As the annual nine-day Hindu festival of Navratri commenced on September 26 this year, the FM brand Radio Mirchi has come up with a creepy program that promotes stalking and harassment of Hindu girls participating in the Navratri Garba events. Notably, Radio Mirchi is owned by Entertainment Network India Ltd (ENIL), a subsidiary of The Times Group.
Radharaman Das, Vice President of ISKCON Kolkata, took to Twitter to share a segment broadcasted by Radio Mirchi during one of its shows in which two guys can be heard discussing strategies to stalk women visiting Navratri Garba Pandals.
Red FM, which is owned by Shahrukh Khan is giving ideas to Muslim youths how to get Hindu girls contact details & trap them in Love Jihad. Can u believe this? This program is called 2 mins love story on Red FM…1/3 👇 pic.twitter.com/2pm5wMvXUL
— Radharamn Das राधारमण दास (@RadharamnDas) September 30, 2022
On the Radio Mirchi show, a man is heard explaining to another youth named Ali, with immense pride rather, that they would create an internet application where girls and women who wanted to visit Garba pandals could register their identities and choose where they wanted to go to play dandiya on that particular night. They would then obtain all of the data and review the profiles of all the girls who had registered on the app. They would then pick to visit the same pandal that the girl whose profile they preferred had chosen to visit to play dandiya.
As Radharaman Das correctly pointed out, such events as the annual Navratri dandiya events, in which Hindu men and women perform the traditional Garba dance around a centrally lit lamp or a picture or statue of the Goddess Shakti to celebrate the annual Hindu festival observed in honour of the goddess Durga, do become a hunting ground to stalk and harass Hindu women.
In fact, over the years, several cases of Muslim youths entering Navratri Garba Pandals by hiding their identity and pretending to be Hindu have come to the fore.
On Wednesday, September 29, seven Muslim youths were arrested by the police from the Garba pandal of Pandharinath in Indore. They were reportedly making videos of Hindu girls. At the same time, Muslim youths who entered the Garba pandal in the Sindhu Bhavan area in Ahmedabad were thrashed by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal activists. The video of the same went viral on social media.
अहमदाबाद: गरबा में दो मुस्लिम युवकों की हुई पिटाई, सूचना मिलने पर चेकिंग करने पहुंचे थे VHP और Bajrang Dal के कार्यकर्ता#BajrangDal #Garba pic.twitter.com/CdqMqVWPp6
— News24 (@news24tvchannel) September 28, 2022
In the case of Indore Garba Pandal, the Bajrang workers asked for the names of suspected Muslim youths and to show their IDs. Initially, the Muslim youths took Hindu names and did not even show ID, however, after further questioning once their real names were known, they were handed over to the police.
