Third from lest is Muzammil. Can a youth who was educated and worked with such mixed society ever think of blowing bombs?
The saga of intense physical and mental suffering and deepening despair suffered by the family of Abdul Rahim Kathewale of Malegaon will match the hardship and pain of the concentration camp of Auschwitz of the Nazis. His son was picked up from his Agog Pharma office in Vasai new Mumbai on May 7, 2003. He was put behind bars in Crawford Market police station from where he was sent to Thane central jail. For more than twelve years his case remained in a limbo. The police accused him in the Mulund railway station bomb blast of 2003. He was nowhere near there and yet the police blamed him for boarding train at VT in which the bomb exploded as it reached Mulund. Eleven people were killed including several police women.
At the Crawford Market the police disrobed his father and showed him to the son and told him that his mother would be brought there next for the same punishment. Muzammil Akhtar was so overwhelmed that he signed whatever paper the y gave him. Thereafter Muzammil remained in the dungeon and only very recently in 2015 the hearing in the case started.
The suffering of the family was unimaginable and continues with the same intensity. He lived in Kurla where in another adjoining room his sister lived. She was a teacher and he a computer expert. They would wait until others had eaten and gone. Then they would sit and eat together. On the day of his arrest she waited and waited and missed her meal. Afterward she was told that her brother was admitted in a hospital. The torture of mind and soul was too much for her that he was sick but not allowed to go and see was too much. In that turmoil she was attacked by tuberculosis and was bedridden. She lost her teaching job in grief. Finally she lost her life in sorrow of her brother.
The police gave phone record that does not prove that he was at the site of the bomb blast. Even so they got promotion and had their service book over written with citation of a grave crime solved by them. This is one of the cases of innocent Muslim educated youths being framed in false cases of terror where they did not play any role and yet languished in prisons for decades. They were the bread winners of their family as was Muzammil and his sister Shahenaz Akhtar. His father Abdul Rahim had to sell his house in the heart of the city of Malegaon and move to the outlying powerloom concentration parts where the noise of the looms makes life what Tata Institute of Social Sciences book calls as “living hell.” [1]Earlier he had powerlooms away from his house but since the loss of jobs of his children Muzammil and Shahenaz the family has to eke out existence at the most primary level. In his old age Abdul Rahim minds his trashan machine or winding cotton yarn on spindles for the powerlooms which occupy most of the space of their house
In TIME magazine interview of May 2015 PM Narendra Modi speaks of imaginary apprehensions of Muslims and other minorities and asks them to dispel them. However, Muslims’ apprehensions have stood the test of time and are proven by real facts. But only after decades, in some cases of innocents framed in premeditated bogus charges of terrorism against them, spent in prison. One source of this is discovered in the thesis of Professor Dr Subhan of Tata Institute of Social Sciences. He discovered that the police “depict and create conflict like situation and then manage that in order to prove that they are better administrators and so they deserve promotion.” Rajvardhan Sinha was for years Additional Superintendant of police in Malegaon. He was brought back to Malegaon to handle October 25, 2001 riots. Then in September 8, 2006 bomb blasts he was again in Malegaon. Then he was with Viswas Patil at the Taj Hotel in the 26/11 attacks. It was not his duty there but he managed somehow. How? He has risen in position steeply and is now with IB. In most of his career innocent Muslims suffered enormously. In 2006 blasts in Malegaon all the nine Muslims were accused and detained for more than five years because of his machination including his giving two mobile phones to Abrar and his wife Jannatunisha.
Sinha was in charge of foreigners when the American evangelist Kenneth Haywood was allowed to leave the country though the email was sent from his email account claiming that Indian Mujahideen was behind Ahmadabad and Delhi blasts. For this Mansoor Peerbhoy was arrested and imprisoned. No proof has so far surfaced against Mansoor.
It is strange that all these happened when the Congress was in power both at the centre and in Maharashtra.
The Congress party was timid and feared Hindu backlash and had such notorious leaders like Shivraj Patil and RR Patil who had taken it upon themselves to chase the Muslims rather than the real culprits behind bomb blasts. Then followed the “black Fridays”, when the Muslims were chosen as targets of bombing. The bombers wanted maximum casualties and hence the common mid day prayer on Friday. The exceptional explosion in the night of Wednesday April 5, 2006 gave away the secret of Fridays. It was an accidental explosion of bombs meant to explode at Aurangabad railway station mosque on Friday April 7, 2006. The Wednesday night explosion at the house of the RSS activist involved the professed armed wing of the RSS, Bajrang Dal. The police wanted to cover it as a fire ignited by the storing of firecrackers. But the group of Muslim advocates was adamant that it was a sabotage and forced investigation to be more focused and professional and hence the truth that it was bomb that blew up. Three months later on July 11, 2006 a series of bombs exploded in local trains in Mumbai killing more than 186 people.
These attacks according to Kuldip Nayyar may have been mounted for the reason that “there is greater danger from Hindutva extremism/ terrorism because they ignite the majority. We can deal with the communalism of the minority but the communalism of the majority Hindus would change into riots.” [2] Indeed, Dr Pascricha DGP Maharashtra expressed his view candidly on September 9, 2006 that the blasts in Malegaon on September 8, 2006 were the handiwork of Bajrang Dal and behind the July 11, 2006 serial attacks on local trains were two Maharashtrian leaders. [3]
The other Friday attacks are also from Marathwada regions: the Mohammadiya Masjid in Parbhani (November 2003), at the Quadriya Masjid in Jalna (August 2004) and at the Meraj-ul-Uloom Madrassa/Masjid in Purna in Parbhani district (August 2004).
Abdul Rahim’s remaining life is a shuttle of movement from Malegaon to courts and prison outside for more than 13 years and there is no end in sight. In vain he has trailed after the leaders and now hopes time has come for change, after all his son is innocent. But that is the depth of anguish of aging parents, his and his wife’s and Muzammil’s sibblings.
It is also a grueling fact that Abdul Rahim knows that a Shiv Sena leader and also a labourer union leader had eyed the job that Muzammil was doing. He had him arrested. In the turn of events the police officer who arrested Muzammil got his nephew appointed in the post instead. In this dog eat dog competition the Muslims stand no chance. This is the travail.
------
[1]http://www.indianexpress.com/news/60-per-cent-malegaon -residents-below-poverty-line.tiss-report192776210
[2] “The Threat of Communalism”, Jagran, January 31, 2013.
[3] Punnynagri, September 11, 2006.
Note
Chapter
Does Modi want another crusade: Islam versus the rest?
When the TIME editor Nancy Gibbs, Asia editor Zoher Abdoolcarim and South Asia bureau chief Nikhil Kumar interviewed PM Narendra Modi on May 2, 2015 many things crystallized and others showed up the true picture in a twist of diaoramic reflection.
One, that Modi is a Hindu nationalist in the political register of India which the interviewers could not grasp or prod. They only referred to his colleagues like Sakshi Maharaj, Giriraj Singh, and slew of sadhvis for their intemperate outburst. Perhaps many of them bachelors. The intemperate outbursts match the cold logic of Subramanium Swami, Arun Shouri and others who also are in the fraternity of the right wing ideology of RSS and members of BJP. Despite their obvious differences they are Hindu nationalists. He who worship mother India and prefers her over his biological mother is a different aspect. Abandons his wife or remains celibate is also another dimension. In the end of the interview Modi says that he had vowed to serve mother India at age 15-16 because of the poverty of the people he was renounching the world and later his his marriage to live in celibacy like AB Vajpayee. His wearing the ten lakh rupees pinstripe monogrammed dress to appear with President Barak Obama and the auctioning of it for 4.31 crore to Lalbhai Patel is ostentation of plutocracy rather than democracy. The fanfare of wearing another such gaudy dress for TIME cover took four hours of dress rehearsal which would make the Lal Bahadur Shastri and other previous Prime Ministers turn in their graves.
What he spoke in the interview is the accumulative effect of being doctrined in right wing ideology tempered with sophistry.He also quoted Swami Vivekanand in the same vein.
TIME: “As we are heading to the US political campaign, a lot of America’s political leaders are talking about the role that their
faith plays and their views of themselves as leaders. Could you talk a little about what your faith of Hinduism means to you as India’s leader?
Modi: “Religion and faith are very personal matters. So far as the government is concerned, there is only one holy book, which is the Constitution of India.
“In fact, if I look at the definition of Hinduism, the Supreme Court of India has given a beautiful definition; it says that Hinduism is not a religion, it is actually a way of life.
“If one looks at my own belief, I think I have grown up with these values which I mentioned earlier, that religion is a way of life. We also say ‘Vasudhaiv Kutumbkam’ – the entire world is one family, and respect for all religions. Those are the values I have grown up with.
“Essentially the crux of Indian philosophy, the Hindu philosophy, is that all should be happy, all should be healthy, all should live life to the fullest. It is not something that is specific to a particular religion, or to a particular sect. It’s a[sic] philosophy, it’s a way of life which encompasses all societies.”
In organizing the rath yatra in the first stage of Gujarat in 1990 it was Modi whose efforts mainly rolled the chariot with LK Advani and Pramod Mahajan on it from the Somnath temple . It led to one of the bloodiest trail of bloodbath in India which finally culminated in the demoliton of the Babri mosque and its consequences. This gives away the lie that religion and faith are very personal matter. Modil and his party and patron organization thrive on mobilization Hindus against Muslims and other minorities. The 2002 election was won because of the pogroms of Muslims in Gujarat. Later Modi justified the fake encounter of Sohrabuddin and others for his political calculation.
Another is the view that Modi expressed in the September 2001 debate that Islam as a religion was behind 9/11 attack. This is also continued in the May 2, 2015 interview of TIME. “Till 1993, for example, there were several countries that did not fully understand the full force of this evil. They used to see it and they used to appreciate it purely as a law and order situation of individual countries rather than as an evil force internationally.” He seems to have induced himself to a Rip Van Winkle sleep over chunks of history. What the Nazis did to the Jews and Jews did to the Palestinians by driving them out of the land was also terrorism and qua international terrorism. So terrorism has been used by other communities and not just Muslims alone.
However, Modi went further and considered terrorism as a thought process: “I think terrorism is a thought process. It is a thought process that is a great threat to the international community.” When Bal Thackeray said that Shiva’s third eye was opening around the January 6, 1993 his Shiv Sainiks were allowed to massacre Muslims in Bombay. The police stood as spectators. In his Saamna he openly exhorted to his musclemen to teach the circumcised (Muslims) a lesson. During Modi’s Sadhbhauvna or harmony programme in 2012, Thackeray reminded Modi that it was he who had taught the Muslim a lesson and showed the way to Modi; he was the first that had shown Muslims their place. Modi’s teaching Muslims a lesson on February 27, 2002 and thereafter was a replica of his.
Modi’s view that the world till 1993 was different then; what changed it was the serial bomb blasts in Bombay on March 12, 1993. Here he misses his own Newtonian theory of every action leading to equal and opposite reaction.
He opens a Pandora’s Box when he divides the world between the countries who believe in humanity and those who do not (and support terrorism, like Pakistan): “the countries that believe in human values need to come together and fight this evil force as an ideological force.” Note that “this evil force” is “ideological force.” It would imply that if Islamic terrorism (his phrase from 2001 debate) is the driving force of modern terrorism then the Islamic world is devoid of humanity. To be more overt Jihad is opposed to humanity. This leads to further difficulties, the US aided the Talibans to fight a jihad against the Russian troops! The US led war on terror in Iraq in which hundreds of thousands perished was according to Harold Pinter terrorism and the greatest terrorist was the American president, George W Bush. If Modi’s acts of commission and omission in 2002 led to the genocide of Muslims then the Marathi writer Vijay Tendulkar was right in telling school children in Mumbai then that if he had a gun he would have killed Modi. The chief minister of Gujarat had the temerity to provide him one!
If terrorism is an ideology then RSS also has an ideology of dealing with the minorities. There are numerous cases where its pracharaks directly hatched conspiracy and planted bombs to kill Muslims or to cause a riot between Muslims and Hindus in which it is but natural that Muslims suffer more. This has always happened and there is no sign of let up. Gujarat is an example and Modi too was a pracharak of RSS. On July 26, 2008 at least 16 small bombs explode in Ahmadabad, Gujarat, killing 45 people and wounding 161. A little-known group called the “Indian Mujahideen” claimed responsibility for the attack and the May 13 attack in Jaipur. The email was sent from the wi-fi connection of the evangelist Keneth Haywood in Mumbai for which Mansoor Peerbhoy was arrested. He did not travel to Mumbai on either July 26 or around nor was his family car (in which he was alleged by the police to have travelled) in the city at that time. In 2008 Modi was the chief minister. In the same year there was bomb blast on September 29 in Modasa. On the same occasion there was bomb blast in Malegaon where Hemant Karkare discrovered how the Hindutva group Abhinav Bharat was behind the blasts. The cause of concern was that Modi slept over these issues.
If he sleeps over such matters and keeps his mouth shut when he should be communicating then why does he “choke and tear up” when he speaks about his poverty in his boyhood and youth? The boy who died in Modasa was also very poor so were the victims in Malegaon. One of them was a school going girl named Farheen. She had the ambition to take further education and become a doctor so that she could improve the lot of her indigent family.
Karkare found out in his investigation that Lt Col Prasad Purohit had promised two such incidents to convince the Israelis in return for diplomatic recognition of India as a Hindu Country and asylum in Tel Aviv and steady supply of weapons.
In fact Modi acted very abrasively when spoke of Muslims in general. He scorned at the roadside greasers and mechanics of vehicles and cycle repairers in their shabby dresses. He looked down upon them as an eye sore and hurdle to progress and development. It is also remarkable that in the genocide of Muslims the rich Gujaratis came in their expensive cars to loot the luxury consumer items from the shops owned by Muslims but they burnt the shops of the mechanics and greasers. Modi speaks of humanity versus terrorism. Why did he not then concern with the humanitarian disaster that the genocide was. Those who brought about the sudden change of fortune to Muslims practiced terrorism. Indeed it was international terrorism as the fund to conduct the genocide was collected by Sonal Shah and others of Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America. Those Patels who killed Muslims for their rich land fled to America to hide from the law. Why is Modi so much in agony over his poor past but indifferent to the lot of the poor Muslims in Gujarat?
Modi does not want to remember that like the Jews the Hindu Patels wanted the fertile land of their neighbouring Muslims of Ode village. A large number of Muslims were killed. The poor Muslims who worked for the Patels could not even imagine that they would be herded together and killed. This establishes the fact that the terrorists had chosen their geographical location of the victims. So what is the purport of Modi’s assertion? “We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what are their names, what is their geographical location, who are the victims of terrorism…I think we should not see them in individual pieces. We should rather have a comprehensive look at the ideology of terrorism, see it as something that is a fight for human values, as terrorists are fighting against humanity.”The killers behind the Muslim farmers and farm hands were nonresident Patels who fled to the US. During his visit to the US Modi also legalized the citizenship of some of them.
Even more pointed target of what in Indian jargon of the bill that the Hindu party shot down in parliament was Ahsan Jafri’s house in Gulberg society. More than 70 Muslims had sought refuge from the fury of the extremist Hindus who wanted to destroy it along with the people within. Only three of them were Parsis. The violence was orchestrated from early morning of February 28, 2002. The former Member of Parliament was the bête noir of Modi and opposed him in election of that month on the issue of communalism of Modi. He appealed for help to one and all and made 200 phone calls. Finally at 2 pm he appealed to Modi for mercy. The chief minister cursed him and wondered that he still was alive. A strike force of police was in the area but did nothing. The Parsi housewife Rupa Mody contacted some influential man to save. He asked her how many of them, she said she and her two children. Then she grew conscious that the other hapless were watching her. She added many. She and her daughter were rescued. Most probably her son Azhar was killed in the continuous attacks mounted earlier for more than five hours.
In the meantime the senior police officer in charge of the security of even Modi, Sanjiv Bhatt, conveyed the details of the siege and asked the Commissioner of Police and even Modi to intervene. But to no avail. Can the PM Modi have the cheeks to say TIME that the geographical location of the victim is unessential? That the nameplate of MP Ahsan Jafri is of no use? How could he forget of that entire nameplate, names, group identity and locations, in that specific case should not matter as humanity? Where was his humanity?
Gujarat was very much under his watch and he had visited Naroda Patia in the evening of February 28, 2002…
Even the President of India KR Narayanan spoke to PM AB Vajpayee for the security of the Muslims and then even wrote a letter reprimanding the PM. But to no avail.
The three viz. nameplates, religion of the victims and the geographical location were important. Even before February 2002 surveys were conducted of Muslim commercial establishments and houses and printouts were with the marauding mobs.
What was the scene in the streets? Hundreds of Muslim girls and women were raped. Many of them had their fetuses yanked out and killed and burnt. But those who survived had iron rods and wooden sticks thrust into their vagina. They walked to the refugee camps naked. As they passed through the Hindu areas no one dared throw a piece of cloth to them to cover their nudity nor did give water to drink. Their thirst was unbearable. Even Modi dehyderated by Karan Thapar several years later when the anchor asked him about his image of a mass murderer! Do not TIME Nancy Gibbs, Zoher Abdoolcarim and Nikhil Kumar know this? Did not Peter Hapak who spent 4 hours with Modi catch a glimpse of it in his famed portraiture which appeared on the cover of Asia and US editions dodging the “devil’s horns”?
Friday, May 1, 2015
Indian Muslims Continuing Agony
Indian Muslims’ Continuing agony [book under construction]
Mustafa Khan
Even Keel
2015
Contents
Preface
Chapter 1 Lynching in Nagaland,
Chapter 2 Target generic Bengali speaking Muslims
Chapter 3 “The arc of justice is long”
Chapter 4 Muslims as scapegoat
Chapter 5 “Hindutva is the identity of India”
Chapter 6 Usurping wakf
Chapter 7 Banning beef
Chapter 8 Reconversion
Chapter 9 Women
Chapter 10 Muslims as exporters/importers of terrorism!
Chapter 11 Etched into flesh innocents’ framed arrest
Chaper 12 Hashimpura
Chapter 13 Modi as a cause of agony
Chapter 14 Claiming to teach Muslims a lesson
Chapter 15 Muslims continue to die in fake encounters
Preface
Muslims who chose to live in India and share the land with their fellow Hindu brethren threw in their lot with them. They worked whatever their hand could lay on, the plough in the field or basket in the market to carry the load in tandem with the rich shopper in vegetable market in town. There was a much lesser tense atmosphere then as compared to since 1992. The rise of the Hindu party BJP made a chemical change in their lot for it tried to teach them their place, second class citizens at the sufferance of the Hindus. Hence their saga of suffering physical and mental pain accrued over the decades.
Theatres of action came up not naturally but manufactured by hate ideology of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. It opposed Muslims in every way solely on the basis of their faith, Islam. From such theatres of action as Assam in the east and Gujarat in the west, Kashmir in the north to Kerala in the south there is saga of suffering in galore.
Hashimpura 1987 massacre is enduring pain. More than forty Muslims were herded together and taken to the river and shot and killed. There were some victims who swam to safety with bullet injury. Of the two or three such there was Mohammad Usman. He was injured in the leg. Police told him that they would let him live on the condition that he would “never mention that the PAC shot at us”…If there is one thing I regret, it is statement I made to the police 20 years ago absolving the PAC. He was clearly told that otherwise he would be killed. His survival is life in death. Another victim also survived by the same technique: Zulfiqar Nasir.I thught if I have to survive , I have to pretend to be dead.” [Indian Express March 23, 2015]
Even 28 years later the measly recognition of rehabilitating the victims of Hashimpura is under hung with a qualifying clause which is like quid pro quo: “Although the accused persons have to be acquitted in this case, this court also feels that requirement for rehabilitation of the victims and affected families,” so ruled his lordship Sanjay Jindal.
It is grey region where road rage borders into hate crime against Muslims. In the night of Sunday night of April 5, 2015 when Shahenawaz and histwo sons and wife were returning from marriage dinner on their motorbike they had an ‘accident.’ It lightly grazed a car by its silencer. The five men inside the car came out and quarreled and then beat Shahenawaz with iron rods in full view of his two sons and wife and also molested his wife. His 14 year son Fahd saw them beating his father for 15 minutes until he died. There was traffic disturbance at Turkeman gate area. Next day one of the attackers was arrested. [Inquilab April 7, 2015.]
Taunting the other is the excruciating and seemingly unending source of agony. After winning election in Pune in 2015 BJP and its associates in Pramod Muthalik’s Shri Ram Sena put a banner that they have captured Babri mosque and hence won Ayodhya. Their next aim is Mecca and the next celebration will be in the holy city of Saudia Arabia:
If this was taunting in the stupor of victory then there is the taunting in attacking the enemy and scoring points over them like it happened in Bombay in 1992-3. This causes acute suffering of body and mind in the minority who do not have the wherewithal to take legal recourse or have an impartial judiciary and police to secure their right in our so called democracy. In the London metro bombing 2007 the judge acquitted a real brother of one of the accused. In India where even innocents are framed and extra judicially executed in prison it is no surprise to know the fate of Yakub Memon. He through his lawyer was negotiating with the Indian government to surrender. He was not involved in the bomb blasts of March 12 1993 nor were all the Memons in the family anti India. But the CBI trapped him in Nepal and brought him to India. He was tried and sentenced to death and the SC has confirmed the sentence. The President of India also showed no leniency and the result is that Yakub would be hanged like others. As Masee Rehman who was Mumbai’s bureau chief of India Today in 1993 wrote that Yakub’s conviction is “not just a travesty of justice but the negation of a family’s extraordinary faith in Indian democracy.”
“Our leaders have often said that not a single Indian Muslim joined the al-Qaeda in the past because India is a democracy. An open and fair society with a robust judicial system, they said, does not produce jihadis. So it is all the more ironic that India’s most notorious Muslim family which voluntarily returned to the country to face trial because of its faith in the system today feels it made a big mistake.”[Sunday Express August 5, 2007]
Chapter one
Lynching in Nagaland, finger of suspicion pointing at Modi Sarkar
The juggernaut of the BJP government against Indian Muslims is stepping up. The inhuman dragging of the accused Sharif Khan for more than seven miles, stark naked, pelted with stones and beaten most brutally and then hung on the clock tower in the centre of the Dimapur city of Nagaland is a rare nightmare in India for more than six decades of Independence. For the beleaguered Muslim minority it is continuing agony. The time was well chosen to offset the cultural malaise of the ignominious male psychology of rapists as revealed through the BBC video film India’s Daughter. It was followed by a week in which PM Narendra Modi expressed regret for a 70 year old nun raped in Nadia in West Bengal and a church in Hisar, Haryana vandalized but no regret for Sharif Khan ala no remorse over the contraption used in catching head of dog with which Ahsan Jafri was caught and hacked to pieces or the much nearer in time, the Poona techie’s brutal murder by Hindu Jagran Sameti! The incident of the so called rape in Dimapur on February 23, 2015 was revived to stage manage a protest in which Muslims were again in for identity politics of being meted out jungle law dispensation of justice on March 5th. It surely reminds one of Muzaffarnagar where the incident of teasing a Hindu girl on August 27, 2013 led to the Jat panchayat on September 7 when murder and mayhem was let loose on the Muslims for electoral gains that was to follow. Similar incidents come to mind like Modi taking 10 hours to come up with his manufactured theory that the Godhra train fire was sabotage perpetrated by Pakistan agencies rather than a fire incident that it actually was.
“It is the Centre who is responsible for ensuring the security of the inmates [of the central jail in Dimapur],” remarked Tarun Gogoi, chief minister of Assam on March 5th. He also observed that the medical report did not show any trace of rape.[1]The Modi sarkar chose to look the other way as usual when it comes to perpetrating revanchist attacks on Muslims. It was as if the Modi sarkar was seeking to retaliate Muslims of Bengali-Assamese origin to avenge for Muslims not voting for either the Hindu party BJP candidates or its allies with grouse against the minority in the disturbed NE region. The similarity of ten days interregnum in Dimapur matches with Muzaffarnagar scourge of Muslims, instrument of torture and punishment. First three days passed peacefully for the government of Nagaland had refused to allow protest under Section 177. There was no need to sanction the protest on March 5th. They were in touch with the Home Minister of India, Rajnath Singh. Who then finally prevailed upon the state to bring about lapsing and relaxing Section 177 of Criminal Procedure Code. It clearly forbids unlawful assembly. Why did Chief Minister Zeliang admit that it was a mistake? Was he under pressure and from whom?
