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“Serial bomb blasts in Delhi. Where are you? Are you safe?” read a
text message on my mobile from a friend in Delhi. It was late in
the evening of September 13, 2008.
“That’s horrible. I am fine
though, and in Bihar. Hope you and your family members are all
right,” I replied before forwarding the message to other friends
in Delhi. I was in Bihar surveying the aftermath of the
devastating floods that had struck the Kosi region that year.
On September 13, 2008, the sun went down to serial bomb blasts in
Delhi, killing 26 people and injuring many more. In all, five bomb
blasts within a span of 30 minutes created havoc. I heaved a sigh
of relief when all the messages I received in reply to my
forwarded one, were positive. My friends were all fine. The last
reply I got was around midnight, from a senior colleague of mine,
A R Agwan, a former assistant professor of environment sciences
with whom I had conducted a number of workshops for human rights
activists in various parts of the country. He messaged me saying
he was all right and had been sleeping, hence the delay in
replying.
Still shaken by the news I tried getting on with my work,
believing the worst was over. But I was about to be proved wrong.
Around noon the next day, I received a frantic call from the
secretary of the Association for the Protection of Civil Rights (APCR),
a Delhi-based civil rights group I was working with as a
coordinator. The man sounded tense and poor connectivity added to
the problem. All I was able to make out was that the situation in
Delhi, especially in Jamia Nagar, an area in south Delhi populated
by Muslims, was bad. A sense of fear pervaded the area. The police
had been randomly picking up Muslims. I was asked to come to Delhi
as soon as I possibly could.
Not satisfied with the details, I tried ringing A R Agwan as he
was from the area. I grew worried when around 20 calls made to his
mobile through the day went unanswered. It was unusual for him to
react in this manner. Immediately after iftar (it was the month of
Ramadan), I proceeded to the nearest cyber cafe to book my ticket
to Delhi. Then I received an email: A R Agwan was under arrest! He
had been picked up by a special cell of the Delhi police – the
equivalent of the anti-terror squad or special taskforce in other
states.
A R Agwan is a prominent social activist and has been attached to
many social and human rights groups. With a clear record, and an
even clearer conscience, his arrest sent shockwaves through the
community. Leaders of the Muslim community were outraged by the
arrest. His neighbours did not know how to react. Enquiries with
other activists revealed that, apart from Agwan, three other
people had been detained from the area. Agwan was released only
after pressure from community leaders, social and religious
organisations. Also released was Adnan Fahad, a DTP operator in
his late-20s who had a small publishing business. They were
arrested around 11 am in the morning and freed late evening,
around 7.30 pm. Their illegal detention would have gone on longer
had community leaders and activists not pressurises the Delhi
police.
On September 17, immediately after returning to Delhi, I went to
see Agwan. He was still recovering from the shock, having been
though the worst hours of his life. He was at a complete loss as
to why he had been picked up.
“They asked me about my whereabouts
on the day of the blasts, my activities in the evening that day. I
told them I was at home meeting two non-Muslim friends from
Hyderabad. They had come over to discuss starting up an NGO. Then
they questioned me about the Students Islamic Movement of India
(SIMI) and its people. They pressed me to give the names of some
SIMI people in my locality, and I told them I didn’t know
anything. But they kept insisting.”
The interrogators also asked
him about Abul Bashar, a madrasa graduate, who had been arrested
from Azamgarh a month earlier and was later projected as the
mastermind of the Ahmedabad serial blasts. “I told them I did not
know any more about Abul Bashar than what had already appeared in
the media,” Agwan recalled.
Not content with this response, his
interrogators alleged that Bashar had Agwan’s phone number and
that he had stayed in his home. Agwan flatly denied the charges.
“But they did not believe me and put words in my mouth. They just
wanted me to confess to something I had absolutely no connection
to. It was like there was no rule of law, and the police had
become a law unto themselves,” he told me.
“When they realised
that it would be difficult to continue my custody, as pressure was
mounting from different sections of society for my release, they
offered to drop me home. I refused to go with them. I told them I
was afraid they would take me to some other place and torture me
severely so that I ‘confessed’ to their charges, as has been done
to hundreds of Muslims across the country. I asked them to tell my
family to come and collect me.”
