Maulana Arshad Madani Decries Administration’s Religious Discrimination Against Protestors as ‘Sad’

Condemning the Haldwani police action in strong words, Maulana Arshad Madani, president of Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, said that what happened in Haldwani is very sad. Maulana Madani said that the report given by the representative delegation of Jamiat-i-Ulema Hind which visited Haldwani today to review the affected areas, is very extremely painful.

And it has come out as clear as a mirror that the role of the police and the administration has been very bad. According to the report, the police are arresting people breaking all the limits of cruelty and abuse, even breaking the door and forcibly entering the houses. Men and women are also being oppressed, this is extreme cruelty and no just society can tolerate it.

The indiscriminate firing by the police on the protestors is a barbaric act

We have also written a letter to the Uttarakhand DGP yesterday demanding to pay immediate attention in this regard. The abuses that the police are committing on innocent citizens should not only be stopped, rather, the nefarious series of arrests that have started should also be stopped immediately, and there should be a fair investigation into this whole incident.

He said that if the police and the administration had tried to solve the matter honestly, this tragedy could have been prevented from happening, but instead of doing so, the police preferred to use force, which made the situation worse, and as a result, five innocent people lost their lives.

Maulana Madani also said that when the matter was in court, why was the administration in such a hurry to demolish the mosque and madrasa? According to my information, the hearing of this case was held on February 8 at 11 o’clock in the High Court, and the court gave the date of its re-hearing on February 14. But on the same day, February 8, around five o’clock in the evening, the officers of the Municipal Corporation and the administration arrived to demolish the mosque and the madrassa, and the impetuousness was shown by them.

He said that the information provided to us that this land was leased to a person in 1937 during British rule, on which Muslims settled and built a mosque and a madrasa. He said that the police action is now being argued that the local people were willing to commit violence and were pelting stones from the roofs of their houses, due to this the police had to open fire to control the situation. It is also being propagated that the police were attacked in a planned manner, obviously such things are now being done to cover up the matter and justify the firing.

Local people were protesting against the administration and this is not a crime. The constitution has given every citizen of the country the right to protest. The main question is, why did this happen? It was the duty of the administration to talk to the local people before taking such action, take them into confidence and apprise them of the real situation. But nothing like that happened, suddenly when the people of Municipal Corporation reached there with the bulldozers, the local people protested, to suppress them, the police used lathi charge and started firing.

He said that this is not the first incident in the history of the country. Instead of enforcing law and order, the police become a party against Muslims everywhere, and on the contrary, in other cases they do not do so.

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Maulana Madani said that the administration has two ways of looking at the protest. If the Muslim minority protests, it is an unforgivable crime; but if the majority protest and carry out violent actions on the streets, and blow up entire trains and stations, they are not even lightly lathi-charged to be dispersed. Discrimination on the basis of religion among the protestors is deplorable.

He said that the recent violent protest against contract jobs in the army is proof of this. Protesters set fire to trains, damaged government property and pelted stones at the police, but the same police, who break all boundaries against Muslims, remained a silent spectator. Minor provisions were imposed that they got bail from the police station itself.

Hundreds of examples can be given, we have been raising our voice against it for a long time, but unfortunately every case is being looked at through a religious lens.