Roots in history

The politics of jehad in Hyderabad goes back to 1948 when the princely state resisted accession to the Indian Union.

in New Delhi

IN April 1948, a dapper man in an impeccably tailored traditional suit announced at a press conference that he intended to plant the flag of the Nizam of Hyderabad on the Red Fort in Delhi.

This was none other than Islamist leader Kasim Rizvi whose Razakar militia battled the Indian troops in Hyderabad in September 1948. Rizvi fought hard to save the princely states theocracy-based world one which the terror groups that carried out last months strikes in Hyderabad now hope to recreate. Despite covert backing from Pakistan candidly documented by its armed forces last commander-in-chief, Lieutenant-General Gul Hasan Khan Rizvi came nowhere near success; but his struggle is still celebrated by Islamists.

Half a century later, another Islamist leader, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the supreme spiritual and temporal head of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, promised to succeed where Rizvi had failed. As his Inter Services Intelligence-backed organisation began to unleash a welter of new terror cells on the city, Saeed promised to unfurl the Islamic flag on the Red Fort. The real war, he promised cadre discouraged by Pakistans defeat in Kargil, will be inside [India]. Soon after, in February 2000, his second-in-command Abdul Rehman Makki, promised to liberate Hyderabad from Indian rule.

Understanding this extraordinary continuity of purpose and the legitimacy it has found among some young men in Hyderabad needs engagement with Hyderabads unique inheritance of hatred.

Historians have long known that communal politics watered the political soil in which the Hyderabad jehad blossomed.

Mir Osman Ali Khan, Hyderabads last Nizam, administered a system in which religious affiliation was a key source of legitimacy building. Although Muslims made up just 10 per cent of his realms population, they held three-quarters of the state jobs. And of the seven major feudal estates, six were controlled by Muslim notables.

In the two decades before Independence, Hyderabad saw the growth of two communal movements, which Hindu and Muslim elites used to strengthen their positions.

The Arya Samaj, speaking for the emerging Hindu industrial bourgeoisie, argued that practices such as idol worship had weakened the faith and thus facilitated centuries of what it characterised as alien rule. In response, Muslim elites set up the Majlis-e-Ittehad ul-Muslimeen, or the Organisation for the Unity of Muslims.

The Majlis was founded on the doctrine that Hyderabad Muslims were its natural hakim kaum, or ruling race. It was deeply influenced by the work of the 19th century revivalist Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareili who, as the scholar Vali Nasr has recorded, identified false Sufism, Shiism and errant popular customs as the sources of religious corruption and hence declining Muslim power. These competing communal movements collided in April 1938, when the city saw its first communal riots.

Besieged by the Congress demands for democratic elections and the Arya Samajs religious mobilisation, Nizam Osman Ali Khan responded to the growing violence by proscribing both. He turned to the Majlis for support.

Rizvi now set up the Razakars as a paramilitary sword arm of the Nizam. Majlis leaders, the scholar Lucien Benichou has recorded, candidly stated that their objective was to keep the sovereignty of His Exalted Highness intact and to prevent Hindus from establishing supremacy over Muslims.

In 1947, Rizvi unleashed his forces in support of the Nizams claims to independence. Thousands both Hindus and Muslims opposed to Osman Ali Khan were killed before the Indian Army swept into the state in September 1948. Hyderabad capitulated within five days. While the Nizam became the titular head of state, Rizvi was captured and imprisoned. He was finally expelled to Pakistan in 1957.

Rizvis expulsion did not mark the end of the story. The Majlis was reborn in 1957, under the leadership of the affluent cleric and lawyer Abdul Wahid Owaisi, who drafted a new constitution committing it to the Union of India. Sultan Salahuddin Owaisi, his son, took over the organisation in 1976. Salahuddin Owaisis sons, Asaduddin Owaisi and Akbaruddin Owaisi, are in turn now its most visible faces.

Starting from nothing, the Majlis rapidly established itself as the principal spokesperson for Old City Muslims. By 1977-1978, the Congress which had unleashed the Indian Army on the Majlis just three decades earlier was seeking electoral alliances with it.

In 1986, a Majlis-Congress alliance took charge of Hyderabads municipal corporation. The Majlis spoke for two distinct constituencies within the Old City: a devout, traditional elite disinherited by the coming of democratic rule and an urban underclass that remained economically disenfranchised despite it.

Just how did the party succeed in re-establishing itself so fast? AshutoshVarshney has recorded: In the 1960s, there were riots in eight out of ten years in Hyderabad. After 1978, the trend towards communal violence took a turn for the worse. Except for the period 1986-89, riots took place virtually every year between 1978 and 1993, often many times in the same year. Communal parties, not surprisingly, acquired centrestage. With growing support from Hyderabad Muslims based in West Asia, the Majlis grew into a formidable competitor to the Hindu Right.

