Hard times for Muslims

Life is becoming tougher for Muslims in India. The bloody campaign by extremist Hindus continues unabatedly against them and they are killed without any fear of law. That makes one to believe that the so-called law enforcing agencies are either in connivance with the killers or have political pressure to look the other way. The excuse is simple….carrying beef. If you are not carrying beef then you must be a child lifter. On Saturday a lynch mob beat to death a Muslim Mohammad Azam, a Hyderabad based techie who worked for Google, in Karnataka on the rumour of being a chid-lifter. Azam was on vacation with his three friends, Salham Eid Al Kubasi, a Qatari national and Noor Mohammad. A mob of some 2000 people gheraoed them at Thoul village Bidi district and attacked tgem with rods and lathis. They were dragged out from the Toyota Innova and beaten up by the mob. While Azam who was driving the car died on the spot, Noor Mohammad suffered a grievous injury on his head and is paralysed on one side. Salham too was injured in the brutal attack. The rage against them was engineered through whatsApp message that they were child-lifters. Lynching Muslims under than one or the other pretext has become norm in India. That the lynch has the patronage of the state and the ruling BJP can be understood from the fact that a minister in Narendra Modi’s Jayant Sinha garlanded and feted eight men convicted in the Ramgarh lynching case in Jharkhand after they were released on bail on Thursday.The life sentences handed to the eight men, including BJP functionary, was suspended by the high court and they walked out of the Jai Prakash Narain Central Jail and headed straight to the residence of Sinha, where the minister garlanded them. The convicts were led by local BJP leader Amardeep Yadav, who is also the OBC Morcha president of the party. India is losing its face in the eyes of international community as a country that has descended to medieval madness in targeting Muslims in particular and Dalits in general. Muslim individuals were targeted under the manufactured allegations of eating or carrying beef or slaughtering or ferrying a cow for slaughter. Around two dozen Muslims were killed by these lynch-soldiers on false pretexts. The lynch mob has public support from the BJP as most these cases have happened in BJP-ruled states. The common people and India civil society too have maintained criminal silence over the brutal incidents. Instead of recognising that a sickness is spreading through Hindu society, the silence grows, revealing how most Hindus—instead of standing up and saying this must not happen in our name—either choose to be ignorant, find justifications or are complicit. Many have few qualms in saying this is what Muslims deserve. By now the lynching has become part of what is now known as the normalisation of hatred, the process of becoming immune or deadened to atrocity because there is so much of it. The creation of the new normal is well underway among those in India’s Hindu right, which barely reacts to the killing of Muslims. Over the past some time, the attacks by lynch mobs is not restricted to Muslims only. Many a Hindus belonging to lower sections of the society too have become the target of these extremists. Most of the latest killings have occurred due to rumours on social media of child-lifting. Innocent people are being beaten to death by an angry mobs blinded by rage and powered by rumours of child-lifters circulating on social messaging platforms, that is, WhatsApp. Some time when some Congress workers slaughtered a cow in Kerala, a hue and cry was made by the BJP people in and outside power but when innocent people are lynched; they maintain criminal silence, more so, if the victim is a Muslim. The lynching of Pehlu Khan in Rajsthan was done in full public view and videos of which went viral on social media but still no action was taken against the killers. Some of them arrested for the crime were released after three months with claims of lack of evidence. This is making a new India where crime and criminals are seen through religious prism. This should be a matter of serious concern for all those who believe in multi-religious and multi-culture unity of India.