By Mumtaz Alam Falahi, TwoCircles.net,
New Delhi: The two-day National Seminar on Muslim Alienation: Manifestation and Challenges began today at Jamia Millia Islamia with the inaugural by Abusaleh Shariff, former Member Secretary of PM’s High Level Committee to prepare a report on Social, Economic and Educational Status of Muslim Community in India, popularly known as Sachar Committee.
L-R: Tanweer Fazal, Raheem Mondal, Adil Mehdi
The seminar organized by the Department of Sociology, Jamia Millia Islamia, is being sponsored by Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR).
In the first session titled “Muslim Alienation: Politics of Exclusion”, speakers took up various aspects of the title.
Talking on “Between ‘Minorityism’ and Minority Rights: Interrogating Post-Sachar Strategies of Intervention, Professor Tanweer Fazal of Jamia Millia Islamia said that in the garb of attempt to avoid minorityism, successive governments have just dodged the agenda of the empowerment of the Muslim community.
“Minority rights theorists have drawn our attention towards essentially cultural rights of ethnically differentiated minority groups living within the precincts of the ‘nation-state.’ Perforce, culture remains the site of contestation with groups vying for recognition, more or less, concession from the ‘national culture’. In India, far from ensuring equity and equal citizenship to its vulnerable minorities, such a conceptualization centred on the discourse of cultural rights and autonomy has only allowed successive regimes to dodge the agenda of empowerment,” Prof. Fazal said.
To all intents and purposes, such state practices border on what can be termed, ‘minorityism’. Different from the right wing invocation of minorityism as essentially ‘appeasement’ the term is used here to refer to the secular state’s refrain from making any committed advance towards minority empowerment, its flirtations with culturalisms of various kinds while in effect, shying away from issues of material progress, of distributive justice, of participation and share in national wealth, he further said.
While taking a critical look at the government’s claim that it has implemented 90% of Sachar recommendations, he said the Multi-sectoral Development Program for 90 Minority Concentration Districts has just diluted for mentioning the term minority, rather than Muslims. As a result, only 30% of Muslims are benefiting the program.
Presenting his paper on “Enforced Alienation: The case of Batla House encounter”, Adil Mehdi, also Jamia Millia professor, said: “The most serious form of alienation of Muslims in this country stems not so much from the lack of equal opportunities but from the lack of basic security of life and property, whether it comes from communal violence or violence by the organs of the state or their failure to provide safeguards.”
Prof Mehdi talked about the issue of alienation resulting from the cases of encounters and extra judicial killings of Muslims carried out in the name of fighting terrorism with the apparent backing of the state.
Presenting his point in the context of the Batla House encounter, Prof Mehdi said: “In spite of overwhelming doubts about the genuineness of the encounter, the state and its legal, political and security machinery resisted every attempt to institute a judicial enquiry into the incident, which has led to loss of faith among Muslims in the impartiality of the government as well as the judiciary.”
Recently, a Supreme Court bench headed by the Chief Justice of India rejected the plea for an enquiry into the Batla encounter “on the shocking grounds that it would cause “unnecessary harassment” and “demoralization” of the police force. At the same time, a speedy high level enquiry was ordered in another suspected encounter case in Dehradun a few months ago in which a Hindu young man, named Ranbir, was killed,” said Prof Mehdi.
“Interestingly, it appears that both extra judicial (cases of suspected encounters) and judicial (persistence refusal of the courts to order enquiry) means are arbitrarily employed in dealing with the minorities. Such insensitive attitude of the government inevitably reinforces and exacerbates the feelings of injustice and alienation among the Muslims,” he concluded.
Reading his paper on “Muslims in Delhi: Reading from the Kaleidoscope of Discriminations,” human rights activist Biju Laal M V said: While the post-Ayodhya and post-Godhra incidents set the benchmark for the public debates on human rights and dignity of Muslims, the everyday life of Indian Muslims living in segregation, insult and attacks were displaced from public memory. In several instances, direct experiences of concerned human rights activists exposed these unnoticed but serious uninterrupted violations that affected those belonging to the Muslim community.
He talked about how the human rights and guarantees of citizenship to people belonging to Muslim community are violated in New Delhi, the Capital of India. He also threw light on how Muslims were affected at the time of slum evictions in Delhi. “During eviction and demolition drive in Yamuna Pushta area of Delhi Muslim house owners were not given any official slip that they could claim any compensation in future.” He also highlighted the discrimination of Muslims in Kacchi Khajuri area of the Khajuri Khas colony in the North-East Delhi district.
He raised the illegal deportation of Bengali Muslims in violation to international human rights law as well as many other direct, indirect and contributory forms of human rights violations that community face in the urban social space.
He said: The life of Muslims in the city reflect a serious legitimation crisis and tries to present it through images from the political and systemically marginalized people.
Chairing the session, Prof Sheikh Raheem Mondal of North Bengal University said that earlier the topic of Muslim community and Muslim society was the most neglected in the departments of sociology across the country. When he began career, he said, it was taboo to talk about Muslim community.
The speakers to highlight other aspects of the Muslim alienation on the second day of the seminar include Prof. Imtiaz Ahmad, Asghar Ali Engineer, Zakia Soman, Prashant Bhushan, Prof. Anand Kumar, Ram Puniyani and Prof. Javeed Alam.