New Delhi: “Should we shave our beards, start punishing ourselves for being born Muslim?” asks Firuz Khan, a young graduate living in Surat, as he looks at the Gujarat Police’s new ‘anti-radicalisation’ Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) being widely shared on social media.
On June 15, Praful Vaniya, Superintendent of Police (Intelligence) in the Gujarat State Police Service (SPS), issued a notice announcing the arrival of the new Anti-Radicalisation Cell (ARC). The notice also provides a step-by-step identification, prevention, detection, intervention and re-integration checklist that the police has in mind.
The SOP for Gujarat’s newly operationalised ARC claims to lay down ways to assess and decode behavioural indicators for identifying ‘radicalised’ individuals – but the details listed seem exclusively focused on Muslim radicals, conflate Muslim religious practices with security threats, and are silent on any markers of Hindu radicalism of the kind the state witnessed in 2002 and after or the rest of India has witnessed over the past decade.
From monitoring beards and niqabs to seeing Middle East travels as suspicious, from questioning the use of Signal for messaging to watching those supporting Muslim rights on social media, the SOP appears designed to penalise common Muslims – and is silent on the violent activities of cow vigilantes and the calls by Hindutva radicals for the boycott and even killing of Muslims.
Who is a ‘radicalised person’?
“A radicalised person refers to an individual affecting law and order in the State who, driven by extremist (‘kattarpant’) ideologies, engages in anti-national activities to harm the unity and integrity of the nation, creates an atmosphere of fear among the people, and try to manipulate a sane/rational person to get them to convert their religion” – these are the exact words of the notice, seen by The Wire.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.