Driven into a Corner by SC, Delhi Police Say They’ll File FIR Against BJP MP ‘today’; Ahmadiyya Lawyer Arrested in Pak for Adding ‘Syed’ to His Name

Court acquits Sooraj Pancholi in Jiah suicide case, Mukesh Ambani firm to stream ‘Succession’ in India, from Nehru legacy to Atiq’s crime capital, ‘dangers lurking in Ayurveda’, Rohingya resilience

Apr 28, 2023

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Snapshot of the day

April 28, 2023

Vinay Pandey

The Delhi police told the Supreme Court on Friday that they “will file an FIR today” against BJP MP and Wrestling Federation of India chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh on the complaint given by seven female wrestlers. This followed a notice issued by the top court to the police on a petition filed by the seven wrestlers for an FIR against Singh. The Delhi police had been refusing to file an FIR for more than three months, the wrestlers protesting at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar had alleged.

India’s two individual Olympic gold medallists on Friday lent support to the protesting top wrestlers of the country. Abhinav Bindra and Neeraj Chopra tweeted support for the wrestlers. Those lending support to the protesters included cricket great Kapil Dev and world champion boxer Nikhat Zareen. On Thursday, Indian Olympic Association chief PT Usha had said that the ongoing protest by wrestlers “amounted to indiscipline”.

The Supreme Court on Friday asked the Calcutta high court acting chief justice to reassign the West Bengal school jobs “scam” case to another judge after examining a report on Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay’s interview to a news channel about the matter. Hearing a plea of TMC leader Abhishek Banerjee, a bench comprising Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud and Justice PS Narasimha took note of the report of the Registrar General of the Calcutta high court and said the case has to be reassigned to a bench headed by another judge.

In another case the apex court directed the UP government to submit a status report on the steps taken following the killing of gangster turned politician Atiq Ahmed and his brother.

The bench comprising Justice S Ravindra Bhat and Dipankar Datta was hearing a plea filed by advocate Vishal Tiwari, who sought an inquiry into the 183 encounters that have taken place in the state since 2017, when Yogi Adityanath became chief minister.

In a first of its kind case against the persecuted Ahmadiyya sect in Pakistan, a senior advocate from the community has been arrested by the Karachi police for adding “Syed” to his name. One Mohammad Azhar Khan, also an advocate, had filed an FIR at the City Court police station against Ali Ahmed Tariq, over the fact that Tariq had added “Syed” before his name in an affidavit submitted before a district judge. The FIR invoked Section 298-B (misuse of epithets, descriptions, and titles, etc reserved for certain holy personages or places) of the Pakistan Penal Code.

Calling it the “topmost priority”, defence minister Rajnath Singh on Friday called upon member states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) to collectively work towards eliminating terrorism in all its forms and fixing accountability on those who aid or fund such activities.

A Mumbai court on Friday acquitted actor Sooraj Pancholi due to lack of evidence in the Jiah Khan suicide case. Pancholi was accused of abetment of suicide. Special judge AS Sayyed told Jiah’s mother, Rabiya Khan, she can appeal against the acquittal in the Bombay high court.

Mukesh Ambani’s broadcast venture, Viacom18 Media, and Warner Bros Discovery signed a multi-year deal to stream the latter’s exclusive content in India, marking another win for Asia’s richest man over Walt Disney Co in the race to corner one of the world’s biggest media markets. Web series including Succession, House of the Dragon and The Last of Us as well as other content from HBO and Max Original will be available on JioCinema next month, reports Bloomberg.

The Economist takes note of how Indian firms are flocking to the United Arab Emirates. It says Abu Dhabi and Dubai’s relationship with India will increasingly mirror Singapore’s with Southeast Asia: tiny, tidy city-states acting as financial and commercial hubs for big, obnoxious neighbours.

According to a report published by Project 39A, there were 165 death sentences in India last year, the highest annual figure since 2000. In an interview, Anup Surendranath, the executive director of Project 39A speaks to India Spends on the retention of the death penalty, the problems with retributive justice, and the increasing trend of death penalties in recent years.

As bulldozers continue to become unchecked symbols of state power, Coda Story looks at how the “Bulldozer Baba” in Uttar Pradesh is becoming a favourite Hindu nationalist politician.

