While Muslims from Azamgarh demonstrated in New Delhi against random arrest of Muslims in the name of terrorism, Gujarat Muslims avoid any democratic agitation against indiscriminate arrest. While some say it is `fear psychosis’ others hold community’s ‘mercantile culture’ responsible for it.
By TwoCircles.net special correspondent,
Ahmedabad: When hundreds of innocent Muslim youths were arrested indiscriminately for interrogation into the Ahmedabad July 26, 2008 serial bomb blasts, there was not even a whisper of protest from Muslims in Gujarat. None of the Muslim NGOs or human rights organisations came forward nor any religious organization raised voice against random arrest of the Muslim youths.
All of them remained confined to their cocoons as if nothing had happened with the community in Gujarat or what had happened was too minor a thing to disturb them and did not deserve any attention. There were a few organizations that had even instructed their volunteers to avoid any contact with the relatives of those rounded up by the police.
But their efforts to distance themselves could not protect them from police highhandedness. The top office-bearers of a well-known organization claiming to be the champions of the community, who had maintained distance from the relatives of the arrested persons, were called to the police station and grilled intensively for more than 24 hours.
However, when two Muslim youths from Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh in North India were shot dead in Batla House area of New Delhi on the pretext of them being terrorists, Muslims in Delhi as also Azamgarh, 800 KMs from New Delhi, came out on streets and lodged strong protest against targeting educated Muslim youths by the police.
Photo by Saad.Akhtar
Over 3000 people from Azamgarh led by their political, social and religious leadership converged in New Delhi on January 29 to protest the hounding out of Muslims all over the country by the police in the name of tackling terror. From the physical appearances of those coming from Azamgarh and the clothes put on by them indicated that they were not financially very well off, yet each of them spent Rs. 700 from their own pocket to reach the nation’s capital to protest the tyranny the Muslims are being subjected to by the state machinery in open defiance of the secular and constitutional laws of the country.
A question arises why the police excesses all over Gujarat did not stir a similar reaction from Muslims in this Western Indian state though Gujarati Muslims are considered to be the richest among Indian Muslims? While sleuths of Ahmedabad crime branch indiscriminately arrested more than 500 Muslim youths for their interrogation into July 26 serial blasts, the Muslims here remained totally indifferent. Police finally arrested 51 of them and booked them in different blast cases. Among them also include a neo-Muslim, who had converted to Islam five years ago with his wife and three children and shifted to a Muslim locality in Ahmedabad after he and his family was subjected to social boycott by his relatives and neighbours in the Hindu locality.
But what accounts for such indifference of the Gujarati Muslims to resort to democratic means of agitation like staging protests and taking out rallies to demand an end to the police highhandedness? “While fear psychosis owing to extremely harsh methods used by the police and law & order machinery used to suppress Muslims in 2002 and even prior to that in 1992-93 anti-Muslim riots has resulted in an attitude of indifference of Muslims to police excesses, `mercantile culture’ of the community is mostly responsible in shaping their existing behaviour and cold responses to such outrages”, opines Dr. Hanif Lakdawala, a medico-turned-activist representing Ahmedabad-based NGO Sanchetna. The mercantile culture in which one gives more importance to profit and gains, according to Dr. Lakdawala, generates fear and awe about those wielding the power to cause harm.
When he went around various localities in Ahmedabad and questioned the local community leaders about arrests, he was told that police had promised to release them in a day or two and hence, there was no need to organize any protest. “while gross violation of human rights was taking place, the local and state community leaders exhibited a reaction as if nothing wrong was being done with the community”, Dr. Lakdawala, himself a Gujarati, said. “This is really very obnoxious”, he commented.
Ibrahim sheikh, another social activist, had called a meeting of some local leaders, businessmen and activists at his residence to organize a protest against detention of innocent Muslims. “But a well known businessman and a politician attending the meet warned not to organize any protest as he expressed fear they will also be harassed by the police”, sheikh narrated, saying that fear of state apparatus runs very deep among Gujarati Muslims and it was the reason for Muslims not to take part in anti-police agitations. He said only a few Muslims turned up in a rally organized by the Jan Sangharsh Morcha (JSM) headed by senior Gujarat high court advocate Mukul Sinha against indiscriminate arrest of Muslims. Sinha is defending a large number of Muslims facing charges under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) in the court.
President of People Union for Civil Liberties(PUCL) Juzar S Bandukwala, who has always resisted the police and state brutalities, says that suppression of Muslims in 2002 with no political outfit in the state coming to defend them has so much terrified the Muslims that they are no longer willing to come out against the police and the state.