In warrior’s uniform tolling the bell but refusing to wear the white skull cap of peace [Islam]
The students wearing school and college uniforms were released from their institutions in a surge of waves upon waves rushing to the central jail where the violence was in full force. This is indication of well prepared plan beforehand and not spontaneous. The central police force could have swung into action and prevented them at the origin, their educational centres. But the students marched like a parade before breaking into running all the way several kilometers to take part in the lynching. This could not be called spontaneous reaction. But Hindutva forces and political parties like BJP and Shiv Sena have never missed any occasion to blame the Muslims. In the Saamna editorial March 9th the party spokesman and editor wrote: "What should have happened in Delhi, has happened in Nagaland. The accused in the December 16 [2012] gang rape case are presently in Tihar jail and international news channels are showing their lives on TV as if they are actors."[2]
The descending hordes on the central prison guarded by central government reserve police, resembled the followers of Jack in their hunt of their arch rival Ralph in William Golding‘s novel Lord of the flies. It is a story of how children left to themselves without discipline, morality and religious pieties can lapse into barbarism and acquiring the law of the jungle. Golding was a born protestant but had qualms over the working of the evil in the world hence got converted to Catholicism. The novel illustrates the transformation in the life of the children. As PM Narendra Modi eulogized the Nagas as well educated and young who speak English, like the children in the novel. Left to themselves they live post ‘lapsarian’ life where their leaders exploit them. The teachers in the schools and colleges could have on their own controlled them and prevented rushing out. But they deliberately failed in their duty as did the police. It reflects on India of 1992 when the central government paramilitary forces and army failed to prevent the destruction of the Babri mosque, pulled down in the presence of the religious and spiritual leaders and heads.
Gogoi knew the combination of the security forces around the prison in Dimapur and the attitude of BJP government to Muslims. That is why he inferred that the central government was responsible. Only a few months back he had cautioned the new prime minister about the dangers of the infiltrators from Bangladesh. But the murderous mobs knew that their victim was Assamese Muslim and that was enough. He was a Muslim.
The manufacturing of a cause to cause a riot was unmistakable. The victim of the so called rape had demand a huge sum of money, two lakh rupees when she visited the hotel. Sharif refused. Therefore, an ingenious excuse, bogus rape report was the instrument of pressure, the despicable jazia. Gogoi had come to know that there was no trace of rape, swab or no swab. Minor injuries to the fingers do not constitute rape. Sending further swabs to the laboratory is eye wash. As a consequence cultural reasons: "The people of Nagaland have long been protesting the illegal migration from Bangladesh. But their protests were ignored. In the middle of this unrest came up this rape incident...This incident made people lose their patience...it is only a result of people's anger against increasing sexual crimes."[Saamna editorial] Bal Thackeray had always called Bengalese speaking Indian Muslims as Bangladeshis. He even advocated attacking them in acts of terror. This discrimination is based not on linguistic factor but religious. The same sophistry is followed in the present situation in Dimapur. Its precursor was the speech of Modi on the eve of 2014 election and the subsequent pogroms in Assam.
The event of March 5th bore the hallmark of Talibans, "a Talibani style of functioning," is emulating of the terrorism practiced by fanatic Muslims in order to also stigmatize the community. The PM had praised the Nagas as sport loving people. The children in Lord of Flies had great fun in hunting the pigs as a sport but it transformed into hunting to kill human beings. It is the leader who is the agent of change. As Subhajit Sengupta put it “Farid[Sharif], it appears, has become a victim of the identity mistakenly or conveniently bestowed upon him. The mob targeted him more for his perceived IBI[Illegal Bangladeshi Immigrant] identity and his alleged crime only acted as the spark. However, there doesn't appear to be any direct link between the alleged rape victim and this violent mob.”[3]
Rape is used as a strategic dynamic of violence on the “other”. In October 2001 riots in Malegaon whispering campaign was launched that Muslims had raped Hindu women and that resulted in 16 innocent Muslims killed in police firing. Muslims hadn’t raped or molested anyone. The other has no right to touch our women but if he dares to do so we have the right and capability to retaliate. “The ugly premise behind both is the same. Women are regarded as the property of a community and what outrages a community is not rape but the temerity of the “outsider” who lays claim to another’s community’s “property”.[4]
The lynching in Nagaland was sown way back during the election campaign 2014. In the fag end of the campaign on May 4, 2014 Modi invoked Mamta Banerji “You are concerned about infiltrators and not your own people ... they must go back, they are robbing the youths of India of their livelihood.”[5] After becoming PM Modi praised the Naga youths while completely ignoring their lifelong insurgency in order to further divide the populace ala ‘your enemy’s enemy is your friend.’ He befriended the Nagas for a cause.
Whose enemies’ enemies were the so called Nigerians at the Ravi Metro Station in Delhi on September 28, 2014? They were trying to board the train when they were pushed aside by other passengers. Their taking objection of this kind of unseemly and unfamiliar behavior was misunderstood. Thereupon the locals started thrashing them. For a long time they were beaten blue. Then the Central Industrial Security Force arrived there, however the beating went on. The CISF took custody of them and as they were taking them to their office the crowds again snatched them from the security personnels and again set upon them. As the crowd raised ‘Bharat mata ki jai’, long live mother India, the victims gave call of ‘Allah is great’. This attempted lynching was caught on camera and played again and again and again. The Modi sarkar took no notice. Given the kind of milieu created by the Hindutva extremists and their sympathizers there is eerie silence that this might lead to a reign of lynching or a reign of terror! That is what had happened in May campaign. The recriminating campaigning of Narendra Modi against the Muslim minority everywhere including West Bengal and Assam is responsible for the plight of the Muslims. A common thread runs through the pogroms of Narayanguri, Dimapur and Ravi Metro Station: religious identity. Not the extermination of rhinoceros to make place for illegal immigrants but extermination of Muslims themselves!
The way Sharif Khan was taken out and lynched leaves no doubt that it was a conspiracy. He had “consensual sex” with her. She was a neighbor from the village of his wife and there was no reason why he should do anything. But the go between the two was well acquainted with the woman and Sharif. He had arranged a deal whereby Sharif had paid her 5000 for having sex with her twice. From the interrogation it was clear that this was not rape and yet the central police did not act firmly. The woman should also have been arrested for the false FIR she had lodged. There was enough time for it. Several days had passed. Furthermore, the hordes which had broken the jail did not touch the middle man who was also lodged in the jail. He was known to the attackers as he was from their Naga community. The first day Sharif spent was in the police custody, it was on the second day that he was transferred to the central jail. The first report of the state government said that it was not clear that he had raped her. In the second report it said “Khan did not rape the woman.” [6]So the question arises who in the meanwhile arranged the mammoth crowd to descend on the jail and break it even when it was heavily guarded not by state force but central government force, CISF that is under Ministry for Home Affairs, under Raj Singh? The agony of Indian Muslims is graphically caught in the photo of the victim of the lynching. Even after his death it is extended to those Muslims who have survived him in the rest of the country. For them to see and remember their fate in the country!
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[1]http://www.mid-day.com/articles/protests-erupt-in-assam-cm-gogoi-blames-csf-for-attack/16043163#sthash.uvN4wlHy.dpuf
[2] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/lynching-of-rape-accused-reflects-peoples-anger-shiv-sena/articleshow/46500427.cms
[3] http://ibnlive.in.com/news/dimapur-lynching-an-identity-lynched/532888-3-226.html
[4] http://www.firstpost.com/india/dont-touch-our-women-the-dimapur-lynching-was-never-about-justice-2143305.html
[5] http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/05/04/modi-assam-muslims-immigrant-congress-idINKBN0DK0FQ20140504
Modi rails against illegal immigrants after Muslim killings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Dimapur_mob_lynching
[6] http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/dimapur-mob-lynching-victim-was-never-raped-nagaland-govt-tells-mha/
Chapter two
Target generic Bengali speaking Muslims designated as IBI
The lynching in Nagaland was a conspiracy to force the Bengali Muslims of Assam settled in Nagaland pack and leave. It was a spectacular display of terrorism.
After a similar spectacular success in sugar bowl of Muzaffarnagar another group, the Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce this time, inducted terrorism in yet another halcyon land. The back ground was prepared in the ten days preceding the lynching. Sharif Khan was no stranger in Dimapur. He was a dealer of car parts in the commercial hub of Nagaland. People also knew that the rape victim was his neighbor who knew her fellow Naga woman, wife of Sharif Khan. The pimp who arranged the consensual sex was also arrested and was in the central prison. The marauding jail breakers left him untouched. As the rape was foisted on what was consensual sex the girl students of the women’s college began protesting at the gate of the college at 10 am on March 4, 2015. In a systematic preparation the Naga youths secured the high way first to prevent National Security Guards and other paramilitary units from entering environs of the central jail and the imitation Eiffel tower in the town square. The commercial hub behind the square was mostly run by Assamese and Biharis, etc. The site of extra judicially executing Sharif was carefully chosen to make the migrant traders read the handwriting on the wall. As one of the targeted victims remarked to Indian Express “There was nothing subtle about it, it was for all of us to see.” The Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce communalized the situation in Dimapur like what Suresh Rana and Hukum Singh had done in Muzaffarnagar. They inflamed the public against the Muslims. Their leaders had already prepared the rationale of lynching. The editorial of a daily put it succinctly: “the problem lies in the fact that though all Bangladeshis may be Muslims (at least in as far as the issue is involved); yet all Muslims are not Bangladeshis.” What Nagaland Post has construed is the Hindutva ideology. First, all Bangladeshis are Muslims and, second, that there were other immigrants who are also Muslims. For Hindus immigrants from the neighbouring country are eligible for citizenship and settlement. But not Muslims. That is how the Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce liaised with Nagaland Confederation of Chamber of Commerce of which Khukeugha Tuccu is chairman. His remark that “There is absolute frustration at jobs going to migrants” is indicative of the source of sowing violence.
Even the late night meeting on March 4th resembles Modi’s late night meeting of February 27, 2002. The National Security Forces were brought in. They must have known how the government had let the people protest the following day. But the students, mostly young girls and women prevented the forces from reaching the scene of action. And those who were already deployed there simply stood and watched the unfolding drama of lynching.
By midday March 4 the shopkeepers were filled with premonition that Sharif Khan was doomed to die as the Nagas went around the main market threatening shopkeepers: ‘Sab Miyakani yatepora jaba lagibo (All Muslim illegal migrants get out)’.”
As in the case of Muzaffarpur where Narendra Modi Sena appeared on the scene just before the pogroms so did Survival Nagaland five months ago. Khukeugha Tuccu, chairman of the Confederation of Nagaland Chamber of Commerce and Industry
The Nagaland Post justified the killing in its editorial: the problem lies in the fact that though all Bangladeshis may be Muslims (at least in as far as the issue is involved); yet all Muslims are not Bangladeshis.”
Muslims in Assam are of different origin, for example the Goria, the Moria and Desin. The Muslim attacks in Assam began in the 13th century and in 16th when the Muslims were defeated by the Ahom dynasty such divisions appeared as Goria, Moria and Desi. Further accentuation in the divisions took place with the rise of All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) BJP. There was also Sufi Azan Fakir’s influence in the mid 17 century. The emigration of Bengali Muslims started in 1826 and continued till India became independent in 1947.[1]
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. [1]Nazrul Haque and Malini Bhattacharjee, from Bangalore’s Azim Premji University, presented a paper — Identities in Quandary: The Complex Narrative of ‘Assamese Muslims’ — at “Reimagining the North East: Narratives, Networks and Negotiations”, hosted by Jamia Millia Islamia’s Centre for the North East.
.
Chapter 3
‘The arc of justice is long’
Gujarat leads the list not because of the pogroms but also the suffering that Muslims go through even after the events of 2002 and the fake encounters. Sadiq Jamal Mahtar was killed in a fake encounter in 2003 on the bogus charge that he was on his way to kill CM Narendra Modi. He was small time criminal who acquired enough money to buy a house in a decent locality of Bhavnagar, Ahmadabad. He approached a famous encounter specialist, Daya Naik, of Mumbai police. Naik instead of helping him arrested him and held him in detention in a private place. He negotiated with the Gujarat police. Inspector Barot went to Borivali in Mumbai and took charge of Sadiq. Inspector GH Gohill of Gujarat police brought Sadiq from Detection of Crime Branch office at Dafnala in Shahibaug to the place of encounter where the Gujarat police killed him in cold blood. Gohil was charge sheeted in 2012 by the CBI court because a witness Ahmedmiyan Malik gave evidence. But strangely he was given bail on March 3, 2015. The court gave him bail on the principle of parity as four other accused policemen—RI Mavani, Km Vaghela, CM Chaudasma and Ajaypal Yadav—were given relief. The two disturbing points are not just that an innocent Muslim youth was killed but was held in illegal detention in a private house in Mumbai kept by Mumbai police but also in illegal detention by the Gujarat police. Neither the Mumbai angle has been investigated nor the Gujarat DCB office detention. Muslims with no crime record of terror were traded in extraordinary rendition and then killed.
--- Indian Express March 4, 2015.
Narendra Modi as chief minister of the state has so far maneuvered successfully to avoid arrest for the crimes against humanity committed during 2002 pogroms and also the fake encounters staged in the name of his security but also on his instruction. He was the white bearded that consented to liquidate Ishrat Jahan and many others because the Subsidiary Intelligence Bureau under its special deputy director Rajendra Kumar created false input against her and also against others like Sadiq. There has been no investigation against the role of SIB or Mumbai police as if they had no involvement. A clean chit by SIT has given enough reprieves to Modi until another election four years later in 2019 while the brother of Sadiq, Sabbir, is waiting for further investigation which he requested for in May 2013. This filibustering has not only wasted time but also given the pliant officials enough time to destroy vital proof and scuttle the cases.
One such instance is from the Gulberg society case. Police Inspector KG Erda was posted around Ahsan Jafri house in Gulbarg society. At 14 [2 in the afternoon] he sent a message on phone that the Hindu crowd of 10,000 was about set fire to the society. He repeated it at 14.45. Modi was also the Home Minister and should have known it. Even Sanjiv Bhatt, security in charge of Modi, personally told the chief minister about the attack in progress. Modi like modern day Nero turned deaf ear to it. The SIT under RK Raghvan is on record that the telephone records were destroyed by the government. So another grieved Zakia has to wait indefinitely for the truth to come out. Thus the agony continues. First the police would not allow an FIR by her and then courts in Gujarat refused to entertain her appeal. Bhatt deputy DGP in charge of internal security including that of the chief minister attended the meeting at the official residence of Modi. The CM denied that he had attended the meeting. Bhatt wanted an FIR filed against the chief minister in a criminal case but as it was impossible under the rule of Modi he submitted details of the meeting off the record to AK Malhotra of SIT. He repeated exactly what the CM had instructed on February 27 2002 meeting: “There is a lot of anger in the people. This time a balanced approach against Hindus and Muslims will not work. It is necessary that the anger of the people is allowed to be vented.” [Tehelka Magazine, Vol 8, Issue 7, February 19, 2011]
Bhatt wanted a case of crime be registered against Modi, an FIR, so that he could depose it officially. This was not to be. So he went on telling the truth nevertheless. It is just because it is off record Indian courts have simply not bothered about it. The courts have not even taken suo motto notice of it. Even the inquiry officer of SIT AK Malhotra did not make note of what Bhatt had said. Bhatt had also remarked that the 27th meeting was held in the basement of the official residence of Modi and he was very much there. Romila Thapar in “India: Memorial to a Genocide- Insist on Justice” says that there was a carefully crafted design to “destroy skilled Muslim artisans” in the genocide. The political and economic motives must not be ignored. [Hard News. November 2012] Modi’s subsequent attempt to brush the genocide under the carpet of development will make the suffering of Muslims continue. The compensation was never sufficient to any Muslim’s loss of life and property. He was also paid half of what any Hindu got, to begin with. The vice president of United States Commission on International Religious Freedom wants to visit India for the purpose of getting justice to the victims of the genocide. Dr Katrina Lantos Swett says “Success has a way of shifting the gaze and re-focusing people’s attention elsewhere… [but] the arc of justice is long,” and that the right of victims to compensation as well as the assigning of responsibility for violence will not “evaporate simply as a result of Mr. Modi’s election.” India is under the watch of the panel as “Tier II” or “watch-list.” “We believe, and many other continue to believe, that not all the questions have been fully answered about the tragic events that happened in Gujarat. There are people in India who continue to believe that there remain unanswered questions. There may also be some process.” “Hindu nationalists forced some Christians and Muslims to convert.”[1]
Much larger issues that have sprung up since Modi assumed office of the PM of India. The vibe of making India a vegetarian country is the brain child of Modi and his ilks. Maharashtra banned beef and slaughter of bulls and bullocks as well. In Haryana also beef is prohibited and significantly what used to happen in Gujarat has spread out to Haryana. In Gujarat under Modi’s stewardship the Hindu extremists would stop trucks carrying meat and beat up Muslim drivers or butchers. The modus operandi was thrashing the driver or meat seller and then dragging him to a police station. A trail of hooligans taking the law in their hands and beating the victims sans mercy was a familiar spectacle. In Maharashtra this caught up with Gujarat and Haryana when trucks carrying meat were overturned and burnt as in Chandwad-Lasalgaon. In Haryana on March 24, 2015 Hindu extremists caught a Muslim Tahseen (43) as he was tending some bulls to a farm. They started beating him. His brother in law Mubin Khan and two others were also with him. They escaped with minor injuries. The marauders carried away Tahseen into the darkness of the night. Mubin went to the police station and wanted to lodge a complaint. The police drove him away. Next day Tahseen’s dead body was found in a farm canal. There was sign of torture on his body. His assailants had accused him of slaughtering a cow. Mubin and others denied it and accused the police of their complicity in the murder. [Inquilab March 26, 2015] This would be the earliest of brutal attack on Muslims since the heightened tension over the ban of beef became a raging passion of the supporters of Modi. As usual Modi did not say a single word over the worsening situation after his becoming PM. So his moving to Delhi is extending of his regimen of Gujarat chief minister ship.
Rashid alias Pandya[a Brahmin], Hamid alias Lendi [dry pellet refuge of goats]and Asif Talathi[the lowest land revenue collector] are, patently in their aliases at least, natives of Malegaon who have been booked for killing two calves on March 25, 2015 in Bajrang wadi area of Malegaon. Once very sensitive area and prone to communal violence till a score years earlier, but now overcrowded with power looms and ancillary shops. Once famous for cowsheds housing hundreds of buffaloes however now overtaken by powerloom sheds and living quarters. It is cheek by jowl to the Azad police station and the old police check post at Naka Belbag. Famous for teeming population of police informers a larger number of women overrunning males, Malegaon south matches Malegaon north of Central talkies Idgah area notorious for not only police informers but also its bygone past of brothels. So additional superintendant of police Sunil Kudasne’s getting tip off of the slaughter need not surprise anyone. He directed his deputy Mahes Swai to take action Swai ordered Azan Nagar police inspector Masud Khan to arrest the three. By the time the communication was delivered the three decamped. Thus the new Maharashtra Animal (Amended)act banning the slaughter of bulls and bullocks surfaced in action as it was the first case namely 3004/2015.
Around the same time a meeting at 9 pm on March 25, 2015 was held at the gate of old Gulshan school Jaffarnagar SR No 90. Mufti Ismail Qasmi addressed he butchers in distress and empathize with them for their continuing striking against the ban on beef. He reminded the audience that it was the protest of Malegaon citizens in the wake of the bomb blasts on September 29, 2008 that led to the discovery of Hindutva terrorism. Likewise Malegaon would very soon let the world know that they would organize protest against the ban on beef and would successfully get the ban abrogated. The Malegaon Municipal Corporation Mayor Haji Ibrahim Md Yasin remarked that 313 companions had started a move for Islam and they showed how they succeeded. In the same way there are few as in Malegaon who have started the move to get the ban on beef abrogated and they would succeed.
The need to empathize with the butchers’ community was the need of the hour for thousands of the butchers had struck work and was facing starvation. There was no progeny of a cow to be seen with a butcher going to the chopping block anywhere in the town.
Their travails to survive these difficult times was crystallized in the words of one Naeem Qureshi from Malegaon: “We feel disappointed and cheated by the government. They are spending around Rs 1,000 crore to protect cows, bullocks and buffalos, but what about us> we are human beings. We have been left jobless.” [Indian Express, March 27, 2015]
Another culinary habit of the Muslims is biryani most popularly rice cooked with beef with generous use of condiments and spices. It is the most celebrated cuisine of south east Asia. Biryani is also a tell-tale item of the complex relationship. Modi at one time had said he would not serve biryani to Pakistani. The chief public prosecutor Ujwal Nikam revealed on March 20, 2015 about the Pakistan born Ajma Kasab. “Kasab never demanded biryani and was never served it by the government. I concocted it just to break an emotional atmosphere which was taking shape in favour of Kasab during the trial of the case.” [ Asian Age March 21, 2015]Nikam was speaking at Jaipur in an international conference on counter terrorism. Kasab also had broken down in the court. “It was a Raksha Bandhan that day[ when Hindu women tie a trinket on the wrist of their brothers and pledge to always help and maintain them]. “Some speculated that Kasab had become emotional in memory of his sister and some even went on to question whether he was terrorist or not. This kind of emotional wave and atmosphere needed to be stopped. So after that I gave a statement to the media sing Kasab has demanded mutton biryani in jai.” Nikam could also create other false excuses for the accused ones. Kasab was after all a Pakistani but he should have been probed more rigorously for there are attenuating circumstances. Even the ex-jail chief of Arthur road jail Rajendra Dhamne denied that Kasab ever ate beef biryani. “He [Kasab] never asked for non-vegetarian food. He didn’t like non-vegetarian food it seemed and for the record we never offered him vegetarian food. He used to get the same food, rice, dal and chapattis as other prisoners.”[ Asian Age March 22, 2015]
This surely is an eample of telling lies to frame a Muslim. It is a tip of the ice berg. The fisherwoman Anita Udaiyya had seen the six terrorists who had climbed out of the dinghy at Cuffe Parade. She had spoken to them and knew them. Her statement jolted the US and it had her transported by an emergency flight to record her statement in the US court. She also averred she had not met Kasab. She had seen him only in the hospital. He was not one of them that landed at Cuffe Parade.
Justice Tahiliyani had conducted the trial of 26/11 at Mumbai. He was also disturbed to know that one of the accued Fahim Ansari had never met Kasab and did not know him. It was music to his ears so he cleared all the people from the court and questioned about it to Fahim. Lawyer Sahahid Azmi was killed for he had proved that the map the public prosecutor referred as drawn by Fhaim to guide Kasab and others in the metropolis was planted by the police.
The framing of Fahim and Sabauddin Ansari in 26/11 shows the travail of how the Muslim community is passing through trauma of suffering.
Dr. Lantos-Swett added, “Success has a way of shifting the gaze and re-focusing people’s attention elsewhere… [but] the arc of justice is long,” and that the right of victims to compensation as well as the assigning of responsibility for violence will not “evaporate simply as a result of Mr. Modi’s election.”
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[1]http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/world/allow-us-to-visit-india-us-panel-on-religious-freedom/article6991274.ece
March 14, 2015
Tehelka Magazine, vol 8, issue 7 February 19 2011
Contains details of Bharwad, Sanjive Bhatt attending meeting Pandya in another room.
