NEW DELHI, 6 September 2006 — Prime Minister Manmohan Singh yesterday called for the redressal of grievances nursed by the minority Muslim community in the country, sources said.
While addressing chief ministers of all states at a conference on internal security, Manmohan acknowledged that there prevails a sense of “insecurity among minorities, specially Muslims.”
The prime minister, himself a member of the minority Sikh community, said Muslims nursed a strong sense of grievance that they have not actively benefited from the processes of social and economic development. “All of us have an obligation to redress legitimate grievances of our minorities,” he said.
“Chief ministers must pay personal attention to ensuring that our minorities are effective partners in the processes of social and economic change,” Manmohan said.
India has to urgently counter this sense of alienation among Muslims and ensure its efforts to stamp out militancy do not victimize the entire community, Manmohan said.
Manmohan said “the prevailing insecurity” among 140 million Muslims could have extremely damaging effects on the country, and warned this would be fueled if innocent people were harassed in the struggle against terrorism. He was speaking nearly two months after a series of bombs on commuter trains in Bombay killed 186 people, in an attack blamed on domestic militants with links across the border in Pakistan.
“It is unfortunate that terrorism has resulted in certain sections of our population being targeted, with a result that a wrong impression has been created of the radicalization of the entire Muslim community,” Manmohan said.
India had to immediately embark on a pro-active policy “to ensure that a few individual acts do not result in tarnishing the image of an entire community, and remove any feelings of persecution and alienation from the minds of the minorities.”
The July 11 bomb attacks in Bombay prompted police raids on the city’s Muslim ghettos and the detention of hundreds.
He asked the chief ministers to be sensitive and scrupulous while dealing with terrorism.
“In dealing with terrorism, scrupulous regard and respect for fundamental human rights of citizens, particularly of minority communities, ought to be a core concern of our law enforcement agencies,” he said.
“No innocent person should be harassed in the struggle against terrorism,” Manmohan told top officials from central and state governments. “If a mistake is made, effective remedial corrective measures should be taken well in time.”
Alienation has also been fuelled by communal riots in the western state of Gujarat in 2002, when over 2,500 people, mostly Muslims, were hacked and burnt to death. Despite a national outcry, little has been done to catch the culprits.
Yesterday, the Indian Express newspaper said heavy handed policing in the wake of the Bombay blasts had left Muslims in the city feeling “under siege,” and had reinforced communal fault lines.
“Even through the worst, Bombay has held fast to its cosmopolitan spirit,” it said in an editorial. “It must therefore take the seeds of discrimination being sown very, very seriously.”
Manmohan said that intelligence agencies had warned more terrorist attacks were likely, possibly on economic and religious targets as well as on nuclear installations. “Concern about the increasing activities of externally inspired and directed terrorist outfits in the country is justified,” Manmohan told the internal security meeting.
