Why in the name of Islam?

Picture from Ananda Bazar Patrika

A family I know had their car wrecked by a mob in Calcutta (Kolkata) yesterday. Fortunately, no one was in the car at the time. It just happened to be parked at a spot where vandals went on the rampage in the name of Islam.

I got the first inkling of trouble while listening to the BBC World Service in Singapore last night. The news reader said the army had been called out after rioting by mobs protesting against attacks on Muslims and demanding the expulsion of a Bangladeshi  writer for “insulting” Islam.

Immediately, I called my wife in Calcutta, who told me about the car. Several cars had been damaged and many policemen injured but the army had brought the situation under control, I learnt.

But what happened was unthinkable. We are talking of Calcutta, which has been remarkably free of communal violence.

The attacks on Muslims the mobs were so worked up about occurred in the village of Nandigram and its surrounding areas, but both Hindus and Muslims have suffered, the Muslims were not the only victims. Indeed, some of the thugs arrested in connection with the violence there happen to be Muslims.

It’s a political crisis: the Marxists ruling the state of West Bengal – of which Calcutta is the capital – wanted to move the villagers out of Nandigram and hand it to the Salim business group from Indonesia for industrialisation. The villagers protested. Opposition parties rallied round them, including the Maoists. But the Marxists stuck to their guns, and all hell broke loose. Several people have been killed in Nandigram.

It’s a shameful story and the Marxists have been castigated by everyone including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, West Bengal Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi, who is a grandson of Gandhi, and artists and intellectuals in Calcutta.

But it’s wrong to turn Nandigram into a communal issue.  The predominantly Muslim All-India Minority Forum had no business calling protests in Calcutta yesterday about “attacks on Muslims” in Nandigram.

It was equally egregious to demand the expulsion of the Bangladeshi writer, Taslima Nasrin. She faced death threats in Bangladesh after being accused of blasphemy, went into exile and spent several years in Europe. She has spent the last three years in India and though she has failed to get  Indian citizenship, she had her visa renewed recently and has been staying in Calcutta. But the All-India Minority Forum wants her expelled from the country for “insulting” Islam. There’s more on her and Nandigram in Wikipedia.

I sympathise with the people of Nandigram. But their cause suffers when it is taken up by Muslim zealots who also want Taslima Nasrin expelled from India for “insulting” Islam. India is a secular state. It did not expel the artist MF Husain for “insulting” Hinduism, as alleged by Hindu militants. He moved abroad on his own.

But the Muslim zealots pose such a threat that the West Bengal police offered to move Taslima Nasrin out of the state for her own safety. She is believed to have turned down the offer, reported the Hindu newspaper.

Further proof of the communal threat is the restraint shown by the police and the military. According to news reports, police used only teargas and did not fire on the mobs to avoid further violence. In other words, the violence reached a level where the police could have opened fire.  But that would have been playing into the communalists’ hands.

I wonder how sincere the All-India Minority Forum is about protecting the Muslims. The rioters did not discriminate between Hindus and Muslims when they attacked the police. Among the policemen injured was a top official, Deputy Commissioner (South), Javed Shamim.

The All-India Minority Forum says it had nothing to do with the violence and even has the cheek to claim the rioters were goons hired by the Marxists to discredit it. A Muslim organisation, the Jamiat ul Ulema e Hind, has even called for the Marxist West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s resignation.

That Calcutta is peaceful today in the face of all this provocation is really admirable –- but hardly surprising. We have Muslim friends. My wife has visited Muslim shrines. We know a Bengali Muslim gentleman who knows more about Hinduism than I do. We are proud that Calcutta is not another Gujarat or Ayoddha torn apart by religion.

But something must be done about these rabid communalists who stir up trouble in the name of religion. Unfortunately, the opposite is more likely. All the political parties are likely to bend over backwards to win the Muslim vote in the next elections. They should realise there’s no such thing as a Hindu or a Muslim vote; both Hindus and Muslims may vote for the Marxists or their opponents. Indeed, that’s how it should be.