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Ankit Saxena and Kafeel Khan were publicly sourced.        Image Courtesy: Sanjukta Basu

Delhi: A crowd gathered In Raghubir Nagar, West Delhi, on Sunday. It wasn’t like that day when one of its residents, Ankit Saxena, was murdered four months ago for being in love with a Muslim girl. As soon as the sun set, the crowd swarmed Ankit’s residence and sat down for the Iftar party organized by his father in his memory. In the spirit of ‘Hate Hurts and Harmony Works,’ it was heartening to see Yashpal Saxena combat hate with a deep reserve of love.
 
“At 7:17 pm, fasts were broken with a prayer to Allah and people from all faiths dug into their meals. Among the attendees was Dr. Kafeel Khan, the doctor accused of the Gorakhpur deaths. “Despite everything that Yashpal ji has gone through, he has sent a very powerful message by organizing this Iftar. I have only come to show my support,” he said in a report by Quint.
 
In the midst of serving fruits and water, answering questions of all the media people that had come to cover the event and posing for cameras, Yashpal Saxena was deliberate in spreading just one message. “The idea is to spread communal harmony. I want the spirit of love to be spread, not hatred. I have been left bereft of my son because of hate. If I had responded with the same anger back then…. I don’t want a society where hatred is spread and damage is caused to others,” he said in a report by Firstpost.
 
Around 200 people had gathered for the Iftar that was organized for the first time by the Ankit Saxena Trust. It was set up by his father to promote peace, help inter-faith couples get married and understand the anger of the youth. 23-year-old photographer Ankit was remembered by his many friends, who want him to be remembered as an icon of love, and neighbours who saw him as their own son.

 
Ankit was a victim of alleged ‘honour killing’ where he was murdered by his girlfriend’s family as they were opposed to inter-faith relationships. Yashpal Saxena made waves by asking people to not communalize the issue and spreading love instead of hatred. A report by Scroll stated, “Deputy Commissioner of Police (West) Vijay Singh had said that all the accused in the case have been arrested. The woman’s parents and her uncle are in judicial custody while her brother, who is a minor, was sent to a juvenile home.”
 
Crowdnewsing, a crowdfunding platform, has raised over Rs. 4.5 lakh for the creation of the Ankit Saxena Trust and helping his family with their needs.

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It is unfortunate that despite Delhi’s chief minister Arvind Kejriwal meeting them thrice, the government has not provided any sort of monetary help or compensation for the loss of their child. It had promised them free medical help in a government hospital, but after consulting a doctor there, the couple had to pay for medicines worth Rs. 2,000 from their own pocket. They are mostly being taken care of by their nephew Ashish Duggal and few other relatives – Ashish doing much of the legal formalities at the moment.
 
After meeting the family and discussing their various requirements, we felt that some funds need to be raised to not only take care of their immediate medical needs, but also to fulfill Yashpal Saxena’s wish to create a group or institution for peace and social harmony. There can be no better cause than this for all of us to pool in our resources to deal with the trauma of the Saxena family at this moment.
 
Kindly contact us if you wish to contribute for this cause. Details about how to make your contributions will soon be available on www.imsd.in, www.ektara.org and other websites.
 

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We lived in very troubled times where notions of secularism and justice are continuously negotiated through identities. That there was no march against this barbarism is a testament to the warped understanding of secularism which we practice today. The custodians of secularism see such honour killings only through the majoritarian or the dominant caste lens, thereby completely denying the existence of similar problems within minority communities. This kind of politics in the long run will only turn counter-productive and will be detrimental for the well- being of minorities, particularly Muslims in India.

 If not the secular lobby, then the Muslims should have been at the forefront of leading demonstrations against such barbarism committed by its one of their own. It is a very sorry state of affairs that while we care so much for Hadiya and her freedom of choice, the many Hadiyas within our own community are denied the very same freedoms. But when the practice of secularism has meant protection of all kinds of regressive behaviour within Muslims and the Muslims themselves have internalised it, then it is perhaps too much to expect that things will change for the better in the near future.

It is appalling to see some of the comments on social media which the secular lobby and the Muslim apologists have made. While they are partly right in asserting that there is no need to draw an equivalence between targeted killings of Muslims like Pahlu Khan which is a product of certain ideology, they forget that regimes of honour killings exists among Muslims too. Certainly, there is no movement amongst the Muslims to defend the killers as we see in the case of Shambhulal Raigar, but that does not mean that we shut our eyes and ears to the question of acute gender discrimination in our community.

