Yet another blow

The fundamentalist attack on Prof. T.J. Joseph and his subsequent dismissal from service shock secular sensibilities.

in Thiruvananthapuram

IT was with a sense of disbelief that Kerala heard the news of the dismissal from service of Professor T.J. Joseph, the Head of the Department of Malayalam at Newman College in the town of Thodupuzha in Idukki district. Barely two months had passed after that chilling incident on July 4 when the teacher was brutally attacked by a gang of religious fundamentalists for what they alleged was an inappropriate reference to the Prophet in a question paper he had prepared for some degree students earlier in March. The assailants had cut off his palm and had nearly managed to do the same with his left leg. And now his job too had been taken away from him.

Consequently, the teacher was also debarred from serving under any of the institutions associated with the Kottayam-based Mahatma Gandhi University, to which the private college, run by a Church-controlled management with State financial aid, was affiliated.

Following the dismissal of the professor on September 1, a pastoral letter written by the Bishop of the Kothamangalam diocese of the Syro-Malabar Church was read in about 150 parish churches in the area. It was meant to try and explain to parishioners why Joseph, a victim of one the most brutal fundamentalist attacks in the State, was again being punished by the college management after an internal inquiry.

Among other things, it said, rather strangely for a pastoral letter: The teacher will not be absolved of his mistake just because a group of religious fundamentalists took the law into their own hands and cut off his palm. If we think that he has been absolved of what he did, it would mean that we are accepting the cruel deed of anti-socials. This is where we need to understand the hollowness of the claim that the teacher is being punished twice for a single mistake. Punishment has to be implemented by those who have the responsibility to do it and as per the law. It does not behove of a democratic society if, instead, it thinks that it is enough if somebody or the other implements the punishment.

Initially, Joseph was suspended by the college management on March 26 following angry protests in the town of Thodupuzha on the basis of the allegation that an internal examination question paper on Prose and Writing' prepared by him for second semester B.Com degree students included an excerpt from an essay in which he had introduced an inappropriate reference to the Prophet.

The excerpt, as the professor later pointed out, was from an essay written by a well-known film-maker and former legislator, P.T. Kunjumuhammad, as part of a collection of articles published by the State Institute of Languages under the title Tirakkathayude Reethisasthram (The methodology of screenplays) and which was often suggested as recommended reading for postgraduate students by the university. Kunjumuhammad's essay, Screenplay: Findings of a Believer, refers to a conversation between the hero of his 1999 film Garshom and God. The author explains that he got the inspiration for that particular form' of conversation in the film from real life itself, from a lunatic in his village who often used to imagine that he was having a conversation with God.

However, in the question paper, the 52-year-old professor used the name Muhammad' to refer to this villager (who had no name in the original) while asking the students to add proper punctuation marks in an excerpt of the villager's imaginary conversation with God. Thus, the excerpt provided in the question paper looked like a conversation between a Muhammad' and God, and the content of the exchange was soon claimed to be blasphemous.

Within days a volatile situation ensued in Thodupuzha following a report in Madhyamam, a Malayalam newspaper. With no immediate explanation forthcoming from either the college management or the professor, the allegation of a deliberate act of blasphemy spread quickly. Hundreds of copies of the question paper were circulated and several Muslim organisations, especially the radical Popular Front of India (PFI) and its student wing, the Campus Front, as well as the student groups of the Indian Union Muslim League and the Congress and others launched agitations. The issue was raised in the State Assembly, the town was put under prohibitory orders and, following an all-party meeting convened by the District Collector, the police issued a look-out notice against Joseph as he went into hiding. A case had already been filed against him for causing communal hatred in society.

He was arrested a week later when he returned home with the intention of surrendering before the police, after hiding like a fugitive in many places in Kerala, finding his photographs being shown on television screens, and making unsuccessful attempts to obtain anticipatory bail. The college authorities issued a public apology and announced his immediate suspension from service. All of a sudden, Joseph had become an object of hatred and anger, a teacher who had committed a deliberate act of provocation by meddling with religious sentiments.

Given the emotional outcry that Kerala witnessed then, the peace that followed his arrest and his suspension was momentary. Four months later, on July 4, as Joseph was returning home with his sister and aged mother after the morning mass at a church near his home at Muvattupuzha (in Ernakulam district), his attackers, a gang of eight men armed with knives and axes, waylaid his car and pulled him and his sister out. They then went about their well-planned deed with clinical precision, cutting off his right palm (the hand that set the question paper, as it were) and almost managing to do the same to his left leg, which was 90 per cent severed with the bones visible when they were finished with him.

