The recent serial blasts in Mumbai have again resulted in loss of innocent lives, grievous injuries to more than one hundred people and nationwide trauma. Besides, it means fresh trouble for Muslim community.
The entire nation, nay the entire world condemns the inhuman killings in the strongest words. The intelligence agencies are yet to identify and apprehend the culprits. The atmosphere is thick with rumours and politicians, as usual, are out to indulge in blame game and make political capital out of the tragedy.
However, it shows the maturity of Indians that they have refused to be instigated and finally given a go to the age of communal riots. Even communal parties are changing their strategy of spreading hate and setting communities on each other’s throats. The last massacre was enacted in Gujarat in 2002 with the connivance of those at the helm of affairs in the state. Thereafter started the age of bomb blasts in which, in most of the cases, innocent Muslim youth were implicated. Most of them are languishing in jails and suffering for prolonged periods continued mental and physical torture while their families are suffering from stigma and deprivation. None has been indicted by any court of law.
Even now that trend persists and whenever some blast takes place Muslim youths are routinely apprehended. But our guardians of law have learned a hard lesson after Pragya Thakur and her accomplices’ arrests and voluntary confession of Aseemanand that Hindutwa hardliners were behind most of the blasts. Therefore now they are somewhat cautious about blaming a particular community.
Yet politicians, even suave people like Arun Jaitley, do not miss a chance of pointing fingers, as he did after recent blasts, that government is not serious in stopping terror because of vote bank politics. By this such people mean that Muslims are vote bank of ruling congress, and they in a way are responsible for acts of terror and the government is slow in taking action against them, for fear of losing its vote bank. Such insinuations have enough capability to prolong the atmosphere of hate and suspicion whose ultimate victims are none but Muslims.
Muslims, like other citizens of India, have made it clear time and again, that they do not hold any brief for any type of violence or terrorism and are second to none in condemning violence and supporting the government in fighting terrorism.
One sad aspect of people’s response to acts of terror is that the whole nations forgets the more pressing problems like scams, corruption, inflation, inequality, injustice and other social and economics evils. The need of the hour is better intelligence gathering, more effective security measures, better policing and maturity on the part of the government and the common man.