against fascism MODI INDIA

When Fascism Strikes, Strike Back: Condemn and resist the continuous minority witch hunting by the communal fascist Indian state!

On Sunday, Ammar Yasar, a native of Jharkhand, and his friend Abdul Wahid – both students and residents of Jodhpur - were picked up by the Special Cell of the Delhi police and linked up with the arrest of four people who were arrested and projected as the fictitious „Indian Mujahideen‟ members in Rajasthan a day ago. But before they could be framed in a similar manner, this latest bid of the notorious Special Cell was foiled only because of the militant and spirited protests of the Jamia Nagar residents who came out in the streets in hundreds and blockaded the Noida-Delhi Highway till their release at midnight. While the two had to been released, there have been several cooked up stories that the police has already come up with. One of those arrested from Rajasthan, Zia-ur Rahman has been projected as a key person in the Indian Mujahideen hierarchy and the “mastermind” behind a series of “terror” attacks, such as Jama Masjid attack (September 2010), Varanasi blast (December 2010), Mumbai blast (July 2011), Pune blast (August 2012) and Hyderabad blasts (2013). The Special Cell has also linked Zia with Atif Amin who was killed in cold blood by the Special Cell in 2009 in the Batla House fake encounter. Away from media attention, the Special Cell also took into custody one more youth from Jaipur, brought him to Delhi apparently for „questioning‟ and once again he could be released only because of the intervention and persistent efforts of several activists. In another instance, a renowned Muslim cleric, Maulana Abdul Qavi, the rector of Madarsa Ashraful Uloom in Hyderabad was abducted by the Gujarat police and the Special Cell on the 24th of March as he landed here in Delhi airport. He has also been charged with the conspiracy to kill Modi and others like Advani and Togadia and has also been linked up to some youths who were earlier arrested from Hyderabad.

The corporate media however, went viral immediately after the arrests of 4 youth from Rajasthan. The implanted stories provided by the IB were flooded across headlines. “Foiling of a Major terror plot ahead of the polls”, “IM module in Rajasthan smashed”, “Chunav me dhamaka karne aye chhah atanki giraftar” (6 terrorists aiming to carry out blasts during elections arrested), “IM ka top terrorist police ne dabocha” (Police catches hold of a top IM terrorist)…these were some of the headlines of leading dailies. Bringing out the entrenched Islamophobia, one prominent Hindi daily went so far as to say, “engineering students nikle atankwadi, makaan malik ke saamne padhte the Quran” (engineering students turned out to be terrorists, and they would read the Quran in front of their landlord). The Hindu, considered a progressive newspaper by many, has gone so far as to provide a detailed "life history" (of course as provided by the police) of Zia-Ur Rahman. And in all their narratives what they are trying to establish along with fanning the furor around Islamophobia, is that conspiracies are being hatched to kill Modi! The question to be posed is who actually benefits from this narrative?

“Plotting to kill Modi”, haven‟t we heard it over and over again? This bogey had claimed many lives already. Sadiq Jamal (2003), Ishrat Jahan, Javed Sheikh, Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar (2004), Sohrabuddin Sheikh (2005) and Tulsiram Prajapati (2006) were all killed in fake encounters with this same pretext. Today, it is not a surprise that the same bogey is being manufactured once again ahead of the Lok Sabha polls when the mass murderer of Gujarat is projecting himself as the next PM of the country. In his Bihar rally too last October, after some low intensity bomb blasts, several Muslim youth were immediately arrested. Such projections are nothing but blatant efforts to create a polarization in favour of Modi, to show that he is on a „target‟ because of his "strong stand on Islamic terrorism." This serves two complementary and simultaneous purposes to the system. On one hand it provides a ground for communal fascist state to tighten its grip over the people, especially the muslims. As we have seen in the recent instances, the police, special cell, ATS all plunged together and worked in tandem to implicate people in these false cases and the media faithfully parroted the implanted stories without any attempt to unravel the truth. On the other hand this manufactured „threat‟ also generates legitimacy for a fascist figurehead like Modi to be at realm of power and control the situation with his iron fist.

For fascism to gain grounds and thrive the constant invention of "enemies" which from time to time can be muslims, dalits, migrant labourers, Maoists, Christians, homosexuals, "people-emulating-western-values", oppressed nationalities and so on (the list either keeps shifting or overlaps) is inevitable. The simultaneous ruthless persecution of these imagined enemies also becomes a necessity. The Congress too, trying to take electoral advantage of this polarization, is sending a veiled threat to the muslims that this witch hunting will continue. Like a pack of hunting wolves they send this common signal to the minorities, that they should remain as pliant vote bank or else shall be ruthlessly persecuted as "terrorists" by this cannibal state machinery. In this entire constructed cacophony about "Islamic terrorism", the terror network of the sangh giroh that was behind the series of bomb blasts in Malegaon, Ajmer Sharif, Mecca Masjid, Samjhauta Express is carefully being obliterated from public discourse and memory.

