Who's afraid of Jai Shri Ram? Only the false liberal brigade whose hypocrisy is clearly showing now

Last year, while resigning from the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), Shah Faesal made it amply clear that he treats himself as a Kashmiri Muslim — to my mind, playing victimhood, much unlike the millions of other Indian citizens whose singular identity is their Indianness, irrespective of region, religion, caste or creed. In his Facebook post, which seemed basically a ruse to launch his so-far-insipid political career, he wrote that he was resigning,"To protest against the unabated killings in Kashmir, and lack of any sincere reach-out from the Union government; the marginalization and invisiblization of around 200 million Indian Muslims at the hands of Hindutva forces reducing them to second-class citizens".

Shah Faesal's hypocrisy would be funny, had it not been, as I see it, such an outrageous bunch of concocted lies.

Perhaps he was never told that despite being less than 1% of India's population and accounting for less than 1% of India's GDP, the State of Jammu & Kashmir gets more than 10% of the Union government's allocated funds and within that 10%, a large chunk goes to Muslims in the Kashmir Valley — at the expense of hard-working, honest, Hindu taxpayers from all over the country.

That Faesal has also apparently never castigated — or even expressed scant remorse — for the cold night of 19th January 1990, which aided and abetted the genocide of Kasmiri Pandits who were looted, raped, plundered, murdered and forced to flee from their homes, is of course taking the hypocrisy of many of his ilk to a new level altogether.

More recently, a letter by ‘49 liberally intolerant’ personalities, led by the likes of Aparna Sen, addressed to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, reportedly, on the growing intolerance in India, has triggered a fresh debate on whether the largest democracy in the world has indeed become intolerant.

Well, the pointed answer to that is a vehement NO!

India has always been a multi-lingual, multi-racial and a multi-religious country. That said, it is a fact that almost 80% of the Indian population consists of peace-loving and progressive Hindus, who have seen their rituals being mocked, their traditions being trampled on and their cultural diversity being appropriated by wily politicians and successive erstwhile Congress-led regimes that have celebrated Hinduphobic narratives and denied Sanatan Dharma or Hinduism, as it is popularly known, its rightful place of pride — and yes, all this under the guise of ‘Secularism’.

Of course, secularism as a socio-political ideology is welcome — but pseudo-secularism that thrives on tyranny by radicalised ‘minorities’, who believe in illegal religious conversions and convenient application of the Constitution, only to suit their vested interests, while deriving maximum benefits from state-sponsored largesse, forced Hindus, who, for decades, maintained a stoic silence, to finally assert themselves and stand up as one.

That ‘62 celebrities’, led by the fiesty Kangana Ranaut and the notable Prasoon Joshi, wrote to PM Modi, as a rebuttal to the 49, is in fact a microcosm of a larger trend, where Hindus are no longer apologetic for being the dominant religious sect.

Unfortunately, those who are quick to make baseless allegations of India becoming ‘Lynchistan’ are the very same pseudos who simply do not understand the difference between ‘majority’ and ‘majoritarian’. This is the same lot that pretends to be a beacon of liberal and progressive ideas — but goes into hiding when Jisha, a young law student from Ernakulam, is reportedly raped, stabbed 30 times and killed allegedly by an Ameerul Islam, out of sheer lust and hate. Again, this lot that fears ‘Jai Shri Ram’, which is simply a peaceful religious greeting and a clarion call that unifies Hindus, had nothing to say when an armed and murderous mob of thousands, reportedly shouting ‘Allah-u-Akbar’, brandishing swords and knives, burnt down a police chowki, ran amok vandalising public property and abetted violent communal unrest at Malda in Bengal in 2016.

And yes, this is the very lot which screams hoarse about cow vigilantism — but which has not once spoken out against marauding cattle smugglers who hacked Naresh Saini, a peaceful gau rakshak to death, at Hissar in Haryana in July 2019. Saini is just one among many who have reportedly been slaughtered by the beef mafia which has scant regard for the law of the land, including the law which makes cow slaughter a punishable offence. 

