The Strange Cases Of
Mohammed Haneef And Iftikhar GilaniBy Jawed Naqvi
31 July, 2007
Countercurrents.orgIn a TV interview last week India's National Security Adviser MK Narayanan claimed that Al Qaeda posed a really serious threat to the country. And, he stressed, since Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba is an integral part of Al Qaeda the threat was that much more immediate and palpable. Mr Narayanan's claim sounds convincing because Lashkar fingerprint does appear to be writ on a spate of bombings that have killed civilians in different parts of India. The question is what is to be done.
There are an estimated140 million Muslims in India. Three of them happen to be running for the vice-president's job. The widely watched contest is due next month. But here we confront an old problem. Do the candidates who are shored up by the entire gamut of mainstream parties, from the rightwing Hindu to the leftwing and the Congress, command any credibility among India's variegated and heterogeneous Muslims? Their parties most certainly do not. So what if all three candidates have a lot to commend themselves to seek the country's second highest constitutional post.
The liberal-conservative dichotomy, represented by possibly all the three vice-presidential candidates and the Muslim masses, has grown and not waned since independence. Consequently the country's largest minority group has come to constitute one of the most depressed segments of its social pyramid. The rise of Hindutva politics has threatened to further alienate them from the national mainstream.
Which understandably makes at least a few of them vulnerable to zealotry and to religious extremism. The statistics is stacked against Mr Narayanan. Just half a per cent of extremists out of 140 million can present an enormous challenge. The task for Mr Narayanan is thus truly forbidding. How is anyone to divine the acute and often chronic alienation that lurks somewhere in the deep recesses of the community's psyche for it to be addressed? And yet it would be hugely tragic for all if this aloofness is not identified and checked with care, chances for which have historically looked remote. This, Mr Narayanan, is where Lashkar and Al Qaeda need to be defeated.
And yet, the way forward is surely to isolate the problem and not to circumscribe the community. In fact, sincerest assurances of security and equal economic opportunities to these aggrieved Indians should be a priority, the objective being to rescue 140 million innocent people from the clutches of wily mullahs who have entrenched themselves as middlemen for crucial Muslim votes – and from the vitriol of the Hindutva hordes. The Indian government's efforts in this regard were recently laudable in the case of Mohammed Haneef, the doctor who was, it seems, wrongly arrested, harassed and hounded by Australia's anti-terror sleuths. The relentless support to secure Dr Haneef 's freedom came from the entire Indian establishment – the government and the media included – and was instrumental in winning his eventual release.
For Mr Narayanan though there is little to rejoice in this rare bit of good news for India's secular credentials. It just so happens that the track record of this country in delivering justice for people in Dr Haneef's situation is considerably worse than Australia's could ever be. I spoke to Iftikhar Gilani about the Haneef episode and asked him to compare that example with his own incarceration that lasted seven scorching months in Delhi's notorious Tihar Jail. Iftikhar was accused of espionage simply because he had stored an old published report on India's troop strength in Jammu and Kashmir. "Patriotic" inmates, who included convicted rapists and murderers, made him wear a shirt with which he had cleaned human excreta in the prison's toilets. These convicts then sought to teach him patriotic anthems like Vande Mataram and Saare Jahaan Se Achha Hindustan Hamara (India is better than any other place in the world). None of these abuses were hurled at Haneef in Australia. Moreover, the doctor's charge sheet was ready within five days of his arrest. In India a terror suspect is often held for six months without charge. And this is precisely what happened with Iftikhar Gilani. He lived through hell for seven months and was then as mysteriously freed as he was picked up from his home in Delhi on a boiling June afternoon in 2002. Unlike the care given to Haneef's wife by the Indian media, Iftikhar's family and children were shunned by his neighbours. Even the media, which tends to take its cue from official stance, let him down badly. A woman journalist who falsely reported in her newspaper a confession Iftikhar never made is today a star reporter in a premier TV news channel.
One way to celebrate India's secular democracy would be to publish details in a white paper on Iftikhar Gilani's case. Such a move could also ease Mr Narayanan's task of winning hearts and minds dramatically. Why was he arrested and, equally importantly, why was he released? There was simply no trial. No charges were ever brought against Gilani. Mr Narayanan may also wish to search the precincts of other Indian prisons, big and small, and declare the truth about the countless men and women who are rotting there because they have been simply forgotten there, without any hope for justice. If we have any leg to stand on then we can mock Australia and also perhaps begin to address the massive challenge of terrorism India and neighbouringcountries face.
A few suggestions in this regard have come, Mr Narayanan may be happy to note, from two of India's leading newspapers. So things are changing for the better even if the change is somewhat slow.
The Times of India exulted in Haneef's victory and even advocated a lesson or two for India. "It is heartening that lawyers, the press and civil rights groups in Australia kept up pressure on the authorities to either come up with concrete evidence of his complicity or let him go. The ordeal has clearly been unfortunate for Haneef and his family, but it must be acknowledged that he is also the beneficiary of a criminal justice system that works and, in the last instance, has been fair. When the Australian authorities realised they had made an error of judgment, they acted upon it. Which is not something investigating agencies in India always do. Police here have the dubious record of detaining suspects without charge for much longer than the 90-day limit. And once charged, the period becomes elastic. The police keep them locked up without trial as the excruciatingly slow wheels of justice grind on."
Mr Narayanan could glean another advice from the Times editorial.
"Fake encounters and custodial deaths are par for the course in theIndian police's scheme of things. Forget any admission of lapse, if itemerges that mistakes were made, they will go to great lengths to cover up stained tracks."
In a separate comment on the trial and conviction of the 1993 Mumbai blasts – mostly Muslim – accused, the Times noted the tardy judicial process. But it also asked a question that should be of interest to Mr Narayanan. People under trial in the blasts case have reportedly asked the anti-terror court judges why there has been very little action on the justice Srikrishna report, the Times said. Justice Srikrishna was appointed by the government to investigate the communal riots in Mumbai after the demolition of Babri masjid in December 1992. He held several police officials and Shiv Sena leaders responsible for facilitating and actively taking part in the riots. Successive governments, including Congress-led ones, have failed to act on Srikrishna's findings. "Many people have cited this inaction on the part of the government as evidence of discrimination against Muslims, especially now that guilty verdicts are being handed out in the blasts trials, the Times said.
For the Indian Express, the Indian government's summoning of the Australian high commissioner was "unfortunate, unnecessary and immature". Haneef is free, the paper said, "not because he is brown, Muslim, an immigrant, Indian. He is free because it was deemed that the charges against him would not hold in a court of law. As for the do's, in a country like India where thousands of undertrials languish in prison without charges even being framed, Haneef is proof of the importance of speedy justice."
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