my family cover their hair. However, my maternal grandfather, who lectured at the relatively liberal Aligarh Muslim University in India, insisted the women of his household practise a form of traditional aristocratic seclusion known as purdah. Though associated with Indian Islamic culture, purdah was also practised in many upper-class north Indian Hindu and Sikh households.

It was common in those days for wealthy women to go out shopping while seated in a special palanquin (called a dholi). This was basically a large, comfortable, box-like structure with plenty of cushions for aristocratic women to laze on while their male servants (or even male relatives) would carry them. The curtains around the box had a screen through which the women could peek and decide which shop they would visit.

Women's quarters in 1950s Aligarh homes were places where women enjoyed themselves, freed of any domestic duties, their husbands or fathers employing servants to perform all cooking and other chores. Men were expected to lavish gifts on their female relatives (and in-laws) using the household income, which women were usually responsible for managing (I'm sure to their own advantage). Men were also expected to do all the shopping for food and other household needs. Women only shopped to buy clothes, jewellery and other luxury items for themselves.

Of course, the situation for the aristocratic Indian woman in purdah was a far cry from impoverished women living in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Purdah did not stop my mother from completing high school and a bachelor's degree. The idea of banning women from education or work would be anathema to most Muslims, including the one in four of South Asian heritage.

France has the largest Muslim population of any country in Western Europe.

By focusing on a tiny minority of Muslim women, Sarkozy risks alienating the majority of French Muslims, including those who agree with his basic proposition that the burqa is offensive and degrading to women.

Irfan Yusuf is author of Once Were Radicals: My Years as a Teenage Islamo-Fascist, published by Allen & Unwin. This article was first published in The Age on Monday 6 July 2009.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf




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REVIEW: Ambitious cultural journey loses its way ...

A Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands
By Aatish Taseer
Text Publishing, 323pp, $34.95

WE all inhabit the same planet, yet so often we hear phrases such as "the Muslim world" and "the Western world". Do such discrete entities indeed exist? Perhaps those best equipped to answer this question are those with one foot on either side of the divide.

Aatish Taseer, a 29-year-old freelance journalist and the son of an Indian Sikh mother and a Pakistani Muslim father, should have been such a person. That he isn't so is not entirely hisfault.

The two sides of Taseer's family share the culture and language of Punjab, a region in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent shared by India and Pakistan. Islam and Sikhism have inhabited Punjab's geographical and cultural space for centuries. Sikhism is indigenous to Punjab, while Punjabi Islam has adopted the cultural symbols of the land.

My background is a mixture of Indian and Pakistani. Having been reared in a small South Asian community in Sydney, I found it almost impossible to tell Muslims and Sikhs apart. To this day it is easy for me to confuse a mosque and gurudwara (Sikh temple) until the saffron flags of the latter become apparent.

But there is a huge difference between my upbringing and that of Taseer, whose parents' relationship was kept largely secret.

Taseer's father, Salmaan Taseer, became a senior figure in the Pakistan People's Party, at present the governing party of Pakistan. He is a businessman, media magnate and governor of Pakistan's Punjab province.

Aatish's parents met in India in 1980, where Salmaan Taseer was promoting a biography he'd written of his political mentor and former Pakistani prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Aatish's mother, respected Indian journalist Tavleen Singh, was then a young reporter.

At the time of his parents' brief affair, which lasted hardly a week, Salmaan Taseer was already married with three children.

After his parents' separation, Aatish was reared in his mother's Sikh household in Delhi, under the wing of his loving maternal grandfather. The grandfather had grown up in what is now Pakistan and still corresponded with his best friend from across the border.

Like other Sikhs, the Singhs had to flee their ancestral lands in what became Pakistan during the 1947 Partition, which still leaves some members of the family bitter and resentful towards Pakistan and Muslims in general. To his credit, the maternal grandfather wasn't affected by these sentiments.

'A human being,' my grandfather always asserted, when people asked whether I was being brought up as a Sikh or a Muslim. 'He's being brought up to be a human being.'