The ‘Khan Market Gang’, that epitomises the illiberal intolerance of the fake liberals, in more ways than one, never fails to surprise — this was evident, yet again, when it chose to feign ignorance at the time a CBI court in Ranchi framed charges against one Raqibul Hassan, alias Ranjit Kohli, for allegedly giving false information about his religion while marrying national-level air rifle shooter Tara Shahdeo — to my mind, a grim reminder of the pervasive ‘Love Jihad’ that has systematically wreaked havoc with the lives of Hindu women and is no isolated practice.

It is worth mentioning here that while Hindus are in a majority in India, the Modi government is certainly not majoritarian. It truly believes in ‘Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas, Sabka Vishwaas’.

However, ‘Sabka Saath’ also means taking pride in chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ as much as it is about worshipping ‘Gau Mata’, or celebrating the oneness of yoga and reclaiming our abandoned, old temples that were ravaged by marauding Mughals centuries back. And what makes the Modi government stand out is the fact that it is not apologetic about the richness of Hinduism — its sages, saints, rishis, gurus, Vedas, Shankaracharyas, mutts, et al.

This is precisely what the pseudo-secular lobby is not able to digest.

So, while the ‘radicalised minoritarian lobby’ does not think twice before blaring ‘azaan’ from loudspeakers, five times a day, flouting umpteen court rulings, Hindus are demonised for celebrating Diwali with firecrackers or enjoying Holi, the festival of colours, by this leftist lobby, that has accused these festivals of being harmful to the environment. Ironically, this glib ‘pseudo-secular lobby’ looks the other way when, for instance, countless goats are butchered mercilessly during Eid.

This 'Award Wapasi Gang’, that reared its ugly head in 2015, and has now done an encore in 2019, with this letter by the ‘intolerant 49’, is fast fading into oblivion anyway, after many failed comebacks. As recently as 2017, the proposed one-day token ban on a television channel reportedly airing live coverage and giving out sensitive information of the Pathankot airbase attack, had evoked a hue and cry, with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi calling the ban ‘shocking and unprecedented’.

What is shocking is the Gandhi scion’s apparently amnesic memory, given that between 2005 and 2013, during the Congress-led UPA’s reign, 21 channels were reportedly taken off air, on multiple occasions.

Equally hypocritical is the reaction from media bodies, terming the BJP-led NDA government’s proposed action as a reminder of the infamous Emergency of 1975.

The likes of this particular television channel, dying remnants of leftist ideology and large sections of a defunct Indian National Congress that never missed an opportunity to vilify the Modi government, would do well to note that this is 2019 and not 1975, when Indira Gandhi passed the 38th Amendment which prohibited judicial review of the Emergency and the 39th Amendment which gave her, as Prime Minister, absolute power to ignore the courts. She used the two amendments with impunity to nullify the verdict of electoral malpractices against her, in a judgment of Justice Jagmohan Lal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court.

Amnesty International noted that at least 1,10,000 people were summarily jailed by Indira Gandhi under the draconian MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act) — of which purportedly 70,000 were Sikhs. What’s more, MISA was placed under the 9th Schedule, giving it judicial immunity.

Indira Gandhi thereby gifted herself carte blanche to suspend civil and personal liberties, make a mockery of Article 19 of the Constitution, turning the then-President into a puppet and allowing an estimated 11 million forced sterilisations, in the most gruesome display of barbarism.

What is laughable, therefore, is the leftist-liberal, pseudo-secular brigade’s selective outrage on issues.

While copious tears were shed for Rohith Vemula — and rightfully so — there was not even a teary pretence for two Dalit BJP karyakartas in West Bengal, Dhulal Kumar and Trilochan Mahato, who were founding hanging from trees in Purulia district in 2018. The same lot that kept going on about Tabrez Ansari never once spoke about young Sachin Gopalan of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), who was hacked to death a few years back, or the scores of RSS and right-wing activists who have been killed in Opposition-ruled states like Kerala and Bengal. 

