The (in)visible in Indian terrorism

Indian Muslims are often accused of terrorist links, but in many cases it is Muslims themselves who are terrorised. Source: Al Jazeera  : Irfan Ahmad

India's media often rushes to blame Muslims for acts of terrorism, sometimes without serious evidence [EPA] According to the Indian government and media, many Muslim groups have recently been involved in terrorism. Of these, three stand out: Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), formed in 1976 and banned soon after 9/11 for fomenting “communal disharmony” and “sedition”; Deccan Mujahideen (DM), an outfit which shot to prominence by claiming responsibility for the 2008 Mumbai terror attack; and Indian Mujahideen (IM), a group believed to have been formed after 2001. These groups have been charged with killing hundreds of people. The latest attack came on July 13, when 20 people were killed in a series of bombings in Mumbai. Shortly after the attack, the police said that IM and SIMI were behind the blasts. A nationwide hunt followed. According to Rakesh Maria, Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) Chief, expert teams fanned out to seven states. Officers from the National Intelligence Agency, formed after the 2008 Mumbai attacks to fight terrorism, raided the houses of two IM suspects in Ranchi, capital of Jharkhand state. In Indian political discourse, outfits like SIMI, DM and IM appear as a threat to India’s stability and its global rise. While some depict them as domestic groups, others portray them as working in alliance with outfits from Pakistan. It is thus believed that IM was floated by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a militant group formed in 1990 in Afghanistan and active in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Most accounts of these outfits are, however, inconsistent and even contradictory. By analysing the Mumbai attack and the alleged involvement of IM and SIMI, I make three arguments. First, since the media and the security agencies have a close and uncritical relationship, we should have a healthy doubt about the accuracy of their information, and refrain from immediately pointing fingers at one Muslim group or another. Despite the fact that barely anyone adequately knows what IM is and how it came about, after the July attack several Muslims were arrested as terrorists. Second, because Muslims are blamed, arrested, tortured, and killed (by the police) after each terror attack, with little or no evidence, such measures might end up creating the danger the Indian state claims to fight. Third, I contend that the Indian media’s role in “reporting” terrorism is prejudiced.   What is Indian Mujahideen? After the blast, the police arrested many people from Mumbai’s “sensitive” (read Muslim) neighbourhoods, a practice the residents of such neighbourhoods have grown accustomed to in the last decade. One suspect, Faiz Usmani, died in police custody. The police claimed that his death was caused by “hypertension”; his family believes that he was tortured. Usmani was the brother of Afzal Usmani, in jail for his alleged involvement in the 2008 Ahmadabad blast. Both brothers are reported to be IM members. Riaz Bhatkal, described as India’s “most wanted terrorist”, is regarded as IM’s founder. He became close with SIMI in the early 1990s when it began to radicalise. Born in 1976, Bhatkal went to an English-medium school and later studied engineering at a Mumbai college. But beyond that, much of IM’s history remains unclear. It's not even known whether Bhatkal is alive or dead. After the July 13 blast, the ATS attempted to nab him. This is surprising, because early this year the media reported that Bhatkal was killed in Karachi by Chhota Rajan, Mumbai’s underworld don.  The media provides differing accounts of IM’s formation and, in fact, is sometimes inconsistent even within a single version. For example, Animesh Roul, the director of the Society for the Study of Peace and Conflict in Delhi, claimed that IM was “conceived at a terrorist conclave attended by top leaders of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Harkat-ul-Jehadi Islami (HuJI) in Pakistani-administered Kashmir in May 2008”. He did not find it contradictory when in the next paragraph he wrote, “IM came into the open for the first time in November 2007”. In Asian Policy, Christine Fair indicated two dates of its formation: 2001 and an ambiguous date of “much later”. According to The Times of India, IM was formed in 2005. To Namrata Goswami of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis in Delhi, “key SIMI members …started supporting the idea of the formation of the IM as early as December 2007”.      IM first hit the headlines after a series of explosions in November 2007. In an email to the media and police, IM claimed responsibility for the blasts. As the email explained, the aim of those attacks was to protest against “the pathetic conditions of Muslims in India that idol worshippers can kill our brothers, sisters, children and outrage dignity of our sisters at any place and at any time and we can’t resist them”. Then, in 2008, minutes before the blasts in Ahmadabad, IM sent an email (entitled “The Rise of Jihad, Revenge of Gujarat”) to the media saying: “We hereby declare an ultimatum to all the state governments of India … to stop harassing the Muslims and keep a check on their killing, expulsion, and encounters.” The messages are a sign that IM’s aim is to protest against and avenge the killings and humiliation of Muslims at the hands of Hindu nationalists and the state administration. The destruction of the Babri mosque by Hindu nationalists in 1992 is important to IM’s ideological repertoire - hence its description by the media and the terrorism experts as a “home-grown”, “domestic” terror outfit. Since the media regard the Babri mosque as a domestic issue (unlike Kashmir, which is international) and the IM invokes the Babri mosque to rationalise its attacks, the IM is thus considered a domestic outfit. However, many Indian security experts hold that IM is a tool of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) used to destabilise India. In these accounts, IM is a means to advance ISI’s agenda of destabilising India and at the same time to exonerate Pakistan of any allegations made by India and the West of promoting terrorism. The logic of the security experts is that the word “Indian” in IM points to India’s domestic groups, rather than Pakistani groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, through which the ISI has been operating in Kashmir. On the other hand, experts like B Raman allege that IM and SIMI's reach extends beyond South Asia, characterising the groups as a part of a global network of Islamic radicals without furnishing adequate evidence. India’s Guantanamo Bays The media invariably base their stories on the sources of the state. An apt example is Praveen Swami, a terrorism expert cited by everyone writing about the IM. Swami is to print media what Arnab Goswami (of Times Now) is to Indian TV: Their views are rabidly nationalist, some might even say Islamophobic. Swami reproduces the police version (e.g. see his writings in CTC Sentinel, May 2010; The Hindu, Edit-Page, March 22, 2010; and Frontline, June 2-15, 2007) without giving the other side of the story, namely: the viewpoints of the alleged terrorists, their family members, or the Muslim community. It is well-known that the Indian police are biased against Muslims and have been complicit in killing them, as was evident in the state-mediated 2002 Gujarat violence, in which 1,000 Muslims were killed. Given that the Indian media is uninterested in reporting “facts” and multiple views, can an anthropologist like me make sense of the mediatised world of terrorism? Thomas Eriksen holds that a concept like globalisation has “no meaning to an anthropologist unless it can be studied through actual persons, their relationship to each other and to a larger surrounding world”. I thus agree with Peter Van der Veer that “behind the growing visibility [of media] is a growing invisibility”. What is rarely visible in the Indian media, however, are the brutal, illegal methods used against suspected terrorists: torture cells, illegal detention, unlawful killings in “police encounters”; elimination of evidence against the illegal actions of the law-enforcing agencies; and rampant harassment of Muslims. In July 2009, The Week reported on the existence of at least 15 secret torture chambers meant to extract information from the detainees. The methods to extract information include attaching electrodes to a detainee’s genitals as well as the use of pethidine injections. To quote The Week, these chambers are “our own little Guantanamo Bays or Gitmos”, which a top policeman called “precious assets”. In May 2008, a Muslim boy aged 14 was abducted by the Gujarat police. He was dragged to the police car at gunpoint and taken to a detention centre where he was tortured. He returned home ten days later when the court ordered his release following his mother’s petition. The police subsequently threatened the boy’s family with dire consequences if they pursued the case in court. The police harassment becomes even more acute in light of the fact that most lawyers often hesitate to take up the cases of “terrorists”. As a disempowered community - as the government-appointed Sachar Committee report (of 2006) minutely demonstrates - Muslims themselves don’t have adequate and qualified lawyers to pursue such cases. Muslims’ marginalisation thus renders their voice invisible in the media too. It is believed that after SIMI was banned, soon after 9/11, its radical members formed IM. During my fieldwork (2001-2004) on Jamaat-e-Islami and SIMI I did not hear anything about IM. SIMI activists and other Muslims I met felt terrorised themselves. It is worth noting that since 2001 far more people have been arrested as “SIMI terrorists” than the actual number of SIMI members, which in 1996 was 413 (when founded in 1976, SIMI’s members numbered 132). Until today, the Indian government has still not legally proved its rationale for banning SIMI. The story untold In the fight against terrorism, evidence and the rule of law are subservient to prejudice. As of this writing, the Indian government has not yet tracked the perpetrators of the July 13 attack. However, only two days after the attack, Subramanian Swamy, a prominent politician and former minister (with a doctorate from Harvard University) wrote an article called “How to Wipe Out Islamic Terror”. Without any evidence, he blamed Muslims for the attack, in the same way that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Sun suspected Muslim involvement in the Norway shooting nine days later. What Swamy did is standard practice in Indian media. In September 2006, a blast killed 35 people at a Muslim graveyard in Malegaon (in the state of Karnataka). The media blamed Muslims. Likewise, in 2007, after a blast killed 10 Muslims praying in Hyderabad’s Mecca mosque, Praveen Swami freely wrote about the Muslim terrorists he believed caused it and about what he perceived to be the “Islamist threat to India’s cities”. However, investigations later showed that Hindu nationalists carried out the Malegaon and Mecca mosque terror attacks. Returning to Subramanian Swamy, Swamy wrote: “We need a collective mindset as Hindus to stand against the Islamic terrorist. The Muslims of India can join us if they genuinely feel for the Hindus. That they do I will not believe unless they acknowledge with pride that though they may be Muslims, their ancestors were Hindus”. Those refusing to acknowledge this, Swamy advocated, “should not have voting rights”. He proposed declaring India “a Hindu Rashtra [state]”.  Stories of Muslim terrorists abound in both the Indian and Western media. Since the July 13, 2011 Mumbai bombings, vitriolic pieces like Subramanian Swamy’s have appeared frequently in the media. These pieces subtly influence the analyses of many liberal intellectuals. By contrast, stories portraying Muslims as the terrorised remain fairly sparse. One wonders if, and how, such stories will be told. Irfan Ahmad is a political anthropologist and a lecturer at Monash University, Australia and author of Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami (Princeton University Press, 2009) which was short-listed for the 2011 International Convention of Asian Scholars Book Prize for the best study in the field of Social Sciences. The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Babri Masjid -- Mosque Demolition: Rare Video on the Background of the Dispute

