A Report, An Appeal For Justice, Solidarity and Harmony
Findings of the Citizens’ Team that visited Belagavi on 7 October 2021
As reports emerged of the brutal murder of 25-year-old Arbaz Aftab Mulla in Belagavi on 28 September 2021, a team of seven people from Bengaluru and Davangere visited Belagavi on Thursday, 07 October 2021, to express solidarity with the family of the deceased and to conduct a fact finding into the incident. AIPF was part of this team.
We are living through times when communal violence and hatred against religious minorities is increasingly becoming the new normal in Karnataka. Cow vigilantism, attacks on Muslims and moral policing by religious extremist/fundamentalist organisations have escalated all over the state in recent times. While Islamophobia has been a running theme in most such incidents, Christians have also been consistently targeted – revealing the underlying political ideology of Hindu majoritarianism. This violence is the result of years of deliberate and neatly orchestrated communal politics. It has now become more insidious, psychological, and every day, and is dividing our societies and cultures more deeply than ever. Facilitated by the state machinery, which is largely dominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), communal violence is now accompanied by either silence or victim blaming by the administration, media, and society, and the victims receive little solidarity.
The murder of Arbaz Aftab Mulla is part of this terrifying pattern described above. The Citizen’s Team which visited Belagavi has found compelling reasons to believe that the Sri Ram Sene (Hindustan) – henceforth referred to as SRS(H) – was involved in the murder of Arbaz. The murder happened in the context of an interfaith love affair with his Hindu (Marathi) neighbour in Khanapur and appears to have been pre-planned with prior warning given to Arbaz and his family. In the current climate of intense communal polarization and administrative impunity for Hindu extremist violence, the murderers seemed to fear little about the consequences. No wonder it took substantial demands for accountability and justice from local activists and organisations in Belagavi and across the state, including this Citizen’s Team, for the police to make the first set of arrests.
Despite the arrest of ten people on 08 October 2021, ten days after the murder, justice for Arbaz Mulla remains a long shot. Following the arrests, the Belagavi Superintendent of Police Laxman Nimbargi alleged that the girl’s parents had hired contract killers belonging to the SRS(H). Our findings suggest that while the girl’s parents might have had a role to play in the murder, the SP’s allegation could also be a ploy to shift the bulk of the blame from the SRS(H) to the family, thereby making the murder appear to be a contract / supari killing and not a communal “honour killing”.
Our team visited Belagavi to not only enquire about the incident but also to extend solidarity to Arbaz’s family and friends. This report too is more than a fact-finding report. The report describes the context of the incident as well as its aftermath in detail, in order to point to the implications of deep-seated religious polarisation and brewing saffron terror in northern Karnataka. Arbaz’s barbaric murder points also to the radicalisation of members of these Hindu extremist organisations who are willing to dismember and behead a human being driven solely by religious hatred. The BJP’s plans of exporting the Uttar Pradesh model of state sponsored consistent politico-religious violence are well on the way, we suggest. Incidents such as Arbaz’s murder was not the first one in the region and might not be the last. Northern Karnataka’s addition to the saffron sphere of influence poses a grave threat to religious minorities all over the state and threatens to engulf Karnataka in a cauldron of Hindu nationalist violence.
Thus, this report is also an appeal to fellow citizens of Karnataka to come together to not only ensure justice for Arbaz but also to respond comprehensively to the rising communal politics. It is an appeal to launch a broad-based campaign to ensure justice for Muslim, Christian and other persecuted brothers, and sisters, to stand in solidarity with each other and especially with the victims of Hindu nationalist violence, and work towards rebuilding social harmony in our state. This is not possible unless the silent Hindu majority witnessing the saffron violence proactively stands in solidarity with the victims of such violence and stand shoulder to shoulder with our non-Hindu citizens against Hindu nationalism in all its forms. We appeal to one and all to take up the task of rebuilding communal harmony as a peoples’ project.
