| Published on 29-10-2007 In National | | Viewed 2221 times | | Coimbatore, cops, courts, claustrophobia… |
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| Written by
T. S. V. Hari | 
An unsmiling judge reeled off dozens of prison terms in a strange claustrophobic courtroom containing more steel bars than I had seen in a circus tent to 70 persons belonging to a single religious denomination – Islam in Coimbatore – for three days.
By Wednesday afternoon, after the first day's climax of a trial that lasted the better part of a decade following a series of blasts which shook this small city of contrasts, 60 life sentences had been pronounced all over India.
As a result, my very purpose of being there to disseminate information about the denouements for the next 48 hours was almost defeated.
Cops present in intimidating numbers complicated it by using their hands as well as metal detectors to frisk me in spite of the fact that I was carrying ID issued by the Tamil Nadu government. It did not matter that I was part of a motley crowd of other accredited, senior journalists – including a local from the Manchester of South Asia to do a job just like them.
We were brusquely ordered to leave our mobile phones at the gate while three cops and at least seven advocates – prosecution and defence variety alike – were allowed to carry theirs into the Special Court.
All that the uniformed fraternity needed to do was ordering us to keep our mobiles on silent mode. None of us were crazy enough to make/answer a call when the sentencing was on anyway.
Without exceptions – all the prisoners who were handed down stiff sentences ranging between 7 years to life – were smiling and joking with each other before and after the verdict. A few even thanked Allah turning their backs to the judge after he pronounced them guilty.
Was this an indication of their contempt towards the law of the land?
Frankly, I only know that Syed Ahmed Basha, the first accused who was given stiff sentence that boiled down to a single life term in the final analysis, called the conviction "a national shame" and the fifth one handed down a similar verdict called Basith demanded an opportunity to "punish offending Hindu [rightwing] politicians like [India's Opposition Leader Lal Krishna] Advani and [Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra] Modi." The convict didn't spell out as to how he or others would carry out the threat.
Everyone, including the judge knew that the buck wouldn't stop in that confined space as the inevitable appeals can arguably end in some of the convictions being overturned.
The Supreme Court has clearly stated in the past that a life sentence means – the entire lifespan after the verdict.
Yet, most lifers are routinely released after serving a little over 10 years.
The killers of our former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in Tamil Nadu and another who attacked our parliament in New Delhi – despite having exhausted all their appeals against capital punishment want their sentences commuted to life. The compassion of Sonia Gandhi resulted in a reprieve for death row convict Nalini who had provided the logistics to kill her ever-smiling and political novice husband.
Nalini, whose demand for an early release is being justified by her need to bring up her teenaged daughter perhaps didn't dwell too much on similar concerns of Sonia, mother of Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi (now Mrs. Robert Vadra) barely out of their teens in 1991 when Rajiv was blown to pieces by an female assassin in Sriperumbudur – a village in the outskirts of Madras (now Chennai) at the behest of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
The mercy petitions of Nalini's co-accused terrorists (including Murugan, the father of her offspring) have been turned down long ago.
Now they want a reprieve too by averring that the endless wait for the hangman is "worse than death."
I will not be surprised if all of them (old and new prisoners) soon walk out free.
Personally, I am against capital punishment because it is the relinquishment of responsibility to correct instead of being a measure to reform. Though nobody knows what happens after the end of life, except for a brief moment of uncomfortably fatal suffocation following the breaking of the bone inside the nape of the neck, isn't being hanged to death a big relief from a life behind bars?
Coimbatore's sorrow at the end of the 20th century following the mass murder of 58 of its citizens in serial blasts was telescoped by the prosecution into a single conspiracy meant to cause commercial destruction and spreading communal ill-will in the hope of wholesale death sentences.
It didn't matter to anybody that circumstances which caused this (and continues to do so elsewhere in India) had begun long back.
Hindus and Muslims who fought shoulder to shoulder against the colonial yoke in 1857 have acquired a pathological hatred for each other that began as a cataclysm when the British left us with the parting shot in 1947 – dividing the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. It simmered down for sometime – emboldening us to create a new nation out of East Pakistan, call it Bangladesh and recognise its non-existent government before every nation in the world.
