Bukhari leads prayer at razed mosque - By Geeta Gupta - The Indian Express

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/bukhari-leads-prayer-at-razed-mosque/737653/0

Sat, 15 Jan 2011

Bukhari leads prayer at razed mosque

By Geeta Gupta

Tags : religious, chief minister meets shahi imam, mosque

Posted: Sat Jan 15 2011, 03:57 hrs


Police stop Muslims from going to the site of a mosque, which was demolished by the DDA on Wednesday, to offer Friday prayers. Praveen Khanna


New Delhi:

Chief Minister meets Shahi Imam to soothe frayed tempers, says Muslims can pray at masjid site
 
Two days since violence broke out at Nizamuddin and Jangpura, the situation remained tense as religious and political leaders held Friday prayers at the same spot where a mosque was razed by the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) on Wednesday.


Rajya Sabha MP Ram Vilas Paswan, while addressing the crowd outside the Hazrat Nizamuddin Police Station at about 4.30 pm, said: “It is unpardonable that the DDA razed a mosque on the pretext of carrying out a High Court order. I am pleased that Hindus and Muslims are together in this fight. There is no doubt that the land belongs to the Wakf Board, and the mosque should be rebuilt right here. I am going to speak to the Lieutenant-Governor and the Police Commissioner, and I assure you that we are all united in this battle.”


Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit and Lieutenant-Governor Tejendra Khanna met Home Minister P Chidambaram to apprise him of the situation. Around 9.30 am, Dikshit also met the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid, Syed Ahmed Bukhari, and asked him to help bring the situation under control. She also assured him that members of the Muslim community would be allowed to pray at the site of the demolished mosque.

The day witnessed anxious moments at Nizamuddin and Jangpura as a large crowd awaited the arrival of Bukhari, who was reportedly stopped by the police because they felt his presence could result in further tension. The Imam reached the spot around 2.30 pm and initiated the Friday prayers at the razed mosque. Protesters, stationed at the main Mathura Road between Neela Gumbad and Ashram, broke through four layers of police barricades and followed Bukhari to the mosque site to offer prayers. The Shahi Imam has been mobilising Muslims across the city since Wednesday to ensure that Friday prayers are offered at the razed site itself.


“The Delhi Gazette clearly states that the land on which the mosque stood belongs to the Wakf Board. Urban Development Minister Jaipal Reddy and Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit have assured that proof would be presented in court, and the land given back to the Wakf Board. Otherwise, the government will buy the land and give it to the Wakf Board for the mosque to be rebuilt,” Bukhari told Newsline.


Stating that it was the constitutional right of Muslims to pray at the mosque, he accused the Congress government of committing atrocities against the minority community. “I mobilised the crowds by informing them about their constitutional rights and the atrocities committed by the Congress government over the last 60 years. We are happy that the government has lived up to its promise of allowing us to offer jumma namaz at the site. We are waiting for the government to fulfill its second promise of rebuilding the mosque here. There will be more unrest if justice is not done,” Bukhari said.


Okhla MLA Asif Mohammed said the community will not let up “unless a written assurance is given by the Delhi government that the land will be allotted to Muslims”.
 
Buildup to a controversy

March-April 2006: Jangpura RWA files a civil writ petition, alleging illegal encroachment in a section of the area, against the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), and the Delhi government, in the Delhi High Court.

May 2006: High Court issues showcause notices to the three entities.


November 2006: DDA demolishes illegal hutments in the area, leaving the Noor Masjid and Valmiki Temple intact, and forwards the case to the Delhi government’s special Religious Committee for further directions.


January 2007: The Division Bench of the High Court directs the MCD and DDA to take “appropriate steps” for development of the area.


February 2007: Counsel for the respondents tell the court that they would hold a meeting and submit a consolidated proposal with regard to development of the area.


July 2008: Jangpura RWA files another petition, asking the court to direct the respondents to remove all illegal structures at the site, including the mosque. Court directs respondents to take action as per the petition.


June 2009: Religious Committee recommends removal of the masjid and asks DDA to consider re-allotting land to the Valmiki Temple.


August 2009-September 2010: DDA claims it made six attempts during this period to demolish the Noor Masjid, but did not receive adequate cooperation from the Delhi Police.


