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" "And look at the finesse of these historians. They maintain that such facts and narratives must be swept under the carpet in the interest of national integration: recalling them will offend Muslims, they say, doing so will sow rancour against Muslims in the minds of Hindus, they say. Simultaneously, they insist on concocting the myth of Hindus destroying Buddhist temples. Will that concoction not distance Buddhists from Hindus? Will that narrative, specially when it does not have the slightest basis in fact, not embitter Hindus?
Arun Shourie (born 2 November 1941) is a prominent journalist, author, and politician of India.
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The liberal who happens to be a Hindu is so apologetic, he has internalized sham secularism so much, he is in any case so innocent of the texts—of Islam, of Hinduism, of our laws and our Constitution—and he has internalized double standards to such an extent that he has made silence on all matters Islamic, indeed toeing the fundamentalists’ line proof of secularism. The ‘secularists’ of the English press are a ready example. They will refer to Ali Mian as ‘the moderate, universally respected Muslim leader’, without bothering to read anything he has written. They will refer to sundry muftis and maulwis as ‘Muslim divines’. They will shut their eyes tight to what organizations like the All India Muslim Personal Law Board or the All India Milli Council are doing; and will jump in to shout and scream should any agency of the state take a step to uncover their activities. Worst of all, they will, by a Pavlovian reflex, weigh in on the same side as the ulema on issues, and insist that anyone who opposes that side is ‘communal’, ‘fascist’, ‘revanchist’. The effect of such shouting is not limited to poisoning the air of discourse. Weak rulers are swayed by that air. And so public policy bends to the ulema. The latter are thus twice strengthened.
The Jharkhand government, in turn, has announced that members of thirty-two tribes that are the most backward – literacy level among nine of them is said to be just 10 per cent – shall be directly recruited into government service; those among them who pass the graduation examination shall not have to take the qualifying examination which all others who enter government service have to take.
The result has been as predictable as it is iniquitous and absurd: if Ram Sharan sets up an engineering college, the state as well as the university concerned can prescribe all sorts of things it must do; if Mohammed Aslam sets up an exact clone of that engineering college across the road, teaching exactly the same subjects, using exactly the same textbooks, neither the state nor the university can regulate its functioning!