The road outside the stone archway of the brick and concrete mosque is usually bustling with shoppers. But on 20 March it witnessed protests against the arrest of two town imams. With authorities in the Valley moving to keep tabs on the ‘anti-India’ sermons in mosques, clerics are facing facing greater scrutiny by the police, detention and even arrest.
The authorities denied a passport to Bashir Ahmad Azim, head of a local Auqaf Committee of Pulwama, a religious body that manages the mosques, after at least five cases were registered against him for spurring ‘anti-India’ activities through his speeches at the grand mosque in Pulwama. Bashir, who crops a salt and pepper beard and bushy eyebrows, said he couldn’t go on Hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca, after he was denied a passport. “I applied for the passport last year,” he said, sitting on the steps of the mosque. “We are being asked by the police not to give sermons or speeches in the mosques that would fan anti-India sentiment.”
Masrat Ahnad, Station House Officer (SHO), Pulwama Police Station, said he can’t comment on why the passport was denied to Bashir. “ I am not in a position to comment as the decisions were taken by the higher authorities,” he added.
Only a few miles away from the road of the grand mosque, where the vendors sell prayer beads, skull caps, perfume and incense on rope beds and plastic sheets, the house of 60-year-old imam Peerzada Mohammad Amin was surrounded by security forces on 19 March. “It was around 11 pm, when I was awakened by a thud outside. As I drew the curtain, I saw that security forces had climbed the wall of our house. One police officer came inside my home and asked me to accompany him to the police station. I couldn’t understand the urgency of the raid and went with him. It was only next afternoon that I was released after the people protested,” he said, sitting in a small room of Washbugh mosque, where religious books are stacked up on a steel trunk along with Quran on a book rest.