It wasn't until 1980, when he was 21, that the author met his father again. Taseer's interest in travelling through Muslim-majority states was sparked after he wrote a story on the July 7, 2005, London bombings for British magazine Prospect. Taseer's father wrote an angry letter ...

... accus[ing] me of prejudice, of lacking even 'superficial knowledge' of the Pakistani ethos. 'Do you really think you're doing the Taseer name a service by spreading this kind of invidious anti-Muslim propaganda?

Taseer was upset by his father's letter, an irreligious Pakistani politician who hardly embodied religious values.

Yet Taseer's language when describing his father is always restrained, consistent with the elegant and often hauntingly beautiful prose of the book, sadly spoiled by serious factual errors exhibiting not prejudice, which would have been understandable, but some elementary research.

In setting the stage for his travels, Taseer writes that the whole Islamic world ...

... stretched between my father [Lahore] and the place where I read his letter [London].

How does Taseer expect his reader to take his understanding of the Muslim world seriously when he excludes from it the world's largest Muslim majority state, Indonesia?

He claims his father's Pakistani Islam emphasises rejection of Hinduism. But this is hardly pan-Islam, as I discovered during a visit to the Javanese cultural capital of Yogyakarta in 2006.

There I saw Muslim artists perform the Hindu Ramayana ballet before Muslim audiences in one of Southeast Asia's oldest Hindu temples. Not all Muslims share the religious chauvinism of some Pakistanis.

Taseer's book covers his travels in Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia (including a visit to the pilgrimage centre of Mecca), Iran and Pakistan. In each country he provides us with tremendously detailed portraits of scenery, but when it comes to people our encounters are limited to the devout yet chauvinistic on the one hand or the irreligious and resentful on the other.

Are we to believe that only an insignificant unrepresentative minority exists between these two poles?

Most unfortunate for Taseer is that his paradigm for understanding pan-Islamic sentiment emerges largely from Hassan Butt, a young British man who for years claimed to have recruited British Muslims for al-Qa'ida.

Taseer brought Butt to prominence in the article that prompted his father's wrathful letter. Yet in December last year Butt admitted to a British court that he was a professional liar who had told journalists (including, presumably, Taseer) stories the media wanted to hear.

It's a shame such an elegant piece of writing is spoiled in a way that may make some dismiss it altogether.

Sadly for Taseer, this book, the product of months of travel and a lifetime of anguish, may vindicate at least some of his absent father's criticisms. It is not a vindication well-deserved.

Irfan Yusuf is author of Once Were Radicals: My Years as a Teenage Islamo-Fascist (Allen & Unwin). This review was first published in The Australian on 27 June 2009


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COMMENT: Why fight racism when you can incite racism to sell newspapers?

Writing in The Age on May 22 2009, Nazeem Hussain asks some very simple questions about attacks on South Asian (largely Indian) overseas students:

I am another brown person. I can say unequivocally, on behalf of every other non-white person in the country, that hearing about racially motivated crimes frightens us.

To an aggressor bent on beating up a "fob" (fresh off the boat) or a "curry", it does not matter that I was born here, and that my parents came here long before the attacker was born. To the aggressor, I simply match the description of their target.

What concerns me is that each time an attack against an Indian is reported, Victoria Police has quite determinedly ensured the issue of racism is not closely linked to the crime.

Inspector Scott Mahoney said that "sometimes, it's just a combination of timing and chance". Is that supposed to mean that the attackers don't see colour when they incessantly find targets of Indian appearance? These "chance" encounters that he describes are occurring with alarming regularity.

With respect, the inspector's analysis is flawed. Victoria Police has itself claimed that people of Indian background are "over-represented as victims". When both the victims and the aggressors claim that these attacks are racially motivated, what purpose does it serve to avoid a discussion about racism?

The police are charged with upholding the law and fighting crime, whatever its causes. There is little benefit in denying the existence of racist attitudes in our communities ...

