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Mounting
fury over religious discrimination by the Hindu majority in India
With
reporting by S. Hussain Zaidi/Bombay and Sankarshan Thakur/New Delhi
TIMES
ARTICLE
Surveying the sunset over Bombay's southern coastline from the calm of his
palatial first-floor office, police joint commissioner Ahmad Javed could
scarcely look less like an outsider. His uniform is stiff with starch, his shoes
impeccably shined, and when the 45-year-old smoothes his neatly clipped
moustache, he does so with perfectly manicured fingers. On his polished wood
desk, an In tray bulges with the responsibilities of the second-most-senior
policeman in India's biggest metropolis; meanwhile, outside a nervous line of
saluting adjutants waits for signatures, permissions and orders in triplicate.
When Javed speaks, it is with the erudite polish and faintly Victorian manner of
India's finest private school, St. Stephen's College in New Delhi. The
consummate insider, Javed is a man whose instincts and hopes—whose entire
being—are governed by the system he serves. "We have a saying in the service,"
he says. "Once you don your khakis, they become your religion."
Looking down at the same shoreline from the top floor of a nearby hotel,
44-year-old "Umar" is reflecting on a life spent almost entirely outside the
Indian mainstream. Affable, neatly bearded and smartly dressed, Umar (a
pseudonym given to him by TIME) holds the senior rank of ansar, or guide, in
India's loosely knit Muslim militant movement. In that capacity, he told Time,
he has played a central role in a string of deadly bomb blasts that have rocked
Bombay in the past eight months. Just last week, a bus was blown apart as it
drove through eastern Bombay, killing three people and injuring 42. The police
blame the attack on Umar's organization, an unnamed fundamentalist group made up
primarily of former members of the outlawed Student Islamic Movement of India
(SIMI).
Umar and Javed, both Indian Muslims, began their careers simultaneously in the
mid-'70s. But they could hardly have chosen more different paths. While the
policeman was taking his civil-service exams, Umar was being admitted as a
full-time activist in SIMI, a fundamentalist group formed in the late 1970s and
banned by New Delhi after 9/11. Umar spends his life on the run, changing his
appearance, identity and address every few months. But as a member of the
ultra-orthodox Al-e-Hadeez Sunni sect, he maintains a semblance of a traditional
Muslim family life with a wife and two children at a house in northern India.
For most of his 28 years' service as an Indian jihadi, Umar's specialty has been
as a facilitator for foreign Islamic guerrillas from Pakistan, Afghanistan and
even western China, providing them with safe houses, weapons and identities.
(Among those he helped, claims Umar, were Muslim militants who attacked the
Indian Parliament in New Delhi on Dec. 13, 2001, killing 14 people.) Like Javed,
Umar defines himself through his work. But as befits the man at the top of
Javed's most wanted list, in every other respect he is the policeman's
antithesis. "This country doesn't work for Muslims any more," he says. "You
can't get a proper education. You can't get a job. You're not even safe."
Here we have two Indian Muslims with two very different experiences of their
homeland. But the truth is that Javed and Umar share a fundamental burden: in
the eyes of many Hindus, no Muslim can ever truly belong in India. The origins
of this antagonism are centuries old. In essence, hard-line Hindus regard as a
national humiliation the Islamic influence that pervades India's history,
starting with the Mughal Renaissance in the 16th century, continuing with the
birth of Islamic fundamentalism in Asia at Deoband in northern India in the
1860s (the same creed followed by the Taliban) and enduring even today in
India's national symbol, the Mughal mausoleum of the Taj Mahal. This distrust of
Islam has only increased since independence in 1947: modern India was founded in
the Muslim-Hindu bloodletting of partition of the subcontinent, in which a
million people died, and since then tensions have boiled over into three wars
against Islamic neighbor Pakistan. Today, much of the religious tension in the
region stems from India's rule over Muslim-dominated Kashmir in the face of
strident Pakistani opposition. The war on terror and the 1998 election of the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on a Hindu-nationalist agenda, which focused debate
on physically undoing the Mughal invasion by razing mosques built over Hindu
temples, have lent a veil of legitimacy to India's lurking anti-Muslim
prejudice. "Muslims are a despised minority, disliked by a large section of the
majority," wrote Muslim commentator Firoz Bakht Ahmed in the Hindu newspaper
last month.
