“My daughter, in Standard VIII, wakes up at odd hours of night, asking for her father,” says Sama, wife of former Aam Aadmi Party councillor Tahir Hussain, who is languishing in jail under draconian UAPA since February 2020 in connection with the northeast Delhi violence cases.
Sama was speaking to senior journalist Ajaz Ashraf for Mid-Day daily.
“My second son, in Standard XII, no longer orders food from outside; my daughter, in Standard VIII, wakes up at odd hours of night, asking for her father. He has lost so much weight in tension,” Sama said to the newspaper, pointing to her elder Shariq who awaits his BCom results.
“Tahir seems to have slipped into depression. During the five-minute call permitted daily, he harps on being accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime he says he is incapable of even conceiving,” read Ajaz Ashraf’s column “And Tahir Hussain: Victim as villain.”
There are a dozen cases against Hussain, a prominent local politician in the northeast region. Many international and national rights groups and rights activists have been demanding the release of Hussain and other Muslim activists who were arrested under draconian UAPA in connection with the Delhi violence.
Two days ago, the Delhi High Court issued notice on a petition for quashing criminal proceedings against Hussain. The court issued notice on Hussain’s petition, granting the counsel for the respondents time to file their reply, and directed the listing of the matter along with other petitions on January 25, 2023, Indian Express reported.
“Dad never had communal sentiments,” Hussain’s son Shariq said.
“If he were communal-minded, would he have resided on the Hindu side of the road that separates it from Muslim quarters at Khajuri Khas? Would 60 per cent of his employees have been Hindu? Would he have hosted over 1,000 guests every Holi and Diwali?” read Ashraf’s article.
The article also claimed that the police actions and media trials badly affected Hussain’s business. There were at least 200 employees with Hussain before his imprisonment.
The article read: “The company was in the retail fixture business, which entailed making showrooms countrywide for a slew of multinational companies. In 2019-2020, Tahir paid R5 lakh as income tax, a spectacular achievement for one who entered business as a 14-year-old. The infamy maliciously scripted for Tahir ruined his business, as did the Enforcement Directorate investigations probing the sources of his funding. His personal and company’s accounts were frozen. Employees left. MNCs stopped replying to Usman’s mails, and their executives refused to meet him even when he went to their offices. Tahir was now a pariah, for scripting the riots that brought India into disrepute. His MNC clients held back dues running into lakhs, apprehensive the ED would question them about the payments made. The problem of liquidity became so acute that the family had a tough time raising money for paying the fees of Tahir’s two children studying in an elite Delhi school—and for covering legal expenses.”
