Ahmedabad, Feb. 21: A public hearing today on Muslims in Gujarat saw a jury member almost echo Deoband cleric Ghulam Mohammed Wastanvi’s assertion that the community faced “no discrimination” in the Narendra Modi-ruled state.
The hearing was the first such public forum to document violence and bias against the community and “expose” the controversial statement of Wastanvi, the vice-chancellor of the Dar-ul-Uloom seminary, last month. It was organised by NGOs Anhad and the Centre for Social Justice, which work for the 2002 riot victims.
By the end of the hearing, however, jury member Syeda Bilgrami Imam ended up urging “Muslims to look beyond 2002”. “Muslims should not just go on narrating the same old stories. It will not help. It is time to move ahead and not become a prisoner of the past,” Imam, a member of the National Commission for Minorities, told reporters after the session.
The other jury members were writer Geeta Hariharan, activist Gagan Sethi and retired Gujarat High Court judge R.A. Mehta.
Imam suggested there was nothing “very unusual” about the accounts of harassment and bias she heard from most speakers today. “Whatever I have heard here is not very unusual, it is not specific to Gujarat. Similar situations exist everywhere,” she said when asked what she made of the speakers’ allegations.
Imam’s remarks sat uneasily with the tales of harassment narrated by most of the 60-odd speakers and came only a day before an expected verdict by an Ahmedabad court in a riot case. The ruling will be the first among the nine such cases on which the Supreme Court asked the special investigation team to conduct a fresh probe.
Other speakers accused a section of the community of siding with Modi. Among them was J.S. Bandukwala, a retired professor. “Some Muslims have joined hands with Modi. This has weakened our fight against injustice but we understand their compulsions. These rich Muslim businessmen need Modi as much as he needs them,” said Bandukwala, whose house was burnt by rioters.
Other speakers pointed out that of the 270-odd people arrested under the now-repealed anti-terror law Pota, 269 were Muslims.
