For the past two days, Twitter is rife with videos of a three-day event called Dharma Sansad, organised in Haridwar, Uttarakhand. During the event, several Hindu leaders like Yati Narsinghanand allegedly called for violence. The videos doing the rounds on social media have content that, on the face of it, appear divisive and inflaming. If the videos doing the rounds are authentic, no individual in their right mind could condone the speech being made where they are essentially saying that they are ready to murder Muslims the first chance they get.

Snippets of the Dharma Sansad were splashed on Twitter. There were claims that Hinduism and Hindutva are the same, given that these statements were made by saffron-clad “sadhus” and others said that these videos indicated that Hindu terrorism was real.

In a video shared by the Left, Yati Narsinghanand was heard saying that Hindus need to collect better weapons than the Muslims, given that in a battle, those with better weapons win.

Thread on a 3 day "Dharm Sansad" organised in Haridwar by Hindutva groups where explicit calls were given for Hindus to pick up arms against Muslims.#HaridwarGenocidalMeet

Day 1, 17 Dec: Yati Narsinghanand said, "swords won't be enough to kill Muslims. We need beater weapons." pic.twitter.com/MTL8u1H7F3

— Kaushik Raj (@kaushikrj6) December 22, 2021

He said that more kids (to fight the demographic battle) and better weapons are the only things that would save Hindus in a civilisational battle. He said that every Hindu had the responsibility of protecting their own kids and the women of their house.

The next was a short speech snippet of Swami Sagar Sindhu Maharaj from Roorkee. The tweet said that he appealed to Hindus to “at least keep swords” and asks them to purchase weapons of at least Rs. 1 lakh.

Day 1, 17th December:
Swami Sagar Sindhu Maharaj from Roorkee appeals Hindus to "at least keep swords" and asks them to purchase weapons of at least Rs. 1 lakh.#HaridwarGenocidalMeet pic.twitter.com/jePjTbWoc2

— Kaushik Raj (@kaushikrj6) December 22, 2021

In the video, Swami Sagar Sindhu Maharaj could be heard saying that one could use mobiles that cost only Rs 5,000, but Hindus should have good weapons of at least Rs 1 Lac so that, if anyone ever enters their house, they would not escape alive. The important point to note here is that he said that those weapons would be used as a means of self-defence if anyone enters the house, not for unprovoked genocide.

On Day 2, Swami Dharam Das Maharaj made a speech that was indefensible. He said that he would have killed former PM Manmohan Singh if he could gather weapons.

Day 2, 18 December:
This is a highly objectionable and sensitive speech. Swami Dharam Das Maharaj from Patna said, "If I had gun, I would have become Nathuram Godse and I would have shot Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh inside Parliament."

How is this man free? pic.twitter.com/UC2QXJP0cz

— Kaushik Raj (@kaushikrj6) December 22, 2021

Another problematic video was where one Swami Prabhonanand called for a “safai abhiyaan” of Muslims.

Swami Prabodhanand referred to Myanmar and said, "Like Myanmar our police, our politicians, our Army and every Hindu must pick up weapons and conduct this "Safaayi Abhiyan". There is no other option left." pic.twitter.com/hnKseDXTkZ

— Kaushik Raj (@kaushikrj6) December 22, 2021

There were other videos where it was allegedly said that Hindus need someone like Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and Prabhakaran to save Dharma. OpIndia personally cannot vouch for the authenticity of these videos, however, given the statements being made, it leaves little to the imagination as to what the full content of the Sansad was.

In a civilised society, elements that call for violence and provoke citizens to pick up arms against other civilians would be rounded up and put behind bars. But in an increasingly polarised society, divided into religious lines, we see far too many fissures and desensitisation to calls for violence.

When these speeches became viral on social media, the first reaction of most Hindus who follow the news regularly was to either look away or to post a video of AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi making an equally hateful speech. In that video, Owaisi was seen warning police personnel and saying that once Yogi returns to his temple as the Mahant and PM Modi returns to the mountains, there would be nobody to save them from their eventual fate.

The video that several Hindus shared on social media went unnoticed by those outraging against Dharma Sansad. In fact, it was Asaduddin Owaisi who took to Twitter to share how his party had filed a complaint against the speeches made during Dharma Sansad and that he was willing to launch a nationwide agitation if the Hindus sadhus were not arrested.

When Vir Das went to the US and spoke about the two India’s that exist, perhaps this is one aspect that he should have spoken about. Two Indias – one where Hindus are booked when they make speeches like the ones made during Dharma Sansad, and another, where those like Owaisi go scot-free after calling for the genocide of Hindus on multiple occasions and real hate crimes like that in Punjab don’t even invite an FIR against the murderers.

As I said, in any civilised society, both these elements would be thrown in jail and the locks thrown away in the Ganges – but that is not what happens.

When statements are made criticising Islam and Prophet Muhammad, Muslim mobs take to the streets to shout “Gustakh-e-rasool ki saza sar tan se juda”. When that happens, as we saw in the case of Kamlesh Tiwari who was eventually murdered by Muslims, the law enforcement agencies arrest the one criticising Islam, not the one shouting for the beheading of the one who exercised his freedom of speech. We have seen examples aplenty where Muslim mobs have not only screeched genocidal slogans but acted on their slogans and gone on a rampage against Hindus. From the Delhi anti-Hindu riots to the mob violence in Bangalore, from the several cases where Muslim mobs lynched Hindus to more organised instances of violence like the one we saw in Bangladesh against Hindus, or even the violence in Maharashtra after lies of “blasphemy” were spread in Tripura.

