Maulana Abdul Haleem - A scape goat - Investigation by TEHELKA

A three-month investigation by AJIT SAHI exposes the random targeting of Muslims by the police
AS HE’D done unfailingly every Friday for two decades, Maulana Abdul Haleem cleared his throat and began to speak to the faithful on July 25. It was near 2 pm, and the soft-spoken, revered aalim, or Islamic scholar, had just led scores of Muslims in the hour-long juma namaaz at his packed mosque in one of Ahmedabad’s Muslim localities where the preacher and many in his congregation live. His sermon this afternoon was on a Muslim’s duty towards his neighbours. “You cannot fill your stomach if your neighbour is hungry,” Haleem spoke in his unhurried tone. “You cannot discriminate between your Hindu and Muslim neighbours.”
Thirty hours later, within minutes of the serial blasts that killed 53 people in Ahmedabad on Saturday, policemen stormed Haleem’s house barely a km from the mosque and dragged him away as his stunned neighbours watched. On Monday, as a local magistrate gave the Crime Branch his custody for two weeks, police claimed Haleem is a crucial link in the Saturday blasts and that grilling him would unravel the execution of and the conspiracy behind the terror act.
In a time of tragedy and terror, everybody, justifiably, wants answers, culprits, punishment. The challenge then is not to reach for the quick routes, the easy demonisations. Unfortunately, the Indian State has not quite met that challenge. Over the years, for instance, SIMI has come to be a dread acronym for most Indians — Students’ Islamic Movement of India, a hotbed of terrorism, a lethal and shadowy organisation intent on destroying the nation. Quick on the back of every horrific blast, that name is thrust upon the public mind like a deadly innuendo — stretching outwards to embrace the entire community. But how true are these allegations?
In the struggle for a just and safe society, it is crucial to find real perpetrators and correct answers; crucial to cleave doggedly to the idea of fair play and rule of law; crucial not to fall prey to overblown and false psychoses. In pursuit of this, in an attempt to sift fact from prejudice, TEHELKA conducted an investigation across India over three months and 12 cities. Serialised here, starting this week, the disturbing investigation found that an overwhelming majority of terrorism cases — especially those related to the outlawed SIMI — are based on either non-existent or fraudulent evidence and are an affront to both law and common sense.
The investigation found that entrenched prejudices in the executive and the judiciary, an abject lack of political will against framing scapegoats, and a 24x7 news media that demands instant whodunit answers and unquestioningly copy-pastes every unproven police and intelligence story on terrorist networks has morphed into a tragic persecution of hundreds of people falsely accused of terrorism. Nearly all of these are Muslim; nearly all of these are poor.
“We will rise to the challenge and I am confident we will be able to defeat these forces,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said as he walked about in the debris at Ahmedabad’s civil hospital, where two blasts had inflicted the worst casualties. He urged political parties and police and intelligence agencies to work together against efforts aimed at “destroying our social fabric, undermining communal harmony.” Unfortunately, given their staggering record of false cases against innocent people, it appears that incompetent police and intelligence agencies are doing exactly the opposite.
Maulana Abdul Haleem’s story, chronicled below, is a searing example why.
To read the full story visit http://tehelka.com/story_main40.asp?filename=Ne090808coverstory.asp
For authentic political stories read tehelka