The plant that we so diligently watered and cared for has grown into a big banyan; full of flowers and fruits. Own it now.

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