On June 12, 2025, a tragic Air India crash near Ahmedabad shook the nation. Over 240 lives were lost — mothers, fathers, children, and countless stories ended abruptly in a fiery disaster that should have united the country in grief and reflection. But for a certain segment of India’s liberal intelligentsia and their online echo chambers, mourning the dead was secondary. The real tragedy, according to them, would have been if the pilot had been a Muslim.
Yes, a horrifying incident that claimed the lives of more than 240 people didn’t evoke sentiments of solidarity and grief. Instead, vultures used the tragedy to peddle their narrow ideological agendas, with some using the charade of “demanding accountability” to further their aversion of the Modi government while their other ideological counterparts using it as an opportunity to claim what they have mastered all their lives: Muslim victimhood.
One would be inclined to dismiss such antics as depraved attempts at engagement farming, following the social media culture of chasing limelight and impress substance even if it none exist, most notably illustrated by the recent case of Saket Gokhale — a full-time online troll turned Rajya Sabha member — who was recently forced to apologise for his libelous online remarks against a former diplomat.
But such preposterous online discourse has been going on for far too long to be dismissed as a mere impetuous activity in grabbing social media attention. On the contrary, it is a sign of the deepening moral decay afflicting India’s Left ecosystem, one that warrants urgent discussion and debate.
As the country grappled with the horror of the crash, social media saw a peculiar — and deeply disturbing — reaction from some so-called “liberal” voices. Prominent among them was one Amit Behere, a self-styled commentator known more for his crude outbursts than meaningful analysis. Instead of expressing condolences, he tweeted: “Imagine if the pilot was a Muslim. Just imagine. And thank God he was not.” He went on to abuse the Prime Minister in derogatory terms, blaming him and his supporters for the very fact that this thought even crossed his mind.
This statement was not only insensitive but a damning example of the ideological rot that has infested the liberal discourse in India. Over 240 Indians had perished, but the first thought from this gentleman and others like him wasn’t about the victims, the cause of the crash, or the grieving families — it was a hypothetical scenario of communal victimhood.
Let’s be clear: the pilot’s religion, whether Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or Christian, should not — and did not — matter in the wake of such a tragedy. But in the minds of many left-leaning commentators, identity politics must override everything. That’s the poison that keeps them alive; preventing them from slipping into oblivion and presenting an opportunity to animate their dwindling support base. For them, every event must be squeezed through a communal lens, and every tragedy must be converted into an opportunity to portray Muslims as perpetual victims, regardless of facts.
Amit Behere is not an anomaly. He merely represents a wider pattern where some elites have internalised the belief that unless Muslims are framed as victims in every news cycle, every report is a product of ‘Godi media’ —a pejorative that the leftwing outrage machinery employs to suppress hard facts that undermine their narratives. This mindset is not only reductive — it is dangerous. It sidelines real issues, erodes empathy, and replaces genuine humanitarian concern with toxic identity politics.
Imagine being the family member of a victim, scrolling through social media only to see people like Behere obsessing over the religion of the pilot rather than mourning your loved one. Imagine the arrogance and entitlement it takes to use the smouldering wreckage of a plane crash as a soapbox for political grievance-mongering.
This is the perverse moral compass of woke liberalism in India today. It does not see Indians as individuals — it sees only boxes: Hindu, Muslim, upper caste, lower caste, oppressed, oppressor. It does not seek truth — it seeks victimhood validation. And if real events don’t fit the narrative, hypotheticals are invented, as Behere did, to stoke fear, resentment, and anti-government sentiment.
It is also telling that Behere tries to shift the blame for his own twisted thoughts onto the ruling dispensation. “That this thought is forced to cross our mind,” he laments, as if expressing bigotry is justifiable so long as it is cloaked as a response to others. This is classic liberal gaslighting — project your own biases onto society and claim you’re merely a reflection of the environment. It’s cowardice masquerading as insight.
The larger issue here is the weaponisation of tragedy. Whether it’s a terror attack, a natural disaster, or now a plane crash, there’s a disturbing pattern where large sections of the Left and their Islamist fellow travellers use every misfortune as an opportunity — not for unity, not for empathy, but for political mileage. Their toolkit is predictable: communalise the narrative, blame the majority, question the government, and elevate minority victimhood — even if it means completely disregarding the actual victims.
This is what happened when 26 people, all but one Hindus, lost their lives in a ghastly terror attack in Pahalgam earlier this year. The terrorists, believed to be from Islamist terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, identified victims as Hindus, often forcing them to strip to check for circumcision before shooting them point blank. It was an open and shut case of Muslim terrorists killing Hindu tourists. But even then, these hate merchants shamelessly found a way to paint Muslims as victims of the tragedy, brazenly highlighting how the attack has spawned a new wave of “Islamophobia” in the country.
What such incidents reveal is an utter inability to view incidents from a neutral, dispassionate, human perspective. Human lives are stripped of the kaleidscope of emotions and overlaying identities they embody. Instead, they are reduced to the binary setting of the oppressed and the oppressing. For this ideological cabal, the default framework is always oppression. In their world, Muslims must be seen as threatened, Hindus as aggressors, and the BJP-led government as the architect of all evil — regardless of the facts on the ground.
But when 240 lives are lost in a catastrophic air crash and the first instinct is to ask, “What if the pilot was Muslim?” — we’re not dealing with concern. We’re dealing with obsession. An obsession with identity, with grievance, with imaginary persecution. An obsession so deep that it drowns out the cries of the actual victims.
What makes this worse is the silence of the so-called moderate liberals. Not one prominent voice among them condemned this perverse shift in narrative. Not one op-ed was written chastising those who hijacked the grief of hundreds to spin a communal fantasy. This silence isn’t just complicity — it’s consent.
As a nation, we must ask: how did we get here? How did we reach a point where a national tragedy becomes a playground for ideological vendetta? How did a tragedy that should have united us instead become another wedge driven between communities, thanks to the imagination of people who see India as nothing more than a battlefield of perpetual oppression? Who is responsible for this moral decay among the Left intelligentsia?
Surely, personal integrity, honesty, and adherence to moral principles is independent of who is in power and their style of functioning.
There is still time to reclaim our collective sanity. But to do so, we must first call out and reject this perverse strain of pseudo-liberalism that thrives on division, relativism, and emotional blackmail. We must return to a politics of truth, not hypotheticals. A politics of unity, not manufactured victimhood.
Because if even in the face of mass death, we cannot unite in grief, then the rot is far deeper than we imagine — and the tragedy, far greater than we fear.
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