{"id":111739,"date":"2008-08-16T13:22:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-16T07:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/?p=111739"},"modified":"2008-08-16T13:22:00","modified_gmt":"2008-08-16T07:52:00","slug":"dissent-or-dont-youre-damned-either-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/dissent-or-dont-youre-damned-either-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Dissent Or Don\u2019t, You\u2019re Damned Either Way"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>ONE MORNING<\/strong> in July, a nattily dressed man named M. Elliyas arrived at the SIMI tribunal\u2019s sitting at Mumbai and, speaking confidently in English, demanded that his name be struck off the background note that the Centre had issued with its February 7 notification banning SIMI. The note alleged that Elliyas \u201cincited\u201d local Muslims in Pune, who \u201cstaged a demonstration\u201d to protest the municipality razing some illegal construction. \u201cWhen exactly did this happen?\u201d he asked the battery of Central Government lawyers, who shuffled papers and hummed and hawed but couldn\u2019t find more details of their own allegations against him. He volunteered: on the day of the event he was visiting the municipal office to find how to make a birth certificate for his newly-born daughter. Even the local police have never questioned him in that case. Then why name him in the background note?<\/span>
\nBut Elliyas, a successful, 40-year-old IT consultant who topped his Microsoft exam with 99 percent marks, is hardly surprised. Elliyas was a SIMI member during the 1990s and retired when he turned 30, three years before the ban. In the seven years since the ban on SIMI, the Maharashtra police have harassed him no end. He told TEHELKA that when the police couldn\u2019t find anything against him, they booked him under a humiliating law called the \u2018Maharashtra Bad Persons, Slumlords and Bootleggers Act\u2019. It is ridiculous that Elliyas spent a year in jail in 2001 under this law.<\/span>
\nIn his affidavit, Elliyas wrote that the statement against him in the background note \u201cseems to reflect the Central Government\u2019s intolerance of any democratic expression by Muslim members of the public and an attempt is being made to link every such expression with the activities of SIMI to stifle the same\u201d. When Tribunal Judge Geeta Mittal sought to soothe him, Elliyas, in a voice choked with controlled emotion, asked: \u201cWhat does this government want? Should we actually become terrorists?\u201d\u00a0<\/span>\u2022<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since when did protest get you called a jehadi? Ask M. Elliyas, jailed under a ludicrous law, Reports Ajit Sahi<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":112043,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[56],"tags":[7004],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111739"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}