I believe my views on ‘Miyah poetry’ in the Assam context have been misunderstood by some and are being frantically misrepresented by others who passionately invoke abstract rights without thinking of the context. People who are attacking me in print should visit some immigrant Muslim villages and ask people what they think of the work that my colleagues and I have been doing for decades. In most cases, they are likely to say fervently that God will bless me and my colleagues for our efforts to prevent harm to them. Obviously, this trust and confidence have not come out of thin air.
What is the context that I am speaking of now? In Assam, things were slowly returning to normalcy after decades of blind conflict between different ethnic groups. The National Register of Citizens(NRC) is now being used by powerful forces to inflict legal and administrative atrocities in order to arouse blind passions once again. The young men and women who espouse the Cause were too young at that time to really grasp the vicious complexity of those days. The army and the Central Reserve Police Force had gone about it in their blunt ruthless manner unsuited to such a situation and causing greater embitterment.
It was the sane and wise Muslim clerical leaders – at a time when Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind had not yet split into two – who understood the danger and responded to civil society initiatives to restore peace and call saner elements for dialogue and understanding. Perhaps in a knee-jerk reaction to wild terror-tactics by various insurgent groups, practically all significant news from Assam was blacked out in the national media. Even when we addressed a press conference before a packed audience at the Press Club in Delhi, nothing appeared next day in their columns except in The Hindu – which did not then have a wide circulation in the north. So people in Assam were left to their own resources in restoring peace.