PM to ulemas: help us help you become stakeholders in progress

He asked the Ulema to “provide sound leadership to all, so that Muslims could march shoulder to shoulder to further India’s progress”. Acknowledging the role of Muslim clerics in India’s freedom struggle, he said: “It is sad if some people are now equating terror with Islam. This is just a third-rate attempt to provoke Muslims and the conspiracy must be resisted.”

Singh said it was an irony that in a religion, where the founder urged his followers to go as far as China to look for knowledge, women were not being allowed to blossom in India unlike their counterparts in the rest of the world. “The government could help by opening schools but it is for the community’s leadership to make sure Muslim girls attend school and go on to claim their place as equals,” he said. (Incidentally, although there was wide regional representation at the gathering, not a single woman-cleric was invited.)

Singh said that “15 years ago, there was an attempt to portray Sikhs as anti-national, and then should we say that the LTTE has Tamil cadres ? So it would not be appropriate to blame any one community to be associated with terror.”

Maulana Abdul Wahab Khilji of the Jamiat-e-Ahle-Hadis said he was concerned that the term ‘Islamic terror’ was being used continuously. Maulana Arshad Madani of the Jamiatul-Ulema-e-Hind said he was worried about how incidents where non-Muslims were involved were not discussed at all but whenever “a Muslim name came up, the approach would automatically harden”. Most scholars and leaders had concerns with the way security agencies dealt with people after the Mumbai blasts and, in the words of Maulana Athar from Mumbai, only one line of investigation was being pursued, the “accused were presumed to be guilty”.

The PM took on board the concerns about the role of the police and other arms of the government. He announced that he would call a conference of all Chief Ministers to sensitise them to the problems brought to light. He also suggested regular contact at the district level between the administration and the local Muslim leadership. This way, he said, their concerns could be addressed and their help could be sought to weed out elements who may be a source of trouble.

The conference adopted a 6-point declaration—it was read out by convener Mahmood Madani, general secretary of the Jamiatul-Ulema-e-Hind—where they called terrorism as “completely unIslamic”. The declaration condemns “all forms of terror”. It also urged the government not to tar the community with the same brush even if some elements were found to be “galat” (wrong). It says that it expects the government’s security agencies to be fair and even-handed while investigating terror cases.

Earlier in the day, Home Minister Shivraj Patil also encountered a round of uncomfortable questions from the Ulema about the harassment of Muslim youth by the police. He said he would act immediately if concrete cases with proof were furnished. He said that the UPA government did not believe in the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ theory. “India had always believed in an alliance, harmony and unity of Civilizations,” he said.