The Hindustan Times
May 6, 2006
There's a Taliban in Gujarat
Javed Anand
Hate politics has claimed too many innocent lives in the last seven days. It’s victims could have been you or me, Hindu or Muslim, had we found ourselves in the wrong place, at the wrong time and belonging to the 'wrong' religion. Who got killed and who are the murderers?
On Sunday, the Taliban in Afghanistan butchered K Suryanarayana, an engineer from Hyderabad, who risked working in dangerous territory abroad only to earn some extra money for his family. The Taliban fanatics best remembered for the merciless massacre of their adversaries, fellow Muslims torture of those captured in barbaric ways, demolition of the Bayiman Buddhas despite the pleas and protests from Muslims worldwide, and barring women from educational institutions and workplaces. As a result a large number of widows in Afghanistan were forced into prostitution to feed their children.
Within hours of the killing of Suryanarayana, thirty muftis and muftias of Dar-ul-Iftah, Jamiat-ul-Mominath, Hyderabad, issued a fatwa condemning both the kidnapping act and subsequent killing of an innocent person as “inhuman” and “un-Islamic”. They charged the Taliban with having committed a “Gunaah-e-Kabira” (unforgiveable sin). “It seems the Taliban… have just gone mad,” said an outraged Moulana Mufti Abdul Mughni Mazaahiri, director of another Hyderabad-based institution, Sabeel-al-Falah.
Late night the same Sunday, a group of the Pakistani Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists stormed inside homes of Hindu families living in scattered hamlets in Doda district of Jammu and Kashmir and massacred 32 men, women and children. This is not the first time that terrorist outfits trained and armed by the Pakistani establishment have committed such an outrage on Indian soil. And Hindus are not their only targets. In the pursuit of their ugly design, they have never shown any qualm in killing or maiming Muslims either.
With Spain’s Muslims having taken the lead last year, there has been a spate of fatwas from religious leaders across the world condemning Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaeda and other terrorist outfits in unequivocal words for their “inhuman” and “un-Islamic” misdeeds. In India, the terrorist attack on the Sankat Mochan temple in Varanasi in February was greeted with fatwas from muftis in Varanasi, Lucknow, Hyderabad as elsewhere.
In short, the Taliban, Osama Bin Laden and their kind are human abominations masquerading as “Allah’s army”. But what does one say, or do, when an administration sworn to uphold constitutional values and the rule of law act in criminal fashion?
If the dastardly deeds of the Taliban and the terrorists in Doda were naked in their design, the civic administration and the police that targeted Vadodara’s Muslims last Monday were insidious in their shameless bid to couch their blatant communal conduct as an “even-handed” civic anti-encroachment drive.
For the crusaders of Hindutva in Vadodara, the Dargah of Hazrat Rashiduddin that was bulldozed to oblivion last Monday was obviously a huge “embarrassment”, a constant “eyesore”. The shrine has been on the sanghi hit list since 1969, never mind the fact that the dargah, as most others in the country, was the common meeting place for Hindus and Muslims. Or, all the more reason perhaps why it had to go.
Along with mass killings, loot and gangrape, as many as 270 places of religious and cultural importance to Muslims were desecrated or destroyed all over Gujarat in a single week following the Godhra carnage in 2002. Among them was the mazaar of the renowned poet Wali Dakhani just outside the office of the police commissioner of Ahmedabad. The façade of the tomb of Ustad Faiz Khan in Vadodara was also vandalised. How embarrassing, in this background, for a Vadodara sanghi to see the Dargah Hazrat Rashiduddin intact, a constant reminder of the unfinished agenda of 2002. Who'll wait for the next full-blown carnage to provide the pretext? The “development” of Vadodara was good enough cover for the destruction of a 300-year-old monument. If a few makeshift roadside temples also need to be knocked down for pretence of even handedness, that’s fair barter.
For those who think that the genocide in Gujarat in 2002 is a thing of the past, last week’s ugly incidents in Vadodara are a reminder, albeit on a miniscule scale, that in the land of the Mahatma, many of the ingredients and the official instruments that made the earlier conflagration possible are still intact.
A “compromise” formula — local Muslims to hand over two-and-a-half feet of the dargah space that the civic administration wants for road widening — is unilaterally rejected. Civic bulldozers with the city’s BJP mayor, Sushil Solanki, BJP leaders including Nalin Bhatt descend on the dargah, servile policemen in tow. In no time, the entire dargah is turned to rubble and the road is tarred, amidst provocative slogans by cheerleaders from the BJP, VHP and Bajrang Dal: “Destroy the mini-Babri masjid”, “If the corporation fails, the VHP and Bajrang Dal will”. As Muslims protest, the police shoot to kill, claiming three victims.
Later that night, a mob blocks the car of 38-year-old Rafiq Abdul Ghani Vora on a main road while he is returning home from work. In the two hours during which time the mob swells to around 1,000 (under curfew) and finally burns Vora alive. The police is nowhere in sight. Local Muslims claim they made nearly 200 phone calls in their frantic bid for help. Vadodara’s police commissioner, Deepak Swaroop, they claim, kept cutting off their calls while all they got from the police control room was advice: “Go to Pakistan!”
The timing of the eruption in Vadodara may be politically very inconvenient to chief minister Narendra Modi. But it is he alone who bears the responsibility for hounding or sidelining honest police officers, while PC Pandey, the then police commissioner of Ahmedabad who oversaw the killing of nearly 500 Muslims in his city is elevated to the post of Gujarat’s director general of police. When you turn the police force into a servile tool force and nurture mass murderers what else can you expect?
(The author is the co-editor of Communalism Combat)
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