Spare Muslims while probing Mumbai blasts,
MPs ask PM

THE “secular” parties on Friday made yet another attempt to communalise the antiterror campaign by alleging that actions of the police following the Mumbai displayed an anti-Muslim bias. Just like the Left, which has come out with a wacky argument that India’s engagement with the US is radicalising Muslims in India, 17 Muslim MPs on Friday met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and said the government should desist from seeing the Mumbai attack as a manifestation of Islamic terror.

The Samajwadi Party, whose members led the delegation to the prime minister, has been in the forefornt of defending Islamic radical outfit Simi, which provided logistical support for Lashkar-e-Taiba’s bombers in Mumbai. The SP members had come close to defending SIMI inside Parliament on Wednesday.

The MPs, who sought the intervention of the prime minister for the crackdown in Muslim-dominated areas of Mumbai, said the police in Mumbai was “over-reacting”. “We are pained by the violation of human rights in Mumbai,” the memorandum to the prime minister said.

The MPs also used the opportunity to articulate the extra-territorial concerns of hardline community leaders. The memorandum, which asked the government to formulate “appropriate foreign policy response to the attack on Lebanon”, said the country should snap diplomatic ties with Israel.

The government, which is of the view that Hamas and Hezbollah are just as bad as al Qaida, has already rejected the demands from the Left and the SP for downgrading ties with the Israel. India considered the engagement with Israel quite important. Israel is India’s second biggest supplier of defence equipments.

However, the efforts of the SP and its allies must be worrying for the Congress as an attempt is on to build up community opinion against the country’s security and foreign policies. The Congress has only itself to blame as the party had enthusiastically backed the campaign against anti-terror law Pota when hardline elements branded it anti-Muslim.

Encouraged by this development, the community leadership has been making periocic attempts to intervene in the policy matrix of the government. So much so, the Left found them a useful ally when it started the campaign against India’s relations with the US. It be recalled that the SP and the Left organised a series of rowdy protests in Uttar Pradesh with the support of these hardline elements.

That the community leaders and their backers in Parliament are determined to communalise security issues was evident when the memorandum submitted to the prime minister sought stalling of the plans to heighten security cover for the Ayodhya complex. In the wake of jehadi attack on the Ram temple, the government had approached the Supreme Court for putting a new security cover around the complex. “Under the cover of threat perception, the government is planning to carry out civil work at the cost of Rs 7.72 crore”, the memorandum said, and asked the prime minister to call off construction at Ayodhya complex.