Lucknow: Aligarh Police booked controversial Samajwadi Party leader Rubina Khanam Monday evening over allegations of “making objectionable statements against a community” after a viral video shows her allegedly saying Muslims should not be provoked.
“Don’t play with other people’s religion. That won’t bode well,” she’s heard saying in a video Monday morning. “The BJP government wants to make Hindus and Muslims fight. It is targeting Muslims for its politics of polarisation.”
Khanam’s Facebook profile says that she is the city president of Mahila Sabha, the SP’s women’s wing. She was in the news in February —as the hijab controversy was raging — for having said she would “chop off the hands of those who would touch the hijab”.
Khanam’s statements came at a time when there is an ongoing battle being waged over the use of loudspeakers at places of worship.
For context, the ABVP and the Hindu Mahasabha announced last week that they were going to install loudspeakers at 21 crossings in Aligarh to play Hanuman Chalisa. The controversy comes during the month of Ramzan.
On his part, Samajwadi Party spokesperson Rajendra Chowdhury told ThePrint that he was neither aware of Khanam nor what she had said.
“I don’t know about such a person and would not like to comment,” he said.
Also Read: ‘Now they know how it feels’: Varanasi man plays Hanuman Chalisa on loudspeaker during azaan
‘Don’t push us’
“This is a matter of our faith,” Khanam is heard saying in the video.“Loudspeakers have been installed at temples and masjids earlier too, and people have been following their own faith.”
It is “extremely wrong as it was happening during the pious month of Ramzan”, she says in the video.
“Humne mahilayon ne bhi choodiyan nahin pehen rakha hai (we women are not wearing bangles),” she says in a video she shared with the press. “We’ll lead from the front. Hundreds of us will sit in front of your temples and recite the Quran. And this will be done peacefully. We’re not like you.”
Muslims have no problems with using loudspeakers, she says in the video,
“I want to say that there is a temple right opposite the place where I am,” she says in the video. “They recite their ‘paath’ (prayer) for an hour in the morning and evening. Neither I nor any other Muslim has a problem with it. But I say, don’t tease Muslims. Don’t play with our faith, our sentiments.”
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The FIR
The FIR against Khaman says she has been booked under several provisions of the Indian Penal Code that deal with hate speeches: Sections 153A (promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, etc), 295-A (deliberate and malicious acts, intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs), 298 (uttering any word/making sound or gesture with deliberate intention of wounding religious feelings of any person) and 505 (making/publishing/circulating any statement, rumour or report).
Swetabh Pandey, circle officer III of Aligarh Police, told ThePrint that Khanam could be arrested if she did not cooperate with the investigation.
This isn’t Khanam’s first brush with controversy. She made headlines in February — right in the middle of a raging row over the hijab ban in Karnataka schools — when she promised “to chop off the hands of those who touched the hijab”.
Hijab and the ghungat were an integral part of Indian culture, she said, and “creating a controversy by politicising these issues was terrible”.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
Also Read: Muslims must give up azaan by loudspeakers. Even Prophet would have rejected it