Pune: A community panchayat of Shia Muslims has been booked for alleged social boycott of a 35-year-old man in Junnar taluk.
Hamidul Hasan Mohammad Sayyad, who has been ostracised since last April, said he was falsely accused by the Shia Madrasa Trust of financial irregularities, where he worked as a helper between January and November 2015.
However, no police complaint was filed against Mr. Sayyad, who runs a grocery store.
In 2012, he had protested a child marriage within the community, and even filed a police complaint. This action, Mr. Sayyad claimed, raised the hackles of the community panchayat members.
In April 2016, a letter demanding Mr. Sayyad’s boycott was put up at Shia Jama Masjid, which was followed by a resolution passed by the panchayat to socially ostracise him and his family.
“The trust functions like a community panchayat, acting as a law unto itself. They never proved their accusations against me; yet they excluded me and my family from festivals like Muharram,” said Mr. Sayyad.
He had lodged a complaint with the Junnar police. Finally, an FIR under Section 3 of the Maharashtra Prohibition of People from Social Boycott (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2016, and section 506 [criminal intimidation] of the Indian Penal Code was lodged against the panchayat on Monday night, said activists of the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti (MANS).
This marks the first instance of a case lodged under the Act against a Muslim community panchayat.
Nandini Jadhav of the MANS told The Hindu that the police initially dragged their feet despite Mr. Sayyad furnishing solid evidence of his boycott.
“We secured statements [on stamp paper] from a number of people who testified to his boycott along with video evidence. One of the 33 members of the panchayat, who signed the resolution, later testified that he had been forced to sign the document, and that the ‘tribunal’ was indeed harassing Mr. Sayyad,” said Ms. Jadhav.
A number of cases has been filed under the Act with the MANS, the brainchild of late rationalist Narendra Dabholkar. In July, aided by the MANS, the first FIR under the Act was filed by the Kondhwa police in Pune after some members of Telugu Madelwar Parit community filed a complaint against harassment by their caste tribunal.
