What happened in Gujarat is condemnable but that doesn't put off the blame from Muslim community. Who put the train on fire? You must have heard the age old idiom of 'reaping your own harvest'. Still the time is not lost, as we Hindus are magnanimous at heart, you can live peacefully in India if you win and maintain our goodwill and give over the land surrounding Ayodhya by your own freewill as we will take it anyway and help us in the construction of the Ram temple and apologize for the misdeeds done by Mughals during their times and by your fellow men, now in Godhra. Hinduism, as enunciated in the Gita is NOT about non-violence or turning the other cheek or committing mass suicide to shame an implacable enemy.

   RSS admirers : Mr. T S  Bala - Dubai

I refer to the feedback "You reap what you sow". It seems the writer is an admirer of RSS. It's the RSS that recently stated that “Muslims are safe if they win Hindu goodwill”. What the RSS should have said was: “Indians are safe if they win RSS goodwill and willingly agree to subjugation.” Demanding Muslims to do that extra bit to prove their nationality is nothing new for the RSS. If one goes by the book — and by that one means miscellaneous literature that includes Golwalkar’s Bunch of Thoughts — the only Indian is a Hindu Indian. So, the ‘kindness’ shown to Muslim Indians is not as gratifying as it poses to be. In the same resolution, the Godhra massacre was condemned, followed up by the statement that the violent aftermath was “natural and spontaneous”. One hopes that just because there are no ‘natural and spontaneous’ reprisals after each and every VHP and Bajrang Dal act of madness — and one can count many — the RSS does not come to the conclusion that no Indian is appalled by their antics. If the RSS is to be believed. It added that the recent Supreme Court ruling had hurt the “sentiments of millions of Hindus”. What it failed to mention — or accept — was that the sentiments of millions more, as Hindu as anyone in the RSS and who were appalled by the Babri Masjid demolition, were respected with the court decision. What happened in Gujarat, post Godhra, was neither 'turning the other cheek' nor 'the triumph of good over evil'. Innocent children, women and men, who had nothing to do with Godhra, were humiliated, massacred and butchered, their properties and livelihood destroyed, and for about three to four days were completely disowned by the very State machinery which was supposed to protect them. So, what happened in Gujarat was EVIL subjugating and humiliating INNOCENTS. The Gita most certainly does not teach this.

And this is where the RSS gives its game away. No one remembers the RSS becoming the sole representative of Hindus — let alone Indians — in this country. For one, this is an organization that had rejected the Constitution and the national flag. So the notion that its word is gospel hangs solely from the tenuous hooks of RSS imagination. Regarding apology by all Muslims, are we Hindus ready to apologize to Muslims for the Gujarat carnage or to the Christian community for murders of Graham Staines and raping of the nuns in Orissa? or Is it not the same? They say there are 100,000 refugees in Gujarat now. What if a big chunk of them decide to loot and burn. Is the government supposed to sit back and watch?. Will u be able to justify the Mumbai bomb blasts as a rightful retaliation? They are all criminal acts against the society that needs to be punished.

Our past mistakes from Mr. B. Chowdhry, USA.

   I refer to the letter "You reap what we sow" from Mr. Anonymous here and more like him on various Indian Message Boards. Everybody knows what happened in Germany during holocaust. Everybody knows what happened in Spain during inquisition or recently in Bosnia and Kosova. According to me, the biggest mistake that Mughals committed was to let Hindus survive during their over 800 years of rule with tolerance and Justice. Only 10 years were enough as they usually are, to do ethnic cleansing, afterall, it required 7 days bereft of fear of law and over 1000 Muslims were cleansed in Gujarat. Tolerance in Islam is seldom a virtue for the long run. Afterall, we Muslims are even now accused of mass murdering Hindus in India despite clear signs of otherwise. Nobody seems affected by the new findings about the Godhra train blaze. The findings prove that the whole act was well-planned and targeted against innocent, well-to-do members of the minority community. It was not instigated, as was being said before these findings came out, by local Muslims. In fact, the VHP kar sevaks burnt the train on purpose to provide an excuse to carry out the massacre of innocent members of the minority community. After over six months of the Godhra carnage, we still don't know who was responsible for it. We don't know who died in the fire. We don't know how many, if any, kar sevaks were among the victims.
In April, a column in OUtlook India had raised certain questions. They remain unanswered. Why did the government, immediately after the Godhra tragedy, state that the ISI had planned it, and why months later did it say it had not? How could the riots be pre-planned, for which considerable evidence has been adduced, while the event that provoked them was not? Why can't the government furnish the names and identities of the victims?

After these questions were raised, the mystery deepened. The Ahmedabad-based Forensic Science Laboratory proved that the railway carriage was set afire from inside. The outside doors of the burnt bogie were locked. The arsonists therefore could only have entered the compartment through the corridor from the adjoining bogie. How did a Muslim mob pass through unprotesting kar sevaks and burn alive inmates of the adjoining bogie?

The Eastern Railway bifurcation dispute between Mamata Banerjee and Nitish Kumar uncovered more dirt. Mamata claimed that she had seen the forensic report. She accused Nitish of holding back the passenger list to curry favour with the BJP . In response, Nitish disclosed before Parliament that only recently did the investigators ask his ministry for the reserved passenger list. Till today the reserved passengers have not been questioned!

