Rajasthan Tablighi Jamaat Needs Your Help

By Arif A. Syed, Carlsbad, NM

The Meos of Rajasthan in India are a tribe with a pastoral agrarian economy who had a Hindu?Muslim liminal identity. They consider their clan to have descended from Lord Arjuna and Lord Krishna of Mahabharata. They trace descent patrilineally. Then with the arrival of Islam in India, they were influenced by a Sufi Saint Hazrat Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer, and gladly embraced Islam.

The pastoral peasant economy based on the milch cow has undergone a dramatic change. The healthy, white cow of Hindu mythic imagination, has been substituted in real life by the high yielding buffalo-based political economy. Emaciated cows thrown out by their Hindu owners are left to fend for themselves in the countryside or to die. During the drought seasons, the practice of abandoning cows by villagers is widespread and referred to locally as tikka laga ke chhor diya. The application of the red vermilion mark symbolizes the idea that the concerned Hindu will be absolved of any sin by the gods. In big cities like Delhi and Jaipur, beef has become the poor man’s protein since mutton costs ten to fifteen times more.

The Meos have been periodically subjected to ethnic cleansing since 1920s in the former princely states of Bharatpur and Alwar. Each time tension is created in the Mewat area, the trauma of terror among the Meos is palpable. One historian, Ian Copland, in the journal Past & Present has described this ethnic cleansing as a genocide. Meo women form a large component of the women abducted in Rajasthan.

Since 1920, the Tablighi Jama’at has been trying to help them with its limited resources. Maulana llyas, a Jama’at missionary leader, has launched a program of Islamization with great success. This was his first experiment among the Meos. But he was disappointed when they refused to sport the beard or take to namaz. His son continued his mission and internationalized the Jama’at.

In 1932, another Tablighi missionary, Yasin Khan, started a peasant front Kisan Sabha, but the ruling elite of the princely states castigated the movement as communal and one inspired by fundamentalist mullahs. Hindu fanatic organizations are a major power broker in the princly states of Alwar and Bharatpur.

In 1940, another Tablighi missionary, Kunwar Mohammad Ashraf, who was a Malkana Rajput, called for a revival of Meo’s Islamic identity and introduction of self-governance through Panchayat raj. But the Hindus described it as Mogul Raj. In Mewat, the area southwest of Delhi, where the Meo population is concentrated, they are terrorized by right wing Hindu leaders.

During the partition days, 30,000 Meos were killed in Bharatpur alone, according to official record. The number of Meos killed in Alwar state may be more or less the same. At that critical juncture, the Meos flocked to the Tablighi Jama’at for relief, security, bread, butter, and blankets. How the Tablighi missionary workers managed relief work on such a gigantic scale is mind boggling. Meos are now the mainstay of the Jama’at. The Mewat experiment has been globalized now, thanks to the robust leadership of the Tablighi Jama’at, which is in operation in many parts of the world.

After partition, Hindus got an opportunity to grab Muslim lands. All the Hindu rulers, both the bureaucrats and the lower level government servants, knew that the Meos were not interested in Pakistan, Muslim League or Urdu language. But their choice were limited: to die, cross the border, or embrace Hinduism. So the exodus to Pakistan of over half of the Meo population took place. Then with the personal intervention of Mahatma Gandhi and a Tablighi Jama’at leader Yasin Khan, the Meos returned as late as 1950 and 1960. In Pakistan they were not welcomed because they were poor.

Since then the Meos have suffered several times. The year 1992 proved a land mark in the history of India when secularism was replaced by Hindu nationalism. It is strange how mob frenzy continues to be created by the members of Bajran Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad and RSS. All these activities led to major riots in the city of Jaipur in the wake of Rath Yatra undertaken by Lai Kishun Advani and terminated with the demolition of Babri Masjid.

News articles in the regional Hindi and English press report the involvement of the Rajasthan State Agriculture Minister, Mr Tayyab Hussain, with Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence(ISI). The reports stem from the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s complaint to the Chief Minister’s complicity in cow slaughter by the Meo Muslims. The media reporting is only a part of the much deeper and far more disturbing phenomenon of a deliberate creation of ethnic tension, conflict and frenzy. The evidence in this regard is overwhelming in the decade after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Tayyab Hussain, son of Meo leader Yasin Khan, denies any involvement and calls for a CBI probe. The Meo Panchayat also denies involvement. Today Meos flock to Tablighi Jama’at for security, anchorage and mental peace.

Therefore it is my appeal to everybody who reads this letter to donate any amount, even one dollar to the Tablighi Jama’at of Rajasthan, through their offices in the USA and Canada. Although such a donation will be a drop in the ocean, it will uplift the Meos’sinking morale and spirit.