Over the past four months, some of Delhi’s most important monuments have been swarmed by the faithful offering prayers. The law is clear on the violations, the lawmakers are not
(An edited, shorter version of this article by me has appeared in Open magazine.)
Within the space of a week in March this year, just before Lok Sabha elections, mosques in some of Delhi’s most important monuments suddenly started having namaz again – after hundreds of years. Around 200 namazis broke into the Muhammadwali Masjid at Siri Fort on 17 March for Friday prayers; they did the same at the Sultanate-era Nili Masjid in Hauz Khas and at a small mosque at the entrance of the Qutub Minar complex – inside the ticketed area. On 23 March they started namaz at the Jamali Kamali mosque.
Who could have a problem with the devout following the call of the muezzin? A 1958 law does. The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act says that there can be no religious installation or worship where it had ceased. The law seeks to protect such “non-living” monuments for history’s sake. “Once worship or prayers starts, people start affecting the shape of the place,” says writer-filmmaker and die-hard Dilliwallah Sohail Hashmi. Despite FIRs filed by the Archeological Survey of India, the police is allowing namaz to carry on.
The common thread between the imams and maulvis of all the mosques being taken over is that they belong to the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, an organization of nationalist Muslims formed in 1919 in support of Gandhi’s Khilafat movement. All of them are also on the payrolls of the Delhi Wakf Board. The Delhi Wakf Board chairperson, Matin Ahmed, is the tallest Muslim leader of the Delhi state Congress. “Due to migration the Muslim population of Delhi has increased and there aren’t enough mosques,” says Ahmed, “How can I tell people not to pray at a mosque? And the properties the ASI is claiming as protected, we have Gazette notifications showing they are also under the Wakf. Tourists go there wearing shoes, what is the problem with namazis who pray barefoot? ”
The problem is pointed out by Hashmi. “Take the case of four mosques built by Juna Shah Telangani, a noble in the court of Firoze Shah Tughlaq (1309-1388),” Hashmi says. “Two of them are protected and two are not. You can see the difference.”
Kali Masjid in old Delhi’s Turkman Gate and a Jama masjid in Nizamuddin are not protected as they were living monuments in 1958 with daily namaz. Both mosques have been painted green, pink and blue, the Kali masjid has had marble chips added to the front gate, steel brackets with ceiling fans have been added, and so has cement-concrete construction. The domes of the Kali masjid has been painted green and several families live in the basement. “Who will recognize it today as the finest example of Tughlaq architecture?” asks Hashmi. In the Nizamuddin mosque, the ceiling of broken domes has been flattened, women are not allowed inside even to see the mosque and photography is also debarred.
On the contrary are other two of Telangani’s mosques which are under the ASI’s protection – one in Begumpur and the other in Khirki. The restoration work took place only very recently, its malba is still lying outside, people drink on the terrace, smack addicts huddle around a fire on winter evenings. “Such dereliction becomes ammunition for those wanting to revive prayers,” he says.
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In the late thirteenth century, when South Asia’s greatest Sufi saint Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti was leaving Delhi for Ajmer, he asked his disciple Qutubuddin Bakhtiar Kaki to follow him. The people of Mehrauli, which was all of Delhi then, said they would follow Kaki. Seeing this, Chishti asked Kaki to remain in Delhi. The Mehrauli area came to be known as ‘Qutub sahib’.
Niazmuddin Auliya was Kaki’s disciple’s disciple. It is in Mehrauli that Kaki died and was buried, and everyone from then to the time of Bahudur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal ruler, wanted to be buried near Kaki. Even today there are people who want Zafar’s remains to be brought from Rangoon and placed at the place in Mehrauli, Zafar palace, where Zafar wanted to be buried.
Mehrauli has seen a thousand years of building, and the remains that are being excavated and conserved even now are studied by historians to research such details as the mosque architecture, houses, domes and living practices and how they changed over a period of thousand years.
A number of Mehrauli’s monuments, still be excavated, conserved and studied, are in what is called the ‘Mehrauli Archaeological Park’. The most important is the mosque of Jamali Kamali, where a Sufi saint, Sheikh Jamaluddin is buried. The mosque marks an important link between the Sultanate and Mughal periods. Prayers are being held by around ten people every day, three times a day. On Fridays, there could be as many as 200 people. On Friday 24 July, we found a crowd of around hundred people eating biryani in paper plates. The jumma namaz just got over. Some men rush to us, preventing us from taking photographs. You can’t shoot us while we’re eating, they say, you haven’t taken permission from our imam. Namaz is being offered three times a day and nails have already started being hammered into the walls of the Jamali Kamali mosque. “If this is not stopped you will soon find a maulvi living here with his family,” says Hashmi.
ASI field officers who tried to file FIRs with the police were surprised to see the police inaction. It was only on 30 March after a letter was written to the Delhi police commissioner. On 24 July, when we visited Jamali Kamali and the Qutub Minar, we saw the police allowing namaz to take place. “We have taken legal action against whoever has broken the law,” says a Delhi Police spokesperson. Does this mean they will prevent further worship in these monuments? “We have taken legal action,” he repeats. His reluctance to speak beyond the five authorized words may be due to the involvement of ruling Congress politicians such as Matin Ahmed.
