By Md Zeyaul Haque, IOL South Asia Bureau

NEW DELHI, July 16 (IslamOnline)- A section of India's Hindu and Muslim leadership met here on Monday, July 15, to restore cordiality to their relationship under severe strain with anti-Muslim pogroms in the western state of Gujarat and the murder of 27 Hindus in Jammu and Kashmir in north India.

The ice-breaking historic meeting, organized by the National Commission on Minorities (NCM), observed a two-minute silence for the victims of Gujarat and Jammu, and began proceedings on a conciliatory note. To avoid acrimony, it skirted the contentious issues of Gujarat, Babri Masjid (450-year-old mosque demolished by a frenzied mob of Hindus in 1992) and Jammu and Kashmir.

An assortment of Muslim religious leaders -- ulama, mosque prayer leaders (imams), a Shia 'alim and an 'alim heading the state-run Minority Financial and Development Corporation comprised the Muslim delegation.

The mainstream Muslim religious leadership stayed away from the meeting. None of the major Muslim religious organisations -- Jamiatul Ulema-e- Hind, Jamaat-e- Islami, Muslim Majlis-e Mushawarat, Milli Council and All India Muslim Personal Law Board -- was represented. Shia scholar Maulana Kalb-e Sadiq, the vice-president of Muslim Personal Law Board, clarified that he was not representing the board. However, he said the board chairman Maulana Muhammad Rabey Hasani Nadwi desired that he should participate in the meeting.

Interestingly, the Muslim contingent had figures known for their conciliatory, live-and-let-live stance, while the Hindu delegation had men from hard-line Hindu organizations like Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its allied organizations like Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), organizations implicated in the Gujarat pogrom as well in the demolition of the Babri Mosque.

As the Muslim leaders talked of peace and reconciliation, the RSS, VHP and others showed no regret for their role in Gujarat nor any signs of diluting the anti-Muslim program over Ayodhya Temple. Parveen Togadia of the VHP declared that no dialogue was possible with the “serpents in our sleeves,” by which he meant Muslims of India.

However, such proximity talks are always likely to degenerate into trading charges, but this one remained by and large on track, and even cordial.

For much of the cordiality ulama of vision and wide sympathies like Maulana Kalb-e-Abid and Maulana Wahiduddin Kahn could be credited. These men are of the firm opinion that peace is the ultimate value in Islam, and the religion demands an all-inclusive compassion that envelops not only Muslims but entire humanity. They go by the Islamic dictum that the entire Creation is God’ s family. This attitude made it easier for the two-hour meeting to move on relatively smoothly.

The meeting was only an ice-breaking exercise. Such meetings are also being scheduled for future, where the two sides (hopefully, a wider cross-section of Muslim religious opinion) would finally try to work on the tough issues of Babri Masjid, India’ s other mosques and madrasahs. That the future sessions would be stormy was clear from Parveen Togadia’ s declaration that unless the Babri Masjid site was handed over to VHP for temple construction and unless the other two historic mosques in Kashi and Mathura (in the northern state of Uttar Pardesh) were given to Hindus, unless cow slaughter was banned and Hindu refugees resettled in Kashmir, there was no point in such talks.

Jamaat-e-Islami Hind vice-president Maulana Shafi Moonis told IslamOnline Tuesday, July 16, that conciliatory meetings were welcome, but the Hindu organizations involved in the talks were neither representative of wider Hindu opinion nor interested in giving up their anti-Muslim agenda. Hindu-Muslim amity talks were essential, only the organizations selected for it were not up to the great task of national reconciliation, he added.

President of All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat, Syed Shahabuddin, said in a statement that the maulanas were “ handpicked for the meeting” by Maulana Jamil Iliyasi, president of the All India Organization of Imams, and Qazi Mian Mohammad Mazhari, chairman of the Minorities Financial and Development Corporation. “ Neither of them enjoys any weight within the Muslim community,” the statement said.

The Mushawarat president rejected the parleys saying Hindutva (Hindu revivalist) organizations like VHP and RSS did not represent all Hindus, and were incorrigibly hostile to Islam and Muslims. They had shown no contrition over their role in Gujarat. On the contrary, they had hailed the pogroms as assertion of the Hindu spirit.