EDITORIAL: The devilish Hindutva zealots are once again in action to cleanse India of its Muslim population, and this time it has dipped into the dirtiest mire. In recent past they had attacked mosques, lynched Muslim men and forced them to eat the cow dung. But their latest action is a record-setting cheapest pursuit. Photos of more than 80 Muslim women were uploaded in recent weeks on GitHub, a software development platform, for “sale” by auction. GitHub now says it has suspended the users’ accounts and the Delhi police claims to have filed charges against unknown persons. But all of it is post-mischief space filling. The wrong done to these women cannot be condoned. How can they recover from harm done to them by putting them on the slave market for auction? Obviously, while some of these women are in constant state of anger others must be feeling if being non-Hindu means to be someone’s chattel for trade. By and large, the maligned women are professionals. While one is an airline pilot the other is a journalist. “How is this acceptable”, asks the journalist, and there is no answer to it.
The Hindutva zealots’ action perfectly fits in the ruling Modi government’s agenda that India’s over 200 million Muslims should either become Hindu or leave the country. Although the Congress leadership too wanted the post-Independence India to be a Hindu state, the way Modi’s followers are set about achieving that objective is simply monstrous. In the Muslim-majority Illegally Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir the Modi establishment is busy transforming its demographic character by inducting Hindus as Kashmiri citizens – a feat which was impossible before August 5 2019 constitutional perversion. India has refused citizenship to Muslims of Assam who were tricked into leaving their homes and coming to Assam during war in East Pakistan in 1971. Even some of the Modi government ministers and state chief ministers don’t desist from issuing hateful statements against Muslims. But will this Islamophobic drift end anytime soon in India? Yes, it will. The Muslims of India are not a small number of people. As and when their cup of patience is filled up - and that seems to be not very far given Narendra Modi’s mindset – they will come up and tenaciously fight for their faith and history. One should not forget that these Indian Muslims have continuously sustained their Islamic identity over the last seven decades despite Hindu India’s best efforts to subvert it. Time is not far when they will jettison their acquiescence to peaceful existence in an ever-tightening grip of Hindutva and rise to fight for their Islamic identity – as in the historical past.
How ironic it is that this event of ‘auction’ of India’s Muslim women has yet to be condemned by the so-called enlightened, secular West. It may be argued that the West tends to see India through its China prism. That should not be acceptable to conscientious persons in the West or anywhere else. But if history is any guide one would recall that not many years ago India was much closer to the then Soviet Union than with the US-led anti-China West today.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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