With the Congress and Majlis locked in a political embrace, Hindu nationalist forces were able to represent themselves as the sole credible defenders of Hindu interests. Violence became institutionalised, giving rise to what the historian Paul Brass has described as an organised riot system. For instance, gangs of killers were set up to wage war on behalf of their respective religious communities, operating under political immunities granted by various groups a phenomenon documented in the psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakars book The Colors of Violence. Violence, the historian Javeed Alams work on the Majlis shows, acquired growing legitimacy. The distinction between crime and valour, Vars hney has noted, thus disappeared for a large mass of Muslims and Hindus in the Old City of Hyderabad.

Islamist terrorism in Hyderabad marked the breakdown of faith in the Majlis riot system: Muslim interests, recruits to terror groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba argued, could only be defended by integration in the global jehad. However, the new Islamist terror groups drew on much the same resources as the Majlis had: organised crime and communal hatred. Recruits from the mafia of Mohammad Fasiuddin, for instance, were used by jehadists to assassinate Vishwa Hindu Parishad leader Papiah Goud and Bharatiya Janata Partys Nandaraj Goud in 1993, both politicians who were alleged to have played a central role in organising the anti-Muslim violence during the 1990 riots.

Among the architects of the murders was Mohammad Azam Ghauri, a Fasiuddin lieutenant who in 1985 helped set up the Mumbai-based Tanzim Islahul Muslimeen the organisation that later became the Indian wing of the Lashkar-e-Taiba. In the wake of the riots after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, Ghauris group planted bombs at the Medina Education Centre in Hyderabad, the Andhra Pradesh Express, and the Secunderabad Railway Stations reservation complex in 1994. It assassinated Hyderabad-based jeweller Mahaveer Sharma, an alleged financier of the Hindu right wing, in 1997, and killed Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh activist Devender Sharma two years later. Ghauri was eventually killed by police in 2000.

MIM president Sultan

Parallel cells, however, continued to flourish. Mohammad Mujeeb, who organised the assassination of Additional Superintendent of Police G. Krishna Prasad, and Asghar Ali, established deep links with the Hizbul Mujahideen in Jammu and Kashmir. Mirza was killed in a shootout in southern Kashmir, but Ali survived and went on to execute the assassination of Gujarat Home Minister Haren Pandya.

Ali, in turn, was responsible for recruiting several of the key figures in the Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami terror cell, which is believed to have carried out last months serial bombings in the city. Mohammad Abdul Shahed and Mohammad Amzad, both now wanted by INTERPOL (the international police organisation) for their alleged role in the attack, were part of a group of over 20 Hyderabadi men who trained Islamist groups in Pakistan. Alis recruits joined the jehad after the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat just as earlier generations of Islamists had been motivated by the Babri Masjid riots.

Interestingly, most terror recruits appear to be intensely hostile to the Majlis, seeing it as too compromised by political power to serve the Islamist cause. Aware of the threat they pose to its political position, Majlis leaders have often criticised terrorism. At the same time, they have adopted increasingly militant postures to undercut their Islamist opponents. Last month, for instance, the Majlis held out death threats to the author Taslima Nasrin. Tensions between the Majlis and the Hyderabad jehadis run high. In a recent interview, Asaduddin Owaisi noted that these misguided youths call me a kafir. I am on their hit list, he said.

What lies ahead? For one, Andhra Pradesh desperately needs to separate local politics from policing. Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist Mujeeb was released in August 2005 after serving a 14-year sentence for the murder of Krishna Prasad, in a gesture designed to build bridges with Islamists in the city. Within months, though, he had to be rearrested after investigators found him in receipt of funds for building new terror cells. Again, intelligence warnings on last months bombings were ignored since the State government did not want to compromise the Majlis position by authorising aggressive police operations in the Old City.

But freeing policing from politics will not be enough, and the deeper problems may prove less amenable to easy solutions. Media commentary has suggested that the grinding poverty of Old City Muslims lies at the heart of the Islamist success in Hyderabad. But, as Varshney pointed out in 1997, Hyderabad Muslims have done much better than their Lucknow counterparts. Their success however has led not to a reduction but an increase in communal tensions, partly through a strengthening of the Majlis. The relative economic betterment of Muslims is not a cause of increased tensions. An absence of symbiotic linkages is. The two communities do not constitute a web of interdependence. Just how this might be brought about is a problem that needs to be addressed not by police officers but by politicians and, indeed, Indias people.