Stigma of terror

The people of Sanjarpur in U.P. feel they are being used as soft targets in the investigations into terror attacks.

in Azamgarh

JAB tak hamey nyay nahi mil jaata/ Hum koi khushi nahi manaayengey Sanjarpur graamvasi. (Until we get justice, we will not have any celebrations the villagers of Sanjarpur.)

A day before Id-ul-fitr, this was what was proclaimed on cloth banners displayed in different parts of Sanjarpur in Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh. The villagers had vowed not to celebrate Id, which marks the end of the Islamic month of fasting, Ramzan, until they got justice. The justice they wanted was also written on the banners, in smaller letters: Probe the killings of innocents in the name of counter-terrorist operations, by a sitting judge of the Supreme Court. They were referring to the death of two young men from the village, Mohammed Atif Ameen and Mohammed Sajid, in the Jamia Nagar operation carried out by the Delhi Police on September 19.

In the village, the young and old sat in huddles, gloom writ large on their faces. Ever since that black Saturday, this village has not slept. It is not just the pain of losing two young men that we are suffering now, it is also the fear of being targeted as a nursery of terrorists. We do not know how many of our youngsters studying and working outside, in places as far off as Delhi and Mumbai, are in police custody and what their plight is at the moment. We do not know when the next posse of policemen will swoop down on Sanjarpur, barge into houses, throw things around and treat everybody like a culprit, a village resident, Masihuddin, told Frontline.

The residents of Sanjarpur, Masihuddin said, had no official information as to how many of its boys had been rounded up. The villagers rely on media reports for information. According to news reports, until October 1, almost a score of young men from the village had been either arrested or rounded up by the police. Among them were Mohammad Saif, who was arrested on September 19 during the Jamia Nagar operation, and Arif, who was arrested in Lucknow on September 29.

Masihuddin, who runs a tutorial in the village, said that some of the Sanjarpur boys taken into custody by the police in Delhi and Lucknow were his students before they set off for metropolitan cities in search of better education and jobs. One of the youngsters sitting with him was Arifs brother Amir. Arif was preparing for the Combined Pre-Medical Entrance tests in Lucknow. How can we celebrate when we do not know what might happen to our brother? Of course, we will do namaz and pray. That may give us the strength to tide over these trying times, Amir said.

Not far away sat another group, consisting of relatively older men. Among them was Iqbal Ahamed, a retired professor of psychology at the Shibli National College of Azamgarh. It is nothing but cold-blooded murder. I know many of these boys personally. They were normal kids with normal interests. In fact, Atif was not even a keen practitioner of religion. All that the boys wanted was a better education, and they had to go outside for it because Azamgarh has only the Shibli National College. Now, it seems we may have to restrain our boys from seeking better education because they are being branded as terrorists and killed.

Ahamed said that all kinds of stories were being circulated about Sanjarpur and the nearby villages of Saraimeer and Beenapara. Saraimeer houses the ancestral home of Abu Salem, the don accused of an important role in the Mumbai blasts of 1993, and Beenapara is the village of Abu Bashar, arrested for the Gujarat blasts. The police claimed that people here were flush with illegal money. It was even claimed that the bank accounts of Atif and Sajid had transactions running into crores. The Special Cell of the Delhi Police came with much fanfare on September 23 to check this, and all that they found was Rs.1,406 in Atifs account and Rs.31,000 in Sajids account, he said.

Ahamed pointed out that people from Sanjarpur, like people from other villagers of Azamgarh, had been going out of the State and the country in search of jobs and better lives.

Our people have gone to Singapore, Malaysia, the Gulf countries, and even Europe and the United States in search of jobs. This has been going on for several decades. Theres a well-known saying, jahan jahan aadmi, wahan wahan Azmi [wherever there are people, you will find people from Azamgarh]. Through hard work, our boys have often made it good. Now, our tradition of travelling to make a good living is being branded as travelling to spread terror, he said.

Atifs father, Mohammed Ameen, was too overcome by grief to say much, but he agreed with Ahamed. Saifs father, Shadab, is a district-level leader of the Samajwadi Party (S.P.). He said that all that he wanted was a proper inquiry. If my son is guilty, shoot him. But before coming to any conclusion, a proper investigation should be conducted, he said. He added that it was he who first made the demand for an inquiry by a sitting judge of the Supreme Court. It was later taken up by the entire village.

According to Shadab and Masihuddin, all that they wanted was that the investigations should be conducted within the legal framework. But the police employ extraconstitutional and extralegal methods while investigating. As they did in Jamia Nagar, from time to time they do in Sanjarpur. The whole village keeps awake at night to prevent the extralegal intrusions of the security agencies, Masihuddin said.

In Beenapara, Abu Bashars father, Abu Bakr, said that his son was virtually kidnapped by the police. They took him away on the pretext of taking him to see a girl for marriage. It was only later that we realised that he was being taken as a terror suspect.

Most people in Sanjarpur, Saraimeer and Beenapara, all Muslim-dominated villages, feel that they are being branded and targeted as terrorists because they are soft targets. Maulavi Faizal, secretary of the Saraimeer unit of the Jamiat-ulema Hind, said: There are large Muslim majorities in our villages. Many of us are well-to-do and educated, and we have travelled outside. The security agencies seem to use all these factors to build up a cock-and-bull story of terrorist links. They harass us to ward off questions about their failure to get to the bottom of the terror attacks.

In his opinion, the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) was a creation of the Indian state. It was built up like a scourge so that it could be held up from time to time as an anti-national threat and used to harass Muslim minorities. Now the effort is to show that the Indian Mujahideen is a derivative of SIMI. This is being done because the ban on SIMI is becoming legally untenable, especially after the judiciary questioned the ban.

Faizals theory may not find too many takers at a larger level, but in the harassed and terrified villages of Azamgarh, it may well strike a chord.

As Mohammed Yasin, joint secretary of the Varanasi-based Anjuman Intazamiya Masajid, points out, the atmosphere in the Muslim-dominated areas of Azamgarh, and also in other parts of Uttar Pradesh, is one of increasing insecurity.

If the government and leaders such as [Home Minister] Shivraj Patil continue to persist with the current policies, this insecurity could turn into unrest, which in turn would lead to an intensification of the communal divide, he said.

A number of secular politicians in Uttar Pradesh, including S.P. leader Mulayam Singh Yadav, expressed similar misgivings. S.P. leaders also went to Sanjarpur to reassure the Muslim community. But unless the tendency to brand a whole community as perpetrators of terror is checked, Yasins warning could well turn out to be prophetic.