The Union culture secretary has written in this regard to the Lt. Governor of Delhi, Tejinder Khanna. “The LG has asked the Delhi police commissioner to strictly implement the prevailing law and maintain communal harmony,” says Ranjan Mukherjee, OSD in the LG’s secretariat.
With the ASI calling up the police every now and then, the imam at Jamali Kamali, Abdul Raziq, proceeded to meet the superintending officer of the Delhi circle of the ASI, Muhammed KK, explaining that they had been allowed by the Delhi Wakf Board. “He is a Muslim, yet he calls up the police to complain against us,” says Raziq. Muhammed, on his part, gave Raziq examples from his earlier postings, where he has refused to allow people to worship in churches, temples and most crucially, a maqbara in Sasaram, Bihar, where the Vishwa Hindu Parishad wanted to offer puja, claiming it to be a temple. But imam Raziq does not buy any of this. “A masjid is forever a masjid,” he insists, proudly showing a letter by Union Minorities Affairs minister Salman Khursheed asking Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit to look into the problems faced by them in offering namaz.
Around the Mehrauli Archaeological Park, other monuments have also been taken up too. At the Mandi mosque, we even found them cooking. At Rajon ki Baoli, the prayer mats are left even after the namazis leave – markers of a claim. An old, unidentified mosque that INTACH would have restored there is now a madarsa and a grave. Another large, unidentified building was taken over just before INTACH was going to start restoration, and yet another one which was taken over after restoration – whitewashed and painted, all signs of history removed.
At the Qutub Minar, the small mosque which historians say was probably once part of a Mughal-era sarai, has been whitewashed and painted for many years. A maulvi who sits there every day distributed talismans, says an ASI field officer. But the maulvi, Maulana Shair Mohammed, claims he’s been performing namaz for 33 years now, something the ASI denies. “They’re asking the namazis to buy tickets!” complains the maulvi.
There is an added problem at the Qutub Minar. The grand Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque there, on one side, has a small idol of what looks like Hanuman – no surprise because the mosque was built from the ruins of temples. The Bajrang Dal in 2001 wanted to worship the idol, and tp prevent that the ASI covered it with grills so thick the idol is hardly visible. Now again, around 50 Hindus from Mehrauli reached Quwratul Islam and demanded the right to worship the idol because namaz was allowed at the small mosque. An altercation between them and the namazis followed. More recently, the Jama Masjid’s Imam Abdullah Bukhar has also joined the cause.
“This has the potential to open a pandora’s box all over the country,” says the ASI’s KK Muhammed. “There will be demands from Buddhists at Ajanta, Hindus at Konark and Elephanta and in Ellora Hindus, Jains and Buddhists could all lay claim,” he says.
These events have raised the hackles of conservationists and historians. A release from SAHMAT, signed by the likes of Irfan Habib and DN Jha, has appealed to the Prime Minister, who is also in-charge of the culture ministry, to take action. The convenor of the Delhi chapter of INTACH, AGK Menon, points out the case of the Taj Mahal, which is closed on Fridays for prayer at its mosque. “If at all prayer is to be continued then it should be ensured that people don’t make any changes in the monument at all,” he says, adding that often there are encroachments in and around such places once regular prayers start.
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The namazis even point out that the ASI couldn’t be too bothered about conservation if its own Delhi circle office is inside Madarsa Safdarjung! Incidentally, Friday prayers are also held in Madarsa Safdarjung – they had once been allowed by an order from the prime minister’s office, remembers an old ASI hand. Haji Aminuddin knows very well how that happened. We meet him at his house , deep inside old Delhi’s Pahadi Imli Gali. In 1978 he was 15 or 16, he says, “when 10-12 of us kids got together and offered namaz at the Bhoori Bitiyari masjid”. The mosque was inside the campus of the Maulana Azad Medical College and the doctors would call the police. Prevented from offering namaz there they raised such a movement in old Delhi that the government had to not only allow them to offer namaz, but despite being arrested five times the members of what became the Masjid Basao Committee managed to get the land area around the mosque increased. Members of the committee became big Congress politicians, one became a Wakf board chairman and the Jama Masjid’s Abdullah Bukhari became its patron.
“I have more photographs than my weight,” says Aminuddin. These are photographs, mostly, with Congress politicians – you name them, he has them. He remembers well the day in 1983 when he met Indira Gandhi who asked him to support the Congress. Amongst the people who fought cases pro-bono for him was HL Bharadwaj, who later became union law minister. The Masjid Basao Committee of 1978 managed, over the next few years, to revive prayers in not only old the defunct old mosques of old Delhi but also Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque at the Qutub Minar in Mehrauli. He remembers how his group started prayers at ASI-protected Kotla Firoz Shah. “We took a welding machine and cut iron bars and entered. The ASI keeps getting them welded and the community keeps breaking in every now and then, even today,” he says. He is not aware that the mosque’s architecture was liked so much by the invading Timur the Lame that he took a map of it along with Delhi artisans to replicate it in central Asia.
The movement, he says, was later ‘hijacked’ by ‘elders’, but Aminuddin remains a prominent Muslim community ‘face’ in Delhi, invited regularly by politicians. The present Wakf board chairman, Matin Ahmed, is clearly not arguing for something history has not seen.
Eight convicted, three let off