‘After Muslims, It’s The Turn Of Christians:’ With Little Evidence, UP Govt Prosecutes 4 Christian Institutions, Arrests Employees
Four Christian-run institutions in the Uttar Pradesh town of Fatehpur face criminal cases for alleged forcible conversion of Hindus, with over 200 accused, many arrested and imprisoned, under UP’s three-year-old anti-conversion law. Article 14 investigation reveals similar statements in four FIRs over nine months, police cases or raids on Christian institutions, based on illegal third-party or anonymous complaints. Simultaneously, the union government acted against the finances of one of these four institutions.
Tripura Govt Suspends Chief Wildlife Warden Over Akbar-Sita Row: Report
The move comes after the Kolkata high court asked why the pair of lions had been named Akbar and Sita, to cause 'controversy', after the Vishwa Hindu Parishad filed a petition regarding this on February 16.
VHP Moves Calcutta High Court Over Lioness Named 'Sita' Being Housed With Lion Named 'Akbar' At Siliguri Safari Park
The Bengal wing of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) has moved the Calcutta High Court's Circuit Bench at Jalpaiguri, challenging the forest department's move to allegedly keep a lion named 'Akbar' with a lioness named 'Sita' in the same enclosure at Siliguri's Safari park.
Hyderabad: HMDA official seeks action against Bajrang Dal members for attack on church
The Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority official filed a complaint on February 14, a day after the Dalit Christian church was attacked by a mob of 200 Bajrang Dal members from various dominant castes.
Excerpt from Aakar Patel's 'Our Hindu Rashtra' (Westland, 2020)
The Ayodhya issue had actually been launched by the non-political groups inside the RSS, led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. At a meeting in UP in 1983, Rajendra Singh, who would later become RSS chief, demanded that the Babri Masjid be opened to Hindu devotees. In September 1984, the VHP began a campaign against the mosque. This received sufficient public response for the group to claim in 1986 that they would forcibly break the locks open. Rajiv Gandhi succumbed to the pressure and the government told the courts there would be no law and order problem if this happened. The locks were thus opened and Hindus allowed into the mosque.
But the VHP did not stop with being given access to worship at the site: its target was the destruction of the mosque. In February 1989, at the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, the VHP said it would lay the foundation stone for the temple in November. This would involve the making of bricks across the country with Ram’s name embossed on them and their being carried in processions through towns and villages to Ayodhya in November.
Till this time, Advani writes in his autobiography, a few members of the BJP like Vijayaraje Scindia and Vinay Katiyar had participated in the Ayodhya movement in their individual capacity. It was not an issue in mainstream politics. In June, at the BJP’s national executive meeting in Himachal Pradesh, Advani threw the party behind the issue. The BJP resolution demanded that the site ‘should be handed over to the Hindus’ and ‘the mosque built at some other suitable place’. The whole thing was now coloured with religious sentiment.
Elections came a few months later, in November 1989. The BJP’s manifesto now made its first reference to Ayodhya: ‘By not allowing the rebuilding of the Ram Janma Mandir in Ayodhya, on the lines of Somnath Mandir built by the government of India in 1948, it has allowed tensions to rise, and gravely strained social harmony.’ It was a violation of the BJP’s own constitution, which on its first page and opening articles pledged it would bear true faith and allegiance to the principle of secularism.
A few days before voting, the VHP brought all its processions from across India to Ayodhya and laid the foundation stone next to the mosque.
Powered by its divisive, anti-Muslim demand, Advani’s BJP won 85 seats, four times as many as the Jana Sangh in the last election it contested alone and more than forty times as many as Vajpayee had delivered in his reformed and renamed party. Advani had become the most successful political leader from the RSS and had found the recipe for electoral success. He began to invest more in the issue that had brought the dividend.
The Congress lost its majority in the election, and a coalition led by V.P. Singh took power with support from Advani, though for only a short period. Three months after the election, in February 1990, the VHP resumed its mobilisation against the mosque and said it would continue the process of what it called kar seva from October.
The political escalation, according to Advani, happened by accident. Advani writes in his autobiography that in June he was to visit London, and just before he left he was interviewed by the editor of the RSS journal Panchajanya who asked him what would happen if the government failed to resolve the Ayodhya matter. Advani told him that the BJP supported the decision to begin kar seva on 30 October, and if it was stopped there would be a mass movement led by the BJP.
