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 … - Arun Shourie

The earth is stationary. The sun revolves around it. The stars are stationary, hung as lamps by Allah to guide travellers, and to stone the Devil. To believe anything contrary to all this is to betray The Faith. Men are the masters. Each may keep up to four wives at a time and as many concubines ‘as the right hand holds’. The wives are fields which the husband may or may not ‘irrigate’ as he will. The husband can bind them to obeying his merest whim on pain of being divorced. If he is still not satisfied, he can throw them out with one word. Upon being thrown out they are to be entitled to bare sustenance—but only for three months, and nothing at all beyond that. To see any inequity in this, to demand anything more for the women is to question the wisdom of Allah, it is to strike at Islam. To urinate while standing, to fail to do istinja in the prescribed way, to fail to believe that the saliva of a dog is napaak and his body paak—these are grave sins. To ask for the well-being of a kafir, be he ever so saintly, even upon his death, to fail to believe that a Muslim, be he ever so sinful, is better than a kafir, be the latter ever so virtuous, is kufr itself. Such is the mindset of the ulema. It pervades their rulings on all aspects of life.

The object of the framers of the Constitution was, as ours must be, quite the opposite. It was to wipe out the cancer of caste even from Hindu society. Only with the greatest reluctance did they agree to allow reservations for the Scheduled Castes and Tribe – for they felt that doing even this much would perpetuate caste distinctions. The reservations were, therefore, to be exceptions to the general rule.

To rely on these fellows to save us from the impending fascist avalanche is to rely on superannuated buffaloes to see us across a minefield.