Islamic fundamentalism reinvented itself in the early nineties and exploded in unlikely places like interior Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan. The victims included Muslims of Mumbai, Gujarat, Kashmir, Tamil Nadu etc.
Some of the perpetrators of these grisly crimes, which are yet to be completely solved, are presumed to be authored by agent provocateurs from Bangladesh – a country we liberated!
Bangladeshis' national anthem was authored by Rabindra Nath Tagore who wrote ours – the inspiring Jana Gana Mana...which lists "Dravida" – a.k.a. the region of south India.
Nobody remembers today that our Hindu and Muslim freedom fighters had installed the last Mughal Bahadur Shah Zafar as the short-lived "emperor of Hindustan" briefly after the first war of independence that took place 150 years ago – the way we installed Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman in Bangladesh, who was murdered in cold blood.
Shah was a very pessimistic poet.
Neither am I the light in any eye
Nor the peace of any heart
Useless to the one and all
Only a fistful of dirt
Not dear to anybody
Without the possibility of being a guilty lover
A [victim of] fate gone astray
I am a dilapidated shrine…
(Translation: mine)
Shah had enough reason to express such agony.
His entire family was butchered before his very eyes before being sent by the British to distant Rangoon in Burma where the poor man died a lonely death after half a decade of isolated incarceration in 1862 at the age of 87.
And what was Shah's crime?
He visualised a free and united India to stand on its own legs.
One hundred and forty five years later, another Muslim called APJ Abdul Kalam – President of India wrote thus:
I climbed and climbed
Where is the peak, my Lord?
I ploughed and ploughed,
Where is the knowledge treasure, my Lord?
I sailed and sailed
Where is the island of peace, my Lord?
Kalam was 75 when these thoughts occurred to him in the Rashtrapathi Bhavan – which is in New Delhi – less than half a dozen km from where the mayhem of 1857 took place – outside the Red Fort – where our Prime Ministers address a huge captive audience on all anniversaries of our independence.
After electing Kalam as the first citizen of the nation almost unanimously in 2001, our politicians dumped him unceremoniously, denying the scholar a second term he richly deserved.
Kalam's path breaking research to buttress India's defence gave us the edge over our neighbouring nation – Pakistan, which sent a man answering to the name Abdul Qadir Khan – once hailed as the father of its defence programme and therefore Kalam's near equivalent – into disgraceful and near solitary confinement.
Fortunately, Kalam is still revered by us and given a small allowance by our central government, according him a free, comfortable residence to contemplate. He lectures, lives and travels in relative peace.
That is enough digression for the moment.
Though Coimbatore is yet to have its first five-star hotel, one of its popular havens for discerning visitors in its left ventricle was and is a sitting duck for arson because its owner is a Muslim.
So are many other targets owned by Hindus in the vicinity.
Since 1998, a sum of Rs.500 crores has been lost by conservative estimates – either by direct ruin – or through indirect costs of opportunities going waste in Coimbatore.
The trade of Coimbatore's goldsmiths – some of the most talented in the nation – has seen a steep decline because buyers are on the lookout for machine made glossy stuff. Textile magnates whose vocations were profitable till the other day due to their proximity to Tirupur – the hosiery capital of the south – are planning to sell their plants, real estate and move on as the southward sojourn of the greenbacks is spelling doom and the scare prevalent amongst foreign buyers preventing their shopping trips is worsening it.
User-unfriendly atmosphere at its main railway station, inadequacies of an airport to handle its growing domestic traffic due to cheap airfares of private carriers, shortage of decent hotel rooms accentuated during "auspicious days" for Hindu marriages, fleecing of locals and tourists alike by its three-wheeler operators for whom every hirer is only an opportunity for a fast buck and the reluctance of the police force to ensure fair practices for these sources of sure, successful commerce are Coimbatore's other woes.
As if all this isn't enough, a small compendium of houses called Kottaimedu – the poor Muslim quarter of Coimbatore – sends shivers down the spine of locals and visitors alike.
Some of its residents had allegedly set off the bombs that shook the city in 1998.
One of the main thoroughfares of Kottaimedu has a row of concrete slums coming apart at the seams, beams, foundations et al. More than a dozen, including women and children, have died needlessly when some of those tenements collapsed during last week.