Indian Muslims do have their high achievers: President Abdul Kalam; Wipro
chairman and India's richest man, Azim Premji, and a host of Bollywood stars
(Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, Saif Ali Khan). But for every
President or Muslim tech entrepreneur or movie star or policeman, there are
1,000 others with tales of discrimination in the workplace or the education
system, harassment by wayward police officers or segregation into ghettos by
Hindu landlords. Whatever the causes, there is no disputing the fact that Indian
Muslims today are less educated, poorer and live shorter, less secure and less
healthy lives than their Hindu counterparts. Census figures paint a bleak
picture of their plight. In rural India, 29% of Muslims earn less than $6 a
month, compared with 26% of Hindus; in the cities (where a third of all Muslims
live) the gap rises to 40% vs. 22%. Some 13% of India's population is Muslim,
yet Muslims account for just 3% of government employees, and an even smaller
percentage are employed by private Hindu businesses. Meanwhile, in the cities,
30% of Muslims are illiterate, vs. 19% of Hindus. Nor are any of these indices
improving.
India's Muslims are also far more likely than Hindus to be victims of violent
attacks. In all the communal riots since independence, official police records
reveal that three-quarters of the lives lost and properties destroyed were
Muslim, a figure that climbed to 85% during last year's riots in Gujarat. The
Gujarat authorities even went so far as to price Muslim lives below those of
Hindus, offering $2,050 in state compensation for Muslims killed but double that
for the riots' 58 Hindu victims. "There is often a tendency in India to treat
Muslims as them rather than us," says K.C. Tyagi, former leader of the moderate
Hindu Samajwadi Party. "And this tendency does have terrible manifestations.
Even today, by and large, Muslims have not been admitted to what we call the
Indian mainstream." The portion of the population affected by this systemic
discrimination is staggering: India's Muslim "minority" numbers 150 million
people (vs. 850 million Hindus)—after Indonesia, the second-largest Islamic
community in the world.
It's little wonder that these inequalities have fueled a profound sense of
alienation and resentment among many Muslims. In their eyes, what happened in
Gujarat to people like Zaheera Sheikh was a brutal, watershed illustration of
just how inhospitable India has become to Muslims. As Hindu mobs rampaged across
the state in an orgy of violence that was to cost 2,000 Muslim livesSheikh hid
on a rooftop in her hometown of Baroda, Gujarat, and watched a crowd of 100
pelting her family's home and attached bakery with bricks and bags of gasoline.
After an hour of this, she recalls, a Hindu police sergeant addressed the mob:
"He said, 'You have to finish this tonight, to finish everyone off. This has to
be over with by the morning.' And then he got back into his jeep and left."
Nine people were burned alive or clubbed to death at the Sheikh family's house
and bakery that night, including her uncle Kauser Ali and her sister Sabira, as
well as three Muslim neighbors and their four children who believed they would
be safe inside the Sheikhs' concrete walls. When the rioters coaxed the
survivors down from the roof the following morning with promises of safety,
Sheikh and the others agreed. But the mob killed two Muslim men as they ran away
and beat three Hindu bakery workers to the ground before disemboweling them,
piling wood on top of them and setting them alight.
