advertisement
After a mosque in Ram Sanehi Ghat in Uttar Pradesh’s Barabanki district was demolished, we found that the UP government was in an hurry to pull down the structure indicating a disregard for the rule of the law.
“Masjid ke andar musallah tha, Quran sharif tha. Vo sab kisi kissi ka pata nahi, humko nahi diya. JCB laga ke giraya toh usko bhi kuda mein kahi fenk diya hoga. (Inside the mosque there was the holy mat and the holy Quran. We do know where it is, we were not given any of it back. They used a JCB to demolish the structure, so that must have gone in the rubble and be thrown in the dirt somewhere),” the religious scholar for Barabanki district, Maulana Abdul Mustafa, told this reporter sounding pained.
While there is a question of law being flouted on one end, there is also the problematic question of why there is so much fear that people living around the mosque have fled. After repeated attempts we were able to speak to a few people, assuring complete anonymity, to understand how the administration demolished the mosque on 16 May when there was no one to protest from the locality anymore.
In the story we cover the following aspects:
Let’s start with the most important concern regarding allegations that the administration did not follow an Allahabad HC ruling.
According to the Allahabad HC order from 24 April, the part of the order which stated that eviction, dispossession or demolition was to remain in abeyance till 31 May 2021 specifically relates to any such orders "already passed by the High Court, District Court or Civil Court."
However, direction number five of the same order refers to actions of the state government, municipal authorities, other local bodies and agencies of the state government. It says they have been asked to be "slow in taking action of demolition and eviction of persons till 31 May."
Aftab Ahmed, a lawyer of the Sunni Waqf Board, said the same point five is the basis of the petition the board will move in the High Court. “There was a standing order of the High Court to ask the state government in being slow in taking action of demolition. Now see the timing. The administration disposed the reply of the mosque authorities on 2 April and issued an order to demolish the mosque on 9 April, that is within a period of six days. They did not give the parties a notice, a right of response and right to be heard. The orders were not served to the parties or to even us, the legal custodians of the mosque. This is the basis of our petition which is being filed right now. The acts of the UP government are malicious in nature,” Ahmed said.
While the order to demolish was issued on 9 April, the authorities demolished the mosque over a month later on 17 May.
When asked why the Sunni Waqf Board only intervened in this case after the mosque had been demolished, Ahmed said, “Sunni Waqf Board was unaware of the issue of this mosque. We were not issued a notice by the administration as custodians of the mosque and the mosque authorities also did not tell us. We only got to know after the mosque was demolished.”
Right from when the first notice was issued to the mosque authorities on 15 March, to the date that the mosque was bulldozed on 17 May, the locals and activists say the authorities have been spiteful and in a hurry to bring the mosque down.
It started with an order to provide evidence to state the mosque was built on their land on 15 March. “Rather than waiting, they decided to stop Muslims from offering prayers in the mosque on 17 March. This scared us,” Syed Farooq Ahmed, 28, a religious scholar and social activist who knows of the developments around this mosque, says.
The fear let to the authorities moving court on 18 March, through the lawyer Nakul Dubey. The counsel argued that there was an imminent danger of the demolition of the mosque. The court however called these apprehensions unfounded. It said that since the notice was only issued to garner evidence and not for demolition. While disposing of the application the court noted,“apprehensions of the petitioner expressed in this writ petition is thus unfounded”. It also gave the petitioners another 15 days to file their evidence and said then the authorities will come up with a fresh decision.
Tensions continued in the locality.
On 19 March there was a clash between the local Muslims with the police. While Maulana Abdul Mustafa says that it started when someone spread rumours saying the mosque was going to be razed. “That time it did not happen,” he says. The locals and police forces clashed, people claim their homes were ransacked and over 60 people were rounded up and arrested.
“The problem is that the FIRs have “unknown persons” in several of them and the charges include Sections of the Arms Act, attempt to murder, unlawful assembly, amongst others. This basically means the government can pick up anyone and add them to the list of accused. People know that and hence have fled this area since that clash,” a young man who lived behind the mosque, and is currently underground, said.
Recalling the horror of the day, he said, “We only went there because we saw some people inside the mosque and there was JCB machine close by too. The gates of the mosque were open. We tried to stop them, but they attacked us, came into our homes, took our belongings and sent so many to jail. The entire qasbah of Sumerganj is empty, only women and kids are here. The 4-5 people there, they cannot say anything. How could they have protested? The brute force of the UP government is petrifying.”
While people fled and arrests continued, the fifteen days the court had given the mosque authorities to file a response were also running out. Finally, a day before these 15 days ended the mosque authorities submitted their evidence on 1 April. On 2 April the administration went through the order and disposed it stating that the evidence was insufficient and on 9 April they issued orders to demolish the mosque.
Farooq says that the state did not allow the people a right of response or a right to be heard. He said, “It took you (UP administration) less than 24 hours to sift through all our evidence and decide it was insufficient? Also, why were we not told that the evidence was insufficient? Then we could have submitted more. In this case, they did not tell us anything. That they had disposed of our evidence or that they had issued an order of demolition of 9 April. If this is not spiteful anger of the government against the minority community then what is it?”
It is not like the locals did not attempt to find documents and understand the issue better.
“When no one was properly responding to us, I filed an RTI with the local administration. It has been way over the 30 days and I am yet to get my response,” Farooq said.
The queries asked in the RTI were:
The RTI was filed on 3 April and till 21 May, Farooq did not get any response.
According to the tracking of the RTI by him, the RTI was delivered to the office of the local administration on 9 April.
“Having these documents could have allowed us the space to move court or file an FIR or do anything. Not only do they not want us to know they have rejected our evidence, issued an order to demolish the mosque but when we seek responses according to the RTI Act, our queries were stonewalled,” Farooq says.
“What was the hurry to do this? We were still under the impression that we would get time to prove that this is our mosque but they demolished it. We want it to be rebuilt, our demand has not ended,” Maulana said with the hope that the structure will be rebuilt.
The locals who are underground are also certain of their demand. “It was pulled down illegally, so it must be constructed by them,” they said.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)