‘Frankly, I had forgotten about this interview,’ Advani writes, when his wife telephoned him and asked, ‘What have you said? The papers here have reported it with blaring headlines: “On Ayodhya, Advani threatens the biggest mass movement in the history of independent India”.’ Advani adds: ‘The die had been cast.’
After this, Advani says he offered the Muslims a deal. If they would hand over the Babri Masjid, he would ‘personally request’ the VHP to not campaign against two other mosques in Mathura and Varanasi. He writes that he was ‘deeply disappointed’ and ‘annoyed’ that this was not considered to be satisfactory by the Muslims. He announced he would begin his campaign against the mosque on Deendayal Upadhyaya’s birthday, 25 September, in Gujarat, and ride a ‘chariot’ (actually a truck) to Ayodhya on 30 October 1990. [...]
At each stop along the way Advani went about talking about why the Babri Masjid had to be taken down, using the vocabulary and metaphors of religion, in basic speeches that he says were no more than five minutes long. The reduction can only be imagined; the consequence was predictable. The scale of the violence unleashed by Advani’s decision to politicise a communal issue and mobilise on it was staggering in both the numbers killed and the geographical spread.
B. Rajeshwari of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in her work, Communal Riots in India: A Chronology 1947-2003, writes: ‘The mobilisation campaign for kar sevaks to construct the proposed Ram Janma Bhoomi Temple at Ayodhya on 30 October 1990 aggravated the communal atmosphere in the country. Communal riots occurred in the wake of L.K. Advani’s Rath Yatra wherever it went. These riots were led by RSS-BJP men to consolidate the “Hindu” vote bank. They were widespread over almost all the states from Assam to West Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Delhi.’
Between April 1989 and April 1990, Gujarat recorded 262 dead, mostly Muslim. In October 1990, days after Advani’s yatra began, 41 were killed in Ahmedabad. The same month, 52 were killed in Jaipur, 20 in Jodhpur, 33 in Lucknow, over 100 in Delhi, 37 in Assam, 18 in Patna and 165 in Hyderabad. Also in October, a pogrom against Muslims in Bhagalpur, Bihar, saw 960 killed of whom about 900 were Muslim, In November, 31 were killed in Agra, again mostly Muslim and 13 in Indore. In December, 60 were killed in Karnataka and 134 in Hyderabad.
Many parts of India remained tense for long periods of time. Between April and May 1990, three riots in Kanpur killed 30; between May and November 1991 more than 50 were killed in Varanasi. In May 1991, 26 including 24 Muslims were killed in Vadodara.
In October 1992, 44 were killed in Sitamarhi. On 6 December that year, immediately after the Babri Masjid was destroyed, pogroms against Muslims broke out in Surat where 200 died, of whom some 95 per cent were Muslim. In Bhopal in December, 143 were killed. The Bombay riots that broke out at the same time saw the more than 1,000 killed, mostly Muslim.
Advani absolves himself of any responsibility here. He accepts there was violence around India but acquits himself by saying, ‘There were indeed riots in several parts of the country, but none at all along the yatra trail.’ He asks: ‘Was my campaign anti-Muslim?’ and answers himself: ‘Not in the least.’ When the mobs he gathered began to shout, ‘Jo Hindu hit ki baat karega wohi desh pe raj karega’ (only those speaking of Hindu interest will rule India), Advani says he requested them to replace the phrase Hindu hit with rashtra hit. He adds: ‘I was, therefore, pained to see a section of the media carry reports that had sensational titles like “Advani’s blood yatra”.’ Other than this sympathy for himself, Advani has no comment on the killings in his book written fifteen years later.
Many of the riots broke out after calculated provocation. Rath Yatras and associated processions were deliberately taken through Muslim neighbourhoods. Violence was good because it led to polarisation and that made voter choice easy. Advani successfully polarised India from north to south and east to west, pitting Indians against their fellow countrymen and women and children.
The reward was a doubling of the BJP’s vote share. In the general elections held in mid-1991, the BJP got 20 per cent of the total vote and won 120 seats. In the first election held after the demolition, in 1996, the BJP won 161 seats.
Over 3,400 Indians were killed in the violence triggered by Advani’s anti-Babri Masjid campaign and it brought the BJP to the doorstep of power. Advani’s success was built on the corpses of Indians and cemented with their blood.
He writes the day the mosque was demolished was ‘the saddest day of my life’. Having assembled a mob and fired it up against the mosque, he says he was surprised that they immediately tore it down. As a mark of sacrifice, he says that when celebrations broke out on the dais he was sitting in he refused refreshment saying: ‘No, I will not have sweets today.’