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIO6nme7EuA&feature=email&noredirect=1


The Babri Masjid, named after the founder of the Mughal Empire, Babur, was demolished by a mob of 150,000 Hindutva fascist in 1992. Thousands of people, mainly Muslims were killed following the demolition.

This is an interesting and rare video recorded in 1991, a year before the demolition, it digs into the background of the dispute and its origins.
For more:

Documentary, 20 mins: http://www.ndtv.com/news/videos/video_player.php?id=164416

Liberhan Report: BJP's Nightmare, 97 mins. http://www.ndtv.com/news/videos/video_player.php?id=115182

Academic Articles on Hindu King's Destroying Each Others Temples and the Muslim response:

Part I: http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1725/17250620.htm (A Must Read).

Part II: http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1726/17260700.pdf (A Must Read).

Hindu Temples Destroyed by Hindu Rulers:

1089-1101 AD: King Harsha of Kashmir of the first Lohara dynasty indulged in ruthlessly looting the treasures of the temples of Bhimasai and also systematically confiscated and defiled the metallic statues of Gods by outcasts throughout the Kashmir valley in order to obtain the valuable material. He even imposed tax on the night soil. (Ref. Kalhana, Rajataran-gini, Vol. 1, sec. 5, Motilal Banarsidas, page 113)


642 AD: Pallava king Narasimhavarman I looted the image of Ganesha from the Chalukyan capital of Vatapi (present day Badami in Belgaum dist.)

692 AD: Chalukyas invaded North India and brought back to the Deccan what would appear to be images of Ganga and Yamuna looted from defeated powers.

8th century AD: Bengali troops sought revenge on King Lalithaditya's kingdom in Kashmir by destroying what they thought was an image of Vaikunta the state deity of Kashmir kingdom.

9th century AD: Rashtrakuta king Govinda III invaded and occupied Kanchipuram which so intimidated the King of Sri Lanka that he sent Govinda (probably Buddhist) images representing the Sinhala state.