October 2010: Jangpura RWA files a contempt petition against the DDA, MCD and L-G, asking why the demolition hasn’t been carried out so far despite the court’s directive.


January 12, 2011: DDA demolishes the masjid. Violence breaks out.


January 14, 2011: DDA asks court to drop contempt proceedings against it.

------------------------------

Does Nehru Congress secularism condones Masjid demolitions?
I have a 16-page Urdu booklet written by Ilyas Aazmi (2 times Lok Sabha MP from BSP) who writes:

"Now it is proved that in the night of 22nd September, 1949, Faizabad's south Indian collector, K. K. Nayar at the instance of Jawahar Lal Nehru, got Abhay Ram Das, Ram Sukul and Sudarshan Das, to place idols in the Masjid.

Swami Akshay Brahmchari, who was Secretary of Faizabad Zilla Congress at that time, and had been my neighbour for years Chinhat area of Lucknow, told me so many times, that after hearing the news, he reached Ayodhya in the morning, where the 3 accused were present. There were other people outside of the Masjid. All were most worried. I was able to convince them to take out the idol and they agreed for it. At that moment the Collector reach the spot. I told the Collector that there is nothing to worry; as these people have agreed to take away the idols. Collector took me aside and told me that this is all organised on instructions from above and that I should not interfere. And those idols that have been by that time moved out of the 'mimbar' of the Masjid were once again placed back.

On the same day, Central Home Minister Sardar Patel sent a radiogram to UP's Home Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri advising that since we have adopted secularism on our own volition, we should be faithful to our choice. Since UP government agrees that these idols were surreptitiously placed into the Masjid, UP government should remove them through police.

However, as soon as Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru learnt to Sardar Patel's radiogramm, he sent another very long radiogram to UP's then Chief Minister, Govind Vallabh Pant, praising secularism as well as rule of law. He advised the CM to follow the rule of law and the rule of law demands that the matter should be turned over to law.

Due to Congress negligence/oversight/ overconfidence, both these radiograms had remained in official files of UP state government and were released to the public during the time of Janata Party's rule.

Nehru family was much disturbed by the publication of these radiograms as they felt it will be difficult for Nehru secularism to justify itself. They got secret agencies to follow it up.

A clerk named Subash was carrying the files to present them to Librahan Commission. He was pushed down from behind at Tilak Railway bridge and seriously injured and the files were stolen. Father of Subash, travelled from Kanpur to Delhi Hospital. Subash told his father that I may not last another few hours. My murderer has snatched the files. Please try to retrieve them. Subash died. Even in as recently as end 2010, Subash's father has once again reiterated what his son had advised him in his last moments."

This shows how Nehru personally and later his family was involved in the eventual demolition of Babri Masjid.

And it is amazing how Nehru's rule of law and judicial justice priorities time and again become convenient route to impose political expediencies. ( Zionists have coined a new word - legal terrorism - to describe how judiciary can be used to achieve extra-judicial results.)

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
<ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com>
<http://www.ghulammuhammed.blogspot.com/>

Demolition of Babri Masjid is demolition of Indian history - Ghulam Muhammed | Accidental Historian - Richard Eaton - Paramita Ghose - Hindustan Times

Demolition of Babri Masjid is demolition of Indian History. Hindutva extremists cannot fool the world with their skewed version of 'faith-based' mythologizing of Indian history and Brahmin Aryan's vain attempts to treat Muslim Rule as alien while trying to settle in as the very original inhabitants of India divinely chosen to rule the lesser children of God. The Aryan Brahmins cannot digest what they have chewed. Bigger fish always swallow small fish.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai


"Unlike the Sangh Parivar's fanciful claims that 60,000 temples were demolished in the medieval period, Eaton showed through scientific data and intensive research into primary sources that the number was actually 80 over the entire spread of Muslim rule in India from 1190 to 1760. He also investigated why, when and where the temples were destroyed and the wide range of motives that led to their destruction". --- Paramita Ghosh


http://www.hindustantimes.com/The-accidental-historian/Article1-634479.aspx


Mon,06 Dec 2010

The accidental historian

Paramita Ghosh, Hindustan Times
Email Author
December 05, 2010

Grand historical narratives have almost always had humble beginnings in the exacting labour of microscopic research. French Annales historians such as Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel showed how to mingle the modesty of a local schoolteacher's profession with the ambitious scope of a historian's vocation. Richard M Eaton, liberal India's favourite western scholar, has followed in their footsteps.


