CRIMINAL TRIBES IN INDIA’S VIOLENCE AND CORRUPTION

CRIMINAL TRIBES

People have been shocked by a recent report that a 35 year old woman and her 13 year old daughter were brutally gang raped near Ghaziabad in UP. It now emerges that this gang had committed similar crimes on this highway earlier. The police now claim that it is the work of a criminal class of Banwarias living in the area. 

Scheduled classes and castes have great political clout today so it was not surprising that the political establishment reacted angrily when sociologist Ashis Nandy’s had earlier said that they were responsible for much of the corruption in India. These scheduled castes include numerous criminal tribes that had once been well known for violence, theft and other anti social behavior.

As it is politically incorrect today to speak of criminal tribes we have almost forgotten that they once existed and may still form a large though almost invisible social stratum among a number of overlapping social layers. This might also explain why the system of law and order is sometimes so out of sync with ground realities and why India’s politicians and bureaucrats have been incapable of a clear response.

There used to be a Criminal Tribes Act of 1924 that had listed 313 nomadic and other communities (including some of the Ahir, Bangars, Bhanjaras, Bawarias, Bhattis, Gujjars, Jats, Lambadis, Kanjars, Meenas, Sansis, Vagharis, Yadhavs, etc.) Regulating their activities began with the suppression of Thugees in 1831 and was further elaborated in 1871 when 127 tribes were kept under constant police scrutiny. They were described as being “so habitually criminal” that their arrests were non bailable. The British forcibly settled many of these mostly pastoral tribes about a century ago on virtual wastelands like the areas around Faridabad, Manesar and Greater Noida where new industries were to later find cheap land but had to sometimes also face serious violence in their industrial disputes. These tribes and castes were then estimated to number 60 million or around 16 % of India’s population making them too large a number to be so ruthlessly suppressed. It is not a coincidence that many instances of rape and violence including industrial violence have routinely erupted in most of the areas close to where these tribes had been forcibly settled.

After independence the criminal tag was deleted to help them assimilate into India’s mainstream but laws and rules do not instantly change the social behavior or the habits of people. Vote bank politics were to also give them considerable political muscle and further embolden their ambitions. Most Indians may be moral, ethical and religious but there is also a vicious strata that cannot be wished away.

The social values of many these communities as well as some of these clans of north India is also a subject that is seldom discussed. Several social studies have not only shown their tendency to violence and intoxication but a terrible attitude towards women. While their mothers and wives were usually held in honor any other woman is still considered to be open game for exploitation. In many tribal communities marriage by capture had long been a normal custom and this automatically implied rape. How can such people be shocked by rape when young brides in some communities were routinely `deflowered’ by their own fathers-in law or uncles? Why should we then be surprised that village `khaps’ or panchayat courts should self-righteously uphold their mediaeval and often gender hostile old customs. Young members may have had some education but these do not instantly change their social conditioning.

Apart from the molestation of women a cult of violence seeking instant justice or revenge has unfortunately been the stuff of many Indian films and TV shows and may have been especially appealing to socially unsettled people who have long been at the outer fringes of the law. As they had been virtually ostracized by the richer classes they also had little compunction about stealing from them or molesting their women. Over the past few decades India has seen many millions of young villagers move from rural to urban areas. The lucky few got jobs in the petty bureaucracy, property, contractors, trade, small businesses, driving taxis, cars, autos, trucks or buses and in the army or police. The frustrated failures usually drifted into the criminalized underbelly of every town and indulged in violence, car thefts, bootlegging and rape whenever opportunity allowed.

As the police, who are supposed to control them, often come from the same village stock it is not surprising that they are often unwilling or incapable of opposing their own village brothers whose social values they share. This problem needs to be recognized and fully understood before effective measures to solve them can be contemplated.

This article was just published in the quint.

ZAKIR NAIK – PREACHER OR PROVOCATEUR?

