“this is not a case against me as an individual, but it is a warning to the
entire press community not to try to quash the cooked up stories by the police.”
When Two Muslims Meet: The Media(ted) case of Madani and Shahina
K Ashraf & Jenny Rowena
http://thefishpond.in/ashraf/2010/when-two-muslims-meet/
Shahina K K, a journalist with Tehelka went to Karnataka to prepare an
investigative report on the case on Abdul Nasar Madani, the Chairman of PDP.
Madani had spend almost 10 years in Jail as an undertrial in the 1998
Coimbatore blast before he was let off without any charges on 1 August 2007. In
her report (Why is this man still in prison?, Tehelka, December 4th, 2010)
Shahina tried to look into the police story that Madani had conspired in the
Bengaluru blasts in separate meetings two years ago — one which took place in
Madani’s rented home in Kochi and the other in the Lakkeri estate in Kodaku
Karnataka.
Here, she not only talks of the reports about the many people who have
questioned the police story – like James Varghese, the owner of Madani’s rented
house in Kochi, and Madani’s brother Jamal Mohammed – but she also investigates
the witnesses whose accounts have led the court to deny Madani bail. According
to her investigations Shahina finds out that many of the witnesses have things
to say that goes against the police story. For instance, Yoganand, a BJP worker
whose testimony is recorded in the charge sheet, Shahina reports, does not even
know that he is a witness in the Madani case !
Now this is a case of good investigative journalism, which has the power to
unsettle the stories that are constantly being planted in the media by the
police. However, just a few days after her report comes out, the Karnataka
police slaps a case against Shahina under IPC 506, for “intimidating the
witnesses.” No stretch of imagination allows one to view the attempt of a
journalist to talk to the witnesses in a particular case as ‘intimidation.’
Yet, in this age of embedded journalism and paid news and the likes of Praveen
Swamy and Burkha Dutt, this critical attempt at investigation which challenges
a given police story, can easily be labeled thus and the journalist targeted.
More importantly, Shahina’s case is further mediated through other important
issues, which includes the political career of Abdul Nasar Madani, whose case
she was investigating and her own identity as a Muslim woman.
Shahina’s attempt to investigate goes deep into the whole issue of how Abdul
Nasar Madani, who holds a particular and important political position in
Kerala, was incarcerated in jail for long years, without trail, and then
acquitted with all charges against him unproved. This gross case of injustice
was further extended when the police tried to implicate his wife Sufiya in the
Bengaluru blasts that took place on 25th July 2008. Three months back, in spite
of protests from various quarters in Kerala, Madani was arrested once again for
conspiracy as one of the accused in the Bengaluru blasts. Later, his bail
application was also dismissed considering what the court called the “nature
and gravity of the offence.” The repercussions and the backlash on Shahina’s
investigations are clearly connected to the case of Abdul Nazar Madani. In
fact, even to bring up the issue of Madani is to evoke anxieties about Islamic
fundamentalism and terrorism. In the
words of Charles Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood,
“a whole set of questionable assumptions, anxieties, and prejudices [are]
embedded in the notion of Islamic fundamentalism.” (From their article:
Feminism, the Taliban, and Politics of Counter-Insurgency.)
This then is used as a bogey to deal with any kind of response, activity or
political action from the location of a Muslim identity. However, no one
worries that this political leader has been in jail for 10 long years without
trail and that now, he is back in jail and being systematically denied bail. An
issue that Shahina’s report addresses too, with its title: “Why is this man
still in jail?” In fact, today, the question of terrorism and the Muslim can
obfuscate all other questions about equality and justice. The Muslim, is caught
in a construction that implicates him/her as inherently capable of terrorizing
this country and therefore easily punishable. S/he is always already someone
who can be easily pushed outside the ambit of the discourses of human rights
and legal justice.
In fact, Madani is an important political voice in Kerala who addressed the
question of Muslims and dalitbahujans after the Mandal-Masjid phenomenon of the
90s. Rooted in a discourse that drew from Islamic tenants, Madani’s vision
focused on the inherent inequalities in Kerala society, both in terms of caste
and religion. However his new political language was found ‘deviant’ and
ignored or attacked by dominant discourses, mainly because of its allegiance to
Islamic discourses and the Muslim identity. Thus Madani, who had been able to
organize some of the most unprivileged sections in Kerala, is shorn of all his
political credentials from within the stand point of the construction of the
Muslim as the fundamentalist other of a Secular State/Culture.
The media has always stood strongly on the side of such dominant constructions
all through the political career of Madani. Recently when his wife Soofiya
Madani was alleged to have been involved in a conspiracy that led to the
burning of a Tamil Nadu State Transport Corporation bus at Kalamassery, Kochi
in September 2005, reports in the media found her guilty even before Judicial
processes could start. Similarly we have seen the media conniving with the
Police/State on other issues concerning the “others” of Kerala. One can recall
the maligning of the Dalit Human Rights Groups (DHRM) as terrorists and the
false case of Love Jihad, where young Muslim men were accused of converting
Hindu women into Islam after starting romantic relationships with them.
However, when in May 17, 2009 6 Muslim men from a fishing community were killed
and 47 others injured (27 of them had bullet injuries) in a police firing in
Beemapally, most of the Malayalam media kept
completely silent about this incident, which was one of the most violent
incidents of police oppression that Kerala had ever witnessed. All this are
surely signs of the impunity with which the Malayalam media treats issues that
are related to its “others,” especially the Muslim.
It is this entrenched attitude of the media that Shahina’s report tries to
confront, head on. However, it is a Shahina who is doing this and not just
another journalist; like Madani, she too is caught in the same issues that
haunt the Muslim location and identity. In fact, Shahina herself has reported
how, when she went to the village to investigate, she was stopped by the police
and asked whether she was a terrorist. Many of the papers in Karnataka like
Sakthi, Prajavani and Kannada also reported the incident as a “suspicious”
visit by a “group of Muslims !” Here, just as Madani’s Islamic roots could
tarnish the weight and importance of his political career, Shahina’s Muslim
name could do away with all her other identities.
It is no wonder then that a report in the Mathrubhumi faithfully reports the
police version that Shahina and the others in her group tried to “threaten” the
witnesses. Such a report, without even a preliminary kind of investigation,
quickly reiterates the police story, putting the blame squarely on Shahina’s
shoulders. This is exactly how much of the media has behaved in the case of
Madani too. In many ways, it was the media in Kerala that raised the alarm
against Madani so high and shrill that it was so easy for the police to get him
back in jail and keep him there. We need to think seriously about all these
issues raised in connection to the Shahina case.
Surely, as Shahina writes in her status message in Facebook:
“this is not a case against me as an individual, but it is a warning to the
entire press community not to try to quash the cooked up stories by the police.”
Moreover, this is also yet another instance where the complex and often
oppressive relationship of the Indian state and the Muslim minority is clearly
revealed – a relationship in which the media has always played a highly dubious
and questionable role. It is not surprising then that Shahina’s alternative
mediation, to investigate into this and to reveal the fissures within many of
our consensus has met with such a reaction. It is important that we reflect on
these issues and extend our support to Shahina and to Madani, who is still in
jail, also as a result of all these various, anti-minority mediations.
With Regards
Abi
“At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice
he is the worst”
- Aristotle
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