SACW #2 | 5 Aug. 2003 [India]

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire  #2.  |  5 August,  2003

[1.] India's Great Divide (Alex Perry)
[2.] Hate Thy Neighbor (Alex Perry)
[3.] Uniformity or Gender Justice (Ram Puniyani)



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[1.]


Time Asia
http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501030811/story.html

India's Great Divide
Mounting fury over religious discrimination by the Hindu majority is 
triggering an increasingly violent Muslim backlash
By Alex Perry Bombay

Posted Monday, August 4, 2003; 21:00 HKT
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 lives, Sheikh 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


o o o

Time Asia
http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501030811/neighbor.html

Hate Thy Neighbor
Muslims feel the heat as India leans towards Hindu nationalism
By Alex Perry Bombay

Posted Monday, August 4, 2003; 21:00 HKT
India has always prided itself on its secularism. But with the rise 
of a Hindu-chauvinist movement, animosity toward the country's 150 
million Muslim minority has intensified. As a result, many Muslims 
feel more insecure than ever. Their key grievances include:

GUJARAT In retaliation for a Muslim attack on a train carrying Hindu 
pilgrims in February last year, Hindu mobs embarked on an orgy of 
murder, rape and arson against Gujarati Muslims, killing as many as 
2,000

AYODYHA In 1992 Hindu mobs destroyed a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya 
claimed by right-wing Hindu nationalists to have been built on the 
site of a temple that marked the birthplace of the deity Rama. 
Nationwide riots ensued as Muslims protested; nearly 1,800 people 
were killed in Bombay alone. Then, in March 1993, the Muslim 
underworld detonated a series of bombs across Bombay, killing nearly 
300 people. Hindus want to rebuild a temple on the disputed site, but 
preliminary archaeological findings have shown no sign of a previous 
temple there

JOB DISCRIMINATION Although the constitution recognizes the right to 
equal opportunities, many Hindu-run companies don't hire qualified 
Muslims. Likewise, the government hires a disproportionate number of 
Hindus, exacerbating Muslims' sense that they are economically 
oppressed

SCAPEGOATING Indian Muslims are often regarded as a potential fifth 
column for the country's archenemy Pakistan. Accusations of collusion 
with Islamabad surface each time terrorists launch attacks on Indian 
soil


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[2.]

Subject: Issues in Secular politics-August 2003-I


Friends


This bulletin circulated on e-mail, will be carrying fortnightly article
on an issue relevant to the contemporary threat to Secularism and
Democracy in South Asia. This bulletin is meant to discuss the topics of
current relevance and to raise the debate and questions in the
context of the dangers being faced by the democratic ethos from the
Religious Fascist politics.

Please do circulate it further. It can be freely translated, used and
published to increase the awareness on the themes being addressed. Your
suggestions and opinions are most welcome. Please do let me know if you
will like to recommend more interested friends on this list.

Those of you who, who do NOT wish to receive it shwuld kindly send me a
blank mail with the subject-Unsubscribe Bulletin.

With best wishes

Ram Puniyani

(The articles of this bulletin are posted on the following URLs
http://www.boloji.com/voices/index.htm
,http://www.nilacharal.com/news/view/index.html, and on
www.mysprat.org/fraternity)
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Uniformity or Gender Justice

Ram Puniyani

Chief Justice Khare's observation (July 23rd, 2003)
about the need to work for Uniform civil code has
rekindled the debate, which has been raging from last
decade or so. Different groups have responded to it in
a different fashion, with Muslim League opposing it
right away and BJP jubilantly welcoming it. These are
the two opposite poles of the reaction to the
observation of the Chief Justice. It is likely to
bring forth the debate about this vexed issue.
Different social groups have seen the demand for
Uniform code in different perspectives. One of the
arguments is that such a code will strengthen the
National unity.

As such the issue of Uniform civil code was raised in
the beginning by the women's movement in its quest for
gender justice. During Shah Bano case the immaturity
and mistakes of Rajiv Gandhi regime sowed the seeds of
dissatisfaction to this judgment reversal by the act
of parliament. As the orthodox section of Muslim
leadership banked on the preservation of male
domination in the name of Islam, the RSS and its
progeny intensified the campaign for Uniform code. It
came in as a convenient handle to beat the Muslim
community with. It was asserted by BJP leadership that
a uniform code will draw from different prevalent
codes and that's what will bring in a 'model' code.
Realizing that a mere uniformity cannot bring in
justice the women's movement began to call for gender
just code and that's where it stands today. There is a
crucial difference in these two simple concepts. A
uniform code need not be gender just while a gender
just code can be uniform for the whole Nation. As such
the civil code relates more to the laws of inheritance
of property, divorce and custody of children. And in
these matters most of the prevalent codes are biased
in favor of men without any shadow of doubt.

