Humra Quraishi | Kashmir Times online
There’s an ongoing sense of alienation coupled with helplessness amongst the Muslims and Christians. And why not? Look at the way there’s been an ongoing systematic attack on the Christian property and churches in at least three BJP run states of this country. An unabated state of terror seems unleashed on the Christians. And what is the establishment at the Centre doing to cry halt?
Can you imagine such blatant forms of destruction going on, and yet we sit like mute spectators. Helplessly watching this horror show, where the police and politicians are holding sway.
And don’t ask me how upset are the Muslims residing in Delhi’s Jamia Nagar and surrounding localities. And this feeling of utter helplessness cum anger is spreading out, at the way and manner in which the police conducted that so called encounter at Jamia Nagar’s Batla House. No, none of the residents believe the police theories. As a young person commented “Jamia Nagar seems another Srinagar in the making.. there’s police all around, encircling the place, barging into homes, harassing us…we want justice because we don’t believe these stories getting churned by the police.”
And on September 22, at the Press conference held at the Press Club of India, the Coordination Committee of Indian Muslims, supported by Gopal Rai -convenor of Teesra Swandheemta Andolan and Bhai Tej Singh -president Ambedkar Samaj Party, minced no words in their utter disgust at the recent happenings. I quote from their press statement -” …We feel that the Muslim community in general and the Muslim youth in particular are being targeted in the name of fighting terrorism. While security agencies should go about their work to secure the country from terror and make inquiries and arrest the accused and suspects, the same must not take place in an intimidating and insensitive manner. We are opposed to the insensitive style of the police functioning which creates terror and panic in the Muslim localities. We condemn the security and intelligence agencies’ rush to the media after any such incident with theories and conclusions before any real and proper investigation.. More specifically, we reject the Batla House style of encounter killings. We fail to understand why the alleged terrorists were not caught alive. People in the area believe that it was a fake encounter, that it was a one -sided and pre-planned affair. With this encounter the police has discovered a new ‘mastermind’ for all the explosions in the past, which means that India will no longer face terrorist blasts. We demand a high level judicial enquiry into the Batla House encounter so that all facts come out…”
WHERE’S INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM?
I think what we lack today is serious investigative journalism. The way we go on and on repeating the versions provided by the police. And I find it frightfully upsetting when the electronic media puts it all so very simply – a so and so in police custody has admitted he’d committed the crime, “usne apna jurm qubool kar liya. “ As though some ‘nikah’ ceremony was taking place! How very simplistic ! How very naive ! How very insensitive! As though the hapless detained creature has any other option in the midst of the third degree torture sessions he must be getting subjected to !
And how dare we pass judgements that he or she caught is actually a terrorist. Maybe the actual terrorist is sitting high up and here we go nabbing and killing some poor hapless souls ! How do we know that the so called ‘caught terrorist’ is actually the culprit! Maybe he is framed and with that sits ruined for years to come!
Tell me how many of these arrested students would have the means to fight a legal battle for justice, to prove their non – involvement, their innocence. In this context I feel that Professor Mushirul Hasan’s decision to fight the legal battle for the two arrested students of Jamia Millia Islamia is the right decision. After all, they are students of this university and with that they have every right to get justice in a democratic set – up.
DOES THIS GOVERNMENT REALIZE …
In fact, whilst I’m keying in these sentences, what’s hovering around is this thought – does the very establishment realize that the very alienation of the minority communities isn’t really healthy for the very fabric, for the very system Yet, this alienation is going on because of the sheer ruthlessness of the machinery and the way and manner in which the minorities are getting side tracked. Today, talk to any Muslim or Christian (bypassing those who are sitting in political camps) and they’d invariably relay a deep sense of anguish cum alienation There’s little trust in the police and the politician and with that insecurities hit as never before.
There seems only one way out. Apolitical from the majority community has to come forth and speak out at what’s been happening. The concerned citizens of this country from all cross sections will have to voice their disgust cum concern at what’s been happening! Hounding and pounding of innocents has to be halted before our secular fabric gets totally twisted, riddled with fears and suspicion of the so called ‘other’.
SOME OF THOSE QUESTIONS DOING THE ROUNDS –
Shabnam Hashmi, Satya Sivaraman, Manisha Sethi, Tanweer Fazal, Arshad Alam, Pallavi Deka have raised these queries about the so called encounter at Jamia’s Batla House, together with this backgrounder.
