Editorial

Rebuff provocations and maintain peace and harmony!

The storm triggered by the Islamophobic bigotry and derogatory remarks against Prophet Muhammad by well-known BJP national spokesperson Nupur Sharma and the party's Delhi media head Naveen Kumar Jindal is fast turning into a campaign of targeted state-led terror against Indian Muslims and voices of dissent. The remarks had understandably sparked a major international controversy.

Confronted by a flood of condemnations by a wide range of nations, of a piece of Islamophobic hate speech about Prophet Mohammed by a prominent spokesperson of the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party, the Modi Government went into defensive mode. It sought to distance itself from the offender Nupur Sharma by declaring that she was a mere “fringe element” - not someone these foreign governments should take seriously.

Modi Regime’s Continuing War on the Poor

In early March when the BJP managed to retain power in Uttar Pradesh for the second term in a row, the victory was attributed among other things to the delivery of food among the poor to mitigate the extreme economic hardship caused by the cruel lockdown. ‘Labharthi’ or beneficiary of various welfare and assistance schemes became a key talking point for poll analysts. With the elections over, the discourse is fast changing and quite ominously so.

Lessons from Sri Lanka for India:

The Sangh brigade is planning a repeat of the Babri Masjid demolition by raking up a dispute over the Gyanvapi mosque. This is a clear violation of the Places of Worship Act, 1991 which guarantees the status of every place of religious worship as on 15 August, 1947.

The people of Sri Lanka have risen up in sustained protests since March 2022 against the Rajapaksa regime and its misrule. The protests were sparked by economic mismanagement that resulted in soaring prices of food and fuel, fuel shortages, and indefinite power outages, with elderly people dropping dead in fuel queues.

Resist Modi’s Attempts To Project Him As Anti-Muslim Icon

In a public address on the 400th birth anniversary of Sri Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth guru of the Sikhs on April 21, PM Narendra Modi, true to form, tried to distort his legacy to serve Islamophobia. This is part of a larger conspiracy on part of the RSS to pit the Sikh religious minority community against the Muslim one.   

The Assam Police’s arrest of Gujarat MLA and popular Dalit movement leader Jignesh Mevani over a tweet asserting that Prime Minister Modi “considers (Gandhi’s assassin) Godse to be God” and challenging him to visit riot-hit areas has once again brought home the role of the police in India as an arm of the ruling BJP. The Assam Police came all the way to his constituency in Vadgam to arrest him and take him to Kokrajhar in Assam.

In a disturbing pattern, Hindu religious festivals in the past week have been used across India as pretexts to organise menacing armed marches through Muslim localities, raising slogans declaring that only those who acknowledge Hindu supremacy can be allowed to stay in India. First on Ram Navami, and then again on Hanuman Jayanti, RSS-affiliated outfits held processions intended only to humiliate, intimidate and attack Muslims, and vandalise mosques.

Recent bail judgments in India hold up a mirror to blatant judicial double standards – showing lenience towards Hindu-supremacist hate while showing indifference to the indefinite imprisonment of scores of defenders of democracy as under-trials under draconian laws.