Rashtrakuta king Indira III not only destroyed the temple of Kalapriya at Kalpa near the Jamuna river, patronized by their deadly enemies, the Pratiharas, but they took special delight in recording the fact.

9th century AD: Pandyan King Srimara Srivallabha also invaded Sri Lanka and took back to his capital golden Buddha image.

Early 10th century, Pratihara King, Hermabapala, seized solid gold image of Vishnu Vaikunta when he defeated the Sahi kings of Kangra (Himachal Pradesh)

Early 11th century: Chola King, Rajendra I furnished his capital with images he seized from several prominent neighbouring kings: Durga and Ganesha images from the Chalukyas, Bhairava, Bhairavi and Kali images from the Kalingas or Orissa as Nandi image from the Eastern Chalukyans.
(Ref: David Gilmartin and Bruce B. Lawrence (ed.), Beyond Hindu and Turk, University Press of Florida, 2000.

Mosques Destruction by Hindu Rulers

In the year 1547 AD Ali Adil Shah I of the Qutub Shahi Dynasty (Golconda) asked the help of Rama Raya (Vijaynagar Emperor) to attack the Nizam Shahi's of Ahmadnagar. Following the illustrious victory, the Vijaynager army burned to ashes as many mosques and other places of importance they could find in the city of Ahmadnagar.[Ref: Tarik-i-Firishtah Vol II, pg 36 - 37]

The Truth Behind The MUSLIMS IN MODILAND - The dark story of how Gujarat’s Muslims are faring in the fields of education, finance, housing and welfare

MUSLIMS IN MODILAND

The Truth Behind The Stage Show  Personal sketches. Disturbing statistics.

On 14 SEPTEMBER, a few days after the Supreme Court order on Zakia Jafri’s plea, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi announced a sadbhavana fast “to strengthen Gujarat’s environment of peace, unity and harmony”. At the brightly-lit Gujarat University convocation hall in Ahmedabad, Modi praised his government’s efforts at upholding satya, shanti and sadbhavana since 2001, how it has managed to get investment even as vested interests attacked it constantly, and tried to evoke Gujarat’s progress and prosperity with the metaphor of a train — that mothers of youngsters coming to Gujarat sleep peacefully once they hear that the train their child is travelling on has entered the state.

A study in contrast The municipal schools on either side of the Hindu- Muslim divide in Rakhiyal Photo: Anumeha Yadav A study in contrast The municipal schools on either side of the Hindu- Muslim divide in Rakhiyal Photo: Anumeha Yadav Shattered dreams Shah Navaz had to quit his B.Ed course midway due to quota politics Photo: Shailendra Pandey Vibrant Gujarat The squalor in Citizens’ Nagar where victims displaced by the 2002 riots live Photo: Shailendra Pandey Waiting for justice Razakbhai Ghauchi and his wife at their house that was torched in 2002 Photo: Shailendra Pandey Festering wounds Riot victims are prevented from protesting against Modi’s sadbhavana fast Photo: Ramesh Dave Show of strength A defiant Modi breaks his fast but will he be able to break free from the past? Photo: Shailendra Pandey

           At the fast, dozens of Bohra Muslims — the men in white-and-golden caps and their women in ridas — filled the central row. They spoke of how they had come from Jamnagar, Surendranagar and Rajkot, taking turns to attend the three-day fast. Muslims from Juhapura and Porbandar, led by former BJP MP Baburam Bokhiria, who has been in and out of jail on charges of illegal mining of limestone, were also present. On the stage, Bohra priests, sadhus, heads of the four Swaminarayan sects, priests of churches and gurdwaras presented a picture of communal harmony.

The fast is only the latest in Modi’s public posturing and coating what goes in Gujarat with the patina of good governance. A few days earlier, speaking at a function organised by the Ajmeri Education Trust in Ahmedabad on 4 September, Modi had exhorted Muslims to join the ‘mainstream’ and peppered his speech with ‘education’ and ‘inclusive development’.

His recent speeches have been in sharp contrast to 2007 when he spewed venom at Muslims in poll rallies, taunting them with phrases like “hum paanch hamare pachees”. Some commentators have analysed the shift in his stand as the compulsion of appearing palatable as a pan- India leader. Others see this as more insidious, a change of tactics in his communal politics — that beyond merely labelling any discourse on equal treatment of Muslims as ‘pseudo-secular’, he has now shifted to ‘secular-speak’. He offers ‘development’ to Muslims but with caveats — forget the past, minimise your demands for justice, and drop your religious identity.

Is Modi’s claim hyperbole, or does it translate into fair governance? Is his government even delivering on what he boasts of? Do Muslims really have equal opportunities and infrastructure? Modi has won successive elections in Gujarat since 2002 even while his role in the riots was under probe by the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team. How do Muslims negotiate their rights as citizens with a government that has refused to even acknowledge the extent of the pogrom?

Rakhial is a lower middle-class neighbourhood located 5 km north of Maninagar, Chief Minister Modi’s constituency in east Ahmedabad. Of the three large housing colonies located here — Sukhram Nagar, Shivanand Nagar and Sundaram Nagar — Muslims live in the third. Built as a mixed colony in the 1970s, it became a ghetto after the 2002 riots.

National Highway 8 cuts through the settlement and Hindus and Muslims on either side of this refer to it as the “border”, a term common in several other Gujarat neighbourhoods where the two communities live cheek by jowl. Besides this road that cuts through the colonies, a sharp contrast of infrastructure separates the Hindu and Muslim neighbourhoods; a contrast most telling and disturbing in the condition of government primary schools for which the state provides land, buildings and funds for maintenance and facilities like libraries.

A dilapidated structure with a tin roof broken at several places serves as the municipal primary school for 600 children in Muslim-dominated Sundaram Nagar. One part of this rundown building serves as a Gujarati medium school up to Class VII. At the other end, a tin-covered structure open on all sides is used as a classroom to teach Urdu to over 200 students in Classes I to IV. Less than 2 km away, in the same municipal ward of Rajpur, a three-storey building serves as a Gujarati medium school up to Class VII in Hindu-dominated Shivanand Nagar. Sukhram Nagar has a Hindi medium school up to Class VII that is a three-storey building with stone mosaic work depicting Hindu goddesses.