So far, we have seen police directing their attention to victims and potential victims, telling them they should not speak loudly in their native language or travel on public transport with their MP3 players on display. Police also set up a hotline for Indian victims after the attack on Sharma. I fail to see how these measures tackle the cause of the attacks.

Now the police plan to go to India to educate Australia-bound students on how to minimise the risk of being attacked.

I thought the police said these attacks were opportunistic? Why, then, are they going specifically to India to advise Indians on safety? Or is this simply a business trip to ensure Indian international students continue to bring education revenue into the state by allaying their fears?

If it is racist hate-crimes we are looking at, just call them racist hate-crimes. Who or what is committing them is irrelevant.

But Andrew Bolt, provocateur-in-chief for the Herald Sun, isn't interested about the race of victims. Why is that, Andrew? Are they of the wrong colour? Instead, Andrew wants to accuse the whistle-blower of being involved in a cover-up.

But, since he’s writing in The Age, he does not dare be frank himself and name (directly) one of the ethnic groups most implicated in these attacks ...

Jeez, Andrew, does it really matter what ethnic background they are when the gangs perpetrating the incidents are themselves of no single ethnicity? What is the point of pointing out each ethnicity of each perpetrator? What will it prove? That non-whites have the ability to be racist also? That perpetrators of every race and colour can be inspired by the same violent and racist sentiments that you allow onto your blog? And that companies like Dell (whose banner advertisement appeared on Bolt's blog when I accessed it) sponsor?

The two most senior Muslim coppers in the UK are being had up, separately, on charges of serious fraud. Their defence is that the police ‘system’ is ‘institutionlly racist’. This is what happens when cultures (not races!) who do not share Western values in the rule of law and blind justice (and much more besides) infiltrate rather than assimilate. It is too late for Britain (and Holland and France and Canada) but not too late for Australia.
Why is it that Hindus don’t run around the planet beheading people, stoning women to death, letting off bombs and flying planes into buildings?
Gardez Bien (Reply)
Fri 22 May 09 (08:08am)

Probably because Hindus are too busy getting bashed up in Melbourne.

Had Andrew Bolt and his cyber-buddies read the balance of Hussain's article, they would have understood his point. There's no point Victorian police heading off to India to warn people there of the dangers lurking on our trains. Maybe what they should do is deal with the problem here. And acknowledge that these attacks are almost certainly racially motivated, regardless of who is perpetrating them.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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PAKISTAN: The tragedy of the Sikh minority ...

The Taliban militias in Pakistan appear to have turned their sights on the country's small and vulnerable Sikh minority. If reports appearing in some Pakistani newspapers are correct, Taliban leaders have transformed Islamic sacred jurisprudence into an instrument of oppression.

Sikhs in Pakistan are of both Punjabi and Pathan ethnicity. Pathan Sikhs, like Pathan Muslims, speak Pushtu. The Taliban themselves are largely of Pathan heritage. The Sikhs currently being attacked by the Taliban are themselves Pathan. Many are living as refugees in the large Gurudwara Punja Sahib complex in Hassanabdal, among the holiest shrines of Sikhism.

Pakistan's respected Dawn newspaper reported on 30 April 2009 that houses were being bulldozed by Taliban vigilantes.

The Taliban on Wednesday night demolished 11 houses of the Sikh community in the Orakzai Agency for refusing to pay ‘Jazia’.

The action was ordered by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan chief for Orakzai Agency, Hakeemullah Mehsud, after the deadline given to the Sikh community for payment of Jazia passed on Wednesday ...

The Taliban had asked the Sikh community living in the tribal area for centuries earlier this month to pay annual Jazia because “Sharia had been enforced in the area and every non-Muslim had to pay protection money”.

The Sikh community comprising 30 to 35 families shifted from the Feroze Khel area to the nearby Merozai in Lower Orakzai Agency because they could not arrange Rs150 million demanded by the Taliban.

The Taliban had forcibly occupied shops of two Sikh businessmen, Sewa Singh and Kalak Singh, and houses of several Sikhs to force them to pay Jazia. Later, the Sikh community refused to pay Jazia and decided to leave Orakzai and settle in some other area.

