As per the Indian government, India is teeming with infiltrators (ghuspaithi). These illegal people have entered across India in Bihar, Jharkhand, Bengal, Kerala and so on. And they are in large numbers. They, as per the Home Minister, the Prime Minister and other important people in the Indian government, come from Bangladesh, Pakistan and elsewhere. They are, according to the Indian government again, a threat to India. Most of the problems that India faces today are because of them. I'm using the Indian government here to refer to statements or information shared by Prime Minister Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and other important people part of the Indian Government. After all, if the Prime Minister and Home Minister's word isn't a word from the nation itself, then whose word would be said as a word from the nation?

Infiltrators to become majority in Jharkhand in 25–30 years if unchecked: Amit Shah He also criticised the state government for “vote bank” politics and vowed that if the BJP comes to power, it would chase “each” illegal immigrant out of the state.

'Will make Bihar ghuspaithiya mukt': Amit Shah says infiltrators will be deported within 5 years from Seemanchal Amit Shah questioned whether the infiltrators should be removed from the voters' list or not, and asserted that they would have to return to their countries and would have no place in Seemanchal.

Amit Shah directs officials to identify 100 'infiltrators' in every State and deport them The Union Home Minister asked intelligence officials to continue with the targeted crackdown even if the neighbouring countries do not accept the undocumented migrants.

These are just samples. If you dig more, you will find an even larger number of intruders, in thousands and lakhs, roaming in India currently. People in the Indian government know the number; they also know in what states they exist. People in the national media also know about these intruders. All of this makes you wonder, how did these intruders get into India? Who facilitated their entrance? While such a question gets difficult to answer since each intruder might have followed a different path and agent to get in, the other question becomes important. Whose job is to guard our borders? Whose job is to ensure intruders don't intrude on our borders? It is the job of the Indian Army and the Home Ministry, headed by Amit Shah himself. And these repeated statements from the Home Minister reveal a startling reality. People guarding our borders, that is, the Indian armed forces, are no more following orders from the Home Ministry. They are on their own. It is they who are letting these intruders enter India. I'm not saying this thing. It is said, and inferred by the Indian government via the Prime Minister, Home Minister and even the national media.

So there are two things here. Either intruder after intruder is let in by the Indian army. Or these intruders are smarter than the Indian armed forces. These intruders who are illiterate, living on meagre incomes, going inside India to do daily wage labour are cleverer than the Indian armed forces. Essentially, Amit Shah, Modi and the entire machinery of RSS and BJP are saying that the Indian Army is incompetent. That they have failed India, that the Indian army has let in this huge influx of intruders. Given all these facts, does it make sense to even have these men holding guns at the borders? What are they drawing their salaries for? Why are we paying them if they are such failures at their jobs? What's there to take pride in these incompetent men who cannot stop poor intruders from entering our borders? And not one or two, but in such large numbers? And it has been more than ten years since the Modi government has had such reliable information about these intruders, but the Indian army has failed to find any of these enemies from other countries. Just how incompetent are our supposedly brave soldiers? I'm not raising these questions. India's Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah are raising these fingers on our armed forces. And so far, at least I'm not aware of any army commander or regiment clarifying anything on these statements. Meaning? These statements by the Indian government are right, and they agree they are losers who cannot protect our borders or, and I fear to suggest this, for these are the men who brought Ram to Ayodhya, they cannot be liars, for the whole Ram's story is about the truth, Amit Shah and Modi are not lying. Those who follow the message of Ram could never lie. Modi and Shah would never resort to lies. I cannot for once imagine believing such a thing. But then again, years of Congress propaganda have made it harder to disrespect the Indian armed forces. They are a professional force we have been told again and again. It is hard to believe they would let intruders into our borders or even that such a large number could intrude under their watch.

If people who brought Ram to Ayodhya are liars, then how come Maryadapurushottam Ram, whose entire life was a message of adhering to truth, blessed and decided to come to Ayodhya on their request? How did the great seers, learned minds and devotees of Prabhu Ram allow these liars who are so far from the principles of Ram's teachings to inaugurate his abode? Has the lord Ram corrupted himself over the years? Is lord Ram now one among the supporters and cheerleaders of rape and lying? No? Meaning Modi and Shah are not the liars? I can't. I respect Prabhu Ram too much to think of Modi and Shah, soldiers who gave us Ram in Ayodhya, to be liars. That spells the other statement, the one that the Shah and Modi have been repeating without any counterclaim from the army. The Indian army is indeed an incompetent pool of men with arms. Utterly shameful that Indians are paying for their upkeep and more using their hard-earned salaries via taxes.

#NarendraModi #RSS #BJP #Aliens #migrants #refugees #India #Army #hate #propaganda

Many, especially people in Delhi, saw this coming. In a way, it is good. Or as someone mentioned, it was inevitable. Just like how it was important to defeat UPA at the height of their powers and ego trip in 2014, equally, it had become important and necessary to defeat the politics of Arvind Kejriwal. He was thinking that a mini-version of BJP's politics was the strategy to go by. He repeatedly projected himself as the better version of BJP's divisive politics – as if he could hate Muslims but continue to also provide free public services. At every step of the way in recent times, he projected himself as more religious and narrowminded than the BJP. He even avoided supporting his own Muslim legislator and rallied against admitting children of migrants in schools. Forget about his actions concerning Shaheen Bagh and CAA. And of course, he had grown hubris that he could not be defeated in Delhi and had gotten too comfortable which politicians should never be made to feel for the public's own good.

That said, it is concerning what replaces Kejriwal now and UPA then. But again, it also tells the options the public is provided. How they try to avoid the devil and how they eventually give up and choose an open devil rather than the masked monster who hides its claws.

Silver lining wise, Kejriwal is a shrewd politician, unlike Rahul and others. Despite this defeat, he in past has repeatedly shown he knows how to fight the BJP on their turf by twisting and turning the designs to suit him better. Now that he has lost his fiefdom, he has nothing more to lose or concentrate his focus on. BJP can no longer create problems in the capital and keep him engaged. Add to it, unlike the old Kejriwal, this one will have his men in the assembly and parliament who can speak and tomtom his message. If he is up to it, and in all likelihood he will be, he's going to be a hard and harsh thorn in BJP's path from here on.

Congratulations to all, we are in for good times. Politics in India is going to be a good show from now on.

P.S. It is a good time here to remember how the BJP using all sorts of powers and agencies including the courts, almost paralysed Kejriwal's government from working. At the start of his government, Kejriwal using ACB had initiated corruption investigations against Ambani and other heavyweights. Modi government to stop this, passed a fresh law pulling ACB from the control of the Delhi government. Delhi Police was already under Modi government so he was left with nothing to fight corruption and other misdoings. Later on, a new LG was appointed who would refuse to pass any bills and files Kejriwal signed including transfers of officials. Even door-to-door ration and government services were stopped. Kejriwal still found ways to work around these blockers. Then one by one his closest allies and later himself were arrested and kept behind bars. All the cases against his MLAs eventually fizzled out, and nothing could be proved in court but by the time cases could be finished and clean chit was given, his ministers would have spent years (two, three etc) in prison. While it is always hard to pinpoint why people unseat someone and crown another and many times there are always multiple reasons for how people vote, in Delhi's case, voters might just have gotten frustrated as well from this constant tussle. It's not like they could not see how Modi halted Kejriwal on each step he took.

#delhi #politics #arvindkejriwal #narendramodi #bjp #aap #elections

From what I know and can remember Muslim girls in school (not all but some of them) have been wearing hijab (or headscarf) for ages now. It was just another piece of clothing that never bothered us, to the point that we never even noticed its existence. I even know of girls and even teachers who would arrive at school in niqab (or burqa, black outer clothing like a rain-or-sun-coat) and then they would remove it before entering a classroom. Again, this wasn't a point of conversation or of difference. The only time I have been thinking of these clothing choices and the faces of friends that wore them is now. Now when many schools in Karnataka (and even in Madhya Pradesh, another BJP ruled state) have banned young girls (and even teachers) from covering their hair with a cloth also referred to as 'wearing hijab'. It all started with Hindu kids sloganeering and hooting – all of a sudden – as Muslim kids passed before them. Or running to Muslim kids and shouting – Jai Shri Ram – a war cry of Hindus now. The lord Ram (or simply Ram) of Ramayana, if you have ever read, is a soft-spoken and light-mannered hero of the epic. He does everything in a measured and reserved manner. There is this soft tenderness to his actions and his approach to things. In the whole of epic, there is only once that we see Ram agitated and outraged – when the ocean god does not agree to his demand to make way for him and his army to go to Lanka and rescue his wife. It is this image of Ram that the militant Hindu organization Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) has adopted on their posters and hate paraphernalia, and it is this Ram you see depicted elsewhere by Hindus that subscribe to RSS's worldview. The same is the case with Hanuman (there is no instance in the Ramayana of Hanuman displaying aggression but the monkey-god posters you see everywhere now show him in desperate anger and in all-red). The usual picture of Ram that we saw was of him smiling quietly and standing alongside his wife and his brother while Hanuman stood at his feet. The impression was of a feminine soft-spoken hero, not of a military general. And chant at his temples, say at Mathura and Vrindavan or Ayodhya was 'Siyavar Ramachandra ki Jai' (Victory to the groom of Sita, Ramachandra). He was not the centre of the chant but his wife was; he was invoked through her. That was the Ram from Ramayana, the one I knew until the mobs of RSS-BJP descended on streets, heckled and lynched to death the many Indians with chants of 'Jai Shri Ram'.

