CAA Is Correction Of Historical Wrongs And Nothing Explains The Mayhem Against It

As the eventful 2019 concluded, the recent protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC) have exposed India to certain uncomfortable truths.

There is a slow realisation that these protests are underwritten by an unapologetic display of anti-Hindu bigotry which has been nurtured over the past two centuries in academia and media.

Immediately after Parliament passed the bill, Priyamvada Gopal, Reader at the Faculty of English at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Churchill College, called for worldwide persecution of Hindus by branding them ‘sickos’.

She called for blocking their naturalisation and snatching their H-1B visas. And for what? Just because the Indian Parliament decided to give refuge and citizenship to the persecuted minorities, mostly Hindus, from the three neighbouring Islamic countries.

And she isn’t alone in this bigotry. Social media is flooded with posts demonising Hindus. It is telling that such people never called upon the same Western countries to stand for persecuted Hindus or to provide them refuge.

Hindus are the only stateless major religious group in the world. Protestants, Catholics, Shias, Sunnis, Buddhists, Jews all have state power backing them.

But if a secular state provides any relief, too little and too late, to the Hindus without hampering the rights of others, it’s branded as ‘Nazism’.

Hindus fleeing Nuremberg laws are being blamed for Nuremberg laws. Hindus are being asked to apologise for the genocide they haven’t committed while whitewashing all the crimes against Hindus not just in history but in recent times as well.

There is not even an acknowledgment of the Hindu genocides of 1921, 1946, 1971 or ethnic cleansing of the late 1990s in Kashmir.

And today as well, an issue of oppression and religious persecution of Hindus has been made into an issue of Muslim victimhood.

Not only this, the worse kind of Goebbels propaganda has been unleashed against the Hindus. While the coverage of India and Hindus has never been positive or even neutral in the international media and academia, it is significantly worse this time.

Outright lies are being published in the leading newspapers and magazines accusing Hindus of being complicit in an imaginary genocide of Muslims in India.

These same publications ignored and whitewashed the genocide of Hindus even in 1971 when they tried to shame India for intervening in East Pakistan.

It seems there is a concerted attempt to prepare a ground for aggression against the Hindus and India. Already there are calls to put sanctions against India and members of the government.

The Hindus are being compared to fascists and Nazis. Their beliefs and symbols are being deformed and abused in the name of ‘resistance art’. Such art on walls and posters also carry a heavy dose of anti-Semitism, thus, mainstreaming the ISIS propaganda of Israel, India, and America being the great evil that needs to be obliterated.

Not content with falsely branding the Christian Hakenkreuz or "hooked-cross" as swastika, now the most sacred symbol of Om is also being equated with Nazism.

Soon, there will be calls to ban the public use of Om just like a picture of UN Ambassador Nikki Haley with a swastika seen behind her at a Hindu temple in Delhi was censored.

The anti-Hindu bigotry and Hinduphobia are real and must be taken seriously.

The calls for Caliphate 2.0 are being raised openly which reminds Hindus of the fate of Yazidis under ISIS.

In small towns and cities, local Muslim leaders are openly threatening to overthrow the Constitution written by Dr B R Ambedkar and burn India to the ground.

In Bihar, protesters attacked and vandalised a temple. In UP, there have been skirmishes between Muslims and Hindus, with the latter community fearing riots if the protesters “succeeded in going into Hindu localities”.

But all this is being justified as ‘democratic dissent’ and ‘struggle to uphold the Constitution’.

Liberals are now openly calling for anarchy and whitewashing mob violence in op-eds. The use of state power to protect Hindus is nothing short of epistemological violence in the minds of several Hindus, who have internalised that Hindu polity, if it can be allowed to exist, should always be subservient to the Islamic or Western polity.

They are calling it a provocation to the neighbouring countries. Some of them like Aam Aadmi Party leaders are busy whipping up xenophobia against the ‘Pakistani Hindus and Sikhs’.

Those in media and academia are openly justifying the mob violence as legitimate resistance and shifting all blame on the state.

It is an attempt to override the democratic mandate of 2019 by a violence veto and propaganda blitzkrieg by the combined armies of the liberals and the left.

