Tag: Hate speech

‘Indian Muslims Must Remain Patient, Seek Guidance From Quran’

By LokMarg

Maulana Qamar Sultan Rizvi Jarchavi, a 52-year-old Shia cleric from Ghaziabad (UP), offers counsel in these difficult times for the Muslims in India

Muslims in India are going through one of the most challenging times in the history of the country. They have been at the centre of a series controversies such as CAA, hijab, halal, loudspeakers, hate speeches and many more. They are being insulted, disparaged, belittled and have been pushed into a corner. They have come to a point when they feel they can’t take it any longer.

While Muslims are at the receiving end, the majority community needs to spare a few moments and think about the deteriorating, hateful situation that the country has fallen into. They need to do some soul-searching to see whether this hatred is part of Indian tradition or is it something new, premeditated occurrence.

There is another angle to view the whole problem. It’s in the innate nature of human beings when we attain absolute power, we also acquire the fear of losing it. This whole circumstance gives the birth of an idea of setting up a permanent authority, which we also call establishment.

It is commonly observed that to consolidate more power, establishments often look for foes. If they don’t find them, they create such enemies. This whole situation can be likened to an example of a raging bull. He needs opponents to prove its strength. If he doesn’t find one, it rams into poles and pillars to use his energy. So, it’s in the training and nature of the establishment to perform like this. Sometimes, this yields positive results like justice and other times, causes atrocities.

Jarchavi wants a unanimous leadership to emerge among Indian Muslims

We have seen how Muslim rulers oppressed their own Muslim subjects. In the Islamic history, we have an infamous incident of Karbala when Yazid martyred the family members of Prophet Muhammad. In the current times, we have witnessed Muslim rulers like Saddam Hussein and many others who crushed their own people. It shows that the power doesn’t care about right and wrong. It aims to remain unchallenged and wants everyone bow to its might.

ALSO READ: ‘Muslims In UP Are Ill At Ease With Yogi’

Thus, when Muslims are suppressed under the might and power of the establishment, they should turn towards Allah. They need to supplicate in front of him. Muslims have forgotten the power of supplications. We must not forget how help came from Allah in the battle of Badr. Though Muslims were a few hundred in numbers and their enemies were thrice as big yet they won the battle.

Muslims must remember the famous story of the Year of the Elephant. When Abraha al-Ashram led a military expedition to destroy the Kaaba, Prophet Muhammad’s grandfather Abd al-Muttalib, who was the caretaker of the Kaaba, realized he can’t fight the forces of Abraha, so he supplicated. The Quran (Chapter 105) has drawn this incident that how Allah answered his du’a and Abraha and his army were destroyed.

Indian Muslims need to have this much trust in Allah when they raise their hands for du’a.

Besides, we need to end the discord within. We are too involved in settling the issue of minor Islamic jurisprudence that we have forgot to follow the main message of Quran. “And obey Allah and His Messenger, and do not quarrel with one another lest you should lose courage and your power depart. Be patient, surely Allah is with those who remain patient.” (Quran, 8:46)

Muslims also need to choose a unanimous leader who will lead the community in the country. In the absence of a true leadership, we have come to the point when we can’t address either our Islamic issues or worldly issues.

As told to Md Tausif Alam

Hate Machine Is Legit, Centre Mute

By Amit Sengupta

Finally, everything comes back to hate and bigotry. Yogi Adityanath’s first declaration after the model code of conduct was imposed proves that – 80 per cent versus 20 percent. And the Election Commission and most opposition parties choose to remain silent.

Hate has become legit in contemporary India, as is the epidemic of mob lynchings across the tormented Hindi heartland. The bile of poison flows like a relentless dirty gutter in the dingy and cloistered inner lanes of the political subconscious of the ghettoized Neo-Nazi hate machine.

Xenophobia and the politics of hate have been overtly and tacitly legitimized by the dominant power narrative in India. No wonder even high-tech and educated youngsters have become ‘Trads’ – hate-mongering, online warriors who seem to be even Far Right of the Establishment Right Wing.

So much so, there is the danger that this viciously spreading apparatus would one day lose total control and eat up its own inheritors and mentors in the final countdown. Something the RSS and BJP, like the fascists in Germany, refuse to realise – that it is a mad monster they are riding which can one day ravage them also, and with them, the largest democracy in the world.

