Time to act tough

Time to act tough

Those people who refrained from reporting to the authorities on returning after attending the by now notorious Tablighi Jamaat at a mosque at Nizamuddin in the national capital must be held guilty of flouting the law, those people who organized the Jamaat network in Assam must be also held more responsible for pushing these 450-plus people into the jaws of death. Set up nearly 100 years ago by the Deobandi Islamic scholar Maulana Muhammad Ilyas Khandhalawi as a religious reform movement, the Tablighi Jamaat, in simple terms translates into an outreach society or a society to spread faith. While it claims to be a completely non-political movement, the Jamaat reportedly aims at propagating basic tenets of Islam espoused by Prophet Mohammed - Kalimah (declaration of faith), Salat (five time prayers), Ilm-o-Zikr (knowledge), Ikraam-e-Muslim (respect of Muslim), Ikhlas-e-Niyyat (Sincerity of intention) and Tafrigh-i-Waqt (sparing time). But then, going by what it did to several thousand of its followers by drawing them to the congregation at the Nizamuddin Mosque last month, it has become evidently clear that the Tablighi Jamaat hardly practices what it wants to preach. Even if its objectives of ‘declaration of faith’ and ‘five time prayers’ appear to be sincere and non-harmful, the Nizamuddin episode leading to large-scale spread of the killer disease COVID-19 is clearly contradictory to its other objectives – knowledge, respect of Muslim, sincerity of intention and sparing time. Organizing a huge congregation when the government has clearly called for cancelling of all events and strictly following social distancing is no example of spreading knowledge. Pushing its blind followers into the jaws of death does not amount to respect of Muslims. Refraining from cancelling the event and then refraining from reporting to the authorities about keeping such a large number of people crammed inside the mosque is no sincerity of intention. If by ‘sparing time’ it means pushing several hundred innocent and blind followers into a crammed space when the whole world is practicing social distancing to break the coronavirus chain, then the Tablighi Jamaat is definitely criminally guilty.

Now that the Nizamuddin congregation has already been identified as an epicentre of spread of COVID-19 across the country, it is the duty of the governments – both at the Centre and in the states – to ensure that each and every person who had attended the Tablighi Jamaat in New Delhi is traced out, put through thorough medical examination and then shifted to hospitals and quarantines as the different cases may require. But, equally important is to identify those people who run the Tablighi Jamaat network across Assam and the Northeast, why are these organizers – and their state committee, if it has one – not coming forward to help the government identify and track down all those who have gone into hiding. Simultaneously, the government should also inquire into and ascertain whether officials of the masjids in the areas from where these 456 people from Assam had gone to Nizamuddin event are also part of the Tablighi Jamaat. If not, then why are none of these officials making any appeal to those people to come out and report to the authorities? The government must act tough and find out the culprits who had motivated the 450-plus people to travel to Nizamuddin when the alert against COVID-19 had been already sounded, and take legal action against them. It is for the safety of the entire population of the state, and nobody has the right to play with lives of the people, especially in the name of the Allah. At the same time, appropriate action should also be initiated against those who are spreading misinformation and communal remarks in connection with the Nizamuddin fiasco. The Ministry of Home Affairs meanwhile has done well by directing the Delhi Police and the DGPs of all the other concerned states including Assam, to take necessary legal action against 960 foreigners for violating the provisions of the Foreigners’ Act of 1946 and the Disaster Management Act of 2005.

It is however unfortunate that some elements are trying to give a communal colour to the Nizamuddim episode. Some others who are always over-reactive even when the name and identity of a petty thief happening to be of a particular faith is made public, on the other hand have already started using various social media platforms to raise a hue and cry that Muslims are being harassed in the name of preventing the spread of COVID-19. It is a fact that there have been some incidents of defiance and resistance here and there to the government’s best efforts to protect the people – irrespective of religion, language and ethnicity – from the global pandemic. This killer disease neither distinguishes people on religious or ethnic lines, nor does it exempt people belonging to this or that religion or ethnicity. The government should also keep a track of these things. It is a sad story that Nizamuddin has happened.

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