In town for the Medieval History Journal's annual lecture, Eaton turned into a historian from two encounters. He met India via Iran and he travelled through an American county looking for a teaching job. On any subject. It turned out that they wanted a history teacher.
In the Sixties, this gameyness turned the 21-year-old college graduate with a degree in philosophy towards history with a small detour through soil chemistry.

"I was posted in Tabriz as a Peace Corps volunteer…. Before the (Islamic) Revolution, the government of Iran thought Americans could teach anything, so I was asked to teach soil chemistry in an agricultural school," says Eaton with a laugh, sitting on one of the ramparts of the Lodhi tomb, remembering a journey to Delhi in the mid-sixties by train from Iran across the Baluchistan desert.

Eaton's book, Essays on Islam and Indian History (2000) has been the backbone of most arguments for denying the Hindu right's charge of Islam as the sole guiding principle for the destruction of temples by the Mughal rulers of India, and makes it essential reading, especially in our post-Ayodhya times.

Historian Harbans Mukhia says Eaton shifted the terms of debate in medieval history.
"Unlike the Sangh Parivar's fanciful claims that 60,000 temples were demolished in the medieval period, Eaton showed through scientific data and intensive research into primary sources that the number was actually 80 over the entire spread of Muslim rule in India from 1190 to 1760. He also investigated why, when and where the temples were destroyed and the wide range of motives that led to their destruction".

For example, according to Eaton's book, in 1679, temples patronised by Rajput chieftain, Rana Raj Singh, were destroyed by Aurangzeb for having backed his brother and rival, Dara Shikoh.

According to Eaton, the recent Ayodhya judgment - which some have interpreted as 'legitimising' the Babri demolition - is a "panchayat decision" and is symptomatic of the success with which Hindu fundamentalists have been able to project the concept of a 'Hindu nation' versus a 'Muslim nation' onto the 16th century.

"The idea of India as a nation or even two nations is a modern construct. And there was no sustained pattern of a Hindu resistance to Muslim rule unlike Chinese history which was marked by unstable dynasties and their violent overthrow," he says.

Unlike many western scholars whose need to 'understand' Islam is as recent as the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, if not 9/11, Eaton's interest stems from evidences of Islam's pluralism. That this is not a popular idea, even among Muslims themselves, owes a lot, he says, to the technology of communication.

"Earlier, you had local, village Islams... Then came the steamship. Muslims from different parts of the country started going for the Haj together. Travelling on the ship, they began to see themselves as a single community," he says.

"The TV, radio, ship, broke down differences between here and there. It made it all one."
Why is history writing in India skewed? National movements, says Eaton, made it necessary for historians to justify India, and Pakistan, in bipolar terms.

"Historians became servants of politics," he says.

"Post-Independence, the use of Persian declined and historians did not look up sources in the original. To discover new information, you have to go to the mofussil record rooms and not just sit in Calcutta and expect them to come to you."

Or, think that if the information was not in Delhi or Kolkata, it was in London.

If history doesn't stand still, should historians? Eaton, who witnessed the birth of the Subaltern Studies school in the '80s, says its latter-day tendency to do historiography "by keeping the British Raj in the centre" defeated its initial work of writing history from below.
Eaton says his work has Marxist 'influences'.

"Marx," he says, "taught that history is not just pushed along by great men."


As for Partha Chatterjee, the leading light of the Subaltern school, he is, says Eaton, "an old monument".

State secularism in the land of religions and mythologies - By Ghulam Muhammed

Monday, October 11, 2010

State secularism in the land of religions and mythologies

Javed Akhtar, the well-known Bollywood lyricist, a self professed atheist with a Muslim name given by his Muslim parents, and a committed ‘secularist’, finds it increasingly difficult to balance himself sitting on his two-legged chair perched on a political tight-rope. His appearances of TV channel debates register his acute dilemma.

