By Omar Khalidi
The venue was Harvard University’s famed Center for International Affairs, CFIA, which some call made for CIA! The occasion was the 2002 annual meeting of an Islamic Finance Project at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Numerous friends of India, Americans and South Asians alike, were outraged at the recent Gujarat pogrom, forgetting the agenda of the Islamic finance meeting. They admired the heroic role of women like Begum Zakia Jafari, the wife of shahid Ehsan Jafari, the murdered ex MP in standing up to murderer Modi. The names of women like Mallika Sarabhai, Shabana Azami, Teesta Setalvad, Shabnam Hashimi, and men like Harsh Mandir, R.B. Shreekumar, and countless others came up as profiles in courage against the pogrom.
Among the listeners to this conversation at Harvard was Zafar Sareshwala of Parsoli Corporation Ltd of Ahmadabad, a company run by a wealthy Sunni Bohra family. On 27 February 2002, when murderer Modi unleashed the pogrom in Gujarat, Parsoli Corporation, then a ten year old company listed on Mumbai and Ahmadabad stock exchanges received huge financial damages. Naturally, Sareshwala was furious. He met friends at Harvard symposium wanting to come to the rescue of the pogrom’s victims through lobbying US Congress and State Department. He wanted Modi to be sued; he wanted Gujarat government to be held accountable for the staggering losses Muslims of all kinds suffered. Barely a year later, he accompanied by his cronies, Sareshwala “warmly welcomed,” Modi in London, as reported by M. Ghazali Khan in The Milli Gazette, 23 Aug 2003, see
http://www.milligazette.com/dailyupdate/2003/20030823.htm
Shortly after the pogrom ended in March 2002, Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee arrived in Ahmadabad. During a meeting with community leaders in the circuit house in the company of Modi, Daudi Bohra leaders told Vajpayee with folded hands in the Hindu fashion, “Am to Miyan nathi,” we are not Miyans, the Daudi Bohras’ (and Sangh gang’s) slur for general Muslim population in Gujarati. “Am ne Modi sab upar pura bharosoch hai. Aa bahut saras kamgir karich hai, we have full trust in Modi. “He is doing a great job,” continued the Bohra leaders as they handed a check for 50 lakhs to the chief ministers’ relief fund. Despite the fact that all Muslims, including Bohras suffered loss of life and property the Bohra leaders chose to welcome and praise Modi during and after the pogrom. While the rest of world, disregarding political differences, party affiliations, religious loyalties, sought to bring Modi and his accomplices to justice in India and abroad, the pogrom-tainted chief minister received a pleasant surprise in Chennai on 18 September 2005, his birthday, when 30 Daudi Bohra leaders met to greet him with a check for Rs. One lakh. The picture showing the bearded, topied, Bohras smiling with the murderer Modi must have been enough for a jackal to puke, see
http://www.thehindu.com/2005/09/18/stories/2005091805421000.htm
Capping the Bohras’ unstinting praise for the murderer, Bohra chief, “Sayyidna,” our lord to his followers, Muhammad Burhanuddin met Modi in Ahmadabad in April 2008 as shown in Etemaad Daily of Hyderabad to shower his blessings! To anyone with any conscience, this act is an outrage. It is like a Jew complimenting Hitler, a Hyderabadi praising Sardar Patel, But then there is a long history of some victims kowtowing to the killers.
Public memory is too short; it may have forgotten that Muhammad Burhanuddin’s father, Tahir Sayfuddin (1915-65), was the first to congratulate Sardar Patel upon successful completion of Indian army’s Operation Polo in 1948, in which thousands of innocent, unarmed Muslims were killed. In other words, the actions of the Daudi Bohra chiefs are consistent through history: curry the favor of the rulers, even if killers, even if the killers are elected leaders of an avowedly secular state, subject to public and international accountability.
It would be wrong to blame only the Daudi Bohra chief and his chelas for kowtowing to the killers. They have plenty of company. Former Maharashtra minister Rafiq Zakaria, (1920-2005), sang paeans of praise on Patel, the man responsible for the pogrom of Delhi Muslims in September 1947 and Hyderabadis in September 1948, in a book he wrote, Sardar Patel and Indian Muslims. Recall that E. Ahmad, the current minister for state for external affairs, a Muslim League politician from Kerala stood with P.V. Narasimha Rao, (1921-2004) the prime minister (1991-96) responsible for the demolition of Babari mosque and subsequent all-India pogrom of Muslims in 1992.
The temptation to be close to the ruler of the day is such that, even the scholarly Mawlana Wahiduddin Khan could not resist. On the eve of India’s General Election of 2004, he headed a Vajpayee Himayat (support) Committee, a barely disguised outfit to elect the self-confessed RSS leader, and the Sangh gang’s prime minister during 1998-2004.
Kowtowing to the killers is not new; its practitioners include self-appointed, dynastic sectarian leaders like Muhammad Burhanuddin, ministers hankering after powers, businessmen seeking protection for their companies, scholars seeking filthy lucre and the like. So it is unsurprising that some Muslims are supporting a murderer like Modi. Barred from travel just about everywhere, the Daudi Bohras’ praises must be music to the murderer. I have been an admirer of Daudi Bohras’s economic self-reliance and their superb educational institutions. In fact, I advised fellow Muslims to emulate the Daudi Bohras as models of self-reliance. But that does not preclude my abhorrence at the appalling conduct of some Bohras in kowtowing to the killer. No one needs to question what the Daudi Bohra beliefs are, for it is their prerogative, but anyone believing in justice and accountability cannot but be outraged at Burhanuddin and his followers obsequious kowtowing to Modi.
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Omar Khalidi is the author of books like ‘Khaki and Ethnic Violence’ and ‘Muslims in Indian Economy’