“Injustice has run full circle, good days are ahead,” this was the remark of people when 50-year-old Syed Mubarak Husain was acquitted of sedition charges by Mr. Vinay Khare, Sessions Judge of Bareilly on December 1, 2009. Mubarak Husain is a petty trader who used to sell cloths to support his family, old ailing father and three sisters. He was arrested on August 28,2006 from a small mosque in Sanyarani village where he used to sometimes lead prayers. The charges against him were treason and instigating people to rise against Indian armed forces. He was mercilessly tortured for three days in the worst possible way. He was hung upside down and water was pumped through his mouth and nostrils. The police conveniently procured a confession from the poor fellow of being guilty of all charges. He was dubbed a Kashmiri hailing from Ranibagh in Poonch district whereas actually he was a resident of Biswan in Sitapur district of U.P. His bail application was dismissed by Sessions Court and finally granted by Allahabad High Court in 2008. The case against him was evidently false. But he had to suffer for four long years for no fault of his. His father, 80-year-old Syed Nawab Husain, complains that Mubarak was the only bread-winner of the poor family, which was forced to pledge its farmland to fight the case. The family’s economy is destroyed beyond repair.
You will come across thousands of such cases against Muslims all over the country. The question is: Will the civil society rise up to the occasion? Will the human rights organisations act positively? And, will the Government stop these undemocratic methods? This acquittal after a legal battle of four years shows that things have started changing and Muslims have decided to fight all false cases with their full power.
But is it not a tragedy of great magnitude that even after 62 years of Independence we have failed to give a secured and dignified life to a large segment, one-sixth, of Indian population, the Muslims. It is not only that they have been relegated to a backward position in education, economic development and government jobs. The very security of their life and limb is at risk. And their dignity as a community is at stake. After Independence, at least for four decades, when the Congress party was in power there had been more than 40,000 communal riots in which Muslims had to bear the brunt. The Government did nothing, society was insensitive, courts were lethargic and the criminals had full freedom to play their nefarious games.
The mid-1980s witnessed the ascendance of Hindutva, which after demolition of Babri Masjid, tried to demolish the spirit of Muslim community. It enacted the shameful massacre of Gujarat in 2002. But gradually the psyche of common Indians underwent a change. People refused to be victims of hate propaganda unleashed by fascists. They were no longer ready to indulge in communal conflicts. They became more interested in education, economic struggle, a bit of consumerism even tourism. They realised that the communal conflicts were affecting their lives negatively and were not in the interest of the country as a whole.
The same people who had engaged in spreading hatred and communal tensions shifted their attention to selective targeting of educated Muslim youth. Hundreds of Muslims especially youth were arrested under fictitious charges. They were presented before the common man as enemies of India and agents of ISI, etc. They were booked for different crimes purported to be committed in different States. Fake encounters like Batla House were enacted throughout the country. Even old people were not spared as have been the cases of above said Mubarak Husain and Gulam Yahya Ilahi Bakhsh, the Imam of Mumbai Haj House, who was cleared of similar charges of sedition and waging a war against the country recently.