So we have Hindu crowds chanting 'Jai Shri Ram' and trying to scare Muslim hijab-wearing girls, then Hindu groups coming with saffron shawls and later the schools starting to object these girls wearing hijab and now courts debating whether the hijab is central to the religion of Muslims or not. Do you see the problem here? We have conspicuously and to our own benefit have forgotten-and-forgiven the majority community of its divisive-and-violent methods and instead, we are now questioning the basics of minority religion.

The school, high school and college I went to or even the offices that I worked at, all of them in their practises and culture never once felt alien to me or my way of living. Yes, they spoke English during events that were alien at my home. The food served at Hostel mess was strictly vegetarian except for the egg served on Wednesday. Now although having a vegetarian meal every day was alien, having vegetarian meals in itself wasn't alien. At our home, we are required to consume strictly-vegetarian food when there's any festival – like during Ganesh Chaturthi or Deepavali and even during weddings. A vegetarian meal and those who consume vegetarian meals always enjoy high moral value in the Hindu pantheon. It is strange how we the meat-eaters worship gods that despise our food, the one thing that sustains us and makes us capable of praying to them. Apart from these few non-harmful diversions, everything else was like at home. The school office, staff room, principal's room, all had pictures of our gods. Every function began with lighting lamps and chanting mantras. At school, the morning physical exercises started with Sanskrit prayer, then school assembly in the morning started with Sanskrit prayer, all meals – breakfast, lunch and dinner were initiated again with Sanskrit prayers. At my home this wasn't the custom, we never prayed before meals. So essentially I was praying and chanting mantras more at school than at my home. I was also having too many vegetarian meals. If anything I was being converted into a Brahminical specimen of saatvik purush. I don't remember my parents ever being asked about this. I don't also think they would've objected. For generations now local customs and gods have been sacrificed and replaced with Brahminical rituals, customs and food habits. The many vegetarians in India are not vegetarians of consciousness but their parents have forced this choice on them. Being vegetarian is a religious habit in India. And in comparison vegetarian prayer is considered in high regard versus a prayer from non-vegetarians. So what I was doing at school compared to at my home was practising a higher degree of Hinduism (I would say upper casteism but let's not go there). We celebrated Ganesh Chaturthi, Saraswati Puja and other festivals at school. On festival days it was welcome to dress in traditional – i.e., Hindu traditional dress. In offices, we not only celebrate festivals but on occasions like Dasara, in many offices, everyone is required to wear particular colour on a particular day. It is mandated. And there's more. So in essence, at schools and offices, we celebrate the Hindu way of life in and out, and unapologetically. We don't notice it since there's nothing abnormal or extraordinary for us to look at. What we do at school and in the office is similar to what we do at home. Might vary in degrees and sequences but at its heart, it is the same. But now imagine the life of a Muslim kid in India. Everything at school is alien to her and him. Posters on the wall of gods to prayers to festivities. Every day they are forced to question their faith. So many Hindus would object if school walls had posters say of a Dargah or of Kaaba 🕋. And yet Muslims have been enduring this infinite assault on their senses without any outrage. And we Hindus dare call Muslims the intolerants and extremists? Would we sing one of their Arabic prayers on one day of the week? If any teacher dared even once, we would inform our parents and they would quickly rush to the Principal's office to complain. In fact, the teacher would be dragged to a police station or maybe a mob would descend and lynch the poor teacher. And I'm not exaggerating this, we Hindus have lynched Muslims for just existing. “In Jharkhand, on 17 June 2019, a young man called Tabrez Ansari (22 years) was tied to a pole sometime around midnight and beaten by a mob till six in the morning. As he was being battered, Tabrez Ansari was asked to say 'Jai Shri Ram'. He did. It did not save him. He died four days later,” Ravish Kumar wrote of Tabrez's murder in his must-read book, The Free Voice: On Democracy, Culture and the Nation. We Hindus have never been accommodating of Muslims or people of other faith. Would we accept a Christian prayer in a government school? No way. But I know of my Christian friends that sang Sanskrit shlokas in school prayers and before meals every day including on Sundays. They did not object. Their parents did not too. They were accommodating and tolerant. Their gods weren't hurt by it, their faith wasn't shaken by their kids singing prayers of other faith. Or celebrating festivals of other faith. Most of the plays in schools that we acted in were stories from Hindu epics. We acted in them, we saw them and so did students from other faith including Muslims. I even remember a Muslim friend of mine playing Lord Krishna in one play in which I was playing some Hindu saint. I don't remember his parents objecting to it. Or even Hindus that saw that play then. In fact, the teacher who cast him was a Hindu upper-caste Brahmin. None of us saw it as problematic then but all hells will break loose now.

And what are the arguments against Hijab from the Hindu right-wing? You hear a lot of patriarchy-patriarchy then uniform-uniform. The first doesn’t cut it since these are the same Hindu bunch that parade their women everywhere including inside their homes with that noose aka mangalsutra around their neck, sindoor and bindi on their forehead; all prime patriarchal symbols. For most Hindus, the unspoken rule is that women who are menstruating are not allowed to enter temples, religious shrines or even prayer rooms. There are even certain temples in India, such as the Sabarimala temple in Kerala, wherein women who are within the age of menstruating are forbidden from entering. Girls who have not matured yet and women who have reached menopause are allowed entry into the temple. In some households, a woman on her period is not allowed to sleep on the bed, eat from daily kitchenware and must wash her clothes separately. In most rural households, they are not even allowed to enter the house. So it can’t be that Hindus who practise such thick patriarchy at home will have a problem with girls merely covering their hair to school on this ground. Is it then the case of imposition of uniform? Hindus want all children to follow the school uniform strictly? Or at least that’s what so many have been shouting about.

Now, why do schools require uniforms? I wouldn’t go into it since it’s a topic with both sides, and they both have their own merits. Also, note that uniforms are not uniform all over the world – we decide what would be our school uniform. Dupatta is part of the uniform in India but not so elsewhere in the world, mini-skirts are part of girls' uniforms in Japan but not so in India. So there's nothing stopping us from having a uniform that goes with everyone or better, let there be multiple options in uniform, students can choose whichever they feel comfortable in. Coming back to the site and state of outrage; Karnataka in fact has a rule against uniforms – the Admission Guidelines-2021-22 posted on the Department of Pre-University Education (DPUE) website not just states that the uniform is not mandatory, but also points out that some college principals and managements making uniform mandatory is a violation of rules. Are you able to get your head around this? That's not all. As Asaduddin Owaisi pointed out – In 2019, Ireland allowed hijab and turban in police uniform. The decision was welcomed by the Modi government, saying it was in the interest of the diaspora. If it was “historic” for Ireland, then why bother with the girls of Karnataka? Why is their dignity being blown away? So we don’t have a problem with the hijab as a uniform too. So the two primary arguments – uniform and patriarchy – don’t stand or are not the real reasons why Hindus are agitating. What is it then? Two of my friends, one on Twitter and another on Instagram were stressing about children and uniforms, like the uniform must be mandatory for children-children-children. And so my every argument would be countered with “but children and uniform”. Yesterday, the schools in Karnataka even made teachers of the school disrobe their hijab and burqa (outer clothing), at the school gate, in front of the whole gathered crowd (An English professor in Karnataka resigned today citing “self-respect” after she was asked to remove her hijab before entering her college). So the hijab ban isn’t about just children, at least not anymore. And in anyways, the primary goal of schools is to get more and more children into them to impart education and not propagate uniformity. If that was so, we would have had a uniform syllabus and a single language being taught to them. But that’s not the case, is it? That might be the aim eventually but right now at least, that’s not the case.

The only argument or reason that remains is the religion of the little girls going to school with hijab – their identity of being Muslims. And forget oppression, these girls, schoolgoing girls, stood out in open against school administration and against such a large mass of hyena-like right-wing forces and asserted their defiance. That’s no small feat. So many of us so easily bow to authority in offices and of course in schools/colleges out of the fear of being reprimanded by higher-ups. To stand up for one’s beliefs takes absolute courage. And that girl who came to school riding a two-wheeler herself, who parked it and then walked out of a mob that surrounded her and shouted ‘Jai Shri Ram’ to instil fear in her psyche – she walked out of that with her head and fist held high towards the sky. That was extraordinary courage on display there. These are oppressed girls? Really? This is your definition of oppression? How many girls from your family are allowed to go to school riding bikes? How many women in your family are allowed to ride bikes? If anything, Hindu parents must learn from these Muslim parents and their girls. Maybe they could start a crash course on youtube that Hindu parents and their children can enrol. That would benefit them and also this nation.

Through almost four months of protest, photos from the streets of Sudan were rare. Aside from avid observers, few had access to visual documentation of the movement trying to force three-decade ruler Omar Bashir from power. All this changed with this photograph of 22-year-old student Alaa Salah.

Muskan who walked out of the Hindu right-wing mob became the fierce face of Hijab ban controversy

The mob does what it does. It terrorises, creates division in societies and alienates the already alienated. As Ravish Kumar pointed out so succinctly – A mob has its own constitution. It has its own country. It drafts its own orders and directives, and identifies its own prey. But you expect the state and court to abide by the constitution that was drafted by the founders of this republic. Especially the court. For instance, the South African Constitutional Court when a similar petition of a Tamil Hindu girl to wear nose-stud in school as a cultural practice came at its door, went about it in a progressive manner that expanded human values, the culture of diversity and nature of tolerance in their nation.