Elon Musk acquired control of Twitter precisely six months ago, pledging a new era of free expression and impartiality from political prejudice. However, Twitter’s own data reveals that, under Musk, the firm has agreed with hundreds more censorship or monitoring demands from governments, particularly in nations like Turkey and India, Restofworld.org reports. “In one case for January, India’s information ministry ordered Twitter to take down all posts sharing footage from a BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Dozens of posts were removed, including one from a local member of parliament.”

Tracing the fall of Allahabad from Nehru’s legacy to Atiq’s crime capital, the Print writes: “The criminal history of Allahabad, now Prayagraj, started with the Rajiv Gandhi era, when all the big infrastructure contracts started to pour in. It began with the illegal mining of stones at the Ganga basin peripheries and slowly entered the city with the emergence of land grabbers, gradually spreading its tentacles across the city.

“Allahabad, earlier known for the Sangam pilgrimage, Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Anand Bhavan, and Amitabh Bachchan, was by then a divided city – divided by crime, impunity and the glamour of the gun.”

Sacked ad hoc teacher’s death sparks protests in DU

The death of a former professor at Delhi University has triggered protests after a large number of ad hoc faculty members were recently laid off, causing outrage among the academic community. The dismissed faculty members have described their dismissal as “institutional murder”, alleging that the decision has put their livelihoods at risk. The former professor, who had been working at DU for over 25 years, had been an ad hoc faculty member and was among those who lost their jobs. His death has become a symbol of the plight of the ad hoc faculty members, who have been struggling for job security and better working conditions for years.

The DU administration has defended its decision to lay off the ad hoc faculty members, citing financial constraints and the need to streamline the academic process. However, many have criticised the administration for its handling of the situation, saying that it has failed to provide adequate support to the affected faculty members.

PM’s joke on suicide was in poor taste

On Wednesday, speaking at Republic TV Summit, Prime Minister Modi casually recalled a “joke” from his childhood about a professor whose daughter died by suicide. He narrated how she left a note by her bed describing her disappointment with life and her decision to throw herself in the Kankaria, a lake in Ahmedabad. The following day, the professor in the PM’s story finds the note and exclaims: “I have been a professor and worked hard for so many years. Yet, my daughter spells Kankaria wrong.”

The statistics on the deaths by suicide in the country underline why this “joke” by the country’s Prime Minister and the collective jest it sparked among the audience were distasteful and should have been avoided, writes the News Minute.

Showing photos with PM and posh address, how con man dupped people

Sanjay Rai ‘Sherpuria’, the alleged con man arrested by the UP Special Task Force (STF) on Wednesday, claimed to live at “1, Beside Race Course, Safdarjung Rd”, used photos of the Prime Minister and Union ministers to flaunt his connections, and collected ₹6 crore from a prominent Delhi industrialist as donation for a trust, according to an FIR filed by the police.

A Dainik Bhaskar report shows photographs of Rai with several BJP and RSS leaders, including JP Nadda, Anurag Thakur, Keshav Prasad Maurya and Mohan Bhagwat.

BJP and the ‘dangers lurking in Ayurveda’

A recent study by the Indian Veterinary Research Institute, which found that cow urine, often used in Ayurvedic medicine, contains high levels of dangerous bacteria that can cause serious illnesses, has raised concerns about the safety of using cow urine in Ayurvedic medicine, writes the Telegraph, London. Ayurveda is a popular alternative form of treatment in India. The study found that cow urine contained bacteria such as E coli, Salmonella and Staphylococcus, all of which can cause severe infections.

In addition to the financial benefits, the BJP’s promotion of Ayurveda fits its broader Hindu nationalist narrative and the owners of major Ayurveda companies can enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship with the party, the newspaper says.

The Long Cable

Praying on the road is not a good feeling, but what else can we do?

Darab Farooqui

A video of thousands of Muslims performing Eid Namaz on the highway went viral recently. The video was of Jaipur Eidgah. And because Jaipur is my hometown and where I grew up, I must have performed Eid Namaz on the same road for at least 20 years.

It made me nostalgic and triggered a flood of emotions. What follows is my perspective and my memories.

Let’s begin with the location of Eidgah. The entire area is known as Eidgah locally; as you can see, to the right, there is an Idgah Van Vihar Colony, and just above it is an Idgah Kachchi Basti. Locally, the road also is known as Eidgah Road. The yellow road on the map is the national highway.

When we were kids in the 1980s, there were two road connections from Delhi Highway to the city of Jaipur. This Eidgah Highway, and another from Amer Road. This highway was rarely used because trucks moved at high speeds on it, and people preferred the more tranquil and scenic Amer entry.