Chapter 4
Muslims as scapegoat
A nun in West Bengal’s Ranaghat was raped. She was 71 years old. In the days that followed and the days that preceded there were other such incident of targeting Christians, vandalizing their churches and stealing things. Julio Ribeiro a former police commissioner of Mumbai and super cop on assignment to fight Sikh extremists in Punjab and advise Modi government in the 2002 pogroms of Muslims felt for the first time that Christians were no more safe in India. Nitin Gadkari a senior minister in the Narendra Modi government at centre since May 2014 felt it very sad that Ribeiroji should express such regrets in public. In 2002 pogroms many Muslim girls and women met more horrible fate of being raped and burnt alive or had their fetuses destroyed at the point of swords and then made bonfire. The then defense minister George Fernandes observed that these were nothing new to India. Raping an old nun is as condemnable as raping and killing and burning the victims of gang rapes as in Gujarat. However the fate of the Muslims shows a new watershed. Narendra Modi as chief minister of Gujarat played politics over the horrendous mass murders, mayhem and then the fake encounters.
As in Sharif Khan case of Dimapur lynching, there is attempt to blame illegal Bangladeshi immigrants for the rape. Gadkari felt ‘very sad’ he said and had conveyed his feeling to the PM. Modi according to him remarked “we will not protect anyone damaging a minority institution, church or mosque” as “law and order is our responsibility, we will protect minorities.” But how the duo chose to do it is patently what they have imbibed from the RSS. Gadkari: “Everyday in Parliament, there is a new issue to stall business the Left, Congress and anti-BJP have been out to prove that we are against minorities ever since we were elected. Their biggest capital is fear…minorities have nothing to fear from the government, least of all Ribeiroji. He is our icon.” “…incidents happen , now take this nun incident in West Bengal, two Muslim youths were involved in it, one should not look at these things through the prism of caste, sect or religion.” The report of the arrest mentions one Shaikh Salim arrested from Habra WB. Although the FIR mentions that there was only one rapist, but the WB police have also arrested Sikandar Shaikh alias Salim from Nagpada in Mumbai. His face resembles one of the four shown on CCTV grab. The third man arrested was Gopal Sarkar from Bangladesh border. If these were robbers albeit illegal immigrants it is still not clear why they would rape the nurse, a septuagenarian? In yet another case the antecedents of Gopal and Salim are not clear. DNA test could help. The three arrested are of different religions. If robbery was the motive then the religious angle is irrelevant. Even so from the viewpoint of the illegal immigrants it is relevant although one of them is a Hindu.
Playing identity politics pays rich dividends to BJP. But it also helped chief minister Mamata Banerjee of WB. She won the election by defeating the CPIM when it was found that Rizwanur Rehman was killed and the involvement of police was widely suspected. The police commissioner of Kolkata Prasun Mukherjee had defiantly remarked: "If the police does not interfere in these (family) matters, who will do it? PWD (Public Works Department)?"CM Buddhadeb Bhattacharya lost the election because of the proximity of Mukherjee to him. Even a leftist government can play with a minority. Rehman had married Priyanka Todi, daughter of Ashok Todi of Lux Cosi. He had offered to convert to Hindu religion even that did not save his marriage and ultimately his life. Rehman’s last call on phone to his lawyer proved that Ashok Todi did not like his daughter to marry a Muslim.
Rehman had married Priyanka on August 18, 2007 under Special Marriage ACT. Both of them lived together and then he brought her to his house on August 31. Subsequently both of them complained to the commissioner of police that Ashok was threatening them. Rehman was killed on September 21.
The sad parting of her son was in itself overwhelming to Rizwanur Rehman’s mother Kishwar. But when she received a lawyer representing Priyanka asking her to return what the daughter in law had given to her and her son it was unbearable wrench: “You should have come to meet a mother who lost her son because of the conspiracy hatched by influential police officers and your father. It is a matter of deep regret that you have sent the letter through your advocate...”
“I am hoping that you will come yourself and take these things. It will be very unfortunate if I have to hand them over to an advocate’s peon or clerk instead of my daughter-in-law with whom I have no judicial dispute.”[ Priyanka’s letter hurts, says Kishwar Jahan Hindustan Times ]
Sheikh Salim and Sikandar are termed decoits but what about Rizwanur Rehman? He was an Indian like Sharif Khan. The police and the right wing groups conveniently deal with Muslims in grossly inhuman way. Even the railway police officer making inquiry into the mysterious death of Rehman was killed within a year to destroy evidence. The police commissioner Mukherjee and his men had destroyed the cell phone cards of Rehman as well as that the railway officer Arindam Manna on February 11, 2009 who was making investigation into the murder.
Chapter 5
“Hindutva is the identity of India”
The celebration of the birth of Ram on March 29 2015was made the pretext by Hindu Rashtra Sena in Ahmadnagar to manufacture a riot. They took out procession through areas with several mosques. Whichever mosque came in the way was targeted. Stones thrown at them or their cement grills or iron grills were broken. They had come with a prepared agenda of shouting anti Muslim slogans and provoking the minority community. It is important to note that in the aftermath of the murderous attack on techie sheikh Mohsin in Pune last year the Hindu Rashtra Sena was banned. So the HRS took out procession with permission and staged attacks on mosques on the route. The police did nothing to prevent. The police arrested 35 people of both the communities. [Inquilab March 30, 2015] The episode demonstrates what the right wing groups want the world to know by shouting from their roof top that India is a Hindu country; the minorities either merge or perish. The riot underscores that they are celebrating not just Ram’s birth day but more.
On 50th Anniversary of foundation of its religious wing, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, RSS boss Mr. Mohan Bhagwat, obderved “Hindutva is the identity of India and it has the capacity to swallow other identities. We just need to restore those capacities.” 2015 is the fiftieth anniversary of VHP.
Last year in November 2014 450 Muslim families of Kakyannagar and Makatipura had their houses demolished and were to be housed in new colonies. New the colonies have been built but in March 2015 the Muslims were denied new Manjalpur complex because the Hindu neighbours object the Muslims as “problmen elements.” {Indian Express April 2, 2015]
Dattatreya Hosabale Joint General Secretary of RSS said on Marh 13, 2015
“There are no minorities in India where all people are "culturally, nationally and DNA-wise Hindus"
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/no-minorities-in-india-all-culturally-dna-wise-hindus-rss/articleshow/46553317.cms
Chapter 6
Usurping of Wakf properties
Dr Maria Montessory says that when the oppressed community members exploit members of their own community, it is worst. Mufti Mukarram Sahib becoming a tenant of a roof of Chandni Chowk wakf property [whose house number was that of Fatehpuri masjid]is an example of it. He moved an application for tenancy in the name of his wife giving the address of hers at her father’s house and got it in April 2003when the only member who could object went away on Haj arrangement tour. Shakir Ansari became became a national secretary of the minority cell of BJP in Modi set up.
“The usurpation of the roof of a waqf property, that too of a mosque, by a religious scholar aided and abeted by the big ones in Delhi Wakf Board is nothing less than a tragedy in the religious and milli life of the Muslims of Delhi” Plaint of Shahi Imam of Masjid Fatehpuri against Delhi Wakf Board
By Azeem Akhtar
5 April 2015 by Urdu Media Monitor.Com
Chapter 7
Banning beef
http://m.firstpost.com/india/hindutva-fallacy-sorry-rss-beef-ban-nothing-religion-2161729.html
The Hindutva fallacy: Sorry RSS, the beef ban has nothing to do with religion
Ajaz Ashraf
The ban on cattle slaughter, regardless of their age or use, and the imposition of stringent punishment for violating it has spawned a fiery discourse which has been hypocritically, and erroneously, framed as an incendiary issue between Hindus and Muslims.
This discourse justifies the ban on the ground that the slaughter of cattle, whether the cow or the bull or the ox, hurts the religious sentiments of Hindus, besides offering a slew of economic arguments in support. It also accuses Muslims of completely disregarding Hindu sentiments, consuming beef even though the cow doesn't necessarily have to be the animal which has to be sacrificed for religious purposes.
This hypocritical discourse isn't of recent vintage but dates back to the months in which the Constituent Assembly was debating and framing the Indian Constitution. But before reprising that debate, it is pertinent to recall the beef festival that lower caste students of Hyderabad's Osmania University organised in April 2012, triggering a controversy which dominated headlines for days.
At the time some 2000 students partook of beef biryani even as a singer parodied a popular jingle to croon, "Beef is the secret of my energy.” This wasn't merely a display of irreverence, but an assertion of what lower caste students believed was an unassailable logic – beef is a taboo for high caste Hindus, not the Dalits, sections of OBCs, Muslims and Christians. These students, therefore, argued that in not serving beef in hostels, the university authorities were showing an unjustifiable predilection for the religious sensitivity of high caste Hindus.
The 2012 episode belies the claims of those who insist beef is the staple of only Muslims and Christians. Indeed, the argument of hurt religious sentiments to ban cattle slaughter is yet another technique of the Hindu Right to create a homogeneous religious community through the imposition of high caste dietary practices on those lower to them in the social hierarchy.
The Hindu Right has sought to achieve its goal of banning cow slaughter through two methods. One, it has sought to create the myth of cow being the symbol of religious veneration in all times, citing this as the reason why beef is a taboo food item for Hindus. This myth has been punctured through several scholarly studies, which have marshalled an impressive range of evidence to establish that beef was prohibited for only high caste Hindus – that too, perhaps, in the last millennium.
Two, the Hindu Right has invoked economic arguments to justify the ban on cow slaughter. Essentially, this harps on the pivotal role the cattle play in the agrarian economy, from providing milk to pulling the plough to being a source of cheap fuel, to being a symbol of wealth. The sheer usefulness of the cow was cited as the underlying reason why it acquired an exalted status in the Hindu religious consciousness.
Both these arguments – religious and economic – were cited to demand a ban on cow slaughter in the Constituent Assembly.
Believe it or not, Muslim members in the Constituent Assembly said they could comprehend the decision to ban cow slaughter to show respect to Hindu religious sentiments. But this reason should be cited unambiguously, they demanded, not incorporated into the Constitution on flimsy economic grounds.
The ferocious debate over the cow is brought out in a fascinating essay, Negotiating the 'Sacred' Cow: Cow Slaughter and the Regulations of Difference in India, which academician Shraddha Chigateri has authored.
Incredible though it may sound, a few members in the Assembly wanted an Article prohibiting cow slaughter to be incorporated in the Fundamental Rights of the Constitution. Chigateri notes tongue-in-cheek, "This unique constitutional protection would have meant that the protection of the cow would have been treated on par with other human fundamental rights such as right to life, right to equality, etc…”
It was on Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar's insistence that cow protection was included in the chapter on the Directive Principle of State Policy, and not as a Fundamental Right. This found expression in Art 48, which states, "The State shall endeavour to organise agriculture and animal husbandry on modern and scientific lines and shall, in particular, take steps for preserving and improving the breeds, and prohibiting the slaughter of cows and other milch and draught cattle.”
It is this provision which became the basis for several states to enact laws prohibiting or restricting the slaughter of cattle.
In the Constituent Assembly debate, two members, Pandit Thakur Dass Bhargava and Seth Govind Das, cited economic reasons to demand ban on cow slaughter. However, there were subtle differences between their arguments – Bhargava, in contrast to Das, stated explicitly that he wasn't demanding the ban for religious reasons.
Bhargava's intervention in the debate bears this out. He said, "To grow more food and to improve agriculture and the cattle breed are all inter-dependent and are two sides of the same coin. [ ...] The best way of increasing the production is to improve the health of human beings and breed of cattle, whose milk and manure and labour are most essential for growing food. [...] From both points of view, of agriculture and food, protection of the cow becomes necessary.”
Das, on the other hand, also invoked religion in his argument saying, "... Cow protection is not only a matter of religion with us; it is also a cultural and economic question.”
The debate took another turn as a Muslim member from the United Provinces, Z.A. Lari, weighed in, "Mussalmans of India have been, and are, under the impression that they can, without violence to the
principles which govern the State, sacrifice cows and other animals on the occasion of Bakrid.”
He then went on to argue, "If the House is of the opinion that slaughter of cows should be prohibited, let it be prohibited in clear, definite and unambiguous words.”
What could those definite and unambiguous words be? The answer was provided by Syed Muhammad Sa'adulla, a Muslim member from Assam.
He said, "I do not want to obstruct the framers of our Constitution ... if they come out in the open and say directly: 'This is part of our religion. The cow should be protected from slaughter and therefore we want its provision either in the Fundamental Rights or in the Directive Principles ... But, those who put it on the economic front ... do create a suspicion in the minds of many that the ingrained Hindu feeling against cow slaughter is being satisfied by the backdoor.”
The word backdoor here implied citing economic reasons to justify what was a religious demand voiced by the Hindu Right. Tearing into Bhargava's contention, Sa'adulla said that organising of agriculture on scientific lines presupposes culling "useless cattle” and introducing better breeds. He rebutted the arguments that the Muslims were the principal opponents to the contemplated ban on cow slaughter, claiming that there were thousands and thousands of Muslims who did not eat beef, and that for Muslims engaged in agriculture cattle were as useful economically as they were to their Hindu counterparts.
To quote Chigateri, "Syed Sa'adulla questioned the argument that Hindu reverence for the cow was always reflected through a taboo on slaughter, arguing that in Assam, when there was a shortage of cattle and a prohibition on the slaughter of milch or draught cattle, it was Hindus who resorted to slaughtering cows with the argument that the cattle were unserviceable and 'dead weight'.”
Nevertheless, Article 48 was included in the Constitution, its words providing an economic gloss to what was essentially a religious demand. This provision a clutch of Muslim butchers challenged in the courts in the 1950s. The Supreme Court upheld the notion that the cow was held in reverence by the Hindus, but many legal luminaries, such as Prof Upendra Baxi, thought the judges perhaps hadn't been as rigorous in examining evidence to reach such a sweeping conclusion.
The economic arguments, however, were difficult to sustain. Ultimately, the Supreme Court through a clutch of judgements held that a total ban on bullocks and bulls, despite being of old age and no longer economically useful, amounted to imposing unreasonable restrictions on the butchers – and was, therefore, ultra vires of the Constitution.
However, the Supreme accepted the total ban on cattle slaughter in 2005, through a judgement upholding the Gujarat government's legislation on the issue. It declared bullocks and bulls are useful, as Chigateri notes, "past a certain age, in terms of added benefits of urine, dung – manure and biogas, especially in this age of alternate sources of energy.”
The court also cited Section g of Article 51 A to support its verdict. This provision enjoins citizens "to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes, rivers and wild life, and to have compassion for living creations.” For a country debating euthanasia it might seem touching, in very ironical ways, to demonstrate compassion for the ageing and sick bull.
Violation of the ban on cattle slaughter could lead to the guilty being banished for five years in Maharashtra and 10 years in Haryana. Might not marginalized social groups– Dalits, sections of OBCs, and religious minorities –think that cattle in India enjoy greater privileges than them? When hypocrisy trumps reason, the consequences can only be bathetic.
(Ajaz Ashraf is a journalist from Delhi. His novel, The Hour Before Dawn, published by HarperCollins, is available in bookstores. Email: ashrafajaz3@gmail.com)
March 14, 2015
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India - Maharashtra: The beef ban leaves a bad taste in the mouth
Daily News and Analysis, March 12, 2015
The beef ban leaves a bad taste in the mouth
Faizan Mustafa, Hyderabad
The presidential assent to a long-pending Maharashtra Bill on cow slaughter will lead to livelihood loss for thousands of people.
The ruling BJP’s position is quite clear. Its manifesto for the Haryana elections had promised a law to stop cow slaughter in the state.
“The slaughter of cow would be considered equal to murder of a person,” said Ganeshi Lal, chairman of the manifesto committee. Prime Minister Narendra Modi too talked of a ‘pink revolution’ during the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections.
India today is the world’s top beef exporter, second only to Brazil. This is legal as the buffalo is not a sacred animal. Beef worth $29 million was exported in 2012-13.
In BJP-ruled Gujarat, meat export has doubled in the last decade and it is among India’s top 10 states with slaughterhouses. No subsidy is given to meat exporters. The Supreme Court in 2007 had refused to ban cow slaughter on the grounds that it is a policy matter and it is for the government to take a decision.
A few years ago Justice ML Kaul of the Punjab and Haryana High Court had observed that the penalty for cow slaughter must be enhanced. Expressing concern that cow slaughter entailed an imprisonment of five years, the judge said it should be treated on a par with murder, with 14 years’ rigorous imprisonment.
In the Constituent Assembly, some members wanted a ban while others were in favour of partial prohibition.
Raghu Vira argued that in our civilisation Brahma-Hatya and Go-Hatya were on a par. He went on to say, “(The) cow is the mother of the individual, she is the mother of the nation.”
It is interesting to note that Muslim members too made a forceful case for the inclusion of cow slaughter in the fundamental rights chapter of the Constitution.
A historical fact not often referred to is that most of the Muslim rulers of India did in fact ban cow slaughter even during Bakrid, keeping in mind Hindu sentiments.
The British government lifted this ban. During Muslim rule, only 20,000 cows were slaughtered a year but the British were killing approximately 30,000 a day.
The British established India’s first slaughterhouse in 1761. The cow protection movement of 1880-94 was basically directed against the British and Muslims actively participated in it. The recent Deoband fatwa banning cow slaughter received little media attention.
After Independence the government of India did send a note to all states, asking them to avoid a ban on cow slaughter because it would lead to great economic loss, particularly to the leather industry.
However, several states have enacted laws imposing restrictions on the slaughter of animals, including a ban on the slaughter of cows. Some of these laws did come under court scrutiny and almost all of them were pronounced constitutional.
Certain questions regarding these decisions still remain unresolved. One such vital issue is whether these decisions are sound pronouncements of law if examined from the perspective of freedom of religion guaranteed to the Muslims of India by the Constitution.
Constitutionally speaking, between the directive principle of prohibition on cow slaughter and the fundamental right to religion, it is the latter that is more important and shall prevail.
In 1958, it was held by the Supreme Court that cow slaughter was not an essential Islamic practice as Islam did not mandate Muslims to slaughter cows. But then why did no one ever raise the question about the status of cows under Hinduism?
Beef-eating was common in the Vedic and subsequent times even among Brahmins. It was probably for this reason only that the Vajpayee government’s draft Bill on cow slaughter justified the enactment of the law on grounds of cruelty to animals and not on religion.
Faizan Mustafa is vice-chancellor, NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad
The views expressed by the author are personal
Chapter 8
Reconversion
http://communalism.blogspot.com/?m=1
Archive
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-ribeiro-raises-questions-whether-pm-can-rein-in-right-wing-2069368
uished former IPS officer Julio Ribeiro today raised questions on whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP can rein in the Hindu right-wing elements and stressed on the need to promote inclusive development.
86-year-old Ribeiro, a former Mumbai Police Commissioner, also said he never felt that he belonged to a different religion now in comments that came against the backdrop of controversial campaigns like 'Ghar wapsi', attacks on Christian institutions and RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat questioning the work of Mother Teresa.
"People are not listening to him," Ribeiro, a former DGP of Gujarat and Punjab, told PTI when asked whether he expected the Prime Minister to act against Hindu groups indulging in questionable campaigns. He was Punjab Police chief during the insurgency in the state in 1980.
To a query on whether BJP can check such elements, he said, "I don't know if they can rein in such elements." Can they(BJP) do it? I am not sure," he said, adding, "What we need now is inclusive development for all the people in the country and not just some sections." Ribeiro, who stressed that today in his 86th year he felt threatened, not wanted, reduced to a stranger in his own country, said that he never felt that he was belonging to a different religion. He is also a former Ambassador to Romania.
"I never felt this for 85 years plus I am nearly 86 now and I was always accepted by everybody and I accepted everybody. I never felt that I was belonging to a different religion and I am not very religious also," he said.
Ribeiro said he has been fighting for the country doing work for the nation, doing work for the people, the poorest without bothering about which religion they belonged to and we have been brought like that.
"We never think about what is this man's religion or that man's caste or things like that. We are just Indians," he said.
http://www.rediff.com/news/interview/ghar-wapsi-was-motive-behind-ranaghat-attack/20150319.htm?pos=7&src=NL20150320&trackid=7MGeiBNRiOgHpjiU22XIw0UhYgsPCBFedrAsNDfdS8Q=&isnlp=0&isnlsp=0
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Rediff.com » News » 'Ghar wapsi was motive behind Ranaghat attack'
'Ghar wapsi was motive behind Ranaghat attack'
A
March 19, 2015 09:29 IST
'If robbery was their motive, they would have run away with the money.'
'After taking the money, they gang-raped the nun, desecrated the chapel, threw the Holy Communion, broke the statue and ran away with Mother Mary's crown.'
'We must not forget that vandalising churches and dishonouring Christians has become a regular affair in India in the past few months. This incident is a part of such destructive patterns.'
"There is enough evidence which indicates that ghar wapsi was the main motive behind the Ranaghat incident," says Professor Maria Fernandes, vice chairperson of the West Bengal Minorities Commission.
At a convent school in Gangnapur village in Ranaghat in West Bengal's Nadia district, a gang of four to six men ransacked and robbed the school, and raped a 72-year-old nun last week.
A day after her visit to the convent, a visibly-shaken Professor Fernandes, below, left, spoke to Indrani Roy/Rediff.com at her office in central Kolkata.
"I am sad. And I am angry, very very angry," she says. "How could someone molest our mother? Are we moving back to the Dark Ages?"
Professor Fernandes visited the rape survivor at the hospital on Tuesday and was amazed by her strength of mind and calm disposition.
"It is sickening to think that someone could attack such a divine soul," she says.
The commission submitted its first report to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee shortly after this interview ended.
Why do you think that ghar wapsi is behind this incident?
We have proof that suggests that those people had come to the convent to vandalise and to desecrate the Christian place of worship.
If robbery was their motive, they would have run away with the money.
Besides, though a section of the media is claiming that there was 5, 6 lakh (Rs 500,000 to Rs 600,000) kept in the convent on that particular day, I found out that the convent had kept aside about Rs 70,000 to 1 lakh (Rs 100,000) only to meet its daily expenses.
Moreover, after taking the money, they gang-raped the nun, desecrated the chapel, threw the Holy Communion, broke the statue and ran away with Mother Mary's crown.
Why so? Who can provide an answer?
We must not forget that vandalising churches and dishonouring Christians has become a regular affair in India in the past few months.
This incident is a part of such destructive patterns.
And in this particular case, to everybody's shock, the offenders went to the extent of raping a nun.
You said you had met top administrative officials at Ranaghat.
It was essential for me to meet the administrative heads for compiling an unbiased report.
From my interactions, I gathered that the gang's intent was to attack Christian sentiment.
Initial probe by the state Criminal Investigation Department also sends out such a signal.
Though it is too early to draw a conclusion, it is quite clear that the ghar wapsi issue topped the goons's agenda.
If what you are suggesting is true, who do you think could have implanted those criminals?
(Pauses) That's for the CID to find out.
After my visit to the convent and discussions with the relevant people, I am almost certain that those people don't belong to this state. Even Father Saroj, the parish priest of Ranaghat, feels the same.
During your conversation with the nuns at the convent, did you get any information about the attackers?
There were about six of them and one wearing a monkey cap (as caught on the closed-circuit television) was apparently the kingpin. The others were referring to him as 'Boss.'
The picture of an auto-rickshaw – an urban elephant – has been cropped from a larger painting by Feroz Khan, a young artist based in Delhi.
Chapter 9
Women
I always remember, when the riots broke out in Maharashtra’s Nasik district in Malegaon, we reached on the next day. Both the religious groups claimed that their women had been violated and that was the reason why they participated in the riots. But this was far away from the truth. We went around the villages and spoke to people from both the communities. We spoke to Nian Ahmed from Malegaon and the leaders from Bhavsar. There was vast difference between what the men and women had to say on the issue. The Hindu women from Bhavsar colony said that although men bearing weapons had come after them, they were given protection by the Muslim women living in the neighborhoods. And in Nihalnagar, the Muslim women said that they were given protection by the Bhavsar colony consisting of Hindu women. This is a reality that happens every time. The weak is targeted by the fundamentalists who use religion for their expression of power and violence spreads further. `Why should we keep quiet when our women are under attack and when our religion is under attack’, they asked. But the reality was different.
http://www.countercurrents.org/patkar130315.htm
Unite! Let's Make Sure That Kandhamals Are Not Repeated
By Medha Patkar
13 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/3/modi-is-no-ally-for-indias-women.html
Modi is no ally for India’s women
He has long ignored Gujarat mass rapes perpetrated under his watch as state’s chief minister
March 13, 2015 2:00AM ET
by Sheena Sumaria @SheenaSumaria
Leslee Udwin, the director of “India’s Daughter,” a documentary about the brutal gang rape and murder of 23-year-old Jyoti Singh, has appealed to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to lift his government’s ban on it. But her faith in Modi is entirely misplaced.
