On the fringe

DESPITE the December 28 terrorist outrage, there is a curious sense of calm in Bangalore. Unlike in many other parts of the country, Muslims in the city do not feel that they are under siege or are being persecuted. Indeed, there is little fear of indiscriminate police action or insecurity about the possibilities of large-scale communal violence. Yet, the community is increasingly aware of the difficult challenges before it, and the need to address the anger and frustration owing to the Hindu chauvinist tirade against the community as well as widespread economic decline.

Bangalore Muslims have, cutting across class and political lines, condemned the Lashkar-e-Taiba attack on the Indian Institute of Science in the city. Killing innocent people, many argue, is plain murder not jehad. "Jehad is also to strive for self-purification, only after this can you start purifying others," said Siraj Ebrahim, president of the youth wing of the Indian Muslim League. Siraj admits that there "could be some extremist elements among Muslim youth", but attributes it to the anger "at events such as the pogrom in Gujarat, the tearing down of the Babri Masjid, or simply not being heard".

Ebrahim believes that communal violence round the country is a major source of anger and frustration, a view endorsed by many in the community. Frustration has been caused not just by events in Gujarat but by the wrongful condemnation of an innocent man after the December 2001 attack on Parliament House, said Feroz Abdulla, a leading realtor and respected community leader. He believes that events in Jammu and Kashmir have had little impact on the attitudes: "The majority of the mullahs are in favour of finding a solution for Kashmir within the Indian Constitution," he said. Abdulla added that "terrorists have no place in our community".

M.A. Siraj, a journalist, believes that the core problem is that young Muslims in Bangalore are marginalised politically, with few avenues for them to articulate their concerns. "Our youth feel powerless," he said, "since they have no one in the political system who listens to them or whom they can look up to." Siraj acknowledged that "at times this vacuum is exploited by extremists". However, Siraj said: "There is no anti-national feeling among them. The youth know that India is their only home; that there is no place for them in the Arab world." Posters and pamphlets glorifying Osama bin Laden, he argues, are symbols of protest, not ideological commitment.

Political alienation has also expressed itself in what Mohammad Matten describes as "intra-religious extremism, an extremism only in thought". Some young Muslims in Bangalore, he notes, have been attracted to "regulations like the length of your beard, or whether you should wear a cap when you pray, what the length of your trousers should be, or whether you should tie your hands when you pray, and then refusing to budge from pre-conceived fanatical positions". But, Mateen notes, such ultra-conservatism is dangerous: people with extreme religious positions can slip from "one kind of extremism to another".

It is not hard to see that young Muslims in Bangalore are not that different from their Hindu counterparts in the State or elsewhere: slum residents in Mumbai, for example, have sometimes responded to their brutal, iniquitous experience of modernity by turning to religious chauvinism, something which has in turn been exploited by groups such as the Shiv Sena. Dr. Satyanarayana, former head of Bangalore's Administrative Training Institute who has studied urban Muslims in Mysore, has noted that the problems lie in history. Over the past six decades, he notes, the economic status and lifestyle of the city's Muslims have steadily declined, as the artisanal professions they practised lost the patronage of feudal elites and the Mysore royal family. "A hundred years ago," he said, "there were no Muslim beggars. But today their economic situation is desperate. Even education-wise they are worse off than everybody else, since government schools are not catering to their needs."

Like most vulnerable minorities, Bangalore's Muslims themselves are aware of the need for reform and development. "We are extremely keen to make sure that young people do not slip into extremism," says Mateen, "because if they do so it will become very difficult for the whole community." Not surprisingly, the community is piqued that it is being represented in parts of the media as collaborators with terror. "The Koran does not tell us to go and kill innocent people, so linking jehad to terrorism is wrong. If these people gain proper religious knowledge, they will not engage in acts of terrorism," argued Masood Abdul Khadir, president of the Anjuman Khuddbam-un-Muslimeen.

Khadir's call for better religious education, however, points to a second problem: to those Muslims frustrated by deprivation and discrimination, community leaders said, religious propaganda focussed on the historical glories of Islam is profoundly attractive. Altaf Husain, a former Karnataka Wakf Board member and a tax consultant, notes: "Muslims belonging to the socially weaker sections are more easily influenced by the sermons of the mullahs. But unfortunately, many of these mullahs are not educated. What is needed is for our youth to be educated so that they don't get misled. We need to set up hundreds of schools right there in the slums."

Underpinning Khadir's concerns, and those of many others, is the cycle of backwardness that the lack of educational facilities for the Muslim poor has brought about. Children of the poor often end up in madrassas obtaining rudimentary skills in Urdu and scripture that give them few job skills.

Thanks to its prosperity, Bangalore has in recent years attracted large numbers of mullahs from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, many of whom have set up madrassas. Although no verifiable figures are available, there are now some 200 madrassas serving the Bangalore area. More seminaries, and in turn more funding, means influence and power for the clerics who run them.

Heartening signs of resistance to the chauvinists are evident from within the community. Enlightened clerics such as Riyaz ur-Rahman, the head of Bangalore's largest mosque, the Jamia Masjid, have begun to push for improved secular education. The Dar-ul-Umoor seminary in Srirangapatna, 130 kilometres from Bangalore, has started a one-year course for students from madrassas across the country that offers them an education in English, science and management. Of a coherent government initiative to address the problems of Karnataka's Muslims, however, there is still no sign: something which could cost the state dearly in the future.