In 2004, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, then Iran’s Supreme Leader, said that in his opinion, “Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables is the best novel that has been written in history… Les Misérables is a book of sociology, a book of history, a book of criticism, a divine book, a book of love and feeling”.
Two decades later, his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, seems to have completely immersed himself into George Orwell’s 1984, with a particular liking for the following sentences: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” As he targets India in his latest social media post wherein he clubs Indian Muslims with those in Gaza, it seems Iran’s Supreme Leader has added one line of his own: Lie is truth!
On the birth anniversary of Prophet Mohammed on Monday, Khamenei posted a comment on ‘X’, saying: “The enemies of Islam have always tried to make us indifferent with regard to our shared identity as an Islamic Ummah. We cannot consider ourselves to be Muslims if we are oblivious to the suffering that a Muslim is enduring in #Myanmar, #Gaza, #India, or any other place.”
The statement is a blatant, sinister lie. First, it projects India as an “enemy of Islam”. The truth is that while the minorities in most Islamic countries, including Iran, have almost disappeared, in India, the Muslim population has increased. India, the “enemy of Islam”, is today home to every 10th Muslim in the world, which is more than double the population of Iran.
Second, Khamenei accuses India of persecuting Muslims. The fact of the matter is that Muslims in this country have so far enjoyed the “first right to nation’s resources”. They have always been equal, if not first among equals. One just needs to look at the Right to Education Act, the Waqf Act, the state control over Hindu temples whereas minorities are free to run their institutions the way they like, et al, and these anti-Muslim insinuations fall apart. Even under the current so-called ‘Hindutva’ government, if numbers are to be believed, the minorities remain the biggest beneficiaries of the government-run socio-economic schemes in the country.
Given Iran’s own pathetic record on democracy, religious freedom (in an Islamic country, a non-Muslim is a victim of state-sponsored, society-sanctioned discrimination), freedom of speech, and human and gender rights (if a UN report is to be believed, Tehran brutally executed more than 400 people in the last one year, with over a dozen being women), Khamenei’s charges are laughable — and had it not come from a country’s “Supreme Leader”, it would have been brushed aside as being too frivolous to even get a rebuttal. But India’s Ministry for External Affairs (MEA) did come up with a response — strong and scathing. “We strongly deplore the comments made regarding minorities in India by the Supreme Leader of Iran,” the MEA said in a statement, adding: “These are misinformed and unacceptable. Countries commenting on minorities are advised to look at their own record before making any observations about others.”
Interestingly, while Khamenei’s heart bled for Muslims in “Myanmar, Gaza and India”, he failed — or maybe he dared not — to mention the tabooed word in the Muslim word: Xinjiang. The Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority numbering around 10 million in Xinjiang, are facing an existential crisis, with men being sent to jails in the name of “re-educating” them, while their women are being harassed, molested and raped by Chinese soldiers meant to guard them in their absence.
As per an estimate, more than a million Uyghurs are under detention in re-education camps – referred to as “vocational training centres” by Chinese authorities. Such is the level of Chinese interference with their religion that a Uyghur found with the Quran is termed an “extremist”, and about two-thirds of mosques in Xinjiang have been damaged or destroyed since 2017, according to an Australian think-tank report. And what has been left standing, they no longer look like mosques: As per a November 27, 2023, Financial Times report, the minarets of most of the still-standing mosques in not just Xinjiang but the whole of China have been “removed, their domes replaced with pagoda-style cones and their Arab-style arches squared off”.
Still, China is left alone by the global guardians of Islam. The sufferings of the Uyghurs never make them feel guilty about letting down “their people”. But in India, where the other day Muslims celebrated the birthday of the holy Prophet with enthusiasm and gusto — in Varanasi, near the Kashi Vishwanath temple, for instance, where this author was present during the occasion, dozens of loudspeaker-stalled tempos and lorries, each with at least 30-50 Muslim men sitting on the top boisterously celebrating the occasion, constantly plying through the streets through the day with both religious as well as national flags flying atop these vehicles — reminds them of their failure to protect the ummah.
Why this double standard? Is this the case of misinformation?
The truth may be far more complicated. For one, Iran questions India’s credentials on the protection of its minorities because it knows it can get away with it. With China, there’s always a danger of reprisal. In diplomatic and geostrategic circles too, you don’t really offend the bully, more so if he is unpredictable. With India, you largely know what the reaction would be, what would be the follow-up action, and how the situation would be finally “retrieved” diplomatically.
It allows them to fulfil the Islamic “cause” without inviting any reprisal. One former diplomat had an interesting story to share with this writer. He recalled asking his Arab counterpart about the West Asian tendency to invariably vote against India at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) meet each time there was a debate on Kashmir — despite having “friendly ties with New Delhi”. To this, the Arab diplomat said that the “strong” stand on Kashmir would not just let them satiate the popular feeling within the country, but also help them take up the leadership mettle among the Islamic nations.
For a country like Iran, poking at India has been a zero-risk diplomatic gambit, so far. And it has helped strengthen its credentials among Islamic states, with rival countries like Saudi Arabia and Turkey too vying for leadership roles.
To add to it is the fact that Islamists and their patrons have always been alive — both religiously as well as historically — to their long-term objective, which they see as divinely ordained. Lawyer-author J Sai Deepak writes in India, Bharat and Pakistan how Syed Ahmad Barelvi (1786-1831), “credited with laying the foundations for a pan-India Wahhabi network in a systematic manner”, in 1826, visited Afghanistan and camped at the mausoleum of Mahmud of Ghazni, the plunderer and destroyer of Somnath. If Barelvi, “who lived in the 18th-19th centuries, felt a kinship with Mahmud of Ghazni who lived eight centuries before him”, today’s Islamists and their supporters find a similar kinship with Barelvi. For those who are historically alive in Arab and West Asia, India has always aroused popular imagination, enmeshed with envy and anger, for being an unfinished task for Islam.
Interestingly, in February 2019, when India conducted surgical airstrikes in Balakot — in response to the Pulwama suicide bombing that had led to the killing of 40 CRPF jawans— it in a way sent a strong message to Islamists and those historically alive to Islam’s unfinished agenda. Balakot, after all, had been — and continues to be — the epicentre of jihadi terror in Pakistan, if not the entire South Asian region, precisely because Barelvi fell in battle against the Sikhs in Balakot on May 6, 1831. India’s Balakot strikes were, thus, not just aimed at destroying the existing terror infrastructure there, but also sending a larger message: That India understands the true nature of jihadi terrorism emanating from Pakistan.
Khamenei’s irresponsible statement should be an occasion to send a message that India cannot be a soft target for Iranians — to both bolster their Islamist credentials and also gain the leadership position among West Asian nations. Tehran should be reminded matter-of-factly that Delhi stands with the Iranian regime even when the US-led world order seeks to isolate and overthrow it.
Last but not the least, a message for left-‘liberals’, who seem to get overboard with the Iranian ‘friendship’. It’s time we realised that the notion of Islamic exceptionalism and the idea of India being an unfinished agenda for Islam would stop regimes in West Asia to come wholeheartedly in Delhi’s support. There will always be ifs and buts… There will always be pressure to do more for Muslims in general (as if Muslims are second-class citizens) and Kashmir in particular, even when the reality may be just the opposite.
We have to realise that when the next war comes knocking on India’s doors, it will again be Israel that will be providing all possible help, including arms and armament, and our West Asian ‘friends’ would find one excuse or another to ask India to make its own arrangements. Maybe that’s the limit of India’s diplomacy in West Asia.
Source » firstpost