Fear is a potent political weapon. It has been used since the beginning of mankind to get the tribes together, march them up to the war fronts and to convince them to stamp heavy boots on the face of the enemy. World maps have been drawn and redrawn using this single emotion. Empire builders across the centuries have used it to evoke emotions and to raise armies. India has seen this in events before 1947, eventually culminating in a disgusting dance of death and destruction with the partition in 1947.
A partition Pre-destined by British politicians like Churchill in 1942, came true by driving knives into the open scars of distrust between the majority community and minority community possibly on account of being ruled over by one minority community or other for more than seven centuries. Not that British were convinced that the two communities were two different people who ought to live separately, rather they felt a Pakistan supporting west could be their leverage against a socialist India under Nehru. Muslim League played on the fear of Muslims who overwhelmingly voted for them in the name of Islam, even those who eventually did not or could not go.
Sadly, it is the rich who always fire the emotion of fear and it is the poor who bear the brunt of it. This happened in 1947 when the Sherwani-ed class went to play golf in the elite colonies in the newly carved nation, while the poor on both sides of the divide were left to live on the margins of the society, useful during riots and elections in India and for terror in Pakistan.
The poor are the fodder for the imperialistic ambitions of those who don’t want to be seen doing dirty violence themselves. So they create a false narrative, use their intellectual heft, mainstream media access to march people to the battlefronts. Who are they here? In the Indian context, it is an odd mix of Islamist fanatics who hide their fanaticism behind fancy words and the leftists.
A mix of Fear and a false sense of otherness among the tribe has been a potent pill for political violence of the leftists whether it be Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party better known as the Nazis or the Russian Communists who killed millions by creating this Us Versus Them narrative. Rana Ayyub’s latest article in the Washington Post titled “You know India’s democracy is broken when millions wait for election result in fear” published on May, 16 is one such piece.
Why international media particularly US media provides space to such outrageous articles which are weak on the facts and high on the rhetoric is anybody’s guess. As we are into an era of civilized warfare and camouflaged colonization, these news outlets who had cried rivers about Russian interference in US elections have no qualms in publishing such articles.
The day Sam Pitroda of the Congress nonchalantly dismissed the killing of more than 2000 Sikhs in Delhi and more than 7000 Sikhs across the country in 1984, a huge meltdown was noticed from Ms Rana Ayyub and her friends on social media asking Sam to shut up so that the communal madness which the Congress holds inside is not visible to the electorate, at the time when Modi is talking about development for all.
Rana Ayyub is a left-leaning Hinduphobe and has been struggling for years to resurrect her journalism career by attacking Narendra Modi.
In this article, she tries to create a doomsday scenario, much like the one which was alluded to by Congress leader in 2014 after they sunk to being a pathetically marginal party claiming the possibility of widespread riots; Rakhtpat or bloodshed, as leader of opposition Mallikarjun Kharge, had claimed. The opposition has been trying to engineer riots and create mass hysteria ever since Modi government came into power.
When demonetization happened, at least two elected state Chief Ministers, Mamata Banerjee who leads an Islamist-leaning organization and Arvind Kejriwal, a Khalistan-leaning leader in Delhi, both obliquely urged people to come out and riot. It was only the trust of masses on Narendra Modi which saved the day for India. In her article, Ayyub goes back to 2015 when Mohammad Akhlaq was murdered allegedly on the charges of having beef. She refers to the incident having happened after “the first full year of Narendra Modi’s administration”, leaving the Akhilesh Yadav led state government free of blame, while it was Akhilesh’s state government which had presided over not only the killing of Akhlaq, rather over multiple riots including Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013 in which 67 died and Saharanpur riots of 2014 in which 3 had died. Why would the Muslims be fearful of one dead muslim and not of full-scale riot?
The fact that she goes back to 2015 is also telling. She has nothing worth outrage since 2015 against the present government of Narendra Modi. In a nation of 125 Crore people, she has to go back to 2015 (four years back), quote one murder to indicate how bad things could be under Narendra Modi. This story of Akhlaq which she selectively quotes is also not mentioning a few things. The charge of storing beef later came true in forensic tests. The family of Akhlaq was compensated way higher than even a martyr’s family from Indian army merely because his death became a rallying point to create an image of intolerant Hindutva which served well the Christian-leaning western media.
In the scenario of modern-day Crusade between two expansive and largely imperialistic religions, as we see in New Zealand and now in Sri Lanka, passive religions like Hinduism and Buddhism are a mere nuisance. The international media lapped it up. Most of them, as Rana Ayyub does in this article, failed to report that as per the Indian constitution, law and order is a state subject and UP, the state where the incident happened was being run by Akhilesh Yadav led Samajwadi Party. They also forgot to report, when they projected beef as a part of basic Islamic rights and democratic necessity, that cow slaughter was banned across 23 of Indian states not by Narendra Modi government, but by Indira Gandhi of Congress way back in the late Sixties.
The US media often takes an interesting position on Cow Slaughter, ignoring that Cow is revered in India, a part of Indian rural economy, unlike the ban on Horse Slaughter in the US. Most violence on account of Cow slaughter is not about religion, rather about economy and failure of law and order. Because, in India, cow slaughter is often preceded by cow theft and cow smuggling. Illegal cow slaughter thrived under conniving state machinery is often scared to acts against the minority community engaged in it, at other times, refusing to act due to the avenue of rampant corruption this multi-billion dollar illegal industry presented to people. For Islamists and leftists, it was a tool to run the Hindu noses to dust.
