Soumyadipta, a journalist who has reported from West Bengal in the past, shared his experience on social media and the manner in which editors of newspapers deliberately whitewashed the communal crimes committed by Muslims to maintain the charade of secularism.
He said that there has been a continuous migration of Hindus from the villages of Bengal leading to the situation that we see today. Soumyadipta said that his friend from school called him saying that Muslim mobs were burning buses merely a couple of kilometers away.
https://twitter.com/Soumyadipta/status/1206030628501671937?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The former journalist also said that it was important to understand that the Muslim mobs were not protesting over the CAB but that a law has been implemented that facilitates the entry of ‘Kaafirs’ (non-believers). He said that CAB might arrest the flow of demographic change and the ‘protesters’ are vehemently against it.
https://twitter.com/Soumyadipta/status/1206034198194085889?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Soumyadipta said that he has seen this demoraphic shift ever since he joined journalism in 1999. But Bengali editors ‘intellectualized’ the issue in the name of communism and secularism. He said that he was never allowed to write about how Hindus were being attacked by Muslim fundamentalists. Instead of the identity of the perpetrators, it was always written that ‘locals’ were involved in the crimes.
https://twitter.com/Soumyadipta/status/1206045911815581696?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
Soumyadipta also recounted an incident of a riot in Park Circus, an area in Kolkata heavily dominated by Muslims. It is the same area in Kolkata where protests were witnessed followin the passage of the Act. He had done his due diligence and reported the names of the perpetrators involved along with the madarsa that was involved. However, in the published copy, the names were removed and the crimes were whitewashed by terming it as one committed by ‘locals’. He also received lectures on ‘secularism’ from his editor and the language in the report was ‘not how truth was supposed to be presented in the media’.
https://twitter.com/Soumyadipta/status/1206057227838115840?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
In the end, the accused were released on bail after minor charges were slapped on them as a consequence of the involvement of ‘local political party dadas’. A few years later, there was another major incident of riot where innocents wre killed and it was the same madarsa boys that were involved. Soumyadipta ended his thread with a damning indictment of the Bengali elite. He said, “The intellectuals of Bengal (authors, senior journalists, filmmakers, poets) have consistently overlooked the religious violence in their own backyard. They have justified and intellectualised the violence. They have acted as catalysts to the downfall of Bengal”.