Sheikh's experience of what University of Washington political scientist Paul
Brass calls militant Hindus' "institutionalized riot systems" was all too common
in Gujarat. But it is her tale of what followed that is now forcing the nation
to examine how deeply anti-Muslim prejudice permeates the state. In the riots'
aftermath, what set Sheikh apart from other victims was her steadfast refusal to
recant her police statement identifying her attackers. "My brother received
threats on his mobile phone from politicians. They would say, 'Do you value your
life? Your family's life? Tell your sister to change her testimony or we'll kill
you all.'" But Sheikh refused, exhorting her brother to remember the sight of
their sister Sabira perishing in the flames. Finally, on May 17, Sheikh's day in
court came.
When she arrived at the courthouse steps, Sheikh says, local BJP leader Madhu
Srivastava intercepted her and said "you are not going to get justice." In
addition, she claims, "He asked me, 'Is your life or the lives of your family
not precious to you?'" (Confronted with Sheikh's allegations, Srivastava told
TIME, "These Muslim women are lying. I have never threatened them. They have
entered into a conspiracy with [BRACKET {the opposition}] Congress Party to
defame me and the nationalistic BJP. I am the most popular leader in my
constituency. Otherwise I would not have been elected. The Congress [BRACKET
{Party}] is provoking Muslims to make false statements for its own political
gains.")
As Sheikh recalls it, the courtroom was packed with militant Hindus, staring at
her and making threatening gestures. At this last moment, Sheikh's nerve failed
her. She told prosecutor Raghuvir Pandya that she hadn't been able to see her
attackers in the dark and smoke. Pandya, a BJP member who Sheikh says had not
met his star witness before her court appearance, questioned her briefly, then
let her go. "I had two choices: to speak for my dead relatives or to keep quiet
for my living ones," she says. "I chose the latter." She was one of 41 witnesses
who had changed their statements; soon afterwards, the case collapsed and all 21
accused walked free.
Moreover, Sheikh's case is not even particularly unusual. Hindu riots in India
over the past two decades have cost the lives of more than 6,000 people, yet
only a handful of Hindus have been convicted. Justice is even rarer in a state
where some public prosecutors owe their jobs to the BJP's hard-line icon
Narendra Modi, who did little to control the riots and was re-elected last
December on a wave of Hindu nationalism, and where Pravin Togadia, the extremist
general secretary of the BJP-allied Vishwa Hindu Parishad, has his main support
base. (Togadia once informed TIME that a third of Indian Muslims were "jihadis"
and that all jihadis—50 million people, by his math—should be "executed.")
Indeed, an indication of which way the courts are leaning in three other Gujarat
massacre cases—in which the death tolls were 89, 42 and 38—can be found in the
release on bail of all but 10 of the 114 alleged murderers, rapists and
arsonists.
Nonetheless, Sheikh says she retains her faith in the Indian justice system and
in the humanity of most Hindus. "I don't believe Hindus everywhere are like
this," she says, mentioning several Hindu friends and neighbors and even
policemen who encouraged her to go to court. "If there's a divide here, it is
between those who want to see justice done and those who don't."
But for terrorist Umar, Gujarat and the unabashed prejudice that followed was a
breaking point. "If the government continues on this path, we will go to any
extreme," he warns. "As they reach their peak, so will we."
Indian politicians blamed Pakistan for last Monday's Bombay bus explosion that
killed 3 and injured 42 (bringing the toll from five blasts since December to 17
dead and hundreds injured). But the police in Bombay have little doubt that
Umar's organization was the real culprit. Javed notes that the attack occurred
in Ghatkopar, an area of eastern Bombay that's home to many migrant Gujaratis
and that was also the place where Umar initiated his Bombay bombing campaign on
Dec. 2, when an almost identical bus bomb killed two and hurt 28 others. Issuing
a high alert across the city last week , Javed said the "element of continuity"
from the previous blasts was undeniable. A senior officer from India's
intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), confirms that a hard
core of fundamentalists drawn from SIMI's ranks has switched from backroom
support to frontline terror in the past few months; he also says they were
responsible for the assassination of former Gujarat home minister Haren Pandya
on March 26. The officer from raw adds, "Let's not have any doubts as to what
caused this [BRACKET {Muslim backlash}]. If I was a Muslim and people from my
community were mowed down like they were in Gujarat, do you think I would stand
by and do nothing?"
