S. Gurbachan Singh Talib Quotes

Jinnah and other Muslim leaders had stirred up the Muslims to violence to put pressure on all the parties to accede to Jinnah's Muslim League's demand of an independent Muslim nation—Pakistan. Messervy was very sympathetic to the Muslim leadership as he had been feuding with and frustrated by the predominantly Hindu ruling Congress Party. After partition he accepted the mercenary position of Commander in Chief of the Pakistani Army. Then he was shocked and horrified at the slaughter of the terrorist attacks by the Muslims—about 4,000 Sikh men, women and children had been beaten and cut to death. The Sikhs had been targeted largely because Sikh leaders had recently announced that if there were a Partition, Sikhs would refuse to live in nation under Muslim control.

Hazrat Omar ibn al-Khatab

There were several difficulties in this definition even for those British and Indian Congress leaders who were willing to accede to an independent Muslim state. Two of the most important where the definition of areas. They could be so defined as to include majority Hindu or Sikh areas surrounded by larger majority Muslim areas—the classic problem of boundary districting and redistricting. This was an insurmountable problem in the Punjab and elsewhere. The 2nd was the undemocratic nature of the demand. The Muslim League, unlike the Congress Party, had never had a very large participation and its leaders were never elected over a series of free and fair elections. Many Muslims were opposed to the Muslim League and there were areas of India, like Kashmir, where a large proportion of the 70% Muslim population were opposed to partition and if there were to be one would prefer to remain with India. With virtually 100% of the Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists and Christians of Kashmir refusing to be part of a Muslim state, the majority in Kashmir would have then voted to remain a part of India but the Muslim League did not take account of democratic processes at the time. They changed their view later after they had infiltrated tens of thousands of semi nomadic Muslim Tribesmen across the border to gain the majority. Then the Indians would not accede to a plebiscite until the newcomers were removed and India has been in a constant war with Pakistan who has been trying to gain control of Indian Kashmir by war and terrorism.

The Muslim League was demanding that the Punjab become a part of Pakistan when independence was granted later. However, the Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Christians were all adamant that they would not live in a Muslim nation which would soon become a de facto theocracy if the British could not control them. The Punjab was divided between India and Pakistan, and hundreds of thousands died in Sikh-Muslim attacks and then Hindu-Muslim conflict in the Punjab.

The fear of the Sikhs was that if the Punjab became a part of the new Muslim State of Pakistan, they would not be allowed to practice their religion and that the new Islamic state would discriminate against non-Muslims. They were successful in keeping the Punjab as a part of India, and turned out to have been right about the intolerance of the new Muslim state.

Singh turned him down. Note that even before Pakistan was a country, Jinnah and other Muslim leaders had hopes of grabbing much of India as the British partitioned it, and have been trying to do so ever since the inception of Pakistan

Two months earlier, Jinnah and the Muslim League had, behind the scenes, orchestrated and abetted vicious, murderous, terrorist attacks on Sikhs by Muslim tribesman brought into the Punjab for the purpose." Master Tara Singh

Even into the 21st century, the problem was not solved and Muslims from Pakistan continue their futile but tragic terrorist tactics to try and acquire more territory from India." 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma

He was echoing proposals that he made in the Delhi Emergency Committee that had been called to cope with the butchery and murder when the Hindus and Sikhs were trying to leave the areas that were to be part of Pakistan under the Partition and the retaliations against the Delhi Muslims who were trying to flee to the new Pakistan. Unfortunately, the Muslim leadership did not want such a truce as while the land had been partitioned, Indian Money, military equipment, and other resources were yet to be divided and the Muslim leaders who had been so successful playing the violence card to gain and independent Pakistan, did not want to give up that option in the remainder of the division of India. Also, it was not at all clear that the Muslim political leaders could even then control the mobs who they had already whipped up to violence.

Jinnah himself preached non-violence. At the time there was vicious sectarian violence throughout India but especially in The Frontier Province. However, the Muslims of the day did not heed him or Nehru or Gandhi for that matter and the violence continued. Jinnah however was a particularly shrewd politician who successfully used the threat of Muslim violence to obtain a separate Islamic state with Indian independence. He pointed to the threatening resolution issued earlier {627153}. The man who publicly preached peace, privately threatened violence.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the other Muslim League leaders wanted to stir up India's Muslims in order to prevent Indian Independence from Britain unless India were partitioned and the Muslims could have their own nation. At that point the British and the Congress Party of India—the majority political party were both starting to plan for independence. Jinnah and most of the Muslim nationalists did not want to have Muslims in a Majority Hindu nation. To stop it, they first used fear to try and separate the many Indian Muslims who were politically active from their roles in and loyalty to the Congress Party which although Hindu dominated had Muslim members and officials. All the Muslims who were literate were aware of the terrible revelations of the Nazi Concentration Camps and the attempted extermination of all the Jews of Europe. The "party line" of the Muslim League was that once the British turned the government of India over to the Congress Party, they would turn on the Muslims and exterminate them so that India would be all Hindu. There were no such plans or even suggestions be anyone in the Congress party, the paranoia and the conspiracy theory resonated with many Indian Muslims just as conspiracy theories are believed by some people in every society. In this case, the paranoia that was unleashed by the Muslim League would have tragic consequences as with Independence getting closer many Muslims struck out and preemptively attacked and butchered Hindus and Sikhs who retaliated in kind and the butchery went on all through the Independence process and the partition of India to create a Muslim state—Pakistan. Almost 2 million people would be murdered in the sectarian violence that was unleashed.