“Those living here cannot afford to send their children to private schools and the government takes no responsibility to improve the school,” says Sheikh Ahesan, in his mid-20s, who started the Student Welfare and Education Trust in 2007. Ahesan and his friends have provided floor mats to kids in the Sundaram Nagar municipal school. “Anyone could stand a fair chance by studying and looking for work in the private sector. But how will these children reach there when they do not get to go to a half-decent primary school?” asks Sheikh Usmaan, a member of the trust.

Muslim families living in Rakhiyal narrate countless struggles to get benefits such as educational loans. “For my MBA admission, I went with my uncle to ask Dena Bank for a Rs 1.25 lakh loan. They asked for collateral and discouraged me from applying. Then I got aid from a Muslim trust,” recounts Sheikh Shehzaad. The Central scheme he is referring to is one of the key proposals adopted after the publication of the 2005 Sachar Committee report that mandates banks to give educational loans up to Rs 4 lakh without any collateral to students from poor minority families.

“The bank is asking for income tax returns and PAN card. Where will we get this from?” asks Ghori Firdaus, a homeopathy student, about her experience at the State Bank of India that moved its branch from Sundaram Nagar to the Hindu-dominated Odhav area across the road after 2002. It is to help students like Firdaus, whose father is an autorickshaw driver, that the scheme has flexible rules — the family’s income certificate and an affidavit certifying religion from the Collector’s office are suffice to qualify. “We are able to pool small amounts among ourselves to help these students but some months, especially during admission time, we don’t know what to do because we cannot risk rejection by these banks,” says Shehzaad.

Principal Secretary, Education, Hasmukh Adhiya says he cannot comment on the details of the policy implementation but the department has taken steps where gaps had been brought to its notice. He points out that the government is building a secondary school in Juhapura on the western outskirts of Ahmedabad. “Dr Tripathi made a representation that Juhapura does not have a government school. So we have given permission to start one,” says Adhiya, referring to a request by Prof Vipin Tripathi of IIT-Delhi, who has been working to improve government education facilities in Juhapura since 2008.

A key finding of the Sachar Committee report was that drop-out rates are highest among Muslims. Their mean years of schooling are lower than SCs and STs at a little over three years. In 2008, the Centre started a scholarship scheme for minorities, to be shared in a 75:25 ratio between the Centre and state to encourage students from poor families to complete schooling. Since the scheme started, Gujarat has let the funds lapse by not sending any proposal to the Centre for giving these scholarships.

At first, the state government found faults with the scheme saying this targets religious minorities and is discriminatory on “principles of equity and financial implications”. The Gujarat High Court settled this question when it recognised the Central scheme as constitutionally valid in March 2009. This April, contradicting its own stand in an affidavit filed in response to the PIL in the high court, the government cited a scholarship for minorities that has existed in the state since 1979. It said, since this scheme exists, there is no need for implementing the Central scheme.

The state government added another argument in the affidavit. It said executing the Central scheme for a limited number of students — the Ministry of Minority Affairs (MMA) calculated 52,260 scholarships on the basis of population and income levels among Gujarat’s minorities — will cause “heartburn” among those minority students who do not enjoy the benefits.

But who is stopping the state government from covering the remaining students using additional funds? MMA data shows that in 2010-11, a less developed state like Rajasthan disbursed more than double the year’s target of 60,109 scholarships. Bihar also disbursed more than double its target of 1,45,809 scholarships. Uttar Pradesh disbursed over 130 percent of a target of 3,37,109, and West Bengal — that has one of the highest proportion of Muslims — disbursed 400 percent of its target of 2,22,309. In all these instances, state governments have increased their allocation because of the high quantum of applications; the Centre has matched their funds bearing 75 percent of the total cost.

“The matter is sub judice, I cannot comment,” says Sunaina Tomar, Principal Secretary, Social Justice and Empowerment, when asked why Gujarat, a state that this January boasted of money worth a third of India’s GDP coming in as investment, could not do likewise.

Colonies built to resettle riots victims resound with stories of struggles to get small loans to set up corner shops or buy autorickshaws

THIS FEBRUARY, Abusaleh Shariff of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, Delhi, used National Sample Survey Organisation data to calculate that in Gujarat, only a fourth of Muslim children who started school finish matriculation. He calculated that urban Muslims in Gujarat are eight times poorer than uppercaste Hindus. This is almost twice the gap between Hindus and Muslims on an average nationally.

Muslims’ work participation rate in manufacturing and organised sectors in Gujarat is 13 percent compared to the all- India average of 21 percent. “Gujarat has had better infrastructure such as roads and electricity since the 1960s. As a Muslim, I may prefer to live there than in a poorer state. Does that mean there is no economic discrimination? There is deep-rooted poverty among Muslims compared to other groups,” says Shariff, who is one of the key authors of the Sachar Committee report.

Besides scholarships and school infrastructure, other means of economic mobility such as loans and financial access are outside the grasp of most of Gujarat’s Muslims. Shariff’s analysis showed that in Gujarat, Muslims hold 12 percent of all bank accounts, which is proportionate to their population in the state, but their bank loan amount outstanding is 2.6 percent. This means even when Muslims have accounts, they don’t get loans.

Of 1,958 riot cases reopened after the Supreme Court order, the Gujarat Police made arrests in only 117 cases — 5 percent of the total

The same lack of access reflects in the data from the State Level Bankers’ Committee (SLBC) that looks at implementation of financial inclusion norms. SLBCs monitor priority sector lending, i.e., lending to groups such as farmers and minorities. In 2008, the Centre mandated that minorities should get a 15 percent share of 40 percent that constitutes priority sector lending. In Gujarat, this has hovered around 2-3 percent. In other words, of every Rs 100 of financing, Rs 1 - Rs 1.5 goes to minorities,and of this, a part to Muslims.

“Last month, I met with Muslim entrepreneurs from Dholka. All they wanted to know was about loan subsidy schemes sponsored by the Centre. For an entrepreneur, this should not be the main concern. What can banks do if these people lack vision?” asks JM Patel, assistant general manager, Dena Bank SLBC.

Colonies built to resettle riot victims at Panderwada, Lunavada and Boru village near Kalol resound with stories of struggles to get small loans of Rs 75,000 - Rs 1 lakh to set up corner shops or buy autorickshaws.