The blood profits were not limited to the general elections. Northern states going to Assembly elections after the beginning of the anti-Babri Masjid campaign fell to the BJP for the first time in the party’s history as it won majorities on the back of anti-Muslim mobilisation.
There were BJP chief ministers in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh in 1990, Uttar Pradesh in 1991, Gujarat in 1995 and Maharashtra in coalition with the Shiv Sena the same year.
Advani made the BJP India’s dominant political force. The Babri demolition and the communal violence in its wake also gave the party the template to further expansion. It would abandon or disregard everything that its manifestos claimed, from mechanisation in the economy to limiting private property to prohibition to Swadeshi to throwing English out to Integral Humanism and the other mumbo-jumbo. The BJP would concentrate its politics on India’s Muslims and focus on those issues alone on which Indian society could be divided and kept on the boil.
UP Bajrang Dal leader among 4 arrested for slaughtering cows to falsely implicate a Muslim man
According to the police, one of the accused took the help of Bajrang Dal workers to put his ‘enemy’ in jail by making it appear that he had slaughtered cows.
Hyderabad cops halt screening of Ram Ke Naam, arrest three movie club members
The screening was halted after a complaint by a VHP activist. The complainant also stated that he found a few “men with beards” at the screening, which made him suspicious.
The removal of Annapoorani from Netflix and Kollywood‘s loud silence on it
For an industry that has made several anti-caste films questioning the status quo, Kollywood has surprisingly not condemned Netflix’s decision or extended support to the cast and crew of Annapoorani.
Rajasthan: Junaid-Nasir Were Killed 9 Months Ago, Their Families Remain In Dread
The villagers say they continue to fear for their lives, worried that they could meet the same fate as Junaid and Nasir if they tread too far from familiarity.
How state-backed Hindutva rhetoric is fuelling the ethnic cleansing of Uttarakhand
Extremist organisations project the hill state as the ‘holy land’ of Hindus and Muslims a ‘polluting presence’ unleashing a battery of ‘jihads’, writes Harsh Mander.
Hindutva Groups Are Misusing UP’s Anti-Conversion Law, As Police Register Cases With No Legal Standing
A study of 101 FIRs registered under the Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Act, 2021 showed that more than half were in response to complaints by third parties, which means they may have no legal standing and should not have been registered by the police.
Nationalist efforts have traveled far from the Indian mainland from which they originated, extending their influence into diasporic communities. This trend can be discerned through the emergence of a term that has become increasingly recognizable in the United States — “Hinduphobia.” Muskaan Arshad writes. (H/T: hindutvawatch.org)
Nuh Riots Correspond to Larger Persecution of Region's Muslims: Fact-Finding Team
A fact-finding team constituted by the Centre for Study of Society and Secularism found that Nuh's residents were resentful about how easily its Muslim youth were abducted or killed while the culprits enjoyed impunity.
Two months after violence hit Delhi’s corporate suburb, Muslims who fled their temporary houses to go back to West Bengal, where they felt safer, are back. At home, in some of the State’s least developed areas mainly bordering Bangladesh, there are few jobs and little opportunity. Caught between hunger pangs and threats, Alisha Dutta and Samridhi Tewari ask why they picked the latter.
He live-streamed his attacks on Indian Muslims. YouTube gave him an award.
The Post reviewed more than 140 accounts of cow protectors on Facebook, who often uploaded bucolic videos of injured or abandoned cows being nurtured and fed. But roughly 30 percent of the accounts resembled a hardcore, extrajudicial version of “Cops,” replete with posts of car chases, arrests and beatings.
Hindutva Watch 2023 Half-Yearly Report: Anti-Muslim Hate Speech Events in India
This report aims to document all verified instances of hate speech events organized by Hindu far-right groups against India’s Muslim minorities in the first half of 2023.
In India, Hindutva Schools Are Indoctrinating Poor Children
In rural India, private schools run by the Ekal Foundation provide access to education – but force children to imbibe divisive teachings that preach Hindu superiority.
Vajpayee Govt Didn't Object to UK Report That 2002 Riots Were 'Pre-Planned', Cops 'Told Not to Act'
The minutes of an April 16, 2002 phone call between former external affairs minister Jaswant Singh and his UK counterpart reveal the BJP-led government only protested the leak of the report and its claimed death toll. No criticism was made of the UK report's critical observations about the role played by the Gujarat police and by political organisations connected to Modi in the anti-Muslim violence.