Guilty till proven innocent. This statement sums up the conditions which India Muslims find themselves in whenever any report about bombs or terror attacks reaches police.
"Since those involved in the Malda blast case were all Muslims soon police slapped terror angle to it and the all media organs enthusiastically aimed to identify the men involved in the case as Islamist terrorists," Social Media activist Mohammad Abu Bakr told OnIslam.net.
"More than three months have gone by, but police are yet to announce that the Malda blast case had no terrorist connection," Abu Bakr added.
"In sharp contrast, in the identical case of Bardhaman, within hours after the blast police highlighted that no ‘terror angle' was found there."
Abu Bakr accused a big section of the Hindu-dominated police force of being biased against Muslims in terrorism-related investigations.
He was referring to an accidental explosion in which three men who were making bombs in an underground makeshift workshop in Malda district of West Bengal state were injured in October.
After the incident, all major newspapers and TV channels identified the three suspects, who happened to be Muslims, by name as possible "terrorists".
In another incident in Bardhaman district of the state, two men were injured, when a bomb they were manufacturing secretly, exploded in an accident on January 2.
Interestingly, barring a few Urdu newspapers- which are read only by Muslims, almost all of Kolkata's more than a dozen TV news channels and two dozen English, Bengali and Hindi language newspapers blacked out the news of the January 2 blast.
PTI and ANI- two Indian national news agencies reported the incident, but they did not identify the injured bomb-makers by their names, who happened to be Hindu.
CNN-IBN was perhaps the only national TV channel which reported the Bardhaman incident and identified the two men by their names.
As did ANI, the CNN-IBN report noted that the police had immediately "ruled out any terror angle" to the Bardhaman case.
"Even most newspapers, TV channels and online news portals took the pro-Hindu line of the police and chose to either black out the Bardhaman blast news or stay mum on the religious identity of the Hindu men involved in the case," Abu Bakr added.
Media Too
Sk Younus, a Kolkata-based journalist specializing in Muslim interest issues, notes that whenever something like the threats for apparent terror attacks land in, police being their investigation most often assuming that the Islamists are behind them and the media too follow the same line.
"As it happened in about a dozen cases across India in recent weeks, when some threats of terror attacks landed over phone, email and other modes in the name of some Islamist terror groups, police swung into action to hunt out the ‘Islamists' and the media gave wide coverage to the ‘Islamist threats'," Younus told OnIslam.
"Some online Hindutva groups followed them up spreading an anti-Muslim frenzy across the society.
"After a few days, as soon as the terror threats were traced to some Hindu men, the police announced that they were all hoax threats and that the men could not be terrorists.
"But in cases of identical threat calls Muslims have spent years in jail as it happened to Ziauddin of Uttar Pradesh."
A clear example was the case of Mohammad Ziauddin, a Muslim teenager in Lucknow, who is facing 4 years and eight months in jail over a hoax call made from his mobile.
Though Ziauddin, who worked in a bag factory, denied making the call, he was charged and imprisoned for the hoax call.
Lawyer and human right activist Mohammad Shoaib, who defended Ziauddin and Sartaj in the court, said that he knew of cases in which Hindu young men had threatened terror attacks, but went unpunished.
"When following the threat call Ziauddin and Sartaj were apprehended, indeed the boys who stitched bags did not look like terrorists. Yet, the ATS (Anti-Terrorist Squad of police) booked them for terrorist activities.
"But there are dozens of instances across India which show that police are usually soft to the Hindus committing identical offence- they were not even charged as mischief mongers after issuing terror threats," Lucknow-based Shoaib, who is the president of Rihai Manch, a civil society forum that seeks release of innocent Muslim youths detained in terrorism charges, told OnIslam.
"In most cases it was claimed that the (Hindu) men were mentally disturbed or had some psychiatric problems...and finally they did not face punishment at all."
Last month, in an article in Caravan Daily news portal, Younus listed some cases of Hindus who had posed as Muslims and committed offences like threatening Islamist terror attacks and desecrating Hindu temples, but went almost unpunished.
Headlined "What's the Mystery of Terror Acts Being Claimed by Hindus Posing as Muslims?", the article ends in an aggrieved tone: "It seems a Muslim can never be ‘stressed, depressed or mentally unsound' - he can only be a hardcore terrorist!"
source : www.abna.ir