The Gujarat Minorities Finance and Development Corporation Limited (GMFDL) was set up to finance small entrepreneurs and provide educational loans. It has not given any loans since last April because repayment rates were so low that the Centre stopped sending funds.

Officials admit this is in sharp contrast to states such as Kerala and Karnataka where repayment rates are over 90 percent but take no responsibility for the dismal plight. “The Centre is biased against Gujarat’s Muslims and that is why it has stopped sending funds,” says GMFDL Chair-man Imtiyaz Pathan, a man appointed by the BJP this year after the post lay vacant for the past six years.

THE MODI government shuffles its feet when it comes to doing what it is legally obliged to do — providing education and loans, the two most fluid avenues for change and improvement, to Gujarat’s Muslims. What is the way to the mainstream paradise it promises?

On the other side of the city is Juhapura in west Ahmedabad. The area was developed as a colony to rehabilitate flood victims in 1972. It was a mixed neighbourhood till the 1990s but Hindu Dalits and Bhois moved out after communal violence broke out in 1992. Juhapura is now Gujarat’s largest Muslim ghetto, home to affluent Muslims — businessmen, builders, retired IAS and IPS officers and journalists. Juhapura is proof of how even money is not a conduit to access for Muslims. Any conversation seems to suggest normalcy but probe a bit and there is a deep sense of alienation and disappointment; a resignation that they have to make do without expecting any cooperation from the government.

“There is no municipal water supply, so we had to dig borewells for children to be able to drink water,” says Asifkhan Pathan, who manages Crescent School. The ghetto, which has a population of more than 3 lakh, has only four government- aided schools. woefully short to accomodate over 3,000 incoming students in Class I every year.

“I tried to advertise discounted medical packages on Snapdeal, an advertising website, but a manager turned it down saying he didn’t think any of his users would visit Juhapura,” says Dr Saquib Sheikh, who runs a hospital in the neighbourhood.

Juhapura residents complain that areas dominated by Muslims have been blacklisted by banks for issuing credit cards. In a telling example, a bank officer was denied a credit card by his employer. “I was surprised when my credit card request was turned down because I work in this bank. My colleagues hinted that I should not expect it to have worked when I have a Juhapura pincode in my address,” says the mid-level private bank officer, on the condition of anonymity.

52,260 That’s the number of scholarships minority students should have got in Gujarat. None have been given. UP gave 4,65,812, Bihar gave 3,20,107 and West Bengal gave 9,13,002

Scientist Dr HN Saiyed has a similar story to tell. In 2004, an SBI employee approached him with an offer of a credit card when he was living in government accommodation in Hindu-dominated Maninagar. But his application was turned down after he moved to Juhapura postretirement a few months later. “On the phone, a bank officer expressed embarrassment about the incident and tried to explain it as a mistake by the junior staff. I withdrew my application. I did not want to try a second time,” says Saiyed who was director, National Institute of Occupation Health, a medical research body, till 2004.

Gujarat boasts of more than 90 percent paved roads to remote villages, 98 percent electrification, 86 percent piped water supply and the best of infrastructure in India. But Juhapura has no streetlights, water supply or internal roads. Residents have regularly paid property and water taxes since Juhapura was merged with Ahmedabad municipal limits in July 2006. Those who can afford it have built borewells and paved roads for short stretches.

Residents filed a PIL in the high court, the route that seems to be the most common recourse for groups working for Muslims’ rights. They demanded water and sewage facilities and made several representations to the Urban Development Department. After an interim high court order, the government began providing water to Hindu-dominated Sankalitnagar in 2008. However, Muslim-dominated areas such as Gyaspur, Makarba, Juhapura and Vasna are yet to get these facilities.

“Nothing has changed over the past three years. Now that the Assembly election is approaching, and Modi is focussing on Muslim votes, maybe some things may change,” says lawyer Girish Patel, who is representing Juhapura residents in the high court. “Harassment, discrimination — everything remains the same. The only difference is that Modi has terrified Muslims and they have lost their ability to speak against public wrong.”

The senior lawyer’s analysis is shared by Farooq Mohammed Sheikh, an autorickshaw driver living in Shah Alam, where more than 15,000 riot-affected families stayed in 2002 for over six months. “Modi is responsible for two things — in the Hindus, he has sown the fear that without him to watch their backs, the Muslims would slaughter them, and the Muslims, he has managed to terrorise anyway since 2002,” says Sheikh. “We have become very afraid of the police; who knows under what case they will have us arrested. Such is the fear that our boys do the namaaz on their own.”

25% Number of school-going children from Muslim households who manage to finish matriculation. This state average is 42 percent

Juhapura is the constituency where BJP nominated the most high-profile of its 12 Muslim candidates in last October’s civic polls. AI Saiyed, a retired IPS officer, was in the middle of his speech when a pot was hurled at him from a window in the Royal Akbar housing society. Saiyed was unhurt but he gets a little fazed when talking about the incident. “They are in the grip of the Congress leadership. Their problem is illiteracy; all they want is alif beh the,” he says at the Waqf Board office in Gandhinagar. He was made board chairman after he lost the poll. “They come now and complain that they have no facilities in Juhapura. I tell them this is your nemesis.”

Muslim businessmen owning dealerships and retail stores say they do negotiate concessions out of local BJP functionaries and leaders. They describe instances where they have got help for permissions, licences, in some instances even permission for religious processions. But they add that BJP functionaries do this on the sly, not comfortable being openly associated with Muslims as their political constituency.

Trader Usman Qureshi, who was part of a group of Muslim leaders, businessmen and core members of the chand committee led by Shabir Alam, the Pesh-i-Imam at Ahmedabad’s Juma Masjid, met Modi this April. “Initially the discussion was going OK but when we mentioned school scholarships for minorities, Modi started calling them discriminatory,” Qureshi says at his small automobile parts shop in Mirzapur. “When we requested that Urdu poet Walli’s tombstone, that was destroyed in the riots, be restored, he refused to acknowledge it had ever existed. I came back feeling embarrassed, like I had lost face.”