The fear that Agwan experienced reminded me of the stories that I
had heard at the Impendent People’s Tribunal on ‘Atrocities
Committed against Minorities (read Muslims) in the Name of
Fighting Terrorism’, in Hyderabad, in August 2008. We were told
spine-chilling tales of arbitrary detention and torture by victims
of the so-called ‘war on terror’, families of the accused who were
in jail, and human rights activists. The common complaints were
that they had been punched, kicked, and badly beaten up. In order
to humiliate them and make them break down, they said the
interrogators made them stand for long hours, or hung them upside
down. In custody, they were denied all basic amenities and were
forced to drink water from the toilets. Some were subjected to
electric shocks by police officials and made to repeat what the
police were saying. One of them recounted:
“The interrogators
repeatedly used abusive and profane language with me. The torture
continued from about midnight/1 o’clock until morning.” In most
cases, the first question they were asked was: “Why have you
people become anti-nationals? You all are bloody Pakistanis.”
The torture wasn’t limited to those arrested; the police used
every trick in the book to make their victims ‘confess’. Family
members were also subjected to torture. Ataur Rahman, in his
mid-60s, lived in Mumbai with his family which included an
engineer son who was an accused in the July 2006 Mumbai blasts. At
the tribunal, he told us:
“My house was raided in the night and I
was taken to an unknown destination. After keeping me in illegal
custody for several days, I was formally shown to be arrested on
July 27, 2006, and an FIR was lodged against me. Me, my wife, my
daughter and my daughter-in-law were paraded before my arrested
sons while being continuously abused by the police officers. My
sons and I were beaten up in front of each other. The women of the
family were called up by the ATS every day and asked to drop their
burkha (veil) before my arrested sons. Adding to their
humiliation, my sons were abused in front of the women. An officer
beat me up and threatened me that the women of my family were
outside and they would be stripped naked if I did not remove my
clothes before my children and the police officers. They brought
in other arrested accused and I was stripped naked in their
presence…”
The witch-hunt of Muslims only intensified after the September 13
blasts, which were followed by the infamous ‘encounter’ at Batla
House in the Jamia Nagar area of south Delhi. On September 23, a
meeting was organised in Delhi to discuss the police excesses and
the communal witch-hunt; it was attended by well-known lawyers,
activists, journalists, academicians and community leaders. As the
meeting progressed, we received the disturbing news that a
17-year-old boy, Saqib, had been picked up. Since the men who had
taken the boy were unknown, we decided to lodge a complaint with
the local police station. Initially reluctant to entertain us, the
presence of senior lawyers, Jamia teachers and journalists
pressured them into registering our complaint. We were later
informed that the Delhi police special cell had picked Saqib up
for questioning. When Supreme Court lawyer Colin Gonzalves and the
boy’s relatives approached the special cell, they had another
surprise in store for them. The cops said: “Hand over his brother
and take him!”
Saqib’s is not a unique case. People are picked up
indiscriminately every day and harassed, some of them are brutally
tortured. Most victims prefer to remain quiet to avoid further
harassment. They are also afraid no one will employ or rent a
house to a ‘suspected person’.
Three years after the Delhi bomb blasts and the Batla House
‘encounter’, the residents continue to live in fear. A situation
has been created wherein every Muslim is viewed as a terror
suspect, if not a terrorist. The infamous SMS which reads: “Every
Muslim is not a terrorist, but all terrorists are Muslims”, first
did the rounds after the July 2006 blasts in Mumbai. The implicit
message for a major section of the public is that every Muslim is
a potential terrorist, regardless of whether he is a believer,
agnostic, or atheist.
Take the case of Shaina K K, a journalist and a declared agnostic,
who, whilst receiving an award recently, declared: “See, I happen
to be a Muslim but I am not a terrorist.” Shaina has personal
experience of the suspicion with which Muslims are viewed. She has
been falsely framed for ‘intimidating’ witnesses in the Abdul
Nasir Madani case. Her only ‘crime’ was that she investigated the
case of Kerala People’s Democratic Party (PDP) leader Abdul Nasir
Madani, who is an accused in the infamous Bangalore blasts case,
and asked the question: “Why is this man still in prison?” in the
form of an article which appeared in Tehelka, based on the facts.
