For years, the liberal hatred of everything Hindu was a subtle phenomenon. They used various tricks such as gaslighting, manipulation, deception and victimhood narrative to keep Hindus perpetually guilt-tripped. What was once carried out clandestinely started happening overtly and conspicuously after PM Modi was elected to the highest position offered by the Indian Constitution.
PM Modi’s unrepentant and unabashed display of his Hinduness added to the resentment the left-leaning liberal brigade traditionally harboured against Hindus. They were so rattled so much so that anti-Hindu bigotry was not only mainstreamed but intellectual arguments were offered to rationalise discrimination carried out against Hindus. All the pretence was dropped and Hindus were openly dehumanised and reviled.
From raising the false bogey of “saffron terror” to concocting the imaginary construct of “rising intolerance”, liberals felt no qualms in painting Hindus as aggressors so that their objective of toppling the Modi government could be fulfilled. But that did not happen and PM Modi came back to power with an even greater majority in 2019.
However, that did not deter liberals from pouring scorn over Hindus. In fact, it only intensified after PM Modi’s reelection to the centre in May 2019. Liberals even took objection to the saffron robes worn by UP CM Yogi Adityanath to declare that a religious man is not fit to rule a state of a secular country. However, they don’t mind Muslim MLAs and MPs wearing skull caps while serving in an official capacity because, unfortunately, the burden of upholding secularism in India rests solely on Hindus, while others are “secular” despite wearing their respective religions on their sleeves.
This kind of discrimination against Hindus has become par for the course in liberal discourse. Liberals expect Hindus to stoically endure all the wrongs meted out on them. They believe Hindus should meekly resign to their fate without raising any complaint. When Hindus voice their disapproval over religious discrimination, they are instantly branded as intolerant communal bigots trying to sow discord in society.
Now, lets see what the liberals will have to grapple with if they come to deal with pious Muslims:-
Rampant beheadings, murders and religious conversions
For instance, after Hindus objected to the use of the term “Jashn-e-Riwaz” to describe the festival of Diwali by FabIndia, they were subjected to criticism by the liberals for being intolerant and insecure about their festival and taking offence at small and trivial things such as Urdu appellation of a Hindu festival. Then on Sunday, another brand, Elle, came into the defence of FabIndia and published a Hinduphobic cartoon showing saffron-clad goons’ shutting shops of brands like Tanishq and Fabindia.
The cartoon also depicted a man in an orange gamcha (stole) beating a meat seller sporting a skull cap (presumably for selling beef). Interestingly, this was not the first time that Elle had resorted to Hinduphobia. In yet another attempt to disrespect Hindu sentiments, Elle in its ‘sarcastic’ post had written, “It’s the recurring season where Indian fashion labels are schooled on how to creatively incorporate religion while designing their campaigns. Last year, @tanishqjewellery received a non-violent lesson on how to showcase jewellery without meddling with the ancient Hindu-Muslim narrative. Recently, @fabindiaofficial released and pulled down a Diwali campaign titled – Jashn-e-Riwaz.”
What if this had happened with a Muslim festival? What if a Muslim festival was renamed with a Sanskrit term? It does not take too much to guess what would have been the consequences if any brand had thought of Indianising a Muslim festival. It is an established fact that Islamists strongly oppose any attempt at acculturation of their faith into the larger Indian culture. They continue to promote supremacism by hiding beneath the veneer of religious freedom and dishing out warnings that any attempt to fiddle with their religion will invite retribution.
For them, Islam and its religious texts are immutable. Any measure taken to even initiate a discussion over localising Islam or editing controversial scriptures that do not jibe with India’s pluralistic ethos is stridently opposed, and dubbed as flagrant violation of the sanctity of their faith, or even worse, described as blasphemy and therefore deserving of strictest punishment, which is death.
The liberals diss Hindus for simply taking to social media and expressing their displeasure over the Abrahamisation of Diwali. However, if any organisation had displayed the audacity of using an Indianised name of a Muslim festival, the backlash would be, in all likelihood, not just restricted to the realm of social media but spilt into the real world, with calls for the decapitation of people responsible for the ad campaigns as well as against those who featured in the advertisement. An attack against the company would also be a stark possibility.
The murder of Hindu Samaj leader Kamlesh Tiwari is a testament to that fact. Tiwari was murdered in broad daylight at his residence in Lucknow by two Islamists who held him guilty of blasphemy and therefore not fit for living. The ferocity of the attack against him can be gauged by the fact that he was stabbed 15 times by his assailants. The Islamists attacked Tiwari because he had made unflattering remarks about Prophet Muhammad, for which he served jail time. However, the Islamists were not content with the imprisonment Tiwari had to endure. They were bent on murdering the Hindu Samaj leader, which they did in 2019, four years after his statement on Prophet Muhammad.
