The photos make it clear that there was plenty of room beside the road, and of course Toha Siddiqui could have waited until he got home, or broken his fast in his car. Instead, he chose to make a declaration of supremacism. Should anyone have remonstrated with him for blocking traffic, he would have been rebuked as “Islamophobic.” The public display of Islamic practice is the whole point: it’s a statement of presence and power.
“Mamata Banerjee’s close ceric [sic] Pirzada Toha Siddiqui holds Iftar feast on a road, Muslim netizens slam him calling it drama and hypocrisy,” OpIndia, April 5, 2023:
While the controversy around Namaz on roads and other public places keeps appearing during every Muslim festival, a cleric in West Bengal has moved it a notch higher by now holding iftar on a road. Toha Siddiqui, the Pirzada of Furfura Sharif, a controversial cleric in the state, yesterday took his iftar meal, the meal after the day-long fast during Ramzan, on a road while returning home from somewhere.
Pirzada Toha Siddiqui informed about this himself on Facebook along with several photographs showing an elaborate iftar feat on a road. He wrote in the post, “Iftar on the road while returning home from a function.” In the photographs, four men, including Toha Siddiqui, are seen sitting on a sheet laid on a wide asphalt road.
Half of the sheet is inside the driveway of the road, while the other half is along the parking area along the wide road. The photos show that they carried several polythene bags containing food packets from some store, which they opened on the road for Iftar.
A Mahindra Scorpio with a beacon on it, presumably belonging to Siddique going by Arabic text written on the windshield, is seen parked near them. Along with this, multiple police vehicles, with cops standing near them, are seen in the pictures.
The fact that he was carrying a sheet and food packets indicates that it was pre-planned. He deliberately chose to organise the iftar on the road instead of some other place.
However, Toha Siddiqui’s this ‘iftar on road’ stunt didn’t go well with netizens, including Muslims. His Facebook post has received over 1200 posts till now, almost all of them for misusing his proximity to power to hold iftar on road. Notably, Toha Siddiqui is a close ally of Mamata Banerjee, and he supports her during elections….