Others within the community react to experiences like these with little patience. They compare them to power brokers like Bohra Muslim clergy or businessman Talha Sareshwala, who owns a BMW dealership in Ahmedabad and regularly praises Modi government’s largesse to Muslims. They say this inability to negotiate their demands without obliterating their identity as Muslims is what is at the core of their discomfort with the BJP.

“Things were no better under the Congress but with the BJP, we feel uncomfortable in saying that we are Muslims and we are equal citizens,” says social worker Hanif Lakdawala. His NGO Sanchetna has been struggling to get basic amenities for 90,000 Muslims who moved to the Bombay Hotel area after the riots.

A few hours after Modi began his sadbhavana fast invoking his government’s glory of having rebuilt quake-hit Bhuj in half the time estimated by the World Bank and the success of its biennial investment summits, a crowd gathered around a pool of stagnant water in the Bombay Hotel area. They curiously watched as a JCB made slow, unsure attempts at removing waste that has waterlogged lanes and house plots for the past four months.

“There are no gutters, we get only brackish water. They burn the waste and our house fills up with smoke,” says Afsana Bano, who moved from Naroda Patiya to this colony adjacent to an open landfill after she lost her brother in the 2002 riots.

13% Muslim workers who are involved in manufacturing and organised sectors. The national average is 21 percent

A FASCIST has many faces. Like Hitler had a dream, a vision, now Modi has a dream. Why is he doing all this 10 years late? None of this will translate into any benefit for Muslims except a few who show sadbhavana with him on his stage,” says Shah Navaz, who has volunteered with the Bombay Hotel community since 2002. Shah Navaz has a reason to be angry. He believes that the Modi regime’s mistreatment of Muslims is not just limited to playing truant on providing basic amenities but is part of an insidious discrimination evident in how this government flouts its constitutional responsibilities.

Shah Navaz, who belongs to the Rangrez community — traditionally nomadic dyers — is one of the several OBC Muslims who had to drop out of college in the middle of the academic session when the Department of Underdeveloped Tribes (DUT) cancelled their certificates entitling them to 27 percent quota for socially and educationally backward classes (SEBC).

“I had completed seven months of my B.Ed training course on an SEBC seat when the DUT sent a letter saying they recognised the Gujarati word ‘Galiyara’ for dyers, but not Rangrez. When I met DUT Director KG Vanzara (brother of encounter specialist DCP DG Vanzara) in Gandhinagar, he taunted me by saying ‘Quran’s first aayat, sur-e-fateha, asks you to come into the light, why don’t you?” recounts Shah Navaz, who is in his early 20s. His admission was cancelled when he was just two months away from getting his degree.

15% That’s what minorities are supposed to get out of 40 percent that constitutes priority sector lending. In Gujarat, this is only 2-3 percent

Traditional weavers Julaha Ansaris are fighting the same battle against the Modi regime’s sleight of hand with SEBC caste synonyms. Ansaris say the Modi government deprives them of their entitlements by not recognising synonyms used by various strands of the same OBC community, something that the Mandal Commission report specifically asked state governments to be cognizant of. It recognises Musalman Julaya as an OBC community but refuses to acknowledge the synonym Ansaris that some families have adopted to protect against the derogatory connotation they feel the term ‘Julaha’ has in some settings.

“We submitted proof that we are Ansaris but they didn’t accept our documents,” says Aliya Bano, a tailor, who is wary of making the rounds of the DUT to secure a reserved seat in an engineering college for her 17-year-old son Zaid.

Ironically, in 2005, the same DUT acknowledged that Julaha Ansari is a synonym of Musalman Julaha. Following a representation by the Samastha Julaha Musalman Samaj to the government, a caste scrutiny committee made up of DUT director and head of the Social Justice department got the matter examined by experts in Tribal Research and Training Institute, Gujarat Vidyapeeth. This group’s findings, data from the Anthropological Survey of India and Central List for Gujarat of Mandal Commission Report, all support the Ansaris’ claim that they are the same community as Musalman Julaha, who have OBC status. Despite this evidence gathered by its own departments, Modi’s office has twice — on 30 October 2006 and 2 January 2007 — sent the matter to the OBC Commission. However, the commission has requested that it be excused because deciding if a community name is to be considered a synonym is not in the panel’s ambit but the chief minister’s office.

When asked why the DUTwas wavering on deciding this matter despite all the evidence available with it, Vanzara declined to comment. “The matter is with the chief minister’s office, please don’t ask me any questions,” he said.

Gandhian scholar Tridip Suhrud says it is this question of social justice that will prove to be the true test of Modi’s newfound sadbhavana. “No one has bought Modi’s sadbhavana idea, not even his usual supporters. If he is talking of sadbhavana, he must talk of social justice. But that is where it may start hurting his hard Hindutva constituency,” argues Suhrud.

12% Muslims’ share of bank accounts in Gujarat, but their loan amount outstanding is only 2.6 percent. This proves they don’t get loans

It is in this shifting but unreliable discourse where community leaders like Maulana Ghulam Mohammed Vastanvi’s position becomes significant. When he was quoted this January as saying that minorities don’t face discrimination in getting development opportunities in Gujarat, it was an endorsement that the Hindu Right eagerly lapped up. Vastanvi was ousted as head of the majlis-e-shoora in a move closely intertwined with an internal power struggle at the Dar-ul-Uloom. The Muslim Right thought it fit to remove Vastanvi even though he clarified that he did not intend to give the chief minister a clean chit for his role in the 2002 riots.

“The old ways of communalism are not working and Modi has shifted to a new secular-speak,” says sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan. “He is saying, ‘I am offering you an option — join the mainstream. Take development. Minimise your demands for justice.’ Secular-speak is always in the language of economic rationality. Investment can be calculated, so it is rational. Anything outside this is subjective, ethnic and irrationaI. In secular-speak ‘and’ is no longer available: ethnic and citizen, Muslim and Indian, seeking justice and mobility. Vastanvi’s problem was he tried to say ‘and’.”

AS MODI was fasting for sadbhavana, riot victims demanding justice were prevented from entering the venue and detained. Their protest is a surface symptom of their long-standing anger and eternal wait for justice. Forget the past, seems to be the Modi government’s suggestion. But will the future be secure in any way?

