Writer’s hypocrisy is breathtaking
FOR months and months, frequent letter-writer Ebrahim Essa has been bullying and abusing people for not seeing the world through his eyes. He has criticised other faiths, but leaves out the supremacist hate speech of his own.
He fulminates against European colonialism and imperialism, but leaves out the most brutal colonialism and imperialism of them all – the Islamic kind.
The same applies to slavery. The Islamic slave trade started before the European one and affected several countries, including my ancestral homeland.
He has openly endorsed the shameless glorification of colonisers, invaders, mass rapists, slave traders and plunderers such as the Mughals on TV programmes produced by his co-religionists, and he has compared the “Indian religions” (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism) to a “bioscope”, according to a Herald article a few years ago.
And yet he has the audacity to preach to and lecture us.
He can do this to other communities – they might or might not like it. But we the descendants of the indentured Indians refuse to tolerate his arrogant, merchant-class supremacist nonsense any more.
We were brought to this country in slave-like conditions, and have toiled and suffered since then. Many of us still live in this way.
But we never depended on his class to do anything for us. These high-and-mighty people lived lives of luxury away from us. They still do.
They have the time, money and luxury to do whatever they please. But that does not give them the right to behave like the heirs to their “glorious Mughals” and assume they have custodial rights over us and can lecture us on how to see the world and react to it.
In my culture, we have a saying: “Light the lamp in your own house before trying to light in it in your neighbour’s house.” Or, more simply, in Gandhi'’s words: “Clean your own backyard first.”
PADMA SANDESH | Verulam