All the common arguments right-wing is giving today in India were struck down by the court there explaining why they think the other way. They decided in favour of the girl, her choice of wearing the nose-stud to school and her belief in her faith. You can find judgement here.

Our courts are debating (or factoring) if hijab is central to Islam as if to say what Indians do in their day-to-day life is derived from the religious books. If that was so, Hindus, all of them would continue to this day to be beef-eaters since the old scriptures and people who wrote them ate beef in plenty. We even have a great sage on record scoffing that he prefers meat of a tender calf!

Washington-based Pew Research Centre’s ‘Religion in India: Tolerance and Segregation’ report finds that 89% Indian Muslim women cover their heads outside their home. But so do 86% Sikh women, 59% Hindu women and 21% Christian women. Moreover, 18% Hindus (mostly Brahmins) wear a janeu, while 53% Hindu men wear the tilak; 69% Sikhs wear a turban; and 51% of all people surveyed (including 51% Hindus and 50% Muslims) across religions generally wear “a religious pendant, such as an amulet, cross, image or symbol of god.” – The India Cable

So will court one by one strike all of these and other religious symbols down? At least from schools, colleges, offices and primarily from the parliament where we have MPs wearing saffron robes. Will they? Or is the proving of essential and non-essential practises only applicable to Muslims? Also, this is not the first time when the court has taken this route. Even in Ayodhya judgement court maintained that the masjid was demolished illegally and statues of Ram Lalla were placed illegally but then it went into the argument whether masjid was an essential aspect of Islam and awarded a verdict in the favor of Hindus who were the ones like in hijab case who started the mess, went on a rampage, resorted to violence or disturbed the status quo.

Hindu girls who came with saffron shawls in protest against Hijab – why now?

One of the most striking images from the scenes of Hindus chanting 'Jai Shri Ram' in these videos as Muslim girls in hijab walk by is of a group of Hindu girls supporting the male hooligans by wearing saffron shawls and saffron headgear. Do these girls not know how much it takes for a female child to venture out from home? Are they not aware of cultural policing? To begin with, most girls are not allowed to go to school. Then some who attend school are barred from going to college. And even if they are permitted, a small error like say someone snitching about her sitting or laughing with a boy will invite a ban on her further studies. None of these restrictions applies to boys. In colleges where there are no uniforms, girls still follow a dress code enforced by their homes and society at large. They can't wear just any dress as they please. And you will find them wearing these dresses that are approved by their parents despite their displeasure. If you ask them they will tell you these are minor giveaways so they could get the larger freedom that education enables them to have. So you find them accepting a certain degree of policing from their parents and society so they could attend colleges like their male counterparts. Hijab too exists and functions in this context. Some ladies even in their adult life continue to wear the traditional dress (they used to wear to colleges) just like some Muslim girls continue to wear hijab into their adulthood. Many even start wearing hijab in their adult life, on their own. Angshuman Choudhury  & Suraj Gogoi point exactly this in their scroll piece – the right to wear the hijab (or not) should rest with Muslim women. That choice should solely be their prerogative. This should be the beginning and end of any intellectual discussion on the use of the veil in schools, colleges or any other public space. Ruha Shadab wrote in HT, the immediate issue is not about whether Muslim women in India should be wearing a hijab. The issue is whether anyone should be deciding if they are “allowed” to do so. If people are interested in “liberating” women from wearing a hijab, they must recognise that forcing women to do anything in the name of liberation does not achieve their goal. If the argument is that religious symbols should be banned in India, then stop wearing the janeu, teekas, mangalsutras, and sindoor. What a woman can and cannot wear is a control tactic used to subjugate them. Forcing them to remove their hijab is an example of control tactics, which stokes fear and alienation, but perhaps most importantly, hatred. While the issue and people at its heart are Muslim school-going girls, the attack is solely not about hijab which Choudhary and Gogoi succinctly summarise -The sudden and rapid escalation of a non-issue like the hijab into a matter of national concern, that too by show of force, suggests an insidious and systematic attempt to de-Muslimise Indian Muslims through a mix of violent intimidation and socio-legal morality is underway. So, the anti-hijab argument today is being made in a predominantly sectarian context by a group of people who are avowedly anti-secular and have full sanction from the state. All said and done, it is heartening and utterly sad what we are doing to these girls who merely want to go to school. What's so wrong and criminal about allowing these girls into schools with headscarves which we have been allowing until recently anyway? We even allow, and rightly so, convicted criminals to finish their education from prisons. By forcing these girls to remove their headscarves in exchange for education we are not helping them in any way instead we are creating more problems for these girls. We are further complicating their already complex life. We will just end up depriving them of education. For some Hindus, this might be a hard pill to swallow. You see, they see the hijab as a symbol of oppression but they don't see the uniform with dupatta with the same lens. Dupatta to them is a 'common' culture but the headscarf is Islamic religious wear (and an oppressive one at that). When does one thing become a 'common' culture and until how long must the another remain restricted to just one community despite being worn by so many in the market and elsewhere. Why do Indian families ask girls to drape a dupatta whenever they venture out, even to the house door to collect a parcel? Is that not oppression? Not getting my point? Alright, have a look at the following dress.

Japanese schoolgirls in short mini-skirts. Wikimedia commons.

Would the Indian parents – belonging to any religion – allow this dress as a school uniform? Absolutely not. But why? Japanese schools have this as their uniform. Why would we have a problem? That old rape argument is hogwash. Japan has significantly fewer rape numbers than India. So no, mini-skirts don't cause rapes. Nor do hijabs stop them. That is, uniforms have nothing to do with rapes. Uniforms are merely pieces of clothes that we (school committees) have decided to be their chosen style of wear. And these school committees can easily include hijab in their guidelines. In fact, the school where this outrage first started and others that followed had hijab as a uniform. Girls used to wear hijab of the uniform colour and came to school for a long time now. You won't have to scratch your head a minute longer to guess why and who started this outrage now. No doubt it is political and those who started it with the chants of 'Jai Shri Ram' belong to a certain political ideology. Pitting two communities or cultures that have coexisted for long against each other, encouraging people to see how different others are and how both of them don't belong to the same entity (nation), to aggravate or scale-up minor feuds and differences into big issues, creating differences where none existed is the meat and potatoes of RSS-BJP politics. While in past they targeted adults, they are now straight-up targeting young kids because it's easier to rile these kids up. This is the militarisation of youth just the way Al-Qaeda and other terror organizations in Pakistan did at one point. And I can bet that parents of these kids watch godi media channels like Zee News or local variants of it. These parents haven't been told by their newspapers or television channels of sulli-deals and bulli-deals, two apps on which Muslim women were auctioned by Hindu men and women. Vishal Kumar Jha (21), Niraj Bishnoi (20), Shweta Singh (18), Mayank Rawat (21), Aumkareshwar Thakur (26), Neeraj Singh (28) – all Hindus – were arrested over these auctioning rings. Niraj tried to mislead the police by saying that the Sulli Deals app, which auctioned prominent Muslim women, was created by a Muslim man, Javed Alam, an engineering graduate from Uttar Pradesh. Shweta and Mayank, police said, intentionally used Sikh names on Twitter to promote enmity between Muslims and Sikhs. Creating divisions and enmity between two communities – which political entity benefits from this? It appears the open solidarity Muslims showed towards Sikh farmers in recent protests and Sikh solidarity for Muslims during anti-CAA protests hasn't gone well with the bigoted Hindus. Note also that the arrested men and women are young and educated and hail from different parts of the country. So the hate is no more concentrated in one state or one region and this is very alarming and bother us all. India is a microcosm of the entire world order. Unity in diversity isn't just a stray line to be taught in school but is the foundation on which this nation stands. If differences are left to grow like this then we will cease to exist in near future. The cost of communal politics played by RSS-BJP is paid now by the parents of these young children and our nation, whose next generation is growing as hateful timebombs waiting to be exploited by the Sangh-Parivar whenever they are in need of new divisions to be created for their electoral windfalls. The nominal Hindus, the ones you and I talk to and interact with, that casually spread this hate via fake news and propaganda material on social media and in their casual conversations don't realise that the hate that these politicians spew and spread comes with a real cost. And one of its brutal costs is the innocence of these children. The politics of RSS-BJP combine is imbuing the minds of young kids with hate towards their countrymen; many of the people they now hate because of their religion could have become their close friends but thanks to the divisive agenda, we instead now have ticking time bombs waiting to be triggered when next elections get announced. What Ravish Kumar of NDTV said long ago – Communalism turns human beings into bombs – is now happening right before our eyes. But some of us have decided to look the other way.

