From: Economic and Political Weekly,Vol - XLVII No. 34, August 25, 2012
Commentary
by Jyoti Punwani
The violence against the police and the media at the recent rally in Mumbai held by Muslims to protest the killing of Muslims in Assam and Myanmar took everyone by surprise. While the Mumbai police's remarkable restraint avoided a larger confl agration, it failed to anticipate the violence despite clear signs. Ever since the 1992-93 communal riots in Mumbai, fi rst the Congress Party and later the ationalist Congress Party have cultivated a few Muslim leaders who act as "brokers" and have hardly any grass-roots support within the community
The Muslim rally held in Mumbai to protest against the killing of Muslims in Myanmar and Assam, and which left two Muslims dead from the police firing, may turn out to be historic in many ways. First, for the manner in which the Mumbai police, indicted for their communal conduct towards Muslims by two judicial commissions, handled this violence aimed at them and the media. Second, for the anger of the city’s Muslims against the ulema who organised the rally.
Brokering Peace
In the 1992-93 riots, 233 Muslims and 111 Hindus were killed in police firing, although more Muslims were killed in mob violence (328 Muslims as against 108 Hindus). Since then the Muslims in Mumbai have tried their best to avoid protesting on the streets. They know that the sight of a Muslim crowd acts like a red rag to the police. They also know that they would not be able to control the hotheads among them. Their resolve got strengthened when the Shiv Sena-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took over the reins in Maharashtra in 1995. Muslims knew better than to take them on. So they worked out ways to deal with the community’s problems, which consisted mainly of holding press conferences (given scant attention by the English media), and going in delegations to ministers. Over the years, this latter method has bred a leadership that has no mass following, but acts as brokers between the community and the government.
After the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) combine was voted into power in late 1999, and Maharashtra for the first time had five Muslim ministers, the community felt emboldened. But even at that time, only two groups, neither of which is known for their adherence to peaceful methods, broke this “no-street-protests” norm. These were the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI before it was banned) and Abu Asim Azmi’s Samajwadi Party (SP). Azmi was himself very close to SIMI. Perhaps his presence in the ruling coalition ensured that when SIMI members spilled out on the streets of their stronghold Kurla, and stoned BEST buses to protest the burning of the Koran in Delhi by Bajrang Dal activists (March 2001), the police held their fire. Community leaders had tried their utmost to prevent this protest; their efforts helped in ensuring that it did not spread through the city. They could not, however, prevent the police crack down on SIMI members after the protest. Six months later, SIMI was banned.
As for Azmi, his dharnas, morchas and rallies attract little support from the Muslim community except in his pockets of influence – mainly the slums of Mankhurd, Kurla and Bandra. The poor turnout at these rallies has rendered them ineffective.
However, since the Congress-NCP was voted back into power in 2004, a subtle shift can be seen in the government’s relationship with the Muslims. The Shiv Sena-BJP combine did not bother to build bridges with the community that they regarded as the enemy. The Congress, on the other hand, has always proclaimed itself as the friend of the Muslims. But instead of working with and for the community at its grassroots level, the Congress, and its ally the NCP, have used the old tactic of cultivating a few influential members of the community, mainly the ulema and businessmen.
The best example of this is the well-known Muslim Congress minister, Arif Naseem Khan. Khan was an ordinary Congress member when he filed a petition in the Supreme Court asking that the Srikrishna report be implemented. The Sena-BJP was in power then, and had rejected the report. This one act was enough to earn Khan a ministership when the Congress came to power in 1999. Since then, he has done little to get the report implemented. Most of his time is spent cultivating the city’s ulema and the Urdu press, thereby giving the impression to the party high command that he leads a vast following in the community. He therefore remains a constant in the cabinet.
The NCP has hardly acted differently. Both in 1999 and 2004, it wrested the important portfolio. When Chhagan Bhujbal took over as home minister in 1999, the Srikrishna Commission report indicting Mumbai’s policemen for their role in the 1992-93 riots was just a year old. With the police under his charge, the home minister’s first task should have been to follow the commission’s recommendations, i e, take strict action against the indicted policemen and reopen the riot cases closed by the police despite enough evidence in them to nail the rioters. That would have served as a lesson for both the Sena, whose role in the riots was well known, and the police. But Bhujbal was an ex-Shiv Sainik; he did not consider the conduct of the police towards Muslims during the riots wrong. Indeed, as home minister, he did all he could to protect the indicted policemen.
