Maudany: The Man Our Lies Forsake
By K.S Shameer
27 February, 2013
Countercurrents.org
There are many living examples in India of how the laws implemented with a view to prevent terrorism are grossly unjust and misappropriated. Zakiya Soman, of Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, quotes the Supreme Court as having remarked while acquitting a person arrested under the TADA nearly twenty years ago: ‘This is a terrible law and it has taken the toll of many, many lives.” But such a grave observation seems to have fallen on the deaf ears of the police bureaucracy, if the recent arrest in connection with the Hyderabad bomb blast of people who were earlier acquitted is anything to go by. That draconian laws, illegal detention and the rule of jail in lieu of bail continues is sufficient reason for us to say that there is silent emergency all over India.
None has been victimized worse than Abdul Nasir Maudany by the draconian laws attached with the pervasive ‘silent emergency.’ He has been a prisoner of conscience, or, as Peter Benenson who coined the phrase describes, ‘someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his (sic) government.’ (http://www.amnestyusa.org/about-us/amnesty-50-years/peter-benenson-remembered/the-forgotten-prisoners-by-peter-benenson). He was arrested more than a decade ago as an accused in the Coimabtore blast case. He was imprisoned for about a decade, denied bail or parole, and was finally acquitted by the high court declaring him innocent and the charges against him fabricated. Again, sooner rather than later, he was again arrested as an accused in the Bangalore blast case and has been detained for two and a half years. Speculation was rife during the arrest that it was also politically orchestrated. But this time, thanks to the investigative report of KK Shahina in Tehelka, all witnesses against Maudany said they had not given statement against him. Shahina was also brought under the machinery which tags people as terrorists.
There are many, mostly sympathetic, discourses on the plight of Maudany. But the brilliant, if intensely poignant documentary titled Fabricated, made by KP Sasi outwits all other discourses chiefly for one simple reason: It does not merely say that Maudany deserves sympathy and fair trail; it says how a man stung to political response by the plight of many disenfranchised and tormented lives is targeted by the state machinery and all its apparatuses. It does not single out the figure of Maudany; it rather merges him with many voices and narratives around-like the narratives of landless adivasis and people threatened by mega projects. Mauday said just before he was arrested: ‘This is not the hatred of one Maudany alone. This is the hatred of society, a community, and the harassed minorities in this country.”
KP Sasi’s camera always moves from the public space to the private space, from street to home. Then we see Maudany’s bed-ridden father, careworn mother, and sad, if forbearing, wife and children. They all speak about a book-loving, caring, and brilliant boy growing up in Sasthamcottah and ending up as a recourse for the disenfranchised minorities. The threat of Hindutva rightwing politics which intensified with the demolition of Babri Masjid provoked him, now a religious leader who speaks for minorities and Dalits, to speak strongly against the injustice. Then comes the time when the state colluded with the media to successfully tag him as terrorist. KP Sasi’s brilliance as a filmmaker lies in packing all these events in Maudany’s life in the overall theme of his predicament.
There is a segment in the documentary in which KK Shahina speaks how she unveiled the state plot to trap Maudany. We see all the witnesses in the Bangalore case telling us that either they did not see Maudany or they did not give statement against him or they did not give statement suo moto (i.e they were threatened or forced to sign under the documents written in a language they did not know). We see how the tentacles of an oppressive state closing around Maudany, a Muslim religious scholar who was awakened by the Quran to protect people rendered hapless by the neo-liberal policies on the one hand and the right-wing savarna politics on the other. The documentary puts together many enlightened voices-those of Binayak Sen, Krishna Iyer, Udaya Kurmar, Zakiya Soman, BRP Bhaskar, KEN Kunjahammad, Nalini Prakasham, Advocate Nandini, Civic Chandran, Gro Vasu and CK Abdul Azeez (people who were so victimized by the declared emergency as to put this situation in perspective; people who have analyzed the right-wing Savarna politics; people who are victims also of silent emergency; and people who gloomily see law taking a different course from justice). These voices attest to the fact that democracy is imperiled by the very state which we have trusted.
Media always play the second fiddle to the oppressive state by packaging and distributing the lies manufactured by the latter and by, in their turn, manufacturing common sense. At the same time media activism by selfless individuals will help us hear the pathetic voices of the victims of oppression. When even the Titanic of democracy hits the iceberg of fascism, media activism of this kind appears as life buoy to keep us from drowning in the water of lies, to take us back to the shore of sanity and to rebuild a democracy of future.
K.S Shameer is the executive editor of Other Books, an independent publishing house based in Calicut
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