#communalism #bigotry #India #hijab #womensrights #feminism #choise #BJP #RSS #Hinduism

53 people have lost their lives in the Delhi riots. You have heard this already. But do you see the problem here? Riot? Was it really a riot? Is it a riot if the state machinery and police take sides; forget keeping silent while mobs went on a rampage but Delhi police took stones in their own hands and threw them at the other side, they directed and aided one side of the mob (as if there was another side anyway), they climbed and destroyed CCTV cameras. Yes, police did all this. It’s all on record. There are videos after videos that prove all this. How then can we call it a riot? It was a pogrom. As Rana Ayyub called, state-sponsored anti-Muslim pogrom. Let’s call it what it was. Now that we have settled on the calling business, let’s get on to our language. The 53 dead bodies, actually in some cases, there were no bodies, only a limb which police would not give permission to even DNA test, had both Hindu and Muslim names. And because there were dead bodies from both the sides, we are told it was both-sided violence. Like a cricket match where you fix a date and then come prepared on the scheduled date to hit fours and sixes? An equal opportunity contest is how one person put it to me. But really? Then why are dead bodies so disproportionate? Is it because Hindu men are disproportionately stronger than Muslim men? If so, what is “Hindu Khatre mein hain” all about? A cleverly masterminded political strategy to make the majority feel threatened by the minority? Why only Muslim places of worship were torched and desecrated? Why only the Quran has been burnt and its pages are torn down? Why was it that only Hindu mob got to climb a pillar of a mosque and place a saffron flag (considered Hindu flag) on it? What problem did Muslim men have in climbing a pillar of a temple? Is it that their legs are weak, unlike Hindu men who could so easily climb atop the minaret of a mosque? Or is it that Muslims did not come prepared with their own flags? Did no one inform them that there’s going to be a match on a certain date? Are you getting what I’m saying? Actually, I don’t care what you get and what you don’t. I want to say it because what is being said on TV, on online by influential faces makes no sense. For weeks unless Coronavirus happened on tv, we were busy showing Tahir Hussain and Shahrukh, and family of Ankit who was killed in this pogrom, so much so that, it was feeling as if it was not Hindu men but Muslim men colluded with Delhi police and not slogans of “Jai Shri Ram” but “Allah Hu Akbar” that echoed in Delhi for three days. WhatsApp and social media were then flooded with pictures of Tahir Hussain’s terrace. In all this, nobody cared to question Delhi police on its disastrous flip-flop.

The Delhi Police on Tuesday confirmed that they had rescued suspended Aam Aadmi Party councillor Tahir Hussain from his home in North East Delhi on February 24, when the region was hit by violence due to communal clashes between supporters and opponents of the Citizenship Act. Additional Commissioner of Police Ajit Kumar Singla confirmed this to media personnel on Tuesday. “On February 24, around 11 pm to midnight, some people told us that a councillor is stuck and feeling insecure. He was then rescued,” Singla said. However, about an hour later, news agency ANI put out a clarification, citing Delhi Police officials, that Hussain “did not require rescuing” that night. “News of the councillor being stuck was received by police, upon investigation, it was found the councillor was safe in his house,” ANI cited unidentified officials as saying.

In hours, a man was turned from victim to perpetrator. We sure love swift justice, don’t we?

While videos of rioters and Delhi police were making rounds, a set of people were also urging everyone to maintain peace. Suspiciously though, they wanted people like Rana Ayyub to not speak and disturb the peace. She was on channels after channels (mostly international media as our media was too feared to give her airtime) calling out our use of words among other things. What is this request for peace anyway? We are told Prime Minister has tweeted and asked to maintain peace. What does that mean? While Delhi burnt for two days, the same Prime Minister was giggling, waving hands and bear-hugging Donald Trump. I know problems of whataboutery but why did he not tweet then? Did he not have the time? Or did he not wanted to? And even if he had tweeted, what difference would it have made? The people who comprised the mob, do you think they would have stopped? You and I might fall for Modi’s odd-and-even statesmanship but they know him rather too well. They know what he means when he says something and what he means not, they know exactly what he wants from them. We are fools not to see it through. It has been there before our eyes all this time. We have just been choosing to ignore it. We have been choosing to look the other way. We have forgotten Gujarat 2002, they have not. They know who Modi is. If the man indeed wanted peace, why did he not act on Anurag Thakur for his hate speech that resulted in a shooter who walked in front of Delhi police and shot a bullet at the anti-CAA crowd? If Prime Minister of India wanted peace and not riots and deaths, why did he not immediately sack and act against Kapil Mishra who threatened the peaceful protesters? Why was Delhi police standing behind him when he was giving this threat? Why did Prime Minister not act against his Home Minister under whom comes Delhi police? We are too feared to answer these questions. Some of us, especially TV channels, look at them, they won’t even dare to ask these questions. The answer is, he did not want to stop this. Mr Modi wanted this. Look at his politics. It is full of hate and spreading fear. How did you (or I) expect him to behave any differently? We created him. He is a product of our own making. We told ourselves what he was not. We told he was this progressive statesmanlike figure. Was he though? And where did that idea came from? It came from his PR exercise.

…the media should have been alert to the doublespeak of, and the division of labour in, Hindutva forces. A speech in the hinterland might demonise Muslims; one at a media summit in Delhi might focus on inclusive growth and democracy. A speech made by Modi is not binding on Adityanath, then a member of parliament from Gorakhpur and today the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, whose repugnantly communal comments in the Lok Sabha, just a few weeks after the speech, did not ruffle the prime minister’s feathers. Following 2002, Modi could not catch a break from the stigma of the anti-Muslim pogrom he had overseen as chief minister of Gujarat. Yet by April 2014, the academician Ashutosh Varshney was writing that “Anti-Muslim rhetoric has been missing in Modi’s campaign. Instead, he has concentrated on governance and development.” That simply was not true. Varshney must have missed Modi’s attempt to whip up communal passions with speeches about the “pink revolution,” a reference to cattle slaughter; missed Adityanath on the dais where a BJP man recommended exhuming Muslim women’s corpses in order to rape them; missed Amit Shah exhorting Jats to “take revenge” on Muslims in Muzaffarnagar, where the two communities had clashed violently in 2013. Modi’s smash-hit 2014 election campaign, led by advertising stars from Ogilvy & Mather and McCann Worldgroup, was so successful at this kind of erasure that Business Today ran a case study of it in June 2014. “Marketing gurus cite the examples of Cadbury, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola that battled problems relating to brand-taint,” the article said. “Cadbury had fought its way out of a controversy related to worms in its chocolates while the two beverages giants faced allegations of pesticides in their colas … Not so long so, the words that could have been used to describe Modi were authoritarian, megalomaniac and communal.” By the time of the election, the words imprinted in the public imagination were “strong” and “decisive.” Repeated cattle- and caste-related lynchings, beginning early in his first term, failed to evoke any comment from Modi. Since the mandate had vapourised his communal record and recast him as an economic messiah, many liberal commentators deflected blame to what they insisted were “fringe elements.” Meanwhile, the union minister Mahesh Sharma draped the coffin of a beef-related murder accused in the national flag, and his cabinet colleague Jayant Sinha met another set of Hindutva criminals with garlands. Modi eventually issued a late, half-hearted censure of cow vigilantes. He followed it up by appointing Adityanath — a communal leader with a private militia at his disposal, who faced scores of cases for things including rioting and attempt to murder — as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. It took wilful naïveté to say, as an India Today news anchor tweeted, “Give him a chance.” Few liberals disagree with the view that the BJP has enslaved and destroyed every institution, from the Reserve Bank of India to the Central Bureau of Investigation to the judiciary to the press to our universities. We have watched it coddle rioters who demand a film ban and marchers who support rapists, but crack down on Kashmiris. We have seen it call college kids “anti-nationals,” and put a target on dissenters’ backs. We have had five years of regressive anti-intellectualism, fake news and fudged data; of crony capitalism and poor economic management; of relentless chipping away at Gandhian and Nehruvian legacies; and of increasing Hindutva aggression. As recently as the 2019 campaign, Modi was making divisive remarks, flouting the Election Commission’s code of conduct and seeking votes in the name of the armed forces. On the one hand he whipped up fear about “terrorism,” on the other he gave a ticket to Pragya Thakur, who is an accused in the Malegaon bomb blast and a champion of Mohandas Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse. There is no discernible distance between the centre and the so-called fringe. It is nothing short of horrifying that Amit Shah is now the country’s home minister, responsible for maintaining domestic peace. Besides the fake encounters, Shah has been accused of using the state machinery to spy on a woman for Modi, in a scandal known as Snoopgate; he has called Muslim immigrants “termites”; and has referred to journalists and writers as “breaking India forces” and “the tukde tukde gang.” But on the website of the Observer Research Foundation, a Reliance-funded think tank, Sushant Sareen wrote: “The team comprising of Home Minister Amit Shah, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and the NSA Ajit Doval is something of a security dream-team.” It is equally horrifying that Pragya Thakur sits in parliament, as does her fellow MP Pratap Sarangi, who was the Odisha convenor of the Bajrang Dal when the missionary Graham Staines and his children were burned alive, and who faces several serious criminal charges. The Indian Express, however, chose to fete him for his — wait for it — simple lifestyle. – Mitali Saran, “Worms in the Chocolate”

PRs can achieve wonders. One must read Noam Chomsky on how to manufacture consent. That’s another thing Modi has done. In his “We value hard work not Harvard” way, he and his minions have pushed India into anti-intellectualism. Science has got sidetracked, reading is no more fashionable. And why would it be? If more and more people read Arundhati Roy, Chomsky, Orwell or Snowden, less and less are their chances of supporting this government and RSS’s grand old Nazi project. If you, for instance, read Orwell’s Animal Farm, you would understand most of the games this government is playing with its citizens. If you read Roy’s My Seditious Heart, you’ll see through the maze of power and corporate greed that is sucking this nation and world at large. Nothing that Modi and his minions are doing is new and not that it is hidden from everyone. It is just that those who see through his plan are immediately branded anti-national and worse so you don’t read or listen to them. They want you to close your minds and you have without much of their efforts obliged. That is precisely why you believe and approve of Telangana police’s action on rape and murder of a 26-year-old veterinary doctor and refuse to entertain any divergent thought. You have closed the part of your brain that indulged in logic. They have simplified things for you. They tell you what is right and wrong, and you believe them. They tell you what to do and you act accordingly. Why else did you stand in demonetization queue without a question?