Hundreds of women were gang-raped and then, in almost all cases, burned or hacked to death during the anti-Muslim pogrom that took place under Modi’s watch in 2002 in the Indian state of Gujarat. But in contrast to the mass protests unleashed by Singh’s rape in Delhi, the Gujarat rapes and pogrom are now shrouded in silence.
In 2012 my sister, Sonum, and I traveled to India to make a documentary about the role that the Gujarat government, where Modi was then chief minister, played in the anti-Muslim violence that left almost 2,000 dead, according to Human Rights Watch. (Official figures are lower.)
While filming in the United States, I met Nishrin Jafri Hussain, the daughter of Ehsan Jafri, a prominent Muslim politician and poet who was brutally hacked to pieces and then burned during the 2002 riots. She told me about her father’s murder in the Gulbarg Society housing complex, where 68 others were massacred by a Hindu nationalist mob. As Human Rights Watch showed, the authorities were fully aware of what was happening but didn’t intervene. Surviving family members told her how her father phoned Modi in a last-ditch attempt to save the dozens of Muslims seeking shelter in his home. Far from offering help, Modi apparently expressed surprise that he was still alive. In his final moments, Jafri told those around him, “No help will come.” Shortly afterward, he was killed.
Hussain also spoke of her meeting with Bilkis Bano shortly after the 2002 riots. She was one of the many Muslim women who were raped during the riots. Six months pregnant with her second child, she, along with her mother and sister, was stripped in public and gang-raped. Fourteen of her family members were killed, including her 3-year-old daughter, whose head was smashed in with a stone. Bano was one of the few women brave enough to file a complaint with the police, but she saw justice only several years later, when the Supreme Court ordered the case to be moved out of Gujarat, where evidence had been suppressed.
Modi’s rise to the national stage in India was accompanied by a great euphoria about the country’s economic redemption and a wave of inaccurate media reports that the Supreme Court has cleared him of any involvement in the 2002 riots. Cases against Modi have not yet reached the Supreme Court. While the court-appointed Special Investigation Team concluded that there was no prosecutable evidence against Modi, amicus curiae Raju Ramachandran, who was also appointed by the court, came to the contrary conclusion. Indian journalist Manoj Mitta’s book “The Fiction of Fact-Finding” highlights the procedural flaws. The team’s report and Ramachandran’s findings, however, do not convey the view of the Supreme Court, as they are only advisory. Jafri’s widow is appealing the team’s conclusion. Another civil case against Modi — related to the three British citizens killed during the Gujarat massacres — is still making its way through India’s glacially slow court system.
The attempt to garner Modi’s support for a film against rape is to award him a moral authority he has not earned.
There is ample evidence linking Modi to the riots, including his hate speeches against Muslims, support for an illegal statewide shutdown paving the way for Hindu nationalist mobs to overtake the streets, orders to the police not to intervene during the riots and the destruction of crucial documents that may have implicated him. Modi has repeatedly refused to answer questions about his involvement in the riots. In one telling interview with IBN’s Karan Thapar, which has now been removed from YouTube, Modi walked out.
Since Modi became prime minister in May 2014, his former associate ex-minister Maya Kodnani, who was sentenced to 28 years in prison for her role in anti-Muslim violence, has been miraculously released. Another notorious killer, Babu Bajrangi, who boasted on tape both of slashing open a pregnant woman’s womb and of his subsequent protection by Modi, remains free. Meanwhile, Teesta Setalvad, one of India’s most dedicated civil activists, has faced arrest from a suspiciously energetic police for alleged embezzlement of funds.
Given these facts, the attempt to garner Modi’s support for a film against rape is to award him a moral authority he has not earned. It ignores the contribution of powerful elites to a broader culture of violence — with impunity. Rape is frequently used as a weapon against secessionist movements in Kashmir and Manipur. Eight years ago, Manipuri women responded to a gruesome display of state power by taking off their clothes and storming the army headquarters with placards saying, “Indian army rapes us.” Such protests are in stark contrast to a larger lack of national outrage against similar violence perpetrated by the state.
In 2013, discussing India’s complacency regarding Modi’s actions, Shikha Dalmia wrote at Bloomberg, “Tolerating or ignoring sexual violence for any purpose erodes the overall stigma against it, opening a moral space where hoodlums can run amok.”
“India’s Daughter” is a powerful film that can help challenge attitudes toward women in India and provoke condemnation of those who share the misogynistic views of the perpetrators. But Udwin should be finding her allies not in government but in India’s increasingly besieged civil society, the women’s movement, free speech advocates and activists such as Setalvad, who have demonstrated tremendous courage in fighting for justice for the Gujarat riot victims and the rights of women and minorities in India.
Sheena Sumaria is an independent filmmaker based in the U.K. In 2014, she co-directed the documentary “Even the Crows: A Divided Gujarat.”
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy.
No religion justifies terrorism. Nor can all the followers of any religion be terrorists. When the phenomenon of Hindutva terrorism surfaced at the time of arrest of Sadhvi Pragyasingh Thakur, Shankaracharya Swami Amrutanand Deoteerth [Dyanand Pandy] in October-November 2008there was some confusion in perception. Some of those arrested in Malegaon 2008 blasts like Lt Col Prasad Purohit, and some others like RP Singh, and still some others like absconding Ramji Kalsangra are extremists. They spite the Muslims in extremity. They would make bombs to blow and attack the minority or buy guns to spew death in crowds of Muslims. There are people like Himani Savarkar and Swami Asimanand that itch for bomb-for-bomb retaliation. It is in this context that India’s definition of terrorism got muddled. For, the Newtonian third law that the present prime minister of the country used when he let the Hindus vent their anger for three days against the Muslims in the late night meeting on February 27, 2002 that he was unleashing terrorism on the minority. He was the chief minister of the state of Gujarat. Instead of taking precaution of law and order situation of his state and having been sworn to protect the life of every citizen he let the Hindus kill Muslims. In the same meeting he instructed the police not to come in the way of the Hindu irate retaliation. He even subverted judiciary by all foul means to remain overtly clear of the blame of genocide. Who has the guts to call this terrorism?
However, there are nuances of reaction. Such reaction is indeed terrorism. VD Savarkar supplied guns to kill the collector of Nasik and much later Mahatma Gandhi. If that was pre Independence history, contemporary situation is even more serious as extreme Hindutva groups under the aegis of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, like Bajrand Dal, Abhinav Bharat, is crystal clear. Its top leaders and second rung workers are clearly involved in terror. Mohan Bhagwat, Indresh Kumar, Swami Asimanand, Pravin Togadia, Narendra Modi have dossiers against them on their involvement in terror.
There are such details in two recordings of Captain Nitin Joshi, one of 14-1(1)-2008 and another of 18-11-2008 as submitted to Deputy Commissioner of Police:
1. A certain Dr Dav had given affidavit to the Deputy Commissioner of Police against a man called Bhagwan who had been given RDX for attack on Samjhauta Express in February 2007. It was from the consignment that Purohit had stolen from the army when he was on duty in the Kashmir valley. Captain Nitin Joshi had seen the RDX in a room of Purohit’s bungalow in Pune.
2. Indresh Kumar had advised Hindutva terrorists to target Muslims and kill them in larger number and hide in temples. Kumar and Mohan Bhagwat had received 21 crore rupees from the Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan. Joshi had heard a man say this when he was with Purohit in Purohit’s bungalow. Joshi is witness no. 55 in Malegaon 2008 attack case. Bhagwat now chief of RSS, Kumar and Ramji Kalsangra and many others are members of RSS. Their involvement in terrorism is direct.
Witness no. 61 is Sham Apte in 2008 Malegaon attack case. He says that he had seen a secret dossier mentioning that ISI had given 21 crore to Kumar as head of the Muslim National Front, a sub group of RSS. “I consider this treachery to the nation,” asserts RSS leader Sham Apte. “I was so overwhelmed by shock that I said that we must arrange to kill Bhagwat and Kumar.” [1]However he also claimed in self defense that he did not really intend to kill them.
This so upset Samir Kulkarni another accused in 2008 case that he appealed to the high court that there should be a case filed against Nitin Joshi for taking part in conspiracy to kill. It is clearly an attempt by an accused in support of another. There are other accused inside and outside jail or on parole that are doing the same work. In this Vikram Bhave figures prominently as does Amit Shah. Bhave was accused in the bomb blast on February 20, 2008, in Cineraj cinema in Panvel, Vashi theatre Vishnudas Bhave on May 31, 2008 and in the same week another attack in Gadkari Rangayatan theatre. He was arrested on June 16, 2008 and sentenced to ten years in prison. He wrote his book Malegaon bomb explosion, the invisible hand behind it. He has reproduced certain documents verbatim of which Sham Apte’s needs serious attention to know the shades of Hindutva terror.
Purohit was a more diehard terrorist than is known and yet the army Court of Inquiry supported him. Sham Apte noted ambiguity as hall mark of his character. He had introduced himself as a major when he was just Lieutenant Colonel. When he went to meet Apte he did not make it clear as to who had recommended him to meet Apte. He introduced Apte to Swami Amrutanand Deoteerth, aka Shankaracharya whose real name is Dyanand Pandey. In July 2008 Shankaracharya of Peeth came to Pune and Apte arranged for his stay in Sarda’s house where industrialist Jindal donated ten lakh rupees of which 5 lakh went to the treasury of Abhinav Bharat and the remaining to the Shankaracharya. When the Shankaracharya visited Indore on August 1, 2008 Purohit arranged for travel of Apte and Ajay Rahirkar to fly in to visit the Shankaracharya. In the hotel Apte overheard Purohit asking for one lakh rupees from the holy man.
There were greater frequency of meeting of Abhinav Bharat and RSS functionaries in August and September 2008 and so was more funding of money to AB and Purohit. Parallel to this was the growing and to an extent worked up concern for the displaced Pandit community. All this led to the blast of 2008 in Malegaon.
Some of these details are in chapter 13 of Bhave’s book. His titling the chapter “RSS and Bomb Blast” confirms the South Virginia US think tank Terrorism Research Centre naming RSS as a terrorist organization. It is still a persisted belief in the establishment that neither the RSS nor Narendra Modi can be called terrorist. Even Bhave is ambiguous as is Apte. Apte has been an adherent of RSS.
Apte had spent a long time in the US and when he returned India he found that RSS chey purvee vichar aani aata chey vichar yaant barchshi farkat aahe. “There is a sea of change in the mindset of RSS of yore and of today”.[2] It was a reference to how the so called patriotic organization had accepted money from Pakistan’s ISI to fund RSS run Rashtriya Muslim Manch. This he had read in the dossier that Purohit had handed him when the army man visited Apte at his house. He was shocked by the acceptance of huge amount by Sangh which in its inception was devoted to the moral development of the Hindus for the nation and its culture, he had believed till then. In one stroke the bribery had brought the RSS to the level of ISI. ISI kadun ghetlele paise munzhe deshase gaddari aahe. “Taking money from the ISI is a high treason against the country.”
Next great shock for Apte was when he mentioned this moral turpitude to Mohan Bhagwat, he turned a deaf ear to it! Interestingly the chief of RSS at that time was K Sudarshan a staunch believer in the right wing ideology who of course ignored it.
From the afore mentioned episode Bhave concludes that as the 9 accused in Malegaon 2006blasts were innocent though some were members of Students Islamic Movement of India. In the same way those accused in 2008 were Hindus though some were members of RSS and the law of parity should apply in the latter case, also.
An affidavit is a court document submitted by one stating some truth he swears to put on record in a case of law. Courts in India have shown a tendency of not taking even very crucial affidavits on record. Judges have scanty regard for them when it comes to cases of terrorism. The affidavit of witness number 379 Atif in Malegaon 2006 blast case was the turning point in the investigation for the National Investigation Agency [NIA]. It showed beyond doubt that the nine accused were innocent because Atif was tortured 25 days to implicate the nine on the merit of his being a servant of the main accused Shabbir Masiullah in whose go down the bombs were said to have been assembled. ATS of Maharashtra and CBI had taken inordinate time to mull over the case because they had depended on Atif’s confessional statement which wrongfully played in the hands of the investigators when they framed the nine Muslims. Judge YD Shinde of the designated MCOCA court did not bother about the affidavits of others like Irfan Akeel and Shakeel Ahmad, Hamid Iqbal. If Atif’s statement is crucial then how did the police frame him? Abrar was a police informer who is alleged to have taken money to plant one of the bombs in 2006. Did he help in framing of Atif? His affidavit is even more controversial. He has revealed that he was used by the ATS and betrayed by them when he refused to be an approver. He has alleged in his statement that those who investigated 2006 blasts case had misled the inquiry and when Hemant Karkare became chief of ATS he came to know the truth and started investigation in the right direction. And most crucially the first group under KP Raghuvanshi wanted to liquidate those who were now reinvestigation in the right direction. What is the import of this?
It is banal these days to say that the new Prime Minister from Hindu right has started saffronizing the government, education, perspective on terror and investigation therein and a host of other matters. It was already there when he was the chief minister of Gujarat for more than a decade and even beyond. When Savarkar supplied guns to kill the English it was an act of terrorism despite his being devoted to India. Those who shielded him from prosecution in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi case or were concealing the role of the RSS activist Nathuram Godse as a cadet and member of RSS were also attempting to subvert the judiciary. Godse was a pracharak like Narendra Modi or Ramji Kalsangra. They are product of hate ideology and propagators of it.
In the curious case of the first military officer in service accused of terrorism, Lt Col Prasad Purohit, it is not merely judicial subversion but infiltration of the hate ideology in the army and its extent that is worrisome. It can be seen in the affidavit of Captain [retired] Nitin Darratray Joshi submitted to the metropolitan magistrate at the court 18 in Girgaon, Mumbai on November 18, 2008. He was working at the Bhonsla Military School in Nasik when Purohit was stationed there. Purohit had given his room to Sudhakar Chaturvedi to assemble the bomb that blew up in Bhiku Chowk Malegaon on September 29, 2008.
Joshi says that Purohit was excessively revengeful against Muslim and was extremely scornful to them. To take revenge he had bought two pistols and a revolver and ammunition to use on them in March/April 2006. Joshi had also seen ten kilograms of RDX in a room at the Pune bungalow of Purohit. Purohit had told Joshi that he had supplied RDX for the attack on Samjhauta Express for which innocent Muslims had to languish in prison.
On 5th or 6th of July 2008 Purohit had told Joshi that in August or September there would be big action in Nasik which is the district place of Malegaon town. Joshi also mentions that Purohit had told him after the blast had taken place on September 29, 2008that he was behind the Malegaon blast. [3] Afterward Joshi retracted. This has become the standard practice in all such cases such as Swami Asimanand’s. Zahira Sheikh and a host of others and mostly and quinessentially under Modi rule in Gujrarat. This is on account of pressure and lure of money and promotion. RSS works in such devious manner.
Another is intrigue. There was a standing enmity between Purohit and Colonel RK Srivastava. The colonel was jealous of the popularity of Purhot for his outstanding performance in army in killing many terrorists. He was also seriously injured and given option to go on pension but chose to serve the country by joining intelligence wing of the army in counter insurgency. Srivastava could not stomach this. So when the ATS contacted him regarding arrest of Purohit, he assaulted him. He even reported the matter to his superior through official means. [4] No officer opposed Srivastava when he sent the army men to arrest Purohit and handed him over Purohit to ATS. But strangely when the Court of Inquiry of the Army met the senior officers overwhelmingly supported Purohit.
Furthermore, Vikram Bhave writes in his book what he as an accused and convicted is legally not supposed to write. But he praised the 9 accused because he found them good people falsely accused. He found them in vyatha or affliction. Their suffering and distress in jail is poignant because they were not involved in more than two organized crimes against which Maharashtra Control of Organized Crime ACT [MCOCA] was applied against them. In fact most of them were not having any previous record of crime. Bhave finds that the police had extracted confession from them under torture and threat that they would also be named as co accused in other terrorism cases. He found the Malegaon 2006 cases accused as industrious in jail as they kept to study of law and religion. They would inquire him and others after court hearing and suggest the Hindu accused how to make their lawyers argue on some points. It was Dr Farog Mugdumi who told NIA facts which the agency used against the case made up by the Maharashtra ATSAfter the confession of Swami Asimanand the media and human rights activists said that the confessions given by the nine accused in Malegaon 2006 were bogus. The point was that Raghuvansi had invited Purohit to train ATS in counter terrorism and hence the ATS was biased. On this ground the CBI was called to inquire but it simply rubber stamped the findings of ATS. After Asimanand retracted NIA continued to believe in the Muslims accused and held no objection to their bail. (a)Five days after the September 8, 2008 blasts, there was the discovery of a bomb at Mohammadiya mosque. The panchas or witness who gave witness to the clothes of the injured and dead of September 8 also gave witness to September 13 affair. How could these witnesses give on the same day witness in two different incidents of which the second happened on September 13, the day of the recording of evidence of the witness! (b) Witness 379 gave confession claiming that he had seen the 9 accused assembling bombs. ATS relied on him. CBI simply toed the line taken by ATS although it could not find 379. But NIA found him and interrogated. He told NIA that the ATS had extracted his confession by torturing him and obtained his signature. There is uniformity of being derelict in duty and very prompt or alert in the case of CBI and NIA. [5] (C) Mohammad Zahid Abdul Majid Ansari was one of the planters of the bomb ATS and CBI maintained. But NIA found him 400 kilometers away in Yawatmal at the time of the blasts. Nine witnesses gave evidence in support of the fact. Why did not ATS and CBI try to find the truth which Zahid must have told before NIA took over the case? In contrast to this is the claim of Pandit Chatuvedi accused in Malegaon 2008 blast that he had gone to Mirzapur his native place in UP when the blast took place on September 29, 2008. But nobody bothered about it. It would be decades when the witness that Chaturvedi had in his village would be traced and presented in the court. This believes Bhave would prove that accused no. one Pragyasingh Thakur to accused no.12 Praveen Takkali to be innocent. Therefore the NIA is delaying the charge sheet in 2008 case.
