By IANS,
Nagpur : A Hindi weekly published from Nagpur seems to have had a foreboding of terrorist designs in Jaipur, which rocked by a series of bomb blasts May 13 that claimed over 60 lives.
The weekly newspaper, Iman Ki Awaaz, had in its March 28 issue warned of some terrorist organisations’ efforts to create a base in Rajasthan. Its editor Hamid Engineer said copies of the paper were sent to Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and top bureaucrats of Rajasthan, including the Jaipur city police chief.
“We had also dispatched copies of the weekly to all district superintendents of police in Maharashtra besides circulating it to our 10,000-plus subscribers,” Engineer told IANS here Sunday.
The Iman Ki Awaaz story captioned “Terrorist conspiracy to control Jaipur’s Sunni mosques” talked about the efforts of leaders of the Wahabi sect in the Muslim community to wrest control of the mosques in Jaipur, dubbing these as part of terrorist designs to establish their clout in Rajasthan.
Engineer, who founded the Indian Muslim Association-Noori, a non-political organisation in 2002, launched the weekly as its mouthpiece in January this year.
“IMA-Noori works with an objective of shielding the Muslim community from the growing influence of terrorist tenets preached by the Wahabi sect,” Engineer said.
He added that the rank and file of all “Muslim terrorist organisations” in the world, including in India, was full of Wahabis.
With a national daily publishing a report on the Iman Ki Awaaz story Sunday, the editor of the IMA-Noori mouthpiece was inundated by media calls and visits seeking to know if he really knew in advance about the terrorist plans.
Clarifying that he or anyone in his organisation had no inkling of the devastating bomb blasts that killed at least 61 people, Engineer said the story in his paper referred only to the Wahabi efforts to gain control over Sunni-controlled mosques in Jaipur.
Nagpur police commissioner Satyapal Singh also clarified to the media that IMA-Noori or the proprietors of Iman Ki Awaaz had no links with terrorists.
A Muslim scholar said that contrary to Engineer’s contention, Wahabis constitute a reformist sect among Muslims and have no terrorist leanings whatsoever.
“The Wahabi sect, started by the king of Saudi Arabia in 1740, believes only in Holy Quran and has been opposed all along by the orthodox sects in the community,” former political science professor and author S.A. Ansari told IANS.