OPINION | There Is A Constituency in India for A Pro-Hamas Stance. This Should Worry Us

Who in a secular democracy would be prepared to risk a backlash by describing a militia of xenophobes as freedom fighters? Very few, one imagines, aside from the odd xenophobic degenerate attention seeker.

But this is apparently not the case in India. Here, the dissolute Judeophobic Hamas gets a certificate from mainstream players in the polity.

For Uttar Pradesh-based Arshad Madani, the president of the Jamiat-Ulama-e-Hind, Hamas is a group of “freedom fighters”. And Israel, well, that is to be subjugated under the flag of Islam. Clearly, no question of a two-state solution, no question of two sets of people living side-by-side where Mr Madani is concerned.

In south India, Kerala to be precise, the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind gave a platform to former Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal in a rally called to dismantle Hindutva and Zionism. Meshaal was once infamously called the “Man Who Haunts Israel” by TIME magazine. In Kerala, speaking on a video link, he blathered on and on about the divinely ordained need to reportedly decapitate every “Zionist” who dared to lift his or her head to eye Muslim land.

These two Indian organisations in question have a huge following among Indian Muslims.

That the leaders of these groups believe that their constituencies would be receptive to the mendacious propaganda about the so-called Hamas brand of courage is by itself a myth-shattering development.

For very long, we’ve been told that Indian Muslims would never support religious violence. That we, in India, should be proud that Indian Muslims have thus far not joined any global Jihadist organisation like al-Qaeda. That they don’t subscribe to the idea of a larger holy war that must be waged for the creation of a global caliphate.

But by lapping up without protest the praise of Hamas by their leaders or by cheering the hate-mongering of the likes of Meshaal, Indian Muslims have signalled that they are susceptible to the call of a pan-Islamic state.

For the uninitiated, it is conceived as a veritable green crescent anchored in the Middle East and arching across South Asia sweeping all the way down to Indonesia.

As some know, this project is a widely declared ambition of Islamist groups that subscribe to a hardline ideology. An ideology that was in fact conceived in India’s premier Islamic seminary Darul Uloom Deoband in Uttar Pradesh.

Incidentally, Arshad Madani is the principal of this crucible of exclusivist ideas that have powered the thinking of such lamentable types as the SIMI, and the banned Popular Front of India. A little further from home, the Deoband school of thought has also powered the mean-spiritedness of the Taliban and the Jaish-e-Mohammed.

Many venerable jihadis in al-Qaeda and ISIS have also been known to look to the Deoband school for that little extra ideological zing when justifying their deprivations.

That there are takers among ordinary Muslims for the bigoted revanchism of global jihad is a cause for concern.

In a secular state, the citizen’s primary reference is the Constitution. There is no other written word holier than the law revealed in the Constitution. There is no greater cause than to serve the interest of the country.

An undeclared fifth column that subscribes to a pan-national identity ought to be taken seriously by all those who swear by a plural and inclusive “akhand” Bharat.