[1] Vikram Vinay Bhave. Malegaon bombsphotmageel adrushy haat. Mumbai: Grukurpa Paristhan (2013) p. 92
[2] ibid p.88
[3] ibid. p 85
[4] ibid p. 56
[5] see Chapter 8
Pogroms in Assam: the Modi effect India squeaking
Stephen Cohen speaking at the Brookings Institution said of India: “India has not squeaked at all and squeaking wheels get the grease and India’s got to be squeaking loud. It’s got to be doing things, some risky, some dangerous, some positive.” Narendra Modi’s foreign policy will of course be of concern. The visa ban on Modi was the result of the genocide of Muslims in 2002 from which despite the clean chits issued to Modi the legal battle is still going on. Among the three things risky and dangerous have been there before the 2014 polls started, through the polls and even post poll. The pogroms in Assam are the most portentous ones after the Muzaffarnagar’s share of the preplanned events. All on account of what phenomenon Narendra Modi has created. It is bound to have tectonic changes if Modi is to assume office as prime minister of India. India has been squeaking without the foreigners taking serious note of it except the US Commission on Religious Freedom. It did and recommended visa ban. Cohen says that once Modi is in office India may squeak “with a vengeance with the advent of a Modi foreign policy.” [1]This is undeniable because Muslims were massacred in 2002, 2013 Muzaffanagar and Assam in 2012 and the same repeated in May 2014. The last was on account of the poll which has churned out the Modi phenomenon as a presidential type of electioneering tsunami. It sucked up the highest amount of money so far spent on election by a single party. The human rights violation by the police and the militia in Gujarat and Assam and also the upsurge of the Hindutva militia be it in Muzaffarnagar or Gujarat 2002 have marred the image of India as a multiracial society. Its repercussion is there to see: the US ambassador Nancy Powell has resigned for opposing visa to Modi. Cohen has had this in mind among other things when he observed: “Modi has close relations with China, Japan, and South Korea, and bad relations with the US.” It is not Modi who had bad relation. Cohen is ironic. It the human rights violation and concern over religious freedom that is at the heart of the matter. On Sunday May 4, 2014 the death toll in massacre of Bengali speaking Muslims in Assam rose to 34 when two more bodies were found. The atrocities on Muslims had begun in the night of May 1. They had not voted for the Bodos was the blame upon them. This was poll revenge exacted upon them under the inspiration of and by the kind of hatred Narendra Modi and Amit Shah had been pouring against the Muslims in disguise of innuendos and sarcasm and outright chicanery. They had worked up the audience into a frenzy of lusty cheering during their declamation in every rally. One such was in the night of May 4 where Modi dared the unthinkable: rubbing salt into the wounds still bleeding. Accusing the state government of Mamta Banerjee of West Bengal Modi remarked: “You are concerned about infiltrators and not your own people ... they must go back, they are robbing the youths of India of their livelihood.” [2]West Bengal has always had Bengali speaking Muslims who had lived there even before the partition of Bengal. The Bengali speaking people also had lived in Assam, too, before 1947. But owing to the agitation against immigrants in Assam the Indian Muslims of Bengali origin became aliens in the land of their birth and also choice, they were indigenous Assamese. Many had been surviving only on what they can get at the end of the day to buy food in the evening. Such penurious ones had gone to market to buy food or for work at 3.30 pm when the killers entered the hamlets and assaulted the children and women left in their huts. The recriminating campaigning of Narendra Modi against the Muslim minority everywhere including West Bengal and Assam is responsible for the plight of the Muslims. The river had given them life but man ended their life using river as the boundary. The riverine islands grew up when the river piled up the silt at one place and then continued amassing until it rose above the water level of the river. Having been sufficiently dried up for the seeds to fertilize and the sprouts to show up and then slowly grow into bushes and the grounds to harden enough to bear the weight of man and goods is how inhabitation of the humans opened the way for community life. Man moved in such newly formed land sufficient for vegetation and for man to live, the islands slowly acquired the appearance of a human settlement where there was no need for any passport, visa or identity. Nature’s plenty was enough to supply food and fuel. The poorest had god’s kingdom come to them. The marauders secured the banks first. The men of the Muslim settlement had left for distant places to buy provision or attend work leaving their children and women at home. The attackers took out their AK series assault rifles and sprayed death. The victims in traumatic commotion took to their heels and ran to the opposite direction for the river bank without knowing that more attackers were hiding there in bushes to finish them. In the meantime some children hid behind bushes and trees too petrified to run any more. They were chosen by fate to see what the marauders did to their mothers, sisters and brothers and the elderly. That is the story of Narayanguri. The doorway to the splendours of nature in North East of India had become the corridor of death, murder and mayhem. Ten of the attackers were forest rangers and five were former Bodo guerilla terrorists. They were coordinating the attack for they knew the terrain well and were in service, at least the forest guards. They were tainted with the bias against the Muslims being “the other” taking their land and jobs and making their future bleak. Modi’s ideology worked in them as rebellious against the official line that Assam included the victims as citizens as it did the Bodo tribals. Pramilla Rani Brahma was the MLA from East Kokrajhar and formerly a minister in the Tarun Gogoi government in charge of the forest land. The forest guards and the forest minister had common share in the claim that the [to use the words of Robert Frost] ‘land was theirs before they were of the land.’ Those who came later were the spoilers of the virgin forest. The obvious choice of ways to remove the outsiders was violence and terror. Brahma was involved in the bomb blasts in the Paltan Bazar in 1992 in which 20 people lost their lives. She was arrested. But later she was released because the case was withdrawn as political expediency overruled terrorism. It was she who had said in her speech of April 30, 2014 that Muslims had not voted for Bodo People’s Front candidate Chandan Brahma and therefore there was no chance for Bodo candidate to win. Modi had already been threatening and Amit Shah was also talking of revenge for honour. Another accused in the bomb blast of 1992 was the president of Bodoland Peoples Front Hagrama Mohilary who is also chief executive member of the Bodoland Territorial Council. It is this council that runs the Bodoland Territorial Area Districts comprising of Kokrajhar, Chirang, Baksa, and Udaiguri. Former boss of the Bodoland Liberation Tigers which also included Thibeta of which Mohilary was the chief. Brahma had accused that the Muslims had voted Naba Kumar Sarania who enjoys the support of ULFA which is against separate territorial rights given to Bodos. More details of deeper political conspiracy behind the killings in Assam show that it was well in line with the policy of Modi and Shah. Both played communal card alternating with caste card to divide the society wherever it suited their need. If Modi played the caste card in UP it was aimed at BSP of Mayawati. In Assam it was a carefully thought plan to enhance the enmity between the Bodos and indigenous Assamese Muslims who speak Bengali. It came handy to the right wing Hindutva party BJP to blame them as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. Their circumstances in life are so indigent that they hardly have their three meals a day let alone utensils or having identification documents. Their condition is that of existential level of the lowest strata of society. It is thus easier to play Hindutva politics of framing the Muslims as immigrants and disenfranchising them. This was done earlier in the case of the pogroms in Muzaffarnager where BJP MLA Hukum Singh said that the Muslim refugees had lost their power to vote because they had become squatters. He threatened that he would not let them vote. Another aspect of the same is “The canard of illegal "Bangladeshi" immigrants has been used primarily by the Hindu nationalist BJP as a red herring in order to leverage ethnic rivalry between Bodos and Muslims and gain political mileage.”[3] In the same way the Bodos enjoying state patronage in share of jobs also joined in the preplanned and targeted massacre. As a victim recalls: “I guess we are attacked because of the way people voted in theLok Sabha polls this time…a majority of the non-Bodos, especially the Muslim community, has voted for non-Bodos. The attackers were fromer Bodland Liberation Tigers (BLT) rebel who had jobs in Forest Department.”[4] This is a long simmering problem and cannot be wished away. It would be incorrect to say as does Cohen that “Pogroms against Muslims in India -- I don’t think that’s going to be his [Modi’s] policy. He correctly argues in his defense that whatever we did in 2002, look what the Congress (party) did in 1984 against the Sikhs.”There is a clear difference 1984 was one momentous event albeit a pogrom against the Sikhs but not a result of any entrenched hate ideology against the Sikhs. In the case of the Muslims the hate ideology is very deep rooted and the Hindutva forces could use Sikhs against the Muslims but not vice versa. If the west represented by US and UK speak out against the human rights violation as in Gujarat, Muzaffarnagar and Assam it would not amount to what Cohen thinks damning Hinduism for the pogroms. It would be for equity and justice. Therefore Cohen is less convincing when he says the danger to Modi: “Will be from his right and the belief, the theory that America and the United Kingdom are in a conspiracy against India trying to undercut India by being anti-Hindu.” Much of the violence in Assam is on account of the polls. There have been more such deadly scenes. Even in the peak of the deadly attacks on Hindus by the militant Sikhs in 1984 there were daily massacres. The Akali Dal party wanted greater share in power. The editor of The Times of India, Girilal Jain wrote on March 27, 1984, a day after the Akalis withdrew their agitation: “I sincerely believe the agitation [of Akalis] is misconceived because Sikhs cannot, in my opinion, possibly have any genuine grievances.”[5] Their grievance included that they had only one member in the parliament. A fortnight ago RSS chief Balasaheb Deoras had asked the government to accept the religious demands of the Akalis. In contrast RSS and its conglomerate do not want to accept any demands of the Muslims who have of course not demanded anything in this regard. The grievance of RSS and Modi and Thackerays and the Hindu right is what the government appointed Sachar Commission has recommended and the government has agreed to implement for job reservations for all minorities and not just Muslims. Those killed in Narayanguri were the poorest of the poor. Such penurious and also unpredictable is their life that Syeda Hameed and Gunjan Veda draw a frightening scnenario: “Some three million people or twelve percent of the state’s [Assam’s] population live over 2, 500 islands of the Brahamaputra. Most of these are poor migrants or tribals. At last count, there were 2, 300 villages floating on the river (many chars, and, hence the villages on them, are semi-permanent). Country boats are the only means of connectivity, and these are usually dugouts pulled by oars. During the flood, people’s lives are shattered. Every year, lakhs of women, children and men become homeless and take shelter in temporary relief camps. Here they huddle together for weeks, waiting for the water levels to recede.” [6] Given this low level of indigence the most disempowered Indians on the islands of the river/s were hapless and at the mercy of the dominant majority tribe of Bodos. The forest minister, MLA, the forest guards and others mentioned earlier were not only former surrendered rebels and terrorists accused of bomb blasts they were also empowered with jobs and resources of all kinds. The former rebels used AK assault rifles but the guards used their service guns. The slain had the bullets as silent witness to the pogroms. Yes, they were pogroms. A high court judge hearing the pogroms case and fake encounters of 2002 and after years has gone on record saying that pogroms, holocaust and genocides are foreign terms not applicable to India. His pretension of ignorance is quite understandable because he does not cite as he should the previous such instances. As a judge he should refer. It is his duty. Holocaust deniers are not only in the west but in the south east also. To give one instance. There were the pogroms of 1979 in Jamshedpur in which 108 Muslims were killed. No Hindu was even injured. This was the finding of an official commission whose report was published in The Times of India and Indian Express on September 14, 1981. The commission was appointed by the Janta party government when there was no split in the Janta government or the party. Among other findings, nine Muslims were burnt alive in their house. In one horrible instance an ambulance carrying injured children and women was firebombed killing everyone in it. If this is not pogrom what else is this? The learned judge’s myopic vision is revelatory of how rank communalism works in the Indian polity. Cohen also must know that pogroms have always taken place and it is the RSS in particular with its affiliates has been in the forefront. Five days before the pogroms of 1979 RSS boss Balasaheb Deoras had visited Jamshedpur and had aroused the raw passion of the Hindus against the Muslims. Deoras,Modi, Pramila Rani Brahma, Hagrama Mahilary, Pravin Togadia, etc along with their lieutenants like Maya Kodnani have insistently urged Hindus to attack, kill and rape and burn Muslims. Even government officers like the deputy commissioner of Chotanagpur was involved in the pogroms of 1979, as the commission of inquiry found it. The most recent pogroms have made India squeak. Modi cannot stop it even if he becomes PM or leader of the opposition in Parliament because it is not he but his ideological group RSS that will make India squeak. Even the Jamshedpur educational institutes were rife with the RSS cadets and leaders. It was for this that the South Virginia based Terrorism Research Centre named RSS as a terrorist organization. Vengeance is a recurring feature of pogroms now as highlighted by Modi and Amit Shah. In Assam Modi said in Dhemaji, Assam, that the government was allowing the extermination of the endangered rhinoceros to let the illegal immigrant Muslims settle there. The audience would naturally be instigated to violence against Muslims. Shah asking the voters in western part of UP state to take revenge against those who killed the Jats is as serious as the Jats in their grand kham panchayat or assembly instigated their members to kill Muslims in order to protect Jat women! The Bodo leaders also had egged on the audience to attack Muslims who had not voted their candidate who had no chance of winning on account of the Muslims. BJP had always castigated vote bank politics ascribed to Muslims and days before the polling the Bodo leaders wanted to avenge it. [1] http://www.rediff.com/news/report/ls-election-danger-to-modi-as-prime-minister-will-be-from-his-right-stephen-cohen/20140513.htm Danger to Modi as prime minister 'will be from his right': Stephen Cohen [2] http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/05/04/modi-assam-muslims-immigrant-congress-idINKBN0DK0FQ20140504 Modi rails against illegal immigrants after Muslim killings [3] www.iamc.com [4] http://www.tehelka.com/assam-violence-the-killings-never-stop-bodoland/ [5] Times of India March 27, 1984 [6] Syeda Hameed, Gunjan Veda. Beautiful Country stories from another India Harper Collins Publishers India. New Delhi (2012) p 5
http://www.hindustantimes.com/newdelhi/nigerians-beaten-up-at-rajiv-chowk-metro-station/article1-1269552.aspx
Ambiguous Prime Minister and “exported terrorism”
The basic premise of investigation in bomb blasts within the mainland India is to blame it on foreign involvement and it is of course Pakistan. Within this broad frame comes the local involvement and that is Indian Mujahideen. The calculated effect is that Indian Muslims bear the brunt of the accusation and serious consequences. Innocent members of the community are arrested including women and children. Having stigmatized the whole community is forced to wear the cross of ignominy and suffer untold misery and insult and violence. In most if not all cases the truth comes out much later that Muslims were not involved or the blast was not executed by them or it was some kind of accident which was made out to be a terrorist attack. In Brundwan, West Bengal, the crude explosive device that went off was made out to be a bomb blast in which the deadly RDX was used. Reacting to the attempt to turn it a big event and hunt and hound Muslim the Government Home Secretary Basudeb Banerjee made it clear: “We recovered a large amount of chemicals used in bomb making and crude bombs along with some SIM cards and phones. No IED or RDX was recovered.” [1] There is a premeditated attempt to turn it against the Muslims and BJP goes for it in full swing. This queers the pitch for the Muslims who may ultimately come out as innocent. So right at the beginning the Home Secretary squashed the sinister design when he said further: “The standard rule is to defuse bombs if they are recovered. The bombs were defused by the bomb disposal squad of CID following all the rules. An assistant director of the Central Forensic Laboratory was present and his team had already visited the spot. Moreover, senior officers of central agencies are in touch,” Therefore, this incident does not fit in the description of the event being exported from or imported in from across the borders. So in nutshell there are attempts to manufacture false accusation to pillory the minority community. It is as indigenous as the wherewithal that went in causing/producing explosion. In short stories or novelettes famed Urdu writer Sadat Hasan Mantoo often showed the absurdity of violence and terrorism of a bygone era, partition.
Though, it was not a fashion to talk terrorism then even when terrorism was in full swing. After knifing to death the crowd in Mumbai and elsewhere discovered the victims to be of their same faith! How terrifying it was for determining the faith by unzipping the pants and often even not bothering that! That were hardly few days of new nations of Pakistan and India when the people were discovering and trying their new identity and the pen drawn line dividing what was one unified nationality. Toba Tek Singh of Mantoo had it right, a mad man in jail indecisive of which country to shift. If terrorism was ubiquitous then how have the borders changed our perception of it? It has suddenly become exported! With a new PM in office India is again switched back to the hazy partition. There have been many people including media persons who have questioned PM Narendra Modi’s grasp on facts of history. Still there are others who questioned him on recent history and contemporary events. When he addressed the Council for Foreign Relations in US he said that all terrorism in India is exported. There is no home grown terrorism. It was in the context of Al Qaida Chief Ayman Alzawahiri’s video released early in September 2014. Modi’s observation does not square with the facts on ground for there is no Al Qaid branch in India. However, India has always blamed Pakistan for all acts of terrorism within the country! The only one Pakistani caught and hanged so far was Ajmal Kasab. How could it be exported then? Another context of his remark is Taliban in Pakistan-Afghanistan regions. That can pose problem Talibans have not crossed into India so far, may be because they are too much enmeshed in the two neighbouring countries. When there was an attack on Indian embassy in Kabul our national security advisor MK Narayanan had remarked that India would pay back in the same coin meaning thereby India also would retaliate. That India was involved in Waziristan, Pakistan, was acknowledged by PM Dr Manmohan Singh in a meeting at Sharm al Sheikh, Egypt.
While still in the US Modi tweeted: ✔ @PMOIndia Follow We need to take the issue of terrorism very seriously. Sadly several nations never understood the real menace of terrorism: PM @narendramodi 11:22 PM - 29 Sep 2014 [2] Does Modi still really understand terrorism? He had held out threat to journalists who wanted to cover Gujarat genocide by saying that they would meet the fate of Daniel Pearl! Why did he have it witness in the US tour, it was very much there when he had not left for the US tour. Or did he not realize that Ahsan Jarfi had spoken to him to save the life of the people who had sought refuge there from the marauding extremist Hindus? They had encircled the housing society since nine in the morning of February 28, 2002. There was a striking police force at hand and yet it was shifted to another place. That the besieged Muslims were under imminent threat to their existence was clear as they were continuously firebombed, water supply was cut off, etc. This was terrorism. It was indigenized terrorism. Even the guns and rockets used there were manufactured in Gujarat and some by BJP, VHP, Bajrang Dal and RSS leaders cum business men. Tehelka of November 3, 2007 is full of the details. This is what Jaffrette Christoff means when he calls it emulating and stigmatizing. Emulating whom? (But) Stigmatizing whom? In our zeal to see the export of terrorism from across the border we never bothered why MK Narayanan was instrumental in preventing investigation in Samjhauta Express train attack on February 18, 2007. The Haryana police were on the right track. He said it would earn bad name for India and so he stopped the investigation. Why did the Punjab High Court grant Swami Asimanand bail in the Samjhauta Express when he had confessed that he was involved in it? And that this bail order was passed in September 2014 after Modi had already become the PM! Those who have proven record of involvemet in terror are given bail whereas the overwhelming numbers of Muslims have no time from their daily life to plan and execute any blast and yet they are stigmatized. This is borne out by the record that no Muslim from India had taken part in 9/11 nor in any Al Qaeda attack anywhere else in India or overseas. So Modi’s expectation "Muslims of India will fail al-Qaeda" is hollow.
The prime minister is like many from his state who are solely engaged in business and trade and hence his use of exporting terror is as if it was like cotton that Gujarat produced and exported to other countries over the centuries. Delhi has acquired sort of notoriety over killing innocent North Eastern Indians like the Nagas, Manipuris, etc. The incidents of terrorism here are not exported from any negihbouring country, Bangladesh or Pakistan. However, there is a proviso that terror events in Nigeria may have been partly the cause of the attack on three ‘Nigerians’ on September 28, 2014 in New Delhi. Mapaga (22) and Yohan (22) from Gabon and Guira (20) from Burkina Faso were brutally attacked by the mob of Hindus and almost lynched at Rajiv chowk metro station. Towards the end of the attack the three survivors took refuge in religion and shouted Nare takbeer, Allah-ho-Akbar and were countered by a splutter of Bharat Mata ki jai and a lone cry of Vande Matrum. The attackers beat them in groups and then took turn one by one as the beleaguered foreign nationals tried to climb the enclosure of the police station. One police man was there who initially tried to intervene and there were others who stood cheek by jowl from the police post as silent spectators. [3] This too was act of terrorism. The cause of the terror attack was imported from Nigeria. This sheer inhumanity belies the traditional belief that we Indians are traditionally hospitable to strangers and foreigners. Even so the victims were not from Nigeria but from Gabon and Burkina Faso. This is a travesty of terrorism that in the aftermath of 9/11 Sikhs were attacked and killed and now the mistaken identity played havoc in our own land. But because they were Muslims is what clinched the issue. Terrorism is neither good nor bad in kind says the PM but why some even in mistaken identity are not allowed to prove their innocence? The global dimension of terrorism is very much there but India has exclusively blamed terrorism from across the border, Pakistan. So why this Nigerian angle? Despite our protestation that we are a peace loving country and alien to terrorism we cannot pretend to be ignorant of the fact that the West has categorized Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh as a terrorist organization. We can hardly ignore it as no other than the Terrorism Research Centre based in East Virginia, US, has taken it on its record. It is a research centre and a think tank. Dr Subramniyam Swami has often cited the centre selectively to show how India has been subjected to terrorism as no other country only to hide the other side that we too have terrorist organizations of our own, RSS, ULFA, etc. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat saying on Doordarshan on October 3, 2014 Dussera day that it is the West behind terrorism is complements to Modi. However, Bhagwat like Modi is deeply ambiguous because he speaks of new incarnation of terrorism which is the product of the selfish interest of the West. Modi speaking from the US and Bhagwat speaking from Nagpur, India, have deliberately obfuscated the reference or geography of west. Do they have West Asia in mind which includes the IS or Islamic States of Iraq and Syria or the West in the sense of what Samuel Huntington means when he refers to Islam and the West? Which is the west then? Has the West exported terrorism to the West Asia as a geopolitical strategy and is Al Qaida’s desire to open a branch in India to deal with Kashmir, Gujarat and Assam as an extension of it? And what is more ominous does Modi want to join arms production with the US to claim for its share in the profit in arms sale? Does Modi’s India want to emulate Israel and be in East but be like the West? Self interest is motivating factor for exporting terrorism and Bahgwat hints at it when he speaks of globalization and if any Indian leader who is more for globalization, it is a Gujarat born one for he knows how to power development. The Americans are obliged in the case of Israel and won’t mind to repeat it for India for Yankee profiteering knows no limit, moral or geographical. Lesson to learn: In terrorism call a spade a spade. If beheading by IS or Taliban is terrorism so is the beheading in the US Moore Farm where a cashiered employee tried to force a fellow worker to convert to Islam. When the victim resisted he beheaded him. This could not be jihad. This is indigenous and not exported. Terrorism is hatred for the other The Rajive chowk metro station terrorists hated Muslims, be they black or Asian. [5] Blaming others but never introspecting leads to blind alley. BJP has not learnt it and signs are it would never and hence preventive measure to ban terrorists who are terrorists and not patriots. By the way Julio Ribeiro the supercop called Modi pseugo patriot. Police failing to take action against are complicit in terrorism and hence need to be defined as terrorists. DG Vanzara had arrested the extremists who killed hundereds at Naroda Patia. He let them off without registering crime. Maya Kodnani and Vanzara need to be defined as terrorists. At Yakutpura in Vadodra the police assaulted women and children and burnt cars on during the last four days of September 2014.[6] The city has had many such incidents of arms planted by Vanzara to cause riot in favour of Modi and BJP around election. Modi as CM refused to learn can he refuse it now that he is PM? The violence and terror in 2002 and 2014 was home product and not imported from Pak. Or exported from there either. The four days were no love jihad period although it was Navratri. Viral Desai, VHP president in Bharuch threatening to perform dance before mosque is extension of terrorism but not earlier.
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[1]http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/bjp-on-offensive-bengal-says-no-terror-link-found-in-burdwan-blast/
[2]http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-09-30/news/54475386_1_prime-minister-narendra-modi-terrorism-global-challenge
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Terrorism-is-a-threat-to-humanity-there-is-no-good-or-bad-terrorist-Narendra-Modi/articleshow/43830312.cms
[3] http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/they-kept-calling-us-nigerians-took-turns-to-hit-us/99/
‘They kept calling us Nigerians… took turns to hit us’
http://youtu.be/0XHBOE93Oks
[4]http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report-rss-chief-mohan-bhagwat-claims-western-selfish-interests-leading-to-spread-of-terrorism-praises-india-s-mars-mission-2023237
[5] http://www.news9.com/story/26671662/your-2-cents-debate-over-workplace-violence-terrorism
[6] http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-otherstates/90-arrested-for-vadodara-violence/article6467472.ece
Chapter 11
Etched into flesh innocents’ framed arrest
Adam Sulaeiman Ajmeri
Adambhai was arrested in August 2003 for the September attack on Akshardham temple attack. Losing the job of a rickshaw driver’s steady daily income drove the family to the walls. His wife left her cosy life and took to doing domestic chores in the neighbourhood. Her three daughter took up what she used to do. Their son became a tailor and maintain the family with six siblings.
The trial court sentenced Adamji to death in 2006 and Gujarat High Court confirmed death penalty in 2010. He appealed to the Supreme Court which acquitted him of the charges and set him free on the day Modi won and was elected to be the Prime Minister of India, May 15, 2014. Adambhai had completed elecen years in prison of which 8 years went in the death row!
Chapter 12
Hashimpura
the “benefit of doubt due to insufficient evidence, particularly on the identification of the accused.” 1994 confidential report? Auschwitz camp. Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? Who will guard the guards?
Chapter 13
Modi as a cause of agony
“India’s reformer-in-chief”, indeed!
There are two different and parallel themes in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s utterances. One he views development as necessary and emphasizes it often. But he has always been making it clear that the Muslims are a hurdle to achieve it because of their population. He called the relief camps of 2002 as child producing factories. Much of his pronouncements about the minority are bipartisan. He blames the Muslims as terrorists and their religion as sources of terror despite good principles in it. even more canny is his studied silence and refusal to comment on matters of minority Muslims when his fellow hardliners make acerbic comments.
Participating in the debate two days after 9/11 he spoke fiercely about it. John Elliott, a British journalist who also was present in the debate wrote a more considered recall of what Modi had said. In his book Implosion, India’s tryst with reality (2014) Elliott says that Modi put his finger at the juggad or casual or quick fix attitude of chalta hai as failure of India’s performance. This is a castigation against all and not specifically Muslim minority. However, when he turns to the minority Modi castigates them as obstacles to India’s struggle to achieve development. But he misses the point when he looks at the greasy attire of the Muslim road side repairers of vehicles. Muslims of that profession may not be able to wear the kinds of stylish dress the prime minister wears, changing many times a day. The unseemly dirty appearance of the minority in no way is a failure. This also cannot be underperformance of the minority. To blame them for under performance of India to achieve development is also incorrect.
He has blamed Islam for terrorism ‘when one says your religion is hopeless and mine is better, then hatred starts, and later when that hatred gets linked into society, terror starts’. It is unthinkable that Muslim utter such sentiments. So it is inconceivable why he did persist in this: he wanted ‘Muslim friends’ ‘to ‘understand that terrorism has damaged Islam like anything,’ and, that they needed to ‘come out against the terrorist’. It is also incorrect to say that Islam ‘put its flag in the whole world and the situation today is the result of that’.
So he seems to subscribe to the topic of discussion ‘Is Islam now the driving force of terrorism’.[1] But the truth that is coming out of Gujarat he ruled for more than twelve years show that he was in fact responsible for the blames he cooked up against the Muslims.
There are three most puzzling cases in a host of others regarding Gujarat which President Barack Obama must learn because “India’s reformer-in-chief” is squarely responsible for what EM Forster long back called muddle; the Godhra fire accident, the assassination of Haren Pandya and the attack on Akshardham temple close to the official resident of Modi in 2002. Mufti Qayyum Mansuri was one of the accused arrested. He was given the option to choose in which of the three he would like to be framed. He was innocent and had no involvement in any of the three. Therefore he wanted to tell the world that he had spent more than eleven year in Gujarat prison and was acquitted on the day Modi won election on May 16, 2014 but had to wear the badge of shame of "a life branded as a terrorist without evidence." [2] The mufti wrote a book “Gyarah Saal Salakhon Ke Peeche” [Eleven years behind the bars] in which he has narrated much more than this. He says that the police of Gujarat under Modi had planted evidence to falsely implicate him and others. So far in two cases of assassination of Pandya and attack on Akshardham all the accused have been acquitted. All were Muslims. In the case of Godhra fire incident Muslim accused were similarly framed in bogus charges and have been in jail. But the most crucial point is that every accused was offered to opt in which of the three he would like to be framed! The logical inference is that even in the Godhra case the accused are innocent. How could then Obama call Modi India’s reformer-in-chief?
What Obama does not know is that Modi might have been born poor but he was born as blue boy with silver spoon of RSS. The killers of Gandhi Nathuram and Gopal Godse were also like him.
It is Indian malaise that innocent Muslims are blamed terrorists and rot in prisons across the country. Instead of Obama and other leaders of the world asking India to introspect over it they only sing the development mantra of Modi. They also conveniently over look that if Godhra like the other two cases was also bogus it was this that led to the genocide of Muslims in 2002. Muslims in India like the Armenians in Turkey and the Jews would require half a century to have Gujarat 2002 pogroms recognized as genocide. It was this wrong policy of the US administration of ignoring the genocide when it was overwhelmed by 911 that forced Samantha Power leave Obama election campaign team in which she was talked of as the next secretary of state. Obama’s own secretary of state John Kerry has been asked by a court in America to reply why RSS be not name as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Innocent Muslims have suffered for the terrorism that was the handiwork of extremist Hindus. Among the Indian diaspora there are many in America like Sonal Shah and her father who had funded hate campaign against Muslims and collected huge funds for Vishwa Hindu Parishad America. The fund was sent to the Delhi address of VHP which used it for the genocide. The killers of Muslims had readily available food packets and drinks as they were butchering Muslims. When this matter was raised Obama quietly left Sonal Shah out of the campaign which saw him becoming the first black president of the US. Whatever development in India under Modi in Gujarat and now in India is achieved is thus tainted. It is smeared with the blood of the victims of genocide. Development is a ruse to hide the grave charges of genocide. As Pope Francis observed on April 12, 2015 that honouring the memory of genocide in Armenia April 24, 1915 is needed : “honour their memory, for when memory fades, it means that evil allows wounds to fester.” That is what is happening in Gujarat too. [4]
Further details of the prevention of the publication of the book by Mufti Mohammad Qayum Mansuri show that the police of Gujarat have not changed under a new chief minister. Thus the wounds are festering.
