India's Muslim Spring by Hasan Suroor

Author:Hasan Suroor [Suroor, Hasan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9788129131645
Google: EZCeAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2014
Published: 2014-01-06T04:17:43+00:00

13

A ‘Witch-Hunt’

‘Seventy years ago, US soldiers bearing bayoneted rifles came marching up to the front door of our family’s home in Los Angeles, ordering us out. Our crime was looking like the people who had bombed Pearl Harbour a few months before. I’ll never forget that day, nor the tears streaming down my mother’s face as we were forcibly removed, herded off like animals, to a nearby race track. There, for weeks, we would live in a filthy horse stable while our ‘permanent’ relocation camp was being constructed thousands of miles away in Arkansas, in a place called Rowhwer….

The tragedy of the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans was not only that it was the greatest violation of our constitutional guarantees, but that it broke apart families and whole communities, and left scars that today remain unhealed, even after the government later apologized and issued reparations.’ (My Wartime Internment, George Takei, actor who appeared in the original Star Trek series, The Guardian, 27 April 2012).

Substitute Los Angeles with any Indian city—Moradabad, Aligarh, Pune, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad—and this could well have been written by an Indian Muslim harassed by security forces for ‘looking like the people’ who carry out terror attacks. Ironically, the Indian government protests so vociferously—and rightly—when high-profile Indian Muslims like Shah Rukh Khan are victims of ethnic profiling at western airports, but has no qualms harassing its own Muslim citizens on similar grounds. This has led to a climate of fear in which Muslims say they don’t feel safe.

Abid Shah, who works for an international NGO, says that having seen many of his friends harassed by the police he lives in constant fear.

‘If there is a blast in Delhi I make sure that I reach home as soon as possible. There’s a sense of siege among Muslims. In my case, it is worse. I am from Kashmir. Being a Muslim is bad enough, but being a Kashmiri makes it a double whammy,’ he jokes.

Certain categories of Muslims—the overtly religious types and those with links to a Muslim institution or a Muslim group—feel specially threatened. Most Muslims say they know someone—a neighbour, a friend, a relation, a friend’s friend—who has been harassed after a terror incident, for simply being a Muslim. In the previous chapter I have described how there’s now an all-too-familiar drill which kicks in after a terror attack, triggering a round-up of Muslims often without the slightest of evidence. This despite the fact that at least two major atrocities—the 2007 Samjhauta Express and the Makkah Masjid blasts—were masterminded by Hindu extremists, the so-called ‘saffron terrorists’, after being typically first blamed on Muslims.

Shortly before midnight of 18 February 2007, bombs ripped through two crowded carriages of the Delhi-Lahore Samjhauta Express—a special bi-weekly train service meant to facilitate movement of people between India and Pakistan—as it passed Diwana station near Panipat, 80 kilometres from Delhi. At least 68 people, mostly from Pakistan, were killed and dozens injured. The very next day, police and intelligence sources started briefing the media

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