India, home to over 150 million Muslims, was conspicuously absent from Obama’s Cairo speech. [Transcript]
However, there appears to be a India reference in there, albeit in wider geographical terms.
Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That’s not how moral authority is claimed; that’s how it is surrendered.
The peaceful struggle in South Asia, obviously is India v. Britain, which ended in the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Keeping this in mind, it is somewhat understandable that Obama used South Asia instead of India. The other common thread to the peaceful struggles in the U.S., South Africa and India, is that at some level they all were inspired by Gandhi.
However, this article in Telegraph India offers another explanation for Obama’s speech not containing any India references. [Telegraph]
But it is a testimony to the great detail that went into constructing his Cairo speech that while Obama mentioned South Africa, he avoided any reference to India by name. South Africa is not controversial in the Islamic world. On the contrary, it is popular. India is not.
By invoking India’s freedom struggle without naming India, Obama was sensitive to India’s exclusion from the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, which actually criticises New Delhi at most of its meetings.
India is indeed often at loggerheads with OIC, especially over Kashmir. So in essence, the writer of the Telegraph suggests that Obama deliberately excluded any mention of India, to appease OIC nations. Given the purpose of the Cairo speech, while this does seem like the politically expedient to do, if Obama did deliberately avoid mentioning India by name, a nation that is home to around 10% of his target audience, something does not seem quite right with that decision.
Interestingly enough, after the speech the White House website put up a video titled “Muslim Americans Serving in the U.S. Government” and 2 of the 3 people featured in this video have ties to India. [Video]
The first, Afeefa Syeed, an adviser in the Obama administration reportedly is originally from Kashmir.
“To me, there is no contradiction between being an American, between being a Muslim,” says Afeefa Syeed, a Kashmiri who works as senior adviser in the Obama administration’s global aid agency, the US Agency for International Development, in the video.
Syeed, who emigrated to the US with her parents as a child and covers her head with a scarf, adds that “to be an American Muslim simply to me means that you are practising your faith through the lens of an American identity”.
The second Indian connection in the video is Rashad Hussain, whose parents are from Bihar.
The second Indian American Muslim on the video, Rashad Hussain, a deputy associate counsel to the President in the White House, was born in Wyoming and grew up in Texas, where his mother, Ruqaya, a graduate of Aligarh Muslim University, is a medical doctor.
Hussain’s parents are from Bihar. His father, Mohammad Hussain, is a retired mining engineer. He argues in the video that “the Muslim community in America is very diverse, very vibrant and in many ways it looks like a cross-section of the greater American community”.
The White House website also contains translation of the video in Hindi and Punjabi. [WH]
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