BHOPAL: A year after his request for a month’s stay with Abu Salem at Navi Mumbai’s Taloja Central Jail was rejected by the state government, Madhya Pradesh bureaucrat Niyaz Khan recently travelled to the don’s hometown to learn about his childhood days – purportedly to complete a fiction novel, Love Demands Blood.
The 1999 batch state administrative services officer visited Saraimeer, hometown of the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts convict, in Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh last week. The visit has annoyed the ruling BJP, with the party’s national vice president Prabhat Jha even questioning the official’s nationality over his efforts to pen a novel inspired by Abu Salem and Monica Bedi’s love life.
According to sources in Saraimeer, 800 km from Bhopal, Khan walked with local residents through the alleys of the town, visiting places where Salem spent his childhood. Khan, a deputy secretary in the state secretariat at Bhopal, visited the old and new houses of Salem’s family in Pathani Tola locality but could not meet Salem’s relatives as they did not wish to discuss the don’s early life.He also visited the motorbike repair shop of Anwar Bulletwallah where Salem worked as a teenager before fleeing to Mumbai via Delhi.
Expressing displeasure over the development, BJP’s Rajya Sabha member and former chief of the party’s MP unit, Prabhat Jha, questioned Khan’s intentions in writing the novel and visiting the jailed don’s hometown.“The entire country wants that the state government look into this matter and act appropriately as this amounts to idolization of anti-national Abu Salem as a hero,” Jha told TNIE over phone.
Khan says his novel is an action thriller inspired by the love life of Salem and Bedi.
When asked about his visit to Abu Salem’s hometown, he said: “The fiction novel is nearly complete and I visited Saraimeer only to cross-check facts. I went for novel-related research work after being duly sanctioned leave by my superiors in the state government. As any other Indian citizen, I too enjoy the constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression. Let the novel be out next month, people will themselves see that a law-abiding citizen like me can never even dream of glorifying people like Abu Salem.”
Khan has already penned four novels: Destiny in Drugs, Untold Secrets of My Ashram, Confessions At Black Grave, and Talaq Talaq Talaq, a novel on triple talaq which angered the Muslim community in Madhya Pradesh last year.