Untold Story of Muslims After Partition I Mohd Adeeb

North India's Muslims — we became defensive after '47. And I remember, when I used to go to school — I'm talking about 1950, early '52 — the children at my school would tell me, Pakistan has been made, why do you still live here? Oh, you're saying that now. Yes. I didn't even understand what Pakistan was. I would go and ask my parents why we were living here — hadn't we gotten a separate country of our own? These are memories from our childhood. So from the very first day, once you have been made defensive — and a community that becomes defensive, that becomes afraid — that is why the Islamia school that existed then is still the same college today. Modern education never entered it. As for the question of education, it is equal in the South. You can see that in Tamil Nadu, Muslims are 4% of the population and 10% in government jobs. That is the difference there. They are getting the same education, they have their own language. We faced all of these difficulties. If our leadership had truly been sincere, and if the secular parties had ever let Muslim leadership emerge — I knew Fakhruddin sahib, he was perhaps the last one Indira Gandhi gave full power to. Since then no such leader has come, and whoever has come has kept working for the party. Today's situation is that we don't have any existence anywhere.