Eminent Social scientist Arjun Appadorai, who teaches in Berlin and Paris, wrote recently, and aptly so, “The silence of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah about these unprecedented calls for full-scale armed war against Muslims can be read in one of two ways: as signs of their sense of impunity and confidence, or as signs of their sense of precarity and insecurity. I make a case here for the latter argument… My argument is not the familiar instrumentalist argument about the Uttar Pradesh elections and the BJP’s concern about being humiliated in its sacred heartland. I believe we are witnessing what I call ‘Genocidalism’, which stems from a deeper logic which afflicts all ‘xenophobic nationalisms’. This logic is connected to ‘the relationship between nationalism and violence,’ and to what Marx and many Marxists identify as ‘the Treadmill Effect’.”

Taking the case of the youngsters caught in various small towns across India, auctioning Muslim journalists, professionals and educated women, mothers, daughters and sisters, ‘The Quint’ took the opinion of an expert who has done considerable research on this method in the madness. Indeed, this is not mindless, it follows a belief and value system, like that of the Ku Klux Klan, and it is relentless, often invisible and scattered, but based on the spontaneous mob lynching pattern and psychology, and gets support from the dominant narrative of hate prevalent in current times. Trads, or Traditionalists, are ardent followers of the extreme Right cultural and social ethos, deriving inspiration from the Neo-Nazis and similar movements and individuals. Perhaps they secretly hold the mad mass murderer in Norway, Anders Behring Breivik, as their role model.

Breivik killed 8 persons first by detonating a van bomb at Regeringskvartalet in Oslo, than murdered in cold blood 60 participants of a summer camp organized by the Workers’ Youth League, on July 22, 2011. In his Nazi-type manifesto, he wrote, among other fanatic ramblings, The (then) UPA government “relies on appeasing Muslims, and very sadly, proselytizing Christian missionaries who illegally convert low caste Hindus with lies and fear, along Communists who want total destruction of the Hindu faith”. Surely, most of the current Hindutva fanatics in India share Brievick’s worldview.

Surely, they are like a cult: sexist, racist, homophobic and xenophobic, verging on terrorism. They play with online genocidal ‘humour’, and one-dimensional hate unleashed against Muslims, Dalits, Sikhs, and other minorities. They believe in the ‘Manusmriti’, and that this retrograde anti-women, patriarchal, feudal, upper caste text, should replace the Constitution of India. They care two hoots for the values of the freedom movement or the sacrifices and martyrdoms of our freedom fighters and revolutionaries. According to the expert, they are so extreme sometimes that they even hate the BJP-RSS and its hydra-headed octopus like Sangh Parivar for soft-peddling on hyperbolic Hindutva. Apparently, as ‘The Quint’ reports, “they even dislike Modi and consider him to be unfit to be the PM. They mock his caste and his supposed inability to deal with the minorities with an iron hand…”

“The Trads only love those who can hate unapologetically. They even hate those BJP followers who take refuge in hateful dog whistles. Trads consider them to be hypocritical. Here, hate is ‘humour’ and it includes incitement to mass rapes and genocide. Those who don’t laugh have a problem according to the Indian chanosphere (alt-right universe)…”

Fortunately, the Trads and the mainstream-fringe groups still face large-scale and effective opposition on the ground from a huge majority of mainstream India, across religion and communities, from celebrities, students and intelligentsia, civil society, sportspersons and Olympians, to ordinary folks on the streets. Indeed, thankfully, the Supreme Court too has finally accepted to look into the matter on the call of genocide against the entire Muslim population in India by miscellaneous extremists masquerading as sadhus etc.

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That Modi and his entire cabinet have chosen to remain mum, is predictable. Even the women in his cabinet seemed undisturbed by the perverse and degrading ‘multiple auctions’ of Indian women in the Bulli Bai and Sulli deals. The UP deputy chief minister became brazenly belligerent when a BBC journalist asked him politely about the call for genocide. Why this fear to condemn what is so blatantly wrong and unethical, and goes against all the principles of social conduct, if not a clear case of violation of the law of the land?