It is not just obeisance that we have normalised ourselves in but rape too. Ask anyone on the street if they support the rape of women. I’m certain everyone would say they do not, even the Modi supporters. But Mr Modi, their god, follows more than a dozen people on twitter who everyday tweet rape threats and abuses to women. You might say, he follows so many and might not be aware of these minions everyday tweeting hate. Probably yes, I mean yes, if he was any other person which he is not. He replies to tweets, he wishes people on birthdays and does crazy things on social media. In one RTI, it was even revealed that the two accounts are operated by Mr Modi personally. Oh wait, forget social media. These men, who tweet rape threats, they aren’t just normal people. Modi met these people in person. Some of them have pictures of Prime Minister shaking hands with them. Yes, the same prime minister who was busy not to be able to meet farmers from Tamilnadu who were in Delhi protesting for weeks met twitter trolls. You should read Swati Chaturvedi’s wonderful book on these trolls to understand how organized this trolling business is, how they are paid to abuse and give rape threats. Yes, the rape threats that land into mentions of popular female Indian voices are paid for by the ruling party of the largest democracy. We all know it and yet we support this party and the two men at the helm of its affairs. We despise rape or so we say and yet we support men who have institutionalized rape threats; in a way, on online at least, rape has been normalised, thanks to one party and its supporters. Yes, you might not like this, but you are part of this progress. You have helped this country develop to this stage. If we are discussing citizenship of millions of people today, of their future as citizens of this republic and not becoming a superpower, which was our dream just some years ago and honestly it didn’t felt impossible back then, it is all because of you dear supporter of this bigoted government.

Modi was first elected in May 2014. Do you remember your TV screens some months before that mammoth victory then? Do you remember Anna agitation that swept our imagination thanks to 24*7 coverage of it on our tv screens and mobile solidarity protests across the nation? It gave an impression that if there was one thing Indians despised a lot then that was corruption but is it though? We have seen Rafale scam (similar scam took down Rajiv Gandhi govt), Yes Bank is fresh in memory while PNB is forgotten by everyone except their depositors. There is Maharashtra scholarship scam, Adani, Essar, Reliance are accused of Rs 290 billion scam in one coal-related matter, Reliance Jio scectrum rigging case to name a few. TMC even released A to Z of NDA scams. And yet we think Modi is incorruptible. Even though his government has not acted on any of the scams by his own party and its partners, we don’t attach the word corrupt to Modi govt. Or even if we know they are, we don’t care, which makes one think that the crowds that despised corruption around 2014 were not really worried about corruption but rather were motivated to bring Modi and takedown Congress. It was a political gambit and not a fight to rid the nation of corruption. Let’s not say what it was not.

We have seen institution after institution failing us. RBI under Raghuram Rajan opposed demonetization making Modi government to not extend his tenure and instead have a new governor who agreed for the Tughlaqi act that destroyed Indian Economy as nothing else had in recent memory. It achieved none of the stated objectives, not one. Almost, the entire currency in the market came back. Now if secret objectives were dead bodies, destroyed rural economy, staggering profits for Paytm, etc., then they were achieved. Also, while many had difficulty exchanging their currency, Rs 3,118.51 crore was deposited into 11 Gujarat banks linked to Amit Shah, all within five days of demonic exercise. Now try to imagine what were you doing in those first five days after that fateful night when god Modi came onto TV screens. But you will still find his supporters counting demonetization as one of the successes of Modi government. Ask how and they will not stand for the dialogue.

Courts until a few years ago had a semblance of justice written over them. If not justice, they at least seemed rational and logical. You could expect how their judgements would go. After all, what’s justice if not logical and humane? Ayodhya Judgement proved just how wrong we were. And now, the same Chief Justice who gave a clean chit to Modi in Rafale without hearing, delivered absurd Ayodhya judgement that said Hindus did wrong by placing idols and desecrating mosque but hey, take the land and build the temple for which you destroyed the mosque, and of course who can forget his interventions with regards to Kashmir and horse-trading of MLAs/MPs, that same man has been gifted Rajya Sabha seat. Parliament and Courts should maintain distance from each other, have separation of concerns because it is court’s job to watch over parliament but former CJI wants to bring ‘coherence’, he wants to bring them closer, which is exactly how founding fathers wanted them not to function as. Police can’t make friendships with the criminals and say it wants to bring the two closer and have coherence — for what?

We have almost forgotten the murders of Kalburgi, Pansare, Dabholkar and Lankesh by right-wing fundamentalists. Their deaths have been successfully washed out from public memory. How was this achieved? And who does this achievement benefit? You know as much as myself how far investigations into their murders have reached. We have seen media houses being silenced, editors being sacked, reporters hounded for their reports and if that wasn’t enough, this government has also instituted a 200 member team to watch how media reports on Modi and Shah, and then they call you in case they don’t like your work. People are not realizing how damaging this is for the health of their democracy. If you are not informed of your government’s wrongdoing then you would think it is doing no wrong and government will continue to do what has become everyday slaughter of this republic which just years ago was dreaming about being a superpower, the world looked up to it in awe over the success of its democracy, and citizens hoped we were moving onto becoming a beacon of hope and something beautiful. What have we come to doing now? Thanks to channels like Zee News, majority Hindus now hate Muslims more than ever. That channel has shown doctored videos to demean individuals, to gather public opinion against a public university and help you-know-who. People still watch it. Why? Is it because whatever hate that channel peddles provides a mark of approval for your own inbuilt hate? Constantly manufactured lies and fake news serves the purpose of reassuring people again and again how the hate they harbour in them is justified. Just at the moment when you start to harbour doubt in the regime, they send you one more video or post that injects some more drug to keep you hating for some more time. The stock isn’t going empty any time soon. It is, after all, powered by Sensodyne, Polycab, Super Shakti, Amity University, Century Ply, Maruti Suzuki, Wonder Cement and Somany tiles. As long as you watch the tv, support these brands and they support these channels, the hate industry will continue to flourish.

This can go on and on. There is no end to things that we have normalised to support Modi and his men. There is no end to things that we say we have issues with and yet despite this government and its supporters doing exactly that, we continue to support them. This government and party that you support has men who have been accused of rape and also murder of victim’s relatives, people who have looted public money, those who garlanded men that lynched, ministers who attended rallies in support of the rapists, those that follow trolls that give rape threats (not just Modi but even his ministers follow these trolls), Ajay Singh Bisht aka Yogi Adityanath not only gave hate speech but when a case was filed against him, he gave orders to withdraw case against himself, Modi and his partner from Gujarat, Home Minister Shah revel in hate speech. How can one say he is against rape, murders, hate speech, bigotry, lawlessness when they support Modi and his men? It cannot be both ways. You either support rape or you don’t.

Forget Rs. 3000 crore wasted on a statue when that could have been spent on hospitals and education institutes and tribals that have to give up their land for the same project, Modi government has decided to launch a Rs 12,000-crore project to improve road connectivity to the four revered Hindu pilgrimage sites in Uttarakhand. Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the construction of the Char Dham Mahamarg on December 27, 2016, as a tribute to those who died in the 2013 Kedarnath disaster. As of January 2019, as many as 25,300 trees have been cut and 373 hectares of forestland diverted for Char Dham Mahamarg. This does not involve trees lost in landslides caused due to road widening exercise which have become common in fragile hilly tracks as this exercise progresses. This also involves huge human cost but I will ignore that since that’s what I have learnt from demonetization. Development of a nation requires dead bodies. I get it. Now if you say you care about the environment and people’s livelihoods and yet support this government, who are you trying to fool here?

The latest report of the National Crime Records Bureau has carefully left out data on mob lynchings. Data hiding and number fudging have become a national sport now. This helps in creating chaos with unofficial data release and leaks which are later discarded by one set of panellists on tv creating confusion in minds of citizens over what to believe and what not to. That is how we have forgotten lynching cases which according to The Quint since 2015 stands at 115 deaths now. The thing with numbers is, they no more excite us. Numbers wipe out the faces and families of the dead, their life, livelihood and sorrows. And our inhumane, dastardly involvement in these deaths. Here, let Arundhati Roy describe you one such murder which, one must remember, happened in daylight, was captured on camera and had voyeur crowd looking at the scene of a crime. It stood there, in awe and jubilation.