In 2002, more than 4,500 FIRswere filed in police stations across 16 out of Gujarat’s 26 districts. In 12 districts, the FIRs recorded serious offences such as rioting, arson and rape. Within two years, Gujarat Police closed over 2,000 cases filing ‘A’ summary reports — which says the offence has been committed but the accused is either unidentified or is absconding.

In August 2004, the Supreme Court ruled that there should be an in-depth investigation into these cases. Range IGs were asked to look into FIRs and supporting material and decide if reinvestigation was necessary. Additional DGs were to ensure veracity of the reports and the DGPwas to be in-charge reporting on the status of the cases to the apex court every quarter.

According to the police riots cell data, of the 2,017 cases reconsidered, 1,958 were reopened. Of these, the police made 1,299 arrests in 117 cases till June this year, which makes up a little over 5 percent of the cases. However, data from September 2009 shows the number of cases in which arrests have been made is the same: 117. The police has not made a single arrest in the remaining cases in the past two years.

Razakbhai Ismailbhai Ghauchi, 65, is a farmer from Halodar village in Sabarkantha district. He lives 20 km away from Limbadiya Chowkri, the site of a massacre in which 75 people were killed in 2002. He recalls how he watched from his fields as a mob set his house on fire. Coming out of hiding three weeks later, he tried to file an FIR against 14 persons — including the son of a former Congress MLA living in his neighbourhood — he had identified in the light of the flames that burned his house.

Ghauchi tried to file an FIR accusing these 14 persons with the Malpur Police Station, Modasa Circle Police Station, offices of the DSP and Collector, Himmatnagar, and the National Human Rights Commission, but in vain. He tried again when an inspector from Modasa visited his village in 2003. The police eventually registered an FIR but in his brother Rasul’s name and blamed a mob instead. A few months later, the case was closed. In 2004, when NGO Nyayagruha began work in the region, he got the case reopened.

In 2007, a team from a riot cell in Gandhinagar came and went and closed the case a second time without interviewing him. “When I tried making my way to Rasul’s house, the local police inspector asked me to get the two panchas, the main witnesses. By the time I returned with them, the team had left,” says Ghauchi.

However, the riot cell report has a different story to tell: “A team of senior officers came from Gandhinagar and made a video recording of the reinvestigation in Halodar. Applicant Razakbhai and other witnesses were interviewed. They did not give any information about the accused. The probe was closed on 10 April 2007.”

Nyayagruha coordinator Sheikh Usman, who is following up on 32 reinvestigations in Sabarkantha district, is not amused. “It is the police’s responsibility to ensure that the panchas are there, not the complainant’s. How can they close the case without interviewing the complainant who they knew was present?” he asks.

8TIMES That’s how much poorer urban Muslims are than upper-caste Hindus in Gujarat. This is almost twice the national average

This June, Usmanbhai managed to get a copy of the CD through an appeal to the State Information Commission after Malpur Police Station and the DSP office had both turned down his RTI request. This CD shows police officers perfunctorily interviewing 11 witnesses in less than five minutes before closing the case a second time. An August 2008 video recording of another reinvestigation shows Noor Mohammed, a trader from Tintoi village in Modasa taluka, being interviewed by the police in front of the seven people he had accused of looting his shop in 2002.

For the riot victims, there is palpable anger and disappointment at not being able to find either justice or closure. Ask about Modi’s fast and many Muslims react with a sceptical smile. “He is doing this for ‘raj kaaran’,” is a common refrain. “He thinks he has got 10 more years of relief, so he is celebrating. After the riots, all the relief money came from the Centre, the state didn’t spend a single paisa.” And anger that continues to simmer. “Modi should be punished first. It’s our prerogative to decide whether to forgive him or not.”

From Tehelka

Anumeha Yadav is a Senior Correspondent with Tehelka.

Include Dalits, minorities in Lokpal panel

From Ummid



New Delhi: Dalit group All India Confederation of SC/ST Organisations Tuesday urged the government to give representation to backwards and minorities in the proposed Lokpal panel.

Presenting his 'Bahujan Lokpal bill', group's chairman Udit Raj said: "The government should give representation to these communities not only in the Lokpal committee but also in the process of its selection."

Raj said he will Saturday submit his version of the anti-graft law to the parliamentary panel examining the Lokpal bill.

He added that corporates too should be brought within the ambit of the Lokpal.

Raj said enormous funds are allocated to schemes for these communities, but development is hampered due to corruption, diversion of funds and misutilisation.

Threat to Shehla Masood’s Family

From Ummid Bhopal: The members of Forum-Asia who prepared a report on the killing of Right to Information (RTI) activist Shehla Masood revealed that after her murder her family is also a target as it has received two threat letters. They also expressed surprise at the indifferent attitude of Madhya Pradesh human rights organisation on the issue. Forum-Asia is an independent group of several human rights organisations with headquarters based in Manila. The three-member team comprising Kundan Aryal from Nepal, Balkrishna from Bangkok and Shruti of India spent Sep 17-19 here. "Masood's father and sister informed us that after her killing, they have been threatened through two letters," Aryal told IANS. "They were threatened not to raise the issue much. They handed over the letters to the police. But the letters proved that it was a planned murder and some influential people are behind it," he added. Masood was shot dead in her car when she was leaving her home Aug 16. Names of several state and national leaders of the state's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have got associated with the killing. After initial 20 days of investigation by the local police, now the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is inquiring into the case. Besides meeting Masood's family, the Forum-Asia members also met several officials including police and CBI officers, information commissioner, state human rights members and RTI activists. Their report is significant as they will not only press the National Human Rights Commission but can even submit it to the UN. The members mentioned that they are not an investigative agency and they would not like to accuse any organisation but some facts really surprised them. "It is a fact now that even after 20 days of investigation, police were unable to book the culprits or give any lead in the case," Aryal said. Shruti said: "It is surprising that Madhya Pradesh human rights commission is indifferent on the issue. Its member Vijay Shukul was degrading the case and even said that it is a blind murder, what to do on it." Aryal added: "In our observations, we reached the conclusion that Masood was killed for the sole reason of having filed RTI petitions against influential people." The team will hold a press conference in Delhi Wednesday.

Do Modi and BJP really have reason to celebrate the Supreme Court order?

 

The Last Nine Years...

