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Blasts, encounter & lesson
WSN Bureau
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Follow up on Delhi blasts and
Anti-christian violence shows how India stereotypes muslims and
fails other minorities |
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NEW
DELHI/BANGALORE: See the photograph alongside this story for a
complete meta-narrative of what the Indian nation state and its
agencies do to stereotype a community and give it a bad name.
 Within hours of
Delhi cops barging into a flat in Delhi’s Jamia Nagar area and
claiming they killed two terrorists and arrested one, they arrested
three men suspected of involvement in September 13 Delhi blasts.
This photo shows you the three men: Mohd Shakeel, Saquib Nisar and
Zia-ur-Rehman. Every single name a dead give-away of the community
they belong to.
But the Indian
intelligence needed more to stress the fact. So, pronto! Three
identical scarves appear to help police muffle the faces of the
so-called terrorists. These are clearly Muslim prayer scarves. A
normal towel or a sheet or a rag won’t do for police when
international media cameras are panning.
That is
New Delhi.
Shift to
Bangalore.
And you shall
not see any photos alluding to Bajrang Dal activists demolishing,
destroying churches even though every child in the area knows this.
Hours after the
encounter, on the same Saturday night, Christians in
India’s
showpiece silicon valley city of Bangalore suffered desecration of
two churches. The St. James Church was ransacked, and the Infant
Jesus statue was damaged.
The attacks
disrupted Sunday mass but what angered people was that these took
place in the presence of the police. Those who attacked the St.
James Church clearly wanted to hurt Christian hearts. They opened
the safe in which the sacred sacrament was kept and scattered the
holy Eucharist all over. The targetting of the symbol of veneration
hurt everyone’s sentiments.
This attack came
on the heels of recent attacks on prayer halls in Mangalore.
Incidentally,
the church runs a Kannada-medium school for over a decade on the
same campus and many non-Christian students study there.
The right wing
BJP and its sister neo-terror forums like VHP and Bajrang Dal have
been targeting Christians for their conversion activity, something
that has been used as a ruse to attack Christians.
Conversions to
attack Christians, terrorism to stereotype Muslims. Indian nation
state seems to be having an underpinning of anti-minorityism and the
predominance of brahamanical powers as the common matrix.
Most converted
Christians in
India actually
are from dalit sections of the society, a section already sidelined
by brahamanical forces of BJP and Congress.
But back to
Delhi and
lessons were no different.
The encounter in
Delhi’s
Jamia Nagar area on September 20 lasted for less than half an hour
in which a Delhi inspector and two youth were killed. Both were
pronounced as SIMI youth. Both the youth were students at Jamia
University.
India hailed the
martyr inspector, more so because he had reached the encounter area
straight from a hospital where his son was suffering from dengue.
Amid such quick
success which also took away pressure from
India’s Home
Minister Shivraj Patil, no one paused to answer the simple questions
that area residents asked: Why was it not possible to catch the
‘terrorists’ alive? And how did the two other people in the same
flat flee if scores of cops had surrounded it? Atiq alias Bashir
(24) and Mohammad Sajid were killed, Mohammad Saif was arrested.
Indian media talked of gloom because of the brave inspector’s death,
but very few reached across to Azamgarh from where the killed men
hailed.
Those who did
found a tale of poverty, little aspirations, youth trying to make on
their own, learning some basic computer skills and living in shared
rooms to save on pennies.
But in the heat
of the moment, the large questions of the matrix in which terrorists
are created are only asked later, and if a nation state can help it,
never.
Soon Atiq was
described as a mastermind of Indian Mujahideen (IM), which carried
out blasts in UP,
Hyderabad,
Ahmedabad, Jaipur and Delhi. Clearly, entire case stood solved.
Who, in the face
of such stupendous success, can dare ask the cops how they can lose
an officer, endanger others and fail to prevent escape of two men
from a house whose exact location is pre-known and which has been
cordoned?
In Kerala too
Meanwhile,
anti-Christian violence is spreading. Two churches, one of them
among the oldest in
India, were
vandalised about 35 km from Kochi city in Kerala.
A seven-foot
statue of Christ in the cemetery of the 467-year-old Garvasis and
Prothasis
Church, belonging to the Syro-Malabar Church, was broken and knocked
off its pedestal. Next door, at the Mar Sabore Afroth Syrian
Cathedral Church was also damaged. The cathedral, said to have been
built in 825 A.D., is one of the ancient churches of the Jacobites.
Worst part was
that the violence against Christians came immediately after killings
of scores of Christians in Orissa where Bajrang Dal has openly
claimed credit for violence.
24 September 2008
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