NEW DELHI: India yesterday said the remarks of Pakistan’s permanent representative to the UN seeking to link an Islamic seminary in India to jihadis in Pakistan were “indeed regrettable”.
“Statements by the Pakistani permanent representative (Abdullah Husain Haroon) are indeed regrettable,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Vishnu Prakash said.
“The Darul Uloom Deoband is one of our highly respected institutions of Islamic learning,” he said, alluding to the leading center of Islamic learning in India in western Uttar Pradesh, located over 100 km from New Delhi.
The spokesperson also said that the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind had complained to the ministry on the matter. The Jamiat Ulema, an organization of leading Muslim clerics in India comprising mainly Deoband clerics, was founded in 1866 and opposed the two-nation theory that became the basis of the creation of Pakistan.
It may be noted that the JUH participated actively in the freedom struggle against the British rule. They also strongly opposed the two-nation theory, which led to the formation of Pakistan in 1947.
The Ulema have protested “the language used and aspersions cast” in the statement by the Pakistani diplomat at the UN Security Council during the open debate on Threats to International Peace and Security on Dec. 9, the spokesperson said.
“In the protest, it was pointed out that this was a shameful attempt to deflect attention from the real culprits (of the Mumbai terror attacks),” the spokesperson said.
“It is understood that the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind has sent protest letters to the Pakistani high commissioner in New Delhi as well as to the United Nations secretary-general,” he added.
The Pakistani envoy’s remarks elicited sharp reactions from Darul Uloom, which said it had no sway in the Taleban-controlled areas and that “controlling jihadis in their (Pakistan) territory is their business not ours”.
“Our fatwa applies to the whole world, there is no need to issue a new one,” vice rector Abdul Khalique Madrasi said. In February, the Darul Uloom convened a meeting of the clerics and issued a fatwa denouncing terrorism, calling the killings of innocents “haram” (forbidden). The seminary has reiterated this call against terrorism many times since then.
On Dec. 9, Haroon had said: “It is for the clerics in Deoband, who wield great influence in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) territories of Pakistan and in Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), to come to Pakistan, get together and embed, offer a fatwa in Pakistan against suicide bombings and killings of Muslims in Pakistan as well as in India.”