‘Lord’ Meghnad Desai in his Sunday Indian Express column quoted Javed Akhtar saying: as a Muslim he cannot be secular. (One wonders why then he is the presiding deity at a 3-man paper organization: Muslim for Secular Democracy (MSD); which is so quotable favorite of India’s English media’s Leftist journos.) To add insult to injury, Lord Desai suggested that Javed Akhtar should have added, it is not for people to prove their secularism, but leaders of political parties.

What comes out of this short exchange of views is that the Indian State should be secular, as per our constitution, though people need not be secular. In Indian context, all citizens may belong to any religion or creed or no creed, as long as in matters of state, they confirm to secularism. (Reminds me of old Henry Ford dictum: People can have Model T car in any color, as long as it is black!) So far so good. But what can be done when a miniscule minority of 3% Macaulay Brahmins, impose their will, their religious symbolism and their so called Hindu culture, on rest of the 97% non-Brahmins and get away with it.

Imagine, though Muslim kings and nawabs ruled all over India, for over 1000 years, they did not impose Islamic Sharia on the non-Muslim masses in any permanent manner or continuity. Some of the Kings may have used ‘Jaziya’ for some of the time, but only as reaction to some rebellious groups’ resistance to their rule. Many of the Muslim rulers were pioneer in creating a multi-cultural ethos widely known as Ganga-Jamni culture, for their adopted country. Except for a few exceptions and that too in the annals of communalized history, nobody can blame them for being Islamicists.

While during the watch of the ‘Macaulay Brahmin’ dominated Indian National Congress, in a short time span of mere 63 years, India has got so entrenched in Hindutva lore and culture, that the State is merely giving lip service to its Constitution, when it comes to observing ‘secularism’ in its governance and guidelines.

Creeping erosion of India’s constitutional secularism has come to such a state that even judiciary has become immune or as some may say, contemptuous to its existence.

The naked example of the erosion of our constitutional secularism is the monumental Allahabad High Court verdict on Babri Masjid title suit, after its state-supported demolition watched live by the entire world.

India must correct its course.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com

<http://www.ghulammuhammed.blogspot.com>

A TALE OF TWO CITY NEWSPAPERS By Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

Sunday, December 06, 2009

A TALE OF TWO CITY NEWSPAPERS

As it is, to judge the pulse of the people is a hazardous venture, even with all the high degree of sophistication sold to the gullible by the discredited polling peddlers, the state of editorial confusion in the writers of Mumbai’s two main opinion maker English media, The Times of India and The Indian Express, shows how media uses its power in questionable arbitrary manner, when it comes to Muslim mind. The anniversary of December 6, which is marked by Indian Muslim all over the country as a Black Day; a day when India’s most celebrated secular Constitution was systematically subverted by the two main political parties, joining hands in collusion to demolish the 400 year old historic Babri Masjid at Ayodhya.

Those who had witnessed the event on live telecast cannot forget what role BBC and its local correspondent Mark Tally played in spreading the panic all over the country, by their minute by minute reporting. For all practical purposes, the international media with BBC practically representing western interests in Indian affairs, was seen to be hand in glove with anti-Muslim elements in the Hindutva rabble-rousers as well as the pseudo-secular Brahmins of Indian National Congress that was ruling the country.

It is therefore not surprising that Mumbai’s two English newspapers have come out with reports on the mood of Indian Muslims with two entirely divergent versions.

Times of India report headlined: Looking Beyond Babri carried the theme, paraphrasing a Leftist poet Faiz’s famous line: Aur bhi gham hain Babri ke siva. Indian Express headline: ‘Muslim leaders seek stern action’, on the other hand gave the other side where Muslims are reported as enraged as ever; more so especially after Government’s tabling in Lok Sabha of the Justice Liberhan’s Report on Babri Masjid Demolition, that took 17 years to charge 68 persons, all from the BJP and other member of Hindutva Sangh Parivar. Muslims are reportedly demanding all of them to be brought to justice.