The genocide in Gujarat was very carefully planned. Modi had called the fire incident at Godhra a terrorist attack mounted by LeT and Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan. Till today he has not substantiated on what ground did he say this in the evening of February 27, 2002. Obama’s write up in Time of April 16, 2015 is about the most influential people in the world, yes Modi is very influential. [4]But a part of his influence is in reforming not the economy but India as a Hindu nation. Rewriting history has been a part of it but he is now reforming the judiciary and the legislature. We had collegiums system of appointment of judges but now Modi wants to reform it and hence he is introducing National Judicial Appointment Commission. The purpose behind is alarming. The executive will control NJAC. In the meeting of the chief justice of India and other judges as well as the chief minister of all the states on April 5, 2015 Modi said that the judges must introspect whether they are driven by “five star activists.” He is insinuating them that they have to guard from human rights activists like Teesta Setalvad or those who were against Narmada dam. Such people according to him are not working in the interest of India. Another insidious remark is that “perception” matters a lot. He had always perceived that those killed in the fake encounters were anti national and deserved extrajudicial killing. He is far from obscure as he is preparing his own defense against the cases slapped against his police like DG Vanzara and GL Singhal. These two of nearly scores of police men were very close to him. They are involved in killing people like Sohrabuddin, Tulsiram Prajapati, Ishrat Jahan. Modi and Shah were the ultimate bosses whose orders the cops carried out. The police justified as did Modi that they were doing patriotic duty. This kind of perception Modi wants the judiciary and the legislature to adopt.
PM Modi remarked “It is never too difficult to do justice within the boundaries of law and Constitution. But it is very difficult to find the truth between perception and reality. It must be pondered over whether five-star activists are driving the judiciary today…if havoc is created to drive the judiciary. It has become difficult to deliver justice in an atmosphere of perception. A judge is not completely insular today. A judge is worried over what is happening outside and thinks if a judgment should be delivered one way or the other. It is imperative to strengthen the hands of the judiciary. Be if people in the government or in the media or the issue of bail of five-star activists, we will cause trouble to ourselves, if we don’t help strengthen the judiciary.” His perception of strengthening the judiciary is with a price that the outside world influences a judge. Modi clearly justifies it. He even illustrates with an example that a high court had severe problem because a five star activist had brought an injunction against setting up an electric pole.[5]
Most of the people still do not know that it was not communal violence resulting in riots in 2002. It was genocide. The case of Sardarpura attack on March 1, 2002 illustrates the point. The following description is from what people’s tribunal of eminent jurists and human rights activists. “Muslims constituted about 10 per cent of the total population of Sardarpura, in Mehsana district, which included about 25 families of Pathans, 20 of Sheikhs (Ghanchis) and about 20 families of Mansuri Muslims. On February 28, 2002, at about 9 p.m., several kiosks owned by Muslims, Harijans and Rawals were burnt in Sardarpura by a mob of local Hindus. The police were called but the attack continued even in their presence and even after they had left. Fearing further attack, the Muslims again called the police the following day. Led by two sub-inspectors the police arrived in two jeeps. The idea of forming a peace committee was mooted and names of people from various communities were short-listed. A meeting was fixed for 4 p.m. Apart from the sarpanch and an ex-sarpanch (both Patels), representatives from Harijans, Rawals, Prajapatis and Muslims reached the venue but the Patels stayed away. The sarpanch, too, left the venue shortly saying he would try to get the Patels. He did not return.
“An electrician promptly repaired the streetlights of the village, which were not working for about a month prior to the incident, that evening. A halogen light was installed near the colony of the Sheikhs and a long wire was attached to the same point. By 9.30 p.m., a Hindu mob from 8-10 villages started collecting in Sardarpura. All the three Muslim localities (of Pathans, Sheikhs and Memons) were simultaneously attacked. While shops were being burnt in the localities of the Memons and the Sheikhs, houses of the Pathans were stoned.
“The two sub-inspectors were still in the village when the attack started. Making excuses about going to the other end of the village to stop the attack on the Memon shops, they disappeared and gave inaccurate feedback to the SP that everything was all right in the village. In the Sheikh locality, a two-year-old girl child was flung and killed by the mob. Some of the Muslims ran to the Rawals’ houses for shelter; together with the Rawals then ran away through the fields. One person saved himself by hiding in a grave. Thirty-one people, mostly women and children, had taken shelter in a house in the Sheikh locality. The mob surrounded the house, locked them all in a room, and threw acid at them from outside. An iron rod, attached to the loose end of the live wire was then shoved inside the room packed with Muslims. This instantly electrocuted 29 persons to death. Two children who fell beneath the pile of bodies somehow survived the attack. Finally, after receiving desperate pleas from trapped Muslims on phone, the SP, A Gehlot, reached the village with two vehicles at about 2.30 a.m. The Sardarpura survivors were rescued and taken to Sawala village. The police found that the roads out of Sardarpura were blocked at frequent intervals up to Ladol, 9 km away, to prevent the Muslims from escaping. An FIR was lodged and 28 persons named by survivors. One of the chief accused, Chandra Kant is a Bajrang Dal activist. As of early May, he had still not been arrested.”
The gravamen of the crime against humanity was that the Hindu extremists wanted to attack only Muslims. They had blocked the escape routes to Muslims but not the Hindu Rawals, Prajapatis or the Harijans. They killed only the Muslims in a systematic planned manner. The Patels (Hindus) betrayed the Muslims. The brutal killing of the two year old Muslim girl was a shock and stun strategy of heralding the genocide, that it would run its fixed course. Every Muslim was targeted, children, women and men, old and young. This meets the defining features of what genocide is according to the UNO. In another village called Ode the Muslims were exterminated lock stock and barrel. No one from the minority lives there. The Non Resident Indians (Hindu Patels) behind the genocide there fled to the US. In his first visit to the US, PM Modi saw to it that the Indians like the Patels have their papers of immigration regularized and saved from harassment. This would benefit those who were from Ode and are now hiding in the US.
When journalists were covering 2002 pogroms Modi as chief minister had gagged them by threatening them with the fate of Daniel Pearl, the American journalist executed by the Talibans in Pakistan. The gagging of Mufti Qayum contrasts sharply with Vikram Bhave. The accused member of terrorist outfit Sanatan Sansthan was sentenced to prison for ten years was given bail for two months in which he wrote a book on terrorism and it was published. Even DG Vanzara was allowed to write books and book were released in official function where he occupied seat on the dias. So gagging was used most discriminating way.
Bhave’s book has such disturbing details that it matches with what Mufti Qayum would expose and goes beyond and calls for all the judges entrusted with terrorism cases to introspect as Modi has exhorted: There are such details in two recordings of Captain Nitin Joshi, one of 14-1(1)-2008 and another of 18-11-2008 as submitted to Deputy Commissioner of Police:
1. A certain Dr Dav had given affidavit to the Deputy Commissioner of Police against a man called Bhagwan who had been given RDX for attack on Samjhauta Express in February 2007. It was from the consignment that Purohit had stolen from the army when he was on duty in the Kashmir valley. Captain Nitin Joshi had seen the RDX in a room of Purohit’s bungalow in Pune.
2. Indresh Kumar had advised Hindutva terrorists to target Muslims and kill them in larger number and hide in temples. Kumar and Mohan Bhagwat had received 21 crore rupees from the Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan. Joshi had heard a man say this when he was with Purohit in Purohit’s bungalow. Joshi is witness no. 55 in Malegaon 2008 attack case. Bhagwat now chief of RSS, Kumar and Ramji Kalsangra and many others are members of RSS. Their involvement in terrorism is direct.
Witness no. 61 is Sham Apte in 2008 Malegaon attack case. He says that he had seen a secret dossier mentioning that ISI had given 21 crore to Kumar as head of the Muslim National Front, a sub group of RSS. “I consider this treachery to the nation,” asserts RSS leader Sham Apte. “I was so overwhelmed by shock that I said that we must arrange to kill Bhagwat and Kumar.” [6]However he also claimed in self defense that he did not really intend to kill them.
This so upset Samir Kulkarni another accused in 2008 case that he appealed to the high court that there should be a case filed against Nitin Joshi for taking part in conspiracy to kill. It is clearly an attempt by an accused in support of another. There are other accused inside and outside jail or on parole that are doing the same work. In this Vikram Bhave figures prominently as does Amit Shah. Bhave was accused in the bomb blast on February 20, 2008, in Cineraj cinema in Panvel, Vashi theatre Vishnudas Bhave on May 31, 2008 and in the same week another attack in Gadkari Rangayatan theatre. He was arrested on June 16, 2008 and sentenced to ten years in prison. He wrote his book Malegaon bomb explosion, the invisible hand behind it. He has reproduced certain documents verbatim of which Sham Apte’s needs serious attention to know the shades of Hindutva terror.
Purohit was a more diehard terrorist than is known and yet the army Court of Inquiry supported him. Sham Apte noted ambiguity as hall mark of his character. He had introduced himself as a major when he was just Lieutenant Colonel. When he went to meet Apte he did not make it clear as to who had recommended him to meet Apte. He introduced Apte to Swami Amrutanand Deoteerth, aka Shankaracharya whose real name is Dyanand Pandey. In July 2008 Shankaracharya of Peeth came to Pune and Apte arranged for his stay in Sarda’s house where industrialist Jindal donated ten lakh rupees of which 5 lakh went to the treasury of Abhinav Bharat and the remaining to the Shankaracharya. When the Shankaracharya visited Indore on August 1, 2008 Purohit arranged for travel of Apte and Ajay Rahirkar to fly in to visit the Shankaracharya. In the hotel Apte overheard Purohit asking for one lakh rupees from the holy man.
There were greater frequency of meeting of Abhinav Bharat and RSS functionaries in August and September 2008 and so was more funding of money to AB and Purohit. Parallel to this was the growing and to an extent worked up concern for the displaced Pandit community. All this led to the blast of 2008 in Malegaon.
Some of these details are in chapter 13 of Bhave’s book. His titling the chapter “RSS and Bomb Blast” confirms the South Virginia US think tank Terrorism Research Centre naming RSS as a terrorist organization. It is still a persisted belief in the establishment that neither the RSS nor Narendra Modi can be called terrorist. Even Bhave is ambiguous as is Apte. Apte has been an adherent of RSS.
Apte had spent a long time in the US and when he returned India he found that RSS chey purvee vichar aani aata chey vichar yaant barchshi farkat aahe. “There is a sea of change in the mindset of RSS of yore and of today”.[7] It was a reference to how the so called patriotic organization had accepted money from Pakistan’s ISI to fund RSS run Rashtriya Muslim Manch. This he had read in the dossier that Purohit had handed him when the army man visited Apte at his house. He was shocked by the acceptance of huge amount by Sangh which in its inception was devoted to the moral development of the Hindus for the nation and its culture, he had believed till then. In one stroke the bribery had brought the RSS to the level of ISI. ISI kadun ghetlele paise munzhe deshase gaddari aahe. “Taking money from the ISI is a high treason against the country.”
Next great shock for Apte was when he mentioned this moral turpitude to Mohan Bhagwat, he turned a deaf ear to it! Interestingly the chief of RSS at that time was K Sudarshan a staunch believer in the right wing ideology who of course ignored it.
From the afore mentioned episode Bhave concludes that as the 9 accused in Malegaon 2006blasts were innocent though some were members of Students Islamic Movement of India. In the same way those accused in 2008 were Hindus though some were members of RSS and the law of parity should apply in the latter case, also.
There is a world of difference between Mufti Qayum writing a book because he is the agonized and Modi is the one who is the cause of his agony and also that of the community of Muslims. Modi was not just the chief minister but also the home minister. No case could have been filed without his knowing and approving. The mufti was told to copy a letter in the handwriting of some other person who was also framed. Moreover it was all centered on Gujarat. Therefore Modi has to come clean on it. Is it not agonizing that the mufti was eight years in death row, waiting for the hangman’s noose! How could Modi sleepover the eight years cozily and still pretend that he ruled well.
Bhave’s case is altogether different. He did commit the crime for which he went to jail for ten years. He is not just a member of Sanatan Sansthan, a terrorist outfit, but he is also a member of the RSS. He comments on the schism in the RSS, another terrorist organization. Neither Modi as Chief Minister nor Modi as PM bothered or bothers about this. But to a free judiciary this is a serious matter.
Obama doesn’t know that Modi did not come from extreme poverty and did anything “to reduce extreme poverty” of especially the Muslims who had lost everything in the genocide, their family members, houses and shops. He did nothing to stop the boycott of Muslims. He even did not release the scholarships and stipends the central government had sanctioned for poor school going Muslim boys and girls. Who’s “improving education” Obama speaks of?
Obama should know what the Canadian writer Michael Ignatieff says of democracy as a system in which the minority feels safe and secure. Muslims do not feel safe today, neither in Gujarat nor in the rest of India.
It is significant that a Canadian court for the first time on April 15, 2015 accepted a prima facie case that Modi “committed or counselled torture,” during the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat. The moving force behind it was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, legal advisor to SFJ. Singh remarked that “April 15 will go down in the history as ‘victims of torture day.’ He went on to claim victory for his effort: Modi “escaped trial on the charges of torture under Canadian law only because of the Attorney General's last-minute intervention.” The case was registered under Section 269.1 of the Canadian Criminal Code, and refer to the allegations brought by victim “Asifbhai V.” on two counts.
The two counts are that Mr. Modi as the Chief Minister of Gujarat “did inflict torture” upon the victim and his family by engaging in acts of omission and commission “that intentionally caused severe pain and suffering, including death, for reasons based on religious discrimination.”
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[1]http://scroll.in/article/713145/When-Narendra-Modi-spoke-his-mind-on-Islam
[2] http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/gujarat-police-stop-publication-of-book-by-man-acquitted-in-akshardham-attack-case-755651
[3] Asian Age April 13, 2015.
[4]http://time.com/3823152/jorge-ramos-2015-time-100/
[5] Asian Age April 6, 2015
[6]Vikram Vinay Bhave. Malegaon bombsphotmageel adrushy haat. Mumbai: Grukurpa Paristhan (2013) p. 92
[7] ibid p.88. see also p 56 and 85; chapter 8
[8]http://www.thehindu.com/news/gujarat-riots-canadian-court-issues-summons-for-modi/article7109746.ece
Chapter 14
Claiming to teach Muslims a lesson
In independent India Bal Thackeray and his Shiv Sena attempted to teach Muslims a lesson in the first week of January 1993, from the 6th of the month, to be precise. Till then the anger of Muslims protesting the demolition of the Babri mosque was spontaneously turned against the police and when riots started, against the Hindus in confrontation. The Sainiks began Maha arti pooja as a strategy to take on the Muslims in the matter of their perseverance in praying on road during mid Friday prayer. This naturally led to tension and attacks on Muslims in the aftermath of the murder of the mathadi workers in Dognri and the burning of a family in Jogeshwari. The driver of The Times of India told its editor Dileep Padgaonkar: “If you know Bombay as well as I do you too would not have been surprised. I have long suspected that the city would be up in flames one day. You know why? The Marathis have for many years resented us outsiders [the driver was a Hindu from Saharanpur, UP]. They have envied our success. They have been brainwashed into believing that the outsiders—the Madrasis, the Muslims, the UP bhayyas—have deprived the locals of their livelihood. So as soon as they got a chance they set out to teach the ‘outsiders’ a lesson. The thousands of people who fled Bombay after the riots were both Muslims and Hindus. But obviously the Muslims suffered the most. The Marati police really went berserk against them, especially in December riots. And in the January riots they left other Marathis—the Shiv Sainiks—do the job because their hands were tied.” [1]
This was borne out by the daily reports coming out from the action scene and the Times of India being a leading newspaper had enough material on it. But other newspapers too were reporting it overwhelmingly. Thackeray was very powerful and had powerful friends in the ruling party like the defense minister Sharad Pawar. On January 11 Shiv Sena MLA Madhukar Saroptdar and nine others were supplying arms to the Sainiks. The army men arrested them but Pawar saw to it that they were not only released but Saroptdar was allowed to meet the PM Narsimha Rao two days later on January 15. Afterward, on February 6 Saroptdar was formally arrested by the police.
A report in the Times of India dated February 4, 1993 says that the chief minister Sudhakar Naik and other Maharashtrian leaders had prevailed upon the police not to fire on rioters in Bo mbay after January 8th. This time is crucial and important because it was on that day and thereafter the Shiv Sainiks had started massacring Muslims with the help of the police.
The hardcore Hindutva groups have penchant for teaching Muslims a lesson by all diverse means including subjecting them to compulsory vasectomy. They believe that numerically being in majority they have it as their right ordained. The anguish must be felt by Muslims who would wonder as if they are the chattel of the extremists who have franchise over their right to reproduction. Or else why their adrenalin is so high in making the utterances after assuming office in central government. On April 12, 2015 the state president Anil Singh of Shiv Sena in Kanpur, UP, had this to say, “Welfare of Muslims cannot be achieved through special schemes. They will get empowered automatically once they agree to undergo vasectomy.” [2]
Muzaffarnagar August-September 2013 saw what was according to the police FIR a road accident as cause of a brawl snowballing into a genocidal attack that left 62 Muslims dead and 50,000 made homeless. The traffic incident of August 27 and the subsequent doctored video of beheading by Taliban made to appear as if Muslims in western UP were doing it. Showing the video and the mahapanchayat of Jats were the strategies. Sangeet Some, Sanjiv Balyan, Suresh Rana and others were behind it. Their exhortation included call for revenge against Muslim perceived as threat to their daughters and daughters in law! Amit Shah also exhorted them to take revenge for their honour.
Muslims felt that they had it coming! Their intuition was: “Who toh dange karvayenge, UP ko Gujarat banayenge!” (They would manufacture riots in UP like they did in Gujarat.) To cover their design Amit Shah used the standard RSS fallacious reasoning: “Dange humne nahin karvayen. Dang ek choti si ghatna se shuru huye.” (We did not cause the riot. It began with a minor incident.)
The intent behind turning UP, essentially western region of it, into the pattern of Gujarat 2002 was to drive a wedge in the mutual relationship of the two communities and destroy the bonhomie between the Jats and Muslims who had had such rapport that they lived peacefully and had not riots before. This was another feather in the caps of the duo, Modi and Shah, they successfully won the election by the brutal suffering inflicted on Muslims of western UP. It was nothing less than genocide. They chose to teach Muslims a lesson and they succeeded.
The lesson that the Muslims learnt is that even a niece of a Jat police chief in Maharashtra, KP Raghuvanshi, can have her uncle delay the dispatch of the central reserve police or army from Delhi to Muzaffarnagar so that more and more Muslims can be conveniently butchered before the army arrives. In contrast to the niece the Muslims in such large number in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli were denied right to life. As RSS had roped in the Dalits like the Charrah community in massacring Muslims in Gujarat 2002 so they did they in western UP. In fact Suresh Rana was given Z security as enjoyed by the prime minister. Why were his life so vital and the lives of Muslims so trifling?
The Hindutva groups also underline that the BJP is fake in its commitment to Hindutva issue. Anil Singh reiterated that it was Shive Sena of UP that had demolished Babri mosque. They would also rebuild the Ram temple there when they come to power in UP 2017 election. They never take the Muslims off the hook so that they continue to feel excruciating pain and are always hunted and hounded. “Ham jo kehte hain, wahi karte hain, nakli Rambhacton se savdhan.” [We carry out what we promise so be warned of the fake devotees of Ram] So this makes sure that there is no end in sight to the anxiety that the beleaguered Muslims ever feel. The screw keeps on turning on them. The vise narrows.
The man who was inveterate to teach Muslim a lesson even before he assumed any government office was Narendra Modi. Four weeks before he became chief minister of Gujarat he invented the phrase ‘Islamic terrorism’ in a television debate. He sourced it in the ideology of RSS. Therefore the question that he was a new entrant in politics and had no experience cuts no ice for what he said proved the point beyond doubt. “It has taken an attack like 9/11 for India’s pseudo-secular media to finally use a world like Islamic terrorism and wake up to the reality of how some groups are misusing religion to promote terror.” [3] The attack on America was the result of the US policy. The US had created Osama bin Laden in its fight against the communist Russia’s occupation of Afghanistan. The Americans had used Laden invoking jihad and when the al Qaeda turned against the Americans it became Islamic terrorism. So, was the first phase of the fight not terrorism?
It was as much terrorism as the anchor of the television debate, Sardesai, found. “We had filmed a family charred to death inside a Tata Safari, but never showed the images. We did exercise self-restrain but clearly the government wanted a total blackout.” The government here is PM Vajpayee’s government which viewed 2002 burning the train as an act of terrorism but not the post Godhra genocide of Muslims. After gagging the independent media Pramod Mahajan told Sardesai “Are you trying to spark off another riot? This is a clear instance of cover up of the genocide unleashed upon the Muslims of Gujarat in which the central government was involved.
The other person who was present in the television debate of September 2001 was the British journalist John Elliott whom I have quoted elsewhere in this book to the same effect.
The right wing government of Modi in Gujarat during 2002-2014 and now the central government under him is raising all kinds of issues which help it in hunting and hounding the Muslims. It allows Hidnus to travel to Gujarat and elsewhere for religious purposes like attending Navratri or the Kumbh melas but the Muslims from other countries now will be deported if they participate in any Islamic rites and religious gatherings. In the third week of April 2015 the central government issued an advisory to all the states and central territories to hunt out and deport all the foreign Muslims on tourists visa engaged in Tabligi Jamat work. Tabligi Jamat mainly focuses on exhorting Muslims to pray namaz and keep fast in Ramzan and awakens them to the teaching of Islam. Even this according to the central government is perceived as a threat to India. In fact Modi began his rule in Gujarat by arresting Indian Muslims who were returning from Tabligi Jamaat Ijetema or gathering in London. Those arrested included 44 from Maharashtra, 25 from Gujarat, 13 from MP, 11 from Karnataka, 10 from UP, 9 from Rajasthan, 4 from West Bengal, 4 from Tamil Nadu, 2 from Bihar, and 1 from Chattisgarh.
The central government had banned SIMI on the heels of 9/11 despite the fact that no Indian was involved in 9/11 attack on the US, a fact that even President George Bush averred. This confirms the suspicion that the government headed by the Prime Minister and deputy PM from Hindutva group used the anti-Muslim weltanschauung to piggy ride the US in victimizing the Muslims.
India had suffered a terrorist attack on Parliament on December 13, 2001. A report in the Times of India dated December 30 2001 said that there was no involvement of SIMI in the attack. Even so Modi got 123 arrested after their arrival from London and accused them of being members of the banned organization. A notable role in this was that of the joint director of IB Rajendra Kumar who was a pal of Modi and a pracharak like him. Later in the decade Kumar would generate more such bogus reports like the one that led to the abduction and murder in fake encounter of Ishrat Jahan and three others. Kumar was the one who fed wrong information to Modi that Inter Services Intelligence and Lashkar-e-Toiba were behind Godhra fire incident. He was the one again who fed false information to Commissioner of Police Ahmadabad KR Kaushik on Ishrat Jahan and hence complicit in genocide and fake encounters. But before the month was over the police struck again and arrested 8 suspected members of SIMI from Olpad area in Vadodra where SIMI documents were recovered from a canal (nullah) on January 29, 2002.