It’s being said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi could only build toilets while Muslim rulers built Qutub Minar and Taj Mahal. The irony of comparing Qutub Minar, built by demolishing temples and autocratic vanity of Taj Mahal when India was in the grip of severe famine to a secular, democratic state is completely lost on such supremacists.

People like Abdullah Azzam, ex-president of Aligarh Muslim University, are mocking the plight of Hindus fleeing Pakistan and Bangladesh. In a speech, he argues that even if we believe that Hindus are facing persecution, why would they come to India whose quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate is today less that those countries?

As usual cow urine jibes used by suicide bombers while massacring Indian soldiers are everywhere.

Iconoclastic religious poetry is being celebrated by those who outlaw any hint of Hindu religious expression in protests.

Now suddenly, exclusive religious slogans are being justified as secular and revolutionary. The last time such slogans were heard on streets was during the ethnic cleansing of Hindus from Kashmir.

There is no middle ground left anymore. An attempt is being made to criminalise any expression of Hindu aspiration and polity. Liberals have chosen to ride the Islamist tiger which will ultimately devour them.

Our aim should not be to save them but to prepare for the tiger.

Forget the advanced countries, even developing countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia have a national database of citizens. Only in India such an exercise is branded as ‘Nazism’.

There are indeed different concerns of different sections of the society but these protests are not about including those concerns in the policy but to prevent the preparation of any database forever by force and violence.

Those who were eloquently arguing that issues like Article 370 should be seen in the context of history are now suddenly pretending that there is no history to the CAA. Is it because Article 370 discriminated against non-Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir?

It is clear that those who wanted this discrimination to continue in Kashmir due to ‘context and history’ want perfect equality when it comes to the foreigners without any concern for ‘history and context’.

There is no logic or reasoning here and it’s futile to convince such people who believe that India is a ‘Hindu fascist state’ and ‘azadi’ is the only way.

It is morally reprehensible to argue that the Bangladeshi Muslims, who are economic migrants and Bangladeshi religious minorities, who are seeking safe haven, be treated at par while granting citizenship.

Yes, this entire tussle comes down to the problem of massive migration from Bangladesh over the past few decades.

The experience of Syrian refugee crisis proves that one must prioritise refugees on the basis of the cause of discrimination and persecution.

Hardly 1 per cent of the refugees fleeing ISIS are Christians in the US and the UK as the local power structures make sure that the majority (in the country they are fleeing) Muslim community gets all the access while minority Christians are blocked.

Out of 60,000 Syrian war refugees accepted into the United States and Britain in 2014, almost none were Christians.

In 2016, out of 10,000-plus Syrian refugees admitted into the US, only 56 were Christians.

Ever since the Modi government came to power, it has done nothing to discriminate against the Muslims or other minorities. On the other hand, it has allowed discriminatory policies favouring minorities to continue like exemption of minority schools from the ‘Right to Education’, etc.

It has come up with schemes exclusively for Muslims ranging from skill development, and traditional craft to scholarship.

The scheme of scholarships for 5 crore minority students launched after the 2019 mandate will also mainly benefit the Muslims.

The massive welfare schemes like housing, healthcare, gas-cylinder, insurance, income support have equally benefited a large number of Muslims.

But it seems all that was for nothing.

One law to grant refuge to Hindus fleeing oppression in Islamic countries without banning Muslim refugees, if any, was sufficient to turn a significant section of the Muslim population against the government.

There is indeed a section of Muslims that fell for the propaganda that they will be disenfranchised of their citizenship and sent to ‘concentration camps’ and this fear needs to be addressed.

But it doesn’t explain why large numbers come on the streets and create mayhem from Bengal to Delhi.

It doesn’t explain young boys burning trains, attacking police in a well-coordinated manner from Madhya Pradesh to Uttar Pradesh.

What we witnessed was an attempt to impose the violence veto on Parliament and the Supreme Court with the active support of the liberals and the communists.

Social media is full of people calling for foreign intervention in India. It looks like the redux of Marathas in Delhi.

After centuries, there is a government in Delhi and opponents, the left and Islamists, are marshalling their forces both within India and outside. There is no other way to explain this extreme hostility.