Umar, for one, has no intention of standing by and doing nothing. "We will
continue," he vows. "There is no limit on our actions ... Even to kill children
is good—you stop the generation there, at the beginning."
For law enforcers like Javed, the worry is not so much the ruthless fury of an
extremist like Umar as the extent to which such rage has spread within more
respectable parts of the Muslim community. When Bombay suffered a series of
Islamist bomb attacks in 1993, they were carried out by the city's
Muslim-dominated underworld, men who had long departed the mainstream and for
whom violence was already a way of life. But Javed's right-hand man, deputy
police commissioner (and Hindu) Pradip Sawant, is finding today that even some
whom he'd expect to be India's least marginalized Muslims are heeding the call
to jihad. "Of the 21 we've caught and charged [BRACKET {over the recent Bombay
bombings}]," says Sawant, "two are doctors, six are computer specialists and two
or three more are university graduates in other disciplines." Outside Bombay,
too, the police have broken up terrorist cells in places like Bangalore, Kerala
and New Delhi over the past six months and have been shocked to find that a high
proportion of cell members were university graduates and professionals. "It is a
matter of serious concern," says Javed, "when people who are so qualified choose
a path which means throwing everything away. It tells us that there is a new
sort of thinking circulating in the community."
That new thinking was evident when Javed's men descended upon the prosperous
Muslim suburb of Borivili in April to arrest former SIMI national head Saqib
Nachan, 44, as the suspected ground commander for the Bombay bombings. Javed's
officers were forced to withdraw by a crowd of 300 local residents who assembled
outside their stucco mansions and barred the way. Later, after Nachan
surrendered and confessed his role as a terrorist commander, the police
announced the discovery of two AK-56s, four pistols, four revolvers and 250
homemade bombs hidden in the village well. Nasir Mullah, whose 26-year-old
bank-manager son is a former SIMI member and was also arrested, says the weapons
were to protect Borivili from a Hindu-dominated police force that has since been
censured in an official state report for conducting "ad hoc arrests of the
innocent, torture and forced confessions" there. "Nachan and the other SIMI
people are role models here," says the 55-year-old timber trader. "People need
to defend themselves."
Although he, too, is angry about Gujarat, Javed refuses to concede any common
bond with Umar. To Javed, there is no contradiction between his dismay over
Gujarat and his job, which requires him to hunt down self-styled Muslim
avengers. "There's a world of difference between being upset by Gujarat and
being a committed militant," he says. Wrath is not the only emotion sweeping
India's Muslim community, he adds. Progressive Muslims like Javed are
increasingly expressing alarm at the dangers of radicalization among both Hindus
and Muslims. And in the past year, a growing number of such moderates have
called for Muslims to modernize and show the flexibility needed to begin
bridging India's bitter division. In her steadfast refusal to see Hindus as the
enemy, Sheikh personifies this progressive outlook. "I just don't understand
these old hatreds," she says. "I could never live like that."
But with the rhetoric of intolerance likely to drown out moderation in the
run-up to a general election as little as six months away, Javed and his
officers see more bloodshed coming. "I fear this is only the beginning," says
deputy commissioner Sawant. Indeed, flushed with success, Umar has no intention
of renouncing his terror campaign. "We regret nothing," he says. "We enjoy this
work."
Javed, meanwhile, scans the cityscape's middle distance, as if for signs of his
quarry. "We will have more strife, and the situation will get more difficult,"
he predicts. He pauses. "But there is hope for Muslims in India. There has to
be. If Muslims lose hope, then what?" Then Umar and his Hindu enemies will have
won.
With reporting by S. Hussain Zaidi/Bombay and Sankarshan Thakur/New Delhi
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