Earlier last week, three incidents cropped up that underscored the dehumanisation and demonisation of Hindus underway in India. A Hindu girl committed suicide after being pressurised to convert to Christianity. A Hindu man was murdered in cold blood in the national capital. And a Hindu man convicted of Delhi anti-Hindu riots 2020 based on his identity.
These three incidents, all of which happened in a span of just a few days, should have normally warranted a big outcry, with media channels, journalists, human rights activists clamouring for justice for the victims and emphasising the precarious state of Hindus in India. However, since Hindus do not feature in their scheme of things as a community worth fighting for, they maintained a deafening silence over these issues and blissfully moved on to other sources of outrage, in a bid to divert attention away from the pitiable condition of Hindus in the country.
For the so-called liberals and their allies in the media, the case of a Hindu girl being traumatised, coerced, and tortured into accepting Christianity by a missionary school was not worthy of consideration. This, when the girl is dead and a video of her dying declaration stating that she was pressurised into embracing Christianity is already out in public.
The case refers to the suicide of M Lavanya, a student of standard 12th in Sacred Heart Higher Secondary School, Thirukattupali in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu, who in her dying declaration alleged that the govt-aided Christian missionary school she went to had been pressuring her to convert to Christianity.
However, Lavanya was adamant about not leaving her religion and refused to get converted. Angered by Lavanya’s resistance, the school administration had cancelled her leave application for Pongal Celebrations. Lavanya who was supposed to visit home during her holidays was forced to do chores like cleaning toilets of the school, cooking and washing dishes. It was reported that dejected Lavanya consumed pesticides used in the school garden to end her life.
The incident should have sparked massive outrage over the methods adopted by missionary schools operating in Tamil Nadu. It should have triggered a reckoning among the society, drawing people on the streets and demanding the state government to bring necessary laws to put an end to conversions in missionary schools. However, unfortunately, society and media displayed no such alacrity. Moreover, they also lacked empathy even though a girl was dead and her damning allegations against the missionary school were on record in her video of dying declaration.
This nevertheless underlines the prevalence of dehumanisation of Hindus in India. A rap on the knuckles to a Muslim man for a legitimate reason invariably results in allegations of communal targeting but the death of a Hindu girl hardly evokes any sympathy, let alone anger against missionary school for imposing Christianity on her. It shows that it is no longer just ‘Sanghis’ being dehumanised, which has already become a successful project as even liberal ‘artists’ don’t feel sympathetic on murders of Sanghis, as ‘artist’ TM Krishna himself had put it—he doesn’t feel a shred of empathy when RSS members are killed.
Earlier, it was just ‘Sanghis’ who were dehumanised by the ‘liberal’ media, but now the practice has been extended to all Hindus, including a minor girl who was assertive of her Hindu roots and steadfastly refused to give in to the pressure imposed by her missionary school to embrace Christianity. The death of an innocent girl who surely deserved to live more does not evoke sadness in the secular society. The woke belief that Hindus can’t be victims in a Hindu-majority India is getting mainstreamed and this is bound to spell doom. Even though Christian missionaries using force for conversion might appear as a primary challenge, but is a secondary issue, the primary being the dehumanisation of Hindus.
Hiralal Gujrati was another unfortunate victim who was quickly forgotten by the media and society. On January 17, 2022, Irfan Siddiqui and his brother Sanu brutally killed Hiralal Gujrati, a 38-year-old Dalit in Delhi’s Sultanpuri area. Irfan had come out of jail a few days back. He was imprisoned for raping Hiralal’s sister. Soon after Hiralal’s death, his terror-stricken family put up the ‘on-sale’ poster outside their house stating that the house is on sale due to the terror of Muslims in the area. The family also alleged that Irfan Siddiqui was a relative of AAP MLA Mukesh Ahlawat.
However, just like the case of M Lavanya, the murder of Hiralal was also given short shrift by the mainstream media and ‘journalists’ who claim to represent the voice of the weak and the downtrodden. While this might not be an outright case of dehumanisation of Hindu lives yet, it nonetheless demonstrates how gruesome crimes like murder in the national capital are not given due prominence so that issues like love jihad can be brushed aside as ‘conspiracy theory’.
This ultimately leads to dehumanisation and lack of empathy as crimes and their causes are not brought to notice of the society, which in turn remains in denial over the existence of social evils like love jihad, forcible conversions, etc. and continue to treat them as ‘conspiracy theories’. And when there are real victims of these crimes, they start casting aspersions on the victims instead of doubting all those reports that declare such crimes as conspiracy theories.