Muslims as a community soon grew disenchanted with Bhujbal, whom they had initially seen as the only politician who could take on the Sena chief Bal Thackeray, Bhujbal’s mentor-turned-foe. However, a few brokers of the community remained on good terms with him. Bhujbal’s policy has been followed by his successor R R Patil.
A Bunch of Fanatics
Among the biggest benefactors of this policy is the Raza Academy, a Barelvi group known for its ability to rouse slum-dwellers by its religious rhetoric; for its violent clashes with the Deobandis, including evicting them from Barelvi mosques; its threats to the government of Muslim “ire” if Taslima Nasreen was granted citizenship and its demand that she be “kicked out” of the country; and recently, its announcement of a reward of Rs 1 lakh to anyone who threw a slipper at Salman Rushdie who was scheduled to attend the Jaipur Literary Festival. The media gives this fanatic bunch generous coverage because it provides good sound and visual bytes – always threatening something or to burn someone’s effigy or perform namaz on the roads on 6 December every year (the day the Babri Masjid was brought down).
All this should have been enough to reject any request for a rally called by this group, or at least to lay down stringent conditions, as recommended in the Srikrishna report (detailing measures to prevent communal riots). But there is more damning evidence against the “Academy”. In Bhiwandi in 2006, it had roused passions against the building of a police station on land supposedly meant for a Muslim cemetery. When the police disregarded its protests and carried on with the construction, a mob stormed the police station and lynched two policemen. In the resultant police firing, two Muslims died. Yet, in the days following the violence, instead of being behind bars, Saeed Noorie, the head of the Academy, was being fawned upon by Congress MLA Baba Siddiqui. The painstakingly built-up mohalla committees that had kept Bhiwandi safe even as Mumbai burnt during the 1992-93 riots were neglected and disintegrated as the Bhiwandi police, taking their cue from successive home ministers, began to regard the Raza Academy as the spokesperson of Bhiwandi’s Muslim community.
After the Bhiwandi firing, Home Minister R R Patil had declared “If anyone throws stones at policemen, we will answer them with bullets”. Shocking though his words may have been, the home minister was only articulating a policy that has been in force in Mumbai. No policeman here tolerates any attack on himself or his force. For all their allegiance to the Shiv Sena, the police had not spared Shiv Sainiks whenever the latter had attacked them during the 1992-93 Mumbai riots. A few Shiv Sainiks had even died in such police firing.
Tactful Response
That, coupled with their well-documented animosity towards Muslims, is what makes the Mumbai police’s response to Saturday’s rally historic. Outside Azad Maidan a Muslim mob, without any provocation, set police vans on fire, assaulted cops and molested policewomen. Of 63 persons injured in the violence, 58 are policemen. Inside Azad Maidan were 20,000 Muslims carrying provocative placards and listening to inflammatory speeches by their maulanas. The stage seemed set for a bloody confrontation between the police and the Muslims.
What saved the situation was Mumbai police commissioner Arup Patnaik’s personal initiative. Appealing to the rallyists inside Azad Maidan to prevent a repeat of 1992, he persuaded them to disperse peacefully, assuring them that he would control his men if they did so. He kept his word. Perhaps for the first time in Mumbai, police used tear gas to disperse a violent Muslim mob instead of directly firing at them.
In his report, Justice Srikrishna has listed as one of the immediate causes of the December 1992 riots the “insensitive and harsh approach of the police while handling the protesting (Muslim) mobs which initially were not violent”. Then police commissioner S K Bapat had issued instructions to his men not to allow any protests against the demolition of the Babri Masjid on the streets; and on 6 and 7 December 1992, Muslims who were staging peaceful protests such as road blockades and sit-ins were also shot at. Had someone like Patnaik been in charge then, perhaps the riots would not have assumed the scale they did.