A similar kind of aggression was witnessed against Yati Narsinghanand Saraswati, who called for speaking about the characteristic traits of Prophet Muhammad just like the way Hindus do for their Gods. However, this did not sit well with Islamists, including AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan, who spared no time in calling for the decapitation of Saraswati for affronting Prophet Muhammad. Slogans of beheading were raised against the chief Mahant of the Dasna Devi Temple. An assassination plot against him was also planned but the security agencies foiled it.
In France last year, a teacher named Samuel Paty was murdered by an Islamist on the suspicion that he may have reproduced caricatures of Prophet Muhammad in his classroom and thus committed blasphemy. A social media campaign was launched against the teacher, which ultimately led to his assassination. It was later reported that the allegations of Paty displaying pictures of Prophet Muhammad in his class were unfounded and concocted by one of the students. The entire Islamic world rallied in support of the attack, indirectly justifying the murder of the teacher.
More recently, widespread anti-Hindu violence erupted in Bangladesh after a copy of the Quran was placed in one of the Durga pandals in the country. A Facebook post claiming Hindus put a copy of the Quran near a Durga Puja pandal to ‘insult’ it started doing the rounds on social media. Within hours of the Facebook posts circulating, mobs of local Muslims attacked the Cumilla Durga Puja pandal, damaged the idol and unleashed violence in the area. The Islamists claimed that the Hindus had deliberately kept their holy book in the pandal as a mark of insult. Not just the Durga pandal, the violence spiralled into other parts of the country as Islamists ran riot, vandalised Durga pandals and Hindu temples, and attacked Hindus in their wake. It turns out, that it was a Muslim man who had placed the Quran in the Durga Puja pandal. A concerted effort to give the mobs a reason to attack Hindus, simply for being Hindu.
Besides, cases of grooming jihad and forced conversions would increase significantly. Already, despite stringent laws meant to curb forced conversions are passed by many states in India, the scourge of love jihad continues to plague society. In a society where Islamists are allowed to call the shots, forced conversions will become a norm. As seen in Pakistan, an Islamic republic where Hindu girls are treated as commodities by jihadis, who abduct them, forcibly convert them into Islam before marrying them. This can become a distinct possibility if Islamists are allowed to act as per their whims and fancies.
The liberals, however, should not really have any problem with this aspect of the Islamic society because they believe grooming jihad is just a contrived phenomenon, an imaginary stick conjured up by Hindus to beat the Muslims.
Establishment of Islamic caliphate where rights of non-Muslims are severely curtailed
One of the thorniest problems that liberals have is that Hindus think of India as a Hindu land. In the collective Hindu imagination, India is a Hindu Rashtra by the virtue of the birth of Hinduism and its various offshoots within the geographical boundaries of the country. For thousands of years, Hindus have dwelled in this country and have therefore believed it to be a Hindu country.
But for liberals, it is a maximalist notion. They sideline the fact that Hindus have lived in this country for thousands of years and hark back to the Indian Constitution that terms the country to be a secular state. They overlook the fact that Hindu Rashtra by deed is a secular state because Hindus have always been accommodating and tolerant of other faiths, unlike Abrahamic faiths that inherently believe in divisive supremacist beliefs. It is because of the secular and composite culture of India that vulnerable communities who faced religious persecution in their regions had turned to India for their safety and protection.
As against the notion of a Hindu Rashtra, which includes peaceful coexistence of people belonging to various religions, Muslims support a global Ummah, an Arabic term used to refer to the Muslim world. This was the underlying ideology that powered the rise of the ISIS and other Islamic terrorist organisations who dream of bringing the entire world under the banner of Islam.
If this ideology is given a pass, India will witness demography alteration on a scale that has never been witnessed in its history. The violence that erupted after the West Bengal assembly polls would be commonplace as Islamists would try to intimidate Hindus into acquiescence, forcing them to comply with their demands or face certain death. There would be rioting across the country as Islamists would compel the government to naturalise Muslim immigrants from out of India. This doctrine of establishing an Islamic caliphate was the cornerstone of India’s partition in 1947, which led to the dismemberment of India and the creation of Pakistan and subsequently of Bangladesh.
If Islamists are allowed to carry on with their fantasy of establishing a single Muslim country and bringing the entire world in its fold, there is no denying the possibility of further dismemberment of India, accompanied by a wave of deadly violence as witnessed during the riots that took place during the partition in 1947, or during the protests demanding the rehabilitation of Rohingyas in India recently, or the Malabar genocide of Hindus that happened in 1921 in the run up to the Khilafat movement, a pan-Islamist campaign launched to demand the restoration of the Ottoman Caliphate. More than 10,000 Hindus were slaughtered during that time by Islamists who were leading the Khilafat movement for the resurrection of a Muslim caliphate.
