Why liberals do not outrage over atrocities against Hindus

January 30, 2020

Why liberals do not outrage over atrocities against Hindus

Avantika D

Yahoo India12 December 2018

Since 2014, some renowned journalists have been penning stories recounting atrocities – some true, some imagined, some exaggerated – against a certain community. And foreign media houses feast on such pieces.

Many of these articles are unabashedly biased and shine the torchlight on one tiny selective area of violence because the bigger picture is detrimental to their vested interests. Thus, while one 2002 Godhra seeks to demonise Prime Minister Modi, the 1969 Ahmedabad, 1970 Jalgaon, 1980 Moradabad, 1985 Ahmedabad, 1989 Bhagalpur, 1990 Hyderabad, 1992 Surat, 1993 Mumbai, and 2012 Assam events are conveniently brushed under the carpet.

I almost feel that writing this piece is below me, but if celebrated journalists, under the garb of freedom of expression, can reduce themselves to their religious identities, an insignificant blogger like me is left with no choice but to consider myself nothing more than a Hindu — only with specific reference to such scribes.

Before I start squaring off the balance sheet of thousands of years of ‘communal harmony’, let me just say it out loud: ‘communal harmony in India’ is basically Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. We all know he doesn’t exist, but we deceive ourselves into believing in him for its ‘feel good’ factor.

Now, let’s dig into the theory that self-proclaimed intellectuals have been peddling since 2014 — the manufactured saga of ‘communal harmony being threatened by Modi’, of ‘centuries of communal harmony being destroyed by this government’.

What communal harmony are we even referring to? Invaders, rushing in from far off lands, killing thousands of natives, razing down their places of worship, burning down their libraries, enforcing religious conversions, do not constitute the base of communal harmony in any land. But let medieval history not influence our present; let’s delve into modern times.

Less than a century ago this country was partitioned on communal grounds. There was no Bharatiya Janata Party instigating communal hatred in 1947. Then why couldn’t the land’s dissection, resulting in millions of brutal deaths, rapes and loot in the name of religion, be avoided by the Indian National Congress?

When hundreds of thousands of Bengalis were butchered in Noakhali, there were only Nehru and Gandhi, no Bhagwat or Yogi. There was no Modi on August 16, 1946 when the Direct Action Day was orchestrated and Calcutta was turned into a graveyard in the 72 hours that followed.

Those were tumultuous years, so let’s discuss more recent years instead.

Are the late 1980s recent enough? Over 60,000 Hindu and Sikh families were driven out of their own land, in their own country, after being looted, their women violated. During the shameful Kashmiri Pandit exodus neither was there a BJP government at the state of Jammu & Kashmir, nor at the Centre. A strong army, a trained police force and the revered Constitution were very much in place, but none could save the citizens of this country.

If humanity didn’t cry then and if prominent media houses didn’t see anything wrong in the way the then Indian government was governing this country then, maybe they should avoid hosting prejudiced opinion pieces by peddlers of jaundiced journalism: the kind of journalism that described the rape of nuns in Bengal, committed by Bangladeshi infiltrators, as hate crimes by Hindus.

Here is a question for everyone, in and outside India, who says, ‘Muslims are being subjugated in Modi’s India’: have you heard of the Hindu exodus in Kairana? Protesting some fictitious Hindi imposition, did you raise your collective voices when two Hindu students were shot dead by police for objecting to imposition of Urdu?

Did you scream ‘intolerance’, when over 300 Hindu families were denied their religious right to perform the Durga Puja in Kanglapahadi? Why was there no noise when Geeta, Sanskriti or Divya were molested? Why were these girls any different from the child in Kathua to you?

Were you moved to tears at the death of a Telangana temple priest at the hands of an Imam, just for playing the Suprabhatam? Did you trend hashtags when a priest in Uttar Pradesh was murdered because he got cow smugglers arrested?

You didn’t, because such incidents do not fit into your pseudo-liberal narrative.

But I didn’t, either. I didn’t flash the victim card when, for one Godse, thousands of Marathi Brahmins were chased out and murdered, when Sikhs across India were made to pay for the heinous act committed by Indira Gandhi’s assassins.

When ministers falsely dubbed the Mumbai attacks as an act of Hindu terrorism, I didn’t object. The then prime minister declared that one community has rights over my country’s resources before I do, and though ‘secularism’ laughed out loud that day, I stayed calm. I didn’t cry out, ‘Hindus are living a nightmare in Congress ruled India’.

I have lived through the nightmare tightlipped for far too long: the vilification is becoming unbearable now. I am paying a hefty price for my thousand-year-long tolerance streak. It’s time to break my silence because this yellow journalism that has so far decided the narrative in this country needs to be called out.

PS: I know atrocities committed on Hindus don’t sell papers, but my pen in not for sale either.