Earlier this week, the bone-chilling details of the Shraddha murder case shook the collective conscience of the country. Shraddha, an unsuspecting Mumbai girl with a bright future ahead of us, was perhaps unaware of the fate awaiting her when she shunned her parents and moved to Delhi to live with her live-in partner, Aftab, who turned out to be a monster who brutally killed her.

Aftab met Shraddha in Mumbai while working at a call centre. Shraddha fell in love with Aftab and eloped from her home after her parents disapproved of her relationship with him. The duo, thereafter, began living together in the Mehrauli area of Delhi. Aftab was reportedly miffed with the victim for asking him to marry her. On May 18 this year, he strangled her to death.

The accused then purchased a refrigerator and stored her body in it for several days. He chopped his partner into 35 pieces and disposed of them at 18 different locations in Delhi. In the meanwhile, he dated other girls who came to his home even as severed parts of Shraddha’s body were kept inside the fridge. Reportedly, he would go out every night at 2 am to dump the body parts and destroy the evidence of his heinous crime.

The sheer brutality of the crime naturally attracted prying social media eyeballs, who expressed their outrage and disgust at the ghastly murder of Shraddha by her live-in partner Aftab. While social media users voiced their disbelief at the utter inhuman behaviour of Aftab, some of them, most notably those belonging to the left-leaning intelligentsia, were more concerned that Aftab’s name and religion inevitably featured in online conversation over the murder. 

They tried to leverage the unfortunate death of Shraddha to peddle the Muslim victimhood narrative and blamed ‘Sanghis’ for communalising the murder of a Hindu girl at the hands of her Muslim live-in partner even though religion played no explicit role in driving the perpetrator toward committing an act of such brutality. 

The left-leaning intellectuals and closet Islamists were more obsessed with the name and the religion of the perpetrator being talked about rather than the brutality he inflicted on her, not only killing her but clinically cutting her into 35 pieces and then meticulously planning to dispose of her severed body parts in different locations across the national capital. India is a deeply religious society, and ipso facto, discussions would inevitably veer around the religious identity of a person who committed an act of savagery that sent the entire nation into shock and distress.

The Left-leaning ‘intellectuals’ and fundamentalists outrage over SM discussions on Aftab’s religious identity in the Shraddha murder case

A raft of left-leaning ‘liberals’ made a beeline to express shock and dismay, not at the death of Shraddha but at how the case has gone viral on social media because the identity of the person who killed her was a Muslim.

Safoora Zargar, best known for arranging a flash protest at Jafrabad Metro Station in Delhi on February 22 that later culminated into full-scale communal riots, leaving 53 killed and countless others injured, took to Twitter sounding all but defensive for Aftab Poonawala.

“Abdul Poonawala is not being garlanded. He is in jail. He won’t get bail. Nor will he get a remission. He will not get a ticket to fight any election and nobody will campaign for him. And rightly so. So yes, take a good look at yourself plz,” she tweeted.

RJ Sayema, who has a habit of going hammers and tongs when a culprit is a non-Muslim, and the victim is Muslim even when the crime is not religiously motivated, mouthed off platitudes after Shraddha’s murder by Aftab.

“A monster brutally murdered a girl. Those harping on religion, in this case, are the killers of civilized society. Shameful,” tweeted Sayema, even though she has been at the forefront of indulging in behaviour that would, by her definition, amount to killing a civilised society.

A social media user implied that the degree of outrage witnessed currently would have been different if the perpetrator was Anubhav and not Aftab—a clear insinuation that the outrage was religiously motivated. 

Others, too, joined in to question the outsize media coverage of Shraddha’s murder and the resultant outrage it generated. They insinuated that the disproportionate attention to Shraddha’s murder is on account of her killer’s religion, which in this case is Islam. That killer’s identity and religion are being talked about is a testimony to the communalisation of the incident, they averred. 

Some of them even alluded that similar cases of savagery in other cases go unnoticed in the media because the perpetrator is a non-Muslim. 

How the Left cherrypicks data and selectively cites instances to promote its narrative 

While there is some merit in the argument that there were no religious connotations in Shraddha’s murder and that her killing was a result of perhaps a psychologically disturbed man with anger issues, the fact that his religion and identity did factor in online discussions because of obfuscatory practices instituted by the left-leaning media.

The left-leaning media houses and ‘intellectuals’ conveniently reveal the identity of killers and the victims when it suits their agenda. When the perpetrator belongs to a minority community, especially from Islam, the media organisations pull a veil over the identity of the culprit, even if the motive of the crime has religious overtones.

On the contrary, when the victims belong to a minority community or castes that bore the brunt of historical discrimination, the same media organisations and commentariats find no qualms in citing their religion and caste, even though it had no bearing on the crime committed.

