Name Calling

The Name And A Town’s Shame

• The residents of the coastal town of Bhatkal in Karnataka are miffed when it is referred to as a ‘terror exporter’ or a ‘bomb factory’
• Bhatkal’s infamy stems from being the hometown of the brothers Riyaz and Iqbal who are said to be running the Indian Mujahideen (IM)
• The real surname of the infamous brothers is not Bhatkal. It is Shahbandari. The Bhatkal tag is the creation of the police, intelligence, the media
• Though dominated by Muslims, there is communal harmony. There has been no communal incident since 1993. Now said to be a Hindutva ‘laboratory’.
• Residents say Bhatkal’s notoriety has led to Muslims from the town being discriminated and boycotted in other parts of India

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The people of this flourishing coastal trading town in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka feel insulted and unequivocally condemn this manufactured reputation, the dubious production, they say, of the police, the intelligence agencies and some sections of the media. Bhatkal town is dominated by Navayathi Muslims, who speak Konkani, and are believed to have arrived for trade, over a thousand years ago, from the Middle East. There are close to a 100 mosques in the town. But Bhatkal taluka is predominantly Hindu. The town has a history of some communal tension. Even so, since the post-Babri riots of 1992-93, which claimed 18 lives, there has been no communal violence. The communities freely intermingle and are dependent on each other: 90 per cent of the maids in Muslim houses are Hindu; so are most of the autorickhaw drivers. Not restricting itself to Muslims, the Islamic bank in town gives interest-free loans to poor non-Muslims too.

Then why the undeserved opprobrium? The police and central and state intelligence agencies began it by calling the two brothers running the IM the “Bhatkal brothers”, using the town’s name as the brothers’ surname. But neither do the brothers bear that surname—their real surname is Shahbandari—nor is it the practice by and large for townsfolk to add ‘Bhatkal’ or ‘Bhatkali’ to their name or use them as surnames. The police recently appended one more name to the IM list, Yasin. And though he’s no relation to the brothers, his full name too is given out as Yasin Bhatkal.

“Why embarrass the whole town by calling them ‘Bhatkals’?” asks S.M. Syed Khalil, an NRI businessman and chairman of the Anjuman group of educational institutions. “All kinds of nonsense is being written about the town and the Muslims here. We are being called a terror hub when in fact our doors are always open and our mosques anyway have no doors.” He explains that Navayathi Muslims generally use family names (a common practice in south India) or surnames like ‘Shahbandari’, ‘Ruknuddin’, ‘Mohtesham’ or ‘Ikkery’.

Raza Manvi, a school teacher and journalist, recollects that a couple of years ago, a local paper alleged that some mosques in Bhatkal were dens for bomb-making. Police found no evidence. The then deputy SP, Dr C.B. Ved Murthy, had inspected the mosques. Manvi says, “We realised this was part of the Sangh parivar’s campaign to make coastal Karnataka a Hindutva laboratory.”

Surendra Shanbag, of Seva Vahini, a social organisation, says, “Clearly, there are elements in political parties and the media trying to drive a wedge between the communities.” Seva Vahini promotes harmony. For social work and education, it has tied up with Rabita, a Muslim voluntary group. The two groups met on July 17 to discuss the smear campaign against the town, about which anyone you meet in Bhatkal is hurt.

An insensitive BJP government has chosen just this disturbed atmosphere to introduce a police beat that Muslims are calling “communal profiling”. “The beat system was meant to be a joint effort of the police and the community to improve security,” says Parvez Kashimji, head of the century-old social organisation Majlise Islam Tanzim. “But using that leverage, the police started going from one Muslim household to another, seeking details of family members, their income details, their passport and vehicle numbers, things like that. This was an indirect way of warning us and profiling us. We have thoroughly resisted this.” The Uttara Kannada district SP, R. Ramesh, thinks Muslims are being alarmist and misconstruing systems that had the best of intentions. But some policemen admit the practice is unwise as local Muslims would associate it with similar exercises of the BJP government in Gujarat, profiling Muslims, especially pre-Godhra.

Red-flagging Bhatkal as a ‘terror factory’ has had serious implications for the locals. Naseef Ikkery, member of the Jali gram panchayat, says Muslims from Bhatkal are routinely pulled aside at airport immigration queues for interrogation, not given hotel rooms in other cities, looked on with intense suspicion. “It hurts,” he says. “We are traders and travel quite a lot. Being viewed with suspicion has a demoralising effect. Can two people destroy our entire town’s reputation?” For this well-to-do business community, with a strong remittance economy from workers abroad, always travelling, such attention is continual—and oppressive. Many businessmen fear that soon, other well-to-do Muslim towns will also be slandered.

Bhatkalis emphasise that there’s much harmony in their town. Advocate Victor Francis Gomes says not a single case related to communal violence is before the Bhatkal Class I judicial magistrate’s court. The SP confirms there has been no major incident since 1993. “Whatever skirmishes took place in the past were acts of miscreants of both sides,” says Syed Hasan Barmawar, a social worker. “In fact, the tradition is that when the annual chariot festival of the Hanuman temple takes place, festivities begin only after the Chirkin Shahbandari family on Sultan Street gives its consent. This is because the family had helped restore the deity’s chariot during the British raj and ever since, Hindus have generously acknowledged the gesture.”

Of the IM brothers, local Muslims say the two never grew up in Bhatkal. They were raised in Mumbai. The family returned to Bhatkal around 2004. Iqbal, the elder brother, practised homoeopathy in town; Riyaz worked in a construction company in Mangalore. They had become Salafis, embracing an orthodox variety of Islam unfamiliar to most townsmen. Riyaz went missing around 2005, but Iqbal, they recall, was around when the German Bakery blasts happened in 2010. The third “Bhatkal”, Yasin, whose real surname is ‘Siddibapa’, had left town as a child for Dubai with his parents and never came back.

The parents of the two brothers, Shahida and Ismail Shahbandari, who live in Madina Colony with their seven grandchildren and two daughters-in-law, say: “Every time there is a blast, the police trace their steps to our house. If our sons have committed a crime, hang them. Why make us suffer like this? Even if a part of the money that the media has made writing about us was given to us, we wouldn’t be so poor. The police are using our children to cover up their inefficiency. Our children are shareef, educated. They ran away because they were being falsely implicated. They feared that if they were picked up by the police they would never come back alive. It is six years since we spoke to them. We came back here because this is our hometown, now our home has become our prison.”

The entire town feels that way. To that extent the Shahbandari family has company.

This version of the print magazine story has been corrected and edited before posting on line