On Tuesday, a 22-year-old Hindu boy named Adarsh Tapadia was stabbed to death by members of another community over a petty dispute in Rajasthan’s Bhilwara district. Time and again we have witnessed increased hate crimes against Hindus. However, the communal angle in such incidents is often subsumed many times, while they are categorised as mere law and order issues.
The underlying factor that binds all of this – be it the alleged targetted death of Lavanya by suicide to the brutal murder of Adarsh Tapadia last week, is the whitewashing of communal crimes in which Hindus have been regularly and repeatedly victimised.
The concerted effort so employed to belittle the oppression of Hindus by extremists conspires in many ways. It starts off with denying the Hindu hatred which often acts as the trigger for the attacks and ends up resting the onus of violence on Hindus themselves. Here are five ways in which a toolkit to whitewash atrocities against Hindus develops patterns in propaganda, positioning of narratives and shapes power.
Islamist propaganda in the guise of ‘Fact checking’
On the 14th of April, a letter by terror organisation Lashkar-e-Islam surfaced, where Islamists issued threats to the Kashmiri Hindu community. Titled a ‘Letter to kafirs’ it said, “Leave the valley or face dire consequences”, giving a final warning to Kashmiri Pandits, migrants and ‘RSS agents’. However, the self-proclaimed ‘fact-checking’ website AltNews indulged in mental gymnastics to prove that Islamists had not threatened Hindus and that the letter was fake. It pointed out a few spelling mistakes, claimed factual inaccuracies and the letter not being signed as reasons why the letter should not be taken seriously.
While AltNews has a habit of dishing out clean chits and making presumptions based on flimsy evidence, it has turned out to be a fake news peddler itself many times. The website recently gave a free pass to the Muslim community after a controversy erupted when posters bearing incendiary quotes attributed to prominent Muslim leaders from AIMIM MLA Akbaruddin Owaisi to Islamic hate preacher Zakir Naik were installed in Uttar Pradesh’s Pratapgarh. The posters contained dire warnings to Hindus, racial slurs and glorified Islamic invaders in medieval India.
On the other hand, another leftist and Islamist propaganda website ‘The Wire’ is known for conflating Muslim sentiments with perpetual victimhood. In a recent video, well-known Islamist apologist Arfa Khanum Sherwani urged that Hindus should come out and apologise for recent incidents of violence during Hindu festivals in India. Sherwani asked Hindus to ‘disassociate themselves from all religious groups’ and come to the aid of Muslims who, despite pelting stones and firing at police, were victims in her eyes. Wire’s co-founder Siddharth Varadarajan has even claimed that the Godhra killings were just a conspiracy hatched by Hindu nationalists to blame the Muslims. In a tweet, he said, “we are still living a lie that “anti-Hindu conspirators” forcibly entered a railway coach filled to the brim with karsevaks, who poured 60 litres of petrol and set it on fire without even a single passenger seeing them do this.”
In 2021, when a frenzied mob of about 400-500 Islamists attacked the ISKCON temple in the Noakhali district of Bangladesh, Genesia Alves, a columnist with leftist portal Scroll justified the attack by saying, ‘as you sow,’ (suggesting – so shall you reap) while pinning the blame on the temple authorities for the attack. The instances where these online portals have indulged in professional whitewashing hate crimes against Hindus are countless.
The entitlement called ‘Muslim areas’
Recently, two NDTV journalists wanted to point out that it was the ‘provocative music and slogans’ which incited violence among the Muslim population as Shobhayatras celebrating Hindu festivals passed through ‘Muslim ghettos’ in many cities in India. Sreenivasan Jain, In his tweet, not only suggested that there are ‘no-go’ ‘Muslim areas’ which should be left untouched by the ‘kafir’ Hindus, he also veneered his argument by overstating the ‘raising of slogans’ as the cause of violence. Later, Gargi Rawat too was seen unapologetically justifying the attack on Hindu processions by arguing stating that the ‘procession was taken through Muslim areas’ and ended up blaming the ‘aggressive’ sloganeering for the ‘invariable’ stone-pelting and clashes.
Both, Rawat and Jain, whitewashed the actual crime, which was stone-pelting and attacks of petrol bombs on the procession by conflating that with the music being played that was ‘problematic’. Hindu presence is seen as provocative in places where Muslim population is dominant, which have now evolved into private precincts of the Muslim community on a city level. The mere sight of Hindu elements in these areas, as we have seen has resulted in an escalation of violence from the other side.
However, it is not the violent actors from the Muslim side who pelt stones at Hindu processions, but the presence of processions themself that is held responsible for the hate crimes inside the minds of these ‘secularists’. When brute street power meets narrative setters, they pave way for ‘Muslim areas’ of two kinds – The first one being the physical occupation in the city while the latter is an intellectual space which whitewashes crimes against Hindus.
Employing ‘influencers’
We all have seen how prominent names in the Western Media and its employed footsoldiers in India consciously peddle fake news and propaganda on Indian issues to serve their local politics. Now academicians and ex-bureaucrats to global figures to artists have been asked to participate in decrying India with a meta-narrative of ‘Muslim persecution in India’. These eminences have taken it upon themselves to root for creating a political opposition to Narendra Modi, which the opposition parties have failed in doing so in the electoral process.
Their process, however, starts from secularising the instances where communal hatred in terms of stone peltings, shootings, and killings against the Hindu population and then trivialising any action against Islamic extremism as a threat to Muslims. Lately, former National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon, ex-foreign secretary Sujatha Singh, former Lt Governor of Delhi Najeeb Jung, former home secretary G K Pillai and former prime minister Manmohan Singh’s principal secretary T K A Nair among the 103 others wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to condemn the “politics of hate” allegedly practised by state governments under BJP’s control.
