Calendar celebrating Kashmiri Islamist terrorists distributed in premier Muslim University – no big deal. Calendar featuring PM Modi instead of Mahatma Gandhi issued by an obscure Government organization – WAR. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the moral compass of our mainstream media and Lutyens’ elites.

After the mountain out of a mole hill ‘controversy’ over PM Modi appearing in the annual KVIC calendar (probably an act of an over-eager bureaucrat), comes news of another calendar – one featuring Kashmiri Islamist terrorists such as Burhan Wani and Afzal Guru – which was distributed among students of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU).

As per regional news portal uttarpradesh.org, this calendar was recently distributed among students of AMU and features Kashmiri terrorists like Burhan Wani, Afzal Guru, Maqbool Bhatt and separatist leaders like Masarat Alam, besides others.

The portal claims that both State and Central authorities are aware of this dangerous development, but while central intelligence agencies have already shared an interim report with Home Ministry, UP State Government and police are downplaying the incident. UP anti-terrorist squad chief Asim Arun (IG IPS) was unreachable for comment.

Reality check on ‘progressive’ AMU

AMU is the premier Muslim minority institution in Bharat, along with Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi. It is touted as the fountainhead of progressive, modern, enlightened Muslim thinking in the country. Originally established by Syed Ahmad Khan as Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College in 1875, it later became Aligarh Muslim University in 1920. AMU’s motto is ‘allam al-insān-a mā lam yaʻlam’ – Taught man what he knew not (Qur’an 96:5).

While Syed Ahmad Khan is known as an Islamic reformist and promoter of Western-style scientific education, what is less well known is that it was he who coined the two-nation theory influencing Allama Iqbal & Jinnah. AMU was one of the main factors that led to the communal Partition of Bharat. All through his life, Syed Ahmed Khan extended unflinching support to the British invaders against those struggling for the reestablishment of indigenous rule. He tried to inculcate in the minds of the Muslims the feeling that they constituted a distinct superior nation, and stridently opposed the ‘Hindu’ Congress. He once claimed that “Urdu was the language of gentry and Hindi that of the vulgar.” His educational and political work was centred around and exclusively for Muslim interests.

While fearful of the loss of Muslim political power owing to the community’s backwardness, Syed Ahmed was also averse to the prospect of democratic self-government, which would give control of government to the Hindu-majority population.

The Muslim supremacist streak still persists in AMU, which despite being funded entirely by taxpayers’ money still desires a ‘minority’ tag. Even the original stress on developing scientific temper has given way to rising influence of Islamism, as this article by noted analyst Tufail Ahmed shows –

“Its (AMU’s) negligible role in scientific innovation, original research in social sciences, or excellence in other fields reflects the following: a comprehensive failure to recruit and promote meritorious teachers, lack of progressive culture and free thinking among students, inability to promote a culture of debate and questioning on campus, and the like. In that sense, AMU mirrors the wider Muslim society. 

In India and abroad, it is understood that universities should be administered by academics who better understand their needs. However, it seems that Muslim societies have a predilection for Islamism and authoritarianism, factors evident in the governance of leading minority institutions like the AMU and the Jamia Millia Islamia of Delhi. Regionalism, feudalism and Islamism are undermining north Indian Muslim educational institutions, combined with a failure in the voluntary education sector. P K Abdul Aziz, a southerner from Kerala [state of India] who did not speak Urdu and did not bend to the pulls of the feudal, Islamist and regional lobbies of north Indians on the AMU campus, was accused of being an enemy of Urdu and forced to quit as VC.

AMU vice chancellor retired Lt Gen Zameer Uddin Shah pledged to turn the university into an “intellectual powerhouse” but Shah has recently shunned the path of setting up expert committees to recruit academics. Instead, he has misused emergency powers to appoint professors, notably in the departments of West Asian studies, English and electronics engineering—one of them being a retired major general with no teaching experience in West Asian studies, another an Islamist ideologue with no research experience in English and a third from the Tablighi Jamaat with no degree in electronics. Shah, a former deputy chief of Indian Army, has relied on recruiting retired military officials to key offices, notably Brig Syed Ahmad Ali as pro-VC, Gr. Captain Shahrukh Shamshad as registrar and another as an intermediate college principal.“

In a recent article ‘Is Aligarh Muslim University, once again, leading a campaign for Partition of India?’, Tufail Ahmed shows how AMU is once again at the forefront of Islam-based advocacy by demanding reservation for Muslims in order to eradicate their “social and educational backwardness.” That such sectarian demands are emanating from the likes of AMU pro-vice chancellor Brigadier (retd) Syed Ahmad Ali, who served 35 years in the Indian Army, is doubly worrying.

Incidentally, AMU vice chancellor Lt Gen (retd) Zameer Uddin Shah is the brother of noted Bollywood actor Naseeruddin Shah who believes that India ‘bullies’ Pakistan and that ‘Indians are being brainwashed into believing Pakistan to be the enemy.’

The reason that institutions like AMU & ‘liberal’ Muslims like the Shah brothers escape critical questioning is because in the politically correct ‘secular’ world, raising such questions is tantamount to hate-mongering and stereotyping of Muslims. So Hindus are told to dig their heads in the sand, and let the AMU mindset breed in its silo.

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