December 2006 
Year 13    No.121

Ethos


An innocent life

What did they gain by killing Maulvi Abdul Gafoor?

BY SARA ABUBAKKAR

Sara Abubakkar is a noted Kannada short story writer and novelist. Known for her sensitive and balanced depiction of the plight of Muslim women, her writings have brought a unique sensibility to Kannada literature. She has often been criticised for her outspoken writings by fundamentalist Muslims. This piece, which appeared in Kannada weekly magazine, Lankesh, has been translated into English by VS Sreedhara, member of the Karnataka Communal Harmony Forum.

As I started writing about the recent communal disturbances in Mangalore, the one face that kept popping up in my mind was that of Maulvi Abdul Gafoor. I write this with a deep sense of anguish.

In our household, we do not usually send our children to madrassas. We engage a religious teacher to teach the holy Koran and the moral teachings of the prophet to our children at home. Thus we had engaged Gafoor, a newcomer to Bejai masjid, to teach my grandson at home. He had been coming to our home for the past year. Mild-mannered, Gafoor never troubled a soul. He would read Gauri Lankesh’s paper (Lankesh) and Prajavani once he was through with his work and then leave. Sometimes he read my books too. He was a learned and balanced man.

He did not come to us for a whole week after the Ramzan fasts began. Then he turned up on October 3. He told us he had been in hospital for a week, recovering from malaria. He looked very run-down.

The next day there was a Karnataka bandh on the Belgaum issue. The following day the Bajrang Dal called a bandh in Mangalore on some silly pretext. Again, on Friday, another communal outfit called for a bandh because its leader, Pramod Mutalik, had been arrested in Bababudangiri. News of sporadic communal clashes here and there started trickling in.

It was a Ramzan Friday, a holy day for Muslims. That day, Gafoor called our home at 4.30 in the evening to say, "I can’t come today either, I will come on Monday then."

I asked him, "Won’t you go to the big masjid for Friday prayers?"

He replied, "No, I can’t even step out. It is the way I dress!"

He did not step out, fearing that communalists would go after him once they saw him in his white mundu, white shirt and white headgear. But at about 7 p.m. that very day, as he was returning to his masjid after iftaar at a nearby home, a gang of seven or eight persons on motorcycles attacked him. A pious, poor man who had done no one any harm, who worked as a maulvi for his livelihood, was done to death with swords and knives. What did these young people achieve by killing this man? According to one rumour, killing a religious head would fetch a reward of 10,000 rupees!

Everyone now knows about the communal clashes and police atrocities that took place in Mangalore. Life here went haywire for an entire week because of the saffron brigade’s designs to disturb the climate of harmony in Dakshina Kannada district by fabricating rumours and spreading false news. During the one-hour break in curfew, people, be they Hindu or Muslim, hurried to buy essential commodities, cursing the communalists alike!

Let us now examine the reasons for the communal violence.

Last year a friend from Delhi told me that there would be big communal clashes in Mangalore. That Muslims here are a prosperous community may be one reason for this. But another equally important factor is the strategy to use Dakshina Kannada as the first step in making Karnataka into another Gujarat, an attempt that has been under way for the past year. There is nothing new about the Bajrang Dal taking the law into its own hands and acting as a surrogate police force in the name of preventing illegal cattle transport or the police, on their part, turning a blind eye to such cases.

In every such instance one cannot but appreciate the forbearance shown by Muslims. Communalists interfered even when Muslim boys and Hindu girls travelled on the same bus; they even threatened the girls’ relatives. Yet Muslims barely reacted to such provocation.

Similarly, when the BJP minister for higher education (DH Shankaramurthy) called Tipu Sultan "anti-Kannada", Muslims did not react as expected – there were a few murmurs among them and some wrote letters of protest to the papers. Perhaps they did not feel the need to respond strongly since Kannada writers themselves stood firmly behind Tipu’s cause.

The same response has also prevailed with regard to the Bababudangiri issue. Since Gauri Lankesh and Komu Souharda Vedike are fighting for Bababudangiri, Muslims saw no need to raise their voices. Bent upon provoking Muslims somehow, the sangh parivar tried to make yet another attempt to incite Muslims during the Sharada (Durga) statue immersion in Bajpe.

They paraded a tableau depicting a bearded maulvi as the legendary Bappa Beary  standing at the feet of the Goddess Sharada reading the Koran. Even then the Muslims did not lose patience. All they did was inform the police about this insulting depiction with a request that the said representation of Bappa Beary be removed. It was only after the procession continued without any change the next day, along with defamatory anti-Muslim slogans and when the police watched as mute witnesses, that there was a Muslim reaction. There were instances of stone throwing from inside a masjid. Even so, local Muslims displayed tremendous restraint and communal violence did not spread to Mangalore.

As tension in Bababudangiri mounted, most of the state police were deployed to control the law and order situation there. Awaiting just such an opportunity, the communalists used the occasion to their advantage. They alleged that a tempo used for illegal transportation of cattle fled after ramming into two cars and injuring a woman. Though the cars were never shown in any media reports, the story gave communalists the necessary motive to create trouble even as some local evening papers gave them abundant support.