I quote them -” Some Questions about the Counter-Terror Operation at Jamia Nagar, New Delhi- A team comprising activists, academicians and journalists visited the site of the police operation against alleged terrorists staying in an apartment in Jamia Nagar in the afternoon of 20.09.2008 (Saturday). Two alleged terrorists Atif and Sajid, along with Mohan Chand Sharma, an inspector of the Delhi Police’s Special Cell died in the operation while a third alleged terrorist was arrested.
On the basis of our interactions with the local residents, eye witnesses and the reports which have appeared in the media, we would like to pose the following questions:
1) It has been widely reported (and not refuted by the Police) that in early August this year Atif, who is described by the Delhi Police as the mastermind behind the recent terrorist bombings in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi, underwent a police verification exercise along with his four roommates in order to rent the apartment they were staying in Jamia Nagar. All the five youth living in the apartment submitted to the Delhi police their personal details, including permanent address, driving license details, address of the house they previously stayed in, all of which were found to be accurate.
Is it conceivable that the alleged kingpin behind the terrorist Indian Mujahideen outfit would have wanted to undergo a police verification- for whatever purpose- just a week after the Ahmedabad blasts and a month before the bombings in Delhi?
2) The four-storeyed house L-18 in Jamia Nagar, where the alleged terrorists were staying, has only one access point, through the stair case, which is covered by an iron grill. It is impossible to leave the house except from the staircase. By all reports, the staircase was taken over by the Special Cell and/ or other agencies during the counter-terror operation. The house, indeed the entire block, was cordoned off at the time of the operation.
How then was it then possible, as claimed by the police, for two alleged terrorists to escape the premises during the police operation?
3) The media has quoted ‘police sources’ as having informed them that the Special Cell was fully aware about the presence of dreaded terrorists, involved in the bombings in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi, staying in the apartment that was raided.
Why was the late Inspector Mohan Chand Sharma, a veteran of dozens of encounter operations, the only officer in the operation not wearing a bullet proof vest? Was this due to over-confidence or is there something else to his mysterious death during the operation? Will the forensic report of the bullets that killed Inspector Sharma be made public?
4) There are reports that towards the end of the counter-terror operation, some policemen climbed on the roof of L-18 and fired several rounds in the air. Other policemen were seen breaking windows and even throwing flower pots to the ground from flats adjacent or opposite to L-18
Why was the police firing in the air and why did it indulge in destruction of property around L-18 after the encounter?
5) The police officials claim that an AK-47 and pistols were recovered from L-18.
What was the weapon that killed Inspector Sharma? Was the AK-47 used at all and by whom? Going by some reports that have appeared (see ‘Times of India’, 20.09.08), the AK-47s have been used by the police only. Is it not strange that alleged terrorists did not use a more deadly and sophisticated weapon like the AK-47, which they purportedly possessed, preferring to use pistols?
We feel that there are far too many loose ends in the current story of the police encounter at L-18 in Jamia Nagar. We demand that a fair, impartial and independent probe into the incident be initiated at the earliest to answer the above questions as also any other ones that arise from the contradictions of the case.
*(Humra Quraishi is a freelance columnist based in Delhi and is currently a visiting Professor in the Academy of Third World Studies in Jamia Milia University).
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Raina: India’s Failed Secularism
October 8, 2008A recipe for disintegration
By Badri Raina | ZNet, Oct 7, 2008
Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page
As I suggested in my previous column (“Sweet Time for the Left in India”, ZNet, Sept. 2, 2008) events on Wall Street have shown what a fortuitous circumstance it was that the Indian Prime Minister, in his own words, remained a “bonded slave” to the supporting Left parties until the other day.
Had he had unfettered freedom in matters economic, India would be sinking today faster than a tanker.
Likewise, how fortuitous for India’s beleaguered Christians that the good Prime Minister had to suffer “embarrassment” while traveling Christian lands recently. Think that in France, the spunky Sarkozy called the Kandhamal mayhem a “massacre” to his face.
Thus, superseding the travails of the Christians in Orissa, it was the rebuke to India’s “image” that registered powerfully. A circumstance that makes you think how much “nationalism” is often a matter of image and how little of any actual concern for the people who inhabit the nation.
That “embarrassment” has at least yielded some concrete threats to the BJP/BJD government in Orissa after the many politic secular noises about the arson, rape, and murder there. Will it lead to a constitutional dismissal of the government, though? Think again; elections are round the corner in many states. And, as always, the Constitution must give way to canny political considerations. Remember that Modi was allowed to carry on despite the total and proven complicity of the state in the butcheries in Gujarat in 2002
Speaking of which, how unfortunate for India’s Muslims that no country in the world that the Indian Prime Minister has visited or is likely to visit should want to embarrass him about the excesses committed against Indian Muslims. Something that suggests the colossal helplessness that has become their lot.
