Poison Politics

The Muharram plot uncovered by Mumbai Police deserves to rank among the gravest terror conspiracies thwarted in recent years. Investigators say that Fayyaz Premji, a Pune-based businessman, spent nearly two weeks in a Dongri hotel assembling thousands of capsules containing zinc phosphide, a highly toxic rodenticide, before allegedly distributing them to Shia mourners during Muharram as purported painkillers. Nearly 15,000 poisoned capsules were reportedly recovered from his hotel room. Eleven people fell ill after consuming some of those already distributed. Had the conspiracy unfolded on the scale allegedly intended, Mumbai could have witnessed a sectarian massacre of horrifying proportions.

The case has immediately acquired another dimension because of the political commentary surrounding it. Even before investigators have completed their inquiry, familiar voices have begun suggesting that the affair is somehow too convenient to be true. The case is politically awkward precisely because it refuses to fit India’s preferred ideological templates.

The intended victims were Shia Muslims. The alleged perpetrator had once belonged to the Khoja Shia community before publicly renouncing Islam and embarking upon an increasingly bitter campaign against Shia religious institutions. According to investigators, the motive appears rooted in sectarian hostility rather than the Hindu-Muslim polarisation that usually dominates India's political discourse.

For decades, India’s debate on communalism has become increasingly one-dimensional. Much attention has, understandably, been devoted to majoritarian politics and Hindu-Muslim relations. Yet sectarian violence within religious communities has rarely received comparable analytical attention despite its devastating record elsewhere. The Sunni-Shia schism has fuelled conflicts from Iraq and Syria to Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives over successive decades. It is among the oldest unresolved religious fault lines in the world.

India has largely avoided importing that conflict on any significant scale. But that does not mean the fault line does not exist.

The Mumbai case therefore deserves to be examined as a reminder that religious extremism wears many faces. It does not always conform to the narratives that dominate television studios or election campaigns. Sometimes its victims belong to the same broad religious community as its perpetrators.

This is also a moment for introspection among those who pride themselves on opposing communal politics. Genuine secularism cannot operate selectively. It cannot acknowledge only those forms of religious hatred that reinforce pre-existing political convictions while treating others as inconvenient anomalies.

More troubling still is the eagerness with which some commentators appear willing to transform an ongoing criminal investigation into another chapter of partisan warfare. To see every act of terror principally through the prism of electoral advantage is itself a form of communal politics.

The courts are the bodies to determine guilt. But if the allegations are ultimately sustained, India should recognise the conspiracy for what it was: not merely an attempted mass poisoning, but a warning that sectarian extremism is neither geographically distant nor historically extinct.