Column

Grab any handy Muslim and work backwards to prove your case. The majority would cheer every step of your inverted logic.

Another bomb ripped through a Delhi market today, another Saturday afternoon exactly two weeks after the five blasts in Delhi markets that killed 24 and injured more than 100. As I write this, three people are reported killed and about 20 injured. TV screens are again flooded with images of blood on the streets, weeping women and shell-shocked men, witnesses talking of the loud blast, the shattered glass and the injuries of the dead and wounded. Scenes we are all too familiar with.

But Delhi cops had been preening for days about how they had solved the case, killed the ‘mastermind’ Atif Ameen, the man behind the Delhi and Ahmedabad blasts. The cops boasted of catching several ‘terrorists’, who all happen to be living in Jamia Nagar, the Muslim colony around the renowned Jamia Milia Islamia University, and most hail from Azamgarh. Very clear-cut.

Not to be outdone, the Mumbai police piped up shortly thereafter, declaring that they had the real ‘mastermind’ responsible for all terror attacks in India since 2005: Sadiq Sheikh of Mumbai. He was even the kingpin of the Mumbai train blasts of 2006, where seven bombs killed more than 200 people! This macho boasting may have given Mumbai cops an edge over the Delhi police, but it seriously harmed the prospect of prosecuting those accused in the Mumbai train blasts. “We had said Cheema is the mastermind!” lamented unidentified Mumbai cops. “How can we have two different masterminds for the same crime?”

Why just two, we better get used to having several different ‘masterminds’ for the same crime as police teams of different states fall over each other to grab the limelight in fighting terror. It’s easy — grab any handy Muslim and work backwards to prove your case. The privileged majority would cheer every step of your inverted logic.

You could even start by killing the ‘terrorists’, like in the ‘encounter’ in Jamia Nagar last week. Unfortunately, when the police shot dead two boys in their home, seasoned ‘encounter specialist’ Inspector MC Sharma was also killed. Let’s put aside for now the serious doubts about the ‘encounter’ and how Sharma died. The cops rushed to the media and we reproduced their story verbatim. Gradually, with enough innuendo and repeated images, you start believing that Muslims are genetically terrorists.

Activists and lawyers pointed out gaping holes in the police version. But when judging an entire community as guilty, such protestations are easily brushed aside. The suspects were paraded in front of the media wearing not the black hood that suspects are normally given to wear, but red chequered Palestinian scarves covering their faces, looking like Hamas bombers. The image of the Muslim as international terrorist was taking shape beautifully.

Jamia university decided to give its arrested students legal aid. The “patriots” went ballistic: How could a government-funded university defend terrorists? “Atrocious, anti-national and highly objectionable!” they screamed, ignoring that every Indian is presumed innocent until proven guilty and has the Constitutional right to legal counsel.
And it was amazing how swiftly these patriots get on to TV screens. Even as the injured were being taken to hospital this afternoon, BJP politician VK Malhotra, the Delhi CM hopeful, descended on the spot holding forth among the devastated on how the UPA government was protecting and funding terrorists by providing legal aid. If terrorist attacks are criminal, so is such stereotyping of Indian Muslims. It assaults the spirit of our Constitution and kills the concept of justice, and the very idea of India.

The writer is Editor, The Little Magazine. Email: sen@littlemag.com