Azamgarh Muslims: Breaking the Community’s Siege

“Apney quwwat-e-bazoo pur etmaad kur, iltija na kur sayyad say; Kabhi koi qufs toota hay faryaaad say”

(Put your own abilities to work, do not grovel; Has the groveling of the tormented ever opened the gates of any prison ) 

Recently when my US born medical student daughter doing rotational training in a hospital in Mumbai told the head of her department that, I was born in Azamgarh, the said eminent doctor told her that she should not mention this to anyone lest she may get into trouble.  The young son of Dr Javed Akhtar, the top orthopedic surgeon in Azamgarh studying for MBA in Mumbai was falsely charged by police as belonging to the Indian Mujahideen group without any evidence or information.  The national English and Hindi media is routinely referring to Azamgarh as “Atankgarh (terrorist town)”.  When well educated and well to do Azamgarh Muslims travel to another city and to rent a room in a hotel identify themselves as being from Azamgarh, they are denied lodging.  When well educated/professional Azamgarh Muslims try to rent a house in another city they are refused.

The Despair:

If you thought this was happening in a police state, think again, for this is happening in the world’s largest secular democracy of India.  In September 2008 the police, unable to locate the culprits responsible for the string of terrorist bombings across India, decided to target and kill a few Azamgarh Muslim students at the Jamia Milia university, New Delhi, with a fake encounter.  Despite many appeals by many upright national leaders, institutions, many huge rallies of Muslims and other deprived minorities, and even a court of law,  the government of India continues to refuse to conduct even a simple magisterial enquiry into these instances of harassment of the Muslims of Azamgarh.  The mainstream English language print and electronic media is going full-bore in maligning the Muslims of eastern Uttar Pradesh in general and those of Azamgarh in particular as terrorism-prone. 

The fear of being maligned as terrorists and even arrested seeped so deep that many Azamgarh Muslims, when asked to name their hometown, gave names of other cities.  Many a Azamgarh Muslims withdrew their children, who were pursuing higher studies in sciences, management, engineering in major universities in other cities, back to Azamgarh.  The careers of many an enterprising Muslim students from Azamgarh,  is wilting.  The continous presence of special Anti Terrorist Section (ATS) police units in various Muslim localities in Azamgarh district, random police check points and random arrests of Muslim youth imposed a regime of fear on the district.  The city of Azamgarh felt as if it had been marked down as enemy territory – a camp under siege.

But in its entire history, Azamgarh has never been a renegade town.  It is the land of ardent nationalists like Allama Shibli Nomani, Kaifi Azmi, Allama Iqbal Suhail, Prime minister Chandrashekhar, at least two chief ministers of the state, martyr Brigadier Usman, state chief justice Iqbal Ahmed and the eminent scientist Shamim Jairajpuri .   Among the doctors and hospitals in Azamgarh district the majority is that of Muslim doctors; among the engineers in U.P. state government employment, a very sizeable number are Azamgarh Muslims; among professors and accademecis in many universities in north India a very substantial number are Azamgarh Muslims; among the resurgent Muslims in the modern industrial units and Bollywood operations in Mumbai you will find many from Azamgarh.

This oppressive situation in Azamgarh and its adjoining towns has been particularly frustrating for the Muslims of the district because in recent decades they have put most of their resources and energies into improving their educational institutions, into converting their city into a hub of the commercial activity for eastern Uttar Pradesh, and into modernizing their city.  What I saw in a recent visit to Azamgarh after many years was that, this small pastoral town has transformed into a beehive of modern commercial activities.  The newly improved road from the state capitol of Lucknow and new express trains have  made it far easier to reach Azamgarh in a few hours; gone is the day-long and arduous train ride on meter gauge through the Shagunj junction.     