Since then the situation has deteriorated especially since BJP came to power in Delhi. In the blistering heat in Menth near Aligarh seven Muslims were travelling when they became very thirsty and begged a native Surajpal for water. He showed great humanity in not only giving water but also allowed themt o pray mid day prayer as it was due. Someone saw them praying and spread rumour that they were converting Surajpal. Eve the Mayor of Aligarh Shakuntla Bharti fell victim of the false rumour as did the village head SateeshSingh. They prevailed upon the police to register a case against them and make arrest. They were released in the evning as people intervened made the matter plain. [4]
Operation Targeting Hyderabad
There has been a concerted effort by Hindutva groups including VHP under Pravin Togadia to teach Muslims his revanchist theory that they are at the mercy of the police who are Hindu in majority. His remark illustrates his point that Bhagalpur was an instance of how because of the police alone the massacre of Muslim took place. This he had reiterated during his visit to the city as a retort to AIMIM leader Akbaruddin Oweisi’s defiant posture that if the police are removed for a quarter of an hour people would see who is braver.
The murder of Vaqaruddin and four others in April 2015, according to Latif Mohammad Khan, General Secretary Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee, Amberpet Hyderabad, AP, was solely aimed at convey the message to the Muslims that their live at the sufferance of the police and that the Telanga police mindset is against Muslims. Obviously teaching such lesson through violent acts is terrorism which underlines the impunity with which the police can operate and exposes how impotent the government is. It raises the question as to who really rules India, then.
Earlier in 2015 it was the same situation in Nagaland in lynching in Dimapur. Modi maintained his silence because RSS views Rani Gaidinliu (1915-1993)as true Nagaland heroine. She fought the British and the Americans because they were imperialists and conducted proselytization. So lynching a Muslim emigrant from Assam to Nagaland has its own justification. Nagaland has 90% Christians and they either subscribe to RSS ideology and merge or swing to extremism, session.
http://www.thehinducentre.com/the-arena/current-issues/article6916230.ece
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[1] When Bombay Burned, ed Dileep Padgaonkar. UBSPD Delhi 1993.p5
[2] Indian Express April 13, 2015
[3]Rajdeep Sardesai, 2014: The Election that Changed India. Penguin, 2014, p 10
[4] Inquilab April 23, 2015
Chapter 15
Muslims continue to die again in fake encounters for planning to kill Modi
Gujarat still continues to haunt Muslims when their community members die in suspected fake encounters. In 2002 Samir Khan Pathan was killed by the Gujarat police under DG Vanzara, Modi’s confidant. He too was accused of killing a Gujarat police man like Vaqaruddin Ahmad of Hyderabad who was killed on April 7, 2015. The police had brought Samir to the park when he was alleged to have killed a cop. He was made to act how he did it and just then he was also finished. Vaqaruddin Ahmed and four of his associates were taken in a police van from Warangal central prison to Hyderabad. One of them tried to flee according to police version. In retaliation the cops killed all the five inside the van with their hands shackled and feet attached to chains including the would be attacker. The substance in the statement of Vaqar’s father that the police planned and bumped off his son and others will come out by and by. However the circumstances give lie to the police version that one of them had struggled to flee. Another lie is that the police had stopped the van after the five repeated their requested to stop so they could relieve themselves. The five did not do anything when they were taken out to ease themselves. How come they were brought back and were sitting in their seats when they were fired at and killed.
It appears that the five were not taken out at all. Their bus unusually left Warangal at 8. This would mean that the cops had a brief to finish the encounter conveniently much before the court hearing. Usually the Tilangana police take undertrials to Hyderbad by 11. The police and higher echellon had been in unseemly hurry. Modi has gone silent over many murky deeds. This baleful influence of the prime minister has seeped down to others like the chief minister K Chandershekha Rao. It is not mere coincidence that Rao is eager to have his daughter inducted into the central government ministry led by Modi. Therefore Vaqaruddin and his associates were blamed for preparing to kill Modi who was at the time of their arrest the chief minister of the state.
Vaqar is shown in the photo dead in sitting posture with iron shackles trailing to his seat. He was secured to the hand rest.
If all the five were killed while sitting in their allotted seats then how could they had fired at the rear of the bus as shown in the picture?
There is also the question mark on what the police have found or failed to find against them. Continuing agony of the falsely accused is a stigma of which the guilty find ways to eclipse the real crime. CBI found that police officer Dr Narendra Amin had played a greater role in the murder of Ishrat Jahan and others. He was the one who injected her sleep inducing drug before killing and another cop GL Singhal had refused to kill her. But the higher authorities including Vanzara and the black bearded and white bearded cleared their order and then she and the other three were killed. The last two whose orders outweighed were the Minister of State for Home and the Chief Minister!
There is hardly any chance that justice would be done either in the Samir Khan Patahn case or the latest one from Hyderabad involving Vaqaruddin! For this a better way to get the truth is entrust the cases to International Criminal Court or to the UNO Security Council through Optional Protocol number 2. This is absolutely necessary because PM Narendra Modi wants harmony between the legislature and the judiciary. The writing on the wall is clear enough for anyone to decipher. In the conference of Chief Justices of India and Chief Ministers in Delhi on April 5, 2015 Modi had no time to introspect because if he had done so Justice Akshay Mehta would not have given bail to Babu Bajrangi nor would have Tushar Mehta the Advocate General of Gujarat instead of defending the victims of the pogroms been torpedoing the cases from within lassoing in such RSS ideologues as S Gurumurthy. Why should the PM blame the five star activists and their perception? The desi handpicked are worse like the modern day Neros!
The death of Viqaruddin Ahmed and other four Suleman, Zakir, Azad and Asif must not go in vain. Nor should justice delayed lead to justice denied as the history of Modi’s rule in Gujarat is a witness to it.
The Gujarat angle is sinister. There have been cases of terror suspects arrested in the length and breadth of India had themselves framed against cases in Gujarat. Asghar Ali was from Hyderabad and framed in the bogus case of the murder of Haren Pandya. Years on end he was in Gujarat prison and then it was found that he was not involved in the Pandya case. There is need to have a commission which can go into the Gujarat involvement. Modi is morally and legally answerable to what happened in his state under his watch. Neither his ideology nor his being RSS pracharak must come in the way because even as PM of the country it would be foolish to think that he has been absolved all the crimes. That the Gujarat diaspora is funding hate is well known and it should be brought under the purview of further inquiry and judicial process.
The fact finding team report shows that the police in Telangana followed Gujarat pattern of bumping off Muslims falsely accused of planning to kill Modi and other Hindutva leaders. They left so many loopholes that they were reckless and deliberatedly wanted it to dawn on the public that it was fake encounter and such people arrested under section 307 deserved to be liquidated. In contrast the police have not registered the killing of the five under section 302 by the security forces! [1]
There were 17 police man escorting the five under-trials from Warangal to Hyderabad. It is illogical to premise even that anyone one of the five could have dared to think of snatching weapons while sitting in their assigned seat and hands and feet shackled. Their death coming at the end of the trial raises more doubts. As the Imam Maulana Mohammad Moazam of Fatehpuri mosque question: “Was the crime committed by Vaqar proved in the court of law? If yes, then did the court give order to the police to execute the encounter? If not, then who gave order to the police? The police will have to give explanation. Who is the police to give its judgment before the court has give its own?” [2]
This is not the whole of the moral outrage. The president of Human Rights Forum Jeevan Kumar bemoaned the loss of innocent lives and remarked that it was blot on humanity. Such Machiavellian act is unparalleled by the police anywhere else in the history of the country. He demanded suspension of the policemen involved until the matter is fully investigated.
The Congress party leader Digvijay Singh said that it was a fake encounter. It was staged to bring Vaqar to his end as the police wanted it. All India Muslim Personal Law Board spokes person Abdul Rahim Qureshi said that it was day light murder of the five innocent Muslims whose legal case was drawing to a close. Probably they would have been acquitted of all the allegations. All the witnesses had given their statements and the witnesses had gone against the police so according to a conspiracy they were killed.
The case against Vaqar and others range from allegations of dacoity, jail break, illegal arms dealing, etc. there was no enough evidence against them. They were accused of escaping from Khandawa jail Madhya Pradesh in 2013. They were also accused of a train blast in Chennai 2014. [3]
Early in April 2015 the CBI did not appeal to the court in the case of Amit Shah granted discharge in the case of Sohrabuddin. One officer of CBI had furnished this explanation: "There are many instances where in one case, there is strong evidence against an accused while there is weak evidence against another. It doesn't mean our investigation was not credible. Many police officers are on trial in the case and there is reliable evidence against them. It is not necessary that CBI should go in appeal against the discharge of a particular person on the basis of same evidence and statements.” [4]If this kind of syllogism is applied in the case of Vaqar and the four you would be surprised that there was little evidence against the five except that they were petty criminals, some habitually. Shah and others enjoyed full police and paramilitary protection. The five Muslims had no such privilege.
Vaqar’s father Mohammad Ahmad made his stand clear: “Whatever the court decides, even if it is a death sentence, we will accept, but not killings by the police." [5] His lawyer Mohammad Azim remarked"It is murder intentionally carried out by the police."
Many Muslims were falsely accused of planning to kill Modi and other extremist Hindu leaders like Pravin Togadia, etc. In almost all cases there was no iota of evidence that they were on the way to kill Modi and therefore they were encountered. So far no court in India has found any such Muslim. And yet scores of them have been killed by the police. This extrajudicial killing is in clear violation of human rights of the unfortunate Muslims. Whether he was Mufti Qayum, Ishrat Jahan or Vaqaruddin. Qayum survived because the Supreme Court intervened. It found no evidence whatsoever and further it also asked for further information on DGVanzara and GL Singhal. These two police officers have played havoc with the law of the land and are involved in scores of other offenses including more than a dozen fake encounters they carried out in order to protect CM Modi.
Even so the government in Gujarat did not allow the publication of Qayum’s book on April 16, 2015. Therefore the gravaman of the matter is that there is something of evidentiary value of which the state government is terribly afraid of. If it is not possible to unearth that then the International Criminal Court can lend help in this. This is very cogent because Vaqarudding was killed with four others in which the nefarious connection between Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat police figure. In Sohrabuddin case police officers of these two states as well as others from Rajasthan were involved in his kidnap and murder as well as his wife Kauser. Asghar Ali was accused of killing Haren Pandya. He too was acquitted. Haren’s father blamed Modi for his murder. In all these cases Modi kept silent. But in the case of Sohrabuddin he even dared the central government of Sonia Gandhi’s to prosecute him. She did not rise to the bait because of fear of Hindu backlash. Therefore to circumvent this political imbroglio that has paralysed the judicial system the need of the hour is ICC.
Vaqaruddin and his relatives had orally and in writing to court and police expressed fear of danger to his life from the police. Shakeel Ahmad spent 14 years in jail and would have been acquitted. He too expressed fear to his life from the police and jail authorities. Qateel Siddiquy also went through the same. They could never return to their home. Khalid Mujahid also died in the same way. Now there is need for a firm stand on Vaqaruddin and the others killed for conspiring to kill Modi. It enjoins the prime minister of India and the people to come clean on the matter. The PM, for why so many innocents were killed in fake encounters; and, the people for having quietly acquiesced in the media trial where Muslims were declared as terrorists out to kill Modi even before the tiral had started. The people also must come clearn because do they also feel that Vaqaruddin was capable of committing treachery against the nation. If not then why this silence over their death!
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[1]Inquilab April 28, 2015
[2]Inquilab April 7,2015
http://www.ndtv.com/telangana-news/5-suspected-terrorists-killed-in-encounter-in-telangana-752853
[3]http://www.siasat.com/english/news/5-persons-including-simi-activist-vikaruddin-ahmed-killed-encounter
[4] Sohrab case: No CBI appeal against Shah’s discharge
Neeraj Chauhan,TNN | Apr 9, 2015
[5] http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/viqaruddin-s-father-cries-foul-over-son-s-encounter-killing-115040701395_1.html
Note. Inquilab dated 28, 2015 has summary of the fact finding committee’s finding in Vaqaruddin case: 1. Those who hatched the conspiracy to kill the five chose the place of encounter to underline the fact that despite fake encounter the police are safe and nothing would happen to them. 2. There was clear deep planning behind the encounter. 3. The high police officials seem to be not only aware of the conspiracy but had sought nod from government authorities. 4. The travel arrangement was brought up early at 8 am instead of usual start of journey from Warangal to Hyderbad at 11 in order to get over what was a foregone conclusion. 5. There are errors in Inspector Uday Bhaskar’s statement. 6. The victim and his family had expressed orally and in writing their apprehension that there was danger to Vaqar’s life. 7. He was accused of firing on police in order to revenge the police firing at Mecca mosque in 2007 and then he was accused of planning to kill Modi and hence treason against the country, instead. 8. Torture in jail and during transit. 9. Post mortem in violation of Human Rights’ norms. Torture scars on the body. 10. Different departments of government collusion. 11. The juggernaut against Muslims started in 2007 is still on. 12. Political parties are hesitating to raise finger at the fake encounter. 13. Questionable role of the SHO’s registering the crime under 307 before ascertaining facts. This led to media trial. 14. It is usual with theAndhra Pardesh police to accuse Muslims as terrorists and involve them in crimes. 15. Muslim leadership is shirking responsibility by saying that all these are natural consequences of the creation of Telangana. 16. Chief Minister K Chandershekhar is eyeing his daughter’s inclusion in Modi cabinet and hence his silence. 17. The collusion and bias of the state government is clear as the chief secretary considered the five as terrorists. 18. The media is in the control of the rich who are devoid of moral values. 19. The judciary failed to give security to the five despite the five writing to the judges and the chief justice for security of life. 20. The police registered section 307 against the five but applied section 302 against the police!
Chapter
Terrorism charges: not “imaginary apprehensions’ of Muslims
Third from lest is Muzammil. Can a youth who was educated and worked with such mixed society ever think of blowing bombs?
The saga of intense physical and mental suffering and deepening despair suffered by the family of Abdul Rahim Kathewale of Malegaon will match the hardship and pain of the concentration camp of Auschwitz of the Nazis. His son was picked up from his Agog Pharma office in Vasai new Mumbai on May 7, 2003. He was put behind bars in Crawford Market police station from where he was sent to Thane central jail. For more than twelve years his case remained in a limbo. The police accused him in the Mulund railway station bomb blast of 2003. He was nowhere near there and yet the police blamed him for boarding train at VT in which the bomb exploded as it reached Mulund. Eleven people were killed including several police women.
At the Crawford Market the police disrobed his father and showed him to the son and told him that his mother would be brought there next for the same punishment. Muzammil Akhtar was so overwhelmed that he signed whatever paper the y gave him. Thereafter Muzammil remained in the dungeon and only very recently in 2015 the hearing in the case started.
The suffering of the family was unimaginable and continues with the same intensity. He lived in Kurla where in another adjoining room his sister lived. She was a teacher and he a computer expert. They would wait until others had eaten and gone. Then they would sit and eat together. On the day of his arrest she waited and waited and missed her meal. Afterward she was told that her brother was admitted in a hospital. The torture of mind and soul was too much for her that he was sick but not allowed to go and see was too much. In that turmoil she was attacked by tuberculosis and was bedridden. She lost her teaching job in grief. Finally she lost her life in sorrow of her brother.
The police gave phone record that does not prove that he was at the site of the bomb blast. Even so they got promotion and had their service book over written with citation of a grave crime solved by them. This is one of the cases of innocent Muslim educated youths being framed in false cases of terror where they did not play any role and yet languished in prisons for decades. They were the bread winners of their family as was Muzammil and his sister Shahenaz Akhtar. His father Abdul Rahim had to sell his house in the heart of the city of Malegaon and move to the outlying powerloom concentration parts where the noise of the looms makes life what Tata Institute of Social Sciences book calls as “living hell.” [1]Earlier he had powerlooms away from his house but since the loss of jobs of his children Muzammil and Shahenaz the family has to eke out existence at the most primary level. In his old age Abdul Rahim minds his trashan machine or winding cotton yarn on spindles for the powerlooms which occupy most of the space of their house
In TIME magazine interview of May 2015 PM Narendra Modi speaks of imaginary apprehensions of Muslims and other minorities and asks them to dispel them. However, Muslims’ apprehensions have stood the test of time and are proven by real facts. But only after decades, in some cases of innocents framed in premeditated bogus charges of terrorism against them, spent in prison. One source of this is discovered in the thesis of Professor Dr Subhan of Tata Institute of Social Sciences. He discovered that the police “depict and create conflict like situation and then manage that in order to prove that they are better administrators and so they deserve promotion.” Rajvardhan Sinha was for years Additional Superintendant of police in Malegaon. He was brought back to Malegaon to handle October 25, 2001 riots. Then in September 8, 2006 bomb blasts he was again in Malegaon. Then he was with Viswas Patil at the Taj Hotel in the 26/11 attacks. It was not his duty there but he managed somehow. How? He has risen in position steeply and is now with IB. In most of his career innocent Muslims suffered enormously. In 2006 blasts in Malegaon all the nine Muslims were accused and detained for more than five years because of his machination including his giving two mobile phones to Abrar and his wife Jannatunisha.
Sinha was in charge of foreigners when the American evangelist Kenneth Haywood was allowed to leave the country though the email was sent from his email account claiming that Indian Mujahideen was behind Ahmadabad and Delhi blasts. For this Mansoor Peerbhoy was arrested and imprisoned. No proof has so far surfaced against Mansoor.
It is strange that all these happened when the Congress was in power both at the centre and in Maharashtra.
The Congress party was timid and feared Hindu backlash and had such notorious leaders like Shivraj Patil and RR Patil who had taken it upon themselves to chase the Muslims rather than the real culprits behind bomb blasts. Then followed the “black Fridays”, when the Muslims were chosen as targets of bombing. The bombers wanted maximum casualties and hence the common mid day prayer on Friday. The exceptional explosion in the night of Wednesday April 5, 2006 gave away the secret of Fridays. It was an accidental explosion of bombs meant to explode at Aurangabad railway station mosque on Friday April 7, 2006. The Wednesday night explosion at the house of the RSS activist involved the professed armed wing of the RSS, Bajrang Dal. The police wanted to cover it as a fire ignited by the storing of firecrackers. But the group of Muslim advocates was adamant that it was a sabotage and forced investigation to be more focused and professional and hence the truth that it was bomb that blew up. Three months later on July 11, 2006 a series of bombs exploded in local trains in Mumbai killing more than 186 people.
These attacks according to Kuldip Nayyar may have been mounted for the reason that “there is greater danger from Hindutva extremism/ terrorism because they ignite the majority. We can deal with the communalism of the minority but the communalism of the majority Hindus would change into riots.” [2] Indeed, Dr Pascricha DGP Maharashtra expressed his view candidly on September 9, 2006 that the blasts in Malegaon on September 8, 2006 were the handiwork of Bajrang Dal and behind the July 11, 2006 serial attacks on local trains were two Maharashtrian leaders. [3]
The other Friday attacks are also from Marathwada regions: the Mohammadiya Masjid in Parbhani (November 2003), at the Quadriya Masjid in Jalna (August 2004) and at the Meraj-ul-Uloom Madrassa/Masjid in Purna in Parbhani district (August 2004).
Abdul Rahim’s remaining life is a shuttle of movement from Malegaon to courts and prison outside for more than 13 years and there is no end in sight. In vain he has trailed after the leaders and now hopes time has come for change, after all his son is innocent. But that is the depth of anguish of aging parents, his and his wife’s and Muzammil’s sibblings.
It is also a grueling fact that Abdul Rahim knows that a Shiv Sena leader and also a labourer union leader had eyed the job that Muzammil was doing. He had him arrested. In the turn of events the police officer who arrested Muzammil got his nephew appointed in the post instead. In this dog eat dog competition the Muslims stand no chance. This is the travail.
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[1]http://www.indianexpress.com/news/60-per-cent-malegaon -residents-below-poverty-line.tiss-report192776210
[2] “The Threat of Communalism”, Jagran, January 31, 2013.
[3] Punnynagri, September 11, 2006.
Note
Chapter
Does Modi want another crusade: Islam versus the rest?
When the TIME editor Nancy Gibbs, Asia editor Zoher Abdoolcarim and South Asia bureau chief Nikhil Kumar interviewed PM Narendra Modi on May 2, 2015 many things crystallized and others showed up the true picture in a twist of diaoramic reflection.
One, that Modi is a Hindu nationalist in the political register of India which the interviewers could not grasp or prod. They only referred to his colleagues like Sakshi Maharaj, Giriraj Singh, and slew of sadhvis for their intemperate outburst. Perhaps many of them bachelors. The intemperate outbursts match the cold logic of Subramanium Swami, Arun Shouri and others who also are in the fraternity of the right wing ideology of RSS and members of BJP. Despite their obvious differences they are Hindu nationalists. He who worship mother India and prefers her over his biological mother is a different aspect. Abandons his wife or remains celibate is also another dimension. In the end of the interview Modi says that he had vowed to serve mother India at age 15-16 because of the poverty of the people he was renounching the world and later his his marriage to live in celibacy like AB Vajpayee. His wearing the ten lakh rupees pinstripe monogrammed dress to appear with President Barak Obama and the auctioning of it for 4.31 crore to Lalbhai Patel is ostentation of plutocracy rather than democracy. The fanfare of wearing another such gaudy dress for TIME cover took four hours of dress rehearsal which would make the Lal Bahadur Shastri and other previous Prime Ministers turn in their graves.
What he spoke in the interview is the accumulative effect of being doctrined in right wing ideology tempered with sophistry.He also quoted Swami Vivekanand in the same vein.
TIME: “As we are heading to the US political campaign, a lot of America’s political leaders are talking about the role that their
faith plays and their views of themselves as leaders. Could you talk a little about what your faith of Hinduism means to you as India’s leader?
Modi: “Religion and faith are very personal matters. So far as the government is concerned, there is only one holy book, which is the Constitution of India.
“In fact, if I look at the definition of Hinduism, the Supreme Court of India has given a beautiful definition; it says that Hinduism is not a religion, it is actually a way of life.
“If one looks at my own belief, I think I have grown up with these values which I mentioned earlier, that religion is a way of life. We also say ‘Vasudhaiv Kutumbkam’ – the entire world is one family, and respect for all religions. Those are the values I have grown up with.
“Essentially the crux of Indian philosophy, the Hindu philosophy, is that all should be happy, all should be healthy, all should live life to the fullest. It is not something that is specific to a particular religion, or to a particular sect. It’s a[sic] philosophy, it’s a way of life which encompasses all societies.”
In organizing the rath yatra in the first stage of Gujarat in 1990 it was Modi whose efforts mainly rolled the chariot with LK Advani and Pramod Mahajan on it from the Somnath temple . It led to one of the bloodiest trail of bloodbath in India which finally culminated in the demoliton of the Babri mosque and its consequences. This gives away the lie that religion and faith are very personal matter. Modil and his party and patron organization thrive on mobilization Hindus against Muslims and other minorities. The 2002 election was won because of the pogroms of Muslims in Gujarat. Later Modi justified the fake encounter of Sohrabuddin and others for his political calculation.
Another is the view that Modi expressed in the September 2001 debate that Islam as a religion was behind 9/11 attack. This is also continued in the May 2, 2015 interview of TIME. “Till 1993, for example, there were several countries that did not fully understand the full force of this evil. They used to see it and they used to appreciate it purely as a law and order situation of individual countries rather than as an evil force internationally.” He seems to have induced himself to a Rip Van Winkle sleep over chunks of history. What the Nazis did to the Jews and Jews did to the Palestinians by driving them out of the land was also terrorism and qua international terrorism. So terrorism has been used by other communities and not just Muslims alone.
However, Modi went further and considered terrorism as a thought process: “I think terrorism is a thought process. It is a thought process that is a great threat to the international community.” When Bal Thackeray said that Shiva’s third eye was opening around the January 6, 1993 his Shiv Sainiks were allowed to massacre Muslims in Bombay. The police stood as spectators. In his Saamna he openly exhorted to his musclemen to teach the circumcised (Muslims) a lesson. During Modi’s Sadhbhauvna or harmony programme in 2012, Thackeray reminded Modi that it was he who had taught the Muslim a lesson and showed the way to Modi; he was the first that had shown Muslims their place. Modi’s teaching Muslims a lesson on February 27, 2002 and thereafter was a replica of his.