To cling on to this fanatic hate machine, and to play this polarizing card, seems to be the ‘final solution’ of this discredited regime, with failure written sharp and clear on its face, on all the human development index, its economy and foreign policy in an abyss, and all its promises of ‘acche din’ having disappeared without a trace.

The petitioners said that they were constrained to approach the top court seeking its urgent intervention regarding the hate speeches between December 17 and 19, 2021 in the two events organized in Haridwar (by Yati Narsinghanand), and in Delhi (by the ‘Hindu Yuva Vahini’). It said, “the aforementioned hate speeches consisted of open calls for genocide of Muslims in order to achieve ethnic cleansing. It is pertinent to note that the said speeches are not mere hate speeches but amount to an open call for murder of an entire community. The said speeches, thus, pose a grave threat not just to the unity and integrity of our country, but also endanger the lives of millions of Muslim citizens.”

The petition said, “…it is also relevant to note that no action whatsoever has been taken by the Delhi Police in relation with the event held in Delhi despite the fact that open calls for genocide, that are available on the internet, were made therein.” It also said that that the “recent speeches are a part of a series of similar speeches that we have come across in the past…”

Indeed, despite the bile and the poison, hope floats. Not only the secular society, but a large number of educated people have protested. Faculty members and students from the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) in Ahmedabad and Bengaluru have written a letter to Modi asserting that his silence “emboldens” voices of hate. The letter has 183 signatories – including 13 faculty members of IIM Bangalore and three of IIM Ahmedabad.

“Your silence on the rising intolerance in our country, Honourable Prime Minister, is disheartening to all of us who value the multicultural fabric of our country. Your silence, Honourable Prime Minister, emboldens the hate-filled voices and threatens the unity and integrity of our country,” says the letter.

 “For far too long, the mainstream discourse has dismissed the voices of hate as the fringe. That’s how we are here,” a faculty member at IIM Ahmedbad told the ‘Indian Express’.

However, the point is, is the Honourable Prime Minister listening at all? By all indications, he is not. He never did.

Two Indias: With Hate, With Hope

By Amit Sengupta

There is a continuous, vicious and vile synchronization, jarring as a crass orchestra, which seems to be the perennial background score of the C-Grade horror movie unleashed in India since the summer of 2014. It seems breathless, relentless, and endless. Almost like a bad dream in bad faith. And, unlike the most terrible nightmares in half-sleep, this ‘phenomena’ simply refuses to die.

And, yet, hope floats, like both counter-culture and parallel cinema, with its own uplifting, classically pulsating and melodious music as backdrop. Like a mountain stream across the zigzag of the moist and lovely sun-soaked Himalayan foothills, with its butterflies and grasshoppers floating like freedom’s own, special species. Like two Indias.

For instance, the hate mongers are afraid that Vir Das has created an upsurge of hope and rationality. There might be two Indias and there might be a million Indias, though without a million mutinies, as VS Naipaul said once upon a time. However, if he has struck a chord with millions across the globe, it is again evidence that come what may, despite the daily onslaught, a huge population has refused to succumb to fanaticism and ugliness. They still are celebrating unity in diversity, the deep beauty of secular humanity and the inner greatness of stoic resistance. As Vir Das says, “Please do not be fooled by edited snippets. People cheer for India with hope, not hate. People clap for India with respect, not malice.”

The detention in Tripura and Assam of two young women journalists is not the first instance which reflects that Indian democracy and its freedom of Press has been under severe strain in contemporary India, even while the loyalist media runs amok, and both objectivity and media ethics can be damned. In the everyday history of this vast geography, the vicious synchronization of injustice and hate politics has become so ritualistic and commonplace that, sometimes, all seems lost.

And, yet, surely, all is not lost. There is almost always a great current which flows simultaneously, across the polluted landscape, and brings with it a breath of fresh air. It restores our faith in the secular pluralism of a shared existential reality, as much as in the abiding faith that India might be an unequal, unjust and fragmented democracy, but, nevertheless, it is still a democracy, with a noble Indian Constitution derived from the great values of the freedom movement and revolutionary struggle against colonial slavery, and its martyrdoms, prisons, sacrifices, ideals, visions and dreams. Clearly, those who did not participate in the freedom struggle, and those who were glorifying Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust during that historic epoch, remain clueless.