• February 28, 2002: Mobs attack Gulberg Society. Former Congress MP Ehsan Jafri is charred to death, 68 others are also killed
• June 8, 2006: Ehsan Jafri's widow, Zakiya, seeks FIR against Narendra Modi & 61 others
• May 1, 2007: Zakiya moves the Gujarat High Court after the police don't entertain her complaint. The court dismisses her plea on Nov 2.
• Apr 27, 2009: The Supreme Court asks an SIT to look into the complaint
• May 14, 2010: SIT submits its report with Prashant Bhushan as amicus curiae
• Oct 26, 2010: Bhushan quits. New amicus Raju Ramachandran finds flaws in SIT report. In Mar 2011, SIT is asked to probe case again.
• Apr 25, 2011: SIT submits final report to SC
• May 5, 2011: SC gives report to amicus curiae
• Sep 12, 2011: SC directs trial court in Gujarat to take up the case.

***

It was through journalists that Zakiya Jafri, 75, heard about the September 12 Supreme Court order on her petition seeking an FIR against 62 persons, including chief minister Narendra Modi, in the Gulberg Society killings during the 2002 Gujarat carnage. Seated in her son Tanvir’s house in Surat, where a power cut had cut off her access to television, she got to know about the order when TV reporters sought her reaction on it. They told her that Modi had been granted “a reprieve, a clean chit”, making her worst expectations come true. As Modi tweeted “God is great” and the BJP exulted in “victory”, inundating the media with soundbites, Jafri’s perception only gained strength.
It was only in the next couple of hours, as she spoke with Tanvir, who was in the court with her lawyers and co-petitioners, that her reaction went from dismay and disappointment to quiet satisfaction and triumph. “I understand that we are now finally on the path of justice. I am okay with the order,” she told Tanvir. He, on his part, later told Outlook: “The channels first said Modi got a ‘clean chit’, then the BJP said the same. How is it a ‘clean chit’ when Modi has to appear before the magistrate’s court in Gujarat? Even my mother now understands this.”
The graph of reactions showed by Zakiya, widow of then Congress MP Ehsan Jafri who was killed in their house in Gulberg Society along with 68 others in February 2002, is not unique to her. It more or less represents the mood among other victims of that carnage, as well as citizens not directly affected but nevertheless interested to see how the apex court would deal with the issue.

Somewhere along the way, as Jafri and co-petitioner Teesta Setalvad’s Citizens for Peace and Justice (CJP) took the petition from the then DGP (Gujarat) to the Gujarat High Court and finally approached the SC beginning 2006, the issue had morphed from seeking an FIR against the suspects into total legal censure of Modi. It all boiled down to one simplistic formulation: would the SC put Modi in the dock? A bench comprising Justices D.K. Jain, P. Sathasivam and Aftab Alam refrained from passing such an order; it directed the trial court in Gujarat to take a decision on Jafri’s complaint, and told the SC-appointed Special Investigation Team (SIT) to submit its final report to the trial court, suggesting that it “obtain from the amicus curiae copies of his report” submitted to the SC.
In effect, it meant that, let alone filing an FIR, the Supreme Court stated that the investigation had been completed, an independent assessment made by the amicus curiae and, as per law, the trial court was the appropriate forum in law to decide the case. Modi and others would now appear in the trial court, and the complainants would have the right to be heard before any name is dropped. “It’s indeed a good order,” says Tanvir, an assistant general manager with an engineering company.

“We are five steps ahead of what we asked for, but dismayed that SIT is the agency,” says Teesta Setalvad.

However, the absence of direct strictures against Modi allowed the CM and the BJP to interpret that the SC order was in their favour. Veteran leader L.K. Advani said the order was “a big relief” to the BJP, leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley said “we stand vindicated...we had always said the allegations against Modi are totally false”, while his Lok Sabha counterpart Sushma Swaraj exulted that “Narendrabhai had passed the agnipariksha”. In Gandhinagar, Modi himself expressed relief even as his acolytes took on “the pseudo-secular activists” for unfairly targeting him for direct and indirect culpability. This chimera of a victory allowed the party to again bring up his candidature for the prime minister’s chair in 2014; it undoubtedly boosted Modi’s chances in the state polls next year. Through the din, the Congress soldiered on, maintaining that the SC order “was no clean chit”. Ace lawyer and party spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi refuted the BJP claim that Modi had been exonerated in the case. Though it was the correct legal position, the Congress seemed to have lost the battle of perceptions. Every legal point was given a liberal political spin. For example, the SC order stated that it would not monitor the case now as the SIT had completed all investigation, but the BJP took this to imply that the matter was not so serious any more.
Seizing the moment, Modi wrote an open letter to his “six crore Gujarati brothers and sisters” declaring that he would fast for three days beginning September 17, his birthday, “for peace”. Not to be outdone in the tried-and-tested Gandhian tactic, state Congress leader Shankersinh Vaghela too announced his intention to fast on the same days. The political battle received a boost from another open letter, this one from suspended IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, who had testified against Modi before the SIT and later filed an affidavit in the SC about the crucial February 27, 2002, meeting where Modi had reportedly asked the administration to go easy to allow “Hindus to vent their anger”. Invoking Goebbels and Gujarati poetry, Bhatt termed the SC order “a very cleverly-worded order that takes the perpetrators and facilitators of the 2002 carnage a few leaps closer to their day of reckoning”.

The SC order appears to put the onus on the SIT, chaired by former CBI director R.K. Raghavan. But what is causing disquiet among the petitioners and the anti-Modi brigade is the SIT’s earlier observation that there was no “prosecutable evidence” against Modi. As Setalvad said, “We are five steps ahead of what we asked for, but are disappointed that the SIT remains the agency. Raghavan’s conclusions are a problem, but we now have the locus to argue them in the trial court.” The SIT had submitted its report, but the SC had asked the amicus curiae to independently review it.
In this context, Modi’s legal—and political—future depends on amicus curiae Raju Ramachandran’s observations and conclusions in his report (see interview). “As I understand it, Modi stands an accused now in the sessions court and we will be consulted before his name can be dropped from the case,” says Tanvir Jafri. “If there was any other kind of SC order, it might have had terrible repercussions and the whole country may have come to a standstill.” All eyes are now on the trial court.

From Oulook