The Dawn further reported on 1 May 2009 that Sikhs in some villages have been pressured to pay the jizya tax and have had their properties confiscated or even bulldozed.

The Sikh community living in lower Orakzai Agency for centuries started leaving their village on Thursday following threats and forced occupation of their shops and houses by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan.

On Wednesday night, the TTP destroyed 11 houses of the Sikh community, which forced 60 to 65 Sikhs to auction their shops and leave the Feroze Khel area permanently.

The plight of the Sikhs has seen the usual comments from Indian officials and the usual denials from Pakistani officials. A Pakistani foreign office spokesman was quoted by Dawn as remarking:

Sikhs living in Orakzai agency are Pakistani citizens and hence of no concern to India.

Yeah, right. Try telling that to this chap. The plight of his co-religionists surely must be of concern to the first Prime Minister of India to come from a religious minority. Although India's own religious minorities aren't always treated the best. India's failure to properly conduct an investigation into the 1984 anti-Sikh riots has led to its Home Minister being the subject of some Bush-in-Baghdad treatment.

Still, some Sikh refugees are denying reports of Taliban abuses to Sikh property. The News International quoted one Pakistani Sikh leader remarking:

Believe me that the state of Pakistan treats us like a gul (flower). We are better off than the majority Pakistanis.

(It sounds less ridiculously flowery in Urdu!)

In such a situation, it's hard to know how else a vulnerable religious minority would react. Still, Pakistan's former Information Minister Sherry Rahman didn't have any such hesitation. The Hindustan Times reported:

Describing extortion demands from the minority Sikh community by the Taliban as a “criminal act”, former Pakistani minister Sherry Rehman on Sunday said such incidents must be condemned and “halted at all costs”.

“We hear that Sikh families are being harassed and forced out of their homes, as if non-Muslims don’t have a right to live peacefully and with clear citizenship rights in Pakistan,” she said while responding to reports of Taliban issuing threats to Sikh families in the Aurakzai tribal region.

“This is dangerous nonsense and must be condemned and halted at all costs. Sikh, Christian, Hindu communities and other citizens belonging to any religious denomination have full rights to live in Pakistan as per our constitution,” Rehman, a close aide of slain former Premier Benazir Bhutto, said ...

“The families that have decided to move out of the area need to be extended maximum assistance by the government. At the same time, parliament must take note of the violation of constitutional rights of the Pakistani citizens and make serious efforts to extend necessary protection to minorities,” she said.

Rehman said the government’s efforts to "counter non-state actors should proceed with the understanding that not only are they challenging the writ of the state, (but) they are attempting to take over our territory and establish their own unconstitutional and illegal order by way of force".

She said, “What happened with Sikh families is just one example of the way the neo-Taliban are attempting to establish their own authority in the region.”

Perhaps the ultimate measure of a nation's civility is in how it treats its minorities. Pakistan must act to stop attacks on its Sikh and other minorities.

REFLECTION/FILM: What’s that idiot doing?

I have a terrible habit of watching the same movie many times. If it’s a silly comedy, and if I take a liking to it, don’t be surprised if I would have already seen it at least 5 times within the first 12 months of having watched it. And don’t be surprised if I’ve memorised some of its more memorable gags.

It’s a habit I developed from childhood when video cassette recorders first came onto the market. It was around this time that we learned it was possible to record shows and movies shown on the TV. The vast majority of our video cassettes were of Indian movies. Fittingly, the first movie we had recorded from the TV also was an Indian movie. Well, kind of.

Peter Sellers’ The Party was played over and over again in our house. Sellers starred as Hrundi V. Bakshi, a bumbling Indian actor imported to Hollywood to play a soldier of the British Raj fighting (as luck would have it) in Afghanistan. At least the area on the set looked like Afghanistan, until Bakhshi accidentally blew it up while strapping up his sandals.



