Growth of radical Islam will worry India for long

The increasing reality of Islamophobia that is being endured by people, owing to extreme religious fundamentalism practiced by Islam, is pushing other religious groups of India, and other parts of the world in a quandary wherever they are in the minority. This frightening scenario is confronted in almost all countries of the world, validly posing questions of existential crisis for other religious minority groups with unjustifiable acts of violence against them.

The recurring incidents of suicide bombing in Afghanistan on Shia mosques, and other public places are indicative of this cruel reality that Islam is capable of unleashing against its own kind, albeit for some irrational and flimsy reasons, which gives rise to pertinent doubts in the minds of other religious groups, living in their midst, to be even considered as worthwhile fellow humans to survive amidst them, and left alone to live lives according to their own tradition and religious practice as part of humanitarian consideration - and not to be regard as fit cases to meet their death by branding as infidels or forcefully converted to Islam, by way of final design.

These forebodings gain ground, in the wake of many such past experiences the minorities have been enduring in Pakistan, and other prominently Muslim dominated countries. The sequence of events against the Hindu community in Bangladesh, during Navarathra festivities for some silly reason that is based more on the hearsay in which the community was at the receiving end of the worst human rights violations.

These incidents culminated in the destruction of innumerable Pooja pandals in Bangladesh, and attack on the ISKCON temple, in which two devotees were killed. This dastardly and condemnable doesn't show Islam in positive light except as a barbaric intolerant religion, despite values and virtues ingrained in it. Many female devotees and imamates of ISKCON were molested, and their modesty outraged. The burning down of several Hindu houses, along with the livestock, were sheer acts of vandalism and calculated brutality.

The Muslim community is putting other religious groups under existential threat, by its religious heads who are institutionalising their powers to call shots in framing blasphemy laws, as per their whims and fancies that are punishable by death for innocuous and well-meaning observations and constructive criticism against Islam - by way of course correction by level headed activists, and religious scholars, in an attempt to infuse some sanity into it.

The pertinent question that keeps coming to the minds of Indians, whether the Muslim community in the country too is capable of harbouring such inimical mindset and intention of religious persecution when they emerge as a dominating force in the locality or mohalla, which is already evident in some parts of Kerala, UP and Assam where the predominant Muslim population is attempting to undermine the rule of law, to be replaced and substituted by sharia laws; and the vigilante groups are enforcing them - about which the elected government and administration seems helpless in correcting the trend.

The siege and occupation of Afghanistan by the Taliban has enthused such radical groups to no end in J&K, to see the dawn of Caliphate in these parts; which is also the dream of the Islamists; and the day is not far, when radical Islam to be eating into multi-religious fabric of India, and the world, by sidelining, sane and non-violent religious groups that have been so far the balancing factors in the society, in imposing its writ, with no questions asked. There is a need for finding a sane answer to this nagging reality, about which the majority community in India, cannot be silent any longer.

— K V Raghuram, Wayanad