Murad Ali Baig

It is easy to blame anyone for inspiring terrorism but there is no evidence that Zakir Naik is guilty of doing anything but proclaiming words about Islamic law and traditions. A look at YouTube or other social media will show an ardent speaker in a prayer cap to proclaim his piety and a neat western suit and tie to declare his relevance to modern audiences. He attracts huge audiences not only on his own PeaceTV but at numerous public venues in Dubai, Dacca and in many Indian cities.

Many viewers may be offended by his remarks about women’s rights, Osama Bin Laden, Jews, etc., but it has to be said that Naik does not step outside the limits of Islamic traditions. If his comments are offensive it is because the Quran and many other sources of Islamic law, like all scriptures, were created in mediaeval times when values were very different to those of today. He greatly resembles a passionate criminal lawyer who will argue his brief and shows an impressive knowledge about Judaism, Christianity and even Hinduism.

His brief is however confined to Islamic writings and he does not admit what historians know today that the verses of Quran were only collected 33 years after the death of the prophet by Uthman the third Khalif. He, like most Muslims, also ardently believes that the events in the life of the prophet were well recorded when in fact the first biographer ibn Ishaq was born 72 years after Muhammad’s death. Al Tabari the second biographer was a Persian born another 53 years later. The second most important Islamic scripture is the Hadis (Hadith) that was composed by Al Bukhari and others still later. Islamic traditions can thus be proved to be the work of a number of mortal humans and not the immortal words of God as many want to believe.

Zakir Naik is not universally popular in Muslim circles but this is not surprising as there are approximately 72 Muslim sects and sub sects and his strongly Wahhabi orientation is especially offensive to the many million Shias, Sufi and Ahmediyas. The Wahhabi element is mainly responsible for the hate and violence that it often advocates. Abd Al Wahhab, born about 1703, popularized a very extreme Islamic philosophy that rejected not just idolatry but reverence to any mortal. The Wahhabis disallowed ceremonies for marriage or death, worship of saints, adorning of graves, tombs or other sacred objects, holding religious processions, art, music and dance and demanded the total suppression of women. They did not even spare the tomb of the prophet at Madina and stripped the Kaaba of all the treasures gifted by pilgrims to decorate it. 

Religious teachers including his own father and uncle were horrified at his excesses but he was fortunate to find a patron in Muhammad Al-Saud who used this vitriolic new creed as a powerful weapon to propel his tribe to win his descendents the kingdom of Arabia that they rule to this day. Then the discovery of oil in 1938 gave them the power to finance the spread of their fanatic creed to all Muslim countries. 

Though Naik appears knowledgeable about Judaism he does not explain how the Jewish Torah (Tawraat) became one of the sacred books of Islam roughly three hundred years after the prophet. Most of the horrible sins in the 613 (not 10) Commandments and the ghastly punishments in the book of Leviticus are not found in the Quran but are widely used by many Muslim clerics to make Islam so unpalatable in modern times.

HOW ISLAM BECAME HIJACKED BY REVISIONISTS

This article was published in the e-edition of Outlook magazine

The brutal killing of over 130 innocent people in Paris is another example of the mindlessness of Islamic terrorism. Few people however realize that terrorism had never been endorsed by the prophet Muhammad nor sanctioned in the Quran. Like all religions the traditions of Islam were however frequently changed over time and many passionate clerics moved Islamic Sharia from the mostly gentle words of Muhammad to the angry rhetoric of the Taliban or ISIS. The Quran clearly says that killing in the name of Islam is the opposite of Jihad and expressly forbids an attack on anyone who had offered no offence. It is forbidden to harm or to kill women and children, take hostages or to torture or kill prisoners and commit suicide. 

Two hundred years after the death of the prophet several pious Muslim scholars put together another sacred book called the Hadis (or Hadith) that told Muslims that they should not only follow the words of the prophet but also examples from his life. Several scholars like al Bukhari tried to reconstruct the stories of his life from the testimonies of people who claimed to be descendants of the prophet or his companions. After eight or ten generations such testimonies were very dubious. Restrictions on women like the veil only now become an Islamic requirement. Many Muslims now began to copy the prophet’s behavior as acts of piety. Even acts like putting on the left slipper first or entering a room with the right foot and every detail including his clothes, habits or behavior became acts of piety. 