Bengal's CM Mamata Banerjee — notorious for arresting Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mahapatra, in 2012, for merely a harmless spoof — then has the audacity to act holier than thou and sing paeans about secularism, after apparently getting a 17-year-old teenager arrested for an innocuous Facebook post in 2017, and then turning a deaf ear to the ugly Basirhat riots that followed, where a helpless 65-year-old Kartik Ghose was reportedly lynched by radicalised Islamist jihadis.

That Hindus in Nalhati in Birbhum district of Bengal were reportedly not allowed to celebrate Durga Puja for years together by the Mamata-led TMC regime, or that Hindus were apparently forced to flee en masse from Raniganj in Asansol by Islamist mobs in 2018, never made it to mainstream national headlines.

Worse still, the likes of Aparna Sen, Kaushik Sen, Bolan Ganguly and others — part of the ‘gang of 49’ — have been mute spectators and not spoken out even once against ‘hate crimes’ in their own backyard, by jihadist elements against the Hindus of Bengal. What a shame that those whining about intolerance, and calling ‘Jai Shri Ram’ a provocative war cry, were wilfully ignorant when 20-year-old Shipra Ghosh was kidnapped, gangraped and murdered at Kamduni in Bengal in June 2013, by nine men, allegedly including an Amin, Ansar and Saiful Ali.

And chanting ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ is being fascist?

Condemning Burhan Wani, a dreaded Hizbul Mujahideen terrorist, is being insensitive to the idea of ‘Kashmiriyat and Jamhooriyat’?

The hanging of Yakub Memon, one of the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror attack that killed hundreds, is a travesty of ‘Insaaniyat’?

Continuing AFSPA in disturbed areas is being 'draconian'?

Using pellet guns on treacherous Jihadis and their handlers, who pelt stones at our soldiers when the latter are in the midst of a fierce gun battle with terrorists, is being 'brutal'?

Doing surya namaskar in schools is being 'communal' — but young girls getting raped in a madrasa is not even worth condemnation?

Encroaching on state property and reading ‘namaz’ on the roads is acceptable but festive revelry invoking Bhole Naath or Bhagwan Shivji, during Shravan Melas and Kanwar Yatras, are 'debauchery'?

Who says so?

The leftist cabal that enjoys all the benefits of the Indian state, including an Indian passport and various freebies at the expense of the average Indian taxpayer — and yet, undermines every Indian institution by repeatedly lampooning everything Indian.

Again, a ban on cow slaughter is an impingement of the freedom of our taste buds, but pork is haraam?

Deaths of Akhlaq and Pehlu Khan are worthy of media attention, but the gruesome murder of 24-year-old Hitesh Mulchandani in Pune in July 2019, allegedly by Shahbaz Qureshi, Amin Firoze Khan and Arbaaz Shaikh, only because he protested against their daily routine of urinating right outside his grocery shop, is kosher?

Chanting Hanuman Chalisa is incendiary but being conveniently mute when V Ramalingam in Thirubhuvanam had his hands chopped off, only because he protested against forced conversions of Dalits in his village by Muslims, before being stabbed to death, reportedly by Myden Ahmed and Mohamed Quthoos, is not even worthy of outrage?

Why are liberals progressive enough to outrage over reel-life scenes of Jauhar in the movie Padmaavat or male chauvinism in Kabir Singh — but not progressive enough to call out the misogyny of serial offender Azam Khan, who, on the floor of Parliament, passed a sexist comment against Rama Devi, chair of the House?

Blaming ‘Devisthan’ and ‘Hindustan’ for the Kathua rape is fine — but not even a meek squeak from the placard-holding Bollywood starlets, a jaded poet and his intolerant spouse against the barbaric rapes of a three-year-old in Aligarh by Zahid Aslam, a 7-year-old in Jaipur by Sikander, a 9-year-old in Delhi, allegedly by a 67-year-old maulvi?

It is precisely this deafening silence by the leftist cabal that has polarised society and poses a grave threat to India's inherently inclusive Hindus.