Actually this should have provided the occasion to debate what is wrong within our community, instead the whole energy of the community has gone into proving how this case should not be equated with cases like that of Pahlu Khan and other Muslims who have been killed in the name of love jihad. What is more troublesome are those voices from within the community who refuse to believe that this is a structural issue within the community. Rather, the argument is that this should be treated as an aberration and should be located within the criminality of that particular family who committed this act of barbarity. It is the same people who were arguing how the killings of Muslims were part of a pattern which arose from ideological indoctrination of the Hindu Right wing and that it should not be seen as an isolated incident. In borrowing the language of Right Wing Hindutva forces, the Muslims and the seculars need to decide whether this strategy will do their politics any good in the long run.

There is a need to acknowledge that problem exists and that scores of Muslim girls are not afforded the choice of marrying out of their own volition. Compounded with this is the indoctrination which goes in the mind of every Muslim child that Islam is the best religion and therefore even if a girl chooses to marry outside the community, the man has to necessarily convert to Islam. If we agree that this amounts to ideological indoctrination and yet we are absolutely fine with it, then I do not understand why we should have a problem with the ideological indoctrination carried on the Hindu Right wing forces. Failure to recognise this only makes us hypocritical and open to allegations that we practice double standards.

 Certainly, this is not the first case of honour killing associated with the Muslim community. Neither is it going to be the last. In Kolkata in 2012, a Muslim brother severed the head her sister for being in a relationship with another Muslim man, but which the family did not approve of. He took the severed head of his sister to the police station as a trophy and surrendered without any remorse. That women are considered properties of their respective families and communities applies equally to Muslims.

Only through a reasoned and empathetic debate can we arrive at a solution to this problem of honour killings. But all such discussion will have to keep the individual’s choice at the forefront. Muslims themselves should take the lead to initiate such a discussion within their community. Democracy and secularism are not for others to practice but rather it is the minorities who should be at the forefront of all such struggles. Sadly, it is us, the Muslim minority, which has very acute deficit of democracy and choice within our own community.

Arshad Alam is a NewAgeIslam.com columnist.

Courtesy: NewAgeIslam
 

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It was an act of violence and terror, albeit of a critically different kind. When 23-year-old Ankit Saxena’s throat was slit after an altercation with the family members of his childhood sweetheart a few days ago, while the usual suspects of the BJP, Manoj Tiwari, and the Bajrang Dal swung into pre-scripted, hate-driven action, a worrying silence from votaries of “secularism” and “religious progressives” echoed in the public sphere.

It would be easy to assuage the guilt caused by this silence by brushing off Ankit’s murder as an act of individual brutality and insanity, atypical and distinguished from organised, targeted killings in the name of faith or caste. Young Ankit’s death can also then be distinguished aside and away from the “secularism and Constitution in danger” paradigm. Warning bells need not be rung. For the venomous proponents of the “love jihad” myth, this is an act in reverse, with the young man, a Hindu, a victim. For both sides of the deep communal divide, the response is common: Greater segregation, less democratisation for the young, no sharing of spaces. Do no candles need to be lit for Ankit and his lost love?

This story appeared as the lead editorial piece in The Indian Express on February 6, 2018. The rest of the story may be read here 

The post A candle for Ankit … and his lost love and a flickering secularism appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Would you peacefully allow your sister/daughter to marry a non-Muslim man? Because, if you won’t, we lose the moral authority to fight the ruckus created by RSS over the so-called “Love Jihad”. The Special Marriage Act allows interfaith couples to register a marriage without conversion. When we, as a minority, insist on our Constitutional rights, let’s remember that this too is a Constitutional right. Not only do minority communities have Constitutional rights, individuals too have Constitutional rights.
 
The way an adult Muslim woman Hadiya has a right to choose Shefin Jahan as her life partner, another adult Muslim woman has a right to choose Ankit Saxena as her partner. It’s the Constitution – and not Islamic/Hindu law – that gives both of them this right. Both Islamic and Hindu law require the father to “give away” the daughter. But it is the Constitution that allowed Hadiya to choose her partner. So, when you outrage – and rightly so – over the denial of her right to choose, please understand that the right is Constitutional, and is available to all adult Muslim women, regardless of who they love. When we insist that Hadiya be treated as an adult, as an individual who has Constitutional rights, let’s please uphold the same standard for all adult Muslim women – regardless of who they love.
 
There are those who hate Muslims, and those who love Muslims – who do we prefer?
 
A 20-yr old Hindu girl who said “I love Muslims” was driven to suicide by BJP members. A 23-yr old boy who dared to love a Muslim girl was killed by conservatives of the other shade.
Shame on us.
 
If we do not make room for love, we deserve to be ruled by hatred.
 
#JusticeForAnkitSaxena

(As received through Whatsapp).
 
 

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