What the Muslims of Azamgarh found most disappointing was that the secular political parties that often proclaimed themselves as the defenders of the Muslims either kept quiet or made only cosmetic noises, as their community was being maligned as soft on terrorism.  The Congress party, the Samajwadi party, the Bahujan Samaj party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal made no real effort to ensure that the government conducts a quick investigation, and then absolves the 2 million strong Muslim community of Azamgarh from the nefarious “Atankgarh”  label.  In fact when the local BSP member of parliament, Akbar Ahmad Dumpy  wore the kafayah (an Arab headgear) to a session of parliament to protest government inaction against the maligning of Azamgarh Muslims, the BSP supreme leader Mayawati admonished him and indicated that she may deny him the BSP ticket in the upcoming election.   

The Way Out:

It was Azamgarh’s own illustrious son Urdu poet Kaifi Azmi who had said:

“Bahut andhera haiy, ek diya jalao;  Is deewar main ek darwza kholo, ek rassta nikaalo.”

After fuming over in anger, desperation and loneliness in the darkness of the siege and the fear, the Muslims of Azamgarh took an action that has not been seen that often in recent times among the Muslims.  The modern educated Muslim intelligentsia (doctors, engineers, lawyers, professors, businessmen) consulted with the Ulema (Islamic scholars) from several well known Islamic colleges (Jamiatul Falah, Jamia Islah, Jamiatul Rashad) .  Together they decided that rather than cower in fear, loneliness and continual desperation, they should find a way out of this misery that enveloped the entire city of Azamgarh.  They decided to use the best democratic institutions of society and state to find a way out of the siege.  Thus was formed the Ulema Council in Azamgarh in October 2008.

The Ulema Council:

Unlike a religious organization that imposes clerics on the community, from the very beginning Ulema Council decided that its charter of action is only just and fair treatment for the entire Azamgarh population – Muslims, Hindus, Dalits alike.  When I recently visited Jamiatul Rashad, the Islamic college in Azamgarh where the Ulema Council was formed, its head, Maulana Ammar Rashdi, son of the late illustrious scholar Maulana Mohibullah Rashdi, convener of  the Ulema Council told me  that the council’s major goals are, to raise Shibli National College into a quality university and a center for academic excellence, to increase Hindu-Muslim-Dalit friendship, to expand the commercial-industrial base in Azamgarh, so that the district can become a major center of education and employment for the people of eastern Uttar Pradesh.  When I asked him if he was in favour of demanding reservation for Muslims, he surprised me by saying that he was for  Muslims acquiring good education right from primary schools so that they have no need for reservation.

With these goals in mind the Ulema Council held two most successful mass rallies, one in New Delhi and the other in Lucknow, each attended by about 100,000 people of diverse religious backgrounds.  For both rallies the Ulema Council reserved complete trains to take people from Azamgarh to New Delhi and Lucknow respectively and paid full fare for the trains, a first in the nation’s history where typically rally participants travel in trains ticketless. The participants in these rallies included as many from the intelligentsia as from the cleric backgrounds.

Indeed the Ulema Council began and still is a grassroots movement of ordinary citizens of all religious backgrounds who have been often manipulated by political parties that claim the mantle of secularism and justice but in real terms after winning elections put those issues on the backfoot. The Ulema Council never really intended to take part in elections and definitely not in the April-May 2009 election.  But the circumstances and compulsions of strategy forced it to contest five parliamentary seats in U.P.  Of the 5 seats the Council is contesting, 2 of its candidates (Amresh Misra and Chandu Lal) are Hindu; the remaining 3 being Muslim.   

The Future:

In a conversation with me when I visited Aamgarh in early April, Dr Javed Akhtar, Azamgarh’s top orthopedic surgeon and the Ulema Council’s parliamentary candidate from Azamgarh said that, the Council’s goal is the U.P. State Assembly election of 2011.  The current electoral effort is merely a rehearsal.  He also told me that soon the Council will merge with other smaller political parties, change its name to one that reflects its ethos of “justice for all” and a non-religious paradigm, for instance, “Insaaf Council”.  He said that his party will become a truly secular group where Muslims will like to have a sizeable presence but where there will be a substantial number of non-Muslims, especially Dalits.  He indicated that the Muslims of UP and Bihar are fed up with those political leaders who do not allow hard working Muslim activists from becoming leaders in the parties that call themselves secular; do not work hard for the pressing demands of the Muslims, namely security, removing educational backwardness and economic deprivation.

