New Delhi, June 11: Muslim leaders have had enough of anti-terror conferences and want the focus to shift back to bread-and-butter issues.

After two back-to-back public meetings in Delhi and many smaller conventions across north India to denounce terror, weariness has set in.

Three upcoming conferences point to the community’s desire to bring economic, social and political issues back on the agenda:

Patna’s Imarat Shariah Phulwari Sharif is holding a conference from June 21 to assess how the government has followed up the Sachar recommendations on education after it received complaints that scholarships were not properly disbursed

Janata Dal (United) MP Anawar Ansari Ali, who heads Pasmanda, an organisation of backward caste and Dalit Muslims, will launch a “self-respect” programme from July 8 to press for reservation for these groups

Khalid Rashid, the president of the Ulema Council of India, will demand a separate planning commission to address the needs of minorities.

Contrast this with the two conferences held in the capital recently, which were both centred on terror.

Deoband’s Dar ul-Uloom held a rally with the Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind in New Delhi on May 31 to iterate that Islam rejects all forms of terror, including suicide bombings. The Jama Masjid United Forum organised a day-long seminar in a five-star hotel here with the same agenda.

In February, the Dar ul-Uloom, which represents the most puritanical school of Muslim thought, had issued an edict against terror.

The Jamiat has also held meetings across the north, including one in Jaipur after the blasts, to address this issue.

“But reinforcing this message can become counter-productive,” said K. Rahman Khan, Congress MP and deputy chairman of the Rajya Sabha. “The community’s confused. Muslims don’t know what is expected of them. Should they empower themselves or just prove their loyalty to the nation all their lives?”

Empowerment and the “loyalty test” are connected, he said. “Private Islamic trusts or individuals wanting to set up education institutions and job training schemes seldom manage to get them passed by the bureaucracy. It’s not for want of funds or meeting the legal and administrative norms. It’s a mindset which views the community with suspicion.” he said.

Khan’s own project to end state Haj subsidy by creating a “Haj Management Fund” is lying in cold storage with the cabinet secretariat.

“We had to choose between protecting our religion from attack and working for the community’s welfare. We had to answer charges of how Islam glorified ‘jihadi’ violence and how our ‘madarsas’ were training terrorists,” said Syed Arshad Madani, the head of a Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind faction.

But now theologians, thinkers and politicians feel the community needs to ensure that the agenda set by the Sachar Committee report, which went into the condition of Muslims in the country, does not get obscured by this obsession with terrorism.

Politics is also to blame for the cynicism with the anti-terror plank. “We cannot help feeling that the Congress uses us as cannon fodder against the BJP. Otherwise why would they covertly patronise one of the Jamiat factions and not do a thing about the Sachar report?” asked Zafarul Islam Khan, the chief of the Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat.

Manzoor Alam, the general secretary of the Milli Council, said that while it became “more incumbent” on community leaders to denounce terror after “Indian Muslims” — and not the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed — were suspected to be involved in the Mumbai and Malegaon blasts, the responsibility should not be theirs alone.

A convention against terrorism in the capital on April 27 had demanded that the “secular” UPA government set up a judicial commission to re-investigate all terror attacks in the past 10 years and establish how many Muslims were finally convicted, Alam said.

The demand was communicated to the Prime Minister, Sonia Gandhi and all chief ministers. “Only Sheila Dikshit (the Delhi chief minister) responded,” he said.