Insecure at Home

Rashid’s hounding shows state paranoia at its worst

First Sheikh Abdul Rashid, superintendent of police (prisons), Baramulla, had to face state paranoia. Now he must face its petty-minded vindictiveness. A month ago, this paper revealed how Rashid on a visit to the Capital from Srinagar, and scheduled to attend a Union Home Ministry seminar was dragged out of an apartment on the morning of July 3, and detained for five hours at a police station. The Delhi police suspected the SP of being a ‘‘dreaded militant’’, the onus was on him to prove his innocence. It has now come to light that the Home ministry has ordered the J&K government not to let Rashid go ‘‘unpunished’’ for his crime of going public with his story and the state government has responded with gleeful alacrity. It has transferred Rashid to Ladakh first, and will ask questions later. It is preposterous that instead of punishing the criminally inept Delhi police team that had blundered on that July morning, the Home ministry chose to target Rashid.

The fact is this is not just about a few misdirected policemen. The malaise travels deeper, and higher. Rashid’s harassment and detention belong to a wider pattern of events they are the outcome of a larger mindset. It sees ‘‘dreaded Kashmiri militants’’ prowling in all our backyards, all set to ‘‘destabilise’’ the nation and/or attack the Red Fort. It resorts to an opaque terminology ‘‘our own information’’ and ‘‘intelligence inputs’’ to paper over the terrible fact that if you are a Muslim who has flown in from Srinagar and are sleeping in a house owned by a Muslim, a la Rashid, that may well turn out to be reason enough for the state to look at you with suspicion. The same mindset skulked behind the detention for a full week last month of three students of the Deoband madarsa by the Ghaziabad police, for no other visible reason than that they were students of the madarsa. The police later confessed that they had no concrete evidence of their involvement in the blast on the Hardwar-Delhi Express in the aftermath of which the students had been picked up and detained. This siege mentality finds outward expression too. The Home ministry order that drew public outrage three months ago questioning the hosting of foreign guests in any citizen’s home is part of this story. As is the promulgation of a Home ministry circular sent out by the Human Resource Development ministry on January 6, 2001, to registrars of all universities and deemed universities making ‘‘political clearance’’ mandatory for holding international seminars and conferences, especially for participants from all neighbouring countries except Nepal.

Surely, this paranoia, this mean vision, is unworthy of the largest democracy in the world. Surely the Union Home ministry has more important matters to attend to than the avid construction of bogeys.