The lynching of Tabrez Ansari illustrates just how broken the ship is, and how deep the rot. Lynching is a public performance of ritualised murder, in which a man or woman is killed to remind their community that it lives at the mercy of the mob. And that the police, the law, the government, as well as the good people in their homes, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, who go to work and take care of their families, are friends of the mob. Tabrez was lynched this June. He was an orphan, raised by his uncles in the state of Jharkhand. As a teenager, he went away to the city of Pune, where he found a job as a welder. When he turned 22, he returned home to get married. Soon after his wedding to eighteen-year-old Shahista, Tabrez was caught by a mob, tied to a lamppost, beaten for hours and forced to chant the new Hindu war cry, “Jai Shri Ram!”—Victory to Lord Ram! The police eventually took Tabrez into custody, but refused to allow his distraught family and young bride to take him to the hospital. Instead they accused him of being a thief, and produced him before a magistrate, who sent him back to custody. He died four days later.

How did we let all this pass? When did we get ourselves normalised with such open hate and daylight murders? And then we shout Pakistan is killing Hindus? Which Hindus and where? We are speculating Pakistan is killing Hindus while we are here, openly killing Muslims — on the street and in our trains. We are not even hiding their dead bodies. Some of these bigoted murders and violence was shot on camera for public viewing. Did that agitate us? No. In fact, we reelected the same people who sat on these murders. People, who did not act on the perpetrators. How should anyone believe that Indians are peaceful or that Indians abhor killings? On the contrary, it appears we very much enjoy public floggings. What did we do about Dalit floggings from Una? Nothing. We successfully forgot. We succeeded in erasing these violent images from public memory. That is us. The sick, demented, contagious disease of the human race.

It is important how and what information is served to us. For instance, the ‘Howdy Modi’ event in America was attended by fifty thousand people including President Trump but what our news channels did not show were thousands of people protesting outside the stadium. In absence of such information you tend to think there is no opposition to Mr Modi and it also makes you hide your own doubt or inconvenience with the regime. We are herd animals. Many of us don’t express ourselves when we see or in this case perceive (thanks to our media) how everyone else is thinking otherwise.

Last five years have made us go through tragedy after tragedy. We have seen and done unimaginable things. For instance, do you think we would have stood in line without questions if Manmohan Singh had announced demonetization? I’m sure the doctor wouldn’t have done such a horrible thing but in case he had, would we stand in line like sheep and pay our obeisance? Were people not on streets when gas prices were above Rs. 400 and Rupee was at 64 per dollar? A gas cylinder today costs well above Rs. 800 and dollar to rupee is well above 75. Economically and socially, we are looking only downwards and yet this government enjoys huge support. How does one explain that except saying that Modi was elected for his divisive agenda? This government was elected to pursue the Nazi project of RSS. There is no other explanation. So let’s be clear of who we are and who we are supporting and what our unquestioned support means. Let’s not tell ourselves otherwise. Stop lying and deceiving others and yourself. We are infected. As Arundhati Roy said, this is our version of the coronavirus. We are sick.

Coronavirus can be kept at a distance by drinking cow piss (gaumutra for the initiated) but try it at your own risk for one BJP worker who had it at a gaumutra drinking party got sick and needed to be admitted into a hospital. News channels are saying, good news, Coronavirus infected have been cured in Jaipur hospital — Modi’s India has shown the world the way. But wait, didn’t first cure case from India come from Kerala? Also, as of 21 March, 91,133 have been recovered from COVID-19 worldwide. Home Minister Shah in Parliament says Delhi riots were stopped in 36 hours so let’s thank Delhi police. That is, of course, a lie, for gunshots and fire were still seen after 36 hours. What to do? Home Minister is allowed to lie in Parliament all the while our state symbol, Ashoka emblem continues to have Satyamev Jayate (Truth Alone Triumphs) engraved under it. Also, the Delhi police participated in the pogrom (oops! Riots). They, if wanted, could have stopped the riots before they had even begun. They simply did not want them to stop. It’s like appreciating a murderer, who killed eleven people, for stopping his count at eleven and not moving to the twelfth body. “I stopped my gun from shooting the twelfth man” Slow claps

We are indeed sick. Our language, our hearts, our minds, our politics, the way we perceive things, the way we look at people, the way we think, the things we read, the things that we watch, our sources of information, people who are to safeguard us, our avenues to seek justice, everything and everyone has been infected. We have become sick. And unless we see ourselves, we acknowledge the virus residing in us, the thing that has made a home in our body-politic, we won’t get out of this puddle. We have run too far for patches and band-aids to work now. Just look at our conversations, our language and our attitude; Nothing that we do, the way we talk and the way we listen right now is inspiring any confidence. We might find momentary solace through patches but the real cure will need far greater strength. And nothing that we are doing right now suggests we are ready for it.

#Politics #Hindu #Islam #Hate #fakenews #AmitShah #NarendraModi #BJP #Delhi #Pogrom #Violence #India

53 people have lost their lives in the Delhi riots. You have heard this already. But do you see the problem here? Riot? Was it really a riot? Is it a riot if the state machinery and police take sides; forget keeping silent while mobs went on a rampage but Delhi police took stones in their own hands and threw them at the other side, they directed and aided one side of the mob (as if there was another side anyway), they climbed and destroyed CCTV cameras. Yes, police did all this. It’s all on record. There are videos after videos that prove all this. How then can we call it a riot? It was a pogrom. As Rana Ayyub called, state-sponsored anti-Muslim pogrom. Let’s call it what it was. Now that we have settled on the calling business, let’s get on to our language. The 53 dead bodies, actually in some cases, there were no bodies, only a limb which police would not give permission to even DNA test, had both Hindu and Muslim names. And because there were dead bodies from both the sides, we are told it was both-sided violence. Like a cricket match where you fix a date and then come prepared on the scheduled date to hit fours and sixes? An equal opportunity contest is how one person put it to me. But really? Then why are dead bodies so disproportionate? Is it because Hindu men are disproportionately stronger than Muslim men? If so, what is “Hindu Khatre mein hain” all about? A cleverly masterminded political strategy to make the majority feel threatened by the minority? Why only Muslim places of worship were torched and desecrated? Why only the Quran has been burnt and its pages are torn down? Why was it that only Hindu mob got to climb a pillar of a mosque and place a saffron flag (considered Hindu flag) on it? What problem did Muslim men have in climbing a pillar of a temple? Is it that their legs are weak, unlike Hindu men who could so easily climb atop the minaret of a mosque? Or is it that Muslims did not come prepared with their own flags? Did no one inform them that there’s going to be a match on a certain date? Are you getting what I’m saying? Actually, I don’t care what you get and what you don’t. I want to say it because what is being said on TV, on online by influential faces makes no sense. For weeks unless Coronavirus happened on tv, we were busy showing Tahir Hussain and Shahrukh, and family of Ankit who was killed in this pogrom, so much so that, it was feeling as if it was not Hindu men but Muslim men colluded with Delhi police and not slogans of “Jai Shri Ram” but “Allah Hu Akbar” that echoed in Delhi for three days. WhatsApp and social media were then flooded with pictures of Tahir Hussain’s terrace. In all this, nobody cared to question Delhi police on its disastrous flip-flop.

The Delhi Police on Tuesday confirmed that they had rescued suspended Aam Aadmi Party councillor Tahir Hussain from his home in North East Delhi on February 24, when the region was hit by violence due to communal clashes between supporters and opponents of the Citizenship Act. Additional Commissioner of Police Ajit Kumar Singla confirmed this to media personnel on Tuesday. “On February 24, around 11 pm to midnight, some people told us that a councillor is stuck and feeling insecure. He was then rescued,” Singla said. However, about an hour later, news agency ANI put out a clarification, citing Delhi Police officials, that Hussain “did not require rescuing” that night. “News of the councillor being stuck was received by police, upon investigation, it was found the councillor was safe in his house,” ANI cited unidentified officials as saying.

In hours, a man was turned from victim to perpetrator. We sure love swift justice, don’t we?

While videos of rioters and Delhi police were making rounds, a set of people were also urging everyone to maintain peace. Suspiciously though, they wanted people like Rana Ayyub to not speak and disturb the peace. She was on channels after channels (mostly international media as our media was too feared to give her airtime) calling out our use of words among other things. What is this request for peace anyway? We are told Prime Minister has tweeted and asked to maintain peace. What does that mean? While Delhi burnt for two days, the same Prime Minister was giggling, waving hands and bear-hugging Donald Trump. I know problems of whataboutery but why did he not tweet then? Did he not have the time? Or did he not wanted to? And even if he had tweeted, what difference would it have made? The people who comprised the mob, do you think they would have stopped? You and I might fall for Modi’s odd-and-even statesmanship but they know him rather too well. They know what he means when he says something and what he means not, they know exactly what he wants from them. We are fools not to see it through. It has been there before our eyes all this time. We have just been choosing to ignore it. We have been choosing to look the other way. We have forgotten Gujarat 2002, they have not. They know who Modi is. If the man indeed wanted peace, why did he not act on Anurag Thakur for his hate speech that resulted in a shooter who walked in front of Delhi police and shot a bullet at the anti-CAA crowd? If Prime Minister of India wanted peace and not riots and deaths, why did he not immediately sack and act against Kapil Mishra who threatened the peaceful protesters? Why was Delhi police standing behind him when he was giving this threat? Why did Prime Minister not act against his Home Minister under whom comes Delhi police? We are too feared to answer these questions. Some of us, especially TV channels, look at them, they won’t even dare to ask these questions. The answer is, he did not want to stop this. Mr Modi wanted this. Look at his politics. It is full of hate and spreading fear. How did you (or I) expect him to behave any differently? We created him. He is a product of our own making. We told ourselves what he was not. We told he was this progressive statesmanlike figure. Was he though? And where did that idea came from? It came from his PR exercise.

