On Mahashivratri, when Hindus worship Lord Shiva, Sara Ali Khan, the daughter of Saif Ali Khan and Amrita Singh, was abused and attacked on social media yet again because she posted a picture of performing puja at the Omkareshwar Temple Jyotirlinga. Members of the Muslim community descended in her mentions on Instagram abusing her for performing ‘Shirk’. ‘Are you a Muslim?’ was a common comment under her picture.
In one of the pictures, one individual belonging to the Muslim community said that it is understandable that despite being a Muslim, she wears short clothes and acts in movies, but performing Shirk is an absolute sin.
The Quran stresses in many verses that God does not share his powers with any partner (sharīk). It warns those who believe their idols will intercede for them that they, together with the idols, will become fuel for hellfire on the Day of Judgment (21:98). Shirk in Islam is, therefore, idolatry, polytheism, and the association of God with other deities.
In this context, the comment of the Muslim individual becomes extremely important. For the average Muslim, it would appear, no sin is greater than that of Shirk – worshipping Hindu deities, in the context of India.
For most, social media comments are just that – social media comments that must be summarily ignored as the rants of deranged minds who have nothing better to do in life, except of course, when they abuse the likes of Rana Ayyub – then they become the symbols of Hindu terrorism – but we will discuss that some other day.
The attacks against Sara Ali Khan aren’t new or one-off. She was abused for visiting the Ujjain Mahakal Temple, the Kedarnath temple and even for wishing Home Minister Amit Shah on his birthday.
Repeatedly, on almost every Hindu festival, Islamists descend in her mentions abusing her for committing Shirk, for being a bad Muslim – some abuse, some post Quran verses, some issue threats and others simply ask her to leave Islam if she is so drawn towards Kafirs and their religion.
I would be remiss if I did not admit that the attacks against Khan have become so frequent, that when she was attacked recently, I paused before covering and eventually, let it slide. How many times do we cover the same issue, I had remarked – she gets abused every single day. It was only later that I realised that my reaction was precisely the problem and how I had done injustice to the subject by not covering the latest incident.
Essentially, by not covering the vile attack against Khan, I ended up normalising the barbaric Islamic attack on anyone who shows reverence to the Hindu faith. I let down ex-Muslims, anyone who worships Hindu Gods and Goddesses and most of all – Hindus.
Let me explain how.
As the editor-in-chief of OpIndia, there is a deep sense of realisation that we are not really like Times of India. We don’t cover everything. We don’t write 100 reports a day and cover every incident under the sun. OpIndia has a specific brief. We cover what we think is necessary for the cause of Hindus and Bharat.
The unbridled hate of the Islamists, directed towards the Hindu community, our faith and our Gods and Goddesses has been a large part of what we aim to cover in OpIndia. While the mythical beast of Islamophobia is mainstreamed, the irrepressible hatred against Hindus, their genocide, their murders and iconoclasm has been summarily ignored in the pages of history and therefore, the real and present dangers that Hindus face have been buried under sheets of secularism, political correctness and the importance we seem to give to the phenomenon of Sarva Garam Vada Pao, foisted upon us by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
The attacks we see against Sara Ali Khan aren’t random – we have seen such concerted attacks before by the Muslim community and they have, almost always, stemmed from the same malaise that cannot be ignored no matter how repetitive it gets. The unintended consequence of ignoring the attacks against Khan, just because they have become usual and repetitive, only ends in the normalisation of hatred against Hindus and their Deities, a consequence we must be mindful of.
Every time such attacks happen, one has to hear canards about Islam being a religion of peace and all the violence that has somehow been sanctioned by Islam are misinformation being spread by Islamophobes. Then comes the reply that all religions are the same and therefore, indoctrinated elements exist in all religions. Essentially, the apologists of Islam say that all religions are equal (teaching love, brotherhood and peace) and such comments on posts like Sara’s should be ignored because a few bad apples do not define the adherents of faith in totality.
At the very outset, it suffices to say that no other religion in the world, at this point in time in history, lays out a doctrine for the torture, subjugation, conversion and humiliation of all the people who refuse to believe in their faith, other than Islam.
No other religion in the world has left behind a trail of mangled bodies, blood and gore in its wake as much as Islam and what is worse is that this carnage was sanctified in their religion, in fact, it is one of the necessities of their religion. Moral relativists and apologists of Islam often say that Islam is a religion of peace and it is its adherents who have distorted the peaceful version of Islam.
And therefore, any threats made by the Muslim community has to be amplified and taken seriously, not ignored and normalised. Almost on a daily basis, we hear “Gau Mutra” jibes being thrown at Hindus. While it is just “trolling” for those who want to apologise for Islam’s deep-seated hatred, it is an indication of the malaise that ails the Muslim community, as evidenced by the fact that even the Pulwama terrorist used the “Gau Mutra” jibe in his video. He blew himself up. One has to then wonder what really is the difference between those who make these comments online and those who blow themselves up offline.
For thousands of years, Hindus have been subjugated by the Islamist invaders who have raped Hindu women, beheaded our kings, murdered our children all for the ultimate goal of the establishment of the Caliphate. There are countless tales of how the Islamic invaders murdered Hindus and kept their wives, mothers and daughters as slaves – the spoils of war.
The barbarity was so perverse, that Hindu women often chose to jump into the fire and give up their lives after Hindus were defeated in war, lest they were taken slaves by Islamic invaders. You might wonder why they didn’t simply slit their wrists instead of stepping into the burning fire – well – they did not want their corpse to be desecrated by the followers of Islam who had laid siege on their land.
The brutality is not just limited to Islamic invaders. In the modern political landscape of India, Hindus were humiliated during the partition as well. One recalls how the Khilafat movement claimed the lives of countless Hindus during the Moplah massacres by Islamists and even the Direct Action Day, spearheaded by Jinnah. After the countless deaths of Hindus, our own, MK Gandhi, asked Hindus to simply lay down their lives if the Islamists chose to claim it.
During partition, Hindus were mutilated and their women raped. At the altar of ‘secularism’, which the Atheists love to espouse, India decided to not conduct a full exchange of population, a suggestion that was made by various luminaries at the time including Dr B.R. Ambedkar, and thus, began another cycle of subjugation in modern India. This year itself, we saw riots by sections of the Muslim community and aided by the Left against the Hindus.
The saga of brutality continues to this day not just in India, but also, against the minority Hindus of Pakistan and when India decided that the minority Hindus could take refuge in India, their natural home post-partition, the Islamists ran riots yet again. They stabbed a Hindu over 50 times simply because he was Hindu and chopped off the arms and legs of another before burning him alive.
Therefore, every comment against Sara Ali Khan is not just an attack against her, but when Islamists abuse her for visiting temples, it is essentially their hate for Hindus, Hinduism, Polytheism and their generational need for iconoclasm. Every temple desecrated, every Hindu killed, every incident of abuse, offline or online, needs to be documented with clinical precision and an unswerving commitment – documenting the siege against our people and our faith cannot be cast aside simply because it is repetitive.
