Thread by @gauravsabnis

What the holy actual blasted fuck? We haven't screwed over Kashmir enough already that we let crony capitalists extort them like this?

Again, people, hath not an Indian Muslim (population equal to Brazil) eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?

https://twitter.com/OmarAbdullah/status/1496448450506162177

Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal'd by the same means, warm'd and cool'd by the same winter
and summer, as an Indian Hindu is?

If we Indian Hindus prick Indian Muslims, do they not bleed? If
we tickle them, do they not laugh? If we poison them, do they not die? And if we wrong them, will they not revenge?

If they are like us in the
rest, they will resemble us in that.

Indian Muslims are, if you think about it in global historical terms, THE model minority of all time. For 75 years, Indian Muslims on the aggregate have been fully all in with the secular Indian republic. I'm not going to let random Shahbano type exceptions obfuscate that.

Because the thing to remember is that Indian Muslims are not really a "minority" in the general sense of the word. Yes, mathematically, they are a minority. But India belongs as much to Indian Muslims as it does to Indian Hindus. They are not some "outsiders" like sangh gaslights

The sangh has run a century long gaslighting campaign to make the Hindu mainstream think of Muslims or Islam as something external and foreign. And it finally succeeded and now runs India and has deep billionaire pockets. So that gaslighting is at whole new level.

But it's up to those of us who know better to tell the next generations, this was not India or the subcontinent always. For most of the last thousand years, Hindus and Muslims generally coexisted in South Asia in peace without any real widespread Hindu-Muslim civil war.

A huge percentage of Shivaji's army was Muslim and a huge percentage of Aurangzeb's army was Hindu. The subcontinent was never ever ever in a "Hindu v Muslim" battle or civil war ever until the sangh came along.

The very fundamental idea of India, historically, has Muslims as equal stakeholders. Not a "minority". We shouldn't be making them beg for their rights.

This fight the sangh has been waging against Indian Muslims is the most pointlessly cruel thing ever.

It literally makes me cry, watching this centuries old tradition of Hindus and Muslims happily co-existing in that gorgeous weird subcontinent being destroyed just because some 1920s RSS bros had a Fascist boner.

And even leaving the obvious ethical and human rights issues aside, do you all know how many Indian Muslims there are?

There are a lot!

What do you think the end result will be of telling 25 crore fellow citizens that they are not Indian? Killing, arresting, annexing...

Killing, arresting, annexing tactics are still not going to change the fact that there are a lot of Indian Muslims.

Even from a purely tactical militaristic mindset, what's the endgame here?

Basically RSS is trying to provoke Indian Muslims into actual widespread terrorism.

For me, the idea of India or South Asia or whatever is tied to positivity and diversity. I come from probably the last generation of India that actually believed "Unity in Diversity".

All of us in South Asia, whatever religion or creed, are in it together. Fuck the extremists.