In Dakshina Kannada there was only a lukewarm response to the state’s call for an all-Karnataka bandh on the Belgaum border issue. However, when the Bajrang Dal announced a bandh all shops were closed and traffic came to a grinding halt. Newspapers heralded the bandh as a total success. Don’t the media know that more often than not people observe a bandh out of fear for their lives and property and not because they support it? In celebrating the bandh as a success the media only reveals how much they are saffronised themselves.

The bandh to protest against the arrest of Pramod Mutalik was called by a small group, one that the district administration and the police could easily have stopped. In the past, when Bharatlal Meena was deputy commissioner, the administration had made arrangements for the smooth running of buses under police protection. Was it so difficult to take similarly stringent steps this time, to arrest those who had called for the bandh and send them to Bellary jail? Or was it their intention to allow the clashes to happen, then round up innocent Muslim youth and deport them to Bellary jail?

Reports of police atrocities committed on Muslims have already been widely publicised. Can there be anything more shameful than the police robbing 25 sovereigns worth of gold ornaments put aside for a daughter’s wedding? What explanation do police higher-ups have for such heinous acts?

Much more shameful is the statement issued by the home minister blaming the Congress party for stoking communal passions. One can understand a district in-charge BJP minister and his cronies saying such things but we expected better of someone like MP Prakash (the Janata Dal (Secular) home minister), for whom we had some respect. Who would imagine that money and power could make a person stoop so low? Even Congress MPs and MLAs have never gone this far! Every Congressman who happens to be a Muslim, be it (Mangalore) Mayor Ashraf or (youth leader) UT Khader, was held responsible for the communal violence in Mangalore and elsewhere. Did the home minister not feel a single prick of conscience when he told such blatant lies?

There have been reports that the shop belonging to a big cloth merchant in Ullal was spared because he donated Rs 50,000 to the Bajrang Dal.

Because of the curfew, the damage in Mangalore was not substantial except, of course, for two deaths.

The other murder appears to have been pre-planned. It is alleged that the person from the neighbourhood who arranged for an ambulance to transport a Muslim labourer to Dubai (a matter of some urgency because his visa could expire) turned out to be an informant. He not only informed the communalists about going to the airport in an ambulance, but also stopped the vehicle when they waylaid it. As a result, those travelling in the ambulance were attacked, causing the death of the man who would otherwise have boarded the plane.

There are some issues we must now ponder deeply. Muslims are, in some ways, too sensitive by nature and tend to exaggerate the most trivial matters.

Bappa Beary was said to be a rich merchant and it is believed that he donated money to have a temple built for Goddess Durga. That is why Hindus respect him. But this reverence has now become a matter of ridicule. And it is this that really provoked the Muslims in Bajpe.

But Muslims have no real reason to feel hurt. Image worship is prohibited in Islam. Any Muslim believing in image worship ceases to be a Muslim. It doesn’t matter how a non-Muslim is portrayed by non-Muslims, there is no need for any Muslims to feel that they have been humiliated or dishonoured.

The Muslims here are like an island unto themselves. And they are becoming even more isolated because of the teachings of fundamentalists. What’s more, they remain educationally backward. All this has made it easy to push them into becoming even more fundamentalist. This is what has happened here.

Unlike their brethren in Kerala, Muslims in coastal Karnataka do not extend a friendly hand towards non-Muslims or share in their happiness and sorrow. Since the 1950s Malayalam cinema has frequently depicted the many social problems faced by Muslim women, such as talaq and polygamy, and this trend continues even today. Only two years ago Padam Onnu Oru Vilapam, a Malyalam film dealing with Muslim child marriage and talaq, won the national Golden Lotus cinema award. There are some Muslim faces visible in their television serials as well while actors like Prem Nazir and Mammooty have won the hearts of all Malayalis. Kerala Muslims have welcomed these phenomena without paying much heed to religion.

But what has happened to Karnataka? A film like Munnudi, which had a Muslim theme, was taken off all theatres just a week after its release. They could not tolerate Muslim women writers writing about the plight of Muslim women and hounded them out. There are few Muslim artistes in Kannada films. And though we have four Kannada television channels churning out serial after serial, none of them contains a Muslim character or has ever dealt with a theme related to Muslims.

Though the Haj pilgrimage in Mecca is telecast on television, in Mangalore there are restrictions barring videography at Muslim weddings in masjids. Thanks to this we couldn’t see pictures of my granddaughter’s wedding! The burkha is no longer restricted to the head and body, it has been extended to cover even eyes and noses! And what of science? Better not mention it!

Be that as it may, let us set our eyes on future goals. We should aim to bring all the downtrodden, minorities and Dalits, together. First, Muslims need to come out of their shells, shun their complexes and join hands with others. Live and let live should be our new maxim. For that we need to create conditions for equality. Today even Dalits and other backward classes are becoming slaves to Hindutva. Unless and until they comprehend the manipulation by upper castes, Dalit and other minority movements will not gain strength. Our thoughts and actions must flow in that direction.


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