God and Country?

Song and dance over 'national' anthem....

A few days ago, the chief Muslim Mullah who presides over the historical mosque named Jama Masjid in Delhi, proclaimed that 'true' Islamists should not sing a song in praise of the motherland called 'Vande Mataram', because it says that the motherland is to be worshipped, and according to him, Islam says that only Allah has to be worshipped....

This caused an uproar, especially as the Hindu right and their cohorts the RSS, the Bajrang Dal, and the vishwa Hindu Parishad immediately went on the offensive, lambasting Bukhari as well as the Indian muslims...

Interestingly, the Muslim composer AR Rehman who reworked this great national song written during the Indian national struggle against the British by Bankim Chandra chatterjee and made it an instant hit among the hip generation throughout India...

Most Indian Muslims will not care a fig about what Bukhari says ... but once again, this controversial Mohammedan leader has served to push the Muslim community into a ghetto... there is , even at this moment, an upheaval within the Muslim community within india, with a lot of money from saudi Arabia coming in to fund hardline and fundamentalist preachers who run 'madrasas' or islamic schools in many impoverished muslim settlements....

The Taj Mahal built by a Muslim king is the abiding symbol of love and of India ... one can only hope that the fundamentalist Hindu, Muslim, and Christians won't tear apart the fabric of this polycultural , polylingual and polytheistic country that is unique in the world... a country called Hundustan by the Mughals, Bharat by the Aryans, India by the Europeans .....

The mere singing of a song that equates the land of one's birth with God does not give one the stamp of a patriot ...nor does the refusal to sing it necessarily make one an enemy ...

Vande Mataram!