The arrest and harassment of the women journalists was widely covered in the Indian media, and so was the bail. The reports told their own truth with non-partisan objectivity. Significantly, the Indian Women’s Press Corps (IWPC), while demanding their immediate release, issued a categorical statement. “The Indian Women’s Press Corps stands in solidarity with Samriddhi K. Sakunia and Swarna Jha, the two women journalists who have been harassed, intimidated and detained for doing their job. The IWPC demands that the police immediately releases them and allows them to do their job without fear.”

The small border state of Tripura, which showed reasonable progress, peace and harmony under a long spell under the Left led by former chief minister Manik Sarkar of the CPM, with his reputation of impeccable integrity, seems to be torn asunder under the current BJP regime. Not only has economic distress and failed promises stalked this beautiful state in recent times, delicately poised as it is at the border with multiple conflict zones, but communal violence and divisive politics has now ravaged its social fabric. Hence, the significant response from The Editors Guild of India, is, yet again, a sign of dogged hope.

“The Editors Guild of India is deeply shocked by the Tripura Police’s action of booking 102 people, including journalists, under the coercive Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, for reporting and writing on the recent communal violence in the state…The Guild is of the opinion that this is an attempt by the state government to deflect attention away from its own failure to control majoritarian violence, as well as to take action against the perpetrators. Governments cannot use stringent laws like UAPA to suppress reporting on such incidents.”

ALSO READ: Pegasus And Beyond – Press Freedom At Stake

Ace fast bowler Mohammad Shami was trolled because he was a Muslim. Only those who are fanatically bereft of rationality or sporting spirit can equate a cricket match with hate politics and war. Virat Kohli proved them wrong, both as a captain and as a thinking, secular human being. First, he was hanging out with the Pakistani openers who played so well to defeat India by 10 wickets, apparently congratulating them. And, second, he was forthright during a press conference soon after in Dubai.

He said: “To me attacking someone over their religion is the most, I would say, pathetic thing that a human being can do. Everyone has the right to voice their opinion and what they feel about certain situations, but I personally have never ever even thought of discriminating against anyone over their religion. That is a very sacred and personal thing to every human being and that should be left there…We stand by him fully. We are backing him 200%, and all those who have attacked him can come with more force if they want to: our brotherhood, our friendship within the team, nothing can be shaken. I can guarantee you that as the captain of the team, we have built a culture where these things will not even infiltrate into this environment 0.0001%. That is an absolute guarantee from my side…There’s a good reason why we are playing on the field and not some bunch of spineless people on social media that have no courage to actually speak to any individual in person. They hide behind their identities and go after people through social media, making fun of people and that has become a source of entertainment in today’s world, which is so unfortunate and sad to see because this is literally the lowest level of human potential that one can operate at, and that’s how I look at these people.”

Even Sachin Tendulkar spoke out: “When we support #TeamIndia, we support every person who represents Team India. @MdShami11 is a committed, world-class bowler. He had an off day like any other sportsperson can have. I stand behind Shami & Team India.”  

However, Rahul Gandhi, told the bitter truth: “Mohammad #Shami we are all with you. These people are filled with hate because nobody gives them any love. Forgive them.”

And what happened after Olympic gold medalist Neeraj Chopra made a remark on Pakistani javelin thrower Arshad Nadeem? Predictably, huge hate outrage against the Pakistani.  And how did Neeraj Chopra react to that?

In a video posted on Twitter, he said: “I would request everyone to please not use me and my comments as a medium to further your vested interests and propaganda. Sports teaches us to be together and united. I’m extremely disappointed to see some of the reactions from the public on my recent comments.”

So they went after Aryan Khan and his father. The fake news and propaganda media, possessed and obsessed, yet again ran amok. So please check out the unprecedented outpouring of an ocean of support for Shahrukh Khan, and not only on social media. Even most of Bollywood biggies came out strongly for him, and publicly, in what is surely a secular film industry, with its great progressive and brilliant inheritance.

That is why, I say, let us not get suffocated by the jarring orchestra of a bad dream in bad faith. Let us follow the pristine mountain spring, and the sublime originality of the beautiful music, which purifies our sad souls, and heals our simmering wounds. This is because, humanism, love and good sense will win, in the final instance; because, butterflies are free. That is why, hope floats, eternally, inside our hearts, and in our chilly, wounded, winter landscape.