The Times of India, in a report meticulously written by its confirmed Leftist liberal, Mohammed Wajihuddin stuck to his usual suspects in his progressive backyard, to paint a picture of ‘liberal’ Muslims, trying to monopolize the debate by burying their heads in sand, pretending Babri is dead. He should have added: Long Live Babri. For Times of India, to promote the notion that Babri is a non-issue is not only audacious, but dangerous, as it is underestimating the rage that is simmering in the Muslim milieu. Wajihuddin completely ignores the majority of Muslims in the city who by no means can be calculated as following Left liberal creed of making all religious issues irrelevant. Not a single of his quote is from mainstream Muslim citizens. His observations are therefore based on faulty and arbitrarily biased polling of the people. That does not reflect the fact. As it is when Muslim masses have spoken in united terms? Wajihuddin’s report therefore is a propaganda report. Much that liberals would like religion to be out of national debate, religion in India, in all its variations is the very soul of the people. 

Times of India’s attempt to sooth the nerves of the majority of its non-Muslim readership, is understandable; but it can make people and government complacent and take them with surprise when even small matters could trigger the simmering rage to the surface. It would therefore be better to err on the side of caution.

‘The Indian Express’ has picked up its line from politicians of the two different political parties, without bothering to go deeper into the subject of how mainstream Muslim feels about the Babri Masjid demolition and what are its aspiration over justice and restitution of Babri at its original site. Congress Party spokesperson, Hussain Dalwai, again a left liberal, dutifully followed the party line. Congress by releasing the Liberhan report is into political maneuvering as how to exploit Liberahan Commission’s findings to rouse sentiments in Uttar Pradesh and regain Muslim trust to once again secure a dominant political space for Congress in the pivotal state. A sizeable percentage of Mumbai population has live links with people back home in Uttar Pradesh. As earning members contributing to the family budget, they are susceptible to maneuverings by political parties in Mumbai. In this context, Samajwadi Party leader, Abu Asim Azmi, as quoted by Indian Express, follows the Muslim mainstream sentiments and demands the whole works.

None of the two Media reports go deeper into the possibility that Babri sentiments could last for another 500 years or more than its old historical structure survived. With Muslims feeling under siege all over the globe, Babri demolition is India’s contribution to Muslim rage, that better be tackled by Congress government as soon as possible.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com

www.GhulamMuhammed.Blogspot.com

 http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Client.asp?Daily=TOIM&showST=true&login=default&pub=TOI&Enter=true&Skin=TOINEW&GZ=T

Looking beyond BABRI

Sixteen years after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, both the Muslim mindset and the leadership have undergone a sea change

Mohammed Wajihuddin | TNN 

    Zohair Afsar was all of two when a frenzied mob of kar sevaks demolished the 400-year-old Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992. Obviously, he remembers neither the denouement of that black Sunday nor the countrywide dance of death in its aftermath. Growing up in Deoband, the UP town that houses Islamic seminary Darul Uloom—which, despite its lofty history of producing a galaxy of nationalist ulema, has often been pilloried for its regressive fatwas—one would have expected the boy to catch the virus of minority victimhood. But Zohair, now 19 and a student of mass media in Mumbai’s Burhani College, has a different perspective. “Babri masjid is not an issue with me,’’ he declares. “I want to get educated and excel in my field.’’

    Zohair belongs to the post-Babri generation of Muslims who have undergone a remarkable change in mindset. This generation, reaping 

the opportunities of globalisation, genuinely believes that the past cannot hold it back. For its members it is career rather than an obsession with rebuilding the destroyed mosque that is paramount: the collective fury that had consumed them for years after the demolition has today given way to a desire for education and prosperity.

 
    The indications are everywhere. At a meet at Urdu Markaz, a cultural centre in Dongri, a group discussed the three-day career festival that begins on January 8. “We will have stalls for career counselling, workshops on different career options and speeches by role models on how to excel in different professions,’’ says Aamir Edresy of the Association of Muslim Professionals, which is holding the career fest in co-ordination with Anjumane-Islam.

 
    Alfiya Ansari, a master in marketing management and a participant in the career fest, grew up in the Muslim ghetto of Nagpada. Communal thugs burnt down her father’s cloth manufacturing unit in neighbouring Surat during the 1992-’93 riots. “My father remained missing for many days. We were so scared that we had almost planned to leave Mumbai,’’ recalls 24-yearold Alfiya. “But we decided to stay back and avenge the injustice through education.’’

