Why I’m inherently anti-muslim

So yes, I consider myself a secularist and all that. I have a number of friends who are from “minority  communities”. I still, however, think that parties like the Congress do go out of their way in order to woo “minority communities”. And (though i’ve never voted so far) unless the BJP majorly goofs up on some other axis, I’m significantly more likely to vote for the BJP than vote for the Congress. There are times when I want to try my hand at politics, and those times I wish I had friends in the BJP through whom I could try get a foothold. At times, however, I don’t care and become willing to join just about any party which will welcome me.

So this is the reason I think I’ve been inherently anti-Muslim. Back in kindergarten, there were two bullies in my class. Two absolute bullies, boys who were bigger than most others, who wouldn’t hesitate to be violent. When I was in second standard, one of them had scratched my leg so hard that there was a septic infection which took a long time to heal. I would see conscious efforts by these guys to be mean to others.

Back in junior school, there were three Muslims in my class. There was one quiet girl who I must admit I didn’t talk much to, but then back then I didn’t talk much to girls at all in general. And then there were two Muslim boys. And they happened to be two bullies.

So here I am, six or seven years old, and seeing a one-to-one correspondence between Muslim boys and bullies. I’m too young to know of stuff like “selection bias”, “small sample bias” and the like. Every day, on TV, I’m hearing anti-Pakistan rhetoric. And this was the period between the Shah Bano case and the Babri Masjid demolition, so most family members were also fairly anti-Muslim. And when India won against Pakistan in Sharjah for the first time (Srinath’s debut; October 1991), it was a victory not against Pakistan but against “those bloody Muslims”. When a week later (in the final league match), we lost narrowly trying to chase down 250 odd in utter darkness, it was because “those bloody Muslims had cheated us”.

You can be a rational person, but it is hard to go against biases that were created fairly early on in life. However hard you try to make rational decisions, it’s hard to go against something that’s been built into your instincts. And as I explained earlier, there was a clear one-to-one correspondence that I noticed that made me form my biases. Yes, I try to be rational and “secular”, but sometimes it takes effort to go against your instincts. So yes, I suffer from “anti-Muslim bias”.

8 thoughts on “Why I’m inherently anti-muslim”

    1. your mother is not the only source for biases. i mean, there are lots ofthings around you which could’ve biased you in many ways

    1. so, basically the way this works for me is every time I form an instinctive opinion about these matters, and then, I need to explicitly question myself about whether I’m being rational (most often, not) and then use some of my willpower to overcome my biases!

      Yes, I do use willpower to overcome bias, but I’m not able to cure the “inherent bias”

  1. I don’t think this is a good explanation. After all you were bullied by your mother also, and you managed to get along with Brahmins quite well your whole life. Not to mention your great fandom of other smug and domineering women like Momjane.

    1. 1. my mother hardly bullied me when i was a kid. Bullying started only after I grew up
      2. there were other brahmin women, such as my mother’s mother with whom I would spend most of my day with, who were unconditionally nice and never bullied. Hence I never had the same kind of unconditional evidence like I did with muslim boys in my class

  2. you are not alone.. I vividly remember during that Sharjah cup I heard that certain muslims were praying for a pakistani win in the match against india. such instances early on in ones life tend to make hindus exposed to that environment form an anti-muslim bias. And these muslims werent the product of partition either(you cant expect to find them down south at chennai)

  3. Dude,

    I am sure you will cut it out in politics. You are stupid enough.

    Like you do, making a simple thing sound insanely complicated:

    The function that maps Pakistan to Islam is a not an invertible function.

    Moron!

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