IAMC Fundraising Event
Lives Interrupted!
Impact of law enforcement bias on Muslim youth
Keynote Speaker: Manisha Sethi
Assistant Professor, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
Associate Editor, Biblio: A Review of Books
President, Jamia Teachers' Solidarity Association
Manisha Sethi is Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Study of Comparative Religions and Civilizations, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her research interests are in the area of gender and religion, communalism, and law and terrorism. She has published extensively on these themes in academic as well as popular publications. She is currently Associate Editor, Biblio: A Review of Books, India’s premier book review journal, with which she has been associated for over a decade.
Sethi is the President of Jamia Teachers’ Solidarity Association, a civil rights group of teachers which was formed in the aftermath of the Batla House ‘encounter’. JTSA has been closely involved in a campaign against extra judicial killings and communal witchhunt by investigating agencies. JTSA conducts investigations, produces fact finding reports and provides legal aid.
Civil rights groups have been arguing for long that the investigations into bomb blasts and terror attacks have degenerated into communal witch-hunts. Bomb blasts are followed predictably by mass arrests of Muslim youth, raids in Muslim-dominated localities, detentions, arrests and torture; media trials, charge sheets and prosecution based on custodial confessions and little real evidence. It has been assumed, and accepted widely, that no further proof of guilt need be offered than the fact that the accused belonged to a particular community. Leads which pointed to the hands of groups affiliated to Sangh organizations and their complicity in planning and executing acts of terror were ignored, never seriously pursued. The agencies, showing their abject bias, instead chose to pursue the beaten track of
investigating supposedly Islamic terrorist organizations—despite clear evidence pointing in the opposite direction.
Manisha Sethi will discuss the blatant subversion of due processes in the course of investigations and the impact such bias has on the lives of young people so targeted.
Indian-American Muslim Council (formerly Indian Muslim Council-USA) is the largest advocacy organization of Indian Muslims in the United States with 10 chapters across the nation. For more information please visit our new website at: www.iamc.com
For more information please contact Safeer Hashmi at 630-670-5942 or Sobaan Khan at 773.578.7839