Eidgah is a term used in South Asian Islamic culture to refer to the open-air enclosure usually located outside the city that is reserved for Eid prayers offered in the morning of Eid al-Fitr (Mithi Eid in local parlance) and Eid al-Adha (Bakra Eid).

It is usually a public space that is not used for prayers during the rest of the year. On Eid, the first thing Muslims do in the morning is gather at a large open ground and offer special prayers. Every now and then, you’d hear the word “maidan” attached to Eidgah, which literally means open ground. This is because there used to be a large ground, where people would read namaz, which was connected to the Eidgah.

As a general guideline in Islam, performing the Eid namaz on the outskirts of town is better and more virtuous than performing it in town. Failing to perform Eid namaz in the Eidgah without a valid excuse is against the Sunnah. Because it is difficult to have Eidgahs on the outskirts of major cities, a large open plain ground is chosen for the Eidgah. However, because Jaipur already had an Eidgah, this was not a problem.

But, as far as I recall, even in the early 1980s, Jaipur Eidgah had a peculiar problem. It was not connected to a large ground. Maybe the open, extended space was considered large when it was built, but not by the early 1980s.

As a result, people would spill over to the sides and eventually onto the highway. Even in the early 1980s, a large section of the highway was covered with namazis. I used to be one of those namazis, when I was younger, somewhere far from the Eidgah structure.

Eidgah was about 6km away from my home. Which seemed like a long distance when I was a kid. It was truly on the outskirts of town. Jaipur was much smaller back then.

My father is a pious man. And because it was nearly impossible to find a prayer space inside the Eidgah, he would finish his early morning prayer (fajr) and leave on his black Atlas cycle just around sunrise for Eidgah. It was a big deal for him to pray inside the premises.

He would often lament that we lived so far away from the Eidgah that he would never get a place in the first three rows of namazis. Our uncles were tasked with bringing all of us children to Eidgah. And it used to be complete pandemonium.

Our uncles were screaming and shouting at us to get us ready on time. They were all terrified of my father. He is the “elder brother” of the family. Everyone had to shower and change into white kurta-pyjamas. (Winters were absolute torture for early morning bathing.)

The ladies of the house would be screaming as well. There would be chaos as, inadvertently, one of the pyjamas would be found torn in the morning because no one bothered to check it when it was purchased. Another pyjama’s izarband (drawstring) would be missing. Someone’s new kurta would have a stain. Some child might cry because they were wearing an old kurta with a new pyjama, or vice versa. Some kid would be crying because they had been slapped for laughing at the crying kid. Every morning of Eid was a race against the clock.

But every year, we’d arrive on time, but never at the Eidgah. But on the highway, about a hundred metres from the Eidgah. We’d bring our improvised janamaaz (prayer mat), which was mostly a freshly washed double bedsheet, and spread it out on the road while we waited.

Every year, our uncles would argue that because we were too far away from Eidgah, we would not appear in the Rajasthan Patrika front-page photo this year. The photo of the namaz used to be on the front page of the newspaper the next day. Everyone was a tiny dot in that picture, but it felt great if you could tentatively locate yourself in it. The photograph was always taken from the tall exterior wall of Eidgah.

And the Eid Namaz is distinct from other namaz. The procedure is slightly different. Every child makes mistakes inadvertently. And as kids, we’d remember who made which errors. It was a contest of “who failed less”. The kid who made the fewest mistakes won the bragging rights.

We’d get 5-10 minutes of play time after the namaz, either at the small Eid mela or just faffing around at the venue. But, in the next 20 minutes, all the namazis would clear the road and traffic would begin. We wouldn’t stay long because my father would return from the main Eidgah premises, either ecstatic that he got a spot in the starting rows or devastated that he couldn’t make it in time.

As soon as we returned home, there was joy all around, and we began badgering elders for the customary “Eidi”. There was always talk about how small the Eidgah is and how rare it is for someone to get a place inside the main premises of Eidgah. And this was back in the 80s.

Other youngsters took our position as we grew older. The discussions remained constant. No Muslim appreciates praying on the road, and most of us found it humiliating. Eid, on the other hand, is intended to be a collective prayer that ends with embraces. Muslims adapted to it.

We recognise that masjids cannot accommodate the whole population. Praying on the road is not a good feeling, but what else can we do? The summer heat is awful, and the monsoon season is the worst if it begins to rain.

