In a Hinduphobic tweet, Sahitya Akademi Award winning poet Munawwar Rana referred to Hindus as ‘animals’ who only come in handy while voting and Muslims as ‘humans’.
https://twitter.com/MunawwarRana/status/1260418949147172865?ref_src=twsrc%5EtfwAddressing BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra, Munawwar Rana was criticising government of India’s measures to combat coronavirus. He said, “After seeing government’s failure on coronavirus, it has been proven that there are 35 crore humans and 100 crore animals,”. As per 2011 census, Muslim population was estimated at about 17.22 crore which would have grown over the years. And while he did not explicitly mention that he meant Hindus and Muslims as ‘animals’ and ‘humans’ in his tweet, netizens objected to this tweet of Rana and pointed out the Hinduphobic nature of his tweet.
https://twitter.com/Kamlesh150762/status/1260495318711513089?ref_src=twsrc%5EtfwAfter the outrage, he again took to Twitter to ‘clarify’ that his words were being twisted.
https://twitter.com/MunawwarRana/status/1260584178132934669?ref_src=twsrc%5EtfwHe claimed the 35 crore mentioned in his original tweet were not Muslims but those who are healthy and happy and 100 crore ‘animals’ are those who are deprived of basic things like food, water and shelter. But netizens were not buying it.
https://twitter.com/rahulsikarwar01/status/1260609125827989505?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/santosh581158/status/1260733054030622720?ref_src=twsrc%5EtfwAmusingly, soon after clarifying that he did not mean to divide Indians on religion as ‘animals’ and ‘humans’, Rana defended the Tablighi Jamaat, which emerged as one of the major hotspots for coronavirus in India.
https://twitter.com/MunawwarRana/status/1260603317966815237?ref_src=twsrc%5EtfwMany of the Tablighi Jamaat members were accused of pelting stones and misbehaving with the healthcare workers and frontline staff. UP Police recently arrested few attendees who had allegedly molested a nurse at quarantine centre.
Munawwar Rana
Munawwar Rana was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2014 by the same ‘fascist’ Modi government he keeps whining against. He was awarded for “Shehdaba”, a collection of ghazals and nazms (long poems). One of the poems in Shehdaba, was on Sonia Gandhi, which was written when Sonia Gandhi, despite winning with a thumping majority, refused the chair of the prime ministership. He returned the award in 2015 to protest against the ‘rising intolerance’.
In December 2019, his daughter, while protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act, the Act which sought to fast-track Indian citizenship to persecuted religious minorities in three neighbouring Islamic countries, Pakistani, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, had said that Muslims are Muslims first, then anything else. “Do not lose your identity to become secular,” she said.