Damned Muslims

[Fake Messiah]

Point of this article is that Muslims and Hindus in India are duped into spending all their money and emotions on expensive temples while living in slums.

Hindus and Muslims are fighting about mosques and temples instead of basic civic rights

This is what makes it so puzzling that Hindus and Muslims should be fighting about mosques and temples when they should be fighting for basic civic rights. I have personally not been to Sambhal but I have been to many small towns in Uttar Pradesh over the years and not come across one that showed the smallest signs of municipal governance. In these towns if there is one, clean and relatively attractive structure it is always a mosque or a temple that shine like beacons in the wasteland from which they rise.

Instead of fighting for the right to better living standards, Hindus and Muslims spend their time killing each other while trying to establish that beneath some mosque there may once have been a Hindu temple. Why do we not just agree that when Muslim invaders rampaged through India, they flattened thousands of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain temples? Why not just accept this ugly truth? Why do we need to continue blaming every Indian Muslim today for what his co-religionists did hundreds of years ago? Muslims are not innocent victims either. They rally in support of a Waqf Board that has been notoriously corrupt and criminally territorial for far too long. But when you have a Hindutva government trying to restrict the Waqf’s powers there are inevitably suspicions that this is just one more attempt to humiliate Muslims in general.

As someone who has traveled in much poorer countries than India, I often say in this column, that there is almost no country in the world in which I have seen living conditions more abysmal than in India. They will improve only when ordinary citizens discover that they need basic, civic governance more than places of worship.

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinio...s-9699447/