FAITH HEALING
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 he wasn’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)
