We Can't Laugh and We Can't Cry

     In spite of his precise English, personal integrity, and literary sensibilities,  Shuja is tasting despair.  With a graduate degree in English literature, he, like many highly educated youth in India, cannot find employment.  For him the 10% unemployment rate among college graduates is compounded by his religion

     Shuja never felt discrimination as a young Muslim student.  He attended school with a largely Hindu student population and performed routine rituals like everyone else.  However, out of 10,000 families in his village near Mumbai, he is one of the only ones who has attained a university education.  His people are largely informal laborers.

  This is not the source of bitterness though.  The taste comes from the fear that right-wing Hindu movement is targeting Muslims while ignoring social injustices and even atrocities committed against them. Killings and rapes impacting 2000 Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, initial false reports of Muslim perpetrators causing a deadly blast in Hyderabad, death by burning of an eleven-year-old Muslim boy in the army compound and subsequent suicide of an Army guard--these events combined with the lack of public awareness or outcry erode hope.

Reminder of atrocities committed against Muslim innocents

     The Prevention of Terrorism Act can be used to search and detain individuals seemingly for no other reason than that they are Muslim.  Even on campus, which seems to be a safe haven from "outside" forces, a place where freedom of thought and exploration of viewpoints is encouraged, members of the Ambedekhar Student Association (a social rights group) and others may come under surveillance by authorities searching for terrorist activity.  The forced detention of a friend (actually Hindu) by local police because he appeared to be Muslim brings this reality home.  When Shuja and his friends went to the authorities to ask why the friend had been detained, they received no satisfactory answer.  

Learn about Gujarat 2002.

    The discrimination weighs most heavily when Shuja considers the future.  A doctoral student with an emphasis on the Muslim diaspora, he wonders if his education will ever lead to employment, and if it doesn't, what value does it have?  When Shuja applied for a teaching position, he was asked if he had completed his studies in translated Urdu rather than in  English.  The assumption was that he must have received an inferior education and with his Muslim name, would have been educated only in Urdu.  Although Urdu is historically associated with Islam, the question is preposterous--what English major studies Shakespeare in another language?

     One question for Shuja and socially aware men like him, is how to evince change.  Extremist acts of violence  are unpalatable for followers of Islam, but the weight of discrimination, lack of opportunity, and acts of hate are nearly intolerable.  "We can't laugh and we can't cry.  We can only keep going."

Campus Grafitti