In the lanes of Sarai Meer in Uttar Pradesh’s Azamgarh district, anger and suspicion meet at crossroads where people gather and disown the town’s recently acquired terror tag.

With Friday’s encounter in Delhi throwing up names of local boys, Sarai Meer, which first shot into notoriety as the home of don Abu Salem, finds the spotlight fixed on it once again.

The road from Sarai Meer travels 3 km to lead to Beenapara village. That 3-km stretch marks the transition from a crowded qasbah to a village set against lush fields and a whitewashed madrassa and schools, clean tea shops and a wall bearing an ad of Western Union money transfer. This is the village of Abu Bashar, the man accused of masterminding the July 26 Ahmedabad blasts.

“People come to Azamgarh asking for Abu Bashar’s house, for Abu Salem’s house. No one comes looking for the house of educationist Mohammad Shibli Nomani, poet Kaifi Azmi or scholar Rahul Sankrityayan. No one asks for the house of Pervez sa’ab, who is from the neighbouring village and is one of the top scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre,” says Mohammad Shahid, the pradhan of Beenapara.

“We feel suffocated now,” says Abul Kalam, a retired lecturer of the BIC Inter College at Beenapara, who switches from Urdu to English, and back, with ease. The articulate Kalam goes on to narrate an incident he heard somewhere to make the larger point about Azamgarh’s predicament. “In Gonda, a teacher asked a child: ‘If you meet a snake and an Azamgarhi, who will you kill?’ The boy replied ‘snake’ and the teacher failed him,” says Kalam. The story may sound dubious but the sense of persecution that informs it is real.

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