Azam Khan’s letter to UN is an insult to India
Senior Samajwadi Party leader and Uttar Pradesh Minister Azam Khan has made a fool of himself by complaining to the United Nations about the Dadri killing. He has not only communalised the issue but also used it to berate his country's Government abroad and cast unfounded aspersions on the ruling party at the Centre. He claims that the Dadri incident is an example of how “Fascist forces are attempting to create a divide in the society by launching a hate campaign against Muslims”. This is silly. The unfortunate incident never had the support of either the Bharatiya Janata Party or its Government in New Delhi. On the contrary, leader after senior leader of the party has condemned the incident and called for stringent punishment to the guilty. The ‘forces’ which Mr Khan refers to are present across the political spectrum, including his own Samajwadi Party. Indeed, Mr Khan has himself in the recent past made many objectionable remarks that were hardly conducive to communal harmony. He is widely seen as a polarising figure in the negative sense and has been a major embarrassment to his party. He likes to project himself as not just the Muslim face of the Samajwadi Party but also an enlightened leader of the country's entire Muslim community. But beyond Uttar Pradesh, and that too in his backyard, Mr Khan is not taken very seriously. That even the United Nations would not waste a second on the letter he has written, had been obvious to the letter-writer, since he has thereafter lamented, “When we did not get justice from our own, then what will the world give usIJ” That being the case, for argument's sake, why did he take the trouble to shoot off that missive to the UNIJ The idea was clearly not to get the grievances of the Muslim community — on whose behalf he had the cheek to write — addressed, but to make political hay and present himself as the messiah of the minority community. Before approaching the UN, did Mr Khan petition the various independent authorities, such as the National Humans Rights Commission or the National Minorities Commission in the country and seek their interventionIJ If he finds these organisations to be useless in such matters, then there indeed is a serious problem with his mindset.
Interestingly, while Mr Khan blames everyone, from the Bharatiya Janata Party to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to Fascist forces, for the Dadri incident, he conveniently forgets that the crime happened in a State ruled by his own party, and that the State Government is primarily responsible for law and order there. If there are divisive elements out to create trouble, it is for the State administration to act decisively and promptly. That the State’s regime has comprehensively failed, and repeatedly (as the earlier Muzaffarnagar violence demonstrated), is widely acknowledged. Mr Khan must direct his ire against his own Government and stop behaving like a petulant child.