 
    The desire for education, say activists who worked among the riotaffected, became the catalyst that triggered a change in the Muslim mindset. Farid Khan, general secretary of Majlis-e-Shoora, a sociocultural body set up after the Mumbai riots, recalls how angry youth then wanted to avenge the humiliation. “Posters with the domes of the Babri mosque painted like bleeding eyes were pasted on walls in Muslim pockets. Slogans like ‘God, send us another Mehmood Ghaznavi (the 10th-century Muslim invader who destroyed the Somnath Temple several times) to rebuild the demolished mosque’ would rend the air,’’ recalls Khan. Today nobody raises such provocative slogans. Even the patriarchal and heavily patronising leadership of the All India Babri Masjid Action Committee, formed to save the mosque, is now marginalised. The leaders have prudently joined the chorus of accepting the court’s verdict on the issue.

 
    The irrelevance of the myopic Muslim leadership is so evident that, as reformist Islamic scholar Asgar Ali Engineer says, the community feels it would have been better off without such ‘leaders’. Engineer recalls a meeting of Muslim intellectuals in Delhi a few years ago where a prominent Muslim leader came uninvited. “When hewasn’t asked to speak, he stood up demanding to know why,’’ says Engineer. “The crowd had a terse reply: ‘We have reached this stage because we allowed you to speak for so long. Now shut up.’ The leader left the venue humiliated.’’

 
    Engineer also compares the Muslim response to the recent Sachar Committee report as against its reaction to the Gopal Singh Committee report which looked into the socio-economic and educational status of Muslims in the late 1980s. “Then the movement to rebuild the mosque was on every Muslim leader’s agenda. All other more pressing issues were relegated to the back burner,’’ he says. “But today Sachar is being debated at a different level.’’

 
    One of the remedies even the Sachar Committee suggests is to train Muslim candidates for the prestigious civil services exams. And the Muslim and liberal leadership in Mumbai, breaking its unexplained long silence, recently took an initiative in this direction. The Haj Committee of India, headquartered at the swanky Haj House near CST, has started coaching Muslim candidates for the civils. “The response to our advertisement was overwhelming. For the 50 seats, we received over 300 applications from Muslims belonging to poor and lower-middle-class families. This is a very positive trend,’’ says 
Mohammed Owais, CEO of the the Haj Committee.

 
    Again, at a UNICEF-sponsored debate on minorities’ problems at the government’s Sahyadri guest house last week, the participants, mostly Muslim women, discussed everything but Babri. “There was not even a mention of the Liberhan report during the day-long debate. It was all about education, health and employment,’’ says Prof Farrukh Waris of Burhani College, one of the invitees at the debate. Evidently, the ghosts of Babri are being quietly laid to rest.

WAR AND PEACE Hindu fundamentalists destroyed the Babri Masjid in 1992, but Ayodhya is hardly an issue for today’s Muslim youth (left)

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http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Muslim-leaders-seek-stern-action/550555

Muslim leaders seek stern action

Demolition anniversary : They term government reaction eye-wash, demand immediate justice

Muslim leaders have demanded “stern action” against those named in the Liberhan Commission report besides implementation of the report of the Srikrishna Commission set up following the 1992-’93 riots in Mumbai.

“Stern action should be taken against those who have been named by the Liberhan Commission,” said Congress spokesperson and former minister Husain Dalwai on the eve of the Babri demolition anniversary.

Attacking senior BJP leaders named in the report for claiming that they were not involved in the demolition, Dalwai alleged that the Ram Janmabhoomi movement was organised to demolish the mosque.

“It is necessary to implement the Srikrishna Commission report,” said Dalwai, adding that police officers against whom strictures had been passed by the commission had been promoted later. He said the issue needed to be settled and the communal divide in the country needed to be bridged by erecting a temple and a masjid at the site in Ayodhya.

Samajwadi Party (SP) MLA Abu Asim Azmi termed the statements of the government regarding the Liberhan and Srikrishna Commission reports as an “eye wash” and said justice needed to delivered speedily.

“What action has been taken after it?” questioned Azmi, pointing to the report of the commission set up under Justice Manmohan Singh Liberhan submitting its report 17 years after it had been set up. He also sought that the masjid be rebuilt at the same spot.

Accusing the government of lacking “will power,” Azmi, who was arrested for allegedly booking tickets for people involved in the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts that occurred after the demolitions, but subsequently discharged by the apex court, said the masterminds behind the demolition needed to be punished.