Fifty-eight passengers died at Godhra. Only four among them were reserved passengers. Nineteen remained unidentified. Thirty-five charred non-reserved passengers, therefore, were 'identified' by the government.

Who were they?

We still don't know this six months after the tragedy.

Is this investigation or farce? Never mind the government, what about the media? Editors have armies of reporters under them. Can't they track down reserved passengers and ask them how and why they were not in the carriage when it was burnt? Or is the truth too frightening to confront?

Circumstantial evidence suggests the possibility of foreign-funded saboteurs having infiltrated the Sangh parivar to act as enemies of the state. If investigations bear this out, these infiltrators must be hunted, exposed and punished. They could be the greatest threat to national security.
The response of the Indian prime minister and his Deputy has been dismissive since the findings were released, even though he has not hesitated to blame Muslims for the Gujarat riots or go so far as to call them "trouble makers". I think Prime Minister Vajpayee at least owes an apology to the Muslims for his accusations and remarks. It was because of the restraint shown by Muslims that the riots did not spread to other parts of the country.

India used to be a secular country once upon a time, but now, thanks to political parties such as the BJP and Shiv Sena, prospects for the country's biggest minority community can hardly be described as bright

Just and fair - by Guided Ones

Mr. Choudhury, in response to the present carnage undertaken by RSS, we have found many saner elements of society who have been really enraged and concerned over this fanatical tide of injustice and murder by the state machinery. Those enraged belongs to all denominations and all religions. To condemn all Hindus will amount to doing the the same mistake of which we Muslims are against. Most of the mails that I have received are from Hindus who are aghast at this conduct by the members of their religion who made a mockery of the law. In the words of Mr. Pratap who also writes for Outlook magazine, " If Hinduism has produced the eviscerated ideologues of Hinduism such as Veer Savarkar and M. S. Golwalkar who would confine its best aspirations to a pinched up sense of territorial identity. But it also produced Tagore and Vivekananda, Aurobindo and Gandhi. No matter how much condescension of posterity we may impose on the latter group, it would be difficult to argue that their identities were constituted negatively: as if the only way of being a Hindu was beating up someone else, or protecting yourself. The depth of the crisis within Hinduism is signified by the fact that even many well meaning Hindus, who would have no truck with the VHP, have internalized a narrative of victim hood. On this narrative, Hindus have been for centuries at the receiving end of onslaughts. We will have to conduct a dialogue with Hindus on this front with facts on our side. It is never fair to indict a whole people, but there is something seriously amiss with a Hinduism that seeks to protect and disseminate itself, not by internal reform, or an inner strength of conviction, but by committing the very wrongs that it claims were done to it in the past." He is very right in his analysis. 

Also, On the issue of tolerance by Mughal Rulers of India, though they cannot be called as beacons of Islam or ones that represented Islamic teaching in it's very essence but they were indeed Muslims and if they tolerated or ruled with better credentials towards their subjects of other faiths, then there is no doubt about that, in the eyes of history, religious toleration is the highest evidence of culture in a people. Sir Marmaduke Pickthall noted in one of his lectures way back in the 60s, that when we look upon the ruin of the Muslim realm from Spain to India, we find it compassed through the agency of those very peoples whom the Muslims had tolerated and protected through the centuries when Western Europe thought it a religious duty to exterminate or forcibly convert all peoples of another faith than their own, be they Jews or Muslims - today RSS seems to adopt the same philosophy, but let no Muslim, seeing this, imagine that toleration is a weakness in Islam. It is the greatest strength of Islam because it is the attitude of truth. 

If one reads history without blinders of prejudice, we will see that Islam and Muslims have the best record out of all three monotheistic religions when it comes to the treatment of non Muslims. There are a myriad of example in Islamic history where non Muslims lived peacefully among Muslims and in many cases they thrived in their religious endeavors, they succeeded financially and politically reaching to the high posts of government. Even now if you travel around the world you will see evidence of what I am saying. There are beautiful churches and synagogues all around the Muslim world. I am guessing the only information you might have about Islamic history are the unfortunate times when abuses took place. I would like to remind you that worst abuses occurred under Christendom and Judaism. As Jesus ones said let the one who has never sinned cast the first stone.

As in the case of Israel, Muslims oppose only one thing, INJUSTICE. It is unjust to force the native people out and oppress the ones who remained. It would not have been tolerated if Muslims did this, but it is defended when Jews do it.

Jews lived among Palestinians peacefully, they were allowed to buy land and build synagogues before 1948. They did not want coexistence, they wanted a Jewish State, so they had to make room for the world Jewry and expel the Palestinians. This is wrong by anyone's standards. I have a question for you. Do you think Israel would have had the support of the US and Europe if the majority of Palestinians where Christians? Surely not. So the misfortune of the Palestinians is that they were mostly Muslims and we as Muslims know that.

Allah (SWT) is not the God of the Jews or the Christians or the Muslims only, any more than the sun shines or the rain falls for Jews or Christians or Muslims only.