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Antulay’s Crime & Muslim Opinion
WSN Network
India is gunning
for A R Antulay because he alluded to the fact that three top
officers of Maharashtra Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) were killed in a
rather strange manner and they were part of the mission that exposed
the saffron reprisal terror. The RSS, the VHP, the Bajrang Dal, the
BJP, the myriad saffron sadhus, Akharas and the many faces of RSS
were all gunning for Hemant Karkare, and then Karkare dies in rather
peculiar circumstances. Antulay had said it should be investigated.
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A R Antulay
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Now, large
sections of Indian political establishment are gunning for Antulay,
and Congress is under pressure to drop him. Barkha Dutt, a better
known face of Indian TV journalism, wrote that Antulay be sacked,
Indian Express editorial was titled "Sack Antulay" and everyone in
BJP wears a moronic statement on his face that says "Sack Antulay".
Now, some of the MPs not only want that, they want him to be tried
for sedition.
Though trial is
something they want to deny terrorists whom they want to be hanged
from the nearest lamp post.
Lumpen justice
marks Indian political debate these days.
But there are
some other voices also which hardly make it to the columns of the
Indian media or the soundbyte electronic journalism.
Ex-IFS officer
and MP Syed Shahabuddin has congratulated Minister for Minority
Affairs A R Antulay for “saying the unspeakable.”
Asked "Do you
think Antulay was right in his remarks over Karkare’s death?", 90%
say yes in an online poll by Siasat, the English-language website of
India’s second largest Urdu newspaper.
Mujatba Farooque,
political secretary, Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Hind: “Is Karkare Osama that
he cannot be praised? He was on the verge of investigating some very
powerful people. He got death threats, what’s wrong if one asks for
this to be probed?”
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Hemant Karkare |
The national
media's efforts to project that the opinion on Antulay's remarks is
a monolith is not true. From opinion leaders to Urdu press,
including Munsif, the largest Urdu newspaper, Siasat, Inquilab and
Urdu Times, many have raised the same question and issues that
Antulay did.
While few in the
Muslim community dispute the fact that terrorists from
Pakistan
carried out the Mumbai attacks, their question mark over Karkare’s
death seems to have more to do with what the former ATS chief had
come to symbolise for Muslims than the events of the night of
November 26.
Central
Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah best explains this
apparent contradiction. He says that as Karkare died in full public
view, it’s wrong to think of his perpetrators being different from
those who attacked Mumbai that day.
So why do
Antulay’s remarks find a resonance in many Muslims?
“Generally,
Muslims have very little faith in police investigations and their
claims. So they feel that anybody who stands up for them is
susceptible,” says Habibullah.
And then adds:
“It’s not as if Karkare’s name had just come up. Even in the
aftermath of the 1993 communal riots in Mumbai, his role in trying
to restore communal amity was noted by people working there then.
His going away appears to snuff out hope that might have been held
out for those who saw his investigations into
Malegaon and
other such cases as fair and off the beaten track.”
"Hemant Karkare
ne police ke taur tareeqon ka naqaab ulat diya," said Shahabuddin
about the Maelgaon investigation.
Karkare’s
investigations into
Malegaon and
other related cases, say Muslim opinion leaders, were seen as a
“breath of fresh air” and unusual “even-handedness” by a community
which sees the Indian police as still prejudiced and predictable in
who it implicates. Karkare’s death, therefore, emerged as a focus to
express this.
Shahabuddin, who
recently quit the Congress to join the Janata Dal (U), says he is
drafting a “brief” letter to the Prime Minister urging him to ensure
that the cases Karkare was looking at, get the same attention now
that he’s gone.
Says Mujatba
Farooque, political secretary of the Jamaat-e-Islami-e-Hind:
“Karkare was a great man, what Muslims feel is that if anybody dares
to think out of the box and work like a professional investigator,
his life is not safe, that’s the message to the police.” Farooque
says BJP’s Narendra Modi jumped in with the offer of Rs 1 crore for
the police officers when he died but when “Karkare was alive, they
were saying all kinds of things about him.”
For
Zafar-ul-Islam Khan, of the Majlis-e-Mushawarat, criticism of
Antulay is misplaced. “Why does our democracy seem so fragile? If
Shabana Azmi (who recently spoke about prejudice while renting homes
for Muslims) or now Antulay give voice to something which sizeable
sections experience in their daily lives, what’s wrong? If we are
criminals and violent, punish us but why are these boundaries drawn
of what is the acceptable view and what cannot be said? What’s wrong
if we wonder about the circumstances around how Karkare, the man who
dared touch the hot potato, suddenly loses his life?”
24 December
2008
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