Nothing brings out this hypocrisy more than the radio silence on the spate of ‘Love Jihad’ and ‘Rape Jihad’ incidents in the last few years, where Hindu girls have been lured into a fake marriage or forcibly converted or raped. This was the case allegedly with aspiring model Manasi Dixit, who was reportedly hacked to death by Muzzamil, her partner, in a gut-wrenching case of hate crime in October 2018, in Mumbai. The horrific case of Heena Talreja from Mirpur, allegedly raped and shot by her husband Adnan and his friend, in August 2017, only because she dared to question Adnan's alleged infidelity, are not stray incidents of hate crimes by radicalised minoritarian groups.

The sharp and manifold surge in such incidents is, to my mind, a telling sign of how the Hindu majority has not only been victimised, but also, in a shameful display of selective amnesia and selective outrage, a false counter-narrative has started, of Muslim victimhood. The truth is, it is not Muslims but very often Hindus who have been brutalised; from a 22-year-old Chandan Gupta allegedly killed by Salman and Saleem, merely for carrying out a ‘Tiranga Yatra’ in ‘Mohalla Nawab’ colony, a Muslim majority area in Kasganj, UP, as part of Republic Day celebrations in 2018, to Bharat Yadav, a poor lassi vendor in Mathura, who was attacked by an armed mob of 15, reportedly led by Mohd Hanif and Shah Rukh, who apparently thrashed Bharat to death, in May 2019 — only because he dared to ask them to pay for the lassi they consumed. 

The war of letters between the ‘intolerant gang of 49’ and the ‘celebrated 62’, in the final analysis, is therefore, not one about freedom of speech and expression or law and order or even minority versus majority. It is not about Hindus versus Muslims. It has nothing to do with healthy dissent, by any measure.

The crux of the issue is simply and unequivocally about the rapidly dwindling fortunes of an illiberal pseudo-secular mafia that has had its bluff called, fair and square.

This leftist bunch are not agents of change but mere opportunists who wish to overthrow a duly elected popular government and destabilise democratic institutions by creating a deviously biased false narrative against the Narendra Modi-led government. They have realised their hypocrisy barely counts in the ‘New India’ being shaped by PM Modi, a nation that is not xenophobic, that is aspirational and that will not succumb to bullying by intellectual pygmies and entitled dynasts — who do not know the difference between nationalism and separatism, dissent and disintegration.

The ‘fiberal secularati’ that pontificated sanctimoniously about how the SP of Shamli in Uttar Pradesh, Ajay Kumar Pandey, had no business massaging the foot of a tired ‘kaanwariya’, while in uniform, did not condemn the barbaric rape of a nun by a Christian priest, under pristine white robes! What a pity that those Hinduphobes, who talk ad nauseaum about 'weaponisation' of ‘Jai Shri Ram’, were so quiet when a Muslim lawyer and member of the AIMIM reportedly recently gave a war cry for an ‘Islamic militia’, shamefully enough, from a mosque, by asking his Muslim brethren to train in arms and learn how to acquire gun licenses.

The Janus-faced hypocrisy of pseudo-secular, left-liberal, anti-Modi propagandists and ‘professional pessimists’, desperately trying to clutch at any fig leaf or straw in the wind, that comes their way by design or accident, is clear. They know it is end game for them in the war of narratives because truth has a way of finding its own way, unfettered. For very long, this Lutyenised cabal has tried mocking nationalists as part of a ‘tilak-wearing saffron fringe’ that is Islamophobic. The truth however is, Hindus, who are inherently secular, are no longer apologetic of ‘Ram Lalla, Tilak, Mangalsutra, Bindi or Bhagwa’. And yes, Hindus, Hinduism and Hindutva are, in essence, interchangeable, as they are about religion, traditions, culture, divinity, ‘aastha’ and much more.

On that note, I would simply say to them, ‘Jai Shri Ram’!

Also Read: The Liberal Mafia: Entitled, assertive and vindictive, the liberal gang of India is deeply biased