Maulana Noor-ul-Huda an Islamic Scholar who runs a Madrassa, was offloaded an international flight just before take off at Delhi, arrested and kept in jail for a night.
This was due to a misunderstanding in overhearing the Maulana’s cellphone conversation with his son who had come to see him off at the airport. The lady who overheard the conversation is a Non Resident Indian (NRI), euphemism for a person of Indian origin, normally residing outside India.
You can read all about the incident in most of Indian newspapers today and all the tones of the report convey indignation and anger at the incident. Naturally, many political actors wooing the Muslim vote bank, have got on to the band wagon and clamouring for someone’s head to roll. One reasonably balanced report from the Indian Express can be read here.
I am willing to grant that the police have over reached themselves in their action but would ask the Maulana to introspect on an important aspect of the action about which he said, “I had to spend a night in jail just because I have a long beard and I am from Deoband and I run a madrassa. More than the mobile phone conversation, it seems to me that my profile appeared suspicious to them,”
I believe that this is a typical victim mentality trying to appear as a martyr to the public and particularly to his constituency, the Indian Muslims. He would do well to ask himself why the profile appeared suspicious, and why an innocuous comment caused such an embarrassing situation for him. Any child should be able to answer those questions. The Maulana can do a great deal with his constituency to get Indian Muslims to relate to the atmosphere and environment in a country beset by Islamist terrorism and do something about it.
I also challenge some rating seeking TV channel to do a similar sting operation on any Indian Muslim, to what they did to one notorious Hindu extremist Muthalik yesterday. The man was shown up to be just an opportunistic hoodlum holding people to ransom be acts of hooliganism and goondaism. The Congress mentioned in the article is the political party to which our Prime Minister belongs as does the Minister for Home affairs and Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. When this man threatened to disrupt the last Valentine’s Day celebrations, Indian women expressed their protest in a very novel way and some others blackened his face.
This post is primarily to educate my readers about India’s “secularism” and has been written without any malice towards either Hindus or Muslims.
