Seizing the moment

Collateral damage has become part of the politically correct lexicon ever since the war on terror was launched. Puja Awasthi investigates how many young muslims are living that grim reality.

lucknow riotIn the short seconds that it takes Zoya Tariq to say that jail is a place where good and educated grown-ups are locked, an encyclopaedia of pain can be read and re-read. Five years ago, her father, Tariq Qazmi was picked up by security agencies for his role in the bomb blasts across the courts of Lucknow, Faizabad and Varanasi. Unknown to Zoya, a government mandated inquiry, yet to be released but appropriately ‘leaked’ has poked holes in the manner and logic of his arrest. What she does know is that her father, a doctor, left home one morning for his clinic and never returned. Zoya was then five. Her youngest sibling was six months old.

In her modest home at the village of Sammopur, which stands next to a large yellow one which the media has so gleefully portrayed as evidence of Qazmi’s ill gotten wealth (it actually belongs to a relative), Zoya stands in a dank corridor, small arms crossed against her body as she listens to her mother, Ayesha’s lament of helplessness.
“For five years we lived on hope. Then this government came and it all faded. Sometimes I want to bang my head against the walls of the jail. Someone might listen. Then I think of our children...”, Ayesha trails off.

Zoya and Ayesha are centre and circumference of an imperfectly drawn, poorly understood curve of pain, helplessness and betrayal that has closed in on Azamgarh’s Muslims. Across the state, a similar amalgam of negatives feeds a rapidly growing disenchantment but even four years after the Batla House encounter, Azamgarh remains the definitive emblem of all that is going wrong with and for the state’s largest minority.

In the market of Badarka, where the noise of vehicles competes with the holler of push cart vendors, Shahid Badr, former president of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) attributes an ugly, pervasive anger against the government to ill conceived political caprice. “Deep in the villages, women took it upon themselves to motivate other women to vote. Women who had never voted came out, propelled by the Samajwadi Party’s promises. It was as if the drowning had been thrown a life jacket. They did it for their boys. Now they realise it was in vain”, says Badr.

The steady stream of patients and visitors to the clinic of a greying Badr, who as a gentle, soft spoken doctor of Unani medicine, is unimaginable as a man who was once charged with spewing anti national speeches, offer their own elaborations on his observation. One says that the Samajwadi Party (SP) manifesto, in its Urdu version had made its way to almost every home to be read, discussed and propagated as a symbol of change that promised the community, among other things, special support packages, reservation and a re- look into the cases of terrorism. Another, charges the government with doublespeak—projecting itself as the custodian of Muslim interest and then brushing aside protests and sending a senior minister to Israel. A third says that while change has not happened, even the scant sense of security that minorities enjoyed under the previous regime has vanished as proved by the rioting and arson of the last eight months.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri

and Arindam Chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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