Comment

Dr. Mohammad Manzoor Alam

By now we had almost started half-believing in BJP’s new-found love for Muslims. The party had almost convinced some Muslims (including the Akbar-e-Azam of Indian journalism) that Gujarat 2002 was a fiction written by a secularist with a fervid imagination.

Men like the pious, bearded, mustache-less Zafar Sareshwalla have been telling us day in day out that Narendrabhai Modi is the latest Messiah of Indian Muslims. As one side of the BJP has been trying to look secular, for electoral purposes, another side of it has been working overtime to harm Muslims.

The Muzaffarnagar carnage came as BJP had been busy convincing us of its secular intent. Muzaffarnagar 2013 looked a lot like Gujarat 2002 largely because the hand of Sangh and its affiliates (including the BJP) had been seen behind both the pogroms. All this was going on while pious men like Sareshwalla had been convincing us that BJP was a friend of Muslims.

Also, all this happened in Muzaffarnagar while an accused of Gujarat 2002, Amit Shah of Gujarat, was the chief of BJP election campaign in UP. Shah, who could have been behind the bars like Maya Kodnani, is out on bail only because of superior legal skills of the lawyer Ram Jethmalani. This is the real of face of the party.

It has been claiming to be a friend of Muslims while opposing each and every government policy meant to uplift poor and backward Muslims.

The latest attempt to harm Muslims has been made by Delhi BJP’s senior functionary Vijay Kumar Malhotra. Earlier this week this man, hobbled by what we can call Partition psyche, chose to call a press conference.

Partition mentality being sick mentality, Malhotra betrayed his sickness by declaring irresponsibly that the Jamia Nagar locality was a hotbed of terrorism and its residents had not only been sheltering terrorists but resisting policemen trying to arrest them.

Muslim leaders have reacted angrily to it. They have rightly said that this is part of the Sangh’s long-drawn out campaign to target and malign Muslims in all areas where they live in substantial numbers across the country.

Right from Bhatkal in the south to Darbhanga in the east and Guwahati in the north-east through Azamgarh in eastern UP, Aligarh in Western UP to Jamia Nagar in the national capital, they have been maligning Muslim areas and trying to hunt down their youth.

Young men from Muslim areas of the country have been regularly harassed, tortured and thrown into jails to rot for years. Virtually in every case the courts have acquitted them honorably and passed strictures against policemen for implicating them in false, concocted cases. The courts have also recommended legal action against policemen guilty of such misconduct, but so far victims have avoided filing court cases against the officers who had committed the crime.

It is a clear case of police aggression against one community. In his two books on Hemant Karkare and his colleagues, the former Inspector General of Maharashtra Police, SM Musrif, has said that a certain section of intelligence services is aligned with the Sangh. Thus Muslim young men from the Muslim educational hubs of AMU and Jamia have especially been maligned and targeted by the Sangh and communally-minded elements in the police and intelligence services.

Muslim students of engineering and medical colleges from all over the country have been particularly targeted as have been young Muslims working in the flourishing IT sector. They clearly want that our young men should not be allowed to become engineers and doctors. They also want to bar our youth from jobs in IT sector where they show some promise.

The malice and dishonesty of Malhotra is evident from the fact that this man did not brand the places as terror hubs from where Hindutva terrorists like Swami Aseemanand, Col Purohit and Sadhvi Pragya Thakur have been arrested.

In a way this despicable act of Malhotra is welcome as it has exposed the false friendliness of BJP. Even then we condemn the viciousness of Malhotra, his party and its source of ill will, the Sangh.