It began with a light board installed in front of a lane in Kanpur, “I love Muhammad” written on it, ahead of the annual Barawafat procession to mark Prophet Muhammad’s birth anniversary. A police FIR blamed one community for deliberately introducing a new practice — “jaan boojh kar nayi parampara ki shuruaat” — which would ostensibly endanger communal amity, and relocated the banner. But that was not the end of the matter. Over nearly a month since then, protests against the police action spread across several of Uttar Pradesh’s districts, roiling Bareilly in particular, and spilled into other states, including Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Karnataka, Telangana, Maharashtra. They were met, more often than not, with official heavy-handedness, with FIRs slapped indiscriminately, a spate of arrests, and demolition of properties. This disquieting pattern is now ebbing mercifully.
Violence and arson are unacceptable and those who participate in the lumpenism of the mob must be proceeded against lawfully. At the same time, hard questions need to be asked of those who criminalised the putting up of an innocuous banner. Indeed, it wasn’t even all that new, similar banners had been put up in the Kanpur neighbourhood earlier too — in cloth, if not as a well-lit display board. And what is wrong, anyway, with a “nayi parampara” that does not disturb the peace? More fundamentally, the question is: In a country where the Constitution guarantees and protects the right of every citizen to profess and propagate a religion of her choice, why does the police FIR read like an indictment of the religious practice of one community, and a punishment for its public visibility? The political leadership also has much to answer for. In times when there is a simmering sense of siege in the beleaguered minority community, it is the work of politics, especially one that proclaims “Sabka saath…. sabka vishwas”, to observe restraint and apply the healing touch. UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s hardline – “denting-painting” must be done to trouble-makers, he said, and a lesson taught to subdue future generations — is divisive. It does not behove his office.
Especially now that his refrain is the economic development of UP. The state government has been making moves to attract private investment, and address long-standing infrastructure deficits. The flaring of tensions over the “I love Muhammad” banners, the excessive use of the state’s strong arm and the political bid to stoke minority insecurities, undermine that effort. They point to a state in which peace is fragile and the vulnerable are ill at ease. The Yogi Adityanath government must heed its mandate and its constitutional duty and take steps to correct this.
