By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Mar 28 2003 (IPS)

The brief detention of a key Muslim leader in India and his supporters outside the Kuwait Embassy soon after Friday prayers this week, seemed to signal the start of a new phase of anti-war agitations in this country, home to 120 million Muslims.

Arrested was Shahi Imam (Imperial Prelate) Syed Ahmed Bukhari, the descendent of a long line of hereditary imams who have led Friday prayers at the historic 17th century Jama Masjid here, built by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan.

He had invoked the wrath of ”Allah and the entire Muslim world ” on Kuwait for facilitating the U.S.-led war on its larger neighbour, Iraq.

Bukhari, who commands respect not only in India but among Muslims across the vast subcontinent, later released along with his supporters but not before he let it be known that as far as he was concerned, Washington was out to decimate Muslims across the world.

”America supports the massacre of Muslims in Palestine, it has massacred our brothers in Afghanistan and now it is doing the same in Iraq,” Bukhari thundered at the pulpit before marching out of his cavernous marble and sandstone mosque to the Kuwait Embassy – and to certain arrest.

Bukhari’s dramatic gesture was one of the more visible protests in the capital city where protests against the war in Iraq have, so far, been somewhat muted compared to that in other provincial capitals with large Muslim concentrations such as Lucknow in northern Uttar Pradesh state, Bhopal in central Madhya Pradesh and Hyderabad in Andhra Pradesh.

Protests have also been loud in Bangalore, an acknowledged technology hub where they are being led by groups of scientists and engineers and in Kolkata, capital of the Marxist stronghold of West Bengal state.

To Bangalore goes the credit of launching a Gandhian-style boycott of British and U.S.-made goods as the best way to get the message home that people in this former British colony regard the war in Iraq essentially as recrudescence of imperialism.

Said Basavaraju, secretary of the All-India People’s Science Network (APSN) in Bangalore: ”Our programmes have so far been successful but we are convening a meeting of various organisations on Monday to chalk out a plan for future agitations.”

Basavaraju explained the anti-war initiatives taken by groups in Bangalore to the presence there of a large number of scientists and software professionals, many of whom have had exposure to the United States.

”Besides, most of us here have good Internet connections and are constantly in touch with each other over e-mail,” he said.

Sabyasachi Chatterjee,a member of the AIPSN, who teaches astrophysics at the prestigious Indian Institute of Science, observed that Britain, which has traditionally enjoyed the goodwill of people in India after the peaceful transfer of power in 1947, is now rapidly losing it.

”Much of the goodwill that Britain enjoys in this country is now evaporating,” he said pointing to a demand for the expulsion of Britain from the Commonwealth, an association of former British colonies that many say is far overshadowed by the U.S-British alliance leading the war.

In Bangalore, a group of citizens have holding peaceful demonstrations and candlelight vigils in protests against the war in front of the British Trade Office and the British Council Library

”These offices are the only British establishments in this city and we are trying to organise similar demonstrations at consular and other offices across the country,” Chatterjee said.

With London unmoved, the APSN, the People’s Health Movement (PHM) and other civil society groups have sent letters to other Commonwealth countries explaining why they are calling for Britain’s expulsion form the grouping.

”By going to war without consulting member countries, Britain has violated a founding principle of the Commonwealth – democratic process of decision-making,” their letter said. It noted that Britain had, by joining the U.S.-led war, violated the charter of the United Nations, which had ”facilitated the liberation of many countries form the clutches of colonial powers in the past and is respected in these countries”.

Friday’s biggest protests were reported from India’s only Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, where a two-day general strike called by the Jamaat Ul Mujahideen group turned violent after Friday prayers. Police used tear gas and batons to disperse a procession attempting to get to the United Nations Military Observers Group (UNMOG) in Srinagar.

The UNMOG was set up to monitor the ceasefire line or Line of Control (LoC), drawn up where the armies of Indian and Pakistan fought each other to a standstill in the first of series of wars fought by the two neighbours over possession of Kashmir more than 50 years ago.

Pakistan has been accused by India of being behind last Sunday’s killing of 24 Hindus in Kashmir, which has been called yet another ethnic cleansing act that has resulted in the exodus of nearly all of the 400,000 Hindus from the state since 1989.

Islamabad has denied involvement in the violence. But in a joint statement, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw once again asked Pakistan to take steps to check cross-border infiltration across the Line of Control.

Such support by Britain and the United States for India’s position on Kashmir, based essentially on respect for the LoC, is valued by the Indian government and is at least partly responsible for the reluctance of the central government led by right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to openly criticise the invasion of Iraq.

The pro-Islamic groups and anti-war intellectuals are, however, finding support from the powerful opposition Congress party, which led India to independence in 1947 and which runs 15 provincials governments across the country, as well as among the left-wing parties.

”India has a tradition of support to countries defending their national sovereignty against imperial aggression,” said a joint statement by former prime ministers Deve Gowda, Inder Kumar Gujral and Vishwanath Pratap Singh, who will lead a nationwide protest on Mar 31.

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