Rana’s intellectual dishonesty is evident from the fact that in talking of communal unrest, she goes to 2015, 2002 and 1993. We are in 2019. Apart from the incident from 2015 under Akhilesh Yadav government for which she incorrectly blames Narendra Modi, she does not mention any other incident. When we look at the recent past, a Hindu father was lynched by Muslims in Delhi for objecting to the molestation of his daughter.
The left rushed in claiming that the killing was not communal. By that logic, there is no communal killing. Was Akhlaq killed because the killers wanted him to convert to Hinduism? The incident is called communal because the killers belonged to one community and the victim to another. In February last year, a Hindu man was beheaded by Muslims in Delhi because he fell in love with a Muslim girl. In Delhi, a young woman Riya Gautam was stabbed to death in March 2017 by her stalker, Mohammad Adil.
What is sad is the so-called conscience-keepers of society are only concerned with the victims of one community and when they have to go back four years to quote one case of atrocity against Muslim, it only shows how safe Muslims have been in last four years. The only case Ms Ayyub is able to bring to discussion happened under Samajwadi party, much adored by so-called liberals gang of which Ms Ayyub is a part.
An honest assessment of the situation will bring forth the odd belligerence of Muslims, largely ghettoed by the conspiracy of the liberals and emboldened by the moronic justification of their crimes by the intelligentsia, by silence and eloquence. The Islamist leanings of Rana Ayyub under the garb of a neutral humanitarian and journalist is evident from the fact that her concern doesn’t go beyond one particular religion and is largely untouched by the gruesome deaths of Ankit, Dhruv Tyagi, Ramalingam, Riya Gautam, Chandan Gupta, and many others merely because the victims are Hindu and the perpetrators Muslims. Such selective outrage from the intellectuals merely brings reverse discrimination from the majority community, which has been bending over backwards in a zeal to prove its secular credentials.
What is even more troublesome that this consolidation of Hindu electorate with minimal representation in the socialist power structure of the nation created by the earlier leaders, has scared the intellectual colonialists so much that they would feel little shame in leaning on propaganda to discredit a democracy merely because they do not agree to the expected electoral outcome. The fearmongering has begun in this piece by Rana Ayyub, much as it was done by the left and Congress-leaning intellectuals after 2014 elections.
Just as before, there is little substance to it. Rana Ayyub, as is her style, is heavy on her rhetoric and scarce on data, which serves the purpose of both the writer and the publication. She paints a bleak picture of India under Modi and predicts a bleaker picture in the event of Modi winning 2019 election. It is really a pity that a Muslim woman fails to acknowledge the effort Modi made to save Muslim women from the whimsical triple Talaq which left many women homeless, hopeless and helpless, running the risk of losing out on fanatic vote bank cultivated by the Congress over the year.
Proclaiming herself to be a feminist voice, she sides with the Congress whose leaders have publicly declared that they will bring back the right of Muslim men to arbitrarily divorce women with Triple Talaq once and if they are back in power. In a nation of 125 Crore people, she has to hinge her propaganda on one rare and unfortunate crime from 2015 to make her point as she could not find any charge substantive enough to attack the last four years of Narendra Modi.
When data is not with you, lies become difficult. Though when numbers betray the truth, words are used to twist them. Take for instance the headline which was much touted by people like Rana Ayuub – Communal violence rose by 28% from 2014 to 2017. The second line of the headline- which adds, 2008 remains the year of highest instances of religious violence at 943 followed by 843 incidents in 2009. Now, if we consider the second line of the headline in light of this data, it will become quite difficult for Rana Ayyub to explain why would she want a Government which presided over 943 communal incidents in a year to replace a Government under which the highest number of incidents in a year was 822.
Communal violence has been a stick to beat the Modi government with, but an impartial view of the historical data presents a different picture altogether. And let us not discount the fact that law and order in India is a state subject. The highest number of people killed in the communal violence in one year over the period of 2008-2018 has been highest at 165 in 2008, 133 in 2013 and 125 in 2009. The deaths in communal violence between 2015 and 2017 vary between 97 and 111.
If one looks at the historical data, after the gruesome violence of 1947-48, there was relative calm till 1960 and then incidents began increasing again in 1964. The worst riots since 1967 in terms of lives lost have been Delhi 1984 (2733 deaths) under Congress), Nellie massacre(1819 deaths) under Congress, Moradabad (1500) under Congress, Gujarat (1267) under BJP and Bhagalpur (1161) under Congress.
Even in the 2008-2017 data, in the much-maligned UP, the maximum number of communal incidents were in 2013 at 247 under Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, which went down to 133 in 2014, when Modi government came in power in the centre. The maximum loss of life in UP was 77 in 2013 with SP in state and the Congress in the centre. Maharashtra had the highest deaths in 2008 at 26, which went down to 2 in 2017 under Devendra Fadnavis’ BJP government.
A publication like the Washington Post would do well to validate the rhetoric and propaganda. Once the data is published, it gains currency and unduly tries to influence democracy. The fact that the piece by Rana Ayyub is promoted by Indian-born British-resident ex-actress whose own brother was caught in the conspiracy of 26/11 in which 300 Indians died, clearly indicate the mischief contained in the data. I would strongly urge people to ignore the rhetoric and make their democratic choices.