One of the assailants threw the severed portion of his hand into a neighbour's compound. As shocked onlookers stood by, the assailants disappeared in the van that had blocked the family's car. Joseph was left profusely bleeding with over 18 grave wounds.

Intense police action followed and many of those arrested immediately included members of the PFI, a confederation of several radical Muslim organisations in South India, whose leaders have continued to deny any role of the organisation in the incident. On September 8, while dismissing the bail petitions of seven of the accused in the case, Justice V. Ramkumar of the Kerala High Court, however, said that all the accused were either members or office-bearers of the PFI or its political arm, the Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI).

The court also said that all the accused had prior knowledge of the operation, had been involved in the criminal conspiracy, and the objective of the well-planned operation (some details of which the court explained) had been to disturb communal peace and to create a sense of insecurity in the State. The court also said that several of the accused, including the chief coordinator of the crime, were yet to be arrested. (Until September 13, only 24 of the 53 accused in the case had been arrested.)

Joseph survived but only because his family and neighbours managed to take him to a speciality hospital in Kochi, about 50 km away, immediately after the attack. His palm and leg were reattached through a long and complex surgical procedure and the litres of blood he needed to stay alive were donated by a group of Muslims in a gesture that really testified to Kerala's secular credentials.

Nearly three months after that nightmarish incident, Joseph can barely sit up in bed, cannot stand or walk without help, and is undergoing daily sessions of physiotherapy. The attack against him eventually proved to be a turning point in the way Kerala society became aware of his personal trauma. It was only after all this, as he was recuperating in his hospital bed, that he finally got an opportunity to explain his side of the story to the public.

But notwithstanding the universal condemnation of the attack, the decision of major Muslim organisations to rally against and isolate radical fundamentalist organisations and the growing support for his assertion of innocence, and despite the M.G. University Syndicate's and the State government's intervention in his favour, the college management and the Church leadership have sought to find him guilty of the very same reasons for which he was attacked in the first place (see box for the Church's version). The management first said that the professor would be taken back if the Muslim community was willing to pardon him but eventually took the position that Joseph's only recourse now was to seek a legal remedy.

I had no intention of denigrating the Prophet or any religion. People who know me I was also the director of Value Education in the college will never believe that I used the name Muhammad' in the question to denigrate a religion. I never even thought that if I used the name Muhammad', such a common name among Muslims in Kerala, some people would take it to mean the Prophet Muhammad', Joseph told Frontline in a telephone interview on September 14. However, he said, learning to use proper punctuation marks is part of the syllabus for degree students. A teacher can use his own passage or borrow it from some text to test the students.

I chose a passage at random, from an essay I was familiar with, because I had discussed it in several postgraduate classes earlier. I couldn't choose a non-conversational passage for this type of a question, because mere sentences (in Malayalam) would require only very few punctuation marks. So I chose this excerpt from the essay, a conversation between a lunatic and God. Since the idea was to test whether the student knew the proper signs to use in a written text, I thought the unnamed character needed a name. And since he was addressing God as Padachone!, a salutation used by Muslims in Kerala when they refer to God, I thought a Muslim name would be the appropriate one in the context. And the first name that came to my mind was Muhammad', maybe because the author of the essay was Kunjumuhammad'.

No dubious reason

Joseph denied that he had any dubious reason to use that name, as is still being alleged, by the college management, among others.

He said: My focus was not on the name at all. In fact, a girl student in my class, a Muslim, came to me after the examination and told me that since her religious belief did not allow her to use the name Muhammad', she had instead answered the question as if it was a conversation between an elder brother' and a younger brother'. She asked me not in anger at all, but as if she had done some mischief whether she would lose marks because she had changed the names. I told her it was perfectly alright, because the test was on whether she knew the right punctuation. I also remember telling her about the essay on screenplays from which it was taken and that I would discuss it in class some time later. That was the end of the matter. Later, I found she had explained her reason for changing the names in her answer sheet too. I gave her three out of four marks. She lost a mark only because she failed to get all the punctuations right.

However, what put the professor in danger was perhaps not even the use of the name as such but its use along with the type of conversation selected to go with it, which once it went out of the classroom and into the vortex of growing religiosity and the hardening of communal prejudices in Kerala (see interview with Dr K.N. Panikkar) offered the perfect backdrop for fundamentalist elements to intervene and inflame passions. This they could do so successfully, and then proceed with such medieval intent to deliver their punishment in broad daylight on a public road in Kerala.