Missing the Indian Muslim story

India’s Muslim Spring
Why is Nobody Talking about It?   
Hasan Suroor
Published in Rainlight
by Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 201
Pages: 200 / Rs 395

From Prologue

I discovered a refreshing mood of self-introspection and a willingness to face up to the community’s own failings. Voices such as Jameel and Sadia’s are the kind of voices I had been dying to hear, but had almost given up on. One reason why much of the outside world doesn’t even know that such voices exist is that they are effectively blacked out by the media. For one thing, stories about introspection and community-building make boring news compared to fire-and-brimstone fatwas—and I say this as a weather-beaten journalist who has personal experience of this sort of thing. But there is also a political agenda at work here. Which is, to promote a negative image of Muslims and portray them only as fatwa-spewing, book-burning vandals. Watching Indian television channels, it seems there is a rule of thumb to keep out Muslims who do not fit this image. Major English-language national newspapers do often tend to make an effort to project moderate Muslim voices, but the vast majority of both print and electronic media are interested only in the extreme fringe.

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From Chapter 2

Away from the sensational headlines about Islamic extremism, a quiet revolution is taking place. The Muslim discourse has moved on from an obsessive focus on sectarian demands (does anyone remember the last big debate on Muslim Personal Law, for example?) to the more secular bread-and-butter issues. Where once the dinner table talk in Muslim households was unremittingly negative and pessimistic (it was all about how Muslims were being ‘crushed’ and trampled upon, and had no future in India), today it is about change and looking forward. There is a new optimism abroad that is hard to miss. What is significant is that the change is being urged upon not by the usual suspects—the agnostic left-wing Muslim intellectuals answering the description of Jean Paul Sartre’s ‘inauthentic’ Muslim—but by ‘gold-plated’ practising Muslims, deeply conscious of their Muslim identity and unapologetic about flaunting it.

In the fashionable lingo of the day, Indian Muslims are having their own ‘spring’. It may not have the shape of an organised movement, and we may not see people going around waving banners or picketing ‘mullahs’, but it is genuine, widespread, and it looks like it is here to stay. The media has largely ignored the change that is sweeping India’s Muslim community, and continues to play up the extreme voices because they make ‘news’. Yet, five or ten years from now, it might realise that it missed the biggest story of its time unfolding right under its nose.

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From Chapter 13

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 that Indian Muslim extremist groups such as the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), were suspected to have assisted Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed in carrying out the atrocity. Police even released sketches of two alleged suspects and several people, including several SIMI office-bearers who were not only arrested but subjected to narcotics tests in order to obtain confessions. A drunk Pakistani national who, the police claimed, was seen throwing one of the suitcases containing bombs from the train, was also questioned.

Yet it was to take the security services more than a year to achieve a breakthrough during which period Muslims remained under suspicion. Amid continued media frenzy, in September 2008, India Today carried an ‘exclusive’ report claiming: ‘Narco analysis tests conducted on three key activists of the banned Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) have revealed that its activists had helped carry out the Mumbai train bombings of 11 July 2006 and the Samjhauta Express blasts of January 2007. The bombings were carried out with the help of Pakistani nationals who had come from across the border. The tests were carried out in Bangalore on the general secretary Safdar Nagori, his brother Kamruddin Nagori and Amil Parvez in April this year. The “Nagori 13” were arrested from their hideout in Indore by Madhya Pradesh police in March this year. Results of the narco analyst tests exclusively available with India Today have revealed, for the first time, SIMI’s direct links with not only the Mumbai train bombings which killed over 200 persons but also links with the Samjhauta Express blast of February 2007 which killed 68 persons.’

Similar breathless reports, based on briefings from intelligence sources, appeared in other newspapers and were broadcast by television channels.

Two months later—in November 2008—it was revealed that the attacks were linked to Prasad Shrikant Purohit, an Indian army officer and a member of the Hindu extremist group Abhinav Bharat. Purohit claimed that he had ‘infiltrated’ Abhinav Bharat and was simply doing his job of collecting intelligence. Meanwhile, the Rajasthan anti-terrorist squad prepared an 800-page charge-sheet in October 2010 according to which the Samjhauta Express was discussed as a potential target for an attack at a meeting of Hindutva bomb makers in February 2006.

To cut the story short, in December 2010 the National Investigation Agency, which had taken over the probe by then, identified Swami Aseemanad, a former RSS activist, as the mastermind behind the blast. He confessed that Hindutva extremists groups engineered the bombing but later claimed that it had been obtained under duress. He was later chargesheeted as one of the main accused in the case along with Sadhvi Pragya Thakur, a self-styled ‘godwoman’, and is awaiting trial at the time of writing (May 2013). Others arrested for their role in the blast include Kamal Chouhan, another former RSS worker. He is suspected to have planted the bombs with his accomplice Chaudhary, alias Samandar Das.

Aseemanand has also been linked to the Makkah Masjid blasts in Hyderabad on 18 May 2007 in which 14 people were killed, and a series of other terror attacks including those in the Maharashtra towns of Malegaon and Modasa in 2008, and the Ajmer Sharif Darga blast in October 2007 which, again, was initially blamed on Muslim groups.

I have gone at some length to narrate these incidents here not to score points about saffron or green terrorism but to underline how the government agencies and the media have created an atmosphere in which it has become all too easy to pin every act of terrorism on Muslims. In recent years, hundreds of innocent Muslims, young and old, have been thrown into jail on the basis of nothing more than vague suspicion. Many have been held for years without charge. Quite a few have had their careers destroyed in the process.

Reprinted with the permission of Rupa Publications.