Going back early to the days of Nehru-Ambedkar, one
recalls that Nehru had requested Dr. Ambedkar to begin
the process of drafting civil codes, beginning with
Hindu code. Hindu being the majority it was more
pertinent to begin with that. In due course
Ambedkar-Nehru duo realized that the serious
opposition to this within the ruling party itself will
not permit the passage of the bill and the justice
cannot be delivered to women so easily. Meanwhile the
women's movement started picking up and it in due
course started articulating for equality before law
and need for legal provisions in that direction. While
even the process for Hindus is not complete the women
from Minority community started suffering from other
disadvantages. The regular recurrence of anti-minority
violence intimidated the minorities, minority women in
particular. Till 91-92 the contradictory trends of
progress and regression of minority reforms was fairly
in balance. Post babri the regressive trends became
stronger and the ghettoisation of Muslim community
started setting in. The Muslim community as whole and
Muslim women in particular became subject to a
physical-psychological intimidation. Every round of
violence left a scar on the minority psyche. The
Mumbai riots were a severe blow to internal reforms
within the community. The Gujarat carnage has exceeded
all the imaginable barbarities against women and the
same battered women had to take shelters in the
mosques. What will be the result of this phenomenon,
'mosque as the only savior for Muslim women'? To say
that it will further strengthen the hold of Mullahs is
to state the obvious. The movement of Muslim women for
justice has been on in a small but significant way.
This gets a severe jolt every time a bout of Anti
Muslim violence breaks out. The Muslim women are
double victims. On one hand they have to face the
violence of Hindutva from outside and on the other
they are victims of the intimidation of Mullahs from
inside.

To begin with no civil codes cannot be imposed from
outside. We require a feeling of security to ensure
that reform process begins. In the current scenario
the Hindutva movement is repressive not only to the
Muslim minorities but it also it targets at the gender
equality. It asserts that notion of Women's liberation
is licentious, synonym of loose morals. It moans about
the glorious position of Indian women in the past
where women were worshipped. And so we do not need any
notions of "Western" ideas of gender equality as
Hindus worshipped 'their' women. The Hindutva women's
organizations, which are subordinate to male RSS,
propagate an opposition to the ideas of struggling for
equality and justice. The parallel cultural expression
is being percolated through the current Hindi serials
like Saas bhi Khabhi Bahu thi and its clones on
different channels, which merely propagate the
patriarchal notions in different guises. Also with the
ascendance of Hindu Right movement all the other Human
rights movements are facing a setback.

Today it is an impossibility to take up the issue of
Gender just code right away. The doctored minds are
talking of the great traditions, unmindful of the fact
that what is being paraded as the great tradition is
nothing but the values enshrined in the Manusmirit in
more refined form.

We do need Uniformity, but of course it has to be
based on justice. This justice is the biggest victim
at the hands of the Religion based nationalism. We
need to restore the democratic culture and spirit in
all aspects of social life as the prerequisite for
justice. No threatened and insecure community can go
in for reforms. It is commendable that even in the
shadow of terror of this atmosphere, created by
Togadia's and Modi's, a large section of Muslim
community and leadership are talking of progress and
reforms. The Shahi Imams are being marginalized. This
is a positive trend in the Nation. While BJP will try
its best to use this handle of Uniform code, it is
imperative that democratic movement works for a riot
free India, a harmonious atmosphere where communities
feel secure and thereby strive for progress and
justice. More than Muslims, the major opposition to
tie gender just code will come from the same Hindutva
forces that today are demanding for Uniform code. Once
the terrain is shifted to Justice as the first
principle and uniformity as an accompaniment Hidutva
will oppose it tooth and nail as its very foundation
is on the concept of patriarchy and male domination.
It's a clone of Talibanism or Islamism as being
practiced by the Pakistani ruling junta where Mullahs
hold the sway.

There is an urgent need to shift the debate to issues
of security and justice which are the core issues, the
basic foundation on which Uniformity can be built and
brought in for all the communities


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Buzz on the perils of fundamentalist politics, on matters of peace 
and democratisation in South Asia. SACW is an independent & 
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