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India is on high alert this week for terrorist attacks, as the country marks the one- year anniversary of strikes that paralyzed Mumbai last year. Indian officials have warned about threats from both foreign and domestic militants. But as we heard in part one, Muslims in India have largely not been radicalized to a violent form of Islam. However that hasn’t stopped the police from targeting suspected homegrown terrorists. In the second part of her series, Miranda Kennedy reports on the growing alienation of Mumbai’s Muslims.
 Hameedia Mosque in Mumbai |
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. India is on high alert this week. The country is marking the one year anniversary of the Mumbai terrorist attacks and officials have warned about new threats from both foreign and domestic militants. The concern about homegrown terrorists in India often focuses on Muslims. But as we reported yesterday Muslims in India have largely not been radicalized to a violent form of Islam. In the second of our stories about India’s Muslim minority Miranda Kennedy reports from Mumbai.
MIRANDA KENNEDY: The streets around Hameedia Masjid, one of Mumbai’s oldest mosques, are jammed with the usual tumult of Indian life. Streams of traffic maneuver around a cow lying nonchalantly in the road. Cows are sacred to most Hindus and even in this Muslim area they respect it. Maulana Daryabadi who preaches in the mosque says that’s because Hindus and Muslims have lived side by side here for at least a century.
MAULANA DARYBADI: [SPEAKING ARABIC]
TRANSLATOR: This is a country where one cannot work without the other. The Hindus and the Muslims always work together. They always need each other.
KENNEDY: Muslims may be geographically and culturally integrated into Indian society but the Mualana says that when it comes to how the authorities with them all is not equal.
DARYBADI: [SPEAKING ARABIC]
TRANSLATOR: Every time there’s a blast or anything happening wrong they come and round up Muslims. We have demanded from the government to look into the matter questioning them why.
KENNEDY: His congregation tells him stories of their sons being tortured in police custody or worse of those who’ve been encountered. That’s a verb you hear a lot in India. It refers to extrajudicial killings by the police. The government doesn’t deny that these killings happen. In fact several Mumbai police offers have been dubbed encounter specialists and publicly commended for their work. The Indian government denies that police ever target people from a particular religion or community.
SAYEEDA HAMEED: There’s a long history of deprivation which starts in 1857.
KENNEDY: Sayeeda Hameed, a cabinet minister who is herself a Muslim, sites that year because it was the first major Indian rebellion against British colonial forces. The British blamed Indian Muslims and worked to undermine their power. When India declared its independence in 1947 it was a secular democracy that promised equal rights to Muslims even though many chose to move to neighboring Pakistan. Yet she says the Muslim population in India has consistently been neglected.
HAMEED: They have fallen so far behind that it’s going to take a while before we bring them on par with other communities.
KENNEDY: A government report on the state of India’s Muslims found that there actually fewer schools and roads in Muslim dominated areas than in other parts of the country. Twenty five percent of Muslim children have either never gone to school or have dropped out. Because there’s no affirmative action policy for Muslims there are less gainfully employed than all other groups in India.
[HASHMI FILM SONG]
And it’s not just the poorest of the poor who experience discrimination. It’s found even here among the stars of Bollywood, India’s prolific and lighthearted film industry. In this film Jannat, the actor Emraan Hashmi, is the romantic hero courting the young heroin.
[HASHMI FILM SONG]
Hashmi has become a sought after name in the industry in the last couple of years. He can now charge about a million dollars a film. And the fact that his name clearly identifies him as Muslim has not been a problem for him. But outside the film studios actors like Hashmi sometimes find themselves treated like Muslims rather than stars. Recently Hashmi tried to by an apartment in a well-heeled neighborhood known as the Beverly Hills of Mumbai.
EMRAAN HASHMI: Because everyone knew that there are a couple of buildings that don’t know allow people from a section and we had heard that this building don’t allow Muslims.
KENNEDY: But Hashmi and his wife really liked the place so they found a broker who was willing to try to get it for them.
HASHMI: The reason why he said that you know I’ll try to get the deal through is because I’m an actor and maybe they will overlook the fact that I’m Muslim.
KENNEDY: Although they’d agreed to pay the asking price, $700,000 for a two bedroom, the couple was refused. The co-op insists it did not deny Hashmi the apartment because of his religion but he filed a compliant with the government minority commission and publicly accused them of discrimination. Since he went public with his complaint Hashmi has realized that no matter how rich and famous he is he shares a common bond with India’s impoverished Muslim community. He’s been shocked at how many people have told him similar stories about being denied housing because of their religion. The difference is that no one paid them any attention. For The World this is Miranda Kennedy, Mumbai.
WERMAN: Tomorrow we stay in Bollywood for the third in our series of stories from Mumbai. A look at how Muslims are portrayed in Indian films.
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Indian muslims whole heartedly participated in 1857 revolution to root out british from India and british realized that if they had to rule India subjugate muslim community so they followed a policy of muslim descrimination. Most of the muslim stayed from the modern education and english which proved determental for muslim representaion in goverment jobs and private jobs.
India got freedom in 1947 and large section of Indian muslims preferred India over Pakistan because of their roots and India being a secular democracy where people of all faith would have equal opportunities.
But since partition Indian muslims are struggling to get equal opportunities and to be treated par with majority community. They are descriminated just because they follow different religion, if you dont beleive me look at facts how many muslims are in govt./private jobs, their share in jobs is always less than their population share, its very common to lebel muslims anti national by right wing hindu organizations. Though muslims have proved their loyalty to India several times, first time when they chose India over pakistan and decided to stay back in secular India rather than moving to Islamic republic of Pakistan.