In the wake of the anti-encroachment drive that tore down illegal constructions in violence-stricken Jahangirpuri, Islamists resorted to scaremongering, peddling the propaganda that the action was an attempt to exact ‘revenge against Muslims’. It naturally sowed distrust and elicited angry reactions from a section of Muslims, many of whom were gullible enough to believe that the action was religiously discriminatory.
A video of one such resentful Muslim woman has gone viral on the internet. In the video, the woman wishes calamity such as coronavirus, which she claimed did not affect Muslims, to be struck on Hindus yet again.
“कोरोना से सिर्फ हिन्दू मरे थे , मुसलमान को कुछ नहीं हुआ था , अल्लाह करे हिन्दू पर फ़िर कोई कहर टूटे।”
— Panchjanya (@epanchjanya) April 24, 2022
: जहांगीरपुरी की मुस्लिम महिला
Video : @Dipanshu_IND pic.twitter.com/dpDUE69NNp
In a recent ground report by Panchjanya, a middle-aged woman was interviewed about the bulldozer action in the neighbourhood of Jahangirpuri. On April 20, the NMDC started its anti-encroachment drive in Delhi’s Jahangirpuri area to bring down illegal structures, shops and other encroachments. The lady in the video is seen saying, “We were given no notice. The authorities are doing this of their own will…On their own wish, they are targeting Muslims by threatening and beating them, taking their wives, and destructing their homes. What justice is this?” “The almighty is seeing it all,” the lady said.
“It won’t be the humans, but the God who will decide this”, she said after going on her tirade. Further, when the reporter tried to suggest that it was the Muslim side from where stones were thrown on the Hanuman Jayanti procession, she went on to say, “Like, in the Corona times, only Hindus were affected by the disease. Muslims were not affected. Now at God’s will, there will be such a calamity, that will be struck only the Hindus and not the Muslims.”
However, this is an isolated incident when a comment attaching Covid-19 as a supernatural happening was made.
The plethora of comments that are unscientific at their best and Hinduphobic to the worst includes comments made by burqa-clad women in a famous video in 2019, where they claimed that the deadly coronavirus is the grace of Allah and the Quran to mankind.“The Quran mentions a disease named Corona. We have always been strong and ready. Do you think you can scare us with corona? Death can come at any given time. Don’t think of scaring us with this disease,” a woman in the video claimed.
bored becoz of #JantaCurfew ?
— आलू बोंडा (@ek_aalu_bonda) March 22, 2020
Watch this..😹😹😹
Qur@n sharif me hai ye ki ek bimari aisi aayegi jiska naam corona hoga.. isiliye hum taiyyar rhe.
All@h ne corona ko bhej diya hai; faisala krne ke liye ki yaha kon rahega.. humko kuch nhi hoga. pic.twitter.com/OemSgiooYw
In the April of 2020, A Maulavi from Bengal, Abbas Siddiqui, was seen roaring from a stage, “Recently I have got the news that mosques are being set on fire…I think something is going to happen within a month. May Allah accept our prayers. May Allah send such a terrible virus to India that ten to twenty to fifty crore people die in India. Am I saying something wrong? It is absolutely blissful.” The Maulavi was seen spewing hate at a time when the world was battling the misinformation in the run-up to the first global wave of Covid-19 in 2020.
And they call us Islamophobic pic.twitter.com/fY5HJY9xZC
— Mohit Gulati 🇮🇳 (@desimojito) April 1, 2020
Similarly, in 2020 there were dozens of videos on TikTok featuring Muslims claiming that Coronavirus would not do any harm to them as they regularly pray to their God. Another video from Nashik showed a Muslim man taking a bunch of currency notes and licking them with his tongue and wiping his nose with them. He claimed that the coronavirus has no treatment because it is sent by ‘Allah’ to imply that he is going to pass those currency notes around, to spread the disease.
The wake of the Corona Virus in India was also the time when anti-CAA/NRC protests were happening. On Tiktok, in certain videos posted by Islamists, one can see them saying, “Welcome to India, coronavirus. To the ones who were asking for our NRC, my God (Allah)’s NRC is now being implemented. Now only He will decide who will stay and who will go.”
In the March of 2019, in the run-up to an increase in Covid-19 cases in India, Tablighi Jamaat chief Maulana Saad had mocked government orders of avoiding huge gatherings and insisted that people should visit the mosques, despite the regulations. Over 2100 attendees including foreign Islamic preachers were found in the Markaz in Delhi while hundreds of others had already reached other parts of the country who were later tested positive.