After being sacked from the movie, Bakshi somehow manages to score an invitation to a party hosted at the home of the magnate who owns the studio where the explosions took place. Sellers’ Indian accent sounds to me like a stereotypical American attempt to mimic the Indian accent.

His behaviour, dress and mannerisms (he’s even shown playing sitar at home) is such that you’d expect Indo-Pakistanis to be most peeved. But my memory is of my father and Indo-Pak uncles laughing heartily at Sellers’ accent, not to mention his awkward antics at the party. One of their favourite scenes was when he spoiled a gorgeous song whilst searching for a toilet. Perhaps my uncles appreciated that this party was Bakshi’s first such gathering, and they could relate to an Indian being marginalised by people because of his accent, his smiling clumsiness and his attempts to fit into any conversation he can find, all the while strictly avoiding a glass of wine. And they would have enjoyed the fact that, by the end of the party, it was Bakshi who was the only person (apart from the French actress he befriended at the party) that remained in one piece.



Perhaps they also realised that, in reality, The Party is less a spoof of Indians than of the American high society of the time. On the one hand, there is the hostess of the party who is happy to have an exotic Indian man along to the same dinner where she will also have Russian musicians and dancers performing - remember that this was during the heart of the Cold War! On the other hand, the majority of the guests as well as the host treat Bakshi with disdain. Even the daughter of the hosts, who appears with her friends later in the movie along with an elephant painted with hippy slogans that offend Bakshi sensibilities, soon bends over backwards to placate him buy having her friends scrub the poor beast.

A fair few of the scenes from The Party have been mimicked in other movies in both India and the United States. The Naked Gun 2½ featured a scene involving Frank Drebin (played by Leslie Nielsen) flipping a piece of food into Winnie Mandela’s headscarf. Meanwhile Arjun Singh (played by Amitabh Bachchan) manages to lose his shoe in some water in the Bollywood classic Namak Halal.

There are many classic gags and scenes I grew up with and whose broader significance (presuming they had any) I couldn’t appreciate until now. You can watch some of them below while I get ready to hit the sack. It’s 3:15am.

Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf




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VIDEO: How do Indians become citizens ...

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HUMOUR: Nazi-lover learns how to spell ...

A reader just sent me a post he noticed on the Sheik Yermami website.

For those of you who don't know, Sheik Yermami is a neo-Nazi blogger whose past posts have included this gushing tribute to a deceased far-Right and notoriously anti-Semitic Austrian politician.

Yermami now claims that someone using a computer (one which I also use from time to time) has left messages on his blog.

Among the messages is one that I acknowledge leaving, and in which I had to correct Sheik Yermami's spelling. Yermami thanked me for the spelling lesson, but then posted this point ...

Does that change the fact that Binyam Mohamed is not a “Briton” and that you and GANDHI have nothing in common?

Gandhi and I have nothing in common? Let's see ...

a. Gandhi and I are of North Indian extraction, he from Gujrat and my ancestors from Uttar Pradesh.

b. Gandhi spoke a language which the Poms once called "Hindustani". I speak the same language.

c. Gandhi spoke, read and wrote English. I speak, read and write English.

d. Gandhi was a lawyer. I'm a lawyer.

Clearly Gandhi and I have absolutely nothing in common. My apologies to Yermami for making such a dreadful error.

But what about the other messages Yermami refers to? Jeez, how should I know? It could be any number of relos or friends, including the friend who pointed out Yermami's post to me. Tim Blair's defence shouldn't just work for Tim Blair.

I guess being a Nazi never required much brain power ...



(Thanks to GA)

UPDATE I: In one recent post, Sheik Yer'mami features a cartoon of me as follows:



Notice the shape of the black hat, the side locks and the largish nose. Yes, this here sheik is a true Nazi, happy to describe me as "fact and truth-challenged" and illustrating his claim by making be resemble an observant Jewish male. In the mind of this "sheik", being dishonest and observing Judaism are one and the same. The ultimate in dishonesty, in the eyes of this neo-Nazi blogger, looks something like this ...



Words © 2009 Irfan Yusuf


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