How Tablighi Jamaat activity was the worst coronavirus vector in India

New Delhi, India – The headquarters of the Muslim missionary organization, the Tablighi Jamaat, is full of twists and turns every day in narrow streets of the capital New Delhi’s Nizamuddin neighbourhood, with hundreds of Jamatis pouring into and out of the five-story structure.
Yet, on March 22, officials locked down their doors-with about 2,500 Jamatis already inside. After it appeared that the biggest coronavirus outbreak in India was affected by a spiritual meeting held by the community on March 13–15.

There was no screening even when there were reports that some people with a history of travel to the Markaz had been found corona positive. A day after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi enforced a national lockdown to handle the pandemic, officials only started screening
people staying at the Markaz from March 26. On March 22, the Markaz gates, which also serves as a dormitory for hundreds of preachers from around the world, were locked after the Delhi city-state government imposed curbs on people’s movement.

Nobody will go out any longer,

said the 64-year-old Jamadi Mohammad Jaynul Abdin, who was inside the house. He was among 2,361 people evacuated by the government from March 30 to April 1. Abdin, a former headteacher of an Islamic school in Assam’s northeastern district, has been transferred to an isolation ward at Rajiv Gandhi Super Specialty Hospital in New Delhi.

They keep putting a needle through my nose. How many more can they test?

he said in a phone call from the hospital, moaning about the
samples being collected from the medical swab.

Virus panic across India

Meanwhile, a large part of India was in a panic as state governments began a massive search to identify all those who visited Markaz and the people got contact with them. As of Monday 12th April 2020, more than 25,000 Jamaat leaders and their associates had been quarantined across nearly 15 Indian nations.

Our doubling rate is currently 4.1 days, but if additional cases reported due to the Tablighi Jamaat had not occurred, then the
doubling rate would have been 7.4 days,

said Lav Agarwal, Joint Secretary in India’s Health Ministry, to reporters on Sunday.

Unfortunately, people are calling it a conspiracy and using terms like Corona Jihad. FAIZAN MUSTAFA, CONSTITUTIONAL EXPERT But experts have warned that India is not testing enough people, with an average of 93 tests per million people.

It soon became apparent that most of the infected people, including more than 1,000 foreigners, had travelled to Markaz before dispersing 1,3 billion people to different parts of the country. In the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, of a total of 610 COVID-19 cases, at least 570 were linked to the Markaz event.

The state government asked the members of Tablighi Jamaat

to identify themselves, and more than 500 participants came forward. In Telangana, one of the worst affected states, all 11 deaths were linked to the New Delhi congregation. At least 265 Jamaat members and their contacts were tested positive.

KT Rama Rao, Minister of the Telangana Government, told Al Jazeera that the state had a complete list of attendees and that almost all of them and their contacts had been tracked. The state’s director general of police, Damodar Gautam Sawang, told Al Jazeera in Andhra Pradesh that 100 participants were contaminated along with 25 others who had come into contact with them. Of the state’s 260 cases, 243 had ties to the Jamaat congregation.

We use social influencers, religious and community leaders to convince people who are hesitant to become admitted to quarantine or
isolation wards,

Sawang said. In Assam, authorities initially found it difficult to classify cases of viruses because families would not have accepted that attendants had returned to the state.

By Sunday, at least 25 tested positive and state health officials did not rule out the possibility of community spread. More than 400
people have been quarantined out of the 835 who attended the Markaz event. Jamaat accused of negligence The authorities in the Delhi Government accused Tablighi Jamaat of ignoring their order, which prohibited the assembly of more than 50 people.

In a 28-minute audio clip of a sermon on Markaz’s YouTube channel on March 19, Jamaat Chief Maulana Saad called coronavirus an “azaab” (God’s punishment) and asked his followers to run to the mosques. He also claimed that people gathering in the mosque would lead to more infections, such as “baatil khayal” (falsehood) In a later clip, however,

he urged his followers to follow the government guidelines on the pandemic.

As pressure builds, the Delhi Police Crime Branch registered a case on March 31 under the British-era Epidemic Diseases Act, charging
Maulana Saad and Markaz management with defying the government’s social distancing rules. The law provides for six months’ imprisonment or a fine of 1,000 rupees ($14) or both.

Dismissing the rumours that Saad was hiding, Mujeeb-ur-Rehman, his lawyer and Jamaat’s spokesperson, said he responded to the court summons by saying that he was in self-quarantine and his whereabouts were known to the authorities. Meanwhile, the Jamaat statement claimed that the entry of participants had been halted immediately after restrictions had been announced by the authorities on 22 March.

Rehman pointed out that it was unfair to target the Jamaat alone.

On March 13, the Ministry of Health stated that it was not a health emergency. The attitude of the people in Gurudwaras (Sikh temples), temples and other religious places were also the same that it was not an emergency. It was the same attitude to the Markaz,

he said, adding that many people from within the country were actually encouraged to travel back to their home country. In the absence of screening, many of them carried the virus back home, a fact the government only woke up to towards the end of March.

There was no screening, even when there were reports that some people with a history of travel to the Markaz had tested positive,

Rehman said ‘There was no response’

After the Janta Curfew (public curfew) on March 22, Rehman said Jamaat officials got in touch with local officials, requesting permission to move.

On March 25, the Markaz officials met the Sub-Divisional Magistrate and demanded passes. There was no response,”

Rehman said.

Tablighi Jamaat has been as careless as the authorities of the country,

Rehman said to Al Jazeera.

On Thursday, the government blacklisted 960 foreign nationals for violating the visa requirements. According to government reports, as many as 2,100 foreign nationals have been visiting India since March for the Tablighi events. Yet, as recently as early as March, only tourists from a few countries, including China yet Italy, had been tracked.

Between 27 February and 1 March, several Jamaat leaders entered India after attending a large congregation at the Sri Petaling Mosque in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which later emerged as the source of several hundred COVID-19 infections in Southeast Asia.
About 16,500 people attended the Kuala Lumpur gathering and kick-started the outbreak in both Malaysia and Brunei, with cases traced back to Cambodia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines.

The first incident that the government should have warned came on March 16, when a group of Indonesian preachers was taken to an isolation ward in Telangana’s capital, Hyderabad. The first one of them tested positive the next day. By 21 March all 10 had been tested positive.

On March 26, a preacher in Indian-administered Kashmir who had no travel history died.

Islamophobia Faizan Mustafa, a constitutional expert, said the Jamaat did not act properly and ignored the writing on the wall after the Indian preachers in Telangana tested positive.

Since its establishment in 1926, Jamaat has remained an apolitical organization and works to inspire Muslims to practice Islam as it is
believed to have been practised at the time of Prophet Mohammed.The mass media vilified the party for its “carelessness,” and blamed the country’s 200 million Muslims for spreading the virus that killed more than 70,000 people worldwide.

Corona Jihad trended on Twitter, with various ruling members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) branding the religious meeting “corona jihad” -a word many said pointed at the governing party’s Islamophobia

A central minister called a “Talibani violence” gathering the Markaz

Tweets with # CoronaJihad appeared nearly 300,000 times and was theoretically seen by 165 million people since March 28,
according to a study in Time magazine.

It was founded by Maulana Muhammad Ilyas Kandhlawi in the Mewat region of north Haryana. Maulana Saad, his current President, is the great-grandson of Kandhalawi.

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