“Those who masterminded the demolition of the Babri Masjid have not been punished,” said Azmi, pointing out that such incidents led to “outside forces” trying to brainwash youth from the minority community that they would not get justice in the country.

Former Congress minister Anis Ahmed too pointed out that the Liberhan report had held BJP leaders responsible for the demolition, and called for action against those indicted. “The guilty should be punished,” he said, ruing that people only got empty assurances in return.

Salute to Arnab Goswami and TIMES NOW TV - By Ghulam Muhammed

Monday, November 23, 2009

A LETTER TO THE EDITOR:

Salute to Arnab Goswami and TIMES NOW TV

Arnab Goswami of TIMES NOW TV deserves kudos for playing a clip showing Atal Behari Vajpayee, the anointed Saint of the Sangh Parivar, gleefully regaling his audience in a meeting, one day earlier to the December 6, 1992 Babri Masjid demolition. While L. K. Advani was raising a storm under constant chant of shame, shame in the Lok Sabha in the morning, faking surprise that Atal Behari’s name has been reported to be cited as being one of the prime conspirator and master mind of Babri Masjid demolition, Arnab Goswami dug out the TV clip from OUTLOOK archives, and countered L. K. Advani in public arena. Atal Behari Vajpayee clearly said, that he was asked to go to Delhi and in fact, while the conclave disbursed in Lucknow on Dec 5, Atal Behari who was a participant, left for Delhi while others participants in BJP meeting, including L. K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Uma Bharti, left Lucknow for Ayodhya. Arnab Goswami’s playing of that clip was instant indictment of Vajpayee, as openly exhorting Kar Sevaks, to level the ground of the site, so that a yagya can be organised. Can there be any more proof of the guilt that surrounds Vajpayee.

Now that the leak of Liberhan Report details as published by Indian Express on its front page, has become the more important subject than the reported content of the report, Arnab Goswami’s continuous and relentless attempt to shot down deflecting arguments by BJP and Congress spokespersons on TIMES NOW panel, was a single most contribution to justice and fair play in public debate, on one of the most gruesome and sordid act of rape of India’s constitutional commitment to secularism in free India’s short history of independence.

India’s media, especially the English language media, which commands audience all over world, carries a big responsibilities to counter deliberate shenanigans by India’s notorious political class, to use matters of justice to mock the victims of their deliberate and premeditated criminal acts like the demolition of Babri Masjid and the subsequent orgy of carnage inflicted on Muslims citizens all across the land.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com

www.GhulamMuhammed.Blogspot.com

Comments posted on Facebook on the Status of Tarek Fateh

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=163868712507&comments=

Ghulam Muhammed

 Tarek, I find so many similarities in conditions prevailing in the US post-9/11 and in India post Babri Masjid Demolition and the Bombay Riots followed by Bombay Blasts in 1992-93.

I have lived through the period, just as you are a witness in these troubled times. You will be surprised how Indian police and communal elements in Indian government hounded Muslims, religious or irreligious and murdered them and their families. Only their names had to be Muslims. Rioters went through voters lists and other local directories to single out Muslim names and go hunting. Famous liberals, who swore they never went to any Masjid all their lives, had to face the brutalities of the mobs as well as the communalized police.

I must admit that Left liberals, especially in English media, were in the forefront of fighting these communal crimes. And some of them are still resolutely fighting communalism.

However, it is only now, 20 years later, the real face of Hindutva terror has been exposed through the single-minded professional work of Anti-Terrorist Squad Chief Hemant Karkare, (who was among the first shot dead in the 26/11 carnage in Mumbai), that Hindutva terror group were identified and exposed. A long list of Muslims who have been incarcerated in the intervening years, due to no fault of theirs except carrying a Muslim name, are still to be released. The persecution rate of all Muslims in jail is less than 10% or even less.

I find the same persecution of innocent Muslims being callously inflicted in the aftermath of 9/11 and simple minded people like you with a chip on their shoulder, are making their work so much easier. Go through Google under police encounters in India. They shoot first and brand the victims terrorists. I see the pattern emerging in the USA. And there is no organised group of civil libertarian who can challenge the bona-fide of such summary executions. People like Tarek Fateh are so engrossed in their own war, they are not aware what is happening in their own backyard.