The Telegraph, 27 september 2008
Traitors without trial & hanging of a community
- UNPROVEN TAINT LEAVES AZAMGARH’S MUSLIMS ALIENATED
by SANKARSHAN THAKUR
Maulana Ashfaq Ahmed at Saraimir’s Madarsa-e-Tul Islah. Picture by Sankarshan Thakur
Azamgarh, Sept. 26: There’s a disquieting war in the works here, arrived from afar and unpacking its wares across unmindful townships and qasbahs.
It is erecting frontiers village after village and installing rabid little armies across them. It is spewing new poison as it rolls on and is churning up fires that have left Azamgarh’s syncretic history in an ominous shambles. It is a war that extant prejudice is waging on past pride.
The liberal Shibli Noomani and Rahul Sankrityayan lie discarded in its ruinous wake, the exhaust has gagged the song that Kaifi Azmi sang. Abu Salem, and the alleged flowering of his progeny, have become the preferred standard of discourse — it is seeding the countryside with the prospect of a frightening outcrop.
“Sab terrorist hain… (expletive deleted), desh ke dushman, asli rang mein aa gaye… (expletive deleted),” says Maniram Pandey, a schoolteacher at Pharia, a crossroads hamlet short of Azamgarh. “Kas ke lagaam nahin lagi to gaon-gaon mein tabahi macha denge. Chhoriye Azmi-Kazmi, Abu Salem ki aulad ki baat keejiye. (All of them are terrorists, enemies of the nation… if they are not reined in, they will set off a blaze across the villages. Forget the Kaifi Azmis, talk about Abu Salem and his children.)”
The broad brush is being brandished hard to apportion indiscriminate taint; it has left the Muslims fenced in and alienated at home.
“Even protesting innocence is not granted us anymore,” says Obaidul Rehman, an elderly Saraimir farmer. “Even seeking fair trial becomes firm proof of our complicity in crime. Where are we to go, who are we to ask? For police, we are all part of the big conspiracy; for the politicians, we have become too hot to handle. We have become our own spokesmen and nobody is listening.”
The usual suspects of secular politics — the Congress, Samajwadi Party and the ruling BSP — have fallen strangely silent. The BJP, meantime, is exulting in daily vindications, as much here as across the country, gleeful that it has discovered in “Islamic terror” a new energy resource.
“We have been warning all along,” says Bhadresh Singh, a local Sangh pracharak. “Now the country is realising at its own cost, these people need to be taught a tough lesson.”
Singh’s cry is getting free run of the field. “There is urgent need for secular parties to come forth and stop this sweeping canker,” pleads Ashraf Qazi, an SP votary. “Political leaders have to moderate the distinction between a handful of so-called miscreants and the hanging of a whole community. But where are they?”
They are all nervously perched on the fence, twiddling with the vote calculus, their secular convictions enfeebled by the terrors of fickle votebanks.
“It’s true we can’t decide,” an Azamgarh Congressman sheepishly admits. “Abhi maamla bada fluid hai, Hindu vote ka bhi to khayal rakhna hai, chalen jaayen Muslamaanon ki tarafdari karne is garam mahaul mein aur suli pe chadh jaayen? (Things are very fluid at the moment, we have to bother about the Hindu vote too. Shall we rush in to the Muslims’ rescue in this surcharged atmosphere and get hanged?)”
But the Congress isn’t the only party gripped by perilous confusions. The SP is at best mumbling inchoately and the BSP is in proactive abdication. Azamgarh’s man in the Lok Sabha, Akbar Dumpy Ahmed, hasn’t once sought news of home since the Jamianagar encounter and its unsettling aftermath. His troubled constituents are guessing, probably rightly, that following delimitation, Dumpy is probably eyeing another seat; Azamgarh stands dumped.
Its anxieties, though, eddy portentously. Allegations, no more, ringing out of Delhi and Mumbai and Ahmedabad have become ruse to post hurried and harsh judgement: Musalmaan, traitor, lumped with unproven guilt and unprocessed bias. He labours in the Gulf and wires back his earnings; the Western Union outlet his family goes to becomes a signpost of dirty money. He paints his mosque and his patriotism gets stained. He raises funds to build a charitable hospital and it becomes added evidence of dubiously gotten wealth. He sets up a PCO and he is in conversation with the Devil himself. He builds a school and it becomes the eruption of another seminary of terror.
The madarsa has long been the maligned eye of sectarian storms. Saraimir’s Madarsa-e-Tul Islah is no exception. It’s an institution dating back more than a hundred years, set in a sprawling expanse of groves and flower-beds. Ashfaq Ahmed, the 76-year-old rector, sits solitary in the shade of an open, high-domed gazebo. He wears the calm of a wizened man, but the tumult rippling around hasn’t left him untouched.
“I have spent all my life here, as a student, then as a teacher,” he says. “Hundreds of thousands of us have lived here for ages and ages. We’ve fought wars for freedom, we’ve struggled for independence, we’re stakeholders in the destiny of the country, and suddenly we are being told we are traitors. On what ground? By who, with what legitimacy? Whose country is this now? Not ours?”
He isn’t arguing the boys from Azamgarh are all above guilt, but he isn’t allowing anyone else to pass judgement on them either. “We’ve been allowed to believe we have a Constitution and laws. How can the police, and even you the media, call people guilty without affording them trial, everybody is innocent until otherwise proved, isn’t it? What you are doing is tearing this earth apart, it’s my earth too, don’t forget, I daily labour to spring those flowers you see.”
Not very far from this madarsa is a village called Lamhi, home to Munshi Prem Chand, who wrote a once-celebrated story called The Temple and the Mosque in which maulana and mahant together dictate the end to communal disruption and repair broken fences.
Prem Chand’s craft, we are reliably told, represented reality. Today, you might want to dismiss that as figment of his fantasy. Rest in peace, Prem Chand, there’s a war rumbling over your memory, mahant and maulana are back at the broken fence, this time dealing blows.
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