People would have you believe that what we perceive as humiliation is part of a big plan to destabilise the country. In 2023, they make it appear to be some grand conspiracy, as if it’s a plot to disrupt the nation’s peace. As if we intend to take over the highways. As if roadblocking is something that Muslims like doing. When it’s just something we’ve learned to live with.

Imagine having a perfectly clean and peaceful location to pray inside a mosque and Muslims swarming the streets, clogging traffic, merely to frustrate people. Only a hateful and malicious mindset would believe that.

By the way, I had a great time writing this, thinking about the past. At one point, I even forgot I was demolishing the schedule. I couldn’t care less. But now you know why Muslims pray on the road. We don’t want to do it, but we don’t have any other option.

It’s a sad situation, but that’s life. Indian Muslims are hardy people who find joy even in the most difficult of circumstances. We rarely have somebody to explain our points of view to. We just go about our business while being pelted with muck from all sides.

Finally, all I have to say is this – On a particularly happy day, such as Eid, nobody likes to pray on the road. Muslims do not read namaz on the road because they want to, but because they have to.

(Darab Farooqui is a screenplay writer. He wrote the screenplay for Dedh Ishqiya)

Prime Number: 0

The BJP-led central government in its undertaking to the Bombay high court said that it will not constitute a fact-check unit under the new Information Technology Rules, 2023 till July 5. No censorship till then, one cannot really infer.

Deep Dive

Smartphones are no longer a personal device in India. Around 85 million users (39%) in rural India watch videos or attend online classes with others. Interestingly, more women than men. Wade into penetrating insights on the changing nature and use of smartphones in India and in the media.

Opeds you don’t want to miss

The collegium system of appointing judges is close to a technical knockout, writes Madan B Lokur
A nation that cannot offer proper education to all will forever find population growth a bane, writes Sanjaya Baru
Behind attempts to corner Kejriwal for renovation costs is Narendra Modi’s desperation, writes Prem Shankar Jha.
Derek O’Brien on same-sex marriage: Queer Indians fighting the good fight.
Jyotsna Mohan writes on wrestlers demanding justice for sexual harassment allegedly at the hands of a BJP MP. “These are the same people politicians leech onto when they win medals to leverage a pie of the limelight.”
Samarveer’s death is possibly sounding the death knell of higher education institutions through blatant politicisation of the recruitment process, writes R Mahalakshmi.
Hamid Ansari on the challenge of reviving a sense of fraternity.
Should India consider phasing out nuclear power? asks Jacob Koshy.
TK Arun on how policy choices can turn India into a hub of global prosperity or of global disorder.
India’s banks are skimping on loss provisions when profitability is still strong. This may not be prudent, writes Andy Mukherjee.
Not by “Vande Bharat” alone – the nation can ill-afford to let the performance of the Indian Railways be judged merely on the basis of certain and well-publicised services, writes P Balakesari.
‘Can you help us?’ Abhinay Despande writes on the moral challenges while reporting.
Is it genuine curriculum rationalisation or part of a plan to promote creationism and Hindu theology in education? asks SK Arun Murthi.

Listen up

For decades, Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar have been subjected to continuous persecution, with the most horrific phase of violence erupting in August 2017, forcing nearly 700,000 Rohingya to flee Myanmar in the wake of a massive military crackdown. Journalist Kaamil Ahmed in a conversation with Carl Miller discusses the resilience that has helped the community to survive. They are now living mostly in Bangladesh’s refugee camps, or precariously, in Malaysia, India, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

Watch out

In a conversation with Rangan Bhardwaj, Mani Ratnam and AR Rahman talk about their musical journey, the much-awaited film Ponniyin Selvan 2 and their ever-encompassing bond over the years.

Over and out

Read an excerpt from “Where the Madness Lies: Citizen Accounts of Identity and Nationalism”, by Kishalay Bhattacharjee.

A seldom seen photograph from the Harappa excavations in 1923–1924, which took place before we learned the city was home to the Indus civilisation.

The Nochikuppam fish market was at the centre of the storm. In an interesting piece, The Hindu inquires about the opinions of the fishermen in light of plans to move the market.

That’s it for today. We’ll be back with you on Monday, on a device near you. If The India Cable was forwarded to you by a friend (perhaps a common friend!) book your own copy by SUBSCRIBING HERE.