By Saiyed Danish
The unfortunate and unforgivable Bodhgaya bombings were much more than a series of nine/ten low-intensity terror attacks which targeted the premises of the ancient Mahabodhi temple. As we know, that, in their aftermath, more than threatening the sovereignty of our country, such unacceptable and condemnable events including the gallant ‘encounters’, imperil the innocent, have-to-do-nothing-with lives hailing from the minority communities residing in the cities chosen for such attacks.
The horrid memories of the near consensual and unanimous branding of the town of Azamgarh as ‘Atankgarh’ by our mainstream media are still fresh in the minds of the people hailing from that town. When (following the hours of the Batla House killing of two terror suspects) the broad, flashy strips of almost all the TRP-starved news channels got illuminated with their flash-fiction theories about Azamgarh as breeding home for terrorists in large Hindi and English fonts; my parents warned me about my possible friends from Azamgarh, “Azamgarh walon se door rehna, waqt theek nahin hai, (Avoid people from Azamgarh, times are different).”
It’s been approximately five years since I received that warning from my parents. What is left in the retrospect is the rear-view mirror image of the chagrining narrative of a town and its transformed imagery from a city of celebrated poets and intellectuals to a den of ‘jihadi’ and ‘dreaded’ terrorists. In many localities of the town, following the grisly stigmatization of Azamgarh post-September 2008, the schools remained shut, local business suffered, people remained locked in their homes, many people who were studying or working in Delhi did not want to go back leaving their families behind in the town for they had no idea who could be picked up from where during the Holocaust-fashioned round up of Muslim youths which ensued, the local Muslim population lived in a state of unremitting horror for months to come.
Come Gaya, the second largest city in Bihar with a bustling population of more than 4 million inhabitants and a commendable ‘first division’ literacy rate of 66%. For decades, Gaya has enjoyed a historically gifted atmosphere of peaceful religious co-existence and cultural heterogeneity. Muslims of Gaya extract complete satisfaction as residents of the city. Their businesses have continued to thrive in the past decades. They dominate commercial areas like Chhatta Masjid and Chowk while the areas of GB Road and Bajaja Road are the commercial hubs mainly operated by Marwaris. The city’s large, one hundred eighty year-old Jama Masjid mosque is a tangible, long-standing proof of eras of composite culture of the city. It is also a centre for Tabligh missions in Bihar. The Muslims have hardly seen any communal riot in the city in the last two decades. But now, frighteningly for them, the post-July 2013 Gaya may have a spate of unseen and unwanted events coming its way.
The hours following the Bodhgaya blast, a battery of security and defence analysts affiliated to their respective media houses came out of their hibernation to amplify IB’s claims that the blasts were carried out by Indian Mujahideen (IM). But then the theory still did not qualify for the best-selling fiction so by the next day IB conjured up its ‘very-IB-ish’ theory that the attack was carried out by Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar in tandem with LeT and IM, the idea was that since the Rohingyas were being brutally oppressed by radical Buddhist leaders in their own country, they saw in Bodhgaya a golden opportunity to avenge for what had been inflicted upon them.
Thus Gaya fall straight before the IB’s crosshairs and the process of making it the new Azamgarh, henceforth began with some of the leading national newspapers commencing their own trials before even the sketch of the possible suspects could surface in the media. Numerous reports in the print media appeared on the role of LeT and Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar having possibly being involved in the attacks and quite Dan Brown-ishly, all the sub-plots traced back their roots to the one.
The black shadow of IB’s skulduggery over financially weak and now, for some years, educated Muslim youths has by now ably educated us also on how to determine the modus operandi of IB itself.
Gaya
The first tenet of their belief is that IM exists in all those places where bombs go off and all such places are home for IM and at least one mastermind of the attack hails from the venue of the terror attack. Hence we must assume that IM runs the best ever operational sleeper cells in the world and its presence in our country is far better networked than all the post offices put together and the home-grown outfit recruits only masterminds and no ground cadres which equate it with the likes of blockbuster Hollywood franchise like Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen or The Expendables. Another apocryphal feature of IB’s cryptic narrative is that almost all of the suspected IM operatives are also its founding members. Perhaps IB assumes, and correctly, that public memory in our times is suffering from the worst kind of wilful dementia but the headcount of those who, against all odds, choose to resist this popular form of amnesia is now growing. Although the alleged IM terror module was set up at Darbhanga, Gaya becomes the latest pretext for IB whose own credentials are under scanner as Rajinder Kumar, a top officer in the agency has been named in the detailed charge-sheet filed by CBI in Ishart Jahan ‘fake’ encounter case who, along with other three was inebriated and murdered in cold blood by security agencies on 15 June, 2004 only to be thumbnailed as an LeT operative out to kill Gujarat’s chief minister Narendra Modi.
Gaya blasts gave NDA, a fresh pretext to push hard for the formation of Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) in Bihar. In a politically unwise attempt to silence the opposition’s claims of slackness in state’s security arrangements. Nitish government approved the creation of ATS on July 8 after a presentation on ‘terror hubs of Bihar’ was given by National Investigation Agency (NIA) in a multi-agency meeting immediately after the bombs went off at Mahabodhi Temple. It had already announced vacancy of 343 seats in the state. Once filled, Bihar may become like Gujarat and Gaya may become worse than Darbhanga or Forbesganj or Azamgarh.
What could happen? We all know. The freshly formed ATS units could repeat the worst form of psychological torture it has so far inflicted on the residents of other towns: abductions by cops in plain clothes and vehicles with no number plates, visiting their homes mostly during the nights. Families grilled about their works, sources of livelihood and possible relatives living in Pakistan or in Middle East. Police peeping inside homes with raised eyebrows looking for terror trails, their weapons glimmering in the eyes of frightened women from time to time, pages of Urdu books and literatures suspiciously flipped, rounds of mock interrogations and intimidation emanating from their unaccommodating body language before the jeeps leave for the residence of another terror suspect.