…the media should have been alert to the doublespeak of, and the division of labour in, Hindutva forces. A speech in the hinterland might demonise Muslims; one at a media summit in Delhi might focus on inclusive growth and democracy. A speech made by Modi is not binding on Adityanath, then a member of parliament from Gorakhpur and today the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, whose repugnantly communal comments in the Lok Sabha, just a few weeks after the speech, did not ruffle the prime minister’s feathers. Following 2002, Modi could not catch a break from the stigma of the anti-Muslim pogrom he had overseen as chief minister of Gujarat. Yet by April 2014, the academician Ashutosh Varshney was writing that “Anti-Muslim rhetoric has been missing in Modi’s campaign. Instead, he has concentrated on governance and development.” That simply was not true. Varshney must have missed Modi’s attempt to whip up communal passions with speeches about the “pink revolution,” a reference to cattle slaughter; missed Adityanath on the dais where a BJP man recommended exhuming Muslim women’s corpses in order to rape them; missed Amit Shah exhorting Jats to “take revenge” on Muslims in Muzaffarnagar, where the two communities had clashed violently in 2013. Modi’s smash-hit 2014 election campaign, led by advertising stars from Ogilvy & Mather and McCann Worldgroup, was so successful at this kind of erasure that Business Today ran a case study of it in June 2014. “Marketing gurus cite the examples of Cadbury, PepsiCo and Coca-Cola that battled problems relating to brand-taint,” the article said. “Cadbury had fought its way out of a controversy related to worms in its chocolates while the two beverages giants faced allegations of pesticides in their colas … Not so long so, the words that could have been used to describe Modi were authoritarian, megalomaniac and communal.” By the time of the election, the words imprinted in the public imagination were “strong” and “decisive.” Repeated cattle- and caste-related lynchings, beginning early in his first term, failed to evoke any comment from Modi. Since the mandate had vapourised his communal record and recast him as an economic messiah, many liberal commentators deflected blame to what they insisted were “fringe elements.” Meanwhile, the union minister Mahesh Sharma draped the coffin of a beef-related murder accused in the national flag, and his cabinet colleague Jayant Sinha met another set of Hindutva criminals with garlands. Modi eventually issued a late, half-hearted censure of cow vigilantes. He followed it up by appointing Adityanath — a communal leader with a private militia at his disposal, who faced scores of cases for things including rioting and attempt to murder — as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. It took wilful naïveté to say, as an India Today news anchor tweeted, “Give him a chance.” Few liberals disagree with the view that the BJP has enslaved and destroyed every institution, from the Reserve Bank of India to the Central Bureau of Investigation to the judiciary to the press to our universities. We have watched it coddle rioters who demand a film ban and marchers who support rapists, but crack down on Kashmiris. We have seen it call college kids “anti-nationals,” and put a target on dissenters’ backs. We have had five years of regressive anti-intellectualism, fake news and fudged data; of crony capitalism and poor economic management; of relentless chipping away at Gandhian and Nehruvian legacies; and of increasing Hindutva aggression. As recently as the 2019 campaign, Modi was making divisive remarks, flouting the Election Commission’s code of conduct and seeking votes in the name of the armed forces. On the one hand he whipped up fear about “terrorism,” on the other he gave a ticket to Pragya Thakur, who is an accused in the Malegaon bomb blast and a champion of Mohandas Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse. There is no discernible distance between the centre and the so-called fringe. It is nothing short of horrifying that Amit Shah is now the country’s home minister, responsible for maintaining domestic peace. Besides the fake encounters, Shah has been accused of using the state machinery to spy on a woman for Modi, in a scandal known as Snoopgate; he has called Muslim immigrants “termites”; and has referred to journalists and writers as “breaking India forces” and “the tukde tukde gang.” But on the website of the Observer Research Foundation, a Reliance-funded think tank, Sushant Sareen wrote: “The team comprising of Home Minister Amit Shah, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and the NSA Ajit Doval is something of a security dream-team.” It is equally horrifying that Pragya Thakur sits in parliament, as does her fellow MP Pratap Sarangi, who was the Odisha convenor of the Bajrang Dal when the missionary Graham Staines and his children were burned alive, and who faces several serious criminal charges. The Indian Express, however, chose to fete him for his — wait for it — simple lifestyle. – Mitali Saran, “Worms in the Chocolate”

PRs can achieve wonders. One must read Noam Chomsky on how to manufacture consent. That’s another thing Modi has done. In his “We value hard work not Harvard” way, he and his minions have pushed India into anti-intellectualism. Science has got sidetracked, reading is no more fashionable. And why would it be? If more and more people read Arundhati Roy, Chomsky, Orwell or Snowden, less and less are their chances of supporting this government and RSS’s grand old Nazi project. If you, for instance, read Orwell’s Animal Farm, you would understand most of the games this government is playing with its citizens. If you read Roy’s My Seditious Heart, you’ll see through the maze of power and corporate greed that is sucking this nation and world at large. Nothing that Modi and his minions are doing is new and not that it is hidden from everyone. It is just that those who see through his plan are immediately branded anti-national and worse so you don’t read or listen to them. They want you to close your minds and you have without much of their efforts obliged. That is precisely why you believe and approve of Telangana police’s action on rape and murder of a 26-year-old veterinary doctor and refuse to entertain any divergent thought. You have closed the part of your brain that indulged in logic. They have simplified things for you. They tell you what is right and wrong, and you believe them. They tell you what to do and you act accordingly. Why else did you stand in demonetization queue without a question?

It is not just obeisance that we have normalised ourselves in but rape too. Ask anyone on the street if they support the rape of women. I’m certain everyone would say they do not, even the Modi supporters. But Mr Modi, their god, follows more than a dozen people on twitter who everyday tweet rape threats and abuses to women. You might say, he follows so many and might not be aware of these minions everyday tweeting hate. Probably yes, I mean yes, if he was any other person which he is not. He replies to tweets, he wishes people on birthdays and does crazy things on social media. In one RTI, it was even revealed that the two accounts are operated by Mr Modi personally. Oh wait, forget social media. These men, who tweet rape threats, they aren’t just normal people. Modi met these people in person. Some of them have pictures of Prime Minister shaking hands with them. Yes, the same prime minister who was busy not to be able to meet farmers from Tamilnadu who were in Delhi protesting for weeks met twitter trolls. You should read Swati Chaturvedi’s wonderful book on these trolls to understand how organized this trolling business is, how they are paid to abuse and give rape threats. Yes, the rape threats that land into mentions of popular female Indian voices are paid for by the ruling party of the largest democracy. We all know it and yet we support this party and the two men at the helm of its affairs. We despise rape or so we say and yet we support men who have institutionalized rape threats; in a way, on online at least, rape has been normalised, thanks to one party and its supporters. Yes, you might not like this, but you are part of this progress. You have helped this country develop to this stage. If we are discussing citizenship of millions of people today, of their future as citizens of this republic and not becoming a superpower, which was our dream just some years ago and honestly it didn’t felt impossible back then, it is all because of you dear supporter of this bigoted government.

Modi was first elected in May 2014. Do you remember your TV screens some months before that mammoth victory then? Do you remember Anna agitation that swept our imagination thanks to 24*7 coverage of it on our tv screens and mobile solidarity protests across the nation? It gave an impression that if there was one thing Indians despised a lot then that was corruption but is it though? We have seen Rafale scam (similar scam took down Rajiv Gandhi govt), Yes Bank is fresh in memory while PNB is forgotten by everyone except their depositors. There is Maharashtra scholarship scam, Adani, Essar, Reliance are accused of Rs 290 billion scam in one coal-related matter, Reliance Jio scectrum rigging case to name a few. TMC even released A to Z of NDA scams. And yet we think Modi is incorruptible. Even though his government has not acted on any of the scams by his own party and its partners, we don’t attach the word corrupt to Modi govt. Or even if we know they are, we don’t care, which makes one think that the crowds that despised corruption around 2014 were not really worried about corruption but rather were motivated to bring Modi and takedown Congress. It was a political gambit and not a fight to rid the nation of corruption. Let’s not say what it was not.

We have seen institution after institution failing us. RBI under Raghuram Rajan opposed demonetization making Modi government to not extend his tenure and instead have a new governor who agreed for the Tughlaqi act that destroyed Indian Economy as nothing else had in recent memory. It achieved none of the stated objectives, not one. Almost, the entire currency in the market came back. Now if secret objectives were dead bodies, destroyed rural economy, staggering profits for Paytm, etc., then they were achieved. Also, while many had difficulty exchanging their currency, Rs 3,118.51 crore was deposited into 11 Gujarat banks linked to Amit Shah, all within five days of demonic exercise. Now try to imagine what were you doing in those first five days after that fateful night when god Modi came onto TV screens. But you will still find his supporters counting demonetization as one of the successes of Modi government. Ask how and they will not stand for the dialogue.

