Fatima sat with her hand clutching Salman’s. She shifted nervously because she had never done this before, never told the world about what it means to be married to Salman. As the comforting hum of the rain falling on the parapet filled the modest living room, almost in contrast, Fatima’s eyes nervously darted back and forth from her wedding picture, to be calmed only by the loving gaze of Salman. “We love each other”, said Salman, almost comforting Fatima. “She did not care about living in poverty and changed her name voluntarily to be with me. She left her parents because they did not agree”, he continued, looking on, dotingly, on his wife who once used to be called Diya.
“How can they make a law to keep us apart? Love is about the heart. It is about attraction and compatibility and understanding. How does religion matter? Do you ask people’s religion before falling in love with them?”, Fatima asked with her coy susurrate changing to measured rage. “Laws are meant to create religious hate in the society. I would like to tell Modi ji that lovers can’t be kept away with his laws and who I marry is none of his business. He should think about the rising petrol prices instead of trying to inject religious hate into love. Society looks down on us because we have such leaders who are telling people that it is ok to be Hindutva extremists who want inter-religious marriages criminalised because demonising Muslims benefits them politically”, she raged.
This story is, of course, bogus. In fact, I got a bit of acid reflux just penning it down. Imagine the delusion of someone who would say that religion is not essential to love while it seems perfectly relevant if one wants to marry a Muslim man – since Diya would have to become Fatima and Ganesh Chaturthi would have to make way for Muharram. But this is the drivel that one would read on ‘Liberal’ websites to whitewash the phenomenon of Grooming Jihad and rampant conversions for the simple fact that nothing obfuscates reality like unbridled emotions.
Marketing pioneer Claude C Hopkins said in 1923: “All advertising is salesmanship.” This essentially claimed that advertising and marketing itself is primarily dependent on a sales pitch where one would rationally convince a customer why they should buy the product. But as our understanding of human psychology evolved, we realised that emotions are a far more potent tool to be exploited than rational thought and reason.
And that is what journalism is today. Journalism, more than ever before, relies not only on tainted information and subjugation but on drama, theatre (sometimes of the absurd) and visual propaganda. These stories serve that purpose rather effectively. You forget that the law itself aims to stop misrepresentation of faith and forceful conversion and focus on “love” because the latter is an emotion that the masses easily understand and therefore, the media can just as easily manipulate.
There are real cases, with real victims, who have extensively spoken about how their spouse pretended to be Vinod, for example, when he was actually Afroz. There are real victims who have narrated the horrors of the torture they were subjected to after they discovered their spouse’s real identity. Some, like this girl from Sonbhadra, did not live to tell the tale. She was murdered, dismembered and discarded. The real perpetrator here is, of course, the Muslim men who conceal their identity with the woman meeting a fatal end when the truth emerges. But that truth is politically inconvenient and the best way to mask it is by talking about feelings, emotions, love and the big, bad Hindu society being radicalised to demonise Muslim men. It is the perfect propaganda recipe that meets multiple desired ends – Keep the imagined victim card firm with the criminal sections of the Muslim society. Demonise a society that refuses to submit to the liberal propaganda any longer and shield Islamists by creating the “Hindu radicalisation” bogeyman.
Sample this tweet, for example.
What a macabre story. Imagine what the noxious Hindu society puts Muslims through. The poor woman had to take on the identity of a Hindu just to get a job and felt comfortable revealing her real identity only when she realised that the person she was working for was a Muslim herself. She was desperate. She was forced to lie by a terrible society majoritarian society. Imagine the plight of this poor Muslim woman who just wants to work and live her life with dignity.
Now after imagining all of that and shedding a few tears, for effect, keep your “feelings” aside and think about the facts. The first indisputable fact is that this story provides no proof. It is an anecdotal, mawkish story designed to do the following:
- Provide a reasonable (not really) explanation for why Muslims fake their identity in different situations and pretend to be Hindus
- Force you to sympathise with the devil because who does not like a good tear-jerker
- Plant, rather craftily, the thought in your head that the real perpetrator is the society at large (that ought to be collectively ashamed) and not the perpetrators who change their identity to commit actual crimes which leave real victims devastated
- And, of course, reinforce the cardinal rule – Hindus bad. Muslims good. Hindus oppress. Muslim victims. Hindus extreme. Muslims helpless.
Nobody really talks about the fact that India has over 200 million Muslims who work and live here with the rights provided by the constitution of India and the inherently tolerant made up of majority Hindus. Nobody really talks about the fact that while politically, it bodes well for vested interests to paint Hindus as the monsters, Hindus have been most persecuted by sections of the Muslim community and yet, seem to live with them in harmony, for the most part, and at least, from their end.
For a moment, let us assume that there exists a fear of hiring Muslim domestic help. If we assume that there is some resistance to hiring Muslim domestic help, we must then ask why there is an inherent fear of hiring Muslim domestic help. Is it because of the unbridled violence that has been unleashed by illegal immigrants from Bangladesh? One recalls Mahagun Moderne mob violence where a posh housing society in Noida was attacked by a mob of Muslims because of an argument a resident had with a Bangladeshi maid. Thereafter, the society had banned the hiring of Bangladeshi Muslims as domestic help.
In this scenario, who would be considered the victim? Those hapless residents who had to deal with a riot like situation and violence unleashed by a Muslim mob because they were hiring Bangladeshi Muslim maids or the Muslim maid who would not be able to work in that society after her brethren unleashed mayhem? If the maid had concealed her identity and pretended to be a Hindu, would it be the fault of the society at large that they did not trust her to begin with? Is it not possible that illegal immigrants hide their identity and pretend to be Hindus because they are not really legally in India? Should society feel ashamed that criminals are faking their identity because they don’t want society to know that.. well.. they are criminals?
