Two significant events took place last weekend in the national capital. ANHAD, an NGO, organised a meeting on the plight of Muslims to show how they were victims of bias and prejudice of the state.
Muslims from across the country attending the three-day meet were critical and sceptical of the secular credentials of the Indian state and many went so far as to insist that the character of the Indian state is patently communal.
In a parallel development the UPA government decided to ignore the recommendations of the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions to standardise and modernise Madrasa education by setting up a Central Madrasa Board for formalising and standardising non-theological madrasa education. Muslim madrasas are spread across the length and breadth of India, specially in the countryside.
Union Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal invited all the 59 sitting Muslim MPs to a meeting to discuss the proposal. Only 18 of them turned up. Four supported the proposal fully, 10 saw nothing wrong with it and generally went along with the proposal. Just four, including the lone Hyderabad-based Majlises Ittehadul Muslimeen (MIM) MP Asaduddin Owaisi and two Trinamul Congress MPs and one other MP opposed the proposal, objecting to the government “interfering in the affairs of the Muslim community.”
They wielded enough clout to make Sibal retreat and say: “If the community does not want it we can drop the idea altogether.”
The MIM has all along been a bit of a mischief maker and the last we heard it assaulted noted Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen and journalists when she was being hosted by the Andhra journalists at the Hyderabad Press Club a couple of years back.
As for Trinamul, it is busy trying to wean Muslims from the CPI-M led Left Front Evidently, it is banking on similar fundamentalist elements , the self-proclaimed wholesale custodians and traders of Muslim votes. That is why perhaps the Trinamul MPs were most vocal in opposing any modernisation of madrasas.
But not far away from this Kapil Sibal meeting, for three days Muslims from across the country assembled at the Constitution Club and explained how they were being hounded and singled out, bundled into jails and false cases were trumped up upon them. They were not allowed to say their prayers even on the Eid day inside the jail.
Victim after victim narrated how there was nobody to appeal to and respond to their plight, how the police, the administration and even the judiciary, including the Human Rights Commission, was adopting two sets of standards when it came to dealing with Muslims.
The Batla House incident and the Ishrat Jehan killing came up for repeated mention to demonstrate how their attempts at getting justice even through the NHRC have failed. Accusing fingers were raised at the Central Govenrment too, both in relation to the Batla House incident and the Ishrat Jehan fake encounter case, where the Central Government had enthusiastically supported the Gujarat government in labelling Ishrat Jehan and her companion Javed Sheikh as LeT activists gone to Ahmedabad to kill Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
Modi and his government’s role came as no surprise to anyone, in the light of what all he had been doing since the February 2002 Godhra incident. But the first affidavit the Union Home Ministry submitted to the Gujarat High Court on August 6, 2009 really shook all faith in the fairness of the Central Government and the policing agencies that are operating under it.
It has since revised the affidavit but without disowning the first and without fixing responsibility on the officers concerned for their blatant communal bias in the first affidavit.
Union Minority Affairs Minister Salman Khursheed, who came to the Muslim meet, virtually raised his hands pleading that he could do precious little to alleviate the sufferings of thousands of poor Muslims across northern and western India who are being subjected to daily humiliation and torture simply because they bear Muslim names or happen to sport a beard or wear a cap on their head and often times the young boys picked up are not even sporting a beard or a cap.
The inference one can draw from these parallel developments is pretty simple. The Muslim community continues to suffer at the hands of a biased and prejudiced administration not just in the state of Gujarat run by Narendra Modi but the situation is hardly different in places like Delhi or UP, run by the supposedly secular governments led by the Congress in Delhi and the BSP and Mayawati in UP.
All the promises of the Congress and UPA government made not just before the 2004 general election but again in the run-up to the 2009 elections of giving a fair treatment to the Muslim community amount to nothing.
But on the other hand, when it comes to issues involving the progress and development of the community, the UPA government and the Congress party would not dare displease the so-called custodians of the Muslim community like MIM or a handful of obscurantist mullahs now aligned to Mamata Banerjee, whom Mamata would not like to annoy at this hour because she hopes to use them to win away all the Muslim voters from the CPI-M dominated Left Front and thus defeat the CPI-M in the next Assembly elections.
This when the recommendations for setting up a Central madrasa board did not come from a saffron body. Rather the NCMEI and its Chairman are all God-fearing Muslims and the Chairman is a respected retired High Court judge. Moreover, the move was inspired by the recommendations of Justice Rajinder Sachar in his now famous Sachar committee report.
When the Sachar report came Muslims were most enthusiastic about it and even MIM MP Asaduddin Owaisi demanded immediate implementation of the report. In fact, modernisation and standardisation of madrasa education will only help Muslim youth in being considered for employment both in the government and other sectors once its certificate is granted a status equal to school pass.
And yet the government is reluctant to move, lest it annoys the self-appointed custodians of Muslim votes, who anyway have a vested interest in keeping the Muslims backward and ghettoised.
In effect, the Congress does not seem to have learnt any lessons from its past mistakes. It continues to encourage and appease wholesale traders of Muslim votes, unmindful of the real concerns of the community. This also has a few lessons for the Muslim community who rushed to the Congress in the hope that in its new avtaar it was different from the Congress of the 1980s.
By Faraz Ahmad
Thanks to The Tribune India