Whining over the anti-encroachment drives across states in India, they have termed them a “frenzy of hate-filled destruction in the country with Muslims and other minorities at the sacrificial altar”.
Washington Post columnist and law professor Khaled Beydoun is known for posting lies on his Twitter handle related to India. Recently, Beydoun blamed Hindus for the crime committed by the mob of Muslims when in Karauli. Muslims had attacked a rally of Hindus celebrating the Hindu new year when it was passing through a Muslim-dominated area. Beydoun has previously claimed ‘violent Hindu supremacy’ in India with racial attacks on Hindutva and the BJP anchored with fake news.
German soccer player Mesut Ozil, during the month of Ramzan, tweeted, “Praying during the holy night of Lailat al-Qadr for the safety and well-being of our Muslim brothers and sisters in India. Let’s spread awareness of this shameful situation!” The Arsenal Footballer asked “What is happening to human rights in the so-called largest democracy in the world?” with the hashtag ‘Break the Silence’.
In a tweet, TV presenter and cook Padma Lakshmi insinuated, “Fellow Hindus, don’t succumb to this fear-mongering. There is no threat to Hinduism in India or anywhere else.” Such a statement from Lakshmi is itself a reflection of Hinduphobia that co-exists with the denial of Hindu human rights from people like her.
Alike his previous reports, British-American MSNBC Journalist Mehdi Hasan carried his tirade against India and PM Modi saying that Modi is hell-bent on re-creating the “lost Hindu kingdom” one likes to call “Hindu Rashtra” and is “far-right” and “supremacist”. The propaganda by Beydoun to Ozil and Padma Laxmi to Hasan tells us that the toolkit of the Muslim brotherhood’s targeting of India was activated in the month of Ramzan, which in reality saw widespread violence against Hindus.
From national-level useful idiots to the International influencers, everyone is employed to further the narrative to claim persecution of ‘Muslims’ in India, and in a way relegate the Hindu concerns to the downstream. All of this, was being done at a time when violence had spurged against Hindus during festivals like New year, Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti. Yet for the ‘liberal’ propagandists, Hindus were responsible for the incidents, as a majority and the Muslims remained full-time victims as usual.
Not addressing the targetted killings in Bengal and Kerala
Political killings in Bengal are not new. However, since the triumphant victory of Mamata Banerjee as a third-time CM over the challenging rise of the BJP in state politics, political killings have been layered with Islamist undertones, while in many instances, BJP workers have been killed for being Hindus.
As late as May 2022, a BJP member named Arjun Chowrasiya was found hanging in West Bengal’s Cossipore. Two days later, 22-year-old Debashish Manna who was the son of a local BJP booth worker suffered the same fate in the East Medinipur district. Similarly, A BJP worker’s body was found mysteriously hanging from a tree at Mallarpur town in Birbhum District, West Bengal. In a number of such cases, families of the victims have alleged political ploys behind the gruesome murders.
Kerala, which remains the last bastion of the Communist parties, has become a breeding ground for Islamic radicalism, leftist terrorism and urban Naxalism. In a state where the killings of BJP/RSS workers is normalised, it has become difficult to survive in the state as an ideologically opposing force. In a recent horrific incident, a senior Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS) leader Sreenivasan, was murdered by a group of 5-6 assailants who arrived on three bikes. Notably, all the 20 accused in the case are affiliated to or members of the radical Popular Front of India (PFI) or its political wing Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI).
However, this was only one such incident which made it to the news. Avenging the deaths of RSS workers, activists for wearing their Hindu identity on their sleeves has evolved into a dangerous paradigm. Moreover, in many cases, most of these crimes fail to make it to the mainstream of Indian politics. The real threat to Indian democracy lies in the said states of Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and others which have witnessed increased violence against Hindutva workers. Incidents like these cannot be defined as mere political killings as those accused in the cases often belong to the radical leftist and Islamist elements.
Belittling Hindu concerns
We have seen that whenever concerns of Hindus are raised in the political arena, they are categorised as ‘majoritarian’ – and are not considered worthy to be discussed. Since the times have changed with Hindutva becoming the ‘mainstream’ of Indian politics, attempts to marginalise concerns of ethnic Hindu communities have been started by the circles on the Left. And if at all, those are highlighted, they are charged for creating animosity between community groups and are hence responsible for creating further violence.
Recently, on May 12, 2022, Kashmiri Hindu youth Rahul Bhat, was murdered by three JeM terrorists in Srinagar. Soon, some of the journalists were eager to blame Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files for the violence in the valley. One would wonder – how a film documenting the genocide of Kashmiri Hindus be responsible for the recent killings of more Hindus in the valley. Putting the onus on the Hindu community whatsoever the incident is a thumb rule of this permanent game.
The ethnic cleansing of the Dharmic population in Bangladesh and Pakistan was not enough, the liberals’ opposition to the CAA came easy. The amendment that accelerated the citizenship process for persecuted minorities in India’s neighbourhood was painted as ‘discriminatory’ towards the local Muslim population. Simply put, whenever Hindus assert themselves with their grievances before the state, they are not allowed to be seen as stand-alone Hindu problems – and somehow a Muslim angle is penetrated.
The whitewashing of communal crimes against Hindus has evolved as a further step towards large-scale purging of Hindus, the first one being their denial.