Predictably, the opposition Shiv Sena and BJP have cried foul at the “soft” treatment given to the rioters, attributing it to their being Muslims. This is ironical considering that these two Hindutva groups, and now, the Raj Thackeray-led Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), have never been touched whenever they have gone on a rampage against Muslims or anybody else. Their immunity from the law has remained consistent, no matter who is in power.
But Patnaik’s sensitivity and tact is one thing. His force’s lack of intelligence, or failure to act on it, is another. Mobilisation for this rally had been on for almost a week. Posters had been put up in all Muslim areas, in English, Hindi and Urdu. Graphic video clips taken from the internet, supposed to be of violence against Muslims in Myanmar and Assam, were being circulated. The Urdu press was awash with this, as well as rantings against the English media for ignoring atrocities on Muslims. The national outrage against the killing of Sikhs in a US gurdwara further incensed these Muslims.
Did not the police see all this? The Mumbai police’s refusal or failure to recruit Muslims, its lack of knowledge of Urdu, its anti-Muslim attitude, and its arrest of Muslims alone for every terror attack, have all led to an abysmal lack of intelligence about the community. Despite this, it has been reported that the additional commissioner of police (special branch) had sent a confidential report to the commissioner about the possibility of a “charged atmosphere” at the rally, and asked for heavy police bandobast. In his defence, the commissioner has pointed out that the joint commissioner (law and order) was himself present at the rally (indeed, he even went on the dais and read out an ayat from the Koran), and 650 policemen were deployed. But the violence by the mob outside the venue took the cops by surprise, he has said.
Given the record of the Raza Academy, should the police have been taken by surprise? Muslims angered by the violence wonder why permission was given at all to such a body to hold the rally on such a sensitive issue. The answer of course must lie in the high-profile patrons of the Raza Academy – among them Congress minister Naseem Khan. The other organiser of the rally was Maulana Moinuddin Miya, reportedly very close to Chhagan Bhujbal and R R Patil. Denial of permission to both these groups by the police may have been tough anyway, given their political patronage. Added to that would have been the protests by the organisers and the Urdu press about the denial of fundamental rights to Muslims. Secularists would have joined in, pointing out how the Shiv Sena needs no permission to hold rallies, enforce bandhs and show its muscle power whenever it wants. Ditto the MNS, which is currently exempted from paying toll at octroi points in the city, because toll collectors know the price they would have to pay were they to insist on any MNS member doing so.
However, despite their anger against Raza Academy and the other ulema who called the rally and then could not control it, very few Muslims are ready to speak openly against it, fearing the repercussions. Only a few activists, considered un-believers and hence with little standing in the community, have done so. One Urdu newspaper has asked for the arrest of the organisers – without naming the Raza Academy. Only one social worker Farid Batatawala has actually filed a complaint with the police asking that the organisers be arrested for making provocative speeches.
Young Muslims
There is one aspect of this incident which has not been reported. That is the extremely provocative behaviour of some of the rallyists on their way back from the rally towards non-Muslims, mirroring the conduct of Shiv Sainiks towards Muslims, when the organisation was at its peak. Placards abusing “Burma” and “Buddhists” were also seen at the rally.
It appears that Mumbai’s Muslims now have a young force that seeks to ape militant Hindutva groups such as the Shiv Sena and the Bajrang Dal. These are not only illiterate poor Muslims; they have access to Facebook and YouTube and carry sophisticated mobiles that can access these. Despite the political backing their leaders enjoy, what saved them – and the city – on Saturday the 11th of August, was the fact that Patnaik was in charge of the city’s police. It is up to the city’s silent majority of Muslims to tackle them in the long term. Of course, it will not be easy. The silent majority of Hindus could not silence the Sena except through the ballot box.
Another fallout of this event has been the hatred now simmering in the minds of ordinary Hindus towards Muslims. “These people always create trouble when they gather in large numbers”, is the comment being heard. So do Shiv Sainiks. Why is their hooliganism taken as a given?
Jyoti Punwani (jyoti.punwani@gmail.com) is an independent journalist based in Mumbai
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