It is a function of this street veto that no law seems to control the menace of Islamism. The worldview of significant sections of the Muslim community make it quite difficult, and in certain cases impossible, to implement law and order in ghettos where they are the overwhelming majority. There is significant resistance towards the implementation of law and order in these areas and a lot of these places are ‘no-go zones’ even for the Police. In such a scenario, the police also focus on arresting the ‘blaspheme’ rather than those threatening to behead a man for saying something mildly uncomfortable. It is a cowardly cop-out, but one that States take to deal with an unnamable Asura that no law, no civilisation has been able to contain. 

While the hoards exercise their street veto and make the State bend to their violent whims, Hindus have often taken to social media to talk about liberal hypocrisy, the impotence of the state, that is meant to have the monopoly on violence, and the overall neutering of the Hindu samaj, that sits back and merely watches their women getting raped, their men getting beheaded and the streets being permeated with Hindu blood.

Amidst all of this, one cannot really discount the helplessness that the average Hindu feels. When Hindus were being massacred in Bengal and OpIndia covered the story of a Hindu girl who was gang-raped in from of her father by Muslim TMC goons looking for “Hindu women”, and the Bengal govt enabled the violence while the central government looked away, it was only human to, in between the sighs and wails, look for our Gopal Patha – Gopal Patha who could pick up weapons and save Hindus from the inevitable and horrifying end that was awaiting them. Did that make Hindus barbarians? Did the prayers for a saviour and the hope for retribution make them genocidal animals? Do victims become aggressors just because they want to be saved?

It is from this stems the reality why we have been numbed to a large extent to speeches where the stray Hindu asks others to ensure they have weapons with which they can defend themselves. Firstly, even the Hindus who have been desensitised to these speeches know on a deeper level that these are merely empty words. When was the last time that rousing speeches gave rise to Hindu mobs that took to the streets with weapons, looking for Muslims to cut up? In the liberal fantasy universe, it is an everyday occurrence, but in real terms, it never really happens. The fact is that these leaders can call upon Hindus to maintain arms and fight for Dharma, but in the end, the actual “fighting” has to be done by average Hindus who hold work-a-day jobs and don’t attend genocidal sessions at their local madrassas, given that temples are certainly not used to congregate mobs, despite the wet dreams liberals seem to write about in Washington Post.

This is exactly why Liberals and assorted Islamists are pressed to focus on “hate speech” while trying to villainize Hindus because there is no on-ground impact of these speeches that they can really focus on. Hindus don’t have a Mahmood Paracha who makes speeches in mosques asking to raise an armed militia. There is no Hindu equivalent of ISIS that will lionise terrorists, hail genocide, splash images of beheadings. There is no Hindu equivalent of the word “kafir”, there is no Hindu equivalent of ISIS and there is no Hindu equivalent of the Quran or Jihad.

While focussing on hate speech, liberals and Islamists conveniently brush aside actual hate crimes against Hindus. It is how the Delhi anti-Hindu riots got morphed into an anti-Muslim pogrom even before the funeral pyres of Ankit Sharma and Dilbar Negi had gone cold.

It is this sophistry that makes Hindus become desensitised to such speeches. While they know this will hardly translate to any bloodshed on the ground, they are pressed to keep their sane, peaceful core aside to look the other way because they know that those demanding for the arrest of these saffron elements would happily whitewash a Hindu’s murder to embolden radical Islamists, Khalistanis and swords for hire. They have lived through those experiences where jokes on their genocide were passed off as free speech, where their murder was whitewashed to peddle the “Muslim pogrom” narrative, where their daughters being abducted and forcefully converted were branded as “voluntary love affairs”.

The Dharma Sansad poses a Dharam Sankat for most Hindus – give in to their basic survival instinct and look away from such speeches or preserve what is inherently good in them and condemn any call for violence thereof.

I am not really ashamed to say that there is no right answer. If the Hindu genocides did not exist, if the Muslim mobs did not go on a rampage, if I had not covered the Delhi anti-Hindu riots and the flawed narrative of “Muslim pogrom”, if I was but a work-a-day citizen far divorced from the reality of the onslaught against Hindus, it would be so much easier to denounce such speech. It would be so much easier to take the moral high ground and say that everyone, whether it is a Yati Narsinghanand or an Asaduddin Owaisi, making speeches provoking violence should be arrested and left to rot behind bars. And somewhere in my heart, I believe this to be the case even now. I want all of these elements to be jailed and removed from society. It is only human to harbour dreams of peace and brotherhood. But when reality hits and one has to cover the brutal murder of yet another Hindu and one is hit with the realisation that even before you can document another step towards our civilisational end, the “liberals” have already started giving the murder a “context” to save their Islamist brethren, one gets jaded, jaded enough to suffer a dilemma when such videos emerge.

It is not the Hindus who created a Swami Yati Narsinghanand – it is the Islamists, their rampages, their genocidal dreams and those who soft-pedal when Hindus are victimised on daily basis.

The speeches made during the Dharma Sansad barely helps the cause of Hindus or Hindutva. Open calls to violence or wanting Hindus to become another Bhindranwale is not the answer. The solution to civilisational causes is the will of the people and that will translating to policy by the government of the day, not thuggish behaviour and calls to violence by political aspirants. It is the classic Godse conundrum – one knows why he did what he did, but with the murder of Gandhi, the Hindutva cause was forever damaged.