The attitude of the non-Muslims at that time was based on the Muslim attacks in the Punjab on Sikhs where entire Sikh villages and neighborhoods in towns and cities were murdered—every man woman and child. In many cases women were first raped. The Muslims had been whipped up by the leaders of the Muslim League to put terrorist pressure on the Sikh, Hindu and British to meet the League's political and territorial demands for an Independent Pakistan. Soon there was retaliation in kind and there were many Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims engaged in internecine slaughter and behaving "little better than animals".

The Sikh's had a long history of living under Muslim domination and wanted no part of any more. Patiala was within the Punjab and Jinnah was insisting that the Punjab should be a Province of the new Pakistan because the Punjab was majority Muslim. However, there were many Sikhs, as well as some Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians and none of these wanted to be a part of Pakistan. Further, a significant portion of the Muslim Punjab population also would prefer to join India for many reasons, not the least of which was that they had become used to a democracy where they had complete freedom of religion and civil right as well, and with the exception of Turkey none of the Muslim countries were democratic and based on the Muslim League which did not democratically elect its leaders, Pakistan would not likely be a democracy that guaranteed civil rights (and they were right). So the majority of the people of the Punjab were opposed to becoming a part of Pakistan. The Sikhs were passionate opponents of being a part of Pakistan.

The throwing of flaming torches to burn out members of the other religion got out of control and the fires spread to the homes of all residents. The fires were so prevalent that the riot was then and has since been referred to as the "Shahalmi Gate Blaze". At the time Jinnah was horrified at the violence, but by the following year he and other Muslim League leaders were aiding and abetting Muslim terrorist attacks to put pressure on the government to create a separate Muslim state upon Indian independence—Pakistan. Most historians agree that the Muslim terrorism in the short run had worked, as it would have been unlikely that India would have been partitioned in the absence of violence. However, it set in motion a cultural pattern of religious hate, bigotry, intolerance, violence and murder which would plague Pakistan thereafter. The politicians throughout the country's history have tried to use the Muslim religious, fundamentalist, extremists for their purposes only to find that the fanatics were out of control and the entire Pakistani population has lived in fear, lest an extremist decide that what they did or say was inimical to Islam and assassinate him or her. They have assassinated even the highest levels of politicians—President, Governors of Provinces, National Legislatures as well as Journalists, writers and academics. But the average Pakistani citizen has always been at risk of brutal murder with hundreds killed every year in an atmosphere of total impunity for the murderers. They have even murdered married women who had been raped on the grounds that they were adulterers and were therefore stoned.

See {586041} for a Koranic quotation that urges world domination by Islam. In this quotation, The Prophet was talking to his followers at a time when Islam was not even a dominant religion in Arabia. And war was the way in which tribes, groups, and religions and sects, established themselves and grew. Although there are other Koranic passages which tell the faithful that people can only legitimately come to Islam through individual commitment and willingly, this passage not only seems to contradict that but also reflects a desire to punish and disgrace “non-believing” groups. This vengeance motif is also contradictory to much else of the Koran which generally preaches love, forgiveness, and understanding. However, there are contradictions and intellectual inconsistencies within the Koran just as there are within the Old and New Testaments.

See {586039} for a quotation that goes further and seeks to punish and humiliate the non believers. This sura is often used by those wishing to illustrate the intolerance of Islam—especially of other religions. They fail to put this into the context of the Old Testament which proscribed death for heretics or the history of Christianity regarding the murder of nonbelievers. The difference is however, that a very small proportion of Jews or Christians today believe in following Biblical instructions in this respect while the proportion of Muslims who believe in the literal interpretation of scripture on these points is much larger. However there are Islamic modernists and moderates throughout the world who reject this notion of warring on all other religions and there is a struggle going on within Islam itself.

Since Muslims try and convert others, one who changes religion and becomes a Muslim is exempt. The death penalty is reserved for Muslims who leave the religion.

This article was originally directed against non-Muslim religions who actively sought to convert Muslims. However, Islamic organizations, have also historically made their greatest inroads with the poor and ignorant members of a society. The madrassas of Pakistan, the activities of Hezbollah, in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza all have common characteristics with the Salvation Army where services are provided for the poor and often uneducated with the required participation in religious services, education and/or prayer. There are many Christian, Muslim, and other religious leaders who do not approve of such attempts at conversion, but there are forces within these same religions who not only take advantage of poverty and ignorance to convert but are almost exclusively devoted to that tactic. The Russian Orthodox Church had the same protest against Protestant sects targeting the poor after the fall of the Soviet Union. In general, most religions see nothing wrong with converting people in times of crisis, so long as they are doing the converting. But if another religion is converting their adherents, then it is a violation of human rights.

Under his leadership most of the Muslims did not accept such a constitution. Partition ensued and with it came the deaths of tens of millions of Indians but Pakistan and Bangladesh were formed. Ironically, there are now about 200 million Muslims in India living under a “Hindu Majority Government” –more than in any country except Indonesia. Few Indian Muslims leave India for Pakistan today.