By Sardar Khan Niazi
The Indian Supreme is the chief torturer of the minorities after it declined to halt the government from razing houses of the Muslims. The court says that we cannot stop demolitions. A Muslim group in Uttar Pradesh had filed a petition, which said that the state government had been punishing members of India’s 200-million-strong Islamic minority for taking part in protests.
With its anti-Muslim judgments, the Indian judiciary has become a tool in the hands of the Narendra Modi government that continues to tyrannize minorities and deny them justice.
The time-to-time verdicts of Indian courts on religious matters have substantiated that the institution is willingly siding with Hindutva and has ignored the Muslim community.
Muslims in India are not facing such a situation for the first time, as history is full of such incidents of state-sponsored persecution of Muslims mainly in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Assam, Delhi, and Gujarat.
In the latest verdict to appease Hindutva, the Supreme Court of India held that a mosque was not essential to the Muslim mode of worship. According to experts, the Indian courts are now just another extension of Hindutva and the ruling on mosques gives acceptance to razing all mosques and mausoleums, chiefly about 5,000 mosques built by the Muslim conquerors.
The high court in India’s Karnataka this March In a case barring the Muslim girl students to wear hijab stated that the headscarf was not crucial to Islam. In its cruel verdict, the three-judge bench held that permitting Muslim women to wear the hijab in classrooms would obstruct their emancipation and go against the constitutional spirit of positive secularism.
An Indian court in 2018 overturned the conviction of senior BJP member Maya Kodnani sentenced to 28 years in jail for her part in the murder of 97 people in 2002 in the state of Gujarat. Her co-accused Bau Bajrangi also got relief in his sentence.
A special court in 2018 in Hyderabad’s Mecca Masjid Blast case of 2007 that had resulted in the killing of 9 people and left 58 injured, acquitted all accused Including Swami Aseemanand. All the accused belonged to organizations practicing Hindutva ideology. In 2019 in the Samjhauta Express case, a special court acquitted all four men involved in bombing the train linking India and Pakistan.
Sixty-four people on board Samjhauta Express were killed after a Hindu right-wing organization had carried out an improvised explosive device blast in 2007. For the notorious Hashimpura massacre of 42 Muslims by the Uttar Pradesh police itself, it took over 31 years for the guilty police officers to be convicted by the Delhi high court in 2018.
The perpetrators of the massacre of 72 Muslims in Maliyana are yet to be punished. The case has been adjourned 900 times. In nearly every communal unrest of India, whether it was Delhi 1984 or Delhi 2020, police have been found to let the minorities suffer at the hands of the majority, or punish them by implicating them in false cases.
Muslims in India still feel the pain of the illegal demolition of Babari Masjid in 1992, where the Indian Supreme Court after 28 years of the incident 2019, held that the site belonged to the birthplace of Lord Ram and awarded the land to a trust for construction of a temple in his name.
The Justice Rajinder Sachar Committee Report 2005 reveals the face of India’s so-called secularism saying that Muslims are seen as anti-nationals.
The bogus encounter killings take place and minorities mostly Muslims are subjected to collective alienation. India continues with its policy of persecution through its State institutions, Pakistan on the other hand, is taking steps for the emancipation of religious minorities.