Not only that, the trope about how Muslims are “forced” to hide their identity itself aims to whitewash the heinous crimes that we see being perpetrated by those Muslims who hide their real identity and pretend to be Hindus for a variety of reasons. We have already spoken about cases of Grooming Jihad and how crimes are unleashed by illegal immigrants. Let us now turn our focus on a recent incident, that is now spurning these fictitious incidents of Muslims being branded as the victim.
Recently, a video went viral where a Muslim bangle seller was being thrashed by several people who were presumably all Hindus. The outrage focussed on the usual trope that urged the Hindu society to be collectively ashamed. Imran Pratapgarhi, National Chairman of, Congress Minority Department, said, “This video is not from Afghanistan but from Indore today. A Muslim bangle seller is being looted and trashed in the land of dreams of CM Shivraj Chouhan. Narendra Modi, sir, did you want this India? When will action be taken against these terrorists?”
Conveniently, a parallel was drawn between the Taliban (who follow Sharia) and Hindus who were seen thrashing a Muslim in a video. The context of the video emerged later. It was found that Tasleem Ali, the man who was being thrashed, had faked his identity, called himself Golu and sexually harassed a minor girl. It was because of this that the man was being thrashed, not because Hindus mirror Taliban and just like to beat up Kafirs. When the truth emerged, the usual suspects who were shaming Hindus went silent. Instead of talking about the merits of the case, we saw stories like the one shared by Hasiba Amin emerge – Muslims fake their identity because they are helpless.
One is forced to wonder what the helplessness was in this case. There appears to be none on the face of it. Why did a Muslim bangle seller have multiple fake Aadhaar cards and what compulsion drove him to call himself ‘Golu’ to get entry into the house of a Hindu family and molest a minor? Perhaps Hasiba can tell us in her next piece of Islamic fiction. We shall wait. For now, we can’t really see it, except the fact that molesting Kafir girls is acceptable and to gain entry into a Kafir home, it would be much easier if Tasleem became Golu.
As these crimes continue to come to the fore, Hindus can expect to be demonised and guilt-tripped to assume that their need to keep themselves and their family safe is a sin they must repent for, by falling on their knees and praying to Allah (even Jesus will do at this point. Any Abrahamic God really. It might also wash away the Hindu privilege if we are lucky).
The drama that awaits us would put Sanjay Leela Bhansali to shame. Just like the bigot-baby-secular-baby stories of the yonder, we must brace ourselves for schmaltzy stories that talk about how a poor bangle seller had to change his name because while the heat melted the bangles, making them unsellable, Hindus refused to buy his product after they saw the pristine white jaalidaar skull cap on his head. The story will talk about how one day, with nothing to eat at home, starving and also dehydrated because of the copious amounts of tears that he was shedding, he took his skull cap off and tucked it away in a forgotten drawer, to assume the identity of Golu, to battle the Taliban-esque Hindu society that does not even recognise the right of a criminal Muslim man to molest Kafir girls – ok – the last part would not feature because it would give too much away.
We would read interviews of Muslim men who reminisce about a time when he was a man of Allah, but how now he hears the haunting chants of Jai Shree Ram in his dreams as he sleeps penniless, homeless and starved. That right before he proceeded to join a mob that unleashed violence on a Kafir colony, he was reminded of the mistreatment he faced from Hindus, as a society of course, when he got a threatening glance once 18.5 years ago.
We can expect Netflix series about a dystopian future where love conquers all, except the hardened hearts of Hindus. How Hindus caged and lashed a Muslim man because he fell in love with a Hindu girl, who was once called Jaya, but took on the name of Arfa simply to be with the man she loved. She would blame the Hindu society at large for not understand how religion does not matter when one falls in love and if it matters when one gets married, it should be ok because we have a syncretic culture that believes in Sarva Garam Vada Pao. The Kalma is after all just another way to reach a higher power – Allah or Ganesha, does not really matter. Maybe an important scene would be added to this moving story – how Arfa and her husband escaped to Syria to get away from RSS – the real enemy who refuses to accept the supremacy of ISIS – the humanitarians. The Gandhians with guns, who were forced into terrorism because the Kafir world perpetuated Islamophobia.
All of this would whitewash the harsh reality. The harsh reality is that several Muslim men change their identity not because they want acceptance, but because it is an effective tool to perpetrate crimes or to evade the law after they have perpetrated those crimes. That the epidemic in the society does not come from Hindus who are just about beginning to open their eyes to reality, but those who hold endless street power and an unending supply of victimhood, supplied so generously by their Liberal allies.
While many Muslims change their names to oppress, their allies, the Liberals, would focus on creating victims out of the very criminals who subjugate and paint the society as a whole as the oppressor – a society made up of Hindus – the same society that has accepted with open arms millions of Muslims who work and live with dignity under their own identity.
It is important to realise that apologists don’t despise Hindus per se. They simply want that the Hindu community never gets over its insurmountable capacity to absorb hate, humiliation, defeat, murder, rape, conversion and the desecration of their faith. For the capacity to absorb humiliation to continue, the Hindu must be made to carry the burden of undeserved guilt perennially. The collective Hindu guilt helps sections of the Muslim community arm-twist a nation-state and by extension, helps the perfumed elite remain the ruling class forever. The guilt, is so insurmountable, that the Hindu society is forced to pretend like the tyranny never existed and the crimes against them were somehow justified. Guilt will, forever, hold society to ransom.