II
I have suggested elsewhere that the secular protestations and pretensions of the Republic of India have remained a paper-provision through the years of India’s existence as a sovereign nation-state primarily owing to the failure of the Congress party to honestly and fearlessly embrace and enforce the Republican principle of citizenship.
All its rhetoric notwithstanding, the Congress remains reluctant to transcend the denominational identity of Indians in political and governmental practice.
From day one, its electoral traditions have tended to be guided by considerations of the social identity of candidates—as much as of any other party—with scant effort made to transform the given and inherited biases of the polity.
Just as the Congress incorporated rather than confronted feudal social practices and formations through the “freedom movement,” it has sought to cater to rather than educate out of existence those formations in the electoral career of independent India.
Not surprisingly, this social and intellectual failure has coloured the ways in which India’s law-enforcement and investigative agencies, indeed often its juridical institutions, at lower levels especially, have operated in approaching the culpabilities of the “majority” and “minority” communities variously.
Consider, for example, that the bail plea of under-trials in the matter of the Godhra train burning of 2002 locked away under the draconian POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) was heard by the highest court in the land in February-March of this year, but the judgement remains in abeyance. In the meanwhile, one more under-trial, Hussein Mohammed Dhobi, age 65, has died there in custody—the fourth fatality in the matter. Nothing has appeared in public as to how those detainees are treated.
Think also that only the other day a CNN-IBN/Hindustan Times countrywide Poll revealed that 87% of Indians think that the police force is communal (read sectarian on the side of the “majority”). As well as an Amnesty International finding that the most corrupt institutions in India are the Police, the Politicians, and the Lower Judiciary! Why Amnesty should either have not looked into the bureaucracy and the corporate sector, or found nothing there remains a surprise.
These facts taken together help explain why it is that the Congress party which never tires of tom-tomming its role in formulating a secular-democratic republic has never yet given a nation-wide call for mobilization on behalf of the secular principle. Something that contrasts rather tellingly with the preparedness of people in Turkey to congregate in the millions whenever that principle is there seen to be in jeopardy. One would have imagined that,learning from Gujarat, and witness to the “majoritarian” rage now in evidence state after state, now would be a good time.
III
Thus it is that when the local head of the Bajrang Dal in Uttar Pradesh makes the public pronouncement that the strategic objective of this terrorizing arm of the RSS is to transform the secular republic into a “Hindu Rashtra” (Hindu theocratic state; see The Hindu, Thursday, October 2nd,’08) no cognizable offence is seen to have been committed. Not to speak of treason against the state as by law established.
Imagine, on the other hand, a call coming from some Muslim organization that they mean to turn India into an Islamic state. Within seconds, the organization would be banned and its members locked up as jehadi “terrorists.”
The crude and abiding fact is that the Congress party never really internalized the fatal truth of the insight that Jawahar Lal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, had voiced as far back as 1937.
Writing on “Hindu and Muslim Communalism,” Nehru had warned that whereas the communalism of the “minority” is patently what it is—sectarian banding together of a defensive nature—that of the Hindu “majority” is always likely to masquerade as “nationalism.” (See Nehru On Communalism, ed. N.L. Gupta, published by Sampradayikta Virodhi Committee, 1965, p.9). And, needless to say, that is then but a short step to fascism.
It is ofcourse a well-recorded fact that within the Congress leadership of those times, more than a few were not only members of the communal Hindu Mahasabha, but believed at heart that Indian social pluralism of centuries notwithstanding, India was at bottom a Hindu nation.
The penetration of the communal virus of those times must suggest something of the quality of the intellectual, cultural, and political battle that Nehru and a few others that notably included Muslim leaders (Abul Kalam Azad, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, Saifuddin Kitchlu, Asaf Ali, to name but a handful) and organisastions (Jamiat-e-ulema-e-Hind) put up against sectarian obscurantisms that disfigured both communities to ensure the founding of a secular republic.
It is to be noted that secularism was subsequently to be designated by a Constitutional Bench of the Supreme Court of India as one of the “basic” features of the Constitution not amenable to amendment by parliament.
Indeed, in an interesting book titled Nehru’s Hero, Lord Meghnad Desai records how during the Nehruvian phase of Independent India, the Nehruvian emphasis on progressive secularism and social pluralism was constantly reflected in the cinematic products of the Bombay Film Industry.
Continued . . .
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Tags:Babri Mosque, Congress party, fascist RSS, India, Indian Christians, Indian Muslims, Pandit Nehru, secularism, TADA and POTA laws
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