It is therefore facile to see Modi as a megalomaniac communal individual who is "posing a threat to the Indian democracy". Quite the contrary, it is each & every cog in the wheel of the casteist, communal, patriarchal & repressive state machinery that has come together in the making of Modi. Be it the army with its top brass involved in Hindutva terror plots; the police with its witch-hunt; the judiciary with its “clean chit” to Modi to cleanse him of the blood of the massacres of thousands; the media with its “NaMo” campaign; and the parliament - every so called "democratic" institution of this country has ensured his rise. Every parliamentary, party including the parliamentary pseudo-left with their complicity & tacit support for this repressive state machinery, has helped it fortify to the extent that now this mass murderer can claim a legitimate rise to the realm of power. Modi is today the strongest advocate of the feudal-Brahmanical-imperialist nexus that has always pervaded & even dominated India‟s parliamentary polity. His agenda of Hindutva & his policies of "development" thereby has the potential to unleash at any given time from a repository of thousands of years of Brahminical caste violence, patriarchal violence, communal-fascist violence & developmental terrorism of loot & plunder.

So, there is no "democracy" that Modi poses a threat to. Rather the challenge in front of us today is to build that real democracy that will wipe out the regime of mass murderers and put an end to such oppression and witch-hunting. Such democratization is possible not through unholy alliances or opportunistic electoral permutations and combinations within the same fascist anti-people system. Only a politics of revolutionary social transformation, that aims to build a united struggle of all the oppressed masses can challenge and crush Modi and the system that backs him.

Condemn the attempts of the Special Cell of the Delhi police to falsely implicate two youth from Jamia Nagar in a ‘terror’ case! Unite to defeat the politics of minority witch-hunting and the so called ‘war on terror’!

DSU condemns in strongest possible terms the attempts by the notorious Special Cell of the Delhi Police to once again frame and harass muslim youth yesterday at Jamia Nagar. As the Special Cell took into custody two youth – Ammar Yasar and Abdul Wahid – from the Abul Fazal Enclave area of Jamia Nagar apparently for ‘questioning’, hundreds of residents came out on the streets. They gheraoed the Jamia Nagar police thana and blocked the Sarita Vihar-Noida highway for hours, despite police attempts to stop the protests. As a result of these spirited and assertive protests, the Special Cell which has a history of illegally detaining innocents and then framing them in ‘terror’ cases was finally forced to release the two around mid-night. The track record of the Special Cell in persecuting, harassing, torturing and even killing muslim youth through fake encounters has been extensively documented, exposed and severely indicted by several rights activists. It cannot be forgotten that this was the same Special Cell which was involved in the infamous Batla House ‘encounter’ five years back, or in the arrest, torture and false framing of Delhi University professor S.A.R. Geelani and countless others.

The turn of events on the day - Early morning on 23rd March at 6.30 am, several plainclothes policemen from the Special Cell along with the local police of the area forcibly barged into a house at the Shaheen Bagh area of Jamia Nagar searching for Ammar Yasar and took him, along with his friend Abdul Wahid into custody. After taking away all their possessions, the police also locked the room where they were staying and took away the keys along with them. When the care taker of the flat inquired as to the reasons for the police operations, he was merely told that it was a ‘normal search operation’ and that the two would be released in an hour or two after questioning. While the police did not inform any local resident or the local police station the reasons for these detentions (which is part of the usual standard procedure), a Special Cell officer went on record to say that two were being questioned with regard to their association with the four youth who had been arrested a day earlier from Rajasthan on the bogus plea that they were part of a ‘Indian Mujahideen terror module’ which was planning to ‘strike during elections’ and also ‘plotting to kill Modi’! Ammar Yasar was a student of the same institute in Jaipur where these four students studied and had come to Delhi to board a flight and was staying in a friend’s flat. As several hours passed by, without any information from the police or the release of the two, the people of the area for whom earlier instances of witch-hunting are all too fresh in their memory came out in big numbers and refused to go back to their houses unless the two are released. The entire traffic on the highway remained jammed for hours and empty assurances from the police could not dampen the protests. Sensing the militancy of the protest and the increasing numbers of protesters, the police tried several times to stop the protests but in vain. It was only after the release of the two around the midnight that the protests were called off.

In the past more than a decade as the Indian state has aligned itself closely with US imperialism’s strategic interests, several governments have systemically carried on the witch-hunt of muslims in the name of ‘war on terror’. Even this story of ‘Islamic terrorists’ conspiring to kill Narendra Modi is not new. One cannot forget how the same was evoked to justify a series of fake encounters in Gujarat - of Sadiq Jamal ( 2003), Ishrat Jahan, Javed Sheikh, Amjad Ali Rana and Zeeshan Johar (2004), Sohrabuddin Sheikh (2005) and Tulsiram Prajapati (2006). With the butcher of Gujarat trying to project himself, with the help of big corporates, as the next prospective Prime Minister the same story has come right back. By trying to show Modi as being on the target of ‘terrorists’, such tactics are aimed at creating a polarization in favour of Modi for his supposedly ‘strong’ stand on ‘Islamic terrorism’. And this campaign, as was seen in the arrests of several youth in Bihar after low intensity blasts in a BJP rally in Patna last October and now the arrests from Rajasthan, is ably supported by all sections of the state – from the police to the media. In these arrests from Rajasthan, sections of the media have shamefully already declared them to be terrorists only on the basis of police claims. With communal-fascism starting at us right in our faces, such attacks by the ruling classes are bound to increase in the coming days - not only on the religious minorities but on all the oppressed sections. It is only a resolute and united fight of all progressive and democratic forces that can counter and put an end to such attacks, witch-hunt and oppression.