Modi’s view that the world till 1993 was different then; what changed it was the serial bomb blasts in Bombay on March 12, 1993. Here he misses his own Newtonian theory of every action leading to equal and opposite reaction.
He opens a Pandora’s Box when he divides the world between the countries who believe in humanity and those who do not (and support terrorism, like Pakistan): “the countries that believe in human values need to come together and fight this evil force as an ideological force.” Note that “this evil force” is “ideological force.” It would imply that if Islamic terrorism (his phrase from 2001 debate) is the driving force of modern terrorism then the Islamic world is devoid of humanity. To be more overt Jihad is opposed to humanity. This leads to further difficulties, the US aided the Talibans to fight a jihad against the Russian troops! The US led war on terror in Iraq in which hundreds of thousands perished was according to Harold Pinter terrorism and the greatest terrorist was the American president, George W Bush. If Modi’s acts of commission and omission in 2002 led to the genocide of Muslims then the Marathi writer Vijay Tendulkar was right in telling school children in Mumbai then that if he had a gun he would have killed Modi. The chief minister of Gujarat had the temerity to provide him one!
If terrorism is an ideology then RSS also has an ideology of dealing with the minorities. There are numerous cases where its pracharaks directly hatched conspiracy and planted bombs to kill Muslims or to cause a riot between Muslims and Hindus in which it is but natural that Muslims suffer more. This has always happened and there is no sign of let up. Gujarat is an example and Modi too was a pracharak of RSS. On July 26, 2008 at least 16 small bombs explode in Ahmadabad, Gujarat, killing 45 people and wounding 161. A little-known group called the “Indian Mujahideen” claimed responsibility for the attack and the May 13 attack in Jaipur. The email was sent from the wi-fi connection of the evangelist Keneth Haywood in Mumbai for which Mansoor Peerbhoy was arrested. He did not travel to Mumbai on either July 26 or around nor was his family car (in which he was alleged by the police to have travelled) in the city at that time. In 2008 Modi was the chief minister. In the same year there was bomb blast on September 29 in Modasa. On the same occasion there was bomb blast in Malegaon where Hemant Karkare discrovered how the Hindutva group Abhinav Bharat was behind the blasts. The cause of concern was that Modi slept over these issues.
If he sleeps over such matters and keeps his mouth shut when he should be communicating then why does he “choke and tear up” when he speaks about his poverty in his boyhood and youth? The boy who died in Modasa was also very poor so were the victims in Malegaon. One of them was a school going girl named Farheen. She had the ambition to take further education and become a doctor so that she could improve the lot of her indigent family.
Karkare found out in his investigation that Lt Col Prasad Purohit had promised two such incidents to convince the Israelis in return for diplomatic recognition of India as a Hindu Country and asylum in Tel Aviv and steady supply of weapons.
In fact Modi acted very abrasively when spoke of Muslims in general. He scorned at the roadside greasers and mechanics of vehicles and cycle repairers in their shabby dresses. He looked down upon them as an eye sore and hurdle to progress and development. It is also remarkable that in the genocide of Muslims the rich Gujaratis came in their expensive cars to loot the luxury consumer items from the shops owned by Muslims but they burnt the shops of the mechanics and greasers. Modi speaks of humanity versus terrorism. Why did he not then concern with the humanitarian disaster that the genocide was. Those who brought about the sudden change of fortune to Muslims practiced terrorism. Indeed it was international terrorism as the fund to conduct the genocide was collected by Sonal Shah and others of Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America. Those Patels who killed Muslims for their rich land fled to America to hide from the law. Why is Modi so much in agony over his poor past but indifferent to the lot of the poor Muslims in Gujarat?
Modi does not want to remember that like the Jews the Hindu Patels wanted the fertile land of their neighbouring Muslims of Ode village. A large number of Muslims were killed. The poor Muslims who worked for the Patels could not even imagine that they would be herded together and killed. This establishes the fact that the terrorists had chosen their geographical location of the victims. So what is the purport of Modi’s assertion? “We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what are their names, what is their geographical location, who are the victims of terrorism…I think we should not see them in individual pieces. We should rather have a comprehensive look at the ideology of terrorism, see it as something that is a fight for human values, as terrorists are fighting against humanity.”The killers behind the Muslim farmers and farm hands were nonresident Patels who fled to the US. During his visit to the US Modi also legalized the citizenship of some of them.
Even more pointed target of what in Indian jargon of the bill that the Hindu party shot down in parliament was Ahsan Jafri’s house in Gulberg society. More than 70 Muslims had sought refuge from the fury of the extremist Hindus who wanted to destroy it along with the people within. Only three of them were Parsis. The violence was orchestrated from early morning of February 28, 2002. The former Member of Parliament was the bête noir of Modi and opposed him in election of that month on the issue of communalism of Modi. He appealed for help to one and all and made 200 phone calls. Finally at 2 pm he appealed to Modi for mercy. The chief minister cursed him and wondered that he still was alive. A strike force of police was in the area but did nothing. The Parsi housewife Rupa Mody contacted some influential man to save. He asked her how many of them, she said she and her two children. Then she grew conscious that the other hapless were watching her. She added many. She and her daughter were rescued. Most probably her son Azhar was killed in the continuous attacks mounted earlier for more than five hours.
In the meantime the senior police officer in charge of the security of even Modi, Sanjiv Bhatt, conveyed the details of the siege and asked the Commissioner of Police and even Modi to intervene. But to no avail. Can the PM Modi have the cheeks to say TIME that the geographical location of the victim is unessential? That the nameplate of MP Ahsan Jafri is of no use? How could he forget of that entire nameplate, names, group identity and locations, in that specific case should not matter as humanity? Where was his humanity?
Gujarat was very much under his watch and he had visited Naroda Patia in the evening of February 28, 2002…
Even the President of India KR Narayanan spoke to PM AB Vajpayee for the security of the Muslims and then even wrote a letter reprimanding the PM. But to no avail.
The three viz. nameplates, religion of the victims and the geographical location were important. Even before February 2002 surveys were conducted of Muslim commercial establishments and houses and printouts were with the marauding mobs.
What was the scene in the streets? Hundreds of Muslim girls and women were raped. Many of them had their fetuses yanked out and killed and burnt. But those who survived had iron rods and wooden sticks thrust into their vagina. They walked to the refugee camps naked. As they passed through the Hindu areas no one dared throw a piece of cloth to them to cover their nudity nor did give water to drink. Their thirst was unbearable. Even Modi dehyderated by Karan Thapar several years later when the anchor asked him about his image of a mass murderer! Do not TIME Nancy Gibbs, Zoher Abdoolcarim and Nikhil Kumar know this? Did not Peter Hapak who spent 4 hours with Modi catch a glimpse of it in his famed portraiture which appeared on the cover of Asia and US editions dodging the “devil’s horns”?
Third from lest is Muzammil. Can a youth who was educated and worked with such mixed society ever think of blowing bombs?
The saga of intense physical and mental suffering and deepening despair suffered by the family of Abdul Rahim Kathewale of Malegaon will match the hardship and pain of the concentration camp of Auschwitz of the Nazis. His son was picked up from his Agog Pharma office in Vasai new Mumbai on May 7, 2003. He was put behind bars in Crawford Market police station from where he was sent to Thane central jail. For more than twelve years his case remained in a limbo. The police accused him in the Mulund railway station bomb blast of 2003. He was nowhere near there and yet the police blamed him for boarding train at VT in which the bomb exploded as it reached Mulund. Eleven people were killed including several police women.
At the Crawford Market the police disrobed his father and showed him to the son and told him that his mother would be brought there next for the same punishment. Muzammil Akhtar was so overwhelmed that he signed whatever paper the y gave him. Thereafter Muzammil remained in the dungeon and only very recently in 2015 the hearing in the case started.
The suffering of the family was unimaginable and continues with the same intensity. He lived in Kurla where in another adjoining room his sister lived. She was a teacher and he a computer expert. They would wait until others had eaten and gone. Then they would sit and eat together. On the day of his arrest she waited and waited and missed her meal. Afterward she was told that her brother was admitted in a hospital. The torture of mind and soul was too much for her that he was sick but not allowed to go and see was too much. In that turmoil she was attacked by tuberculosis and was bedridden. She lost her teaching job in grief. Finally she lost her life in sorrow of her brother.
The police gave phone record that does not prove that he was at the site of the bomb blast. Even so they got promotion and had their service book over written with citation of a grave crime solved by them. This is one of the cases of innocent Muslim educated youths being framed in false cases of terror where they did not play any role and yet languished in prisons for decades. They were the bread winners of their family as was Muzammil and his sister Shahenaz Akhtar. His father Abdul Rahim had to sell his house in the heart of the city of Malegaon and move to the outlying powerloom concentration parts where the noise of the looms makes life what Tata Institute of Social Sciences book calls as “living hell.” [1]Earlier he had powerlooms away from his house but since the loss of jobs of his children Muzammil and Shahenaz the family has to eke out existence at the most primary level. In his old age Abdul Rahim minds his trashan machine or winding cotton yarn on spindles for the powerlooms which occupy most of the space of their house
In TIME magazine interview of May 2015 PM Narendra Modi speaks of imaginary apprehensions of Muslims and other minorities and asks them to dispel them. However, Muslims’ apprehensions have stood the test of time and are proven by real facts. But only after decades, in some cases of innocents framed in premeditated bogus charges of terrorism against them, spent in prison. One source of this is discovered in the thesis of Professor Dr Subhan of Tata Institute of Social Sciences. He discovered that the police “depict and create conflict like situation and then manage that in order to prove that they are better administrators and so they deserve promotion.” Rajvardhan Sinha was for years Additional Superintendant of police in Malegaon. He was brought back to Malegaon to handle October 25, 2001 riots. Then in September 8, 2006 bomb blasts he was again in Malegaon. Then he was with Viswas Patil at the Taj Hotel in the 26/11 attacks. It was not his duty there but he managed somehow. How? He has risen in position steeply and is now with IB. In most of his career innocent Muslims suffered enormously. In 2006 blasts in Malegaon all the nine Muslims were accused and detained for more than five years because of his machination including his giving two mobile phones to Abrar and his wife Jannatunisha.
Sinha was in charge of foreigners when the American evangelist Kenneth Haywood was allowed to leave the country though the email was sent from his email account claiming that Indian Mujahideen was behind Ahmadabad and Delhi blasts. For this Mansoor Peerbhoy was arrested and imprisoned. No proof has so far surfaced against Mansoor.
It is strange that all these happened when the Congress was in power both at the centre and in Maharashtra.
The Congress party was timid and feared Hindu backlash and had such notorious leaders like Shivraj Patil and RR Patil who had taken it upon themselves to chase the Muslims rather than the real culprits behind bomb blasts. Then followed the “black Fridays”, when the Muslims were chosen as targets of bombing. The bombers wanted maximum casualties and hence the common mid day prayer on Friday. The exceptional explosion in the night of Wednesday April 5, 2006 gave away the secret of Fridays. It was an accidental explosion of bombs meant to explode at Aurangabad railway station mosque on Friday April 7, 2006. The Wednesday night explosion at the house of the RSS activist involved the professed armed wing of the RSS, Bajrang Dal. The police wanted to cover it as a fire ignited by the storing of firecrackers. But the group of Muslim advocates was adamant that it was a sabotage and forced investigation to be more focused and professional and hence the truth that it was bomb that blew up. Three months later on July 11, 2006 a series of bombs exploded in local trains in Mumbai killing more than 186 people.
These attacks according to Kuldip Nayyar may have been mounted for the reason that “there is greater danger from Hindutva extremism/ terrorism because they ignite the majority. We can deal with the communalism of the minority but the communalism of the majority Hindus would change into riots.” [2] Indeed, Dr Pascricha DGP Maharashtra expressed his view candidly on September 9, 2006 that the blasts in Malegaon on September 8, 2006 were the handiwork of Bajrang Dal and behind the July 11, 2006 serial attacks on local trains were two Maharashtrian leaders. [3]
The other Friday attacks are also from Marathwada regions: the Mohammadiya Masjid in Parbhani (November 2003), at the Quadriya Masjid in Jalna (August 2004) and at the Meraj-ul-Uloom Madrassa/Masjid in Purna in Parbhani district (August 2004).
Abdul Rahim’s remaining life is a shuttle of movement from Malegaon to courts and prison outside for more than 13 years and there is no end in sight. In vain he has trailed after the leaders and now hopes time has come for change, after all his son is innocent. But that is the depth of anguish of aging parents, his and his wife’s and Muzammil’s sibblings.
It is also a grueling fact that Abdul Rahim knows that a Shiv Sena leader and also a labourer union leader had eyed the job that Muzammil was doing. He had him arrested. In the turn of events the police officer who arrested Muzammil got his nephew appointed in the post instead. In this dog eat dog competition the Muslims stand no chance. This is the travail.
------
[1]http://www.indianexpress.com/news/60-per-cent-malegaon -residents-below-poverty-line.tiss-report192776210
[2] “The Threat of Communalism”, Jagran, January 31, 2013.
[3] Punnynagri, September 11, 2006.
Note
Chapter
Does Modi want another crusade: Islam versus the rest?
When the TIME editor Nancy Gibbs, Asia editor Zoher Abdoolcarim and South Asia bureau chief Nikhil Kumar interviewed PM Narendra Modi on May 2, 2015 many things crystallized and others showed up the true picture in a twist of diaoramic reflection.
One, that Modi is a Hindu nationalist in the political register of India which the interviewers could not grasp or prod. They only referred to his colleagues like Sakshi Maharaj, Giriraj Singh, and slew of sadhvis for their intemperate outburst. Perhaps many of them bachelors. The intemperate outbursts match the cold logic of Subramanium Swami, Arun Shouri and others who also are in the fraternity of the right wing ideology of RSS and members of BJP. Despite their obvious differences they are Hindu nationalists. He who worship mother India and prefers her over his biological mother is a different aspect. Abandons his wife or remains celibate is also another dimension. In the end of the interview Modi says that he had vowed to serve mother India at age 15-16 because of the poverty of the people he was renounching the world and later his his marriage to live in celibacy like AB Vajpayee. His wearing the ten lakh rupees pinstripe monogrammed dress to appear with President Barak Obama and the auctioning of it for 4.31 crore to Lalbhai Patel is ostentation of plutocracy rather than democracy. The fanfare of wearing another such gaudy dress for TIME cover took four hours of dress rehearsal which would make the Lal Bahadur Shastri and other previous Prime Ministers turn in their graves.
What he spoke in the interview is the accumulative effect of being doctrined in right wing ideology tempered with sophistry.He also quoted Swami Vivekanand in the same vein.
TIME: “As we are heading to the US political campaign, a lot of America’s political leaders are talking about the role that their
faith plays and their views of themselves as leaders. Could you talk a little about what your faith of Hinduism means to you as India’s leader?
Modi: “Religion and faith are very personal matters. So far as the government is concerned, there is only one holy book, which is the Constitution of India.
“In fact, if I look at the definition of Hinduism, the Supreme Court of India has given a beautiful definition; it says that Hinduism is not a religion, it is actually a way of life.
“If one looks at my own belief, I think I have grown up with these values which I mentioned earlier, that religion is a way of life. We also say ‘Vasudhaiv Kutumbkam’ – the entire world is one family, and respect for all religions. Those are the values I have grown up with.
“Essentially the crux of Indian philosophy, the Hindu philosophy, is that all should be happy, all should be healthy, all should live life to the fullest. It is not something that is specific to a particular religion, or to a particular sect. It’s a[sic] philosophy, it’s a way of life which encompasses all societies.”
In organizing the rath yatra in the first stage of Gujarat in 1990 it was Modi whose efforts mainly rolled the chariot with LK Advani and Pramod Mahajan on it from the Somnath temple . It led to one of the bloodiest trail of bloodbath in India which finally culminated in the demoliton of the Babri mosque and its consequences. This gives away the lie that religion and faith are very personal matter. Modil and his party and patron organization thrive on mobilization Hindus against Muslims and other minorities. The 2002 election was won because of the pogroms of Muslims in Gujarat. Later Modi justified the fake encounter of Sohrabuddin and others for his political calculation.
Another is the view that Modi expressed in the September 2001 debate that Islam as a religion was behind 9/11 attack. This is also continued in the May 2, 2015 interview of TIME. “Till 1993, for example, there were several countries that did not fully understand the full force of this evil. They used to see it and they used to appreciate it purely as a law and order situation of individual countries rather than as an evil force internationally.” He seems to have induced himself to a Rip Van Winkle sleep over chunks of history. What the Nazis did to the Jews and Jews did to the Palestinians by driving them out of the land was also terrorism and qua international terrorism. So terrorism has been used by other communities and not just Muslims alone.
However, Modi went further and considered terrorism as a thought process: “I think terrorism is a thought process. It is a thought process that is a great threat to the international community.” When Bal Thackeray said that Shiva’s third eye was opening around the January 6, 1993 his Shiv Sainiks were allowed to massacre Muslims in Bombay. The police stood as spectators. In his Saamna he openly exhorted to his musclemen to teach the circumcised (Muslims) a lesson. During Modi’s Sadhbhauvna or harmony programme in 2012, Thackeray reminded Modi that it was he who had taught the Muslim a lesson and showed the way to Modi; he was the first that had shown Muslims their place. Modi’s teaching Muslims a lesson on February 27, 2002 and thereafter was a replica of his.
Modi’s view that the world till 1993 was different then; what changed it was the serial bomb blasts in Bombay on March 12, 1993. Here he misses his own Newtonian theory of every action leading to equal and opposite reaction.
He opens a Pandora’s Box when he divides the world between the countries who believe in humanity and those who do not (and support terrorism, like Pakistan): “the countries that believe in human values need to come together and fight this evil force as an ideological force.” Note that “this evil force” is “ideological force.” It would imply that if Islamic terrorism (his phrase from 2001 debate) is the driving force of modern terrorism then the Islamic world is devoid of humanity. To be more overt Jihad is opposed to humanity. This leads to further difficulties, the US aided the Talibans to fight a jihad against the Russian troops! The US led war on terror in Iraq in which hundreds of thousands perished was according to Harold Pinter terrorism and the greatest terrorist was the American president, George W Bush. If Modi’s acts of commission and omission in 2002 led to the genocide of Muslims then the Marathi writer Vijay Tendulkar was right in telling school children in Mumbai then that if he had a gun he would have killed Modi. The chief minister of Gujarat had the temerity to provide him one!
If terrorism is an ideology then RSS also has an ideology of dealing with the minorities. There are numerous cases where its pracharaks directly hatched conspiracy and planted bombs to kill Muslims or to cause a riot between Muslims and Hindus in which it is but natural that Muslims suffer more. This has always happened and there is no sign of let up. Gujarat is an example and Modi too was a pracharak of RSS. On July 26, 2008 at least 16 small bombs explode in Ahmadabad, Gujarat, killing 45 people and wounding 161. A little-known group called the “Indian Mujahideen” claimed responsibility for the attack and the May 13 attack in Jaipur. The email was sent from the wi-fi connection of the evangelist Keneth Haywood in Mumbai for which Mansoor Peerbhoy was arrested. He did not travel to Mumbai on either July 26 or around nor was his family car (in which he was alleged by the police to have travelled) in the city at that time. In 2008 Modi was the chief minister. In the same year there was bomb blast on September 29 in Modasa. On the same occasion there was bomb blast in Malegaon where Hemant Karkare discrovered how the Hindutva group Abhinav Bharat was behind the blasts. The cause of concern was that Modi slept over these issues.
If he sleeps over such matters and keeps his mouth shut when he should be communicating then why does he “choke and tear up” when he speaks about his poverty in his boyhood and youth? The boy who died in Modasa was also very poor so were the victims in Malegaon. One of them was a school going girl named Farheen. She had the ambition to take further education and become a doctor so that she could improve the lot of her indigent family.
Karkare found out in his investigation that Lt Col Prasad Purohit had promised two such incidents to convince the Israelis in return for diplomatic recognition of India as a Hindu Country and asylum in Tel Aviv and steady supply of weapons.
In fact Modi acted very abrasively when spoke of Muslims in general. He scorned at the roadside greasers and mechanics of vehicles and cycle repairers in their shabby dresses. He looked down upon them as an eye sore and hurdle to progress and development. It is also remarkable that in the genocide of Muslims the rich Gujaratis came in their expensive cars to loot the luxury consumer items from the shops owned by Muslims but they burnt the shops of the mechanics and greasers. Modi speaks of humanity versus terrorism. Why did he not then concern with the humanitarian disaster that the genocide was. Those who brought about the sudden change of fortune to Muslims practiced terrorism. Indeed it was international terrorism as the fund to conduct the genocide was collected by Sonal Shah and others of Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America. Those Patels who killed Muslims for their rich land fled to America to hide from the law. Why is Modi so much in agony over his poor past but indifferent to the lot of the poor Muslims in Gujarat?
Modi does not want to remember that like the Jews the Hindu Patels wanted the fertile land of their neighbouring Muslims of Ode village. A large number of Muslims were killed. The poor Muslims who worked for the Patels could not even imagine that they would be herded together and killed. This establishes the fact that the terrorists had chosen their geographical location of the victims. So what is the purport of Modi’s assertion? “We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what are their names, what is their geographical location, who are the victims of terrorism…I think we should not see them in individual pieces. We should rather have a comprehensive look at the ideology of terrorism, see it as something that is a fight for human values, as terrorists are fighting against humanity.”The killers behind the Muslim farmers and farm hands were nonresident Patels who fled to the US. During his visit to the US Modi also legalized the citizenship of some of them.
Even more pointed target of what in Indian jargon of the bill that the Hindu party shot down in parliament was Ahsan Jafri’s house in Gulberg society. More than 70 Muslims had sought refuge from the fury of the extremist Hindus who wanted to destroy it along with the people within. Only three of them were Parsis. The violence was orchestrated from early morning of February 28, 2002. The former Member of Parliament was the bête noir of Modi and opposed him in election of that month on the issue of communalism of Modi. He appealed for help to one and all and made 200 phone calls. Finally at 2 pm he appealed to Modi for mercy. The chief minister cursed him and wondered that he still was alive. A strike force of police was in the area but did nothing. The Parsi housewife Rupa Mody contacted some influential man to save. He asked her how many of them, she said she and her two children. Then she grew conscious that the other hapless were watching her. She added many. She and her daughter were rescued. Most probably her son Azhar was killed in the continuous attacks mounted earlier for more than five hours.
In the meantime the senior police officer in charge of the security of even Modi, Sanjiv Bhatt, conveyed the details of the siege and asked the Commissioner of Police and even Modi to intervene. But to no avail. Can the PM Modi have the cheeks to say TIME that the geographical location of the victim is unessential? That the nameplate of MP Ahsan Jafri is of no use? How could he forget of that entire nameplate, names, group identity and locations, in that specific case should not matter as humanity? Where was his humanity?
Gujarat was very much under his watch and he had visited Naroda Patia in the evening of February 28, 2002…
Even the President of India KR Narayanan spoke to PM AB Vajpayee for the security of the Muslims and then even wrote a letter reprimanding the PM. But to no avail.
The three viz. nameplates, religion of the victims and the geographical location were important. Even before February 2002 surveys were conducted of Muslim commercial establishments and houses and printouts were with the marauding mobs.
What was the scene in the streets? Hundreds of Muslim girls and women were raped. Many of them had their fetuses yanked out and killed and burnt. But those who survived had iron rods and wooden sticks thrust into their vagina. They walked to the refugee camps naked. As they passed through the Hindu areas no one dared throw a piece of cloth to them to cover their nudity nor did give water to drink. Their thirst was unbearable. Even Modi dehyderated by Karan Thapar several years later when the anchor asked him about his image of a mass murderer! Do not TIME Nancy Gibbs, Zoher Abdoolcarim and Nikhil Kumar know this? Did not Peter Hapak who spent 4 hours with Modi catch a glimpse of it in his famed portraiture which appeared on the cover of Asia and US editions dodging the “devil’s horns”?
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