Author: Editorial
Publication: The Pioneer
September 24, 2008
VC will use public funds to defend 'terrorists'
After denying any links with any of the suspected
terrorists arrested by the police for the Delhi bombings of September 13,
Jamia Milia Islamia, the denominational university that neighbours the Jamia
Nagar ghetto where the Indian Mujahideen module was based, has finally been
forced to admit it was wrong. Having attacked the police for allegedly misleading
the public, the Jamia administrators have grudgingly accepted that two of
those arrested were students of the university. However, this acceptance has
not come with cold horror or sober contrition. Rather, the Vice-Chancellor
of the university has, with uncharacteristic bravado, decided to put the weight
of Jamia -- as the institution is commonly known -- behind the terror suspects.
He has committed the university to providing "legal help to the two students
... until they are proven guilty". In short, a tax-payer dependent institution
will use public money to defend probable terrorists. This is nothing short
of a scandal; Jamia Milia Islamia is betraying its compact with the city of
Delhi. The Vice-Chancellor's act can be only marginally extenuated by taking
the position that he is under pressure from the hot-heads and radicals who
abound on his campus. Yet, this too would amount to justifying craven surrender
and institutional cowardice. It would not address the essential point: The
university's refusal to acknowledge that its facilities are being flagrantly
exploited by the Students Islamic Movement of India and its bloodthirsty cohorts.
That the Vice-Chancellor -- for all his learning
and scholarship and espousal of India's 'syncretic culture' -- is today virtually
a SIMI/Indian Mujahideen captive is symbolic of the larger failure of the
Muslim intelligentsia. In recent days, particular after the Ahmedabad and
Delhi terror conspiracies were exposed and the pan-Indian footprint of the
Indian Mujahideen became visible, the community leadership retreated into
denial. It would have been understandable -- though still not warranted --
if a siege mentality had taken over the bylanes of Jamia Nagar and similar
sectarian back-streets. Here, the police and Government versions are challenged
almost before they are articulated, there is a refusal to believe that local
'boys' could be terrorists or, indeed, any more dangerous than Boy Scouts
in skull caps.
However, what India is seeing is not just
sporadic protest but institutionalised hostility. Not unlike, for instance,
Britain, a strange coalition of the New Left and the Islamists has sought
to hijack the debate over home-grown jihad. The Vice-Chancellor of Jamia is
personification of this phenomenon, but he is not alone. The kangaroo-court
activists and academics who put together a joke report on the September 19
shoot-out in Jamia Nagar represent the virulent intellectual enemy that India
has to take on. Each one of their arguments has been sliced to pieces. The
supposed 'tenant verification certificate' they placed so much faith on has
been shown to be a piece of forgery, with bogus police stamps as well as a
forged signature purporting to be the landlord's. Finally, the protection
that a Jamia identity card offers jihadis continues to be glossed over. Egged
on by fellow travellers in the media, the Left-Islamist duumvirate is emerging
as the collective voice of India's Muslims. This is bad for India. It is worse
for India's Muslims.
