Politics
Muslims pray in a Paris street.
Europe is gradually discovering what India discovered before its independence: that significant numbers of Muslims and Islamists tend to mark themselves out as a nation within a nation.
Last month, Muslim gangs in Sweden rioted after an anti-immigrant politician Rasmus Paludan announced plans to burn the Quran. The Swedish police said “26 police officers and 14 members of the public had been injured in the violence and that more than 20 vehicles had been damaged or destroyed”.
One can understand Muslims protesting against any intended insult to their holy book, but as Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson observed (see The Guardian report here), “What we saw were no political protests…. Police were attacked with stones and molotov cocktails. It was not a political act, it was a criminal act — an attack on the democracy that many have actually fled to.”
She went further and emphasised that Muslims in Sweden were living in a “parallel society… living in different realities”, adding: “Segregation has been allowed to go so far that we have parallel societies in Sweden… We live in the same country but in completely different realities. We will have to reassess our previous truths and make tough decisions.”
In November 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron made the same point, and more emphatically: “Islamist separatism”, he said, was a danger to France as Muslims held their own religious laws to be above that of the nations they reside in, which “often results in the creation of a counter-society….Islam is a religion that is in crisis all over the world today, we are not just seeing this in our country.” (Read the BBC report here on what Macron said)
Muslim ghettoes that are, at least in private, admitted to be no-go zones, exist in Belgium, France, Sweden and Denmark too. Add Germany to that list.
Clearly, there is a problem with Muslim self-segregation in many parts of the world and it is not allegedly “Islamophobic India” that is some kind of exception. If modern European countries with competent police forces, and even the exceptional Nordics, now face a problem with Muslim immigrants who they welcomed with open arms, surely one cannot lay the blame largely on the societies that host these Islamic minorities.
We in India like to blame Hindus, especially Veer Savarkar or the RSS, for the two-nation theory, but we need to re-examine this bogus secular consensus. The problem lies more with Islam and some Muslims who simply do not want to integrate.
If the top democracies in Scandinavia, who top all freedom indices, now believe that Muslims live in “parallel societies”, clearly pluralist India and its “communal policies” aren’t the source of this segregation. This mindset of segregation led us to partition on religious lines, but that has not seen an end to the problem. If Ram Navami processions can be stoned for allegedly moving in “Muslim areas”, clearly invisible no-go zones are being created even in secular India.
Time we said it like it is: the two-nation theory is of Islamic origin.