Madani had already spent 10 years in prison as an undertrial in
the 1997 Coimbatore blast case, and was acquitted in 2007. It was
only last month that Shaina managed to get anticipatory bail,
which put an end to her ‘underground’ life. Another Muslim
journalist from Bangalore, working with a leading newsweekly, was
grilled several times in the same case.
I too have faced this prejudice. During a fact-finding visit to
Giridih jail in Jharkhand in July 2008 I was branded a Maoist
along with two other friends, and illegally detained for five
hours by Giridih superintendent of police, Murari Lal Meena, who
is now being promoted to the rank of DIG, special branch, of the
Jharkhand police.
Later, I was informed by the PUCL Jharkhand
Secretary, Shashi Bhusan Pathak, who was the local organiser of
the visit and had contacted officials for our release, that Meena
had told him: “Since the guy (meaning me) comes from a frontier
area of Bihar which borders Nepal and has studied at Jamia Millia
Islamia, New Delhi, he is a pucca aatankwadi (hardcore
terrorist)!” He had threatened to put us behind bars, in the same
prison, without any hope of being bailed out for at least a year.
In July this year, just a few days before the recent Mumbai
blasts, a Muslim photo-journalist with the Mid-day group, Sayed
Sameer Abedi, was detained for taking innocuous photographs of a
traffic junction and an airplane. He was threatened, roughed up
and called a terrorist because of his Muslim name. According to a
report in Mid-day, at the police station, when Sub-inspector Ashok
Parthi, the investigating officer in his case, asked him about the
incident and he explained everything, emphasising that he had done
no wrong, he was told by the inspector: “Don’t talk too much. Just
shut up and listen to what we are saying. Your name is Sayed, you
could be a terrorist and a Pakistani.”
Unfortunately, this prejudice is not limited to the police and
security agencies. The common man too seems to believe that
Muslims are responsible for every terror strike. This is not a new
phenomenon. In fact, it is worsening every day.
In 2001, I was on my way to Patna by train and I noticed an old
man repeatedly asking a bearded Muslim youth in his teens for an
English magazine that the youth was reading with much
concentration. The youth politely told the old man to wait until
he had finished reading the article. Unmoved by the politeness and
angered at the rebuttal, the man abused the youth calling him and
other Muslims terrorists who were destroying India’s sanctity
after having destroyed America. All Muslims belong to Pakistan,
and should leave for that place, he stated. I was a kid of 15 then
and didn’t want to be identified as a Muslim, so I thought it
unwise to comment. Moreover, the matter subsided when the youth
gave the magazine to the old man (which the old man returned
proclaiming unashamedly that he couldn’t read English!).
As a teenager, I tried not to give the matter much thought.
However, it was not the first time I had been confronted with the
stereotypes about Muslims. I remember a non-Muslim friend being
surprised to hear that I was studying at Jamia Millia Islamia in
Delhi which, he believed, was a madrasa. I told him it was just
like any other university. I still constantly face this question.
It is like living under constant suspicion. In the last three
years, I have often asked myself the question: Am I safe? To be
honest, I doubt it. And my biggest worry is that the ordinary
Muslim youth, who doesn’t have a network of people like Agwan or
me, is in real danger.
After every blast every Muslim youth fears that he could be next.
In India today, to be a Muslim is to live in fear of encounters,
to be constantly suspected of being a terrorist, to know that you
can be illegally detained and severely tortured, and even killed.
How long will the Muslims of India have to bear the burden of
being Muslim? This sense of insecurity has become part and parcel
of our lives. I still have no answer to the question, ‘Will this
never end?’ once asked by a teacher of mine, when I informed her
about the illegal detention of Mohammed Arshad, an engineering
student from Azamgarh who was later released. I can only wish my
answer will soon be in the affirmative.
Mahtab Alam is
a civil rights activist and independent journalist based in Delhi.
The above articles was first published by
Infochange on the website http://infochangeindia.org
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