Anti-Hindu riots will become the order of the day
Liberals have also taken great offence to measures adopted to safeguard beleaguered Hindus in India’s neighbourhood. They vigorously protested and continue to do so to this day against the Citizenship Amendment Act passed by the central government, which allows granting of citizenship to persecuted minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The opposition to the CAA has touched off anti-Hindu riots in many parts of the country, most notably in northeast Delhi, where anti-CAA protests culminated into a communal conflagration leading to the death of 53 people.
Similarly, when Muslims hit the streets demanding the protection of their brethren, the outcome isn’t very different. It unavoidably leads to violence and rioting, and the victims in such cases are mostly non-Muslims. For example, when Muslims in India launch a demonstration in support of Palestinian Muslims, it normally results in violence and disruption in law and order.
Liberals have an unhealthy obsession with clucking over “secularism”, a principle that calls for separation of state from religious institutions. However, they have been honest in promoting the concept in letter and spirit. They keep painting pictures of gloom and doom about “Hindutva” and how that ideology threatens to homogenise the country. So far, their threats have been nothing but boogeyman raised to mobilise minorities against the majority Hindus.
A breeding ground of Islamic terrorism
Contradictorily, it is the menace of Islamism that threatens to tear apart the secular fabric of the country. In the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, the Islamists threatened the indigenous Kashmiri Pandits to leave the state and forced them to live like refugees in their own country. In the rest of India, the Muslim population had flourished over time but in Jammu and Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority state before it was transformed into a union territory, the population of minorities have precipitously declined.
Recently, a spate of attacks against Kashmiri Pandits and non-locals have been reported in Jammu and Kashmir. The Islamists have alleged that they are targeting those who have supported or endorsed the Centre’s move of abrogating Article 370 that effected a greater union of Jammu and Kashmir with India. However, curiously, the attacks have been carried out only against Kashmiri Pandits and non-locals present in the Valley. The intent cannot be more clear—to scare non-Muslims away from Jammu and Kashmir and preserve the numerical superiority of Muslims.
If Islamists are allowed to have their way, such attacks against non-Muslims would become a common occurrence in every part of India. We have already witnessed in Kerala or Mumbai’s Malwani Nagar, once the Islamists gain a majority in an area, they usually resort to extremist measures against minorities. Any non-Muslim who dares assert his or her religious identity is considered as fair game by the Islamists. If they are left to their own devices, they would turn entire India into Pakistan, a place where followers of Hinduism and all other faiths except Islam are relegated to secondary status and violence against them is normalised.
Unrestrained Temple destructions, relegation of non-Muslims to secondary status
In the recent times, we have witnessed a growing number of temple vandalism and idol destruction cases from different parts of the country. Almost on a daily basis, there are reports of temples being desecrated and idols defiled. Miscreants have become emboldened and stepped up their illicit activities that threatens to drive a permanent wedge between different communities.
Riots and vandalism cases normally involve desecration of temples as witnessed during the riots in Delhi and Bengaluru. But in an overwhelming number of cases, the attacks have been unprovoked. Moreover, non-Muslims have hardly ever resorted to attacking worshipping places of their assailants. Instead, they usually repose their faith in judiciary and wait for the law to take its own course.
As opposed to this dignified approach by Hindus, Islamists have chomped at the bit of perpetuating violence even when rumours of attack against their religious places have proven to be hoax. Take for example the violence unleashed in Tripura, where Islamists had gone on a rampage over fake news of miscreants burning a mosque. Even though the police clarifiedthat the rumours of a mosque burning were baseless and misguided, Islamists continued partaking in violence, rioting and vandalism.
In a nutshell, anarchy, chaos and disruption is a hallmark of a society where Islamists reign supreme. They do not have any attachment to any country or group, save their own community and faith. They don’t mind resorting to extreme measures in the pursuit of their objectives. They don’t even mind training their guns against their own allies if they happen to come against their faith.
If liberals still believe Hindus are an intolerant lot, that they deserve contempt and disdain for stoically enduring wrongs done to them and behaving in a civilised manner to voice their grievances, it is their choice. But we really do hope that liberals soon have to deal with Islamists, for whom civilisational advancement, syncretism and democratic institutions are not virtues worth pursuing and preserving, but impediments that hobble them from fulfilling their long-desired dream of establishing a Muslim caliphate in India?
