SIMI encounter: Do Muslim lives matter?

The Madhya Pradesh Police gunned down eight Muslim undertrials after they allegedly escaped the Bhopal Central Jail early on October 31, 2016, by slitting the throat of a prison guard and scaling the walls with tied-up bedsheets.

While the police describe the encounter as a raging gun-battle, several amateur videos have come out showing the police shooting at close range at unarmed suspects who were standing on a hillock with their hands raised.

When the opposition parties, human rights groups and a section of media are raising questions over the police action, terming it as "extrajudicial killings", representatives of the BJP and RSS are retaliating, saying it is "unpatriotic" to question the nation's law enforcement agencies and such criticism undermines the morals of our security forces.

Even the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Shivraj Singh Chouhan, describes the undertrials as terrorists and justifies their killing by his police forces saying: “Who knows what they would have done after escaping.”

In India, it has become routine to arrest a group of Muslim youth immediately after any terror attack. It does not matter whether they were involved or innocent, but it provides an illusion of security to a society which has come to believe that all terrorists are Muslims.

It is also not easy for the media or human right groups to take up the cases of innocent Muslims being kept in jail over framed up charges as it can immediately confer on them the "anti-national" tag.

Since 2001, the country has been struck by a number of terror blasts and a large number of innocent Muslim youth have found themselves falsely accused of terrorism.

Even if Hindutva terror groups were behind terror acts in Muslim neighbourhoods, as it was the case in Malegaon, the Samjhauta Express, Ajmer Sharif and Mecca Masjid, security agencies put Muslim youth behind bars for many years.

Muslim youth have not only been subjected to years of illegal detention in India’s "War against Terror", their "encounter killings" by police forces, like the recent one in Bhopal, is quite a regular event. Even if these killings clearly violate the principles of law, ruling political leaders invariably use it as a badge of honour to show their zero-tolerance policy towards Muslim suspects and reap political benefits.

No one knows the huge political dividends of encounter killings of Muslims more than Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP president Amit Shah.

During their watch as chief minister and home minister of Gujarat, police encounters against Muslim terror suspects had become a norm, especially from 2004 to 2007. Notably, most but not all such encounters of Muslims have taken place in "nationalist" BJP-ruled states. The country in general seems to be dangerously predisposed and that has crept into the psyche of the majority section of internal security apparatus.

There is no doubt that these random arrests and fake encounter killings of Muslim youth have no place in a civilised society. Those who argue that the legal process takes long to convict suspects and such extrajudicial acts of security agencies are the only way to provide security, expose their narrow, bigoted minds.

False arrests and fake killings breed desperation among the targeted group, germinating more hate and revenge. No need to go anywhere, as we know from recent experience that Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani took up arms after his brother was assaulted and detained by security forces, and Wani's encounter killing has probably enraged many Muslim youth in Kashmir and outside, and caused them to lose faith in the system and take up arms.

In India, when the Modi government has unleashed ultra-nationalist fervour and anti-Muslim frenzy has captured the majority imagination, there is growing desperation among Muslims in the country. Failure of opposition parties to rise above politics and to stand with the minority community has also added to their vulnerability.

Despair can turn to be a deadly weapon unless Muslim youth in the country see some ray of hope somewhere.  Unfortunately, there is very little optimism left for Muslims in a growing Hindutva-ised system under the Modi regime that it will be fair to them.

This desperate situation has, however, provided a bright opening for Muslim youth in Indian democracy to take the initiative and start a social movement along the lines of the Black Lives Matter movement in the US.

Since last year, the Black Lives Matter movement has evolved from a small protesting group to a genuinely powerful political force. Its initial objective of opposing police violence against African American youth has broadened to other areas of perceived injustices, from job discrimination to educational institutions’ biases.

The Black Lives Matter movement has already exposed several police chiefs with racist mindsets, fought many cases successfully in courts and has fundamentally changed campus politics all over the US. It has even influenced Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to openly support its cause.

The movement began almost by accident on July 13, 2013, in a Facebook post “A love letter to black people” by Alicia Garza of Oakland, California, when George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager shot in a gated Florida suburb.

Since then, the movement has become the banner under which dozens of disparate organisations and millions of individuals have come together, and has seized the nation’s attention with already 30 official chapters, including one in Canada.

The impressive success of the Black Lives Matters movement in the US in a short-time provides a certain prospect for Muslim youth in an increasingly intolerant India. If only they can wage a successful social movement that can influence India’s security agencies in particular and Indian society in general to move out of their prejudiced mindset and start respecting Muslim lives and their basic fundamental rights.

An effective mobilisation of Muslim youths in India is needed for Muslims not only to live like any other citizen in the country, but is also critical for the country to respect the rule of law and protect its secular values.

Also read: 8 questions as disturbing as Bhopal 'encounter' images of 8 SIMI 'terrorists'

Also read: Intolerance thriving in India, thanks to Modi government