July 20, 1998

Muslim youth oppose a diktat against TV and radio.

By Udayan Namboodiri

The Brazilian Samba has provoked blasphemy in a Bengal village. One midnight last week, Nazrul Islam left the bed of his new bride and walked out into the paddy fields of his Raika village in Garbeta One block of Midnapore district. Several other young men of his village had already collected inside a tea shop on the main road, where a small black-and-white TV set had been rigged up with power from a 12-volt battery. It was all hush hush -- they were breaking a fatwa against watching TV and listening to radio. "At the end of each game the frustration at our isolation only grows," says Islam.

Across a cluster of villages in the district this World Cup season, young men like Islam, Habib, Khaled Mohammed and their friends are telling the wise old men to go take a jump. For some years now, the writ of the local imam, Abdur Rahim, has been ruthlessly implemented by a clutch of moral policemen. They would like girls to stay at home and prepare for marriage at 14 and the boys to grow beards and cut themselves off from the world of the "infidels". Even newspapers and magazines are banned because even if they made fine reading, the advertisements they carry are vulgar. "The mass media makes people lewd and adulterous," says Sheikh Moni, a village elder.

But France 98 came and upset the applecart of the mullahs as about 10 youngsters got together and decided to hire a TV and battery set. It's kept in a "secret place" but everybody, including Imam Rahim, knows about its existence. Islam and his friends, however, are beyond caring. "Who do they think they are? Why should we be denied the pleasure of watching Ronaldo in action?" The imam retorts: "Actually it's the fascination for the girls in the soap ads that draws these boys to the TV."

Till some years ago, Muslims of the area were not allowed to vote. But in the panchayat elections last May, they voted in a CPI(M)-controlled village body which even has a Muslim BJP elected member. Clearly, the winds of change are blowing. But Raika may be an isolated case of simmering protest. Apparently, a similar fatwa is in force in at least 20 villages of the state. Most have come under the spell of petro-dollar rich imams. Over the past two decades, splendid mosques have come up in these remote villages. The military intelligence of the Eastern Command attributes it to "ISI influence". Says a senior officer: "The porous border with Bangladesh makes it easy for Pakistani agents to mingle with the local Muslim population and influence their lives with money power."

Whatever the real reason, Raika's 140 Muslim households send a message of hope to the Islamic orthodoxy trying to cripple rural West Bengal's 21 per cent Muslim population. The local CPI(M) and BJP units know about the stirrings of a new age in Raika but prefer to offer only lip support.

From Islampur in the north to Raika in the deep south, West Bengal has too many mini Saudi Arabias for the Marxist Government's comfort. By failing to actively support the youth of Raika who are using the World Cup to register a minor protest, the well-entrenched Marxist apparatchik undermines its secular professions by hesitating to attack a fundamentalism that keeps Bengal's rural Muslims trapped in the middle ages.

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