Courts until a few years ago had a semblance of justice written over them. If not justice, they at least seemed rational and logical. You could expect how their judgements would go. After all, what’s justice if not logical and humane? Ayodhya Judgement proved just how wrong we were. And now, the same Chief Justice who gave a clean chit to Modi in Rafale without hearing, delivered absurd Ayodhya judgement that said Hindus did wrong by placing idols and desecrating mosque but hey, take the land and build the temple for which you destroyed the mosque, and of course who can forget his interventions with regards to Kashmir and horse-trading of MLAs/MPs, that same man has been gifted Rajya Sabha seat. Parliament and Courts should maintain distance from each other, have separation of concerns because it is court’s job to watch over parliament but former CJI wants to bring ‘coherence’, he wants to bring them closer, which is exactly how founding fathers wanted them not to function as. Police can’t make friendships with the criminals and say it wants to bring the two closer and have coherence — for what?

We have almost forgotten the murders of Kalburgi, Pansare, Dabholkar and Lankesh by right-wing fundamentalists. Their deaths have been successfully washed out from public memory. How was this achieved? And who does this achievement benefit? You know as much as myself how far investigations into their murders have reached. We have seen media houses being silenced, editors being sacked, reporters hounded for their reports and if that wasn’t enough, this government has also instituted a 200 member team to watch how media reports on Modi and Shah, and then they call you in case they don’t like your work. People are not realizing how damaging this is for the health of their democracy. If you are not informed of your government’s wrongdoing then you would think it is doing no wrong and government will continue to do what has become everyday slaughter of this republic which just years ago was dreaming about being a superpower, the world looked up to it in awe over the success of its democracy, and citizens hoped we were moving onto becoming a beacon of hope and something beautiful. What have we come to doing now? Thanks to channels like Zee News, majority Hindus now hate Muslims more than ever. That channel has shown doctored videos to demean individuals, to gather public opinion against a public university and help you-know-who. People still watch it. Why? Is it because whatever hate that channel peddles provides a mark of approval for your own inbuilt hate? Constantly manufactured lies and fake news serves the purpose of reassuring people again and again how the hate they harbour in them is justified. Just at the moment when you start to harbour doubt in the regime, they send you one more video or post that injects some more drug to keep you hating for some more time. The stock isn’t going empty any time soon. It is, after all, powered by Sensodyne, Polycab, Super Shakti, Amity University, Century Ply, Maruti Suzuki, Wonder Cement and Somany tiles. As long as you watch the tv, support these brands and they support these channels, the hate industry will continue to flourish.

This can go on and on. There is no end to things that we have normalised to support Modi and his men. There is no end to things that we say we have issues with and yet despite this government and its supporters doing exactly that, we continue to support them. This government and party that you support has men who have been accused of rape and also murder of victim’s relatives, people who have looted public money, those who garlanded men that lynched, ministers who attended rallies in support of the rapists, those that follow trolls that give rape threats (not just Modi but even his ministers follow these trolls), Ajay Singh Bisht aka Yogi Adityanath not only gave hate speech but when a case was filed against him, he gave orders to withdraw case against himself, Modi and his partner from Gujarat, Home Minister Shah revel in hate speech. How can one say he is against rape, murders, hate speech, bigotry, lawlessness when they support Modi and his men? It cannot be both ways. You either support rape or you don’t.

Forget Rs. 3000 crore wasted on a statue when that could have been spent on hospitals and education institutes and tribals that have to give up their land for the same project, Modi government has decided to launch a Rs 12,000-crore project to improve road connectivity to the four revered Hindu pilgrimage sites in Uttarakhand. Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the construction of the Char Dham Mahamarg on December 27, 2016, as a tribute to those who died in the 2013 Kedarnath disaster. As of January 2019, as many as 25,300 trees have been cut and 373 hectares of forestland diverted for Char Dham Mahamarg. This does not involve trees lost in landslides caused due to road widening exercise which have become common in fragile hilly tracks as this exercise progresses. This also involves huge human cost but I will ignore that since that’s what I have learnt from demonetization. Development of a nation requires dead bodies. I get it. Now if you say you care about the environment and people’s livelihoods and yet support this government, who are you trying to fool here?

The latest report of the National Crime Records Bureau has carefully left out data on mob lynchings. Data hiding and number fudging have become a national sport now. This helps in creating chaos with unofficial data release and leaks which are later discarded by one set of panellists on tv creating confusion in minds of citizens over what to believe and what not to. That is how we have forgotten lynching cases which according to The Quint since 2015 stands at 115 deaths now. The thing with numbers is, they no more excite us. Numbers wipe out the faces and families of the dead, their life, livelihood and sorrows. And our inhumane, dastardly involvement in these deaths. Here, let Arundhati Roy describe you one such murder which, one must remember, happened in daylight, was captured on camera and had voyeur crowd looking at the scene of a crime. It stood there, in awe and jubilation.

The lynching of Tabrez Ansari illustrates just how broken the ship is, and how deep the rot. Lynching is a public performance of ritualised murder, in which a man or woman is killed to remind their community that it lives at the mercy of the mob. And that the police, the law, the government, as well as the good people in their homes, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, who go to work and take care of their families, are friends of the mob. Tabrez was lynched this June. He was an orphan, raised by his uncles in the state of Jharkhand. As a teenager, he went away to the city of Pune, where he found a job as a welder. When he turned 22, he returned home to get married. Soon after his wedding to eighteen-year-old Shahista, Tabrez was caught by a mob, tied to a lamppost, beaten for hours and forced to chant the new Hindu war cry, “Jai Shri Ram!”—Victory to Lord Ram! The police eventually took Tabrez into custody, but refused to allow his distraught family and young bride to take him to the hospital. Instead they accused him of being a thief, and produced him before a magistrate, who sent him back to custody. He died four days later.

How did we let all this pass? When did we get ourselves normalised with such open hate and daylight murders? And then we shout Pakistan is killing Hindus? Which Hindus and where? We are speculating Pakistan is killing Hindus while we are here, openly killing Muslims — on the street and in our trains. We are not even hiding their dead bodies. Some of these bigoted murders and violence was shot on camera for public viewing. Did that agitate us? No. In fact, we reelected the same people who sat on these murders. People, who did not act on the perpetrators. How should anyone believe that Indians are peaceful or that Indians abhor killings? On the contrary, it appears we very much enjoy public floggings. What did we do about Dalit floggings from Una? Nothing. We successfully forgot. We succeeded in erasing these violent images from public memory. That is us. The sick, demented, contagious disease of the human race.

It is important how and what information is served to us. For instance, the ‘Howdy Modi’ event in America was attended by fifty thousand people including President Trump but what our news channels did not show were thousands of people protesting outside the stadium. In absence of such information you tend to think there is no opposition to Mr Modi and it also makes you hide your own doubt or inconvenience with the regime. We are herd animals. Many of us don’t express ourselves when we see or in this case perceive (thanks to our media) how everyone else is thinking otherwise.

Last five years have made us go through tragedy after tragedy. We have seen and done unimaginable things. For instance, do you think we would have stood in line without questions if Manmohan Singh had announced demonetization? I’m sure the doctor wouldn’t have done such a horrible thing but in case he had, would we stand in line like sheep and pay our obeisance? Were people not on streets when gas prices were above Rs. 400 and Rupee was at 64 per dollar? A gas cylinder today costs well above Rs. 800 and dollar to rupee is well above 75. Economically and socially, we are looking only downwards and yet this government enjoys huge support. How does one explain that except saying that Modi was elected for his divisive agenda? This government was elected to pursue the Nazi project of RSS. There is no other explanation. So let’s be clear of who we are and who we are supporting and what our unquestioned support means. Let’s not tell ourselves otherwise. Stop lying and deceiving others and yourself. We are infected. As Arundhati Roy said, this is our version of the coronavirus. We are sick.

Coronavirus can be kept at a distance by drinking cow piss (gaumutra for the initiated) but try it at your own risk for one BJP worker who had it at a gaumutra drinking party got sick and needed to be admitted into a hospital. News channels are saying, good news, Coronavirus infected have been cured in Jaipur hospital — Modi’s India has shown the world the way. But wait, didn’t first cure case from India come from Kerala? Also, as of 21 March, 91,133 have been recovered from COVID-19 worldwide. Home Minister Shah in Parliament says Delhi riots were stopped in 36 hours so let’s thank Delhi police. That is, of course, a lie, for gunshots and fire were still seen after 36 hours. What to do? Home Minister is allowed to lie in Parliament all the while our state symbol, Ashoka emblem continues to have Satyamev Jayate (Truth Alone Triumphs) engraved under it. Also, the Delhi police participated in the pogrom (oops! Riots). They, if wanted, could have stopped the riots before they had even begun. They simply did not want them to stop. It’s like appreciating a murderer, who killed eleven people, for stopping his count at eleven and not moving to the twelfth body. “I stopped my gun from shooting the twelfth man” Slow claps

We are indeed sick. Our language, our hearts, our minds, our politics, the way we perceive things, the way we look at people, the way we think, the things we read, the things that we watch, our sources of information, people who are to safeguard us, our avenues to seek justice, everything and everyone has been infected. We have become sick. And unless we see ourselves, we acknowledge the virus residing in us, the thing that has made a home in our body-politic, we won’t get out of this puddle. We have run too far for patches and band-aids to work now. Just look at our conversations, our language and our attitude; Nothing that we do, the way we talk and the way we listen right now is inspiring any confidence. We might find momentary solace through patches but the real cure will need far greater strength. And nothing that we are doing right now suggests we are ready for it.

#Politics #Hindu #Islam #Hate #fakenews #AmitShah #NarendraModi #BJP #Delhi #Pogrom #Violence #India