Else, it is a maze of narrow alleyways and cul-de-sacs full of structures with common walls stifling ventilation.
Vote-bank politics had created this clustered, cloistered community out of migrant, near-illiterate Muslims from neighbouring Kerala and other parts of Tamil Nadu over the years. They continue to serve that agenda.
Though there are sizeable numbers of Hindus in Coimbatore who are unwilling to believe that all their compatriots with skull caps, beards or burqas are terrorist sympathisers, the slender, tender tendril of trust that bonded them together has been sundered irreparably.
While almost all parts of this vibrant city has neat restaurants, big shopping centres, movie halls and many a relatively peaceful rendezvous for matters as diverse as work and worship, the Muslim quarter is crowded and filthy, triggering a frown in an unwary tourist. Even the mosques situated here with their bright white paint are wedged between dirty eateries and stinking abattoirs.
Such stark poverty sitting on the fringes of a totally different world is doubtlessly a fertile breeding ground for dissent.
Marxists like Engels have averred that angry unrest is a protest of the have-nots against the haves of the society. Such thoughts have been underlined by classic authors like Charles Dickens but the world still believes they were etching an exception in order to excite.
A Coimbatore-based trade unionist affiliated to the CPM had described the Dravidian political parties as embodiments of class enemies to me while angrily reacting to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Karunanidhi's claim that he would have been a communist had he not become Periyar's disciple way back in 1973 when the DMK began its scientific institutionalisation of corruption.
The CPM has a sizeable following in Coimbatore fulfilling the need of the working class of several industries. But, the party's following in Kottaimedu is negligible in spite of the fact that both the sides of the political divide in neighbouring Kerala (the ruling communists and the main opposition – the Congress) had pressured Tamil Nadu to take it easy on another Abdul (whose middle and family name read Nasser Madhani) who was finally acquitted of all charges in the aforementioned case and released by the Special Court after spending nine and a half years in prison on August 1 this year.
Since the colonial days, Muslims were used by major western powers of the world to further their commercial interests all over the globe – be it the Middle-East, South Asia or Far East.
Be it the conversion of Palestinians from citizens to refugees in their own country in 1948 following the creation of Israel, installation of puppet regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq much later in the name of establishing democracy and using it as a one-way giant syringe to deplete the region of its oil wealth, creating economic havoc in Indonesia (its currency lost almost 80 percent of its value in a run organised by global cartels on its stock exchanges), forcing the Pakistanis to fight its own creation – the Taliban, Muslims were and continue to be willing global, geopolitical pawns.
The Indian rupee's steady rise against the dollar and our Central Government's attempt to find common cause with China – our neighbouring economic powerhouse--are reasons enough for global death dealers to destabilise us using our own Muslim brethren who overlook the fact that India has the second largest Muslim population in the world.
Ironically rich Arabic regimes fund it by splurging the pittance earned by them selling the entails of their natural resources to worldwide exploiters to spread hatred against people they consider as "infidels."
It so happens that the majority in India fit into that description.
Though steeped in the unaltered tenets laid down by Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) in the 7th century, Islam has admirable traits like outlawing adultery, intoxication, thievery and usury.
Generosity, one of the religion's other rudiments, simply doesn't properly percolate down to its poor – be it Kottaimedu in Coimbatore or Kurla in Mumbai – the latter city being the financial capital of India.
When it does, its economical side has a criminal string attached to it.
Like elsewhere in India and abroad, Islamic philanthropy has bred gangsters, extortion, murders, arson and eventually bomb blasts in Coimbatore as well.
What the Muslims do not realise – regardless of their being located in squalor in Kottaimedu or palaces in Kuwait--is that the global game of carnage is kicking them towards endlessly shifting goalposts created by communists and capitalists alike.
The plague of Coimbatore – Al Umma is yet another Islamic fundamentalist organisation that deals in a currency called fear – a weapon loved by terrorists for whom borders, languages and laws simply don't matter as lives are an expendable commodity.
Tribes of overworked, tense judges, lawyers, cops and journalists like me are miniscule statistics – contributing to meaningless exercises, getting harassed and hassling as a consequence like foot soldiers without a hope to even figure as a comma in the footnote of history of the proud Coimbatore or its humble crumbling part – Kottaimedu. |
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