Airport authorities have, for now, stopped the offering of prayers at a 136-year-old mosque in the Kolkata airport area of India’s West Bengal state. Prayers were held at the mosque last Friday, but last Saturday the main gate through which worshippers reach the mosque was closed. That gate is the entry path through Gate 8 of the airport, which is used to enter the mosque.
It is the first time a mosque has been closed since the Hindutva BJP government came to power in West Bengal. The BJP chief minister, Suvendu Adhikari, has supported the airport authorities’ move.
No prior notice was given, the mosque committee’s general secretary, Mohammad Jamiruddin, told local media. But airport authorities and the mosque committee have long been in talks to relocate the mosque, and it had been said in the past that a more spacious place would be given for it.
In a recent statement, the airport authorities said that, under international aviation-safety rules, a minimum distance of 240 meters is required between any structure and the runway or the flight path. The mosque, known as the “Bankra Airport Mosque,” is located 165 meters from the runway, they said, so it needs to be relocated.
In the statement, the authorities said the mosque was located inside the zone designated for the airport’s security, an area under the supervision of a central security force, the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF), which has long been responsible for the security of government installations in India and had objected to the structure in the past. Still, no large mosque had been closed in West Bengal before, nor had the offering of prayers been obstructed; this was the first time, on Saturday, that prayers were stopped at the Bankra Airport Mosque.
The issue is that Kolkata International Airport was established in 1924, whereas the mosque was established in 1890, that is, 34 years before the airport was built. The region was then part of undivided Bengal, and the mosque was built with the money of the village people. People from villages in what is now Satkhira in Bangladesh once came to offer prayers at this historic mosque, as did people from the Barrackpore subdivision of West Bengal, according to information found in an essay written on regional history. At that time the mosque was named the “Gouripur Jame Masjid”; its present name is the “Bankra Airport Mosque.” People from a wide area of North 24 Parganas district, adjacent to Bangladesh, still offer prayers at the mosque.
To ensure that the incident does not spread tension, the state president of Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind, India’s largest Muslim organization, Siddiqullah Chowdhury, has appealed to the mosque committee and all local social organizations. “The matter is regrettable, but no one will take to the streets over it. We do not want a fight with the BJP. We want the airport authorities to arrange for prayers at the mosque and to solve the problem through discussion. Forcibly shutting the mosque’s door was not the right thing to do,” he said. Siddiqullah Chowdhury, a former library minister of West Bengal, has appealed to various Muslim organizations, including Darul Uloom Deoband, the Muslim Personal Law Board and Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind, to sit down for talks on the matter.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report