NEWS
VIEWS
INTERVIEWS
CAMPAIGN TRAIL
ISSUES '98
MANIFESTOS
OVERHEARD
POLLING BOOTH
INDIA SPEAKS!
YEH HAI INDIA
CHAT
ELECTIONS '96

The Muslim Sena

N Sathiya Moorthy in Madras

Five years ago, at the height of the Ayodhya demolition crisis, Tamil Nadu was mostly peaceful while the rest of India reverberated with violence. But today, when there is general peace and quiet elsewhere, the election in the state is marked with bomb blasts and unrest.

Not that the local Muslims have woken up to their woes belatedly. Local factors, lack of credible community leadership and frustration among the youth, not to mention the unseen hands of fundamentalists and Pakistan's Inter Service Intelligence, are said to be the cause for the rise in communal violence in the state.

The alarming rise in Muslim fundamentalism is only matched by the expanding Hindutva base. It's difficult to say whether Hindu communalism fed Muslim fundamentalism, or vice versa. But it is definitely safe to conclude, in the light of the recent Coimbatore blasts that Islamic fundamentalists have started choosing their targets with care, sending shivers down the spines of the common populace.

It started with the Bombay blasts of March 12, 1993. But more recently in Madras, the city police, on a tip-off reportedly from a central intelligence agency, thwarted an attempt to blast crowded city landmarks using 'tiffin-box bombs'. Two Islamic fundamentalists with 'Kerala connections' were arrested from a suburban house. That was in mid-1997.

But what has gone mostly unnoticed is the emergency of a new political power centre within the community. S A Basha, chief of Al-Umma that has been 'going soft' since the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government's return in 1996, and Hyder Ali, general secretary of the Tamil Nadu Muslim Munnetra Kazhagam, are not known outside their own outfits, leave alone the community.

While Al-Umma has been in the news for a few years now (for alleged attacks on the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-Hindu Munnani), the blame ultimately fell on the more rabid Jihad Committee, which has been projecting itself as a moderate political force. A two-year-old organisation, its success can be gauged from the 5,000 disciplined volunteers that courted arrest on the 'demolition anniversary' at Madras last year, braving the state-wide preventive arrests (another 5,000 activists were arrested earlier).

On the 'Ayodhya anniversary' in 1996, the TMMK took out a procession to Raj Bhavan and presented a memorandum to the governor. That procession, as also last year's aborted rally, went off peacefully despite fears of violence. The rallyists shouted slogans demanding job reservations for the community, besides those for the restoration of the Ayodhya site to the Muslims.

What has made the TMMK possible and relevant in Muslim politics is the internecine quarrels within the established political leadership of the community. Ever since state Indian Union Muslim League president A K A Abdus Samad and then general secretary M A Lateef fell out over a decade ago, the community has been divided. Lateef floated his own outfit and is now state general secretary of the Indian National League, the splinter IUML group floated by Ibrahim Sulaiman Sait in the post-Ayodhya days.

With the split, the community was slowly losing its electoral clout. There have also been largescale complaints that the established Muslim leadership has been serving its own political and financial ends, exploiting the ignorance of the backward Islamic vote-bank. A prime source of this has been the Wakf board. The rich alone, it is alleged, has benefited; a 'neo-rich' community has been created.

Thus, the situation was ripe for radicals to take root out of sheer frustration. The leadership's shocked silence over the Ayodhya incident only unnerved the youth. Though mostly unaffected by the happenings in the distant Uttar Pradesh town, they could see the 'writing on the wall' when over-enthusiastic Hindutva cadres targetted local Muslims in Tamil Nadu towns.

Last year's Coimbatore violence, and the Samad-Lateef silence on the same, has not helped matters. The community's choice is now between neo-political moderate groups like the TMMK, and the fire-spitting violence-prone outfits like the Jihad Committee.

For his part, Abdus Samad has condemned the Coimbatore blasts and sought severe action against the perpetrators of the heinous crime. But it is another matter whether the police, or the Central Bureau of Imvestigation to whom the Tamil Nadu government may hand over the case, can achieve a real breakthrough.

Fundamentalism is big business, and frustrated youth, left out of the 'Gulf job boom', are easy targets, particularly if ideological colouring and financial incentives are also present. Added to that is the ubiquitous ISI hand, about which central agencies, as also political parties like the BJP, have been making frequent mention.

That way, the Coimbatore blasts should come as an eye-opener. While coming down heavily on the criminal brains behind such acts aimed at perpetuating communal hatred and fear in a region of comparative peace, steps should also be taken to assuage the legitimate fears of the Muslim youth and help integrate them into the political mainstream.

Elections '98

Tell us what you think of this report