The next major change came with the Abbasid Caliphate (750 – 1258). The huge Islamic empire with many diverse races needed new legal authorities like the Qazi (magistrate) to manage complex legal matters, police, taxes and the status of non-Muslim subjects. So Islamic law underwent many changes but adopted many Jewish and Persian laws and split into six schools of law. The Jewish Torah (Toraat) introducing the Jewish sins including blasphemy and heresy that now became Islamic sins. Clerics began prescribing draconian death sentences by burning, stoning, beheading and strangulation as prescribed in the Torah even though the Quran had never demanded such punishments.

Four categories of punishment in Islamic law seem to have been devised much after the Quran. These were Qisas, (retaliation) as `an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth’ that is prescribed in the Jewish Torah; Diyya, or compensation paid to the heirs of a victim in blood money or ransom; Hadud or harsh pre determined punishments for severe crimes like murder, adultery, blasphemy, intoxication, idolatry or apostasy and Tazir that were punishments given at the discretion of a Qazi. The Quran is silent about alcohol and quite mild about intoxication that became a sin according to the authors of the Hadis.

In 1256, after the bloody sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols, Ahmad ibn Tamiyya, a Muslim scholar, was driven out of Iraq and he defined a new policy to divide the Islamic world into two. `Dar ul Islam’ (abode of Islam) and `Dar ul Harb’ (abode of disbelievers). He also redefined the word Jihad to mean a `Holy War’ In 1683 the defeat of the Turkish armies outside Vienna marked the end of Islamic expansion and the rise of European powers that were to soon dominate the world and make Muslim nations react with increasingly narrow orthodoxy. The rise of Europe resulted in the impoverishment of many great Muslim empires and Muslim cultures sank from liberal scholarship to narrow minded illiteracy allowing clerics to exploit the frustration.  

Then, in the eighteenth century, Islam was completely hijacked by Mohammad Abd Al Wahhab (1703 – 1792) who started the Sunni Wahhabiya movement that accepted the authority of the Quran and Hadis but opposed all innovations, superstitions and deviances from their narrow interpretation of these in a very puritanical and legalistic manner. They considered the veneration of pirs, the intercession of Imams, religious holidays, and other devotional acts as heresies and even they desecrated the tomb of Muhammad. With the support of the ibn Saud family of Arabia they promoted an extreme form of Islam that led to formation of the Taliban and Al Qaida.

After the Balfour declaration of 1922 at the end of the First World War, Britain casually divided up the former Turkish territories they had occupied and Israel became an independent country in 1948. This immediately triggered a bitter war between Israel and its Muslim neighbors of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria leading to an unending cycle of conflict ever since.

Then American support to Pakistan for the creation of the Taliban in their covert war to oust USSR from Afghanistan was to make the Taliban a potent force. Radical Muslim clerics would target impoverished young boys who were taught the Quran in Arabic that they could not understand and fool them to believe false translations or interpretations to make them into fanatical terrorists. The American `War on Terror’ against Iraq (1991 and 2003) and Afghanistan (2001) then made most Muslims infuriated by these morally unjustified invasions.

Muslim clerics continued to give the greatest reverence to the Quran and the Hadis as their most sacred books but most of their religious pronouncements were actually dictated by the words of numerous passionate revisionists who preached long after the time of the Prophet. The Quran, for example, was unprecedented in its time for its support of women and their rights but because all the subsequent clerics were men the gentle words of the prophet were steadily eroded to make Islam the most restrictive religion concerning women. Most Muslims accept the sanctity of the words of the prophet but they need to ask themselves whether they should believe there is any sanctity in the words of all the many revisionists. They need to also ask themselves why they should be fooled to go bloody deaths by listening to the words of bigoted Mullahs and other clerics.

Islamic terrorism will not easily succumb to military action but the terrorists might submit to social pressure if the large moderate Muslim majority convinces them that their actions are absolutely against the injunctions of their prophet and will get them to the eternal fire instead of the paradise they fervently hope for.