The Delhi anti-Muslim pogrom exposed many fascism-enablers closeted Sanghis

More than eight days have passed that India’s capital Delhi experienced a ghastly, state-sponsored anti-Muslim pogrom, in which 47 are killed according to government records, while unofficial statistics put the figure above 130. The state machinery and the press are busy maligning the Muslims, who became victims of the gruesome crime, systematically unleashed on the minority community with institutional support, for resisting the perpetrators of the pogrom. The Delhi anti-Muslim pogrom became one of the largest and most-organised communal massacres of recent times, which bears resemblance with the 2002 Gujarat pogrom.

Muslim politicians like Tahir Hussain are vilified for resisting the rioters. At the same time, rather than being arrested for inciting a pogrom, a rabble-rouser like Kapil Mishra of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) got Y+ category security from the Delhi Police. Even after all these, the only thing the press would talk about is the murder of an Intelligence Bureau officer and a police constable during the violence, in which many poor families lost their sole bread earners and look forward to uncertainty, which relegates the Muslim corpses as flotsams. The Delhi anti-Muslim pogrom has actually ripped open the grotesque closet in which many so-called seculars and left-liberals lived and hoodwinked the people with their fake anti-fascist and anti-Hindutva credentials.

Everybody knows the chronology of the pogrom that was initiated by Mishra. He went to Maujpur on 23 February and threatened the protesters opposing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s citizenship matrix of physical violence if they don’t stop protesting. He threatened them in front of the police and his supporters chanted “shoot the traitors”, baying for the blood of Muslims. Everybody knows how Mishra’s feral thugs, aged between 15 and 25, began attacking Muslim women protesting against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA), and then rampaged throughout poor and middle-class Muslim neighbourhoods of northeastern Delhi, killing Muslims, setting their houses, shops and mosques on fire. 

Everybody saw how the Delhi Police was in cahoots with the feral Hindutva-incensed thugs and selectively applied force against Muslims resisting the rioters. They saw the Delhi Police pelting stones at Muslims, allowing the rioters a free-passage, not stopping violence anywhere and, of course, beating the wounded Muslims and forcing them to prove their nationalism after hurling choicest communal abuses.

Still, the mainstream of India, from polity to press, from corporate boardrooms to the drawing rooms of upper-caste Hindu elites and middle class, refuse to accept that there was a state-sponsored anti-Muslim pogrom in Delhi. Conveniently they stamp it as a clash between anti-CAA and pro-CAA supporters, ignoring the fact that the latter is an oxymoron! This blatant political profligacy is an attempt to coat the Hindutva fascist self of the Indian state with pathetic secular shades, even when it refuses to wear any. 

The Indian mainstream has overlooked the pain, the wailing and the frustration of the Indian Muslims, reeling under the Hindutva fascist juggernaut. The Muslims are thrown under the bus and are even denied the right to save themselves from an ordeal. They are supposed to die unopposed; the Muslims are supposed to surrender themselves to Hindutva fascist thugs baying for their blood, and they shouldn’t resist their massacre, rape, burning down of their homes and shops. They must be conforming to what’s expected from them by the Indian ruling classes and the liberals, who teach them secularism and love blaming “both sides”. 

From the High Court’s volte-face over filing FIRs against BJP leaders for their hate speeches and vitriol to the Delhi Police’s witch-hunting against the Muslims, which resulted in the arrest of over 1,284 Muslims under different charges of rioting, while zero arrests of the thugs mobilised by Mishra and the BJP’s paternal body Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh from neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, everywhere, the Indian state has shown that the Muslims are officially condemned in the Hindutva state, yet, there is a strong demand from the so-called left-liberals to not call out this ordeal, to not label this violence as an anti-Muslim pogrom, but a riot! How can there be a balancing act when there is an open onslaught unleashed by the powerful on the powerless? 

The Delhi anti-Muslim pogrom has widened the communal fissures in the society and sowed more communal hatred in the city while providing the upper-caste Hindu elites and middle-class an opportunity to gloat over the corpses of Muslims and shame them for resisting their own massacre. This will go down the annals of history as one of the goriest crimes against humanity, irrespective of what the mainstream and its lackey left-liberals stamp it as. With the Hindutva fascists, such fascism enablers must be exposed on all occasions and be condemned to the trash bin of history. In the battle between democracy and fascism, turncoats are more dangerous than the visible enemy.