Yesterday in Surat.

How ironic that a “rally against mob lynching” incidents would consist of an angry mob attacking policemen?

Such violence is the natural culmination of a very calculated effort by anti-Modi liberals to build up hatred by stringing together a narrative of India being a place where minorities are lynched.

India has always had a weak law enforcement system. Our cops are poorly trained, generally unmotivated and our police to citizen ratio is one of the lowest in the world. The simplest of cases drag on in our courts for decades with no end in sight. Naturally, people in India don’t have much respect for the system. A sad corollary of this is that people in India sometimes resort to mob justice against those they perceive to be criminals.

This is a failure of the state and it certainly should be addressed. But liberals saw an opportunity in this chronic weakness of the Indian state. They decided to string together isolated incidents where Muslims were victims and made up a whole narrative that there is some kind of coordinated targeting of the Muslim community. The unfortunate victims became household names, with the facts of each case garnished from imagination and sprinkled “liberally” with lies.

By the time the truth comes out, the truth no longer matters.

The campaign was initially intended to rally the ragtag “civil society groups,” who had fallen out of favour after the new Modi led BJP assumed power in Delhi. Their hope was to guilt trip the common Hindu. To their dismay, however, they discovered that things had changed in India. The common Hindu saw right through their half-truths and hypocrisies. Campaigns like “Award Wapsi” became the punchline for internet jokes and humour.

That’s when the liberals changed strategy and began playing in two other markets that Indian Hindus could not influence easily. The first was the “export market.” With the so-called first world still insecure about India’s rise, there was a lot of room in Western newspapers and media outlets for badmouthing India and Hindus. Uninformed foreign audiences could easily be fed the worst about India. And the revenue would be coming in much coveted $$$.

The second market is where it gets even more serious and dangerous. Pumping up the anger among Indian Muslims. In some ways, the lies about “Lynchistan” are even more dangerous than lying about riots. A riot is limited to a geographical area. Here, Indian Muslims are being pumped with lies that anybody anywhere could be under threat.

This is from Malegaon a few days ago.

The killing of Tabrez Ansari in Jharkhand is again an example of a real event picked up and fitted into a false narrative.

This particular rally at Malegaon was peaceful, but the false narrative was disseminated among the crowd of lakhs. Listen to the speeches as reported by The Indian Express: “The crowd was also asked to spread the message among Muslims that the “victims of lynchings should not show helplessness in chanting Jai Shri Ram; instead, they should die by taking the Sahadat”.”

This poison drip of lies has been fed to Indian Muslims for so long that violent reactions are coming in all over the place. On Eid day, a mob in Delhi threw stones and wrecked DTC buses in “retaliation” against what they thought was a deliberate disruption of their prayers.

The facts? A car thief ran into the crowd while trying to get away in a vehicle he had stolen!

Then, there was the shocking incident in Chandni Chowk in Delhi, where a Durga Temple was vandalized.

And now Surat, where police have been attacked.

Since the day Modi came to power, a certain group of “liberals” has been anguished, trying to create violence so as to justify their doomsday predictions. And they don’t care if the nation burns down. As Modi spends more and more years in office and there is no actual evidence of systemic injustice to minorities, they are investing with more and more conviction into the “lynchistan” narrative of stringing together disparate events.

It is hard to say how to counter this narrative. Because this is purely an “information war.” Where it is very easy for liberals to mount a rhetorical offensive and accuse the other side of being insensitive to real victims of real crimes. The liberals enjoy the clear advantage in both theatres where this information war is being fought: foreign audiences who do not know anything about India and would like to believe the worst about us. And Indian Muslims whose victimhood complex has been carefully nurtured for seventy years.

There is only one thing the government can do, which it must. That enforces the law strictly. Those who rioted in Delhi on Eid day should have been punished severely. The same goes for the incident in Chandni Chowk and the latest incident in Surat. I am not sure it will arrest the fake narrative being spread about “Lynchistan”, but maintaining the rule of law is a must. On that, there can be no compromise.