The case of Hiralal’s murder also punctures the imaginary construct of Jai Bhim-Jai Meem, a loose coalition of sorts between underprivileged classes and Muslims that liberals cobbled up in a bid to preclude the larger consolidation of the Hindu society. Like in Hiralal’s case, the underprivileged classes continue to remain at the receiving end of Islamist aggression, but all top universities, commentariats, journalists and activists would continue to peddle the fiction that these two groups are close allies and suffering from what they claim to be ‘Brahminical oppression’.
In fact, even worse, people from these two communities would lap up the fiction as gospel truth and spread it further despite reality on the ground being the exact opposite. There have been countless incidents when Dalit localities were targeted and encroached upon by the Islamists. But it is ‘Brahminical oppression’ that is being bandied about to unite the two communities. Thus, the real oppression gets whitewashed while the fictional one is mainstreamed.
Dinesh Yadav conviction: Accused held guilty largely on account of his Hindu identity than on evidence
The third case is of one Dinesh Yadav, who was convicted in the anti-Hindu Delhi riots 2020 on the assumption of guilt, based on him being a Hindu. There was little evidence to tie him to violence but his Hindu identity was enough for him to be convicted of rioting in the national capital. While the above two cases can be blamed on the complicity of media and politicians in driving a particular narrative, in this case, the questions would lie on the Judiciary’s doorstep.
The conviction of Dinesh Yadav calls to attention the dangers associated with the controversial Communal Violence Bill proposed by the Congress-led UPA government. In 2005, UPA1 introduced a communal violence bill. In 2011, under the guidance of the NAC, UPA2 introduced a revised draft of the same. Although the bill had to be dropped in 2014, grounds for its withdrawal were primarily due to the concerns about overlap with powers of the State government. However, the truly worrying parts of the bill are not related to who exercises control — but the starkly communal and draconian provisions it had.
In the 2005 version of the bill, any “group” that has become a victim of communal attacks could seek redressal. However, in 2011, a new definition of the “group” which is protected, was introduced. This protected “group” included a religious or linguistic minority, in any State in the Union of India, or Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes within the meaning of clauses (24) and (25) of Article 366 of the Constitution of India. Thus, the law, had it been passed, would have meant that only minorities and SCs/STs could be “victims” while the perpetrators of communal violence would always be the majority, which is Hindus.
Though the Congress could not muster numbers to pass the bill and turn it into law, the recent verdict by the court in the Dinesh Yadav case shows how the Congress ecosystem still appears to be formidable, with the judiciary an integral part of it, despite being out of power for close to 8 years now and losing a raft of assembly elections in between. Allowing this case to become a precedent is fraught with danger, for it will mean Communal Violence Bill has already become law even though it was never passed because Congress could not come back to power at the Centre.
The above-mentioned three cases are not just incidents foregrounding the continuing dehumanisation of Hindus, the indifference towards atrocities meted out on them and the ominous spectre of the judiciary’s proclivity to hew to Congress’ narrative, but they bring to attention the grave challenges faced by the Hindus in contemporary times. More significantly, it shows the strength of the Congress ecosystem, that despite being out of power for 8 years and being decimated from almost all states, the party’s policy of warming up to minorities and cold-shouldering the majority still holds sway in political and media circles.
As the media, journalists, ‘intellectuals’, turn a blind eye to these atrocities, injustice against Hindus, they, however, display excessive concern over the alleged hate speech made at the Haridwar conclave. Apparently, the purported incendiary remarks made at the Dharma Sansad takes precedence over the actual incidents of violence and coercion committed against Hindus, as was the case in Hiralal’s murder and Lavanya’s suicide respectively. The media and members of the left firmament went into overdrive, creating noises over the Dharma Sansad and demanding action against the participants of the event where allegedly inflammatory remarks were made against Muslims. This concern, however, is only limited to minorities. Hindus, on the other hand, are not accorded the same measure of concern and worry from the media and politicians, who continue to treat them as expendables and as fair-game in their attempt to firm up their self-serving narratives.
It is, therefore, of paramount importance that Hindus realise the challenges that lay in front of them and that they become cognisant of the fact that they can no longer rely on pliant media organisations that describe themselves as “neutral” and ‘liberal’ intellectuals who act as apologists for Islamists. Doing otherwise and basing their faith in slanted media and liberal intelligentsia would only compound their challenges, instead of conquering them. Hindus have been victims of not just hate crimes in this country, but they are also victims of media apathy, judicial prejudice and the left’s malevolence. Lavanya, Hiralal and Dinesh Yadav might just be three names but they are, in reality, a reflection of three grim challenges that Hindus are facing in modern times.
