{"id":111860,"date":"2008-08-16T14:30:33","date_gmt":"2008-08-16T09:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/?p=111860"},"modified":"2008-08-16T14:30:33","modified_gmt":"2008-08-16T09:00:33","slug":"the-history-appraiser-caught-with-his-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/the-history-appraiser-caught-with-his-books\/","title":{"rendered":"The History Appraiser Caught With His Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
Photo:<\/strong> SK Mohan<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nON AUGUST<\/strong> 15, 2006, in his hometown of Kottayam in Kerala, Abdul Razik boarded a 6 am bus for a three-hour journey to a village up north. To mark Independence Day, the village Muslims had invited Razik, a scholar of some repute in the community, to speak on the role of Muslims in India\u2019s freedom struggle. At 10 am, a group of 18 assembled at the ironically named Happy Auditorium. When Razik started his lecture, three policemen he had earlier seen in a jeep outside entered the hall. \u201cThey browsed through my notes and questioned me,\u201d Razik told TEHELKA during an interview at Thiruvananthapuram.<\/span>
\nThe entire group was taken into custody but 13 were let off. Five, including Razik, were arrested and charged with (a) criminal conspiracy to commit an offence punishable with death or life imprisonment; (b) sedition by way of attempting to bring hatred or contempt against the government and \u201cexcite disaffection\u201d towards it; (c) being a member of an unlawful association (yes, SIMI, again); and (d) participating in its meetings to incite unlawful activity. So off went Razik and the other four to jail.<\/span>
\nThe police claim this was a secret meeting called by SIMI, but cite no proof. The organisers deny any SIMI link and say they put out notices in the area, including at the mosque. Happy Auditorium sits squat in the middle of the village, with bustling shops around, including a well patronised bakery- cum-teashop. The law says the police must get \u201cindependent and respectable inhabitants of the locality in which the place to be searched is situated\u201d to stand witness. One imagines there would have been no dearth of witnesses around a place like Happy Auditorium. But the FIR against Razik does not cite any such witnesses, nor does it state whether the police even tried to find any. The only witnesses cited are two policemen.<\/span>
\nThe police say the five arrested were SIMI activists. The host of the meeting, a local by the name of Nizamudheen, denies associating with SIMI. This should be easy to settle: the police have a list of SIMI members seized from its office sealed at the time it was banned in 2001. But the police make no reference to that list. Instead, they say they collected the list of SIMI members from the Intelligence Bureau, without explaining how that list can be deemed incontrovertibly genuine.<\/span>
\nFrom Razik, the police seized a book titled Mass Resistance in Kashmir: Origins, Evolutions, Options. This book is authored by a Pakistani scholar, Tahir Amin, and is published by the Institute of Policy Studies, Islamabad. The book was issued to Razik by a library run by the Jamaat- e-Islami in Kerala. It certainly reflects the typical Pakistani position on Kashmir. But is the possession of this book unlawful? The Kerala police wrote to the Centre asking if the book is banned. The Centre hasn\u2019t yet answered. The police have initiated no action against the Jamaat library that owned it.<\/span>
\nThe \u201cbanned SIMI literature\u201d police claim to have seized includes back issues of SIMI\u2019s Malayalam magazine, Vivekam, published before the ban. Vivekam was registered with the Registrar of Newspapers of India and sold by subscription and on newsstands. The issues allegedly seized are of 1993, 1994, 1998 and 2000. No cases were made out against Vivekam in those years or afterwards. The police also seized from Razik a booklet with articles on the \u201crepression of Muslims\u201d by state agencies. Alleging misdeeds by the State can\u2019t be seditious, can it?<\/span>
\nYet, Razik spent 65 days in jail. The Kerala High Court denied him bail thrice, relenting only when the police failed to submit an update on the investigation, which the judge had repeatedly ordered. This February, the police requested the district collector\u2019s sanction to begin prosecution. Six months later, such sanction is still awaited. The chargesheet is yet to be filed. The trial is yet to begin. Razik, 29, says he has been framed because he was a SIMI member from 1996 until the ban. Razik holds MA and B.ED degrees. He has worked as an editor of religious books in Urdu and Malayalam. His harassment by the police and intelligence agencies began with the ban. His house was often searched; he was often questioned. Never was a case found against him. Even though the ban on SIMI is lifted, the Damocles sword still hangs over him. \u201cI wasn\u2019t angry when I was in jail,\u201d Razik says. \u201cI kept praying to god. I was mentally prepared to be in prison a long time.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Among Abdul Razik\u2019s crimes: books, old issues of a SIMI magazine and a talk on Muslims in the freedom struggle, Reports Ajit Sahi<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":112272,"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\/111860"}],"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=111860"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111860\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}