As Ramzan draws to a close, the iftaar scene has started to sizzle. Last Friday saw the chief minister’s iftaar at Haj House; the Friday before that, it was Sharad Pawar’s party. The proposal by veteran activist Faridbhai Batatawala that this Ramzan there should be no sarkaari iftaars in view of the disaster in Uttarakhand, went unheeded. What would have happened had the CM taken Batatawala’s advice? Would government money have been saved? No. These iftaars are financed by “well-wishers”. Would the average Muslim have been denied a chance to meet the state’s chief executive? No, the average Muslim isn’t invited to political iftaars. In fact, the guest list is so selective that many well-known intellectuals, not-so-well known journalists, and community workers are not invited. The invitee list depends on your closeness to the CM, and what he can gain from inviting you. That explains why some politicians host iftaars solely for journalists. A political journalist who has lived in UP and Delhi for decades, has found not one redeeming feature in political iftaars. If at all, she says, they give the BJP one more opportunity to cry “Muslim appeasement’’. But that’s passé now, for apart from PM-in-waiting Narendra Modi, BJP CMs also host iftaars. And so did the Shiv Sena’s Manohar Joshi, when his party ruled this state. This was  despite the fulminations in Saamana by his self-styled “remote control’’ Bal Thackeray, about the fur caps and green scarves donned by “Muslim-loving” leaders at these iftaars.  (Incidentally, why fur caps in Mumbai’s weather? Green scarves seem to have been replaced by Arabic red-and-white scarves.)News photographs of Manohar Joshi’s iftaar showed a line-up of maulanas with outstretched hands waiting their turn to feed the CM who had defended the use of the abuse “landya” for Muslims, while deposing in front of the Srikrishna Commission. This about sums up the goings-on at political iftaars. This time, there was a strong rumour that Prithviraj Chavan was not going to host one. Had the CM stuck to this laudable resolve, he wouldn’t have lost any votes. But perhaps NCP chief Sharad Pawar’s iftaar scuttled that laudable move. Incidentally, smses doing the rounds after Pawar’s iftaar said: “Who was fasting there but Pawar himself?” A few activists such as Fazal Sha’d, who worked through the 1992-93 riots and the Srikrishna Commission which investigated them, stopped attending political iftaars after 1993, so disgusted were they with the government. A handful of riot victims once distributed leaflets in protest at CM Vilasrao Deshmukh’s iftaar. The CM handed the leaflet to his aide while his distinguished guests wiped their hands on them.  Police iftaars are slightly different. When thrown by individual police stations, the neighbourhood’s Muslim leaders, big and small, are invited, and few refuse, for obvious reasons. The commissioner’s iftaar however, is as grand as the CM’s, but for a few additions to the guest list of Muslim grassroots leaders who negotiate with the commissioner on various matters. Here the money spent is the government’s. So a government which allows its police to hound innocent Muslims, and refuses to punish even those officers charged with murder, pays lakhs once a year so that the same police can break kebabs with the community’s big-wigs.  It was recently reported that the bills for former CP Arup Patnaik’s iftaar have yet to be cleared. Shouldn’t they remain unclaimed in the spirit of Ramzan, considering that Patnaik lost his job because of the unprecedented restraint he showed while dealing with violent Muslims at last year’s Azad Maidan rally?The author is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist

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