Dr Salman Sultan, a professor of Chemistry at the Shibli College, Azamgarh, and a senior Muslim leader in the city described for me the substantial drive of the Azamgarh Muslims in the last twenty years to build quality primary schools, high schools and inter colleges with the community’s  own resources and the resources of Azamgarh Muslims who work in the middle-eastern countries and north America.  In fact he took me to some of those institutions for visit.  In that background Dr Sultan, whose late father was the principal of the Shibli National College, expressed the outrage of the Azamgarh Muslims on being described as soft on terrorism and the labeling of their city by the media as “Atankgarh”.  “How could the Indian nation forget the heritage and contribution of Shibli and Kaifi and put such labels on our city and our community”, Dr Sultan asked me.   

In my visit to Azamgarh I visited several educational institutions and met over two  dozen prominent Muslim doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors who talked with fervor of their dedication to making the Ulema Council a true movement of Muslims and Hindus, that fights for justice and protection from the high-handedness of the police, courts, media, the manipulation of major political parties.  They openly expressed the Muslim community’s frustration with top leaders like Sonia Gandhi, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Laloo Yadav, Mayawati who always proclaim their sympathy with Muslim masses but who have held down the growth of Muslims in the political rungs in their parties, and who have done nothing but lip service for the festering problems of the masses. “Look at the total non-implementation of the Sachar Committee”, they told me.

The Election:

Some people seem to question the Ulema Council’s motives because of its participation in the current election.  Sitting far away from eastern UP, reading English language newspapers or internet reports, and thinking of the word “Ulema” they conjure up images of the Ulema Council as being a sectarian and orthodox group dominated by a set of mullas.  But the facts on the ground are very very different.  If you visit the Muslim localities of cities in UP or read Urdu language newspapers published from UP,  you will understand that the Ulema Council represents a true mainstream, grassroots, non-sectarian, people’s movement for justice and fairness and that a majority of Muslim intelligentsia is nurturing this movement with their support. 

The charge of some people that the Ulema Council candidates may divide the Muslim vote is borne out of ignorance of the ground situation.  For instance the Ulema Council’s Amresh Misra is running against SP’s Nafisa Ali in Lucknow.  On my recent visit to Lucknow when I asked the local Muslims if they knew who Nafisa Ali was, most of them said that they had never heard of her.  A few who had heard her name told me that she is a five-star socialite from New Delhi, the wife of a wealthy polo playing Sikh army colonel, who hardly ever visited Muslim localities.  And Amresh Misra, they said is a courageous journalist who protested against the police maligning of Muslim youth in the Batla House/Jamia Nagar fake encounter and the Mumbai terrorist carnage.  They told me that the days of Muslims supporting the five star, super-secular Muslims like Nafisa Ali, Azharauddin and their ilk are over.  Muslims are now supporting anyone, Muslim or Hindu, who is willing to speak for their deprivations and needs.

In the current election the Ulema Council is expected to do well in two constituencies, namely Azamgarh (Dr Javed Akhtar) and the reserved constituency of Lalganj (Chandulal) .  However, despite overwhelming support from Muslims, it is doubtful if these two Ulema Council candidates will win.  As several leaders of this party elaborated for me repeatedly in several cities in UP recently, the primary objective of the Ulema Council is to mobilize the Muslim community in the face of repeated political manipulation by parties that claim to be their friend but do absolutely nothing to help them.  Their objective is to make the Ulema Council, a peoples’ mass movement, somewhat like the Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF)  of Assam.

Conclusion:

Whether any of the Ulema Council candidates do well in the election or not, one thing is obvious as you travel through UP, the Ulema Council is an unmistakable grassroots movement of ordinary Muslims and it has given them the confidence to break out of a state of siege and fear, and to emphasize to the politicians that they better pay attention to their real problems of lack of security, educational backwardness and economic deprivation.  That is no small achievement.  And this strategy could be a role model for Muslims elsewhere in the contry.