By Rokibuz Zaman / Scroll
The sealing of a private museum in Assam on Tuesday dedicated to showcasing the culture of the marginalised Bengali-origin Miya community and the arrest of three men associated with the exhibition on terror charges marks yet another skirmish in the state’s culture and identity wars.
Assam’s Bharatiya Janata Party government and a section of state’s people believe that this assertion of identity by Bengali-origin Muslims is an attempt to create divisions in Assamese society.
State Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma asked how the Miya could be counted as a distinct ethnicity. “They have to answer this in the forums made by the Assam government,” he said at a press conference on Tuesday. “Is there any community in the name of Miya?”
Among the three men taken into custody was M Mohar Ali, who had spent Rs 7,000 to set up the museum in his home in lower Assam’s Goalpara district just two days earlier. The Assam government on Tuesday afternoon sealed his home, claiming that he has wrongly used premises allotted to him under a government scheme.
Hours before the space was sealed, Assam Chief Minister Sarma had in Guwahati threatened police action against the people who set up the museum. He demanded that they provide proof that the items displayed were used exclusively by Miya people. Sarma criticised the propagation of Miya poetry, a Miya school and the Miya museum.
BJP state leaders and several MLAs had demanded that the museum be shut down.
Terror links alleged
After the space was sealed on Tuesday, the police detained the three men from three different districts in the state, claiming that they were associated with terror outfits. They were formally arrested on Wednesday and sent to two-day police custody.
Ali is the president of an organisation called the Asom-Miyan (Asomiya) Parishad, an organisation from Golapara. It has been established “to preserve and showcase the culture of Miya people”, who live mostly on the chars or sandbanks in the Brahmaputra and its tributaries.
Also taken into custody were the group’s general secretary Abdul Baten Sheikh and Tanu Dhadumia, who was at the inauguration event on October 23.
GP Singh, the special director general of Assam Police, said in a tweet that the three will be questioned about alleged links with the Ansarullah Bangla Team and Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent in relation with a case registered at the Ghograpar police station in Nalbari district.
They have been charged under provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and Indian Penal Code sections pertaining to criminal conspiracy and collecting arms with the intention of waging war against the Union government.
The museum contained traditional agricultural tools such as the plough, gamusa (a traditional hand-woven garment) and bamboo fishing gear. The items were exhibited in the home he had been allotted in Dapkarvita village under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana Gramin (PMAY-G).
Before he was arrested, Ali had told the media that people who do not support the preservation of the culture of the Miya community are “anti-Assamese”.
“Miya is a part of the Assamese community,” he told a local television channel. “We have urged the state government to keep the items used by the Miya people in the Srimanta Sankardeva Kalakshetra”, a cultural complex in Guwahati.
This story was originally published in scroll.in . Read the full story here