The famous liberal journalist gushes like a fan girl before Asiduddin Owaisi. I can’t fathom why. Owaisi crows on about the merits of Islam. The fan girl gushes, Oh, I believe in all religions.
This, Oh, I believe in all religions is the rallying cry of India’s liberals, mostly all Hindus. The Muslim minority refuses to believe in all religions but its own.
The gushing fan girl gets a gig with one of the West’s leading papers, from where she writes column after column about the plight of India’s Muslims and how bad the Indian PM is.
By Al Qaeda’s own estimate, between five and ten million Muslims have been killed by the West, principally America, after 9/11. It wants revenge now.
So the famous Indian journalist talks about the plight of India’s Muslims to people who are slaughtering Muslims the most. What hypocrisy! What kind of world do we live in?
There is a feardom of expression in Modi’s India. Really? Mamata Banerjee, guardian of West Bengal’s Muslims, freely calls Modi the butcher of Gujarat in public, while sending kurtas to him in private. Modi always receives her very cordially. She has become the most prominent threat to his throne. Her politics of attacking the so-called fascists of India has brought her so far and will only take her further.
India traditionally has been a centrist country. The backlash against the Congress’s perceived bent to the Muslims (as outlined in AK Antony’s own introspection after 2014) led to the rise of the Sangh. The Sangh has made India a centre-right country. Hardliners within the Sangh want to push it further to the right.
But the left-wingers are not lying down and taking that quietly. The problem with the Congress is not Sonia Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi or even Robert Vadra. It is that the centrist moderate Hindu who used to adore Nehru and Indira has moved right. The Congress’s traditional base has mostly all fled to the Sangh.
Yes, some centrist Hindus still remain, but they too cannot justify the naked hatred and bigotry exhibited by Owaisi’s flock. They feel that they have kept quiet too long over the plight of Kashmiri Hindus.
The nation has become polarised like never before. One party says Vande Mataram. The other says Jana Gana Mana. Vande Mataram was the cry of the freedom struggle. It was agreed that the first few verses don’t offend any religion, so they could be sung by everyone. Yet liberals won’t sing it. It gave them their freedom, but they hate the song.
One party says Bharat Mata ki Jai, the other says Jai Hind. Saying Bharat Mata ki Jai is like venerating some goddess, so don’t say it.
Soon the beloved tricolour will be at stake too. One party will want to remove the green, the other the saffron. Why not just wave a white flag? To everyone. To the left-wingers. To the right-wingers.
They say that Modi has inculcated a climate of repression in India. I see no repression. I see books depicting Modi in a positive light getting pulped out of fear of how the liberal twitterati will react. If you don’t like that book on Modi, write a counter-book.
But hasn’t the book already been written by another secular journalist exposing his role in the Gujarat riots. She proudly claims that 600,000 copies of her book have been sold and that she’s won four awards. Have right-wingers caused that book to be pulped? Who is holding the country to ransom, the left or the right?
Famous actors go to enemy countries and gush in the audience of the leadership there. Other famous actors give clean chits to Pakistan for its role in 26/11 while visiting Pakistan. There is a temporary flutter, like when pigeons fly in a beautiful European square, and then the actors become busy peddling their movies, which even the right-wingers gobble up.
The Sangh is ruling, so it has no need to introspect. Rahul Gandhi, you want to rule the nation one day. See what hypocrisy is going on the country, and see what hypocrisy you are peddling. Your base has run away. It’s not coming back without you mending your ways.