The Caravan reduces Pulwama martyrs to their caste

For instance, habitual fake news peddler The Caravan, also notorious for peddling communal propaganda, had come up with a caste break-up of CRPF soldiers killed in the Pulwama attack in 2014. The objective of the exercise, though not spelt, was unmistakable—to sow discord within the Army ranks and the Hindu community by highlighting how a sub-section within the Hindu fold suffered disproportionately over another. And this exercise took place even as The Caravan has consistently refrained from linking the attacks in the Valley to Islamic terrorism.

Spat over train seat given communal colour by the Left

Another instance where the hypocrisy of the left ecosystem is apparent is the Junaid Khan murder case when a bevvy of liberals fell over themselves to declare it a hate crime motivated by a rabid desire to kill a Muslim. Media organisations, left intellectuals, journalists, and political analysts summarily declared it an instance of hate crime and a barometer of “rising intolerance” as they proceeded to trumpet the victim’s identity and attribute religious motivations to his murder.

As it turned out, the Punjab and Haryana Court later put paid to the hate crime angle and declared that Junaid was killed over a fight started over a train seat. However, the lie peddled had by then traversed across the globe and is still regurgitated by chronic anti-India propaganda pushers writing for western dailies such as The Washington Post. 

Misleading Muslims with scaremongering over Citizenship Amendment Act

More recently, the left lobby had tried to draw international attention toward India by weaving a false narrative surrounding the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). They claimed that CAA was discriminatory against Muslims and would be used to disenfranchise Indian Muslims—atrocious canards used to galvanise Muslims across the country and mobilise them into protesting against the government.

Some intellectuals even malevolently conflated CAA with NRC to scaremonger Muslims into believing that their citizenship is susceptible to invalidation and they could be sent to detention camps. Ms Zargar was one such individual who committed herself to peddling paranoia among Muslims, following which riots broke out and the police jailed her. 

By contrast, CAA catered to the persecuted minorities from the neighbouring three countries—Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan. It merely fast-tracked the citizenship process for the minorities from the said countries, having no impact on the citizenship of Indian Muslims. But usual suspects went about purveying a malicious lie that ultimately resulted in the 2020 Delhi Riots.

Doctored video used to malign ‘Jai Shri Ram’ chants

In June 2021, Mohammed Zubair shared a video of an assault on an elderly man identified as Abdul Samad Saifi. He alleged that miscreants thrashed the man and forced him to chant ‘Jai Shri Ram’.

The video was widely shared among liberal circles, who used it as another fodder to fuel their vicious campaign against the Modi government and demonisation of ‘Jai Shri Ram’.

However, the Uttar Pradesh Police later clarified that the accused and the victim knew each other before the incident and that it was a case of personal rivalry. The police said that the man was not forced to chant ‘Jai Shri Ram’ or any religious slogan.

Prejudiced hate tracker to project skewed data of hate crimes against Muslims

The controversial IndiaSpend hate tracker, long hailed by ‘intellectuals’ as an authoritative source of hate crime against minorities, was decommissioned after many users highlighted its inherent prejudice, institutional Hinduphobia, and faulty methodology.

Swati Goel Sharma, a journalist associated with Swarajya Magazine, relentlessly busted the hate tracker for its anti-Hindu proclivities, elaborating how it selectively considered instances where Muslims were victims, deliberately twisted the facts of the matter to increase the number of Muslim victims in its database by including cases where the victim and the perpetrator both belonged to the Muslim community and airbrushed instances when the victim was a non-Muslim and aggressor a Muslim.

The blanket denial of love jihad incidents

While no communal motive has been established thus far in Shraddha’s murder, it is not the fault of people who are naming and shaming the perpetrator, who happens to be a Muslim. The perpetrator being a Muslim is not the fault of those concerned about women and cautioning them against Love Jihad, a phenomenon that entails Muslim men using deception and deceit to lure Hindu women into relationships and then coercing them into embracing Islam but is summarily rejected by the Left.

Though this is not a prima facie Love Jihad case, when the Left rejects its occurrence in its entirety, those who have endured it or seen their loved ones go through the menace would instinctively relate the murder of a Hindu woman by her Muslim lover as an instance of love jihad.

In fact, there have been countless cases when the liberals have scoffed at instances of love jihad and termed them as figments of the fringe’s imagination. Their strident opposition to the anti-conversion laws instituted in various states also speaks to their predisposition against the existence of love jihad. It is their blanket denial that has caused many to suspect any awry interfaith relationship between a Hindu girl and a Muslim boy as an act of love jihad and use it as a cautionary tale to warn other Hindu girls.

The story of Shraddha and her killer Aftab may not be a case of love jihad, as per existing details. But it is not people’s fault that a Muslim man who identified himself as a feminist and a proponent of LGBTQ rights turned out to be a murderer. The Left-leaning liberals and ‘intellectuals’ have long deployed the tool of selectively quoting incidents and cherrypicking information that suits their narrative. Now, when their ideological opponents are aping them and reinforcing a narrative they champion, the liberals have no one but themselves to blame.